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It’s been one year, six months, forty minutes and thirty three seconds since he last remembered what ‘warm’ is supposed to feel like. The armor they’ve grafted unto him was designed to filter out any and all foreign bodies, preventing whatever might possibly harm its wearer from getting in. The trade-off, of course, is that no sensation gets through either. No pleasure, no pain, no heat, no nothing.
He used to miss it, back when he remembered how things ought to be. Nowadays, though, he’s almost glad for the fact that he’s completely forgotten, and therefore cannot long for whatever he had happened to lose somewhere down the line.
Exactly one minute to re-acclimatize himself the moment he’s off the operating table, and he’s walking down the corridors amidst the smoke and fire of the battle, armless but otherwise standing tall, sword in teeth, coat hanging from his shoulders. He gets a few terrified looks from the crew members, but no one dares to stop him.
As he makes the impossible jump from the carrier to the fortress, as he lands in the midst of Gekkos and programmed soldiers who are just two steps past whatever he’s already become, Raiden cuts through the legs of the first unmanned unit and considers his next move. There’s a morbid thought, something quick and sharp, when he dwells on the possibility of him coming out of this whole mess alive and realizes that the probability’s over on the negative end of the spectrum. Being a walking, talking machine that just happens to bleed white, however, has the tendency to make it very hard to feel, and that, in turn, makes it very hard to get sentimental.
The only man who call pull everyone through needs assistance. He can provide that better than any of the rest of the lot can.
Besides, with the way things stand for him, with a body made of replaceable parts and no one worth coming home to, it’s hard to tell whether he’s even alive in the first place.