Infinity, Once Again (Rewriting/overhauling, hold please!)

Chapter XXVII

CHAPTER XXVII

Infinity131

Munin

"5.58mm Depleted Uranium bullets"

Current

1600 hours

Universe: 124293891

Munin's hand hurt a bit, not gonna lie. He had spent the last few hours following the group. The head knight, who seemed nice enough and was decently perceptive, had stationed him, Exodus and Yume at the back of their little ragtag formation. Munin, personally, would've loved to just ask Eclipse to steal another car and airdrop it to him, and just sacrifice some NPCs for magic essence or whatever and fuel the car. But no, he had to be normal and follow the caravan of knights and now free hostages to Dreamweaver knows where. And the best part is that they're going through a forest, so his suit battery died a good 9 hours ago. And even better? His suit had decided that the motor on his joints that converted his movement into what precious electricity it could steal, was going to now act as an example as to why you read the instruction manual and not waste RNG on Genshin pulls. Long story short, it's broken. So unlike before, where he could walk for an hour and let his suit walk for half an hour before going back to manual walking, he was now forced to drag himself along full time. Exodus wasn't doing much better, but the kitsune was doing perfectly fine.

How?

Because magic is literal bias on a cosmic level. He was absolutely sure that this fox was just giving herself artificial stamina, mostly because of the somewhat consistent spike in radiation every hour. The first time it happened, he tensed up, and could see Exodus doing the same. Magic made the built in geiger counter in his suit go insane, which was what first alerted him to it. But by the third spike, Munin was noticing a rather subtle glow in the corner of his vision and finally connected the dots. So... yeah. That's how things are going right now.

Munin stepped over a fallen log, muttering something murderous to himself.

"How are you holding up?" Exodus muttered from his side. Munin shrugged, taking his hand off of the fire grip of his rifle and flexing it.

"I'm cold, wet, tired, dragging around an exosuit that is dead, and my left hand is f*cking cramping. And I'm pretty sure my cybernetic hand is about to break. It's been a bad time so far..." He said, taking his other hand from the rear grip and holding it up for Exodus to see. The dark gradient started at superblack hue at the fingertips that faded into a pale institutional white at about 3 cm up from the wrist. The thing looked real up to the point where the gradient ended, as it looked like a gloved hand, but it was mostly just a skin-like covering for a mechanical skeleton underneath. The stuff had originally gone up to the joint where the arm began, but after realizing how utterly annoying it was to deal with it, Munin had just modified the thing and replaced everything that wasn't the hand with a solid composite exoskeleton. It looked fake, sure, but first of all, it was about a good 2 times stronger than the original, and second, he rarely ever wore anything but long sleeves, so it wouldn't affect his visual appearance. And besides. The frostbite-like gradient looked pretty damn nice. But now, the brittle composite had cracked on the back of the wrist, and had unfortunately exposed the very fragile and very very unstable Coridium-based components. Exodus took one look at the glowing red light of the supercapacitors and what other unstable components were exposed to the light and visibly recoiled, adjusting his pace to slowly deviate away from Munin.

"Keep that the f*ck away from me." He muttered, pointing at Munin's hand. The latter rolled his eyes, gripping his rifle again.

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Munin said. "It's not radioactive or anything, just unstable. It'll start to self-seal soon. It'll start to cannibalize some of the composite around the joints or something soon." Munin said, turning back to continue surveying the forest. He was on the left, and was just monitoring the forest through his thermals, when he felt a gentle, but not very gentle tug on his arm. Without even needing to look over, he knew it was Yume, since the person was keeping pace with him without making any sort of sound as they walked across the forest floor. "What is it?" Munin asked, glancing over at the fox.