《Retribution Engine》150 - Bloody Zero

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Portions of the walls and ceiling were stone, but larger portions still were scrap metal. Despite the workshop’s spacious entryway, the amount of various machining tools and parts made it feel cramped - not to mention a variety of blueprints and the massive essentech terminal in one of the corners. Alcerys noticed several brass Tablets with basic storage glyphs etched onto them laying on a table, which she inferred to mean that what was laying out and about didn’t even cover everything, only what Burgess thought he could need at a moment’s notice or couldn’t fit into Fog Storage.

For all the things that filled the workshop however, one thing was nowhere to be seen.

“The tank,” Strake noted. “Where is it?”

Burgess - not even turning to acknowledge the Tankman - nodded his head towards a gaping hole in the wall.

He took a seemingly random piece of scrap metal from a nearby workbench and jammed it into the hole, wrenching it down like a lever until a loud clack could be heard. One of the scrap-metal wall plates shifted in place, sliding to the side and folding away into the compartment which it had previously concealed. A large chamber, twice as large as the workshop easily, with a towering something covered by a tarp in the middle. Burgess hobbled his way over to the object, reaching up and pulling off the tarp to reveal the blood-red metal monstrosity below.

“Thrice the armor, thrice the power output, thrice the speed and violence of any normal walking tank. It would’ve turned my insides to goop if I were to ever drive it at full output for more than a minute. I couldn’t decide on what to name it. Thought of it as nothing more than my Walking Coffin until I learned Estoras was sending someone to get me out… Figured a more fitting name would be the Bloody Zero, seeing as it technically is the sole surviving Type-Zero Frame and I used Rubedo-heavy alchemic paint for the heat shielding. Hence the uh, the zero on the chest - it was going to be a skull.”

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Both Strake and Alcerys were familiar with a First-model’s silhouette, even if from different perspectives, and to both of them, this looked wrong. A cyclopean distortion of the original form, stretched and distended, a monstrous machine somehow exuding a furious aura one would only expect from a wild beast.

The limbs, the engine backpack, the armor, it all looked wrong. It was indeed like there were three walking tanks mashed together in the steel beast’s construction, the damn thing was one and a half times as tall as any normal unit and - he guessed - at least a third wider. It was painted blood-red, and had a crossed-out zero in white paint on its chest. The plating was weathered, scraped up, it had bulletproofing pits all over the chest and shoulder plating, barely concealed by the paint.

On its back were folded two weapons.

One was folded away in a nook next to the engine backpack, a full-length Type-Z Anti-Cultivator Cannon with a bolt-action breach, the bolt lever and trigger both connected to a mechanized armature that strongly implied it would fold upwards and sit on the suit’s shoulder when in use. There was a third, smaller arm there, suggesting Burgess had decided to solve the reloading problem by simply adding an extra manipulator, probably imbued with the instructions to operate the gun and nothing else.

The second gun was folded away on the suit’s lower back, literally folded in half inside a bonafide leather holster and without a dedicated loading mechanism. Instead, its ammo box had three tube-shaped speedloaders poking out of it. Besides these two firearms, the suit had two more close-range armaments.

A giant, rough-hewn cleaver lay on the ground next to it, and it had essentech pilebunkers on the undersides of its forearms. They were simple in concept, but extremely complex in manufacturing, amplifying and translating the output of the engine into kinetic energy to propel the cold-iron spike.

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There were signs of rushing - some of the welds weren’t clean, some of the paintwork was a little uneven, the zero on the chest was extremely rough.

Burgess noticed, pointing out himself that, “I uh, I was gonna try to polish it best I could an’ only use it once they found me, but since Estoras contacted me about the plan I’ve had to hurry up finishing it. If both it and me get back to Willowdale, I insist on cleaning it up.”

Sodan hadn’t been sure how to achieve his second objective up until now, even with both his own and his partner’s capabilities taken into consideration. This had given him a very easy, very direct answer.

“Burgess, do you have an escape route?” he asked. The inventor nodded.

“Yes, multiple, but the city is too densely patrolled to make it through with my bum leg.”

“What if a distraction were to draw the occupying forces away? Would you be able to get out if, say… Someone were to mount a direct assault on the Lighthouse?”

“You can’t-” he began, but then stopped himself, looked at the Bloody Zero, then at the Charred Judge, then back to Sodan. “Yes. Yes I could. But I wouldn’t be able to get back to Willowdale on my own. We’ll need a rendezvous point.”

“How is that supposed to help free Rigport of occupation? It’ll only drive them to push harder.”

“Oh they will, but by the time they’ll be able to get any meaningful force here, the city will already be re-occupied under Grekurian protection via the proxy of the Estoras Family, as was supposed to happen in the first place before the false-flag. Pateiria will be able to do nothing on legal grounds, and the city will be reinforced ten times over against any potential false-flag attacks in the future. Add into the mix simply permitting Ikesians to run their own city guard and conveniently ignoring their inevitable suspicion towards not just Pateirians but anything vaguely Pateirian… It’ll be fine.”

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