[E] The Ride Home

[Okor]

Despite his noticeable lack of lungs, throat, or generally anything, Okor coughed, tainted fluids flecking his withered lips as he looked towards the Samurai, finding the experience of someone towering over him novel.

"Do not speak so lightly of the Machine Spirit, Hiro." Hacked the head, speaking through pus-stained bristles, struggling to stare up at the Greatest Hacker, his monolithic horn obscuring half of the man's features.

"Machine spirit, huh?" Chuckled the codeslinger, spitting out a traumatized tooth at the bucket of rust and rot Okor's skull stewed in, grinning as he looked down on the primitive. "What, is that the closest your people ever came to artificial intelligence? Some kind of little sprite in your skull? The smartest thing in your armour was goddamn clippy!"

A skeletal arm clad in taut skin, still dripping with rancid corruption, emerged from the sludge in the receptacle, bony claws digging into the deck of the ship as a similarly emaciated body crawled from the bucket, the primordial soup rebirthing its corroded crusader. His spine bulged from a barrel-chest, a stark contrast to his hollow abdomen, the tentacular innards within writhing as great fangs slowly emerged to hide them from sight. It was a mockery of man and nature, hunks of ceramite slowly pushing their way through his dead skin, neural interfaces bonded with his nerves, a biomechanical abomination that simply refused to embrace a peaceful end. An eye filled with wriggling worms turned to face the digital daimyo, who had wisely taken several steps back from his reemergence. Ebon tusks, still cracked from the confrontation with the carrion hordes, bared themselves in a grin.

"Not... Quite."

"Mankind forged the Men of Iron." He took a lurching step forward, rot falling to the deck as he shaped himself, cracking his neck in an attempt to straighten a spine as warped as his worldview. "But only one survived the crucible of conflict. We still... Find ruins."

"We swore to never forge an Abominable Intellect again. Instead, we found the spirits of the Machine, and they found their... supplicants." He unclenched a fist, watching the synthmuscle and ceramite of his armour slowly ooze over desiccated flesh. "They were born into their homes of circuit and steel, not placed there. Every weapon is a shrine. Every battle tank a temple to the synthetic. Perhaps, they are lesser than whatever abominations of science you created."

He loomed over Hiro, grinning as his armour slowly forced its way through his pores, pockmarks of plate blemishing his jaundiced skin. "But give it Ten Millennia to glut itself upon the carcasses of Titans, to toughen its hides across a million worlds, and to... Immerse itself in the blessed tides of the Empyrean?"

His helmet slowly formed again, his mask of metal falling back into place as he spoke, the corrupted vox lending a suitably sinister cadence to his words, regardless of his spirit's absence.

"I'm certain you will find it... Different, than your freshly-forged demigods of untested scrapcode."