Note: So, playing an absolute IRRESPONSIBLE amount of Armored Core 6, and the potential for characterization and a great little moment of emergent, gameplay-based story, got me down to put this little number together.

I do not own Armored Core. Feel free, please, to review, comment, and criticize. Most of all, enjoy!

I Am Raven

"I know just the volunteer to go poke that beast with a stick. Gun 13! You get-"

"Raven."

Not all Gen 4s were as generally quiet as 621. Iguazu and his relentless, eternally wounded pride were proof enough of that. But most weren't also nearly so talkative as him. The trauma both physical and mental from the augmentation surgeries. The lack of energy from all the cybernetics their bodies had to support. The difficulty of working their mouth as compared to passing information along via the digital methods and devices they'd been rebuilt to better interface with. Gen 4s mostly weren't chatty, in large part because they literally, physically couldn't be.

Walter himself even had to admit, 621 had only actually spoken to him once so far. After the Watchpoint job, and the Coral explosion.

I… heard a voice.

The admission concerned him, as much as it was likely Gen 4 side-effects. Coral Contact festered at the back of his mind, an old theory that would turn the use and destruction of Coral into… a crime against… humanity at best, new life at worst? But even if it was, it didn't change what needed to be done. Where there was Coral, there would be blood. Death and greed and war would always follow, corps hunting the power and profit of Coral. It was why he was back on Rubicon 3, why he'd bought 621 and all his previous Hounds in the first place.

621. Who's single, barely whispered word had slammed the brakes so hard on everyone's expectations, the briefing for slaying the Ice Worm hadn't ground to a halt; it had thrown itself completely off the rails.

"Heh. Nice…" V. IV Rusty clearly thought more in his head, going by his tone. It was a perhaps-not-so-strange relationship he and 621 were developing. A bond built on honesty, a love of the fight, mutual respect for their skills. A trust forged in battle and victory.

"Think you're such hot shit you can interrupt-!" Iguazu. He was going to try and continue to make himself a problem eventually. Walter could tell.

"The audacity-!" Walter took a calming breath at Snail's… what was it this time? Ego? Classism? Augmentation tech had advanced swiftly enough that slang and pejoratives were still developing. There wasn't yet a full word for Snail's sort; those who saw themselves as superior because they'd gone under the knives just to get the best tech put in them. Those who tried to make what they saw as their inherent superiority a physical, biomechanical reality.

"ALRIGHT! ENOUGH!" Michigan cut through the building argument with his sheer force of personality, and sheer force. Some loved him for it. Just as many hated him because of it. Walter didn't care one way or another. "Gun 13,-"

"Raven."

There it was again, and again it shut everyone up. Hoarse and quiet, the vocal chords atrophied from years of disuse because who would ever care what C4-621 actually had to say? Who would ever deign to give C4-621 the chance to speak? That hoarseness supplemented by cybernetics and digitized enhancement, adding an inhuman, mechanized tint even to just a single word.

"My call-sign is Raven. I… am Raven."

That fight with the pilot they'd stolen the license from must have had a greater affect than Walter had thought. And he couldn't help but feel some pride in his Hound for standing up for themselves, even over something small.

Because they were standing up. There was something implicit in their statement, however short and simple. A dare. A challenge. A warning.

Disagree with me on this. FIGHT ME on this. Deny this one expression of My Self. Go ahead and see what happens.

The ACs swooped and dove around each other at the bottom of Depth 1. All the MTs had been slowly but surely beaten and blasted away, leaving just them. Raven and Michigan. And Raven was running out of options. Both missile launchers were nearly empty from crowd control, and the need for constant suppressing fire on MTs and Michigan himself meant each minigun only had 230 rounds apiece. Not nearly enough to end the fight outright, not with how well Michigan piloted the LIGER TAIL. Another 50 rounds apiece were already spent in the time it took to realize that, many of which had missed.

The scatter of explosives caught Raven off-guard, broke their ACS stability. And Michigan… seemed to be ready to gloat. "Gotta say, I'm impressed. You aren't gonna win this, but damn if you aren't the best pilot I've seen. It's too bad. You would've gone far in Balam, Gun 13."

Michigan's Songbird rose and fired. And against all odds, all laws of mechanics and physics and sense and possibility…

Raven dodged.

"I. Told. You." The tinny, half-digitized voice cut across the open comms feed like a razor. It was as quiet as the last scant words the Gen 4 had spoken, but the anger carried in it…

It had been a long time since Michigan had actually feared anything. But the hateful promise of those three words terrified him into seconds of fatal inaction.

They'd been battling it the entire fight. No, they'd been battling it almost since they'd landed on Rubicon. But really once they'd had to meet and hear Snail and Michigan. The two disparate halves, two broken parts as distinct people. Of that bastards who'd had the audacity to birth them.

He'd been at first, an even pettier, lower Snail. A middle manager of an militarized arms subsidiary of a subsidiary, so low on the totem pole he could only claim to be higher because he could technically order low-level assets be deployed, even if he never had the guts to. Then the parent company had folded, and he'd had to go actually get his hands dirty to try to make ends meet, took his ego and bossiness and superiority and applied it militarily, which suited his wife just fine.

Though they'd each brought both halves of themselves home with them. It had almost been a relief when he'd run off, pursuing a long-shot contract that ultimately killed him, and she'd then had to stay away on longer deployments to make up the money he brought in. Almost, because he'd not just left them. He'd left them with his debts, debts his family couldn't possibly pay.

They hadn't wanted to, but they'd all agreed in the end; the incentives bonuses for undergoing augmentation, supposed contract guarantees to follow. It was the only way to even start chipping away at what they now owed. Then the oldest sister died under the knife, a newly discovered allergic reaction to some of the chemicals necessary to fit the implants in. Such reactions would be screened for in the future; the procedures were expensive and time-consuming, couldn't be wasted on people who'd die on the table.

Then the youngest brother's brain burned up beneath the metal and power and Coral they'd forced into it. Then Mom ate her gun, and her own personal debt she'd been chipping away at in another militarized subsidiary passed down in death. And C4-621 had had no choice but to… become.

And here in Michigan was the platonic ideal of the second half of Dad and ALL of Mom, that brutish militarism given form and voice and the deadly killing power he'd always wished for but never got, and she'd applied far too liberally. And Raven had told him already! The system screamed when the bomb sweep knocked it out of stabilization, and the hormonal regulators went into overdrive as a fury began to build within at Michigan's words. The regulators had no chance. And Raven forced their AC, 8-BALL, to move with sheer will against its own mechanical demands and limitations.

Because like Hell were they going to die to Michigan. The augmentations transferred such sensation between AC and pilot that Raven could feel the grenade rounds displace the air just beside them, feel the heat of the explosion behind them, shrapnel rattle against their back.

"I. Told. You." Raven spat across the open channel, and they could see it gave Michigan pause. Stabilization reset, and Raven kicked in the assault boosters, dove at Michigan, the last hundreds of rounds blared from the barrels, volleys of missiles flew into the air and descended on him. They'd made an opening, and they meant to take advantage.

8-BALL SLAMMED into LIGER TAIL, and drove it up against the wall that had formed the base of the NEPPENTHES. The last dozen rounds screamed against Michigan, and Raven began to furiously swing. One minigun caught the explosives thrower on Michigan's arm and snapped it off, even as the barrel of the minigun bent and shattered from the sheer force of the blow. Raven swung what was left against one of LIGER TAIL's legs and caved one of the quad-leg's knee joints in.

Raven cast the broken weapon aside, and seized the barrel of the other empty gun with the now-free hand, rose and smashed it down on Michigan's other gun with the force of both arms, caved in both weapons and crushed the LIGER TAIL's right hand to scrap. The last volleys of missiles flew and dropped, bathing them both in fire and metal as Raven punched.

"G-G-Gun 13-"

SLAM! SLAM! SLAM!

Raven could feel the cybernetics and brain implants and hormonal regulators desperately try to stop them. Try and fail to suppress their rage. Rage that now came out through the metal fists they swung again and again and again.

"MY!"

Strikes landed with every word.

"NAME!"

One punch shattered LIGER TAIL's optics.

"IS!"

A backhand smashed the cockpit covering out of place.

"RAVEN!"

A final, furious, two-handed strike flew at the man inside. The man who threw his arms up in a futile, instinctual attempt to protect himself. The AC-powered blow reduced Michigan to red pulp stuck in-between the 8-BALL's finger joints.

Raven. It was the one thing they'd truly had for themselves in… they didn't know how long. It had begun as something stolen for convenience, to be sure. But they'd made it their own. Even the pilot they'd stolen it from had admitted that. It had gone from something stolen, to something earned. And what Ayre said it stood for, a dread icon of freedom and power in a galaxy of submission and acquiescence…

"I am… Raven."

So, this came from a couple ideas that had been rattling in my head as I played through AC6, and really became something when I finally played and beat the mission to take out Michigan. I could only beat it with twin miniguns and twin twelve-missile launcher pods at first, and even then, I used up every bullet and repair kit killing Michigan and had to desperately, carefully punch the last six or so MTs (one of which was a tetrapod, god that was terrifying) to death on low health. But the Drama-lover/Writer in me couldn't help but see the dramatic potential. It asked:

"What if we gave 621 ALL the parental issues? Like, made their parents worse, low-class expys of Michigan and Snail, and it was Michigan they punched to death at the end after his consistent AC-Call-sign-Deadnaming?"

This is the result of that question.