Chapter 409: Old Kian's Trial Against the Machine Spirit
Once the neural connection engaged, Boothe's voice drifted in from outside the squire-suit.
"Now, my lord, empty your mind and let the litany before you recite itself, unconsciously. If your awareness starts to blur, don't fight it, that means your consciousness is uploading into the Knight suit. If, in that blur, you sense another presence, don't be afraid. That is the suit's machine spirit. Yield to it..."
Kian never heard the rest. His awareness was already dissolving fast, uploading straight into the machine.
Hazy and half-formed, he felt himself drop into a strange mental space. Only two things existed there: himself, and a dense, concentrated presence of consciousness. That presence was barely humanoid in shape, and it was studying him with open scrutiny.
Kian's mind was foggy, dreamlike, and every judgment he made in that state came from the most primal, unfiltered layer of his instincts.
He looked at the unknown presence staring him down and said, flatly, "The hell you looking at?"
The humanoid presence said nothing. Kian's expression darkened instantly.
"Did you just say something about me, huh?"
The presence still hadn't said a word. Kian let out a triumphant shout, declared a perfect match, and charged straight in for a brawl.
Shoryuken. Strongman's skull-crusher. Crow flying an airplane. Career-ending strike. Tornado that levels a parking lot!
The two masses of consciousness collided in an instant, and the machine spirit, stunned for a moment, snapped into fury and threw itself right back into the fight.
The two of them wrestled and pounded on each other without pause. In the mental space, it looked like two consciousnesses beating each other senseless. In reality, it was Kian's psychic strength locked in a direct contest against the squire-suit's machine spirit, each trying to dominate the other.
"Dragon knee strike! Old Kian's mad elbow! Rocket headbutt! Death scissor legs!"
Kian shouted the name of every move as he unleashed them, each stranger than the last. Since the whole thing played out like a dream, his body kept warping wildly to match. When he shouted "death scissor legs," his legs actually turned into a pair of literal scissors, snapping shut around the machine spirit's head.
The two consciousnesses brawled on and on in that mental space, and the squire-suit's machine spirit started to buckle. Kian was simply too aggressive, throwing out an endless stream of absurd, unpredictable techniques faster than the spirit could keep up with. And the sheer volume of moves he could pull off while still holding the upper hand said something real: his psychic strength was formidable.
Only someone with real mental fortitude had any business piloting a Knight suit. A weak-willed pilot was like fitting a cheap processor into a machine, it just wouldn't run at full capacity. Even a piece of hardware as large as a squire-suit had its own aspirations. It wanted to earn genuine glory on the battlefield, and even if glory was too much to ask, it certainly didn't want to embarrass itself either.
Kian's raw aggression and overflowing energy slowly won the spirit's grudging respect. A squire-suit's compatibility standards weren't nearly as strict as a full-sized Knight's, and after being beaten to its knees for the umpteenth time, right on the edge of dissolving entirely, the machine spirit made a merciful decision: it accepted Kian as its rightful, glorious pilot.
"I've got to crush your skull with my glutes, damn it!"
The umpteenth time he'd pounded the spirit to its knees, Kian sat on its back, locked both hands around its legs, and started squeezing its head between his own glutes.
The spirit felt genuine terror. Kian's glutes felt like some kind of rules-based weapon, and even as a pure consciousness, getting caught between them felt like it was about to trigger some kind of execution animation. Unwilling to risk it any further, the spirit simply dissolved with a soft pop, and the whole strange mental space collapsed along with it.
Kian's mind spun for a moment, and when he came back to himself, his sight and hearing had returned. Only now, they weren't the sight and hearing of a two-meter-tall body of flesh anymore, but of a six-plus-meter frame of solid steel: the squire-suit itself.
His field of view had expanded enormously. An ordinary person only saw what was directly in front of them, but now, as the squire-suit, he could see a full hundred and eighty degrees, up, down, and side to side, at once. Wide-angle cameras, essentially. His hearing had sharpened too, sharp enough that, if he focused, he could hear the pulse of blood through the heart of the tech-priest standing far below him.
And his body of steel was flooded with raw, overwhelming power. He felt no fatigue at all, only the certainty that even the slightest effort would unleash blistering destruction. Every weapon mounted on the frame wasn't some external attachment, it was part of his own body now, as simple to use as curling a finger.
Now in control of the squire-suit, Kian felt something in him ascend. That enormous power set his restless heart hammering with excitement.
Below him, tiny as an insect, Boothe spoke up.
"My lord, it looks like you've succeeded. The machine spirit has accepted you."
Kian's voice boomed out through the suit's external vox.
"That's right. Through sheer tenacity and unbreakable force of character, I earned this squire-suit's machine spirit's respect, and it's handed full control of its body over to me."
Boothe marveled. "My lord, you were accepted remarkably fast. These larger weapon systems' spirits are famously proud. Winning their acceptance this quickly is genuinely difficult. It speaks to how formidable your psychic strength truly is."
Kian said, "I've always known exactly how excellent I am. Now then, take me somewhere I can put this divine machine's power to proper use. I'm dying to unleash some destruction."
Boothe led the way. "Then please, follow me, my lord. I'll take you to the range right now. There's plenty of targets there to help you vent the war engine's full fury."
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