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[Ashwinder] Chapter 2 - The Tenno
🕑 Added 2024-11-16 09:01:23 +0000 UTCAN: If you're interested in joining my Discord server, you can do it at /x7xdd53WqE. It is a small server for now, but I am active there if you have any questions.
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Chapter 2 - The Tenno
Two Warframes sprinted and bullet-jumped through the long and wide corridor of the gas city at breakneck speed, a large group of MOAs and corpus crewmen hot on their tails. 
“Angie, prime them with anti-matter! I’ll protect you!” the Tenno who was controlling Rhino said to the girl next to him.
“Alrighty~” the girl sing-sang a reply.
The pink Nova stopped, and Rhino got in front of her, using his Iron Skin ability that reinforced his durability to block the rain of bullets and laser beams coming at them. With Rhino protecting her, Nova raised her left arm and a sphere of red light formed in her palm before she slapped it on the floor.
With Nova as the centre, a radial wave of anti-matter erupted from her, somehow avoiding Rhino but still afflicting every single one of the enemies around her. The crewmen and the robots started moving like in a slow-motion movie, becoming more than twice as slow as they used to be.
As the two of them ran away, leaving the slowed-down enemies in the dust, they soon arrived at a chamber whose floor was covered in laser beams.
“It’s not here!” the Tenno controlling the pink Nova said.
Blue light suddenly manifested from Nova, and a pink-haired girl no older than 12 materialised in front of the warframe.
“I left it right there, in front of the terminal!” she said, her voice sounding as if she was going to cry. “Trust me, Galen, this room is the last thing I remember before my transference was cut off!”
Another blue light manifested from Rhino too, and Galen, the Tenno who controlled Rhino, materialised in front of his warframe too. He was a 16- or 17-year-old teenager with a short crew-cut hairstyle and black marks that looked like scars on his neck and jaw. They were traces left by the void.
“I trust you, relax. And don’t worry, the Corpus must’ve taken her away, just like they took away your Liset. We have to recover that one too.”
Angie nodded obediently and transferred her consciousness back into her Warframe, with Galen following suit. Then, they left the room with lasers and started running/bullet-jumping again, heading towards another wing of the enormous gas city.
“Hey, Galen.”
“Yes?”
“What if it’s too late? What if we can’t find my Valkitty anymore?” asked Angie.
“You can always build another one, can’t you?” Galen said.
“I can’t. I need Tellurium to craft her, and that’s so hard to obtain. I’d have to infiltrate Uranus again, but you know how difficult that is. That place is crawling with Grineer,” the girl said hesitantly.
“Why would you need Tellurium to craft her?” he asked in confusion. He had a Valkyr too, and he had not needed that material to craft her. “What are you not telling me?”
“. . . My Valkyr was a Prime,” Angie said with half a mouth.
“A Prime?!!” the boy shouted incredulously.
He was so surprised that he even stopped running. His own Rhino wasn’t a Prime but a clone of the original. “How the hell did you lose her?! Primes are invaluable!”
“I didn’t mean to, okay? It’s the first time I broke into a Corpus facility on Jupiter! Salad’s ships are different from any other Corpus ships!”
Rhino ran a thick, armoured hand over his helmet, showing Galen’s disbelief.
“Why in the hell would you take Valkyr to a spy mission??”
Angie didn’t have any excuse for that.
“I was just so excited. . . I never had a Prime before and wanted to try her out. . .”
“No shit that you never had one! There are less than 100 primes in the whole world! They are unique! And you lost her! Haaa. . . what are we to do with you?”
Thoroughly chastised, Angie remained quiet. Luckily for her, an incoming transmission for both of them stopped the older boy from scolding her any further.
The hologram of a woman wearing a lotus-shaped helmet appeared in front of their eyes, and she spoke to them:
“Tenno, I’m sensing a very high density of void energy in one of the Gas Cities nearby. I’ve sent the coordinates to the cephalons of your ships.” (1)
“Does it have to be us? We’re kind of in the middle of something,” Galen replied.
Suddenly, alarms started blaring, and the blast doors, which had been opening for them automatically until then, were all shut down, opening only for a large group of MOAs who flooded the corridor.
To make matters worse, poisonous gas was ejected through the ventilation holes. The MOAs were robotic, so the gas did not affect them, but that was not the case for the Warframes, who were an amalgam of flesh and steel.
“Shit, this is bad! Alad seems determined to get rid of us.”
“What do we do now?” asked Angie. Despite her age and her apparent inexperience, she did not seem to be worried in the least.
“I’ll open the way for us. Keep up with me no matter what. Don’t get left behind!” Galen said, and the Rhino he was controlling let out a Roar, increasing his and his ally’s strength.
At the same time, the Lotus continued talking to them as if she were unaware of the perilous situation they had gotten themselves into.
“It is imperative that you two go there. You are the only two Tenno deployed on Jupiter at this moment. My readings indicate that Alad V has captured one of your fellow Tenno.”
“How is that possible?! We never leave our Orbiter!” the young girl could not believe her ears.
The reason for her lack of worry despite the life-and-death situation she was in right now and the reason why she was still alive after her Warframe had been captured was that she and Galen were actually not there.
Only Nova and Rhino, their Warframes, were present there. The Tenno controlled those super soldiers through an action called “transference”: by sending their consciousness, their astral projections, into the bodies and minds of the Warframes.
Angie and Galen, and all Tenno, with no exception, never left their Orbiters, the mother ship housing their real bodies. While their enemies could kill or capture their Warframes, they could never kill the Tenno, the ones who controlled them. And the Tenno could normally just craft another Warframe in place of the one they had lost.
Galen was just as surprised as Angie, but he didn’t freeze.
“Focus Angie!” he shouted at her.
“Y-Yes, yes!” she said, startled.
Rhino let out another Roar, buffing himself and Nova with increased strength. Rhino’s body glowed with a brown, earthly colour, and his speed increased abruptly as he Charged at one of the blast doors.
All the MOAs in his way were smashed away like bowling pins, and their laser blasts bounced off his Iron Skin, not leaving even a scratch behind.
Then, a deafening crashing sound rang, and the entire room shuddered as Rhino smashed his way through the reinforced blast door, blowing it apart.
Escaping from the room filled with poisonous gas, the two Warframe bullet-jumped continuously along the corridor, heading towards the nearest dry dock where their Cephalons were waiting with their Lisets.
“Couldn’t it be just a Void Gate? I know the Corpus researchers like to study those. I’ve seen a few on Europa,” Galen asked the Lotus while they were running away.
“I am 100% confident. That is the signature of one touched by the Void. I don’t know who was reckless enough to leave the Orbiter on their own, but we cannot let Alad V get his hands on them. They are your sibling. We have to rescue them no matter what.”
“Understood,” Angie and Galen replied at the same time.
The dry dock was just ahead of them, on the level below, when another group of Corpus Crewmen and MOAs appeared in front of them, cutting their way. Furthermore, the level below was infested with enemy troops too.
“I’m low on energy,” Galen said. “Maybe got enough for only one more ability.”
“Leave it to me,” Angie replied confidently, and a rectangular portal appeared in front of her.
Throwing herself through the portal, Nova teleported right into the middle of the enemy squad, drop-kicking one of the crewmen in the head. She had just landed on the ground when she also took out two twin, white submachine guns and fired wildly at everyone around her, killing them mercilessly before they even realized what was happening. 
“Galen!” Angie shouted after massacring the squad of Corpus units and threw a portal in front of her partner.
Rhino threw himself through the portal, which teleported him to the level below them, right above the dry dock swarming with enemies.
Time seemed to have stopped as the juggernaut of a Warframe landed on the ground with a powerful stomp, lifting dozens of robots and Corpus humans in the air. 
Nova also teleported onto the dry dock next to Rhino and unsheathed her melee weapon, a massive scythe. While the enemies were still suspended in mid-air as if through magic, she started swinging her scythe crazily, not minding the blood, gore, and metal parts that splattered all over her when she cut them in half.
Not one to be left behind, Rhino took out a heavy-looking gun, which let out extremely loud sounds with every bolt it fired. The gun was so powerful that its bullets would send the crewmen and the robots flying, nailing them into the distant walls. 
Once the enemy was dealt with, two Lisets landed on the dry dock, and the Tenno rushed to embark.
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The terrifying sounds stopped, and, for a few moments, Harry dared to hope that whoever that may have been went away.
However, five bright, flaming claws suddenly stabbed through the blast doors, and Harry jumped back in surprise when a large portion of the thick, metallic door was ripped apart as if it were cardboard.
Then he saw it: it was a humanoid being, female by the looks of it. The armour she was wearing and the crown-like helmet covering her head may have been white once, but their colour was almost indistinguishable due to the grotesque amount of blood they were caked in.
The creature let out a loud, savage scream that could not have come from a human’s throat before leaping at him, her fiery claws stabbing towards his neck.
He had no time to cast a Shielding Charm. She was too fast, way faster than he could react. In desperation, he could only instinctively raise a hand in an attempt to protect his head.
The sound of an explosion was heard, and Harry found himself slammed into the metallic lockers behind.
Groaning in pain, he opened his eyes to see that the female creature that had tried to kill him had been blasted backwards too, just like him.
He had thought that he was going to die. He had no idea how he had survived or how he had sent the creature flying.
Harry was not aware of it, but, in his desperation, he had called upon the Void powers a second time that day. The first time he did it was when he turned invisible and escaped from the Corpus after coming out through the Veil of Death.
As for what had sent the Warframe flying now, it was a Void Blast.
Coming back to his senses, Harry quickly raised his wand and cast a Shielding Charm.
“Protego!”
However, when she stood up from the floor, the Warframe did not seem to bear ill intent for him anymore. She walked towards him slowly, her arm raised as if to touch him. But her fiery claws were stopped by the thin membrane of light that Harry conjured to protect himself.
As the saying goes, from the fire into the fire pan. Not only was he cornered by a vicious, violent creature in a room with no escape, but, at that moment, he also saw a group of armoured soldiers appearing in the corridor, just outside the broken blast door.
He was not the only one to notice them; the creature did too, and Harry was startled to see her turning with her back to him to face off against the group of men and robots.
Dozens of laser blasts started raining upon the two of them, and he was shocked to see none of the beams reaching him. The creature in front of him started blocking and deflecting all the bullets and laser beams to the side, the stray projectiles leaving deep holes and scorch marks into the metallic walls of the locker room.
Harry did not know it, but, upon feeling the Void energy from his Void Blast, the Warframe mistook him for a Tenno and stopped attacking.
‘Is she. . . protecting me?’ he thought in realisation after a few seconds when he saw the armoured female extending herself to block a laser blast that was not even close to hitting her but could have endangered him in the back.
He was still coming to terms with the fact that the creature who had just tried to kill him had suddenly taken his side when a loud voice rang from the many speakers installed in the facility. Harry could not understand what it said due to the language barrier but the enemy soldiers did.
“The Warframe and the Tenno are both together? How touching! Hahaha! Bring out the sonic battalyst prototype!”
No sooner than his words ended, a Corpus crewman rushed towards the broken door, pushing a circular, heavy-looking device on wheels. While the rest of his fellow crewmates and MOAs were firing continuously upon the Warframe, another crewmate came and inserted a half-a-metre-long power cell into the device.
The so-called sonic battalyst prototype lit up with cyan light, and an extremely powerful sonic wave exploded from it, blasting the Warframe back, into Harry’s Shielding Charm. 
Harry himself cried out in pain as his eardrums were ruptured and blood flowed from them down his neck. Unable to concentrate anymore, his Shielding Charm broke, and the Warframe’s body was slammed into his chest, pinning them both against the metallic lockers behind.
For the third time that day, his newly acquired Void Powers unknowingly flared, and the Warframe lying against his chest was bathed in a bright, powerful blue light.
Energised by the Void Power flooding her system, the Warframe let out a savage cry, and a red aura enveloped her body. She went into Hysteria.
She got up from Harry’s chest and, seemingly completely immune to the devastating sonic attack that was still being fired at her, she leapt with the grace of a feline towards the Corpus device.
What followed next was far from graceful. Enraged by their previous attacks, the Warframe started swinging her claws left and right, tearing everything apart. 
“Get to the Tenno!” Alad V’s screaming voice came from the speakers. “She cares about the Tenno! Attack him to handicap her!”
Was it pure instinct? Or did she understand Alad V’s words? The Corpus Director’s voice had yet to fade away when Valkyr let out a powerful Warcry.
The crewmen and even the MOAs were momentarily disoriented, and they sluggishly turned their weapons towards the Warframe.
“Imbeciles! I said to shoot the damn Tenno! Are you deaf?!” Alad V screamed.
“S-Sir, we can’t!” one of the crewmen shouted while firing his Detron handgun at Warframe.
They didn’t understand what was going on, but Valkyr’s Warcry had not only made them sluggish, but it also made them unable to turn their attention away from her. For all intents and purposes, it was a Taunt, locking their aim to attack her.
Harry didn’t know if it was because he was just barely conscious and his eyes were playing tricks on him or if the creature’s speed had suddenly more than doubled, but she became like a blur in his eyes.
The Warframe threw herself at the still-surviving crewmen and MOAs, killing them brutally. She ripped their intestines out of their stomachs, sliced them half from the waist, broke their spines, or kicked their skulls into a gory paste.
If he had been in a normal state of mind, that display of gore and savagery would have made him empty the contents of his stomach, but, at that moment, everything only seemed like a bad dream to him. With his eardrums ruptured and a blinding pain coming from his back, he could not even stand up.
At last, the screams of people dying and that of robots being destroyed ceased, and the Warframe returned to his side. The last thing he saw was the creature coming to him and picking him up from the floor. She put him on her back and tied his body to hers with a rope before she broke into a run.
In spite of how hard he was shaken by her run, his eyes closed, and he fell unconscious.
But even in his dreams, he could not find peace. Cruel laughter that sounded like himself (but it was not his) and an enraged, female scream filled his mind with an anger that did not belong to him.
Incomprehensible flashes of memories flickered at the front of his mind. Glinting of white and gold, loud sounds of steel and gunfire, and momentary but acute episodes of pain that made him break into a cold sweat and shiver all over.
They were things he had never seen before. They were flashes of memories that did not belong to him but seeped into his mind all the same, consuming him.
Fortunately, that torturous experience did not last forever. He was woken up from his restless slumber when the armoured female who was carrying him on her back stopped. The rhythmical jolting of his body while she was running ended when she stopped and the sudden stillness woke him up.
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As Nova and Rhino disembarked from their Landing Crafts, they checked the holographic map of Thebes that the Lotus had sent them and started running towards the point that she marked on it in real-time, the source of the Void Energy signature that she had detected.
“The Void Signature is heading towards you fast!” the Lotus warned them. “Be careful!”
Nova took out her twin handguns, and Rhino grabbed an enormous hammer from his back. The Lotus may have told them that the Void Signature was a Tenno, but the situation was so unusual (never had a Tenno been captured before) that they could not help being cautious.
Mere seconds after they got into a fighting stance, they saw a formerly-white Warframe, stained with blood and other bodily remains from head to toe, sprinting towards them.
At the sight of them, she lowered her speed gradually until she arrived in front of them.
“That’s my Valkyr!” Angie suddenly shouted. “It’s really her!”
“How is she moving by herself?” Galen asked in bewilderment.
When the girl materialised her consciousness outside her Warframe, Galen shouted at her:
“Angie, don’t be reckless!”
The young girl didn’t listen to him and walked closer to Valkyr, her hand raised in front of her and talking to her in a gentle voice, as if she were talking to a cat:
“There, there, Valkitty, it’s me, Angie. You recognise me, don’t you?”
But when she got within 4 meters of her, the Warframe let out a threatening sound, making the girl freeze in her tracks.
“Angie, fall back. Something is not right,” Galen said, willing his Rhino to pull the girl back.
“Let me go, Galen, let me go!” the girl shouted at him rebelliously. “Don’t you see? It’s my Valkyr! She came to me!”
“She didn’t come to you. Open your eyes and look at what she’s carrying on her back!”
At his words, she finally realised that her beloved Warframe was carrying a boy on her back, his body tied to Valkyr’s back with her Ripline.
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Waking up, Harry looked at his surroundings in confusion due to the vivid but terrible dreams he had been having. Furthermore, everything appeared to be blurry.
His hand went to his face, trying to fix his glasses, only to realise that they were missing. They had fallen off when the sonic attack coming from that Corpus device had slammed him into the locker.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t as though he was entirely blind. He could recognise the shape of two humanoid beings that looked rather similar to the one that was carrying him on his back. Moreover, a young, pink-haired girl stood in front of him, talking to him in a loud voice.
“[....] Valkyr [....] to me [...] mine [...]”
Whatever the girl was saying, he could only understand some broken words from it. But it was strange that he could understand anything at all because that was clearly not English.
After a while, the creature that was carrying him started letting out some threatening sounds. However, he could sense that they were not directed at him but at the people blocking their way.
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“I’ve never seen that guy before,” said Galen. “I would have remembered someone like him.”
There were less than 1000 Tenno; after spending so many years together, he remembered all their faces and even knew most of them by name. For better or worse, they were all of similar ages, children and teenagers who had been touched by the Void.
“Lotus, do you know him?”
If he, by chance, did not remember a green-eyed boy with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead, the Lotus surely would. After all, she was like a mother in all but name for them.
“I don’t. I don’t think he is one of you, the survivors from Zariman.”
Angie’s face stiffened and her astral projection vanished, returning into her Warframe.
“Could it be him?” the girl asked in a fearful voice for the first time.
“What should we do?” asked Galen as his Rhino clenched his powerful hands on the handle of his enormous war hammer.
“It’s not the Man in the Wall if that’s what you’re afraid of,” the Lotus said, putting the two Tenno’s worries to rest. “He appears to be severely injured.”
“Then what should we do? He’s got my Valkitty!” Angie started whining again now that she knew that the boy in front of them was not the sinister creature of the Void that all Tenno were afraid of.
“I’m pretty sure your Valkyr has got him, not the other way around. Look, she tied him to her back with her Ripline,” he remarked.
“Seeing a Warframe act on its own is unusual. Most Warframes do not possess sentience. However, it is not entirely unheard of. Angie’s own Umbra Excalibur showed such sentience too, did it not? I also know of a Mirage and a Voruna who had done the same. There are cases when Warframes act out of their own volition. . . I suggest you allow her to pass. Follow her from a distance and observe her actions,” the Lotus spoke to them.
Although she was very dissatisfied, Angie did not disobey the Lotus. Still grumbling to herself, she followed Rhino’s example and took her Nova out of the way, freeing the path.
With Rhino and Nova moving out of the way, Valkyr stopped growling and broke into a run again. She wasn’t running at random; it looked as though she knew exactly where she was heading.
Following her from behind, Angie and Galen began to wonder why none of the Corpus crewmen and MOA were coming to attack them. But when the pools of blood, piles of corpses, and heaps of robotic parts started filling the corridors, they understood that Valkyr had already killed everything that moved long before their arrival in Thebes.
A few minutes later, the Lotus and the two Tenno finally saw where the female Warframe had led them to: it was a hangar on the other side of the Gas City.
Hanging from the tall ceiling of the hangar was a pink Liset, painted with blue and yellow flowers.
“That’s my ship! So that’s why I couldn’t find it at the Orbiter!” shouted Angie.
Normally, if the Tenno’s Warframe was killed in action, a good and responsible Cephalon would pilot the Landing Craft back to the Orbiter.
The scorch marks marring its surface revealed the fact that the Corpus had tried picking the ship apart, but it appeared that they had yet to succeed in their endeavour because the Liset was still in one piece.
“Seriously, Ordis! How did you get captured?!” Angie came out of her Warframe and yelled at the ship.
The hologram of a cracked cube of light appeared in Angie’s eyes, and a voice filled with emotion rang:
“Operator! Ordis is so glad to see you! Ordis is jubilant! I have been worrying myself insane over your safety!”
Galen also materialised himself outside of his Rhino, and a fed-up expression appeared on his face.
“Angie, why do you still keep this bat-shit crazy Cephalon with you? Just get a new one, for Void’s sake!”
“Hey, don’t be mean to him! I like Ordis just the way he is!” Angie said in a defensive tone, forgetting all about her anger at the Cephalon once Galen insulted him.
Completely ignoring the rude Tenno, Ordis asked Angie:
“Operator, who is that - filthy - um, wounded, boy on your Valkyr’s back?”
The Lotus spoke to them at that moment, cutting their chatter short.
“We don’t know when the Corpus’ reinforcements may arrive. I suggest you leave as soon as you can. Angie, take your Liset and return to the Orbiter. We will be having a discussion later.”
“Understood,” the girl said obediently and walked to her Landing Craft.
“Galen, lead Valkyr and the boy to the dry dock I marked on the map. I have already informed your Cephalons to move your two Lisets there.”
“Are you sure it’s a good idea to bring this guy with us up there?” Galen asked as he looked at the green-eyed boy who was glancing around him vacantly; it was as if he were not fully present or aware of his surroundings. “Even if he’s not the Man in the Wall himself, he could still be an agent of his.”
“The two of you will not go to the Orbiter. Head towards Larunda Relay. I have already contacted Darvo, the weapons dealer, and instructed him to place our subject in a containment chamber and treat his wounds.”
“Understood.”
The situation was still strange and unclear, all the more so because of Valkyr’s unnatural behaviour. But, for now, Galen stopped thinking too much about it, feeling content with the fact that the weird warframe was following him as the Lotus said.
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AN: Did I go overboard with the number of GIFs I posted in this chapter? Please let me know if there were too many or not. Honestly, I don’t think I will post this many gifs in the upcoming chapters, but I felt like it would be nice to do so now, at the beginning of the fic, for the people who aren’t familiar with Warframe to get a better idea of what is going on.
(1) Cephalons are people whose consciousness was turned into data, into some sort of computer program. Some of them did it willingly, others were forced into it.
(2) The GIFs of Nova and Rhino are with Grineer enemies (which have yet to appear in the fic), not Corpus. The enemies may be different but Nova and Rhino's movements are accurate.
This is a Liset. It's basically a ship that is used only to transport the Tenno to their missions and back. 
For those who want to see more of warframe, I strongly recommend these 2 cinematics:
Warframe's Official Cinematic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsbL8lFHrZI (6 minutes long, but it's freaking awesome. One of the best video game cinematics out there)
Valkyr Prime cinematic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ubZLPNE4Lk (2 minutes, 47 seconds)
Comments
Belly
Really enjoyed the story so far, really like that you implemented pictures and gifs to further immerse readers into the story.
Derek Pugh
As someone who recently got back into the warframe grind, I'm really excited for this fic.
