Reforged in Iron and Blood
CW:probably a lot, this could be rough one. Reader discretion is advised
It started when they found out about the existence of vampyres and their regenerative properties. Many subcultures and groups existed at the time, just under the surface of society. But unlike what a lot of media might have you think, they weren’t the secret puppet masters behind society. If anything, they were the opposite; groups of punks and anarchists, community outreach and mutual aid organizations, by ad large they were broadly considered the supposed dregs of society even though they regularly shared what little they had with others. Sure, there were bad ones, like in any community, even whole bad communities, but all the ones you knew were anything but. Heck, they were broadly the exact sort of people the higher ups in both your nation and the one they were at war with hated: those who wanted to build community and help others.
You knew from experience, you used to hang out with a particularly active group, one more than happy to help the local homeless community. Of course, the group, the House, wasn’t just Vampyres. They had a fair few non-Vampyres, like you, on the periphery. Vampyres need blood to survive and thrive, after all, and while pork or beef blood bought from local ethnic markets was more than enough to get by, the fresh blood of a living human was a delicious treat. You’d donated more than once to the House, especially to the House’s founder and one of your best friends.
And when the State came for them, they were all vanished overnight. You’d been worried for them ever since, and terrified that you would be next at first. It’s not like you had any real way to fight back: protests were being met with ever greater amounts of state and journalistic violence, more and more propaganda aimed at anyone that didn’t agree with the state-sponsored disappearances. But your country only had two real political parties with any influence or ability to get voted in, both of whom were in lockstep behind the fascist regressives that were in power. Minority group after minority group had their turn to be demonized and legislated out of public life, with Vampyres being disappeared as ‘anarchist terrorists’. And you were disabled in addition to being in one of those minorities.
Then one day the knock came at your door, you were dragged out of your home, all the neighbors whispering amongst themselves and being told naught but slander. Justifying to the public why they were hauling off someone who was just trying to survive. Someone too broken to grease the wheels of the economy with anything less than their blood.
Everything that followed was a blurry rush of pain. Stripped of all you had, even your name, your identity, your gender. Forcibly fed this thick, metallic fluid something most others wouldn’t be able to place. Bound and gagged as it burned through you, threatened to burn you to ash from the inside out.
Then they gave you to Her. Newly promoted, a newly trained handler. Someone whose training and job revolved around controlling you, directing you, maintaining you like a piece of machinery. She did her job well. At least, ‘well’ by the standard of the book. She disciplined you when you disobeyed, praised you when you did well, ensured you consumed your rations and maintained your body. She cut back your red rations before a battle. Her actions clued you in on just what had happened, what you’d been turned into. That gnawing hunger deep inside, driving you mad, making you unstable and more vicious in a fight. Why your canines had been dulled down.
You hated it. Hated the way you were seen as little more than meat, by her or by the crew, the mechanics. hated the way you were used as much by her. You hated the muzzle you were made to wear, the collar around your neck. Hated the skin-tight suit you had to wear. Hated being directed into that claustrophobic metal coffin. Hated the feeling of pin slipping into socket, of locks clicking into place and holding it firm, an extendable cable letting you move fairly freely while maintaining the connection, not that the security harness let you move too much to begin with.
Hated the data pouring into your head, hated the feeling of mechanical sensors hooking up to your senses. Hated the queer feeling of one set of legs operating pedals while another strides along pavement and stone and soil. Hated the feeling of the blazing heat of your boosters, both on their own and against the metal of your chassis nearby. Hated the recoil of the rifle and the knowledge that you were shooting against other people. Hated the way it never seemed to end, the way there seemed to be a faint crimson stain on your fingers you could never wash off.
And then something started to change. After a fight she offered you twice your red rations, twice what you normally got after a fight. As the last drops slid down your throat, you could feel your head start to clear for the first time in ages, like your sinuses draining all at once after a cold. You still couldn’t think WELL, but you could think. Like a good cup of bean tea after waking u with your mouth dry and your head fogged. It was like being alive again, almost.
She started keeping you on those increased rations, letting your head clear and start to think properly. She began to touch you less, use you less, ask more when she did. Began to think of more than her own pleasure. And it felt so good.
She started to give you an extra vial of red rations before deployments, something to drink right before launch. Something to keep the mind sharp. And your numbers improved. Your numbers proved her right. You may not be as aggressive, but you could aim better, ration your ammo better, pilot better. And you found you were starting to enjoy the sensations. Of wind on your chassis as you move, of the stimulants pumped into your system with each successful hit on an enemy, more for a confirmed kill. Of the taste of the ration before launch. Of the taste of the rations after battle.
You’d met others like you. Half-starved, fangs shaved down. You knew what you all were; pilots, organic components in your machines, weapons, vampyres, materiel. And you reasoned that the reason they did it to you, and seemingly many others, is that it made you pariahs, it isolated you from ‘normal’ society by turning you into a creature that needed blood to survive, limited you from being able to form the kind of community that let the House you knew survive as long as they did. And they cut out your organs and limbs to be able to handle the Gs your machine created. You knew you and these other vampyres, your sisters, were just replaceable materiel, no more valuable to the higher ups than a sidearm or a screwdriver. You knew, and re-learned, that your Handler had you on much higher red rations than your sisters, that other handlers were far worse than yours was even at the start. That theirs only got worse.
Then one evening, after all of your kind had been on reduced rations from supply line issues, your Handler took you aside to her room, just as she had many times before. You knew what to expect. Or at least you thought you did. Instead of askommanding you to take off your clothes, she already had her top off, bare breasts on full display. A knife was sitting by her side, as were an antiseptic and a box of adhesive bandages. You didn’t know how to respond, how to parse what you saw. She offered to let you feed directly from her. To slice open her flesh and drink directly from it.
Fireworks exploded in your head as you tasted her lifeblood fresh from the source, its thick, rich flavor and heat filling your mouth and sinuses and mind. Your muzzle long since removed, you bit down hard, eliciting a surprised gasp from your handler, instincts you’d never felt before taking control. Your teeth sink it as best they could, drawing blood by coaxing it from the wound, only for you to wish you could sink your fangs in properly. But even that mild disappointment paled in comparison to the joy, the raw dopamine you were getting from tasting fresh, truly fresh blood for the first time.
What surprised you most was the heat it filled your body with, driving you to crave more. Crave her. And the sound of her voice made it seem like she craved you as much. When you broke off to breath and rest a moment, she took your face into her hands and leaned in to press her lips against yours, her tongue finding its way inside without resistance.
As her tongue snaked out of your mouth and her hands released your face, your lips and tongue returned to feeding from her, lapping up everything that had dribbled out.
By you woke up in the morn, you were sticky and sore, but felt truly alive for the first time in ages. Moreso than even when you’d been on increased rations. As you moved to re-don your uniform, a warm hand grabbed your wrist, stopping you. Hungrily, she pulled you back into bed, your clothes left forgotten on the floor. You couldn’t help but let out a moan as she explored your body, sought out every sensitive point.
“Why don’t you become mine?”
The suggestion turned over and over in your head even after you left her warmth, her embrace. Even after you traded in the warm embrace of her flesh for that of your outer body’s metal. Another mission today, but thanks to your Handler you were at least well fed. She must have known. They seem to always tell handlers in advance. So they can restrict your red rations, make you hungrier, let the hunger make you more aggressive. But yours fed you herself. Fed herself TO you, in violation of every protocol you could think of. Even with your muzzle back in place, you could still taste the memories of her on your tongue.
Of course they never told you. Why would they? Would they tell a rifle there was a mission coming? A tank? An APC? Of course not, so why would they tell you? They didn’t tell you they were taking away your outer body and “giving” you a new one either. As the ports settled into place and the cables connected, you braced for the usual sensation like nails of information being jabbed into your skull. Instead it came like railroad spikes of raw data being hammered directly into the folds of your brain. Your hands gripped the not-yet-functioning controls and your back stiffened, as if your body was trying to climb away from the source.
The next thing you’re aware of is the mission details already cropping up. They’d found the problem with the supply line; a small enemy base that had been built in a woodland, and they were harassing your lines from there. The perfect opportunity to test your new body out as well, at least that’s what you were sure the higher ups thought.
You felt clamps release from your outer body, various cables releasing from you; a strange, almost sucking sensation as they slip out of ports scattered across your metal body. You couldn’t think of anything to compare it to but your handler as she slipped from within you. Left a curious void behind, one echoed across your body as the last cables pop free, loosing your metal body from the last of its tethers.
You feel the vibrations of your steps against the reinforced floor more through your metal feet than any part of your flesh body, and only in part due to your brain filtering out the weaker sensations from your flesh in favor of the more vital, more intense on ones from your outer body. You grab your new weapon from the rack as you pass, more of your brothers and sisters doing the same as they follow behind, each of you streaming out toward the tarmac instead of the catapults. They point toward the enemy, after all, and the target today was hassling your supply lines behind the front.
The sky is a deep blue-purple, dawn still distant. Your pack walks around to the ‘front’, the side opposite from the catapults. As you walk, you catch sight of numerous bodies like your own one: heavy and armored in comparison to your new body. Even your old body itself, already assigned to a new brother or sister, you could tell from the light scratches and dings in the armor that were too light to bother fixing. Every spare machine you’re aware of must be deployed, they clearly don’t want to be caught off guard while you’re away.
You’re hit with a pang of loss as you passed by what used to be your body but press on regardless. It doesn’t matter anyhow, you’re just materiel. You and the rest chosen for this mission line up just beyond the borders of the base, each machine kneeling in preparation as the mission commander gave your orders, the mission specs dancing in front of your eyes at the same time. Advance below radar, gain altitude, then attack the target from the air.
The squad was ten units strong, split into two teams of five, each with a lead. You had been assigned to lead your team. One by one, you each ignited your thrusters and let them warm up. The familiar purr of your core turned into a heavy growl as the reactors spun up to combat output. The one reactor of your old body’s core replaced by a newer two-reactor system; the specs said they were difficult to sync, but had a synergistic effect that massively increased output. That was what allowed your new body to boast such thin armor, how your new body could fly at all. What allowed your body to use your new service weapon.
Control gave a countdown and you all launched, a tiny fragment of a second between each of you. Each multi-story tall war machine subtly adjusted its speed to bring everyone into formation before matching thrust. Powerful thrusters propelled each machine along, gliding in the air feet above the soil, no plant within more than a hundred meters being allowed to grow tall, lest you be snuck up on. All the world is dyed grey by the pre-dawn light as it speeds past.
The speed felt…good. The feeling of acceleration, pressures squishing your meat-body into the seat. The feeling of the wind on your metal skin and rushing through the gaps, even if the air is still and the wind is only from your speed alone. The heat of the thrusters of your twin tail binders and your legs, lifting you into the air and propelling you forward at speeds that would chafe exposed meat in seconds. The faster you go, the lighter the chains feel.
One by one, each of you noses up and presses the throttle full open, gravity and the acceleration pressing you into your seat. Your suit squeezes down as well, applying pressure in just the right parts to keep too much blood from flooding your brain, protecting you from what would otherwise be a redout. Less than a microsecond of lag, tied into your suit’s computers as it was.
You burst through the cloud layer, emerging out into the early dawn sky, the sun just barely peaking over he horizon. You look upward at the deep blue sky, allowing yourself a moment of thought. Allowing yourself a moment to linger and think about what was taken from you. About the beauty of that sky, about the fact that you’ll never be able to see it with your own two flesh eyes ever again. About how you’ll only be able to see it recreated in images or through the eyes of your outer body.
It was funny, you knew you used to be able to see it for yourself. Used to be able to just walk out into the bright sun without issue but…but you couldn’t remember anything before. Couldn’t remember anything save being materiel.
And yet that deep blue sky looked at once both infinite and yet so close. Your metal claw released your service weapon and reached out, extending up toward that blue sky you know you’ll never be able to look at with your own eyes again, as if you could grasp it if you could just reach a little further.
A spike of adrenaline femtoseconds before a shrill sequence of beeping drug you from your revery. Radar alarm, something’s locked on. Experience told you it was SAMs before the first one broke through the cloud layer far ahead of you. A feeling like a latch coming undone plays out in your brain. Weapons free.
Bursts of vulcan fire comes from some members of the rest of the squad, long before they were in an effective range. You grip your service weapon again and open the throttle, nosing up and accelerating to try for a good angle on one of the SAMs while diverting the one locked onto you. Behind you, you feel others do similar, their IFFs buzzing at the back of your skull, data from the IFF system being mixed with locational data from your 3D radar to ensure you always know where your squamates are.
More bursts of vulcan fire, you release the controls for a moment with one hand, rapidly tapping on a touch panel to one side, queuing up some music to drown out your thoughts. Hands back on the controls, thoughts pushed away, you’re able to focus on the Sam on your tail. You bank hard to the left, not letting up on the throttle lest the missile gain any ground. Your suit squeezes down on you to keep your blood where you need it. You’re not sure how much fuel it has, but you aren’t sure you can keep out-maneuvering it long enough and still have what you need to complete your mission.
You angle up, feeling the pattern of the suit’s pressure changing with your changing inertia. Pulling into an arc, you cut your throttle and use inertia, limb-movements, and the air brakes to rotate your bodies and face the SAM. Taking in and holding a deep breath, you line the reticle up and squeeze the trigger.
A gout of bright white light with a pinkish corona cuts through the air between you and the missile, glancing the missile’s housing. Your rifle won’t be ready for a second shot. Panicking, you immediately reach for the vulcans’ trigger before the missile detonates prematurely, a sight you see just before dropping under the surface of the clouds.
Reclaiming your composure and surmising your rifle must be more powerful than you realized, you open the throttle back up a bit, slowing your decent before starting to move forward again. You gain altitude, climbing back out of the clouds as you see one of your brothers or sisters shoot down the last SAM with their AA vulcans. The interruption finished, you adjust your heading back toward the target and push forward. You’re too close to bother returning to formation.
You scarcely have time to steady your breath before diving back into the clouds, a sea of swirling white and grey. You can feel one unit ahead of you, IFF buzzing ahead and to the left, just above your current angle of decent even if they were technically closer to the earth than you. Both of you had throttled down a bit, you could tell by how stable the relative distance was. Don’t want to go too fast under zero-vis. Your fingers twitch impotently on the controls, your system still swimming in adrenalin.
The squadmate suddenly banks to the left, and you prepare to bank the other way, doing so as soon as you break out of the clouds. AA fire is already lighting up the early morning sky, colors muted by the thick clouds. You dance around tracer fire, trying to track a stream of it down to the surface and lining your reticle up.
With a squeeze of the trigger, the dulled light defused though the grey clouds was overpowered by a white-hot streak. Foliage was instantly reduced to ash and ember without ever having the chance to ignite and one AA emplacement was silenced, but you had no time to celebrate, only evade counter-fire from another. Enemy mechs rose, tossing off camo nets before firing off periodic bursts in your direction.
Your siblings in steel return fire as they blow through the clouds, and the whole thing turns into a hairball. Beams and tracer fire scar the air as each side fires and returns fire and evades, only to start the cycle again. High caliber mecha firearms, AA emplacements, beam rifles, all sear the air and steel, evaporating any plant matter caught in the crossfire.
You’re no exception. Picking your targets carefully as you dance like a giant metal leaf caught in crossing breezes. A lock alert catches your attention, affording you the microseconds needed to evade even if the sudden g-spike threatens to crush your insides. You cut a tight turn to see your pursuer; another machine taking flight.
You increase the output of the thrusters on your metal calves, angling the tail binders down to start climbing, trying to get just enough height. Banking in a little, you try and fire as soon as the reticle is over them, but the shot goes wide, turning a part of the terrain into an angry black scar surrounding a glowing orange welt.
They fire off a pair of missiles from a shoulder-mounted rack as they bank into a turn matching yours, but your CIWS vulcans shoot these thin-shelled projectiles down. Angry orange-red clouds quickly cooling to a dark grey.
You accelerate, determined to stay out of their optimal fire arc and above all to keep them away from your six, even if it widens your turns. You try going low, counting on the proximity of the other machine to shield you from AA fire, it works, somewhat, but that altitude is untenable. An exchange of blades and you separate, them going high and you low by the luck of your relative positions. You’re too low and your speed too high for counter fire as you land with one foot on an AA gun, springing back into the sky after reducing some poor soldier to paste dripping off the flattened remains of their station.
The two of you continue your deadly waltz, never-ending so long as neither could get a firing solution. Neither of you dared risk any fancy maneuvers as your paths helixed ever higher and lower, coiling inward only for the plasma-blades of your wrist-mounted melee weapons to clash, leaving a splash of sparks behind as you separated and once again jockeyed for position.
If you tried stopping or even slowing, you’d be a sitting duck for anyone else, even your dance partner if you missed your shot. But if they missed theirs…
Your movements bring you together for another pass, another spar. As the magnetic containment of the two blades of indigo and violet-hot plasma collide. In the instant they do, you hit your throttle full-open, the acceleration rotating you both from the uneven thrust, letting you kick off the enemy mech and send it back toward the earth. You have microseconds.
You raise your rifle with one hand, getting as close as you dare before squeezing the trigger. You don’t need it to hit, you just need it close. The flash of death cuts straight through the left arm, removing its plasma blade along with it.
You hit the afterburners, acceleration Gs threatening to reduce your insides to a viscous red paste. But you ignore your self-preservation instincts, trusting your suit to keep blood where it belongs long enough. Trust your new body to survive what threatens to rip it to shreds from inertia alone. Your only choice, rifle won’t recover in time, and an AM-assault rifle would cut through your metal skin as easy as flesh.
Your blade, still ignited, plunges into center of mass, where the cockpit most likely was. You’d managed to close the distance and pierce it before the pilot could recover from the impact, flash, and dismemberment. In the instant, you tried to ignore the fact that there was another inside the other machine, maybe another like you. A brother or sister of iron blood that had the misfortune of being born stood against you. Just as you had the misfortune of being stood against them.
You drag the blade down into the abdomen, before reversing and slashing up through the chest, the length of the blade cutting through the head as well. You couldn’t take a chance. Had to survive.
Springing off the metal corpse, you turn into your inertia and open the throttle back up, closed after impacting the target so you didn’t get any closer to the ground than you had to. You hear the machine explode behind you over the music that drowned out your thoughts, taking whatever remained of the pilot with it, it’s shrapnel and remains cascading toward the earth below like jagged metal hail. A kill confirmed, the system gave you a small jet of your crimson rations as a reward, a little something to tell you you did a good job.
You make another attack run on the enemy fortifications, your rifle shot piercing a less aerobatically gifted machine as it struggled to fire back at you and your squad. The plants behind it were reduced to mere shadows of their former lush, green selves just before the machine exploded, igniting the remains as it showered them in superheated scrap. The system judges you worthy of a second reward.
Another lock alert. A hard, sharp movement at the controls shoves you into a banked aileron roll off to one side, giving you just a glimpse of a flash of destruction just like your service weapon’s but scaled up, with a bigger corona, a bright pink scar left more on your memory than anything physical.
Cutting your throttle as you lean into the bank, you trace the ionized trail back to its source as it rises out of the remaining foliage. Easily twice as tall and several times as wide as your metal body, it resembled some malformed metal bird, from where you couldn’t say. All covered in bare, unpainted metal it looked like either it was missing its lower half or the designers thought that more than two limbs were mere decoration. A long head, giving the vaguest impression of a bird’s beak, was split open, revealing a long, complicated looking cylinder, that you could only surmise was the beam weapon that had just nearly vaporized you. It stood tall on its two limbs, terminating somewhere beneath the trees and plants obscuring beyond your view. The head tracked you for a time before you exited what must be its firing arc.
An IFF blinks out, one of your brothers or sisters slain. Two radar responses blink in, emerging from cover to take to the air. They’re flying together, heading your way. You nose up and cut your throttle, using gravity with the air to slow you rapidly, adjusting your yaw to turn to face the pair as they rapidly approach. Your reticle dances over the machine on the right, adrenalin combined with the sensitivity of the controls making it difficult to maintain the focus.
The computer releases a long, high pitched beep and the reticle changes color. As soon as you have a lock you squeeze the trigger. In a blinding flash, one enemy is reduced to a halo of slag with limbs attached for a second before its reactor goes critical and explodes, scattering shrapnel out of a jet black cloud.
You open the throttle to about 75%, jetting forward toward the remaining bogey, igniting your plasma blade. Before they can reorient themselves, you fly by, bisecting the machine. You don’t need to look back to check your work, their blip on the radar turning to static in your head as it dissipates tells you all you need to know. Another ‘reward’ for each. But for each reward you got, it was never enough. It always just stimulated your appetite, made you hungrier, more desperate. And the higher ups knew it.
You get a ping on the radar dead ahead and right in front of you. On instinct, you slam forward on the controls with all your strength, plunging into a desperate crash-dive to avoid whatever was right ahead. You glimpse a flash of silver jet out of the lingering smoke cloud left behind by the first of the pair.
A sharp, searing pain in your left trapezius; your metal body had been clipped. The ground was coming up fast too; you try to pull back but you’re too close. Even with the rubberized parts for grip, your speed and mass make you glide along the ground at high speed, dust and soil kicking up.
Heartbeat signals were still coming in from every part. Just a metal wound, you could keep going. Just had to be careful about using the air brake there. Taking the time to check the rear cameras you see the culprit: a polished silver-colored metal blade attached to a long, black wire. As the blade’s tip turned back toward you, you were struck by the impression of it moving like a living animal. An animal that plunged right back at you!
You open the throttle to full and hit the afterburners, kicking off the ground but flying low you try desperately to outrun it. Finally it seems to reach its limit and you watch it retract toward its source: the metal monstrosity with the beam weapon.
You take the chance to bank away and climb, gaining altitude while trying to gather a thought. If you didn’t kill it, it’d kill you. Kill your siblings. You couldn’t let them that happen. Cutting the afterburners and the throttle, you let gravity slow you. A careful eye kept on the Armor at all times, you adjust your pitch up to near-stall, turning your yaw and pitch to orient you for another run with a tight turn. The blade is already coiled and pointed at you. Your rifle isn’t ready to fire yet, nor do you have time to wait for it.
The Iron Blood and Will Is In Me
The lyric plays on the speakers, galvanizing your focus just before you go to full throttle and afterburners, leaving it all up to this. You’re crushed into your seat, metal body screaming from the Gs. The blade springs at you like a viper. Just before it hits you cut the throttle entirely and open all the air brakes on your right side. A searing pain tears across your abdomen and hip, including a phantom limb. The wing on your right hip is torn clean off, along with the armor on your metal body’s belly. With all your strength, you swing down with a blade of violet-hot plasma on the monster’s tail.
The tail bent away from you, making your blade miss almost entirely, the tip just barely clipping enough to heat the black coating on it. Before you have time to process, the tail whips back in your direction, hitting you hard and sending you flying.
The air escapes from your lungs as you hit the ground hard, feeling metal crumple and deform from the impact, even dampening on the cockpit proving useless.
Dazed, you watch as the monster’s head turns toward a cluster of your siblings, splitting open once again as the main gun charged up. Light began to scatter from it’s weapon, energy building up to a critical mass. Desperate, you put all the strength you can muster into one hand. Slowly, your rifle raises, shakes as the reticle gradually climbs until it dances over the monster’s center mass. You can’t wait for a lock. You suck in all the air you can, holding your breath. And you squeeze the tri
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