[10 Kilometers until Valencia city]

Ring…..

Ring…..

Ring…..

“The user that you-“ The artificial voice was cut off.

In the middle of the highway, Chump and Zippy were on the way to their home.

All electric power was cut off. It was too dark to see clearly.

Thousands of obstacles in the middle of the streets. They couldn’t go fast.

Hundreds of new sounds, roars, and screams. If they stopped, it would be dangerous.

Two partners: one human and one big rabbit. Only ashes on the wind.

The sun started to rise on the horizon, taking them nearly the entire night to cover the two hundred kilometers in the dark. Chump closed the calling application, instantly reopening it to dial a number.

“Master… You should stop. They are not answering…” Zippy tried to halt Chump’s monotonous actions. He placed his paw on top of Chump’s arm, looking at his human with a sad expression, his voice emitting sorrowful squeaks. “You called more than twenty times… They are not there. No one is there…”

Chump tightened his grip on the steering wheel, clenching his teeth. “Please, Zippy, let me call one more time…” His voice weighed heavy, guilt evident in every word.

Zippy responded, his voice trembling. “…They are gone, Master…”

Chump lost his composure and shouted violently, “I couldn’t apologize! I couldn’t even say I loved them! I need to! They need to! No one deserved this! Why?! Why did it happen?!” He slammed his hand against the car dashboard, shaking the interior for a moment and momentarily hurting his hand.

“You’re going to break YOUR hand like this. Breathe out if you feel frustrated.”

He recalled his father’s words, spoken with a deep, firm, and wise voice. He returned his hands to the steering wheel, forcing himself to slow down as they entered the city.

This burst made Zippy jump back, dropping his arm for a moment before putting both paws up. “Y-you are scaring m-me… Please-e… S-Stop-p…”

He looked with anger at the bunny face sideways, only to find the bunny sobbing and crying, pleading with the human.

“You are scaring your mother! Can’t you see she just tried to help you?!”

More echoes of his memories passed through his mind. He wasn’t sure if this was his consciousness kicking in after so much, but his anger faded into worry in a slow transition. His agitated breathing returned to being slow and heavy. His vision cleared from the shock, and he felt an increasing sense of guilt.

“I am really sorry. I don’t know what took over me. Well, as in the expression that meant ‘taking over me’ as something possessing me, but… You know what I meant…” The human muttered. He slowed down the car, picked up the giant bunny, placed him on his lap, and drove the rest of the way with him on top. He kissed the forehead of the bunny and patted him with care. The bunny purred all the way until a more industrial part of the city. He now felt more safe around the human as he calmed down and came back to his senses.

They stopped in front of a completely destroyed and ruined building; from the remaining walls, anyone could guess it was some giant storage. All the cables were torn up and cut off, all the walls broken down and dusty, all the tubes exploded. They made a total disaster of the place. “Gosh darn it, Sharlindra! Did they destroy everything before this? My schematics… Ugh, that’s why APRIL didn’t answer back. Destroyed with everything…” Chump facepalmed, clenching his hand while thinking. Zippy jumped off and moved around like a dragonfly, inspecting everything.

“Master! Everything’s gone! What do we do?” Not a single piece of machinery was left, only remnants of chips, inductors, and many components.

Chump sighed out every frustration in his body and signaled Zippy to go back with his head. “Leave everything; we do not need that yet, and I prefer brand new or made those myself.”

More ashes on the windy, cloudy day, tons of clothes laying around. “We must check on something. Jump on; it’s not far from here, a couple of minutes.”

Zippy jumped back onto his lap the moment he ordered him. They traveled outside the city, beside a forest and the river, to a warehouse beside thousands of piles of materials—an abandoned junkyard of the city. Tons of garbage, leftovers of mankind piled up in never-ending rusty colors. Construction materials, half-torn machines, toys, old consoles, cars, house furniture, electronics. Anything metallic, copper, bronze, platinum, gold threads, silver threads, aluminum. You could name anything that could be from a machine, and it was there.

The warehouse, in contrast to the piles of junk surrounding the building, had clean light blue walls almost in perfect condition, with only tiny specks of rust and dust on the lower parts of the walls touching this junk. The windows were spotless and in perfect shape. The ceiling had a perfect zigzag design. In the front, a tiny side door with a garage door. In contrast to the last building, this one was left untouched, ignored by society.

Chump parked in front of the garage door, applying the manual brake and ensuring everything was turned off. “Still not anyone alive… Holy Christ… She really did clean it out. They really broke their backs… God dammit, Mom… You didn’t have to…” He hid his face with his hand, wiping off his tears.

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“Master Chump, what is this place? Why does it smell funny? Are you… Are you okay?”

Chump snapped out of the tiny trance. “Yeah, coming, coming… I left this place before I started working for… anyone really, before turning an adult. I think it was before I finished my seventh Engineering…” He stood silent while getting to the door. He entered a large code into the panel beside the door. “Was it Civil Engineering? No, no. Computer Engineering. I don’t know why, though. I still write everything down anyway… Gosh darn, wish my handwriting was better.”

“You built here too?! That’s awesome, Master! I am sure that you built something like a time machine!”

Chump giggled and patted the bunny's fluffy head. Both walked inside the building. The human felt nostalgic and melancholy, while the bunny was filled with excitement and energy. Once he stepped inside and turned on the first light, it revealed thousands upon thousands of crates, perfect materials, classified documents. From all types of inductors, batteries, transistors, chips, classified by size and characteristics. Copper, wood, steel, iron, gold, silver, all in raw or ingot materials. Piles of tiny components and boring documents and labels.

Beside the entrance, a desktop was filled with well-used tools, lots of burn marks, tons of random notes and drawings. Tiny sculptures, welders, sponges, scissors, hammers, and, of course, magnifying glasses. Every tool required for working on small materials.

Zippy's energy slipped away; his ears went down, and his excitement turned into sadness, witnessing what his eyes saw as boring work. “…Master… I…”

Chump turned on the rest of the lights, illuminating the building and revealing the last part, filled with prototypes. Drones of various sizes, clothes of different designs, equipment protections with electronic devices attached to them, guns with bombastic designs, computers of all types and eras. Giant industrial machinery, a massive generator, foundry and welders the size of rooms, and a mysterious cape hiding something in the middle of that space. Inside this place, anyone would believe that a century had passed and technology had advanced significantly.

“Did you doubt me for a second there, Zippy?” He genuinely chuckled before patting his hair in disorder. “You have to put a bit of faith in the work as well. ~”

“That’s… so… COOL!!!!” Zippy's energy slipped out, throwing tiny sparks around in tiny spells and hitting the ceiling in thunderbolts. He bolted through the facility like a child in a candy store; his energy was contagious. He asked in rapid-fire about everything he saw. “What does that gun do? How about that machine?! And that forge?! What's under the mantle?!”

He placed his hand on its sides and proclaimed with confidence. “Absolutely nothing!”

“WHAT?! BUT HOW COULD U SAY THAT?! Look how much stuff is in here!” Zippy jumped on the air by the sheer shocked in a dramatic way.

“Because this place was abandoned before I worked for anyone, and that was more than five years ago. Most of these prototypes needed fuels that I couldn’t have access to. Or would raise some alarms if I got the necessary materials to even begin to test them on smaller sizes.”

Zippy zapped back beside the human and tilted its head in curiosity. “But you can do it now, right?”

“Probably, but I won’t anyway…” His smile faded away as he began walking towards the mysterious mantle, covering an unknown invention that, for comparison, could have towered.

“Why, Master?”

It took him a moment to respond. He noticed that the beginning of the building was almost perfectly clean, but the prototype sections were full of dust. My mother really did respect my work… Gosh darn it… no… Ugh, keep it together, Chump. It took a moment for his voice to return to normal, but he softly confessed his reasoning with guilt. “Because I grew up. When you are a kid, you think about how awesome you can be with these inventions. How powerful they can get, epic battles you could have with this artillery…”

He stopped in front of a gun that looked like a plasma rifle, placing his hands on the cannon and cleaning up the dust. “When you’re older and with power, you have many pathways anyone can take. Some let that rage, their inner monster, take control over them and their actions, imposing that vision upon the world. The governments of the world only see it that way.”

He dusted off the keyboard of the generator, and in less than a minute, he turned it on as easily as pulling off a lever. “Some decide to manipulate the world, pulling those strings here and there to get what they want. Social events, information manipulations, creating trends, new topics, rumors… you name it. I am not well-versed, but I knew that’s Sharlindra. Her ways to do it.”

The electricity powered up every single machine in there. Under the rug, many lights turned on, remarkable thanks to the sudden bright spots under it. It revealed now a “And some decide to be a pain in the arse of these guys who decide to take a pathway of questionable morals, taking one that’s even more questionable. She called it a ‘Paladin phase.’ Maybe… Maybe she is right.”

He pulled the rug with force. “But I don’t care anymore.”

Under the rug, it revealed a complete futuristic armour of dark blue-grey steel that towered around two meters and a quarter tall (or 8 feet tall). Giant boots that could stomp anything in their way, with big leg shells, sturdy and resilient enough to be pillars on any construction. The knees and pretty much every main joint in the structure of the enormous armor were composed of many fabrics of a more flexible alloy of kleviar and steel. On the hips, it was fortified with a bulky design with a double functionality of protection and adaptive inventory. Contrary to most armors, the bulky part was not placed on the shoulder or the back, but on the sides, as it seems that it had an incorporated system to place all the weight of the machine on its back, relying on the composition of the legs instead of the torso. The arms found were connected to the shoulders and necks with a rigid structure that held itself on the sides and back, empowering any movement implicated by the upper torso. Lastly, the helmet looked like a compacted version of a welder helmet with a single hermetic window.

(Photo/picture in the future may be provided)

A tiny spark of purple colour emanated from the computers and transported. However, Chump and Zippy were too distracted observing.

“This is awesome! What did you plan this for?! A combat suit?! To dominate the battlefield?! Oh, oh! To survive anything! What if you could have super strength with that and be like that green guy from the comics!!” As he hopped around the armor, but before he could touch it, Chump caught the bunny and hugged him, in a comfortable way to contain him.

“Calm down, my friend. This suit was not made for combat… It was not made for me; this is one for my father, but I couldn't finish it in time before his back broke. This armor was what made the government put their eyes on me. Yes, it provides a lot of protection, super strength, resilience, has a computer with forty-five cores, but the thing is… It was made for workers, for construction workers.”

He turned around and placed Zippy down before finishing his sentence. “He was the inspiration for my turnaround mentality, to use—” But the human was interrupted by a new voice, a cold robotic one.

“Defensive protocol activated."

The armour began to move on its own. And its head aimed toward the pair.