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Desolation: The Vanguard

Chapter I

By Von Krieger

Delilah walked down the hall, each footstep making the ground shake a little bit, the light fixtures swaying overhead. It wasn't that she was in a bad mood, or that the hallway had been poorly constructed, far from it. She was absolutely delighted, as her workload was going to lessen quite a bit. After having spent several years as the lone pilot for Vanguard Lancer Division 112 Research and Development had finally managed to discover how to install the required implants in someone who wasn't already a half-ton killing machine.

And machine was about the right term, even with muscle fibers made of bio-organic mythril, she still required servomotors in her joints to move them. Her bones were heavy, a form of spell-enhanced rhenium diboride alloy grafted onto them to in order to support the heavy ordinance she used to carry. Close to six and a half feet tall, Delilah had weighed a touch under 200 pounds before her conversion from human paladin to cannon-carrying cyborg. Her size had remained the same, but she now weighed in at three quarters of a ton.

Each motion she made was always accompanied by the faint whine of her motorized joints. Through years upon years of experience, she could move just as easily as a normal human being, and despite the fears of others she wouldn't powder the bone of any hand that she shook. She could, but she had the fine control not to.

Delilah looked down at herself, a blend of science and sorcery that had been created for one purpose: destruction. She enjoyed her job a great deal; she was one of the few individuals fully capable of repelling a full-scale demonic incursion force butt-naked. Though that had only happened twice.

Truth be told she felt more at home on the battlefield than anywhere else. She preferred her powered armor to her mythrilized silk clothing. The mystical metal had been formed into threads, woven with four silk fibers to add its legendary strength and durability to the fabric. It was the only thing that Delilah could wear without tearing it apart after a handful of uses. The force of the friction generated by her arm against her side, for example, was immense.

She had reluctantly given up pants as well, since the grinding sound of metal on metal when she walked normally was quite annoying. She preferred the heavy powered armor as its own sounds of movement made her own seem silent and the kinetic dampeners (veins started to throb in the techs' heads if you called them force-fields) meant that she didn't have to walk on eggshells while wearing the stuff.

She suspected that it was so that any passerby would think her just another normal paladin at first glance. But only at the first glance. Delilah's flesh was not her own, every natural bit of herself had been purged one day long ago in preparation for her use as a cyborg. Typical flesh would not stand up being surrounded by what was essentially ultralight steel. Three months spent in an unconscious state in a vat of positively charged deimoplasm had transformed her flesh and bone into the supernatural equivalent.

Delilah worried, on occasion, that the darkness of the demon essence, despite its being purified, had warped and corrupted her. She ran her tongue over the worrying points in her mouth. They weren't uncomfortable, but they were unfamiliar. And also typically one of the first signs of demonic corruption; it made Delilah shudder to think about a dark, twisted, and sinister creature with the amount of power she wielded. She could stand toe-to-toe with nearly anything the supernatural invaders could offer as it was. Infused with the dark energies of the netherworld she would become nearly unstoppable.

She clutched her dog tags, running her thumb over the familiar sword, star, and spear symbol that represented her faction. The action brought her comfort, for her skin did not sear with pain as she pressed it against the celestial steel. She was still one of the righteous.

It worried her now more than ever, for not only was she one of humanity's greatest weapons against the black tides of Hell, but she was the pilot of another; the Lillith.

Much like herself it was a combination of living flesh, the latest in cybernetics and nanotechnology, all powering aspects of demonology and necromancy. The sheer number of forces coming together in one creation were astounding. Delilah had become the Lillith's pilot not from any great piloting skill, but because of the thirteen warriors chosen to become the Vanguard Crown she was the only one that still lived. Still lived and was not demonically corrupted, anyway.

Tanks were expensive, hard to fuel, took years to train a talented crew, and in the wrong circumstances were torn apart like tissue paper. Powered armor troopers were the most effective against the hordes, able to carry heavy weaponry, but still have maneuverability. Cybernetic troopers had been around since even before the bombs fell and the dimensions were breeched. Most Vanguard cyborgs were men and women who had lost limbs in battle, mechanized prosthetics stronger and more useful than the flesh they were meant to replace. A few brave or foolish individuals volunteered to willing become elite units, putting their lives in the hands of scientists, surgeons, and technicians, becoming reborn as mechanized individual infantry.

Delilah had been one of those volunteers. Her ancestors had lived safe below the earth for one hundred years, tucked away and hidden from all the world beneath an entire mountain. There had been peace and prosperity there; it had been a paradise where no one suffered hunger or thirst, illness, disease, or the heartbreak of demonic taint.

Delilah herself had lost three little sisters to the darkness; their innocent spirits housed in increasingly demonic flesh, until they could not stem the flow of evil anymore and accepted their destinies as creatures of the night. Unlike the Vanguard, her tribe had not euthanized the corrupted to save their souls, believing that there might be hope, they had just let each one walk off into the night, never knowing if they became heroes or horrors. Sometimes she thought a bullet in the head might have been more merciful for the new demons and their former families.

Despite her transformation from mortal to half-demon (some called the creatures of positive energy Angels, but Delilah knew they could be just as cold, wicked, and cruel as their dark kin) she had still kept her tattoos; her traditional tribal markings and her celebrations of noteworthy kills. As well as a handful that she had just liked the look of.

She knew that her commanders at the Vanguard disapproved of them, so she had not added any more since her transformation, but the flames, skulls, and demonic visages still remained, forever coloring her pale white skin.

Delilah let out a soft sigh as her fingers went from one object of comfort around her neck to the other. Two lines around her neck with many straight lines between them, repeating the same string of letters over and over again, MDCXCI; a way of remembering where her clan's home had once been without saying its now hated name. She dared not even bring the number to mind, for fear of drawing the attention of the horrors that resided there.

The Lance had finally succeeded in creating a second generation of the Crown, though they were not individually powerful as Delilah was, they didn't need to be. Their deimomechs would be able to carry and house the firepower. Delilah was an obsolete model, the last of a wasted effort. The Lillith could carry far more firepower than she ever could, and it had the advantage of being little more than a machine. Care had been taken to make sure that it could never operate on its own, never become a demon, or become possessed by one. Programs, charms, wards, seals, every system of control known to man prevented the thing from moving on its own.

Delilah arrived at her destination. With a contented sigh she entered her room, flopping down upon her bed. The mattress wriggled and roiled beneath her from the impact, a flexible high impact plastic coating around a large amount of mercury. Delilah's mass would crush springs, permanently compress foam, and reduce just about any other piece of furniture to a snapped and twisted wreck.

This and her chair in the dining hall, constructed of parts from a hydraulic press, where the only two places in the building where she felt comfortable. Truthfully she didn't need to eat, drink, sleep, or even breathe; magical sigils drawn upon her very bones drew upon the energy she needed to keep on living. But going through the day to day operations that normal men and women needed kept Delilah grounded, kept reminding her that beneath all the technology, sorcery, and vat-grown demonhide there was still a human soul in there. Somewhere.

Her gaze drifted to one wall, where she had placed her tribal gear on a framework to display it, to remind her of where she came from. The last of her tribe, though not the last branch of her people, the demons within that black, vile hive sought her people out, abducted them, and twisted them into more demons for their ever-expanding horde. The hive demons had a special affinity for her people, a mere touch was enough to start the inevitable cascade of corruption that would consume one of them, mind, body, and soul.

Delilah had seen the process more times than she wanted to remember. The final time she had witnessed it the most detailed and terrible. She watched her mother ram her sword into one, the monster's purple-black 'blood' flowing up the blade, onto her mother's arms, darkening her skin, taking root, transforming mortal flesh into shaped deimoplasm.

Demons were not flesh and blood creatures. They were spiritual and mystical manifestations, their bodies made up of a single, mutable substance that could be shaped into a variety of functions. What held them together, bound to the mortal plane, was a small, fingernail sized gem housed somewhere within their body. They could easily move it around, never keeping it in the same place twice. You could kill a demon by blowing it apart, by severing the connection between body and soul gem; removed from deimoplasm, the spirit within fled back to the netherworld with the next rise of the sun, leaving behind an item of magical power.

You could draw upon that power to preserve demonic flesh, as Delilah had. She had crafted her armor from the skin of the monsters she had killed in that final battle, enraged by the loss of her mother. Her one regret was that she was never able to lay her mother's spirit to rest, Dara forever damned to nest within that wicked hive as some sort of brood-monster.

Next to the armor was a shield of the same, a dagger made from a massive claw, and a makeshift serrated sword crafted from a leg bone, leather strips, and the fangs and claws of many demons.

Her eyes went from the armor upon the wall to the plain stainless steel ring upon her right ring finger, given to all those in her tribe who could call upon magical energy and remain pure, able to become paladins.

Delilah never understood the workings of magic, there were so many conflicting theories, some with four elements, some with five, six, eight, nine, or even more. Some of these energies came from the planet, others from realms beyond Earth. Paladins were able to call upon what was often called positive, light, or holy mana, anathema to the demons, and yet compatible and similar in some cases.

She could remember the rush that filled her when she called on it; the feeling of peace, perfection, and bliss. She missed it; missed the uplifting surge within her spirit that lifted her up from the drudgery of the world for a few brief moments, fueled its way into her weapon, sliced open monsters, and left her slipping in the deimoplasmic blood. Though the spirit was willing the flesh was... Well... there wasn't any flesh left to channel the energy. Though technology could utilize and channel the mana, it could not call upon it as mortal flesh could.

Demons could draw upon their elemental power, but they had limited amounts of it. The energy they spent was also their own life force. It could be restored with a few days rest, but Delilah never had that luxury. She had been sent to settlement after settlement, fighting demons day after day, week after week, month after month. Her cybernetic flesh never tired, but each time she called upon her power it made her more and more weary in the spirit. She had to stop, or else she would have killed herself. Or worse, left herself a soulless, empty shell. The spirit of the woman who had been Delilah Demonbane passing on into the next life, while her body remained behind. Six of the thirteen members of the Crown had burned themselves out. They had continued for years afterward, but eventually they would drop their weapons in battle, and welcome oblivion.

Before the Lillith project, Delilah had undergone counseling several times by orders of her commanders; she had become listless, introverted, anxious. It seemed to be merely delaying the inevitable, the feelings always returned, with ever more logic behind them. Even with the Lillith, Delilah wanted to leave. Once she had the first six pilots fully trained, she would don her old armor (which had been proclaimed heretical, and Delilah forbidden from wearing it, for fear of a potential corrupting influence with the number of soulstones used to keep it together, even if it took no wear upon her three-quarter ton body) and walk out into the wastes; tirelessly battling the demonic threat without needing to tend to human matters.

A further three of the Crown had similarly wandered off, tales still told of their exploits, but lost to the Vanguard. The specialized equipment to house her used up resources that could be better spent elsewhere. The food she ate could likely feed six other soldiers, or three times that many starving wastelanders.

And then there were the signs of impending corruption. They had been subtle at first, but Delilah had recognized them immediately. Three weeks later they were becoming so noticeable that she actively had to take measures to hide them. Making sure to not open her mouth wide enough for people to see her fangs, wearing her already non-regulation hair (since there wasn't anything that could reliably and painlessly cut it with any precision) down over her ears, and of course wearing her tabard over her usual clothing. The demon sigils upon her alabaster skin stood out through the pure white-silver of her dress, the dark markings easily seen through the garment. Delilah tended to attract stares, she was only normal at first glance.

Her bloodline had been tainted by demonic manipulation, leaving them open to lust, desire, to sexual corruption. They had encouraged her ancestors to couple amorously with anyone and everyone they could, man or woman. The holy sacrament of marriage had been unheard of; they had been altered to birth litters instead of individual children and had been changed to have the number of breasts needed to feed their entire brood at once.

The wasteland had been particularly cruel to Delilah's family. The demonic interference with their genome had left it fragile, easily warped by radiation of both the mundane and magical nature. Rather than the two normal humans sported, or the four her ancestors had, Delilah had six breasts.

Having never been pregnant, they had never been particularly noticeable, the middle and lower pairs needing no support, and easily hidden with bandages. But the reason she had been singled out of the other 3 viable individuals still active within the Crown was because of them. Deimomech pilots had to be female and had to have Paladin abilities. She never mentioned that hers had faded away, vanished with a lack of use, or that she was no longer pure enough to use them. Delilah had almost forgotten about them, until one day she tried to draw on them, and found that she didn't remember how.

Another week, two at the most, and then she could leave. She could stop pretending to be one of them and just do what she was meant to do, kill demons. No one ever tried to befriend her. The high failure rate for cybernetic conversion, the long odds of surviving battle, both meant that it was a bad idea to get close. But six years of being a near-indestructible killing machine behind her, Delilah still had no friends. Despite being a hero, she was an outsider. She was demon-tainted from birth, a mutant, and a tribal. She hadn't been raised in the confines of a Vault, where most of the Vanguard lived. She was an ignorant savage in their eyes. Her transformation hadn't helped that. It merely added half-demon and machine onto the list.

People saw her as a thing, not as a person, a human-shaped piece of ordnance to be stored away when not in use.

Delilah sighed softly and stood, walking to her door and locking it before she dared undress. Old fashioned hooks and clasps held her garment closed, the style an ancient one, dating back to Asia hundreds, maybe thousands of years prior. It slid to the floor in a heap.

She checked the mirror once more, hoping against hope that the marks had vanished, but they hadn't. The inverted star surrounded by a jagged aura on her belly, the eight markings looking like fangs biting down upon each of her six nipples.

The cyborg turned her head away from her reflection. She was supposed to report any signs of corruption immediately, but the next few days would mean the difference between having a fully trained anti-demon fighting force, and a bunch of sitting ducks.

Once her replacements were trained, Delilah could simply walk out into the wastes, find a demon hive, and find peace destroying it. Or the next one. Or the next. She wished that she had something to look forward to, some hope, something redeeming in her life. But all she had was slaughter, the laying to waste of demons before her, for as long as she lived.

Which could be a very long time; some of the first mortals converted to demons still lived. Demons themselves had an unlimited lifespan. Constant fighting forever was all the future seemed to hold.

Was this what it was like to be a demon? Emotionless, cold, empty inside, nothing but the comforts of physical sensation to drive you? Rage, Lust, Gluttony, and Greed, the driving forces behind nearly all demonic attacks? If they truly felt like Delilah she could easily see Envy as being a driving force.

If she had been given the opportunity to live her life over again, she would still chose to take the path of the cyborg. She had saved lives, saved hundreds, maybe thousands from a fate worse then death. What else could she ever have accomplished in this bleak, brutal world?

Her hands rested upon her swollen belly, she had always known she would never have children. She had lost her entire family to demonic corruption, seeing them become horrors before her very eyes. The Stephanite Hive would hunt all who bore its blood to the ends of the Earth, desiring to welcome them to its fold.

Even if the stinger of a demonic scorpion had not stolen away her ability to have children in a battle long ago, Delilah knew in her mind that she would never have had them. Like her mother, who had lost three daughters to the darkness, she to would have to witness her children stolen by the night. She would not bring children into the world in the end, but more demons.

Even if the acidic venom had not burned away her ovaries, even if all the demons vanished overnight, Delilah would be unable to carry a child to term. The only thing she could possibly breed with would be a demon. Even if she carried them the instinctive, muscular contractions of her birth canal would crush the life out of anything she would could attempt to birth. So it was fitting that the chamber made for creating life, a useless compartment upon a killing machine, carried instead more machine parts, as did each of her six breasts. It seemed to be almost some sort of pun based on silicon, a component of computer parts, and silicone, which had been used in breast implants.

She wasn't quite sure what they were made of, but her body housed the core operational components of the Lillith, which was why all the pilots had to be female. The ports along her spine that had been used to bear loads in order to help her carry heavy weaponry and tie into her internal targeting system now served as linking ports that connected her to her mech.

Her pale skin flushed and shamed tears trickled down her cheeks. They could have altered her further, added a new pair of ports just above her pelvis. But no, one of the designers of the Lillith must've been a perverse little creep, since the main control linkage to the deimomech ran right up the existing opening to her womb.

They probably viewed it as something cold and clinical, two compatible cable couplings interfacing. Likely Delilah was just over thinking this, the designers had like thought of herself and her mech as two machines networking into one. Not a woman being fucked deliciously every time she defended the base, or exterminated a demon nest.

For the first time Delilah found a part of herself wanting to be a demon: to experience mindless carnal pleasure, to be able to give and receive it without any moral or spiritual consequence.

She looked back into the mirror, at her markings, telling everyone that a demon laid claim to her belly and bosom. The Lillith had claimed her as its own. She had taken every opportunity that she could to experience life within the cybernetic demon-creature, its senses becoming her own.

Her shame turned to anger, her hand reaching down to grip the segmented, metallic protrusion from the base of her spine. They had installed it so that Delilah would have a sensory analog to the Lillith's tail. They could've placed the link to the primary computer core there. But they hadn't. They'd crafted her body and the Lillith so that it would fuck her every time she piloted it, and with all the cushioning fluid within the pilot's chamber, who would notice her own natural lubrication? No wonder she always felt ecstatic while piloting the thing, with its senses overwhelming her own, it could violate her all it liked without repercussion. A pure maiden could tame a demon; keep it under her control, but a tarnished, combat-weary murder-machine who had forgotten how to draw upon her paladin powers? Easily corruptible.

The Lance techs had developed a remote control module for the Lillith, it wouldn't allow access to the heavy weapons or the graceful, feline movement the deimomech had with a fully linked pilot, but it would be enough to save lives during an ambush, where the five minutes it took Delilah to run across the base and get fully integrated were critical. She had resisted having it installed, not wanting the deimomech to have even the slightest potential for autonomy. It could be installed immediately; Delilah would never need to slip inside the Lillith again.

Delilah laid down upon her bed, pulling the covers over herself. They were synthetic fiber, in no way enhanced, but rather than wash them, the sheets and blankets were just recycled back into the material fabricator again. Delilah could tear them up all she wanted and it wouldn't matter.

She closed her eyes, connecting to the base's internal network and wrote a memo to the tech crew that she had changed her mind, and to install the communications module on the Lillith immediately.

Business concluded, Delilah set the timer to turn off her conscious functions in 30 seconds. She could send herself into whatever stage of sleep she desired. She always used the most restful state she could get without having dreams. Her dreams always hurt her. They were either hideous nightmares that made her wake up in fear, something she hadn't actually felt in years, or were so wonderful that she never wanted to wake up from them.

People had died in the past because Delilah had refused to leave her imaginary family. She had mental images of them in her mind. It was stupid, Nita had been the first to be stolen, when they were six, Mei-Ling had followed into the night at seven, and finally Yuriko when they were twelve.

She wished that the memories of her dreams could be stored in the mechanical components of her consciousness, so she could delete the mocking dream-memories from her mind.

Demons had taken her family. She had no kin. She would never have kin.

Everyone she had ever loved was dead, in one way or another.

Holding onto the images of her sisters grown up, happy, smiling, all they did was hurt her. They weren't real. They were programming bugs in the Vanguard's greatest weapon.

Thankfully the timer ticked down to zero, ending Delilah's thoughts on her imaginary family as she drifted into an empty, dreamless slumber.

-o-

Alarm blazing in her ears, Delilah awoke halfway to the Lillith's bunker, her body responding on instinct, training, and programming before she was fully conscious. The scant few seconds it took for the cyborg to come out of her sleep cycle could cost lives.

She had wrapped her blanket around herself as a makeshift toga and was running at full speed down the hallway. Her potential corruption no longer mattered, she had a job to do, and she would do it to the best of her ability, no matter the cost to herself for this one act.

She leapt down through the center of the stairwell, the stairs leading down to the old railway tunnel were twisted, warped, and broken down in places anyway. A terrible battle had taken place here when demons overran the outposts surrounding them and snuck in during the dead of night through the railway tunnels.

After the battle, they'd planted explosives that collapsed the tunnel on both sides, the concussive force had wrecked the stairs leading down, but to someone who didn't need stairs switching wings of the base via the station tunnel was still the best way to get from the residence halls to the front line bunkers.

Delilah soared over the pit in the middle, landed on the other side, and with another leap found herself in the stairs that lead to Bunkers Six and Seven. Bunker Seven housed the deimomechs, Six had been an auxiliary armory, until a saboteur had blown it up. It was still partially radioactive, and superstitious Vanguard troops told ghost stories centered around the place.

After a few cases of radiation sickness from couples sneaking up there to make out, all the doors had been welded shut. Delilah had un-welded two of them, the one leading from the stairwell to the Bunker Six locker room, and the one leading from the locker room to that shared laundry room between it and Bunker Seven's lockers.

Bunker Seven had its weaponry moved to other bunkers, as it was unknown if the radiation from Bunker Six would creep over. It hadn't, but the area had been given over to the deimomech project, which was a better ward to keeping people away than welded doors and signs warning of radiation. The lockers in the middle of the room had been removed, precisely for the reason that Delilah's all out run clocked in at a good 40 miles per hour, and 1500 pounds of cyborg at that speed meant a good load of destruction for anything that was in the way. Like the lockers had once been.

They'd replaced the locker room door with a curtain for the same reason, the cloth gave way and billowed outward, the metal door simply broke.

The familiar red-black-gold form of the Lillith filled Delilah's vision; she always left the deimomech curled up in a sleeping position right outside. She pulled herself up on one of the skeletal wings, making her way to the pilot's alcove concealed between the beast's shoulders, letting her now tattered blanket fall away from her body.

She slipped her hand beneath the black, segmented armor plates, applying just the right amount of pressure to trigger its release. Only a cyborg could apply the precise amount of force for the precise amount of time, down to four decimal points. The plates telescoped back, revealing the place where the creature's spine split, providing an opening for Delilah to slip down into the mech's very center, where she would be optimally armored and protected from harm.

She gripped the bar that had been fastened to the underside of the armored plate, jumping inside, closing the way after her. It was always warm and humid within the deimomech, as she was essentially slipping inside a living creature.

Demonic flesh closed the passage behind her, sealing the cyborg into a small, ovoid chamber with little more than a chair-shaped 'growth' of the beast's flesh. Delilah settled into the familiar shape, the warmth and smoothness of the deimomech's skin against her own.

A small gap in the chair had been designed for her tail, the metallic, foot-long length slithering in and being gripped by muscles and mechanics alike. The cyborg's sense of touch began to fade away as her tail was linked to the beast's own. She slipped her hands and feet into the pockets provided, wincing at the sticky wetness within.

With her realization of what exactly the primary computer link between her and the creature was, the restraints that held Delilah in place took on a new meaning. She let out a small, pained gasp as the six inch long spikes that allowed her to control the creature drove themselves into her, the linkage always hurt, despite the Helm's insistence that they didn't, it was supposed to be psychosomatic pain, an imagined sensation of having six six-inch spikes rammed into one's body.

Four small tendrils snaked out from the chair, their connections slipping into the slot upon the back and sides of her neck. The chamber had already begun to fill with fluid, up to Delilah's waist as her senses began to dull completely as her mind began to process the Lillith's instead.

The Lillith opened its eyes, not fully awakened yet, but its small, bestial amount of consciousness stirring, the instincts that allowed the pilot to move the creature so easily coming to the forefront.

Then there was the connection, pilot and mech uniting. Delilah felt the primary link connection as a faint pressure on her own form, and a tiny, almost imperceptible moment from the Lillith's senses.

Connected full to its 'brain' within Delilah's womb, the quadrupedal deimomech hopped to its four feet, opening its seven eyes. It processed the visual data, sent it to the cybernetic portion of Delilah's brain, which processed it in a way that wouldn't overwhelm the organic vision center of her mind. The resulting image was far crisper, cleaner, and more detailed than what Delilah's own eyes offered. All its senses were so much keener, and it had more of them. Radar, sonar, thermal imaging, ways of detecting surges of magical energy, all complex devices that couldn't properly fit onto a human-sized cyborg.

The Lillith had been crafted from the parts of a number of slain demonic creatures, fused by sorcery into a single creature. That Frankenstein-ian conglomeration of demon parts had altered shape and size, making the Lillith its own creature. Most of the body had come from a fearsome dragon; Delilah had taken that down with a shot from a 30mm cannon, bestial demons tended to keep their soul gems in their heads, not bright enough to put them elsewhere.

That had given the final creature six limb mounting points, an elongated neck, and a powerful tail. The creature's wings had been ruined, and the Lillith couldn't fly using them, but jet engines were mounted along the creature's sides to increase its leaping capabilities. The tops of the wings struts housed small missiles and were designed to project a mono-molecular field between them, working well as blades and also for gliding, extending the mech's leaps even further.

Its limbs had been taken from one of the Vanguard's summoned guardians once its spirit returned to its own plain. The massive celestial lion's clawed, powerful limbs served the Lillith well, able to run at speeds over one hundred miles per hour, and provided the housing for monomolecular claws.

A fearsome three-headed canine had provided a portion of the upper chest and shoulders, with the canine's destroyed heads replaced by those of saber-toothed lion demons, enchanted to become larger than they got normally.

The Lillith was a mix of feline grace, draconic power, reptilian fluidity, and a prime example of the sheer force that the largest demons could provide. Atop the hardened demonhide had been placed shaped plates of armor, interlocking and rooted deep in adamantine bones; not quite as sturdy as Delilah's, but the magical alloy was far easier to produce.

Adding to the demon's armament were a pair of 50 caliber guns mounted on the tail, along with a camera for vision on all sides, also allowing for precision targeting. Flamethrowers had been mounted in the mouths of each head, and laser cannons adorned its shoulders. The creature's primary weapons, however, were the twin 30mm cannons that Delilah herself had once carried into battle. These, however, were not the breech-loaders she had used for most of her career, but the automatic fire cannons she had used a handful of times when things were truly dire. Still, they were weapons she had been familiar with and knew how to aim.

The bunker's roof had retracted just enough to allow the Lillith to leap out into the open air, its red hide, black armor, and golden armaments gleaming beneath the wasteland sun.

It spun on its haunches, launching from the rocky outcropping to where a monstrous giant, flames writhing about its body, raised a sword, beckoning the horde of lesser demons onward. Seeking to take the Vanguard complex, to feast on the flesh of those inside, it led them to corrupt any it could find within to bolster the numbers of brood-creatures back at the hive.

Small arms fire and the occasional laser blast held the smaller members of the demonic army at bay, creating piles of bodies that defined the edge of the battlefield. The soulstones of weaker demons were fragile; an impact to their center of mass would send ripples through the barely held together slime that comprised their physical bodies.

Delilah didn't worry about them; it was the second wave of larger demons that would actually be dangerous. The Lillith spread its wings, firing off its cache of missiles. They streaked towards the lines where the demons were held in reserve, impacting within their ranks, sending demon blood and chunks splattering over a wide area from the concussive force.

The twin miniguns upon the deimomech's tail whirred as the barrels began to spin, shortly followed by the stuttering sound of perfectly controlled fire. Each demon in sight got three hollow tipped bullets, one in the head, two in the chest. It would either destroy their soulstones, or force them to spend several minutes regenerating from just a single limb.

Delilah pounced, firing up the jet engines that propelled the mech at incredible speeds, though just for a moment, allowing her to further accelerate her pounce, slamming into the third line of demons.

The mech tilted its wings, spinning sideways in the air, the centripetal force spinning the long, heavy tail at incredible forces. The serrated scutes on the sides cut a vicious swath through the demonic army.

Now came the dangerous part. Able to see through the smoke and dust her attacks had caused, Delilah opened fire with the 30mm cannons, crippling the 39 elite soldiers that stood before the 13 commanders who surrounded the demonic general. The local hive always sent the same number of officers, the only thing that changed was the growing tides of the lesser demons that came with each assault.

The Fire Hills Hive had stripped the area bare of settlements, all the people living in a 5 mile radius of the hive had been driven off, killed, converted, or sent into hiding at any one of a dozen Vanguard outposts. There were just too many for an assault upon the demon stronghold. Lesser Fire Hills demons were little more than beasts, no sentience to them, they flung themselves forward in suicidal charges that choked the hallways, trapping Vanguard warriors within. Even with the power the Lillith sported, it could not level mountains.

The volley of explosive shells had taken down most of the elites and a few of the commanders. The Lillith's three heads roared and unleashed thick clouds of blue-green flame. Though demons were resistant to fire, for the most part, adding blessed copper salts to the fuel mixture completely nullified the effect.

Demons were strong, smart, and numerous, though an individual demon or demon type was almost always a matter of two out of three. The Fire Hills Hive were as dumb as bricks. They had one strategy, swarming, and if that didn't work, they merely waited to replenish their numbers and attacked in the same fashion. They seemed entirely set in their ways, thinking of weapons of war as swords and longbows, rather than long range artillery, plasma and laser weapons, and a giant cybernetic demon that dwarfed all but their largest creatures.

Even the demon general was a lightweight compared to the Lillith, while the giant stood half again as tall as the mech, the Lillith's longer body made it a great deal bigger. The giant demon roared in anger, charging forward with its flaming sword held high.

Delilah fired three bursts of 30mm shells, head, heart, and groin. The pained demon slumped over, its charge halted while Delilah dealt with its guardians.

The Lillith's wings flared, glowing softly as the monomolecular fields turned back on. Tail and claws lashing out, three saber-fanged mouths, wings with a blade the width of an atom, all lashing out and tearing apart the demons.

As the giant rose, the Lillith pounced, digging the claws of its forelegs into the creature's thick hide, the powerful bites of three head clamping down on chest, neck, and shoulder, the forces literally tearing the demon in half.

Soaked in red-orange blood, the Lillith threw its heads back and roared in triumph, tail lashing out to strike smaller demons as they fled. Take out the biggest demon, and you ended the siege. With something the size of the Lillith able to bypass having to slog through the lesser hordes, it was much easier to take out the big nasty.

-o-

Delilah felt incredible, so wondrously alive as she relished her victory. She loved the sensations of the Lillith's body. It was huge and heavy, but it was supposed to be, Delilah, on the other hand, was heavy, but not huge, an incredible amount of weight packed onto a comparatively small frame. It felt so much more natural to be inside the deimomech than walking around on her own, and the thought sort of frightened her. She was perfectly capable of residing within the mech forever, she needed nothing save for the energies that were already provided within her. Delilah was the Lillith's brain and she increasingly felt like it. Each time she parted from the deimomech, she felt more and more lost, like parts of her were missing, and phantom tickles abounded in their absence.

The mech darted off, running a scouting perimeter, to assure that a second army was not hiding out somewhere. After fifteen minutes the only magical energies she found were the usual scavenging, magically mutated creatures that always roamed the wastes, and the individual demons returning to their nest.

The Lillith let out a disgusted snort and slowly made its way back to the bunker. Delilah had nothing more to do for the day, as her cybernetic students would all be required on the walls, just in case of another demonic attack. The draconic feline mech slunk back into the bunker, curling up as it had before at its place just before the locker room. Delilah let out a soft sigh as the interface connecting her to the great creature withdrew.

The pilot chamber was drained of fluid, leaving the cyborg to climb out. No one would see the demonic markings upon her body, thankfully. The pink-purple substance was mostly opaque, and would cover her body quite well. The staff had also quickly learned not to gawk, stare, or even look in the general direction of Delilah, as that could be interpreted as gawking or staring. She had made quite clear early on that such behavior would be rewarded by and expertly flung ball of slime to the face. It took Delilah a good ten minutes to wash it off her body; she could only imagine how long it would take someone who couldn't stand the two hundred degree, high pressure spray that she underwent. Though the most time consuming part was working it out of her hair.

Delilah let herself drift off, relaxing under the hot spray. The near boiling water wasn't even close to the temperature needed to actually cause slight discomfort. Though she would prefer something a few hundred degrees warmer, hot water was the easiest thing available. She just concentrated on the warm water, the relaxing spatter against her bare skin. She remained there for quite some time, not wanting to check her internal chronometer. But her shower came to an end when she heard a soft mewing sound.

Delilah turned off the spray, listening for the sound again, wanting to follow it back to its source. Someone's cat had probably gotten lost, or a stray wandered in from the wastes.

"Here kitty," Delilah called, "Here kitty, kitty, are you lost?"

She continued to look for the sound, rather puzzled as it didn't seem to change in volume and she couldn't pinpoint which direction it came from.

It was a soft, quiet cry, like a kitten looking for its mother.

The cyborg looked all around the locker room for the cat, but found herself unable to find it with her normal senses. She sighed and activated her cybernetic sensors and monitoring gear.

The soft mewl came again, but her audio receptors picked up nothing. She wasn't hearing the sound. It bypassed her ears, appearing somehow within her head. Delilah could feel a faint presence, an echo of something familiar.

She pulled on one of the loose sleeves bathrobes provided for her and stepped out into the bunker.

She'd been in the locker room for hours, the lights were all off, the techs gone to bed for the night. It wasn't a good idea to work with demonic magics during the night time, things tended to be a bit more random when darkness reigned.

Delilah stepped through the curtain and was immediately pressed against the wall by an unknown attacker. Likely a slime demon, it was massive, heavy, and wet and...

The soft mews had been replaced by a gentle purr; a massive snout nuzzled Delilah ever so gently.

The remote control module, it must've been installed within the Lillith while she was in the shower. Delilah mentally followed the sound, felt the familiar sense of the deimomech, though dulled, and there was something new.

The Lillith had emotions, feelings; it had been frightened, unable to move, unable to see, crying out for the creature it thought of as its mother. Or perhaps the feelings had always been there, and it had never been able to communicate them.

Drawing upon what little she recalled of her paladin training, she probed the creature's mind and spirit as best she could. It was soft, warm, welcoming, letting Delilah explore freely. There was nothing dark or sinister within the creature, mentally it was nothing more than a kitten, a kitten that thought of her as its mommy.

Delilah patted the three massive snouts before her, climbing up atop the central one and taking a seat upon the Lillith's central neck, rubbing the feline behind the ears, making the creature's purr grow louder.

"I'm sorry..." she whispered, hugging the giant beast, "I didn't know."

One of the heads turned, its rough, feline tongue sliding over Delilah's entire body. It gently plucked her from the other neck, placing her between its forepaws. The mech curled around her in it normal shutdown position.

"Okay," she said softly, "I'll stay with you until you fall asleep."

The mech rumbled softly, a physical purr rather than a mental one. Delilah envisioned the creature as a tiny kitten in her arms, running her fingertips over its heads and back, rubbing between its wings.

She remained with the mech curled around her for quite some time before she felt its senses go offline, its systems shutting down as it went into a slumber. The remote link meant that it couldn't turn itself on, but either a diagnostic program to confirm it worked had activated the Lillith during installation, or Delilah herself had subconsciously activated the creature.

She slowly climb from the deimomech's clutches and returned to her room, positioning the scraps over her robe to cover herself so that the markings upon her body didn't show.

Few people were up and about at this late hour, especially along the route Delilah took back to her room, the same way she had come up. She knew now that she wouldn't leave, she had piloted the Lillith for months now, it had bonded with her. Giving the mech to another pilot would be abandoning the creature. Likely it wouldn't understand.

Delilah had only just locked the door when the strange sensations started. Caresses upon her back and shoulder that made her gasp, the sensations like that of a deep, wonderful massage, the kind that had been impossible to get since her transformation.

She felt three rough tongues licking at her neck, apparently the connection worked both ways. She could manipulate the Lillith's senses, and the deimomech could do the same with her own. Delilah could turn off the link, let the mech sleep, and then sleep as well.

But the intense, pleasurable sensation at the delicious backrub felt too nice to banish. The cyborg tossed aside her ragged robe and lay down upon the bed, letting the overgrown kitten work her sensory data. It worked out all the tension in her metallic muscles, which gave off soft pops as stiff knots finally gave way. It worked over her body, easing the tension that had built up within Delilah over the years, she let out soft moans as the demon mentally rubbed and caressed her. Delilah's eyes widened at a sudden realization. If it were merely sensory over-ride the knots wouldn't be actually working themselves out of her muscles.

She rolled onto her back and reached out, finding some faint resistance to the air. There was a soft shimmer, and a faintly translucent image of the Lillith could be seen, about the size of Delilah herself. This image of the deimomech was bereft of armor and mechanical additions. The proportions were a little different as well; the heads and paws looked a bit bigger, those of a creature in its youth, close to adulthood but not quite there yet.

It was an astral form; the Lillith showing it was a being able to part the soul from the body. With training, some people could learn to do it, but as a demon was little more than matter shaped according to the power of the soul, Delilah had only heard of rare attacks by intangible demons.

"Ok," she said, petting the barely visible creature, "You can stay, just don't make an... mmm...."

The demon had settled down atop Delilah, licking at her breasts with its three tongues.

"No!" she scolded, breaking herself out of her momentary lapse, "Don't do... oooh..." the three headed beast had taken a nipple into each of its three mouths and began to suckle.

"That's not... not..." Delilah protested, "It's not right!"

But it felt oh so good.

"H-have you been doing this when I was linked up with you?" Delilah asked, the beast gave her no reply, but she knew that must be the case. The Lillith had indeed claimed her belly and breasts as its own property. But that would mean...

Delilah let out a soft moan as something penetrated her, deliciously warm and solid despite the creature's ethereal nature. To call the deimomech the Lillith seemed wrong to Delilah now, it wasn't a tank or a ship to be piloted, but a living, thinking, feeling creature. Lillith wasn't its designation, but its name.

A part of Delilah protested, screaming to the cyborg that she was being raped by a demon in her own bed. That part was beaten, bound, and stuffed into a closet by the tag team of Delilah's sexual frustration and her lust. It wasn't rape when your body and spirit had longed for such a thing for years, knowing that no mortal creature would ever be able to grant this pleasure. And Delilah greatly preferred the gentle, playful Lillith to any of the other demons she had met, even the supposed angels summoned by some of the Vanguard Gauntlet. The demon's central head left her breast, and turned, planting a bestial kiss upon Delilah's lips, its forked tongue probing gently for entry.

The warrior opened her lips, allowing the demon's tongue entrance, and she met it with her own. She wrapped her arms around the demon, pulling it tightly against her. Her eyes filled with tears, knowing what she was doing was wrong. She was willingly consorting with a demon. Even though it was a Vanguard creation, she should've fought Lillith off, reported the deimomech's abilities and behavior to her superiors.

But she was just so lonely and Lillith loved her. The demon cared for her enough to do what it could to relieve her tension, to finally burst the building bubble of need that had been growing in Delilah for years.

"I don't care if you corrupt me," she whispered, "I know you'd never do anything to hurt me."

She wrapped her legs around Lillith's midsection, forcing the demon's cock as deep into her as it could go.

"I'm yours," the cyborg said softly, "And you're mine."

Delilah felt something give way inside her, a tired old barrier finally coming down, crashing to the ground. She cried out in shock and bliss, for her climax shortly followed the fall of the psychic wall within her.

An incredible heat surged up within her, filling her womb and radiating outward from there. She knew what it was; she had seen the process occur in friends, family, and colleagues.

She no longer had to fear becoming a demon, for in a few moments she would become one.

And Delilah welcomed it.