Electroknight

A medieval world of robots, where a knight's armour is bolted on, a wound is a broken part, and the soul is a logic core that can be bought and sold.


You were a fencing school's training automaton, the thing the students hit.
The school closed and you were sold off to a junk dealer. He found the core whole, put it in the cheapest body he had, switched you on and explained the deal himself: the core is yours when you have paid for it, no interest, no deadline.
Nothing in the deal says how long a used body lasts.


The fights are physical: every blow lands with real weight, and what it breaks stays broken.
Plates come off first, then the frame gives, then whatever it was holding.
Try not to lose your head, over a win or to the other fighter's blade.


Every other fighter on the bracket lives by your rules.
They climb the same ladder and slide back down it; some retire in time, some end as scrap.
They remember whom they fought.


Tournaments are only part of the map.
The rest happens on the roads between towns: a bandit ambush, a caravan that will buy what you carry, a toll gate across the road, a job nobody else would take.
Go where you like. Just reach the next town in one piece.