It had been two months since the Etsutensoku had made landfall. Nearly three months since he had departed from beneath his master’s watchful gaze and guiding hand.
At every opportune moment, while traveling, performing, even occasionally when fighting, Zanma had been forging the walls of his mental construct, his Outer Fortress. It had been in the first month, on the fourth day of the fourth week, that he had finally completed it. Since then, he had been toiling away with yet more feverish intensity, simultaneously forging his Inner Sanctum and rapidly approaching the completion of the first Hadou Frame.
His breakthroughs were somewhat less momentous than he had hoped; the only thing to clue him in on them was the work he did within his psychoid. There were no significant bottlenecks within the Schizoid Stage, so naturally, once the Outer Fortress was complete, the Inner Sanctum proceeded just as smoothly. He had lived and breathed such workshops for more than half his life; when he closed his eyes, whether he intended to or not, he saw himself there, he could pick out each individual tool and even work on simple projects in his dreams. For anything of real complexity, dream logic kicked in and made it pointless, but as long as it was simple, he could work on it even in his sleep.
It was the final gearbox assembly for the first Hadou Frame that had pushed him to pierce the barrier of the Second Degree of Division, but he dared not celebrate it. It had been smooth sailing thus far for two major reasons: Firstly, “laying the groundwork.” He had already been preparing for the Schizoid Stage months in advance, even before he had breached the First Phase Transition. This had been his life at the puppet theatre; each breakthrough and major advancement would only be attempted after he already understood as much as he possibly could understand at the preceding stage. Out of his years there, he had spent less than a third actively cultivating.
With each step, the amount of effort required to attain the next Degree of Division increased by leaps and bounds. The effort to go from Three Degrees of Division to Four would be equivalent to the effort of going from One to Three. Perfecting the Schizoid Stage to the Fifth Degree or even the Sixth Degree would completely dwarf the previous stages in difficulty and effort invested. It wasn’t just a matter of actual, literal effort, but of complexity. With each degree of division, the Flywheel Gearbox and its linkages within the mental workshop grew increasingly more complex.
His experience working on the Hadou Frame reflected a similar, albeit less aggressive pattern of increasing difficulty. As it stood, it could move and function to a basic standard, and already surpassed any Hollow Man at this “semi-complete” stage — controlling it felt as seamless and snappy as the Wurger with far lesser complexity. Nonetheless it was nowhere near as strong as it should be, and the final steps were, naturally, the most exacting and difficult; chiefly, systems tuning and the implementation of small auxiliary components with a low production success rate even with the correct tooling, which Zanma didn’t have yet. As he saw it, the Hadou Frame could not be completed until he reached his next major goal.
He was reminded of the saying “Nine-tenths of the way there is only halfway.” It was one thing to be told this over and over, one thing to experience a version of it in the later stages of Zero Phase, but only now he truly felt he understood just how true it was.
As he ran through the standard range of motion tests, making the frame take poses and balance in various ways, Zanma simultaneously used the Puppet Body Art to control his own body to perform simple exercises. He had found this to be an effective training method for the Schizoid Stage, and a way to bypass the usual issue of physical exercise — the issue that he simply found it boring.
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The Hadou Frame’s fundamental design had two distinct characteristics that most clearly separated it from typical Hollow Men:
First, an “adjustable frame.” It was designed from the start so that it would be able to fold up into a highly compacted transport configuration, which Zanma found to resemble a pillar. The adjustable frame was also a complex solution to the modularity issue, allowing the puppet to retain the modularity of a Hollow Man without compromising its superior performance or durability. Assembling all the interlocks was a form of self-flagellation, but the design’s robustness could not be denied.
Second, a design that possessed the advantages of both “hollow-type” and “solid-type” puppets. The seamless blending of these two design styles was both the reason for the Hadou Frame’s extraordinary capabilities and its difficulty of construction.
Despite its incompleteness, Zanma decided to mount armor and weapons on the Hadou Frame. Real field-testing would help him work out the issues faster than any theorizing ever could, and… Well, he simply wanted to use it. The Hadou Frame’s modularity allowed for easy modification and swapping of limbs, meaning that, now that he had gone through the initial construction phase, it would be far easier to build further Hadou Frames to this same standard of completeness. In the same way, it would be easier to modify them and return them to a default configuration.
It seemed only natural to mount the revolving hand-cannon on the right arm, directly rather than as a held weapon, to remove a degree of separation. He only had a limited stock of its unique caseless micromissile ammunition even accounting for the powder and projectiles he got from the cyclops' storage device, but it was fine, it would suffice for a while. Naturally, he had already tested the weapon in a stationary mount, but a moving puppet frame would be completely different. Deciding to play it safe, Zanma reinforced the right arm, tuning its joints and attaching synthetic musculature so that it would be able to swing its aim quickly and then lock into a stabilized firing position.
Ten threads extending from him, each attached to a sub-assembly or a single component, he attached the gun and sealed it in place, attaching synthetic muscle and mechanical linkages around it, then adding an armored shell overtop, fully encasing the gun such that only the barrel protruded. The resulting forearm was quite large, but not disproportionate like the Wurger’s forearms. Below the muzzle, he added a trio of small-scale ranging sensors. Following orthodox design convention, he made allowances in the design to fit a fold-out sub-arm that would emerge from the gun-arm’s underside and had no combat purpose, being intended solely for precision work.
The left arm would be an ordinary manipulator, only having the distinction of a strong all-rounder blend of agility, explosive strength, and sustained strength, as well as a clawed hand and a miniature pilebunker — small enough it would only be useful against human-scale opponents, but also able to double as a computerized interface spike. The Hadou Frame, by default, had an empty hardpoint on the back, and the natural conclusion of this, to Zanma, was a third arm. He wrought a utilitarian, entirely nonhumanoid limb, attaching it there such that it could swivel freely and cover most of the puppet’s surroundings. Its design flowed largely from the need to maintain the puppet’s center of balance and to hold its armament, which Zanma picked out as the organic rifle-pattern accelerator. This was in part because it best matched the revolver’s single-shot anti-armor firepower with a more sustainable, conventional option, and in part because he thought it a shame to not use it. It was not his first choice, however. He made attempts at merging three Type-2 accelerator mechanisms into one unit, as per the Triskelion Aperturia paradigm, but he simply wasn’t skilled enough and didn’t have the right equipment to do such a thing and to do it in a reasonable amount of time. The array just wouldn’t synch, behaving as three separate guns firing at once, thus causing the arm to destabilize and lose precision in its aim. Thus, filing it away for now, he resorted to the organic rifle accelerator, refurbishing it to a state better than he had bought it in using most of what he had managed to scavenge in Spine-spire City. Despite the accelerator’s organic lineage, it, too, was shelled in synthetics, concealed.
The puppet’s main “eyes” followed, a triangle array of sensors tuned for ranged target acquisition and tracking, trading off a bit here and there to improve motion detection.
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