Chapter 161: 159 – Man and Machine

Fourth gear. It was not a matter of speed, but overall output. An ultracompact tank could achieve these speeds even in second gear, but it was left without the extra output to fight. Strake knew the importance of fuel conservation, and it didn’t matter right now.

Eighty.

The panicked stare of the single soldier sat inside a checkpoint booth, having only now looked up from whatever he had been reading. Grekurian. This one got to live.

Strake rammed straight through the checkpoint’s gate, continuing to stomp straight down the street. For all their merits, kinetic skates couldn’t bring a walking tank up to the blistering speeds its engine permitted - but then, neither could tracks. It was a duty left to the destructive pounding of its legs, ripping chunks out of the ground with each bound.

A familiar sense of dissociation crept in. Man and machine melting into one-another. 

There was no difference between looking out from inside the cockpit and his own head. 

At this moment, Strake was no longer a man.

He was the ghost within a steel messiah, an embodiment of Ikesia’s unrelenting struggle against foreign imperialism… And with these hands of iron, he would pry apart the manacles placed upon his homeland.

Drifting around the bell tower, he continued down a wider street, busting through another checkpoint before he reached the city’s main street, the unifying artery of commerce that ran through the whole city end-to-end - Stanster Road. It was the width of a whole square, with eight lanes and four rail lines… And it was nearly dead. Sectioned off by multiple checkpoints, many of the stores boarded up, a relatively small number of people out and about - most of whom made the wise decision of getting far out of his way, some far more readily than others. A few even called out - “It’s a tankman! Tankman!”  

The upcoming checkpoint was already in sight, more heavily manned, even possessing gates thick enough that Strake wasn’t so sure he could ram through it in one go. Seven, perhaps eight men. All zipperheads.

He wouldn’t waste his ammo on them, or more than a few dozen seconds… But he needed neither ammo nor time to squash these bugmen.

---

A blood-red steel demon, billowing dark smoke and moving faster than a machine had any right to.

It pounded its way through the checkpoint before any of the men could muster a response, let alone call for backup. None were left alive, crushed by colossal fists, impaled upon pilebunkers, and stomped into the pavement, the blood which spilt upon Zero’s paint seemingly vanishing. 

---

Those manning the next checkpoint put up a fight - or at least, two of them did. 

One a geomancer, able to defend against Zero’s punches by forcing short-lived constructs out of the pavement, whilst the other loaded a talisman-wrapped cannonball into an archaic dragon-headed hand cannon with a sparklock bolted-on where the touchhole had once been.

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Strake pilebunkered the first through one of his own barriers, and simply made Zero stomp the ground when he saw the second getting ready to fire. This gave him enough time to close the distance and impale the gunman, taking from him the hand cannon. Its oversized frame almost looked proportional in Zero’s giant hands.

After busting down the gate with a few more firings of his pilebunkers into its hinges he continued driving Zero at full speed down the road, firing the stolen gun into the booth of the upcoming checkpoint. It exploded into a tangle of rapidly-growing briars, spreading through the outpost faster than most of the occupants could escape, and withering to dry husks just as quickly. Then it all went up in a short-lived inferno, leaving the soldiers with horrible burns, and leaving Strake to finish them off.

It was not long before he reached the checkpoint to Lighthouse Square, a legitimate reinforcement with extra geomantic barricades and two vantage towers. They had not only two commandeered standard-type tanks, as well as four war golems, wrought of fired clay and decorated with various purple-glowing western symbols. They bore a number of metal plates for armor and various oversized weapons grasped in their three-fingered hands. The Type-7h Landship had a turreted high-caliber main gun and two smaller-caliber guns in sponsons on the sides, all three utilizing self-contained shells. Its engine and tracks permitted it rather respectable mobility, and its armor was certainly impressive for the numbers of these vehicles that were produced, able to weather hits from its own weapons…

...Excepting a few key spots, with which Strake was intimately familiar, not to mention the everpresent weakness of engine radiator vents. One might think it a glaring design flaw, but the simple fact was, their flaws and lack of ability to combat high-mobility targets was not an issue, because that was not their purpose. 

That was the purpose of Tankmen.

War golems, on the other hand, imposing as they were, were naught more than moving fortifications in the modern war theatre. They were good for sieges, heavy labor, and fighting monsters, and not much else - even then they were too demanding to maintain and operate to become a fraction as prolific as they still were in the remnants of Old Ankhezia.

A movement of the gearshift.

Fifth gear.

Back up to seventy kilometers per hour, speeding down the road in a zigzagging pattern as both tanks and men up on the checkpoint’s two towers fired their guns at him.

The pull of a lever.

The Type-Z Anti-cultivator Infantry Weapon moved up Zero’s back, deploying over its shoulder, already loaded with an armor-piercing shell. Simultaneously he reached back, pulling out the oversized shotgun with Zero’s left hand. Its two halves swung together, snapping into place with the clang of metal on metal.

Drifting at full speed around the left-hand tank, he fired straight into one of its viewports whilst unleashing a scattergun shot towards the left-hand tower, transforming its two occupants into a fine mist and ripping chunks out of the adjacent building’s facade.

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