Coruscate’s Ironclad
Corus launched from the tower.
Cradled in the cockpit, he flared his fingertips. Airfoils unfolded and Ironclad soared forward. Past the rusting grandeur of Breakwater, built on stilts above the flooded city. His prey was near Tiritiri Matangi Outpost.
Some called them kaiju, some taniwha. Tethers—Seagull pilots—called them munteds, an endless series of monsters chewing through what was left of New Zealand.
A year ago there were five Gulls here. Now there were two, and Diana’s Adzebill was fighting a swarm upriver. He was on his own.
Corus clenched his fists and Ironclad’s claws clenched too.
†
Then
Sparring in the training grounds. A year and a half ago, the eight Gulls at Breakwater guarded what was left of the North Island.
Ballister sneered at him. “That the best you got? They’ll eat you up, Coruscate.”
Corus swung. Ballister, built broad, weathered the hit and swung back. He dodged but their knuckles clipped his chin. Blood in his mouth, copper. “You’d make a better meal, Ballister.”
“I’m a snack, huh?”
Old slang, but his face flushed hot. “No—”
“Boys,” commanded Diana, their instructor. “Behave.”
“They’re not—”
“Leave it.” Ballister opened their stance in invitation. “C’mon, Corus, we’ll make a man of you yet.”
Misshapen scars on his chest from back alley top surgery. He slammed his fists against their unresisting flesh—
†
Then
An entire swarm of munteds, and only five Gulls left at Breakwater.
Corus leaned against Ironclad’s talons, vaping. Bread was thirty bucks a loaf, but tobacco was subsidised.
Ballister, passing, said, “Careful. Those things’ll kill you.”
A laugh cracked out of him like bone snapping. Munted radiation made a tether’s work slowly fatal. At least he’d die in twenty tons of brushed steel.
Over the comm Luminia Grace said, “We take the death to them.”
Corus pocketed his vape and scrambled up. “Bet you I’ll kill more than you.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
He grinned. Muted himself just in time as the spinal spigot connected and he screamed in the usual agony.
†
The signals were strange. A huge munted, but it dipped in and out of the scan.
Water skimmed Ironclad’s feet. The Ministry got pissed if they clawed the seabed up. Protesters regularly ringed the towers.
The government insisted they hadn’t gone back on Nuclear Free, promise. Irradiated monsters just crawled from the sea. Wasn’t offshore nuclear tests, not in clean green New Zealand! Corus didn’t trust the government as far as he could throw them.
Less. He could throw pretty far now.
He was here, but the blip vanished. Tiritiri Matangi to his left, straggling forest and spindly lighthouse. The water off the island was a brilliant blue.
The same seas Calibre Blaze went down in.
†
Then
The swarm battle. Surging up from his underwater fight to find Adzebill overrun, Calibre Blaze nowhere in sight. The blip of Ballister’s presence stuttering, fading out, gone.
A hollowness in Corus’s chest he’d never felt before and pretended was pain. Ironclad’s arm hanging inert, cables chewed through.
He was still slower with that arm, phantom pain like his own body was injured. But he was better off than most, still in the early stages of tethersickness. Hair falling out, nausea. For all the talk about heroes protecting the nation, eligibility for the tether program depended on not being afraid to die.
†
Corus hovered Ironclad above the water. Unease itched down his blistered back.
A signal, right on his location, then it vanished. Corus spun, claws out, as the munted erupted from the waves.
It was massive, twice the size of most. Segmented and clawed like a naked crayfish, lurid flesh with gill-like growths rippling poison-bright in yellow and blue.
The munted seized Ironclad, vicelike, and Corus drove his claws into its soft body.
It released him but the vivid growths stood out straight, shooting a fluid that made Ironclad’s alarms go off. Acid or poison.
Under its horned head was a pulsing sac. A poison gland? If he took that out—
A voice over his comm. “You still forget defence, Corus.”
Ironclad stopped dead, hovering over the water.
His voice cracked. “You’re dead.”
“Am I?” Thoughtful. Still infuriating.
The munted had stopped, antennae twitching. A faint shadow in that sac about the size of a crouching human. Same place as a Gull’s cockpit. Did Ballister choose this or was it done to them?
Corus jetted back, buying space. Alarms bleeped as the acid ate through Ironclad’s plating. “I’m taking you home.”
“Buy a tether dinner first.”
Corus snarled and slammed Ironclad’s fists into the munted’s body. It rippled and closed a pincer around Ironclad’s arm, drawing him close. He kicked it; the beast let him. Like Ballister, weathering hits until Corus exhausted himself and they struck.
“I hate you,” he spat, “I always hated you.” Always needling his weak spots like there was any space for desire in this war.
“I remember that.” The munted tilted its head. Same way Calibre Blaze moved, the body language of a ghost. “One of the few things…”
“Why are you in there? What happened?”
“We have to understand them.” The munted’s glittering eyes fixed on him. “We are them and they are us.”
It gripped Ironclad and spat a gobbet of glowing acid. Alarms screamed, then went silent.
Ballister said, “We made them and they made us!”
“Stop it!” Corus screamed. Ironclad answered sluggishly: he slammed its head against the munted’s body, couldn’t break free. “Why do you always have to fight me!”
All those months training and fighting, he’d never heard them scared. “I’m not—if I’m controlling it, it’s controlling me—”
“I’m getting you out of there!”
“I think killing it will kill me. For good.”
“Then I won’t.” He’d never wanted—
The munted opened its pincer, inside surfaces studded with teeth. “Then run, Coruscate.”
“I hate you!” Corus drove Ironclad’s claws into the munted’s soft body with every ton of force he had. “What's life without you?”
No reply: a burst of static. He might have killed them, his enemy, his friend.
The munted thrashed in the water, sinking. Corus tried to bear its weight, Ironclad’s metal screeching in complaint.
He twisted his fingers in quick commands: release emergency beacon, activate buoys. When he tried to open the cockpit hatch, Ironclad didn’t answer. Acid ate through to the machinery that cradled him and pain firebolted up his spine.
Still, Corus carved around the sac, like scooping a kina’s yolky treasure out of its spiked shell. Claws twitching as the acid ate through Ironclad, he cut into the sac itself. Ballister’s still figure knelt, cradled in sinew.
Better they’d died in that last battle, human instead of something bigger, lesser, worse.
Their head twitched, trying to lift.
Ironclad didn’t answer his commands. It was sinking, flotation devices inflating too slow to bear its weight. Corus pulled the emergency release, screamed, and crawled through the shattered cockpit. Acid spattered his tethersuit.
He dragged himself along the bridge of Ironclad’s dead arm to his stricken Ballist. His face was wet. Salt on his tongue. He pressed his bloodied lips to theirs as the beacons flared.
© 2026 Rem Wigmore
Rem Wigmore is a speculative fiction writer from Aotearoa New Zealand, author of the Vengeful Wild duology (Foxhunt and Wolfpack). Rem’s other works include Riverwitch and The Wind City. Their short fiction is published in venues including Baffling Magazine, Reckoning Magazine and two Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy anthologies. In 2023 Rem won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Fan Writing with their climate fiction essay “Conservation, Red in Tooth and Claw.” Rem’s probably a changeling, but you’re stuck with them now. The coffee here is just too good. Rem can be found online at remwigmore.com. Also, Pacific Rim is their favourite movie.