Despite being regarded as a “safe zone,” the Cordon was even more dangerous than the open wilderness around the Beach-head Zone. Zanma stopped at a small market-town, half repurposed ruins and half new construction, with an ancient, ribcage-like printer-bay occupying a prominent spot, fenced off and guarded, with a price list to the side. Besides the core of “proper” buildings, the rest of the place was a shanty-town in the bombed out wreckage; makeshift roofing and tarps abounded. It was called Amber Pass, so named after an immense Becomer’s eyeball that had at some point been rigged up as an artificial sun; the sphere hung, strung up, from a great obelisk, a megabuilding structural beam that now stood alone, by itself far dwarfing anything else in Amber Pass. The Amber Eye would come on by itself whenever darkness fell, pouring out amber-coloured light that illuminated all within its purview in a manner that flagrantly spat in the face of conventional physics. One could stare at it without going blind, and yet it easily brought light to a fairly large area, even to places that ought to be occluded from its sight. What was more, despite bathing all in orange, one could easily make out colours regardless, a benign contradictory phenomenon that Zanma imagined would weed out those whose minds couldn’t hold up to the truly anomalous. Even here, it was clear that safety and civility was always on a thin margin of equilibrium. An old warehouse had been repurposed just to give the rough men of this place somewhere to fight in an officiated, and of course monetized setting. Everyone loved betting on violence.
Naturally, his arrival drew quite a bit of attention, but just as they gawked at him and the White Serpent, so too he gawked back, albeit in less obvious a manner. Considering the absence of children and the lower degree of reverence for puppetmasters in this place, Zanma adjusted how he approached these people and paid a small group to be his stage-hands. The money had no value to him, anyway. Amber Town painted a tableau of the Cordon’s population, with an almost absurd degree of variation among its people. Ordinary folk mingled with individuals sealed inside environmental suits, with skeletal, metallic prosthetics protruding at the knees and elbows. Not far off, occupying part of an open-air gymnasium in a bombed out building, he spotted a pair of men with strangely distended musculature, as if individual muscle groups had been inflated like balloons, and they had glistening, oiled skin in a shade of brown that would better suit roast pork, and in a spot where the oil had smeared off, pale pink showed through. Passively keeping an eye on them while he was setting up, he didn’t see either man so much as lift a weight the whole time.
Considering the lack of a proper stage, he put on a humbler performance than usual, even resorting to using the instruments taken from Shellhead’s ship. He was well aware that the mainstream puppetmaster culture regarded simply using puppets to play music as a form of “low-status culture,” but where else to perform such things if not here? It wasn’t as if he had the space to put on Paradox Creator, and something told him Demon-slaying Great Saint wouldn’t be particularly popular with these good people. His repertoire of popular music being somewhat limited, he took what material he had and bent it to fit the style native to the Cordon and surrounding areas, folk music of a sort.
Zanma was well aware of this cultural aspect; after all, how could Taisei send him to travel through this place without educating him on it first? But actually steeping in it, observing the contradictions, was altogether a different experience from merely learning about it. These were hardened men and women, many of them criminals running from their past, who venture into the Beach-head Zone to stake their lives for what was often a subpar paycheck. One who didn’t understand might expect them to be a warrior culture, one for extolling their achievements and singing of how they defeat their enemy or slay this or that zone-born monstrosity. But no, they responded most readily to melancholia, to lyrics speaking of lost family, of the strange state of half-death that they lived in, of how the Zone was at once a grave and a place to carve out a new life. They were a lost folk picking through the literal ruins of the past to resurrect bits and pieces of it, to build themselves anew from this corpse of a world that had died before they had been born. Axis Fulcrum wouldn’t have them. The Blood Coast wouldn’t have them. So it was the Zone that took them into its bosom and with its other hand shoved a dagger into their gut, and they embraced it all the same.
The culture of the Cordon and of the Beach-head Zone at large was one of all-pervasive yearning and melancholia. The Great Man of the Zone was not a warlord. It was a solitary traveler smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and stewing mutant meat inside a bombed out high-rise, waiting for a storm to pass him by. It was a wanderer who navigated the Blood Swamp as if it were the forest behind his childhood home.
The performance dragged on for three, four hours. Zanma lost track of time. At one point he ran out of material and started taking suggestions from the crowd. His improvisation went over far better than what he had prepared ahead of time. A drunk tossed a bottle, and, on reflex, Zanma burst it mid-air. This led to many, many more tossed bottles, and a small tsunami of loose coinage. In the end, he made off with a far greater windfall than he had anticipated. Finding someone to take him into the zone proper proved to be a matter of no great difficulty; the envirosuited man with his prosthetic forelimbs offered up his services in exchange for Zanma’s skilled hands, and the young puppetmaster took him up on the offer.
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“Can’t reach my back. Don’t trust the butchers of Amber. Called them on their scams one too many times, I did. You’ll have to do,” explained the man, taking wheezing breaths between each cluster of words.
“Name?” Zanma questioned.
“Makes no difference. Velibor,” the man answered.
Inside the suit, he was a pickled man, quite literally. The finger-wide space between his flesh and the suit was filled with a solution of breathable biogel, and, by the texture it had developed, it hadn’t been replaced in some time. Pale skin, wires and metal bulging underneath, cables and tubes joining flesh to machinery directly. Zanma was amazed at what Velibor had done, at the recklessness and thoroughness of this transformation, exploiting the characteristics of a hard-shell envirosuit to transform it into an ad-hoc biocapsule. In every way that mattered, the suit was his actual skin now. In theory, purely in theory, if worst came to worst, he could still live without it, but it wouldn’t be pleasant or long-term sustainable.
Zanma did his work, tuned up his guide’s metallic spine, replaced the filters that needed replacing, flushed the biogel and spiked the replacement with some additives of his own supply, to help it keep from spoiling for a touch longer.
Within the afternoon, Velibor was as if a new suit-man, exuding an almost palpable aura of bioenergy bordering on First Phase. Not quite there, but almost. Zanma didn’t hazard to guess whether what he had done to himself fell under the purview of Eaters or Becomers.
“Much better. Where was it to? The corpse, yes? Can’t go there, not risking the bugs, they like to crawl inside suits like mine, eat who’s inside, move it around like a puppet. Can take you close, that I can do. Safehouse not far from there. Rest of the way, not that dangerous. Good enough?”
“Good enough,” Zanma acquiesced. And so, for some time, this strange man led his way, pointing out strange beasts, plants, and anomalies as if they were features of a tour. It really did seem like this murderous place was Velibor’s own back yard. The inner checkpoint between the Cordon and Beach-head Zone proper didn’t even register; seeing that he was with Velibor, the guards didn’t bother stopping them. The suit-man’s face had weight.
Their path through the Zone took truly circuitous routes, moving through ruins that Zanma could have never even thought to attempt, cutting through dense forest that to any unknowing observer seemed an impassable death-maze, and avoiding entirely unassuming areas that Velibor explained were hidden anomalous space fields difficult even for psions to detect. The Oculoid, Zanma’s auto-map navigator, naturally swallowed up every bit of this information. Velibor seemed to recognize it, but didn’t bring it up.
The safehouse was barely one, just a pile of heavy-duty containers strongly welded together with passageways cut between them. Nonetheless, they were a suitable shelter for the storm that came.
“Deathrattle. Just in time,” said the suit-man, gazing up at the sky. Zanma sensed nothing for a bit, only for a shiver to run up and down his back, his psionic threads wavering regardless of his efforts to hold them steady. Throngs of birds and bird-sized insects rose up all at once from the ground and trees and buildings, some swarming towards the nearest dense forest, and others into a hole in the ground. An unsteady heaviness descended, and then, the slowest among the birds and beetles, those who had not made it to cover in time, started falling from the sky. A shiver and a wordless scream passed over and through everything, and the sky ripped open in hemorrhage, like a star had been born and disemboweled above their heads. The world thrashed against itself, and against the shelter crashed unending waves of anguish and death and pain and life and death and pain and anguish and bleeding out asphyxiating freezing burning freezing burning torn asunder remade torn asunder remade and- it was over. Far too long and yet short at the same time. Zanma snapped out of it in the same manner as a particularly bad dissociative episode, finding that the White Serpent had gone stiff next to him, for he had completely retracted his psionics without realizing.
“First Deathrattle? Always the worst. Next one will be easier. Much easier. The one after that, a little easier,” Velibor remarked.
“...Yes, first one. Hope not to see many more. Just passing through the zone,” Zanma replied, unconsciously imitating Velibor’s speaking pattern, his thoughts still settling back into place.
“Good fortune to you. May your journey proceed without halt,” the suit-man wished him.
Zanma had known of this hazard, that it came regularly, that it demanded you to take shelter, but, just as with the culture of the Cordon, actually experiencing was entirely different to reading about it. The great beings that had fallen here no longer possessed the privilege of ordinary deaths, and this was nothing less than their self-perpetuating death-throes. The true reason and character of these phenomena had been studied at length by men far more learned than Zanma, and he dared not make uneducated guesses on this matter. To him and to the majority of those who stalked the zone, all that mattered was knowing this: The corpses of these demigods screamed in grief for their own lives with such might that it swept away the unguarded souls of lesser beings, leaving hollowed out shells.
They parted with no particular fanfare; with the deathrattle having passed, Velibor just checked his PDA and walked off in a random direction, muttering about hunting his lunch. How the suit-man ate remained a mystery to him.
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