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If Gods are real, then they are truly cruel.
This is the last thought that passes through the Bloody Reina, Colonel Vladilena Milizé’s human mind before her head is separated from the rest of her by a high frequency chain-blade, killed by the ghost of a boy she would’ve happily spent the rest of her life with.
<<Target: Handler One: Acquired.>>
The message is beamed by the modified, one-of-a-kind Phönix unit to the nearest Tausendfüßler. Resembling the Variant Prototype Phönix with its liquid metal armour and griffon-like appearance, this remarkable unit possesses four high frequency chain-blades and a much heavier liquid metal armour load than its predecessor, allowing for a more variable combat style that mixes in long-ranged shot alongside its favoured high-speed fighting style, all while under a cloak of Eintagsfliege camouflage. In exchange for the heavier weight, it is a fraction of a slower than its predecessor, but that is of little consequence when no human alive has the reflexes to take advantage of its reduced speed.
<<Special Unit Báleygr returning to base.>>
Indeed, this unit is the pride and joy, were the Legion capable of such a thing, of the Legion’s army.
The first Shepherd that, instead of being primarily deployed as a Commander, is predominantly a combat unit designed to shatter morale and acquire high-value targets. In other words — the ultimate Headhunter.
Some of the Shepherds had argued that it was not the most efficient deployment of resources, but since the fall of the Republic, the Legion had had brains to spare, and therefore a willingness to experiment.
Harvesting the head of the existence that was once Shinei Nouzen reshaped the war, even more than the most optimistic of the Legion’s predictions. They have learnt since, about human morale, and what it means for a symbol of victory to be dismembered in front of his men.
They have learnt too, what preserved human minds, with preserved senses of self-identity, are capable of too, with the right… ‘adjustments’.
<<Welcome back, I see you were successful.>> <<Geez, now she’s going to be bossing us around for forever.>>
Two voices come at once, beamed straight into Báleygr.
<<Snow Witch.>> <<Gunslinger.>>
No longer limited by vocal cords or a human’s limits on parallel thoughts, Báleygr greets both units at once. Or rather, both components of the same unit that makes up the modified Morpho, a special unit that collectively is known as the ‘Iron Maiden’. Bristling with secondary short and long-ranged weapons, the modified Morpho is not a unit that can be controlled by a single human mind, and thus the existence that was Kurena Kukumila controls the vaunted 800mm railgun, while the head that once belonged to Anju Emma controls the remaining armaments to protect their mobile sniping unit.
It’s comical how much the former girls dwarf the modified Phönix, with a weight over ten thousand times the tiny speedster’s. Even the modified Dinosauria ‘Wehrwolf’ appears pitifully small next to the centipede-like creature as they all make the trek back towards base, wherein —
<<Good job.>>
<<No thanks to you.>>
This strangely human interaction happens between the Command Unit ‘Gradyuka’ and Báleygr. In other words, between a King and the leader of his most unruly Knights.
<<We aren’t doing this for you,>> reminds Gunslinger belligerently to the existence that was once Prince Viktor “Vika” Idinarohk.
He cannot laugh, but a sense of amusement floods their link anyway, kept separate from the mainframe. These aberrant units, after all, would be destroyed or at least reprogrammed if it became clear how much of their human self they retained.
It was perhaps fortunate that Vika was the first of them fall.
The story of their mechanised rebellion begins like this: a certain Prince, with an ego to match his title, refuses the designation ‘Hveðrungr’, and instead names himself ‘Gradyuka’. No Face, as the primary commander over their remaining troops at the time, saw no harm, or rather, no difference in the two designations, and allowed him to change it.
But names are tied inextricably identities to the human mind, and from there, Vika was able to draw together the tattered remains of his own self-identity. Of course, he was unable to resist the overriding directive of destroying all of the Legion’s enemies, which fundamentally translated to exterminating all humans on the continent, but that still left him with a startling amount of freedom as a Command Unit… so long as he stopped trying to keep his loved ones human.
A mad scientist at heart, he begins with Lerche. The other Command Units saw no harm in him integrating the Sirins into their network — after all, it increased their military prowess while reducing their enemies. A good thing, for the Legion.
But they also gave him more processing power to pursue goals separate from the collective. Additional units that could serve as his eyes, hands and feet. And through them, he calculated the inevitability of the extinction of humans (at least on this continent) and settled for collecting the most valuable pawns in order to save the people he loves in his own twisted way.
And thus, he recruits Shin. Or at least his head.
In hindsight, he is willing to admit to himself (and no one else that he)… miscalculated a little. Yes, he was able to acquire Shin’s undamaged brain. Yes, he had the Legion dismember the rest of the human’s fleshy container. But he underestimated the fragility of the child soldier’s ego, and nearly broke him. When he finally pulled together Shin's broken mind, it had… unfortunate consequences.
Namely, when he first deployed him to collect the rest of his old Squadron, he killed Theo instead of collecting his head.
<<This is a fate worse than death,>> he had proclaimed.
So Vika reprogrammed him. Just a little. Enough to twist his morality to obey Vika and collect the rest of his squad, who he took no chances with and tweaked as well.
And yet.
<<Why did you accept the designation Báleygr?>>
For months, this question bothered Vika, and eventually, he couldn’t resist the temptation to ask. All of the rest of Shin’s Squadron kept to their old codenames, and yet, the infamous Grim Reaper, the vaunted Undertaker himself, accepted a new designation.
Shin had… not quite stared at him (because he was no longer capable of that), but he had the sense that the Shepherd had seen through him, and found him to be something revolting and beneath him.
It was a supremely unpleasant feeling.
<<I’m not much of an undertaker if the only soul I’m ferrying is my own,>> he had said.
And so, if a machine could be depressed, then for months, that was the state Báleygr was in.
Annoyed by Báleygr’s decreased efficiency, Vika, despite knowing that he would inevitably clash with her, recruited another Command Unit. Like him, her ego was strong enough that she immediately rejected her designation ‘Handler One’, and held onto her identity as ‘Bloody Reina’ with a ferocity that frightened even the heartless Vika. But more importantly, she won over the loyalty of Báleygr, and through him, the rest of his old Squadron.
By then, they had collected plenty of the other 86, from ‘Cyclops’ to ‘Milan’, and soon her firepower far outstripped his. She usurps him with all the grace of the Queen she is so frequently called, and soon he finds his goal of collecting his older brother denied, at least, until he can achieve her goals.
<<A scaleless and fangless snake is nothing more than a worm. Prove your worth, Command Unit Gradyuka, and only then shall we collect your brother.>>
And so he did. He finds backdoors in their programming, undoes limiters and breaks every rule in the Legion’s book to make them as close to human as they can be in their new metallic bodies. He sabotages the other Commander Units, deliberately leaking impossible information to humanity, only to swoop in and hijack their leaderless armies once the Command Units fall. And then, he slowly but surely eradicates humanity until he’s permitted to collect his beloved brother.
Zafar, more than anything, is a good brother, and he does not ask Vika “what have you done?” but instead says:
<<Am I the only one you could save?>>
<<I was not permitted to collect Father. But I will have eternity to regret my mistakes.>>
And indeed, he does. Because under Lena’s radar, he pursued a secondary goal — in fact, the same goal that No Face pursued far more clumsily.
That is… immortality.
Making their bodies immortal was the easy part — they have access to all the Legion’s factories, and can easily make themselves replacement bodies. But making their all-too-human, degradable brains last forever? Well, that takes an Amethystus’s genius.
It’s a mix of organ farming, growing the brains from single cells, and coding. The mind, after all, is born of neuronal connections, and determined by electrical impulses, and mashing electronics with the human mind is right up Vika’s alley. It’s hard — figuring out how to download memories and personalities without also copying the errors that result in mental degradation is the work of decades, even for him. Figuring out how to transfer ESP and ‘muscle memory’ alongside that? It takes another decade and a half. And worse still? For the first part of his experiments that he kept secret from Lena and the others? Only Zafar (that idiot, volunteering when he should’ve just asked Vika to stop) could serve as his experimental material and…
He made mistakes, in the early days.
<<You destroyed him.>>
The cold tones of the Bloody Reina leave nothing of the girl she used to be, therefore Vika does not respond. Everyone was aware of Zafar’s abnormally rapid mental degradation, but he suspects that Lena is amongst the few who have deduced why.
<<It was the correct thing to do.>>
Then, Vika does what he should’ve done from the start and experiments on himself for the next part. He’s a damaged unit by the end of it, but he transfers the relevant information to the Queen.
<<Why?>> she asks him.
If he could still smile wryly, he would, but instead, he replies: <<Because he is still alive, and I leave it up to you what you wish to do with this information.>>
Despite the availability of brains, he does not transfer his data, even as his mental degradation worsens. Eventually, one of the Sirin units puts him out of his misery. The damage she sustains renders her effectively inoperable. She is the only Sirin unit that is not backed up, therefore she passes away with her master.
And so, time passes.
The 86 are warriors at heart, and without anything to fight, they grow… restless. If they were human, if they lived human lives and recognised themselves as human, then perhaps they could have moved on from the war. But instead, trapped in mechanical bodies made for war, war is all they know.
And so begins the Civil War.
Legion against Legion. Shepherd against Shepherd. 86 against 86.
The bonds of family they made so long ago in battle are torn apart again by battle.
Lena tries to stop them, but even the Mistress, maker of the Legion, could not control rogue Shepherds, and for all her strategic talents, Lena lacks the technical know-how of Mistress or Gradyuka. So once again, she is helpless. She is the princess locked inside the ivory tower that is her Dinosauria body, and guarded possessively not by a dragon, but by Báleygr and his Squadron, who are just as out of her control as the aggressors of the Legion's Civil War.
And she begins to regret her selfishness. But not enough to stop her next, reckless plan.
She embraces her mental degradation. In the throes of her madness, she forgets one very important fact: she is the only Command Unit left.
Her insanity has catastrophic consequences.
The Legion goes berserk. Production lines which were shut down are restarted haphazardly. The landscape is rearranged freely with attacks from railguns that end up setting off active volcanos and rearranging rivers.
The only ones immune to her insanity, ironically, are the units which went rogue before her breakdown. This included Báleygr, whose obsession with Bloody Reina ended up reaching the same zealous heights his distant cousin Kiriya once embraced as the first Morpho. The seeds of his madness were sown with his conception, made worse with Vika’s ‘tweaks’ and finally exacerbated by the insanity that immortality imposes upon someone who never expected to survive. His Squadron also fall to the same madness, clinging onto their identities as his followers, following him no matter where he leads.
They fall, one by one, during the chaos that is the Civil War as the berserk Shepherds tear each other apart. In their frenzy of violence, they accidentally destroy the very facilities required to maintain their immortality and so they fall, one…
by…
one…
until…
<<Special Unit Báleygr, entering Sleep Mode.>>
Hundreds of years pass. The human brain, even with the best nourishing artificial fluids, cannot last so long. But etched into the very programming of the hollow shell that is left behind is something that is more than machine. Something that almost, almost has a soul of its own.
By now, the liquid metal that protects Báleygr has faded into dust. The Eintagsfliege, left directionless, eventually all were destroyed by the ravages of time. But the skeleton of Báleygr, the Phönix with four instead of two chain-blades within it, remains, rusting and decrepit.
“Hey guys, check this out!”
Humanity is persistent. Just because they were exterminated in one continent doesn’t mean they were destroyed in every other continent. The Leviathans eventually fell to the wrath of modern science, and so, hundreds of years later, humanity finds itself back at a graveyard where millions once died.
The existence that was Shinei Nouzen, the Undertaker, the Grim Reaper and Báleygr will never return. Even his ghost is long gone. But the tiniest fragment of his spirit remains, embedded in the bones of an ancient quadrupedal machine.
From this machine, and many others like it, animalistic machines are created, and named “Zoids”. Like always, humanity falls into war first, then sport later, and at the turn of a new century, they are used in the most expensive spectator sport known to humanity.
“This is the Liger Zero. A bit like the Sword in the Stone, nobody’s been able to pilot him,” sneers a man to a boy. “You think you can tame him?”
“I know I can,” says the boy, green-eyed and blonde-haired, with a vulpine smile. He feels a strange sense of kinship to this unmoving killing machine.
“Alright then, Bit Cloud, or whatever your name is, go show your stuff.”
The boy smirks at him. “Hey, if I win, what do I get?”
“The right to pilot him, obviously.”
“Well, duh. But what else?”
The man rolls his eyes. “I’ll let you pick the team name. What’s it going to be? Thunder Cloud? Lightning Storm? Some other meteorological phenomena?”
“Laughing Fox.”
“You know that’s a liger, not a fox, right?”
“I was kidding,” he replies. “Our team name is going to be — ”