SERAPHIM War in Heaven

0.1.0 · MC 26.2

Field Manual · § 2

What you will be given

In the order you will be given it, which is also the order in which you will have earned it. Nothing here is issued early. The complex has watched enough people die inside plate they had not earned to have opinions about that.

The ladder

  1. Initiate armour, front view

    I

    Initiate

    Shefalite knit. One ember.

  2. Acolyte armour, front view

    II

    Acolyte

    The suit acquires hardware.

  3. Sword armour, front view

    III

    Sword

    The exoskeleton closes.

  4. Archon armour, front view

    IV

    Archon

    Flight frame over the plate.

  5. Enochian armour, front view

    V

    Enochian

    Cloth of light, woven in rows.

Read it left to right and the design is not subtle, because it is not meant to be. Every suit is the one before it with more mass and more of the light let out. The sites do not move: the ember at the sternum sits in the same place on the knit suit a Civilian scavenges as on the raiment an Enochian is buried in, and the reason is that anyone who has worn one already knows where to look at the next. What changes is how much there is.

Initiate is knit — Shefalite thread with four hard parts bolted on and a single lamp at the chest. Acolyte is where the suit acquires hardware, and where all six lit sites come on at once. Sword closes: a sealed exoskeleton with no seams at all, whose entire light budget is hidden inside its joints, because the tier whose job is not being seen should not glow. Archon is a flight frame built over that — ducted, intaked, and carrying the mount the wings hang from. Enochian is lamellar: stacked lapped courses lit along every seam, a coronet, a flared hem. It is the loudest object in the war on purpose. It is the top of a ladder and it has to look like one.

TierSetHelmChestLegs BootsTotalToughKnockMade at
I Initiate 27 52 16 1.0— Bench
II Acolyte 38 63 20 2.55% Fabricator
III Sword 49 74 24 3.010% Fabricator
IV Archon 410 84 26 3.515% Fabricator
V Enochian 511 84 28 4.020% Fabricator

Diamond is twenty points at 2.0 toughness. Acolyte matches it; everything above Acolyte is past it. Durability climbs the same ladder — Initiate at eighteen times base, Enochian at forty-five.

Justiciar

There is a sixth pattern and it is not on the ladder, because it is not issued. Justiciar comes off the enemy: white ceramic whose shadows are gold rather than black, cast rather than pressed, with a laurel band at the brow and the throat and the knee. Twenty-two points at 2.5 — between Acolyte and Sword — and asymmetric, a horn on the left of the helm and a hook on the left shoulder, because their machines are built to be recognised from one side.

It fits. That is the problem with it. Nothing about wearing the enemy's armour is forbidden, nothing about it is free, and the complex has stopped pretending it does not notice which operatives are wearing it.

Justiciar armour, front view: white ceramic with gold laurel bands.
Justiciar pattern. Note that the shadows are gold. Their ramp has no black in it anywhere.

The neural interface

Every helmet from Acolyte up carries one. It is what lets you give a construct an order without touching it and without saying anything aloud, and what it will do depends entirely on which helmet is on your head. The radial opens either way and shows you, in grey, the orders you have not earned and the helmet that would grant them.

InterfaceHelmetGrants
0AcolyteFollow. Stay.
1SwordGuard an area. Return to dock.
2ArchonRecall — a construct comes to you, once, from anywhere it can still reach you from.
3EnochianBroadcast. One order, every construct in range, at once.

Justiciar has no interface. Their helmets were not built to take orders from us and have not been persuaded otherwise.

The Archon Wings

The Archon Wings from behind: three spars a side, each carrying a hard-light membrane that hangs below it and tapers outward to a point.
Three spars a side. Each carries a membrane that hangs beneath it, broadest at the mount and closing to a point outboard, so that the three layer the way primaries layer over secondaries.

Worn on the chest, in place of a chestplate, which is the entire argument against them: six points where Archon plate gives ten, and you will feel the difference the first time something lands a shot on you in the air.

What they buy is the sky. They glide, they boost on Ohr drawn from your own buffer, and the sail is hard light rather than fabric — which is why it folds into a pack the size of a book, and why it goes out when the cell does.

Doctrine

The Adversary does not contest the air seriously. It has never had to. An operative who can be above a nerve centre instead of inside it is a class of problem its patrol patterns were not written against — and that advantage lasts exactly as long as it takes the enemy to notice. Use it. Do not build a plan that assumes it.

Blades

The Herev is the standard: thirteen points, two and a half thousand swings, and it burns what it cuts without being asked. It has two modes and the second one costs.

Abilities draw on your personal Ohr buffer — not the weapon's charge, yours; the five hundred you carry inside you and refill by swallowing capsules. When the buffer is empty an ability does not half-work. It fails, and says so. Filling it before you go up is the difference between a plan and a hope.

WeaponAbilityOhrEffect
Herev Judgment Mode 25 Half again as much damage to the Adversary for ten seconds. Costs nothing to put away.
Maccabee Hammer Liberation Slam 50 Three by three. Breaks Adversary structure outright. Five seconds before you can do it again.
Burning Brand Fire Ignition 30 Sets what you are looking at on fire.

A full set of Sword Exoarmor takes a fifth off all three. The bonus is called Shadow Protocol, and it is the only thing tier three gives you that tier four does not give you more of.

For he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of salvation upon his head. Isaiah 59:17