Awake again. Not suffocating this time. Miserable nonetheless.

  An impact rocked the ship, thundering all around him.

  Head throbbing, Zanma kicked back a shot of Stimulant #8. A shudder came over him, goosebumps running down his back as he rolled his head side-to-side, neck popping and cracking. He meticulously went down the list, popping and stretching all of his joints as the mixture’s stimulants, painkillers, bioboosters and nootropics took hold. As he did this, the Captain’s voice echoed throughout the cargo hold. Between the speaking-tube’s distortion, the footfalls and shouting of the crewmen on the gun-deck above, the thunder of the particle smasher cannons, and the straining of the hull, it was a small miracle that Zanma managed to make out anything at all. He caught enough of it to piece it together, at least.

  Finally, he shook his head to loosen up his hair, and gestured towards a pearlescent-white cube sitting on one of his workbenches. A few strands rose into the air, pointing where he did, and a thread of red light shot out towards it. At the moment of contact, the cube unfolded into a spider with a skeleton of dark alloys and pearlescent outer plates; it had six legs, a head made up of a triangle of sensors and a speaker, as well as a scorpion-type manipulator appendage. The puppet’s only weapon to speak of was a toxin injector concealed within that manipulator. Through the joining of a puppet’s psionic gearbox to a puppetmaster’s threads, inert matter gained a semblance of life, becoming a true extension of the puppetmaster’s being in a way no conventional remote drone could ever achieve. He saw through the spider’s eyes, he sensed the vibrations under its feet, its legs and manipulator moved at his will; it could not be said it moved like his own limbs, because the barrier of control was even lower than that, for thought traveled along the thread instantaneously.

  With a mere thought and a twitch of one finger, lifted by psychokinetic force as if weightless, the puppet shot through the air, landing at the opening of the speaking-tube and climbing up through it, following a route which Zanma had already memorized weeks prior, when he had gone through the ship, performing various small repairs and modifications to make his own journey more comfortable. He wasn’t fond of this type of puppet, but he knew better than to shun them altogether.

  His mind’s eye tracked the spider’s brief journey, and soon enough he saw the bridge and the Captain’s strained expression through its sensors. He made it tap the edge of the speaking-tube to get the old man’s attention.

  “Have they raised the flag of no quarter?” he asked.

  “No. Doesn’t matter either way,” came the Captain’s growl of a voice. “Doubt they’ll leave any of the crew alive, and if they do, it’ll be to sell us.”

  Zanma thought for a moment. “Fire the turrets until they overheat or otherwise malfunction. Override the cruise rotor safety, push them as hard as they will go until they start whining, then shut them off to simulate a breakdown. Order the gunnery crew to break up firing pattern to simulate panic. Signal surrender and let the pirates board. I will handle the rest. Inform me of the enemy’s crew composition when and if able.”

  “At a glance, Fifteen Tilters, three Heads with four Hands each; the Heads carry handheld particle smashers, the rest a mix of crude pulse weapons, cutlasses. Might be more below deck," the Captain replied right away. “Their captain may be an evolver. Be cautious, young master.”

  The red-haired young man stood, waveringly, glancing left and right. He reached up, pinching his left earring between his thumb and index finger. The black rod thrummed in his grip, and his hand slipped into another place, here but elsewhere, a crease in the world. At the next moment, he drew a gun “from thin air,” an angular, uncomfortable design, a rectangular rod with a grip and trigger stuck on, yet these small conveniences were seamlessly melded to the design. A particle accelerator pistol; Type-1, a linear acceleration track, but thanks to its cluster-type acceleration profile, it was potent enough to tear a fist-sized chunk out of a man’s head and toss it on the ground. Its firepower was comparable to a large-bore chemical propellant pistol. He didn’t see himself hitting any impressive killshots, certainly not as he was now, but blasting until it overheated was his best option in case someone got up close. In his left hand, he grasped the canister of Locke’s Salt.

  Out of his workshop, he stepped into the Etsutensoku’s cargo hold — this was where he had set up. It was the most spacious part of the ship; the need to preserve cargo also made it the coolest and least reeking section.

  Assuming the Captain’s estimate held up, and considering they were likely equipped for boarding action, he estimated the pirates could overpower the Etsuntensoku’s crew by around fifty percent. It was a large enough advantage that their confidence made sense. The major tactical consideration was the fact they were Tilters; a bizarre and ruined offshoot of humanity, beings who possessed one main body and multiple secondary bodies, which had no true consciousnesses of their own, but still possessed some autonomy. This was a major advantage, but also a curse, as each Tilter had to contend with and moderate the impulses of all his bodies. Zanma had heard the main and auxiliary bodies being referred to as the Head and Hands respectively. Four-handed Tilters were of a high enough caste to at least possess a bare-minimum degree of self-control, enough to “command” their bodies for squad-level combat. In some way, they could be considered similar to puppetmasters like him, though being compared to a Tilter would be an insult to any puppetmaster.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Zanma knew well enough just how unfortunate the situation was. He was awake and aware, that was true, but he could sense it; he was still poisoned. He wouldn't be able to fight at even half his best if he tried to do things properly... And besides, his master had asked of him to not reveal more of his strength than need-be, even to allies. For all the standards to which he held himself, at this moment, the young man of nineteen was torn between two foolish choices: Try to bring his puppets to bear properly, despite the poisoning, or eschew the methods which he had painstakingly refined over the last decade in favor of the one strength too brutish for the Tridacna Leviathan's poison to disrupt: Vectors.

  Again, he formed a Vector, this time intentionally. The scarlet apparition of an arm writhed and undulated as if it were full of parasitic worms.

  "A few Hollow Men ought to suffice for the bulk of it, and the rest… The rest I’ll do myself," he thought.

  Using Vectors and rudimentary puppetry, he would eliminate the Heads, and the Hands would either scatter or go berserk infighting in the vain effort to assert themselves as the new Head. That was the best-case scenario, anyway. He was sure the Heads would use the Hands as human shields and complicate things, but he would manage.

  As he stepped out of his workshop, he retracted the thread joining him to the spider puppet. Meanwhile, three more threads slowly spun into existence behind him and extended outward, a faint red glow pulsing down the length of his hair. His workshop, after all, was filled with puppets. Most numerous among them were hollow, skeletal humanoids, frames of alloy that couldn’t even be considered unfinished, because he had not begun working on them properly; they were blank canvasses, but they would do. One thread each entered three of them, through the back and into the gearbox, that linchpin of all psionic puppetry; for Hollow Men, a single thread each sufficed only to move them in rudimentary fashion, enough for now. These skeletal warriors rose with nary a sound and, at his will, lumbered to differing corners of the workshop, towards the parts they would need to serve him. Bit by bit, he socketed sensor-eyes into their empty sockets, then willed them to take up arms that suited them — two rifle-type particle accelerators, and one, a long, narrow vibro-sword with a blade three-quarters as long as the puppet was tall, around a meter and a half. Two Gunners and a Swordsman. For the Gunners, he joined black cables from their skulls to their rifles to better relay targeting data, and gave the Swordsman an additional thread, joining this one to the sword’s hilt. Finally, he dressed them in stage props; “jingasa” metal cone hats and raincoats of optic-diffraction fibre. This was for the practical benefits of breaking up the silhouette and confounding the foe’s aim through the optic diffraction effect, but also because they felt naked to him without proper armor, and he felt ashamed of parading their bare frames around, doubly so before pirates.

  These Hollow Men, arrayed behind him, would suffice, and more importantly, he didn’t feel comfortable trying to bring to bear more than these three. Once more his psionics misfired as he sought to form more threads. Instead, an oversized Vector-hand took form, and only then its fingers unraveled in five directions, joining to the Hollow Men. Seven threads dedicated to puppets was a little over half his normal capacity of thirteen, leaving him plenty of room to work with even considering his fluctuating output.

  With his mind forced to a half-waking dream-state by sheer force of stimulants, his psionics at once sluggish and unstable, flanked by skeletal gunmen and guarded from the front by a Swordsman of the same provenance, the red-haired puppetmaster walked through the Etsutensoku’s dim-lit belly. The black surface of his bodysuit gleamed in the red of the emergency lights, and the sound of his near-bare feet against the polymer flooring pierced through the almost soundless footfalls of his puppets. Without thought or intent, through pure instinct, he gave far greater care to the movement of these lifeless things than to his own flesh. Even as he was, even at his worst, the three Hollow Men walked and held their arms with a bearing worthy of royal guards.

  Meanwhile, at the surface, the Captain was doing as he had been told. The vessel’s two turrets howled defiance, spewing accelerated particles rapidly enough to, at points, create the illusion of a continuous beam. Similarly following Zanma's instructions, the gunnery crew began breaking up their firing patterns. They were composed of the gunnery chief, who was a humanoid alcohol gut astride an eight-legged, four-armed life support apparatus, plus three assistants, each of whom had also lost a limb or two fighting some leviathan or other and, unable to bear the strain of combat prosthetics, had retired to the gunnery deck.

  Inevitably, both turrets malfunctioned, and when they did, the gunnery crew ceased firing as they held on for dear life. The Etsutensoku lurched forward, sharply tilting back. Zanma slipped and lost his footing. His body refused to obey, and he fell. His mind saw it coming, but his poisoned limbs wouldn't respond. A Vector shot out at the last second, anchoring him to a structural beam.

  From then on, using his own puppets to support himself, he walked to the top deck. The crewmen swarmed towards him, but dared not approach, sensing the invisible miasma that swirled about the young man. Psionic energy spilling out like water through a sieve, his very presence was poison; such was the effort he was exerting for this unremarkable act, that just the small amount that leaked out due to the poison amounted to a tyrannical ego projection. The paint scraped from the walls and the emergency lights burst like firecrackers with his passage, and in the eyes of the crewmen, whom the red-haired puppetmaster regarded as allies to be protected, he appeared as a demon who had shed the mask of common humanity. These hardened men feared that, should they carelessly approach him, the youth’s hair would flay them where they stood and wrench the life from them.

  None of this even registered to Zanma; he was too busy fighting with himself to make his puppets meet the bare-minimum standard of “moving properly,” and to keep his own fleshly vessel upright as he strained to reach the top deck before the pirates could board. His movement through the stairways and corridors sped up considerably when, at last, the Captain halted all of the Etsutensoku’s propulsions, bringing it to a steady cruise as it bled off the remnants of its speed and the pirate ship closed in. With his passage, the lower-decks’ few crewmen continued their swarming, grabbing what weapons they could in order to prepare for boarding; the Captain had told them little in the chaos, only enough to know that the puppetmaster would head up the defense and to support him as best they could without getting in his way.

  Patreon!