Chapter 10

Kriena looked over her wall of notes on her latest project and 'hmmm-ed' in thought as she reviewed her progress of the past few weeks. The tiny Valkyrur had been in and out of the induced-coma-like state that Kiena's machines had managed to place her in since her capture near a month ago. The redhead had so far managed to simply confuse and frighten her with every new thing she discovered. In her initial assumption Kriena had thought that the Valkyrur's wound would have been fatal when combined with the energy drain of her anti-ragnite troop and armored units but the girl pulled through with surprising ease. Given the scar that marred her abdomen and face it would have seemed that the wound was taken years ago and not the astounding few weeks that had actually passed. Her defence was just that strong. Taking this information Kriena had then tried to test just what made her so durable: was it her skin? Muscle? Some strange Valkyrur artefact she had not found yet? She had to know.

So saying she took what remained of the Valkyrur's right arm and began her testing. Blades initially cut the skin with about three times the required force to penetrate the average soldiers and that alone was of some concern but it failed to explain her resistance to energy blasts so testing continued. Next she tried the same test but did so with her restraining machines turned to a lower setting. The results here were astounding! When Kriena held the limb and went to cut, the girl reacted by jerking the limb out of the blade's path. Startled Kriena had looked to check her machines to ensure that the red-head was still under. Sure enough there was nothing that should have indicated any level of cognition and yet the girl continued to dodge. Finally fed up she had resorted to gripping the scalpel in each of her fists and viciously stabbing at the infuriating limb with wild abandon. This continued for a good twenty minutes until, fed up, she had given the task to two of her assistants promising a kiss for the one that stabbed the offending limb. Eventually one managed to do it but the blade snapped off and ricocheted into the victorious intern's forehead. Similar tests involving less than willing participants yielded similar results and it seemed that the more energy the Valkyrur had, the more durable she became even without cognitive function. The unconscious defense was something that she had never seen and it concerned and excited her to no end. The idea of trying to replicate this into her prototype armor sent shivers down her spine. To add to this the girl was actually trying to adapt her body to produce more energy than Kriena's machines could drain out of her. Every couple of days or so Kriena needed to adjust the power of her siphoning machines in order to keep the girl down and it was starting to get ridiculous.

The energy that her subject was using was also very interesting as it seemed to be a blend of the energy used by Selvaria and the plasma that Kriena herself employed in her ragnite cannons. Kriena had initially discovered the energy while trying to distil Ragnite for use in the artificial Valkyrur suits that Maximilian had asked for when she was initially brought in under the imperial R&D after the rather amusing demise of her father at the hands of Selvaria. Even if Selvaria had taken her father from her Kriena really couldn't find it in herself to blame the Valkyrur and, in fact, blamed her father's carelessness when working with an extremely volatile test subject. Her father did manage to teach Kriena one very important lesson: when experimenting on an entity that can vaporize you, always make sure they are cannot wake up. Ever. To this end the Valkyrur was kept under for the entirety of her experimentation as well as when she was not experimenting and simply in holding her while she went over her findings, wrote up her horrifyingly thorough reports and thought up further things to test.

Taking a step outside of her inner-monologue and once again aware of her surroundings, Kreina peeked through her office blinds and noticed the statuesque figure that had been showing up in her quant little lab from time-to-time: one Selvaria Bles. The silver-haired woman seemed to take quit the interest in the Emperor's latest endeavour and seemed almost…threatened by the existence of another Valkyrur. Compound that with the discovery of yet another Valkyrur on the Gallian side of the conflicts and suddenly her position as the all-powerful and undefeatable Selvaria was starting to look threatened for the first time. Such it was that Kriena found the other Valkyrur's presence rather entertaining as she would simply stare at the prone, incapacitated form of her supposed 'rival'. While the Valkyrur would never come out into the open while Kreina herself was on the floor she had seen the Valkyrur sneak in when Kreina had been holed up in her office for long periods of time to star at her nemesis. In this campaign alone the little red-head was beating Selvaria in just how impressive her power was. Selvaria had a starring role in a miniature campaign of her own but had always had a squad behind her at the very least. The red-head had decimated almost a third of the Empire's armor present in Gallia and that had forced Maximilian to call up more armored units and delayed his push along the coast by a couple of weeks. Selvaria had layed waste to a Gallian armored division but had, to date, been defeated by the Gallian militia of all things.

Turning to the far wall of her study Kriena looked over the other half of the puzzle of her patient. The jewellery that the Valkyrur wore seemed to be similar in make to the spears and shields classically wielded by Valkyrur. The bands themselves were of an unknown material and there was no way to remove a sample as was proven by Kriena trying everything short of ordinance to try and get them off of the red-head. The crystals were something that greatly intrigued the good doctor as something that had never been seen before and the properties of these crystals had given Kriena the insight she had needed to begin completion of other project: a man-made Valkyrur. The crystals seemed to be made out of some sort of hybrid between the energy that this new Valkyrur used, the same that her weapons produced, and 100% purified ragnite. The latter should not have been possible as it was a ragnite crystal always contained flaws and other contaminants from forming deep within the earth. To date there was no real way to get ragnite to crystallize again and most larger ragnite constructs where either ragnite plated or carved from a large crystal. Even the focus crystals that Kriena's rifles used were made from several ragnite shards fitted together and even they were only about 75% pure.

The amount of energy that these crystals could focus or channel was astronomical and helped to explain some of the Valkyrur's power: her jewellery were her weapons. The actual body itself was trained to an absurd level and Kriena was almost sexually excited to find the amount of scar tissue present on the girl given her estimated age. Anything that was cut this much had to have such a wonderful tolerance to pain. She liked to giving pain and the more a subject could take the better. The muscle-tone and metabolism of her guest was off the charts and it stood to reasoning that the Valkyrur could probably still operate at a level close to her previous performances with or without her focusing crystals. Even more exciting was that given just what these crystals were capable of, the Valkyrur had only begun to scratch the tip of their power. If she ever learned to harness their full potential then the Empire was finished. So deadly were the possibilities that Kriena had actually advised Maximilian to slice the girl to ribbons and remove the crystals that way. Even with Selvaria fervently agreeing, he had declined.

Kriena's current step was something that he was greatly looking forward to and that was the rectification of the Valkyrur's current impediment: her right arm. So far she had seen that the girl was able to manipulate ragnite around her through the use of her control and possibly from the jewellery but she had managed to somehow deal with the energy shielding that her armors should have put up around themselves and nullify them. Taking that into consideration she had begun the construction of a prosthetic arm for the girl. It was actually more weapon than it was appendage at this stage of things but it would do. Sitting next to the bed sad a gauntlet that had rough ragnite shards embedded where the Valkyrur's arm would connect to the armor and then there was an outer shroud that covered the elbow joint that the girl had half of and then continued up and over her shoulder to end in a pauldron in the shape of a stylized Dragon's spinal ridge. Maximilian had wanted his new toy up to maximum killing ability and had turned down Kriena's initial suggestion of a simple hand. The gauntlet was now a clawed hand with overlapping, edged sections for the fingers and included a small focusing crystal in the palm for long range capabilities. This was augmented with a wide, heavy blade that was stored along the outside of the forearm and could be extended with an internal mechanism that Kriena could not hope to test until the girl could try on the gauntlet. The entire construct was made of the same ragnite conductive alloy as her Black Armor and shared similar ley-lines for ragnite energy to travel through but had a much more aggressive look to them. Whether or not this was even usable by the girl Kriena had no idea and really was relying on the underlying idea that the girl could control the ragnite in the ley-lines and did not actually need anything to help her move the armor. If she did then they were stuck as there was no ragnite engine small enough for this purpose. Sighing Kriena vowed to test it on the girl on the morn but for now she should stop thinking about the Valkyrur for a while.

Now if only she could figure out how to replicate the crystals she could have an unstoppable weapon for her lord and master to finally crush Gallia once and for all and roll onto the real threat on the other side. So intent on her work she failed to notice that her new toy was under intense scrutiny from one Selvaria Bles.

Selvaria stood as passively as she could manage while she checked over the charts and notes strewn about the restraining table and machines used to keep the other Valkyrur comatose. The readings that the machines were showing were noticeably higher than she remembered seeing not a week ago and that did not seem good. If anything the constant draining of this one's energy was making them grow ever stronger and not weakening them as she would have assumed. It was making her nervous and to such a degree that Maximilian himself had pulled her aside and interrogated her as to her distracted nature as of late. While he was pleased that she seemed even more bloodthirsty in combat, her distracted thoughts while in Ghirlandaio had been noted by more than few of her men and officers. Kriena had no doubt spotted her a few times as she scouted the captive from time to time. Her mind wandered until it clamped down on the glass case she had inadvertently uncovered from beneath a mountain of paper. Within sat a gauntlet and over-armor for a right arm. The complete nature of the forearm combined with only the outer armor for the upper arm and shoulder gave her the insight she needed, it was for her. A prosthetic limb to bring the new weapon up to full strength. Selvaria almost obliterated the artefact before her but abruptly froze both physically and mentally. She had lived through something like this before. Maximilian`s father had kicked off the idea of making a suit of armor that replicated a Valkyrur`s fighting prowess and Selvaria had been the initial test subject for any idea pertaining to this project. That was the reason she was captured in the first place and it brought her endless suffering.

Here Selvaria was torn. The small woman lying here was about to be subjected to something that, more likely than not, scar her mentally and physically for the rest of her life. The marrying of technology and flesh was almost a forbidden science in this time and for good reason: it killed everyone involved. The most anyone would receive in the form of prosthetics was a fake leg or hand made of a solid material. This was ragnite infused technology and seemed designed for complex movement. This was no doubt made from the research notes that were first created with her as the recipient and Selvaria had never screamed like that before or since.

The idea was to create a wearable weapon system that would leach ragnite energy directly from Selvaria`s body and focus it into an extremely potent energy beam. The device was to attach to her back and shoulders to draw power from and then concentrate it along her forearms to fire. The bulky setup had taken months to design and build, all the while testing on how they could draw her energy from her. The process involved piercing her skin with varying probes and the best way to connect, or so the doctor theorized, was through her nervous system. The first time they tried to interface with her she had screamed so harshly she spat blood for an hour. It was only the beginning. It took them six months of trial and error to finally drop the project and it was only because Selvaria had promised to kill herself should Maximilian make her try again that he himself had dropped the idea. Her left shoulder had never worked the same since.

Now here was another. Another her. Another Selvaria lay before her now and she could not choose what to do or how to feel. On the one hand this was her rival for Maximilian`s favour, this was a being that outclassed her in raw power and skill and yet she was about to be subjected to torture on a scale that Selvaria herself could not endure. Conflicted as she was Selvaria felt someone`s gaze upon her and looked back from the glass to see Kriena`s malevolent gaze. The eye contact startled Selvaria and she backed into the case involuntarily as she was brought back to the memories of seeing those same eyes peeking over the top of her surgery table as the young girl delighted at the sight of so much of her father`s toy`s blood. With the thoughts of one Valkyrur`s past clashing with what was to become another Valkyrur`s future, Selvaria glanced at the prone figure with regret and the shadows of pain in her eyes.

"I do not envy you."

The words were lost on the figure but Selvaria had said her piece as she fled from the bloodthirsty gaze of Kriena. Selvaria had been blinded by someone threatening her place with Maximilian but for something such as this Selvaria could not help but feel a twinge of some unpleasant feeling in her chest at the thought of someone going through the same trauma as her for a little reason as a bigger gun to point at your enemies.

It was the following afternoon that the screaming began.

AN:

Well that took a while...To be perfectly honest I got caught by writer's block and it took some time to figure out how to approach this chapter. It is very techno-babel-y but I needed to set the story for the next arch of things to come. that being said: Thank you so very much to everyone who has reviewed, faved, watched or just enjoyed this fic! I will do my level best to see if I can update this with a bit more frequency and I apologize for the slow update. That being said I hope you enjoyed the chapter!

-Arkninja