The marine who had helped me out against the Adepticus Pugilicus jerks insisted on going his own way. I guess he didn’t feel he could trust me around the weapon of mass destruction he was carrying around.
Either way, he walked off in one direction for some reason. When I tried to catch up to him, he whirled around and trained his big fucking gun on me. Sensing a distinct lack of trust there, I let him go and focused on the downed Adepticus marines.
I was able to scoop a good chunk of them out, since they were partially in chunks now. First bones, then some pink goop, then separated chunks of flesh, blood, bones, and muscle, and then intact body parts in the armored sections further from openings or weak points. Very interesting stuff. It confirmed the weakpoints. Any kind of armor tends to be weaker where someone needs to move, and this was no different. Neck, armpits, groin and inner thigh, and the knees.
It’s like I’ve said before, there’s always a way to kill someone. I’m an optimist of death, you might say, except for the part about experiencing it myself.
Once I had the gooey bits out, I set to work extracting and modifying their cores. Part of this involved slipping my right hand out of my glove and into the armor. It took several minutes, but soon the neural connection was made and I delved into the armor’s specs, trying to learn about the powersource.
Despite the armor, the training, the tendency to smack my enemies upside the head with anything at hand, I have only one thing that could be deemed a superpower. My race has the ability to connect to sufficiently advanced technology by touch. Rule of thumb says our nerves can link us up to any computer, including the CPU regulating the flow of energy to a suit of power armor. The communications package on this armor was also useful to know for psychological warfare.
You won’t be seeing too many more like me in all these rants you read from me. I am currently the only one of my kind on this planet. It involves a dimension-breaching bomb and a version of Earth that is in no hurry to get me back.
I had barely finished my work on the explosives when I was viciously snuck up upon by a guy who shot me in that ungloved hand. I was in shock for a second as I stared at the stump where my hand used to be.
Yes, my armor does actually provide some protection, even if its main function is to gather and process nearby visual data to seamlessly project it on me in such a way as to render me invisible. My abilities allow my brain to regulate this as well. With a hand off, I made use of that invisibility capability and its ability to project holograms nearby.
To the Adepticus who had burned me like a motherfucker, argh!, it looked like my image shook and split into three of me in different locations. All three were gloved and perfectly fine. One goaded him on by waving him over with one hand and pantomiming jerking off with the other. The middle cartwheeled into backflipping towards my assailant. The last me around gave him the finger with both hands, then zigzagged low to the ground as he made his way. Two of these were illusions and the Adepticus marine fired on all three. The flipping Gecko dodged one and then caught another beam in the midsection, the ruby beam spearing straight through and out the other side. The zigzagging one also avoided one of them before the laser seared through its leg. The one taunting the marine got a beam between the eyes and between the legs. None of them showed any effect and the two that were approaching never missed a step.
He tried to go for a Swiss army knife and pull out the chainsaw attachment, but that’s when I dropped all the illusions. Even with my left leg barely attached below the knee, I was able to move in close before he realized it was too late. I caught his hand and the chainsaw Swiss army knife with my remaining hand, my glove charged with energy. It burned his armor as I squeezed his hand, managing to snap something in it, an actuator probably. He dropped it and instead brought the butt of the laser rifle around. With a leg almost off, I was unable to dodge and went down to it.
He pointed it right at me then but I gave him an energy punch to the fingers and took the laser from him. Then I fired point blank into his crotch. He fell in front of me, ruined hands holding roasted chestnuts. I slid around and popped him in the ass as well, for good measure. When he tried to defend himself, I smacked him vigorously in the neck with the rifle butt. “You motherfucker, you shot my girlfriend!” I yelled as I shoved my arm stump in his face.
Some might say forty-seven times was one time too many to smack him. Others might have thought when I tore my wounded leg free of the last skin holding it on and shoved it up his ass foot-first I may have gone overboard. Honestly, sticking the barrel in there and finishing him off just seemed the merciful thing to do on my part. It just took four or five shots because I kept missing anything like his heart or brain that would put him down immediately. My aim gets a little off when my FUCKING HAND GETS SHOT OFF!
Afterwards, I looked around at the workshop, checking for a sufficiently long metal pole or something to act as a crutch. My chances of getting off the ship weren’t looking so hot with me losing body parts left and right and my supply of nanites was limited. My supply of patience was spent. A nearby computer gave up the location of the main reactor with a little coaxing from my nub. Other parts and scraps around the workshop gave me the means to reach it.
When I finished, the workshop looked like it had been used for some torture porn film with blood, body parts, and ass everywhere. But when I stepped out of the door of that workshop, it was with a torn scrap of the green silent marine’s shirt over my empty eye socket, a metal peg leg below my left knee, and a single hooked mechanical digit on a metal cup on my burned right wrist. I had four octagonal pulsing power armor cores strung together and slung over my shoulder.
I was tired, in a lot of pain, and surrounded by people who were of no use to me. Body parts missing, gadgets destroyed, and I was going to have to break in a whole new hand when I got back to base. In the meantime, hoist those colors, mateys.
