The Hunduns were coming. A whole herd of them, rumbling across the wilds, stirring up a dark storm of dust through the night. Their rotund, faceless bodies, made of spirit metal, glinted under the silver half-moon and sky full of glittering stars.
A lesser pilot would have had to fight off nerves to go meet them in battle, but Yang Guang wasn’t fazed. At the foot of his watchtower just outside the Great Wall, he compelled his Chrysalis, the Nine-Tailed Fox, to launch into action. It was as tall as a seven- or eight-story building and bristly green. Its metallic claws pounded across the earth, shaking it.
A Chrysalis was no ordinary war machine. Yang Guang didn’t maneuver it with steering wheels or levers, like he would an electric carriage or a hovercraft. No, he became it. While his mortal body sat dormant in the cockpit, its arms around the concubine-pilot he’d taken to battle tonight, his mind psychically commanded every part of the Nine-Tailed Fox, making it pounce toward the incoming herd on the horizon. Far out on either side of him, the silhouettes of other active-duty Chrysalises raced forth as well.
Through hair-thin acupuncture needles along his pilot seat that bit into his spine, Yang Guang channeled his qi, his life force, to power the Fox. Qi was the vital essence that sustained everything in the world, from the sprouting of leaves to the blazing of flames to the turning of the planet. Not only did he draw on his own, he reached across the Chrysalis’s psychic link and sapped up his concubine-pilot’s as well. Her mind wasn’t strong enough to put up any resistance as he did so; it was lost deep inside his. Pieces of her memories flurried through him, but he did his best to ignore them. It was best not to know too much about his concubines. The only thing he needed was the interaction of her qì with his own, which multiplied his spirit pressure, making it possible for him to command a Chrysalis so large.
Trickles of common-class Hunduns reached Yang Guang first, like oversized metal bugs eager to burrow into the Fox and kill him. Their various colors were dull under the starlight. But some lit up, shooting weaponized qì out of their bodies in luminous blasts or crackling bolts. If Yang Guang had faced them as a human, they’d have loomed as big as houses and vaporized him instantly, but when he piloted the Fox, they were too small to hurt him. As he smashed them with the Fox’s claws, bursts of foreign emotion shot through him—grief and terror and rage, as riotous as static. He didn’t know how exactly Chrysalises were made from Hundun husks—only the highest-level engineers were allowed to know—but even centuries of improving their craft hadn’t vanquished the kink that made pilots feel whatever the Hunduns felt when they pierced a Hundun’s hull.
Pilots didn’t talk much about this in public, but resisting these distracting emotions was a surprisingly rigorous part of battle. Yang Guang was one of the most powerful pilots alive precisely because he could detach from them so well. Powering through the mental onslaught, he kept pummeling the Hunduns. The Fox’s nine tails swished and creaked behind him like nine new limbs, slapping larger Hunduns away with resonant clangs.
Yang Guang had no pity for them. The Hunduns were invaders from the cosmos who’d pulverized the height of human civilization some two thousand years ago and shattered humanity into scattered tribes.