Time and time again, as he approached the design’s finalization, the left arm’s minimalism kept cropping up as an issue. It was disproportionately light, and thus imbalanced the puppet. He briefly considered reworking it to incorporate the manica-style armor sleeves with their folding tower shields, but their durability left much to be desired. They were a design laser-focused on their specific niche and deficient in all other quarters. He broke out his largest plate of TPR composite, and reworked the arm’s armoring structure around it as the core of a “light medium shield.” The plate needed much work to become suitable, but, as he worked, the arm came together and the weight distribution improved noticeably just with the main plate’s addition.
There was no getting around it. Zanma had wanted to keep his use of TPR sparse for now, to finish the base design, then start the calculations and slowly incorporate it, but his own desires prevailed over orthodoxy in this one instance. He knew that he could make it work just fine without the full, rigorous design process. It just wasn’t best practice. But then, in the field, one didn’t always have room for best practices, only the better of several less-than--ideal choices.
Ceramic and alloy gave way to ceramic-TPR composite. It was a game of trial and error, and demanded of Zanma a great deal of work with the hateful substance in both its liquid and solid form; he couldn’t just cut his existing stock to shape, that wasted too much material, and was thus only suitable if no other option worked.
The halfway point of the third month dawned. He had traversed the guts of a hollow megabuilding, he had navigated a maze of vending machines, an entire floor strewn by hundreds of skeletons armed with nothing but automatic c-prop guns, another floor that had been filled by rock-hard sealant foam which then had pathways carved through it. Right now, he sat encamped just above his target exit point, waiting out a storm. The winds screamed all around. A gas pipe had been built to this place for some reason, and a gas burner attached at a later date, with the burner putting up a valiant struggle to add to the warmth of Zanma’s encampment.
It had been over three weeks since he had met a living soul, or seen signs of recent human activity. He bit off a chunk of compressed nutrition bar. One bite, 200kcal. Tomb-stable, able to be left out just sitting for up to a thousand years with no special storage measures. He’d found a crate half-full of the things on the next floor up, that battlefield with no winners. His guess, they had been gassed, the way it looked like they all dropped dead at once where they stood guns in hand. Their armor and weaponry was completely anachronistic, like lifted out of antediluvian eras where proto-ceramic plates, kevlar fibre, and primitive c-prop guns with hardened steel penetrators were the peak of personal armament. And they had been battling it out some kind of luxury suite full of gaudy gilded kitsch depicting quasi-occult symbols with no true meaning. A truly strange sight.
Nonetheless, Zanma kept putting on performances. No dialogue, no real story, but the choreographies helped dial in the psi-resonance of the heretofore unnamed Hadou Frame’s armor. In fact, now that he was using the choreographies in this way, he could only grin and shake his head at the realization they were designed to aid in this diagnostic process.
Bit by bit. Inch by inch. The puppet moved, raising and lowering its main gun, adjusting its wide stance and its shield to cover itself, swinging its third arm from one shoulder to the other. And it moved with such ease, Zanma found it difficult to believe. Six threads, the same as the Wurger; and, it was true, this couldn’t achieve the heights of the Wurger’s mobility, but it was so superior in every other aspect that it didn’t matter. Where the Wurger was a single-minded obsession, this Hadou Frame would be the flexible counterpart, the everyman soldier, where the Wurger was an assassin this was a knight. With each motion, its pearlescent armour shimmered with the reflections of nonexistent light, dragging the eyes, smearing in motion, distracting from its true body. A known characteristic of Tridacna Pearl Resin, but hard to understand without seeing it first-hand.
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The left arm, in its completion, became not a mere shield-bearer, but a full armored sleeve borrowing from the spine-spire’s architecture; it had a single main armor section composed of multiple stacked layers in a rectangular shape, and the arm’s upper section was shielded by layered segments with extending fins, like the spurs of a spine, each slightly offset at an angle, allowing them to create overlapping protection without interfering in movement. The right arm’s previously curved casement had to be adjusted for TPR plates, rendering it similarly more angular. In fact, all of the puppet’s armor came out as flat geometric shapes by the nature of TPR, contrasting against the Hadou Frame’s elegant frame full of curves and smooth bevels.
The head, already being armored by default, didn’t necessarily “need” extra armor, but Zanma added it for aesthetic and psi-resonance cohesion. It was a mask designed in the image of one he had picked off of a corpse, shaped roughly like the silhouette of a human skull, with four vertical slits in place of a mouth grill and a single eye-hole over the left eye, which was the spot to which Zanma had relocated the main sensor array. It made sense to him considering the fact the right arm had its own targeting array.
In the end, the plates came together just right. With a few additions and adjustments to the frame, the finished puppet could fold up to form a seamless pillar, with nary a spot of its frame showing through.
Thus, the Pillar Centurion had been born. Zanma’s least proper, least orthodox work, and yet, it had the same silent life and soul as the Wurger. And, in this endeavor, he had reached the Third Degree of Division. He thought it fitting, for a puppet with three arms.
This protracted back-and-forth with himself, this struggle, had sparked in Zanma a yet greater thirst for creation using the Hadou Frame as a medium. Already, barely having completed the Pillar Centurion, he drafted preliminary design documents for its successor, the fulfillment of the promise that the Pillar Centurion held: The Pillar Templar. Having climbed one mountain, he already painted another for himself to crane his neck at.
Time after time, in the course of his travels, the young puppetmaster underwent a repeating cycle of change.
Passing between civilization, wilderness, and a third sort of realm, an underworld neither civilized nor wild, terrible in its danger and generous in its bounties. He navigated corridors of spatial anomalies and spent hours peering at vague distortions in doorways, between trees, across rivers. His own eyes and ears, his psionic senses, and the sensors of his puppets, all these were just barely sufficient to let him navigate such zones of alienation, from which the unevolved were forbidden by the nature of their distorted reality.
And even so, these places were a mere taste of what he had been preparing for all these years. He approached a particularly large such area, a sixty-kilometer stretch of desolate land containing what had once been a section of the Bleeding Mountains; emphasis on past tense, as the megabuildings had been exploited and dismantled so extensively it had come to be considered “reclaimed land” at one point in the past. Indeed, once, this had been a thriving center of civilization and trade, through which all the treasures brought out from the Bleeding Mountains had flowed. Nonetheless, it had been devastated to the extent of, once again, becoming inhospitable in its own way. Within that swath of murderous earth, the only permanent inhabitants one could find were hermits, mutant beasts, and a few evolvers; it was stalked by opportunistic treasure hunters, thrillseekers, and those searching for their ticket onto the path of evolution. In and out these itinerant prospectors went, never staying, always hauling artifacts out or people and supplies in. From where he stood atop the Serpent, hanging from the side of a flat wall hundreds of meters up, he could make out some of the major features of the landscape below him. Far off at the other end of the zone awaited a pass deeper into the Bleeding Mountains, towards his first major goal: A fabricator capable of processing a piece of fabricator-stock that he carried into a universal tool.
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