The rings’ clatter at last ceased and a hair-thin beam erupted out from the Oculus’ eye, pure intent carried on a stream of flame straight into the void of the titan’s eye socket.

Teutobochus walked out of the crater and knelt down before him, the ground shaking beneath its weight. Victor could finally make out the details of its upper body. Bands of reinforced blackstone ran from the corners of its hollow eyes, down the sides of its face. They looked like long-dry trails left by tears of blackest pitch. The great machine’s mouth was of three segments; two instead of an upper lip, split down the middle, and a lower jaw.

It reached out for him, holding its hand out flat, and he walked onto it. Victor had to hold on for dear life as it raised him up to its face. The luciferous beacons that were its eyes burrowed into his very being; he felt the same thrumming burn in his chest as the one caused by an attribute-reader’s silver tendril, only an order of magnitude more thorough.

Then, the ground gave out from under his feet.

A moment of freefall later, he was nowhere.

Rather, he was free-floating in an otherworldly non-space, where the temperature was an exact equilibrium of neither warm nor cold, where the air had no scent, where he could see naught but a tenuous lilac glow going on forever.

The only thing he could feel, besides his own body, was the burn-thrum of a thought-interface; not on his hand, or even just on his skin, but everywhere. It washed over and through him, suffusing every fibre of his being.

It was at this point that he realized he hadn’t even thought to check his own attributes or traits since the enantiomorph - so consumed had he been by acclimating to his own newfound cognitive and sensory capabilities.

He realized this because Teutobochus assaulted him with a mental deluge of information as it affirmed his identity.

NAME VICTOR KHESTUN NEWMAN SEX MALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE C+ PRECISION C+ HARDNESS B+ AETHER A SKILL TRAITS Greater Staff-spear Wielding Lesser Arcane Mathematics Martial Artist Greater Glyphic Magic Fog-breathing Parallel Thought Hypercognition SPECIAL TRAITS Legacy of Bone: Ossomancy Affinity Legacy of Bone: Metabolic Ossum Legacy of Flesh: Carnomancy Affinity Legacy of Flesh: Metabolic Vitae Legacy of Flesh and Bone: Superior Body Hardening Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Callusing Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Exoskeleton Optimized Internal Anatomy Second King’s True-seeing Eyes Instinctive Anatomical Understanding Supremely Dense Skeleton Hyperdense Flesh Despot of Self Macroanimism Second of the Triarchy

It all flashed past in a moment, stopping at the last special trait. Then it vanished.

Suddenly he could see, and hear, and feel what Teutobochus did; sensations distinctly not his own, yet just as vivid and complete nonetheless. The machine had no sense of pain, not in the way humans understood it. It was aware of the marginal wear-and-tear it had sustained in its centuries-long task, but the sense was awareness and nothing more. Victor was also keenly aware that the sensory information it fed him was also filtered and limited, so as not to overwhelm him. Hundreds and hundreds more sensory threads made themselves known like gauge-dials popping up in his mind’s eye, always there, but easy to ignore. Some pertained to the vast energies flowing through Teutobochus’ limbs, others to the status of each of its many hearts, organs, and self-maintenance systems… And Victor understood each and every one of them. Merely directing some attention to any given subsystem dredged up ancient, fundamental understanding from memory.

“Koschei remembered all of this?” Victor wondered.

The voice of Koschei rang in his head, not as the other half of his internal monologue, but not quite as Koschei himself either: “Many a memory Koschei freely consigned to oblivion. Many others he/I doggedly clutched in hand. Had the stone been left alone and Koschei’s spirit left to decay, his/my knowledge of the arcane would be the last to wash away in the Fog-sea’s tides.”

Teutobochus possessed senses beyond those of humans; it had a three-dimensional map of its surroundings, with its field of vision covering a near-complete sphere, while the machine’s eyes were high-performance sensor arrays for long-range scouting and combat. He bid Teutobochus stand, and Teutobochus rose up, commanded just the same as a man might command his arm to bend. He turned the machine’s head towards Zefaris, raising its hand, and curled it into a thumbs-up as he sent a reassuring message over aetherwave: “I’m inside. Controls good. Maintain a safe distance so I don’t step on you.”

He walked a few steps, finding the machine moved with a spry dexterity unbefitting of its giant size. Then, he made the titan raise its arms and move them every-which way, and the same he did for its torso and legs, testing its range of motion. Finding no flaws in it, he turned its burning gaze to the center of the crater it had been found in, for that was designated as the titan’s objective. As he guided it to that place, he also saw Zefaris’ figure cresting the edge of the crater.

It was right there, beneath the ice, though quite deep.

A glistening mass of iron, absent even the smallest hint of rust or rock.

While Victor’s thoughts flowed towards how he would get it out, he was also reminded of the suggestion Koschei had made; to use a tiny portion of Teutobochus’ own mass to form the next iteration of Midnight Wolf. He split his attention between extracting the meteorite and dictating what exactly he wanted the great machine to form. Moments passed before threads of greyish artificial muscle began spinning around his limbs, entering the control-cocoon seemingly out of nowhere, interlacing with similarly grey synthetic tendons. As this took place, already segments of bone plating were taking shape around him.

Feeling the construct-armor’s underlayer take shape around him, his twin internal monologues suddenly came to an agreement; it would be a terrible, vile crime to just name in something as trite as “Boneyard Armor”, or to pretend that it was, in any sense of the word, the same as the mental armor he had donned in his thoughtscape.