Sauer looked around.
“Iing struct. Remarkably stable. From the looks of this mental space… Yes, this will give us a bit more time.”
“A low-footprint engram should not be this responsive. Not without supp hardware.”
“And you should not be able to sustain such a high-resolutioal struct without supp hardware. Perhaps whatever maery you are ected to also enables me to fun in this manner, hm? Ah, but… Who knows. I am a mere engram after all,” he retorted. For just a moment, a familiar grin fshed over his face.
“But-”
“Shut up. I don’t care about your suspis, I don’t care about your deep dark secrets, and I certainly do not care about how e you’re a twenty-something full-anic again. Do you want my help or not? After this, I’m done. Gone. No more Sauer. Does it matter how this mere engram fun to this extent? Have you not seen strahings in your time?”
She tried to query obog’s Mystic Wisdarding Sauer’s engram, and got nothing.
Krahe gave engram-Sauer a martial bow, cupping her left fist with her right hand in front of herself.
Sauer ughed.
“e now, I am not real. Less than even a ghost, I’m probably still alive. Now, where to start. I only draw upon your severely g martial education, so if you’d let me…”
Krahe clearly felt the subtle pressure of Sauer’s request in the back of her head. She let him in, deg to share everything she knew as far as martial arts went, as well as some memories she had of Sauer — those of his real demonstrations, plus oher. Engram-Sauer’s eyes lit up, and his left arm ged to something she reized, yet something she had never seen the real Sauer wear. Indeed, it was the arm she had seen during the Six-eyed Dream Serpent venom vision.
“Yes. This will do. Let’s start with a demonstration, then.”
Without another word, he re-ehe kata Krahe had seen him perf in her vision. Then, he did it again, and again, and again, increasingly breaking it down into individual movements with each repetition. If Krahe didn’t quite grasp a movement the first go round, engram-Sauer would repeat it without her needing to say anything. After that came practical training, and treat relief, Krahe found that she could el thauma with impunity — this wasn’t physical reality, after all. She lost track of time, aually even the awarehat this wasn’t actually Sauer faded out of awareness.
Engram-Sauer gradually unfolded what Krahe had seen in her vision into something altogether different, something plete and even beyond that. To call it a sieique wasn’t right — it was aire movemehod, bining iional off-rhythm awkwardness with explosive movements. Each motion could flow into at least three others, and ead-pose would allow for a wide variety of attacks. There was a subset of altered movements that treated user’s enhanced arm as a defensive implement, positioo interpose it between any ining attacks and the user.
“Now, let us incorporate armaments. By the looks of it, you no longer possess the Bds. What are your current preferences?”
Krahe took a moment to put things in terms that would make seo Sauer, then listed off the tools she most preferred to use: “A ring-trigger pistol, either hand. A dagger, also either hand. Monowire, left-handed, single or multi-strand up to one for each finger. Back-moutack tendril — be blunt, pierg, or explosive-tipped. Generalized short-medium range inbuilt energy ons, left hand, from the palm. Lastly, an inbuilt homing missile uncher — it requires a few seds of preparation. This entails using the aforementioned pistol to shoot a special bullet at any point on the left arm. The missile is an autonomous radiatioer with a stande of several meters and articuted fingers frabbing ontets.”
As she did this, she shared memories of each tool’s characteristics, quickly fleshing out aspects she couldn’t easily put into words without going on at length.
“I see. Good choices,” said Sauer, rubbing his . He remained in thought for some time, before walking to his hut. He emerged immediately afterwards, bearing a pistol in hand and dagger on his waist. The gun was known to Krahe — an affordable and widespread deliver method fh-yield special ammunition, the Wolf and Raven Lawbriype-5. The gun was single-shot, but desigo sync up with a support armature that could seled load ammunition at lightning speed. Mimig that funality to the fullest was still out of reach for Krahe’s tar-tendrils, but not as far as it had once been. A robot walked out after him, a huge, clumsy thing made of scrapped-together military salvage, its armor pitted with bullet holes and gashes. The robot, too, was known to her. A “Big Mook” as the real Sauer had called them. This one was based on her memory of Big Mook 21.
Sauer began with the pistol-adjusted version of the base kata, and moved on in the same order as Krahe had listed things out.
Whether hours, days, or weeks passed, Krahe didn’t know, and didn’t care. The sun never set on this desert of gss, and she never felt thirst, hunger, or exhaustion. There was just one problem: Her arm couldn’t actually facilitate the full extent of what engram-Sauer was showing her. It was only capable of a limited, simplified variant, simir to what she had done during the mansion raid.
Over, and over, and ain. And over, and over, and ain, Krahe tried, even if she felt it ointless, if for no other reason than the delusional desire t that vision to life. She hadn’t been sure back then, but she was absolutely certain now: That vision hadn’t been a mere halluation, aher had been any of the others. Somehow, the Six-eyed Dream Serpent had truly shown her reality — more than that, it had, in a way, takehere. Sauer’s hut, that alley ior 5, the shore of that alien ke, even the rapid-fire fshes of saints rooting out corruption wherever they went. Whether it was delusion or truth, she didn’t know or care — Krahe fully believed that those things had been real.
“Stop. That’s enough. It’s clear that you ck the proper hardware to execute the method. What do we do when our hardware is g?!”
“ge things until it works,” Krahe replied without thinking.
“Correct. ge the method, ge the hardware, whatever is easiest, whatever is most effective.”
Akaso
