The Temple of Karaashi, despite all the horrors surrounding it, had always remained a place of silence.
Near its walls, one would not find the mechanical predators typical of the grey wastes, the digitized abominations, or monsters that defy description.
Silent and serene, the giants guarded their home with such steadfastness that any enemy feared to even approach the stone walls of the ancient monastery.
However, even such stability sometimes trembled under the pressure of the surrounding world.
No matter how mighty the giants were, their world was home to a diverse array of enemies and spawn of the Long Night.
The sounds of heavy machinery on the move shattered the accustomed silence.
Dozens of white combat trucks and even several tanks—clearly battered after thousands of years of operation without proper repair—moved toward the fortress.
Hundreds of cybernetic humanoid beings, incapable of vivid emotions like fear or anxiety, operated the machines with mechanical precision, producing almost no superfluous sound.
The Sublimatum Voivode, a two-meter cyborg almost entirely devoid of flesh, led the largest army of assimilators in history toward a very old enemy, hoping to finally break their resistance.
A significant portion of the AI’s Hive Mind focused on this point, allocating a massive share of its processing power to each individual unit.
Today, their overextended confrontation would finally come to an end.
For centuries, the Assimilators had ceased trying to win the guardians over through diplomacy.
Dozens of offers to accept the Hive Mind had been rejected, and every subsequent attempt was met only with increased aggression.
Unlike other mortals, the giants could live for thousands of years; thus, the memory of past conflicts lived on in the eyes of the survivors, who wanted nothing to do with an overly volatile artificial intelligence.
And so, the guns spoke immediately.
The tanks belonged to various modifications, and thus their armament types differed.
A few machines simply launched electromagnetically accelerated slugs that punched through the thick stone walls of the temple without issue, but others operated on entirely different principles.
A pair of tanks fired focused streams of ions that scorched through almost any hardware, while one cannon attacked with superheated plasma, instantly incinerating its target.
While the Sublimatum’s heavy armor bombarded the temple, more and more rank-and-file assimilator warriors spilled out of the trucks.
Hundreds of cyborgs, armed with a motley assortment of weapons salvaged from the wastes, rapidly surrounded the fortress, cutting off any chance of escape.
Dozens of machine guns on roofs were trained on every potential exit point.
Yet, the giants had no intention of abandoning their home, even under such a devastating assault.
They had built the monastery with their own hands; they knew every corner, every secret passage and tunnel leading into the mountain.
They would hold the line within its walls to the last breath to protect the remnants of knowledge and artifacts accumulated since the Fall of Humanity.
Such was their role, and they would fulfill it until their final gasp.
Even if the entire temple collapsed into a heap of rubble, the enemy would either have to leave or be forced to fight on the giants’ turf, where numerical superiority and heavy machinery offered no advantage.
But things went entirely differently.
After several minutes of shelling, the first and only giant stepped out of the fortress.
All weapons were trained on him, but the Voivode temporarily ordered them not to fire.
Such suicidal tactics were outside his usual planning parameters, and he wanted to know the enemy’s plan.
His self-learning algorithms craved new data.
The titan was vastly different from a typical Guardian of the Peak.
Taller than any of them, the four-meter giant was encased in fully enclosed black-and-grey armor, backlit by a rare green radiance.
His eyes glowed with the same light, making his gaze seem to belong not to a man, but to a living monster from myth.
The chest plate featured thick metal ridges vaguely resembling ribs, while the arm guards mirrored the non-human limb structure of the Iron Men—flexible and unrestrictive, yet incredibly well-protected, fully unleashing the fantastic strength of the individual within.
With every step of this colossus, something flared within each of the cyborgs watching him move.
In his hands, he carried a massive, nearly two-meter weapon resembling a standard plasma pistol but equipped with a glowing bright-green battery and a bayonet that seemed to vibrate slightly in space.
Every attempt by the AI to urgently analyze the device resulted in a cascade of errors, boding nothing good for the Sublimatum.
The closer the giant approached, the stronger the urge grew within the machines to bow before him and drop their weapons.
Only the most deeply embedded Hive Mind algorithms blocked the impulse to defect, but even they began to fail as the enemy drew near.
Thus, the Voivode, as the last combat unit retaining a semblance of reason, decided to attack.
It took the machines less than a second to fire several railgun-accelerated slugs aimed unerringly at the target.
Even the mightiest and most resilient foes on this dead planet would have sustained massive damage, and the vast majority would have perished from a single piece of metal.
But the slugs never reached the figure, ricocheting off the air a few meters from the giant and plowing into the grey earth to the side.
The armor flickered almost imperceptibly with green light as a transparent field became visible for a fraction of a second before vanishing.
The giant did not accelerate; he continued to walk directly toward the enemy Voivode.
Dozens of machine guns immediately began raking the foe with a stream of thousands of bullets, but predictably, there was no result.
The rounds bounced off the invisible protection surrounding the warrior; only two small metal protrusions on his back began to emit a distinct greenish glow, but there were no signs of an overload.
The metal titan kept coming.
The Voivode instantly transmitted the order to stop the senseless waste of precious ammunition, deciding to shift tactics.
While the tanks on the flank needed time to aim and reposition, the Hive Mind representative ordered the nearest heavy trucks to ram the target, hoping to delay him at the very least.
With the loss of irreplaceable machinery, the cost of the operation rose to insane heights, but the central AI kept pushing.
The monster that had appeared terrified even the AI, evoking a fear of the very thing for which it was created: Change.
However, the first truck could not get within fifty meters.
The giant aimed his massive weapon.
It took the Gauss flayer only three-tenths of a second to generate bipolar magnetic fields within itself, after which a focused beam struck the center of the heavy vehicle.
Even the finest steel could not stop the torrent of green flame that unmade everything in its path.
The fire simply passed through the truck, destroying everything layer by layer and severing the atomic bonds holding the material together.
One and two-tenths of a second — that was all the time between the attack and the complete disintegration of the armored transport.
Two more trucks met the same fate.
The Voivode was forced to change tactics again, staking everything on the tanks.
His personal self-preservation protocols screamed for retreat, but the Hive Mind blocked them.
For the first time in its existence, it had encountered an unknown threat of the maximum danger level; it needed data to analyze the target and develop countermeasures.
And the information was worth a high price, for the unknown enemy displayed incredible capabilities.
When he was only a few dozen meters from the Voivode, two tanks finally blocked his path.
Plasma and ion cannons were the next test for the warrior’s armor…
But before they could fire, the target paused for a heartbeat, then accelerated incredibly, practically vanishing into thin air.
Even the machines’ sensors could not calculate his movement before he reached the first tank and touched it with a free hand.
The adamant buckled like paper the moment the giant squeezed his hand, and then he simply shoved the ten-ton machine into the other tank.
It flew with the speed of an accelerated projectile, creating a bright flash of an artificial sun at the point of impact.
A breach appeared in the Sublimatum army, which the giant immediately exploited.
Despite the best augmentations in the wastes, granted by the advanced AI controlling several settlements, everything was useless against the giant.
His hand held the cyborg’s head in an iron grip, and any attempt to even scratch the armor failed.
The Hive Mind itself took control for a final plea:
— Please release this working unit; its cost is too great.
We are retreating and can guarantee we will never disturb this place again.
We are ready to allocate a portion of our personal resources to compensate you for all damages and more…
— Your resources do interest me, but I will obtain them through other means, — a cold voice rang out from the giant’s speakers.
It wasn’t loud, yet every inhabitant of the desert heard it.
And then, the end began.
Black rivulets of living metal began to spread slowly across the Voivode’s steel head, penetrating his cranium without delay.
The AI tried to force-burn all the hardware inside the cyborg, but the nanomachines — invisible to the naked eye — had already seized control, blocking all alien influence.
The Voivode’s body convulsed as the nanites devoured the remnants of his brain and hijacked his memory banks and processors.
His entire essence was slowly but surely coming under the giant’s control.
When the hijacking reached the necessary stage, the assimilator’s signal source began broadcasting a new message across the unified mind network.
The nearby technoghuals froze as new control codes arrived from the Voivode, transferring control of the entire army to another personality.
A few seconds later, the color of their visors changed from a menacing red to a hollow green.
Similar processes were happening across the entire Sublimatum territory.
Former puppets and parts of the network received a single message containing a virus that quickly seized control of their bodies, severing the main AI from its own army.
For the first time in millennia, it felt fear for its own existence and a single individual was the cause.
.
.
.
I calmly surveyed the battlefield while my mind analyzed the acquired hardware.
Eight hundred and forty-four cyborgs, thirty-eight trucks, and four working tanks of various modifications.
Primitive tech, but not to be discarded.
The power generators within these machines will be very useful — after all, even my nanites couldn’t recreate thorium, especially of such purity.
And its extraction could be quite a problem…
— Ferrus?
Is that you?
Inside the armor?..
Are you controlling it?
Of course, I knew Uthor had approached me long before he emerged from the fortress and spoke, but I only paid attention to him when he began to talk.
Even so, though the Sublimatum AI’s processing power was pathetic compared to mine, the old machine did not want to give up easily under the pressure of my virus.
I had to manage every cyber-attack personally, gradually dismantling the consciousness of the aggressive machine.
But if my mentor wished to speak, I was ready to look away.
It would delay the mind’s death by two minutes and twelve seconds, but such an expense was not critical for now.
— I am in full control of my body.
The latest armor development is entirely under my command, – I replied briefly, not turning toward the giant, still busy with the memory banks of the assimilator army.
– To be more precise, this is the latest modification of a nanite swarm code-named “Living Metal.” You can consider it a blend of pre-Long Night human tech and the Precursors who inhabited the Black Pyramids.
Though compared to their creations, I have an insane energy consumption rate and no guarantee of it working for tens of millions of years.
However, my authority over machines is absolute; it is physically impossible to hack.
Uthor continued to watch me in silence, looking toward my head for some reason.
Hidden cameras created by the nanites transmitted the image, and there was something strange in it.
Hmmm, I will need to develop protocols in the future to scan emotions from facial expressions and reflex movements.
I will have to deal with diplomacy eventually, and such a thing will definitely come in handy.
— …Will you tell me what stage your plan is at now?
For the last six years since you returned from your excavations, you have rarely spoken to us, immersed in research…
Once I successfully copied the frequency at which the Voivode sent signals, I recreated the same device on my armor with a single thought, added a few modifications, and amplified the signal manifold.
The cyborg ceased to be of value; I let him go and he slumped to the ground as I turned to my mentor.
— The development of the perfect tool is complete.
Much of the technology is still in the prototype stage, but it is best to test it in practice.
And before you continue, I want to say right now that at this stage, I do not require your help and you will be of much more use continuing to preserve the knowledge of the past.
War is a dirty business where the most worthy die; your demise would be entirely senseless.
I have an army now; all that remains is to acquire the people it will protect.
The final part of the work on greate project has begun — the unification of the world.