A eunuch entered his throne room at precisely the moment he was expected, kowtowed as was expected, and calmly looked up at the Emperor.

“Your Divinity, I come bearing grim news…” he said. “We’ve lost six seers in the scrying ritual due to Blackwall-related stressors, with seventy suffering light to moderate spiritual injuries for unknown reasons. We have no relevant information to show for it.”

“Nothing?” the Emperor raised an eyebrow, pulling away several of his less-important aether mirrors.

“Nothing altogether,” he nodded, holding up a talisman with a hole in the center. At the Emperor’s command, the eunuch performed the gestures and made it project the recording, still maintaining a kneeling position. The recording didn’t unravel, because there was just… Nothing there. Being specifically targeted at a known individual it had a blurry, uncertain outline, but in the center, it was just tattered edges and blank nothingness surrounding an iridescent, stone-still flame of a soul.

This was… An unexpected development, but not necessarily a surprising one. Someone feeding on the essence of a dungeon core using the soul and flesh of a Locust Queen as a filter, that was such an outlandish circumstance that it had never occurred in any history he was aware of. Thus, it stood to reason that a Dungeon Core’s essence would fundamentally remake any living thing subjected to it, imparting some of the Core’s properties in the process, including total immunity to most forms of scrying by virtue of the Core - or Demi-Core in this case - simply not giving off what scrying methods read.

Being effectively un-surveyable outside of mundane means, she had the potential to become a major issue even if he had her put under surveillance beyond Cao Hu’s aged eyes. Among the wizened general’s few flaws, underestimating the threat posed by women was chief - one that had persisted through three arranged marriages and three fortunes lost to scornful wives. The fact that the Emperor had arranged for the latter two to repeat the actions of the first in an attempt to teach the younger man a lesson didn’t help.

This possibility, however, was outweighed in his mind by two things.

Firstly, her history - she had come from nothing. Third child of a lower middle-standing family, self-taught martial artist. She had traveled nigh-on a hundred miles to participate in and subsequently win a tourney whose sole purpose was to select a new disciple for the organizing martial arts school, which itself produced recruits for the Empire’s elite units.

Following extensive mental conditioning and a nearly decade-long career within a shock troop unit, she along with her unit were selected for the Anima Mutagen. It was a direct result of data collected from extensive Chimera Farm research and the Divine Army’s use of God’s Blood Elixir, intended to maximize the odds of a Tiger-class mutagenic reaction. It fulfilled this purpose, producing on average two red-hued mantis mutants out of every ten-man squad, whilst another four-tenths of the subjects became red locust mutants of above-average capability, and the remainder expired due to mutation-related trauma.

The Emperor had made her everything she was, given her a station beyond her family’s reckoning, and even left her the means to directly contact him in case the Queen she was assigned to ever became a liability.

Thus, the mantis had no reason to be anything but unflinchingly loyal to Him and Him alone - and he, in turn, had no reason to doubt her, for he himself had witnessed the fervor with which she proclaimed her dedication to and enforced the Divine Maxims.

Secondly, boredom.

Even on the infinitesimally tiny chance that Red’s ambitions outgrew her station, the amusement it could provide before it was inevitably squashed would far surpass any damage she could do without the Empire’s support at her back.

The day of the execution…

Strake had spent the last day and a half studying Zero, preparing himself mentally for the inevitable struggle that the tank’s will would put up when it formed. It wasn’t a question of if, but rather one of when, and how unstable it would be.

The cockpit was only barely more spacious than a normal one-man tank, containing far more control pedals alongside the usual control sleeves, not to mention what looked like projection glyphs that would likely display whatever the suit’s cyclopean sensor array saw. The seat was a modified standard-model seat, and therefore just comfortable enough, emphasizing stability and pilot safety. A headset was placed on the seat’s headrest, an antenna-like microphone sticking out of it. The cockpit was illuminated on the inside by a series of reddish-orange lightgems that would siphon an infinitesimally tiny portion of engine output during initial startup to recharge.

There were a few conveniences meant to facilitate extended operation times, and Zero included them all - an Aqua extractor with an eyeball-sized gem to fuel it and a mechanical cutoff in case of damage, a few compartments for rations and medical supplies, some emergency replacement parts, five rapid-discharge Fulgur cells for the Thundercharger… And three seal-wrapped phials labeled “V. Wash”.

All in all, Zero’s cockpit was different… But familiar.

Besides its overt weapons, it had some other features as well - kinetic skates, for one. Where normal First-models and even V2 had possessed physical tracks on their feet, Zero had no such thing - it instead had some abominable piece of Kargarian essentech-witchery that even Burgess couldn’t quite explain beyond “when you drive it you’ll be able to tell”. There was also an aetherwave communications array, a model that Strake was familiar with and which he knew could be used to disrupt aetherwave comms in a wide area around the tank at the cost of its own comms.

He had stolen the unit’s sibling from the testing grounds, after all. There had been three cold-iron frames produced of this scale, the first being, counterintuitively, not Zero, but V1.

V2 - the unit which he had stolen and which had served him so reliably for so long - was second, smaller than the first, simpler, less impressive, but sturdier and reparable without a reactor forge on hand. The first step towards mass production.