What felt like a bonfire started up in his stomach, the burning pain spreading all throughout is body as the stench of sulphur filled his breath and a rising sense of blazing anger overtook him, this time his own, mixing and blending with Zero’s rage within the man known as the Steel Comet as he slipped his left arm out of the interface sleeve, reaching up and behind his seat, opening an emergency access hatch.

He grabbed one of the vital cables making up the connection between Zero’s engine and drive train, the machine’s arteries and brainstem simultaneously, twisting its locking cap and pulling it out of its slot. The black serpent’s head was a long, red-hot spike, notched up its entire length like a key and covered in arcane symbols, more a tool of sorcery than science, and like any good tool of sorcery, it quickly found its place in Strake’s flesh when he stuck it into the site of a very old, pitch-black scar, right below his ribs, into the liver.

Indeed, he had done this before, and it didn’t hurt any less now than it had back then, when he slaughtered those Inquisitors.

It was a good, familiar pain, the fire sucked from his body in an instant as Zero came alive once more, the securing hooks of its cable clamping down into his flesh. Metal twisted itself back into shape, tubes and chambers unbuckled and welds re-welded themselves, pilebunkers regrew back to a pristine state. The ultracompact fulgur-igneic reactor that was Zero’s engine roared back to well beyond full output, now supplemented by Strake’s having turned his own flesh to a reactor of sorts. The machine had gotten its ounce of blood, and it knew better than to exsanguinate its lifeline.

Strake activated the machine’s sound system, the steady marching beat and the clarion call of trumpets that made up that ever-familiar theatrical entrance tune carrying over the field and breaking through even gunfire, loud enough to get a sliver of the Walking Mountain’s attention, the remainder of his focus drawn to the Steel Comet by both his subsequent usage of the sound system and the appearance of the walking tank. Its output superseding specifications made whole sections of the hull take on a cherry-red glow, chiefly the joints and actuators, the internal frame slightly warping under the increased energetic load as he intentionally extended the legs to help with cooling. Being well aware of the visual effect, Strake made Zero walk with what would appear as a hunched, bestial gait, creating the appearance that the machine had gone feral; an appearance that was not entirely illusory, as the only thoughts that crossed his mind were of violently dismembering the man before him and using the sound amplifier to blast him with the simultaneously vilest and most creative slurs he could think of.

With Herculean mental effort, Strake held off on simply shouting slurs over his own heroic theme music.

“THIS MACHINE HAS MORE SOUL THAN TEN THOUSAND OF YOUR KIN, FILTHY WESTERNER.”

“LOOK UPON ME, WESTERNER, AND DESPAIR, FOR THIS MACHINE IS MY VERY FLESH, IT IS TO ME AS THE GLORIFIED GOLEM YOU CALL A BODY IS TO YOU.”

Sprinting across the battlefield as it ripped up the ground, Zero crossed the distance in seconds, uprighting itself as it began to drift around Ubul, unloading hi-pen shells into the general one after the other, each blocked in turn by a raised stone wall, for the general was no fool. He flung back hardened stones at the speed of cannonballs, the few which struck the tank’s plating bouncing off. Five flashes were seen overhead that both of them ignored.

“THIS MACHINE - I - WE EVOLVE FURTHER WITH EACH REVOLUTION OF THE ENGINE, A SPIRAL ETERNALLY PUSHING FORWARD.”

“I WAS AT JADE HARBOR, I WAS AT STONOG, KLINIG, HARTUNIA. GONUBANA, GAU HONG, MO SHUI, PAN CHAO, WAN HANYING! I KILLED OR CRIPPLED EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, AND MORE! I AM STEEL COMET. I AM PANZERMENSCH. COME, JOIN YOUR SUBORDINATES AS A NOTCH ON MY LIGHTER.”

Meanwhile, the tank took out the gigantic scattergun that made up its secondary armament, firing CP-T laced explosive shells, the explosives inevitably scattering a good amount of the vile substance all over the general. Stone or flesh, CP-T burned all the same, and Ubul had to divert some of his focus toward shedding the material splattered in it, opening up miniscule but vital weaknesses in his defense. Strake would run out of ammunition soon enough, but that didn’t matter.

“SO LONG AS THERE IS PATEIRIAN BLOOD TO BE SPILLED UPON OUR SOIL, SO LONG AS A SINGLE IKESIAN STILL LIVES, THIS DOG OF WAR CANNOT BE BROUGHT TO HEEL.”

Rack the gun, let it spit hot shells onto blasted earth. Slide in two, four, six. Point. Fire.

Strake was still in there, but he willingly allowed Zero’s all-consuming rancor to guide him, his own will easily aligned with its goals. Even now, the machine’s influence tinged his thoughts and swirled them into frothing rage: “BREAK HIM. PUNISH HIM. HURT HIM. SEND HIM DOWN AND SEND HIM SCREAMING. YOU ARE HELLFIRE NOW, MORE RAGE THAN HUMAN.”

The very last of his Type-1a shells got through, striking Ubul’s core head-on and embedding itself within the fault that Makhus’s slash had put there, spreading yet further cracks. Five gunshots were heard, five blazing comets soaring across the battlefield, yet not one was headed towards Ubul, it seemed. Despite this apparent fact, the general knew better and prepared to defend himself from these, too. He reformed his right arm and formed a hardened shield over the forearm, coating it with a layer of arcanely hardened raw iron, having simply concentrated colossal amounts of Terra within the metal. Ubul was familiar with this energy, this ruinous force that Ankhezian war machines relied upon, and he knew better than to underestimate it. He’d seen beams of it make hard turns mid-air just to strike a target, he wouldn’t be the fool just because this time it was being harnessed by a relatively crude firearm.