“Oh… shit…”

“Y-yeah…”

Alexander waited patiently a few dozen feet away from us, crossing his arms with a stern expression.

“How’d they take it?”

“T-Turns out… R-Raen knew along… that made the both of t-them fight. And t-they’ve been trading j-jabs with each other e-ever since.”

…

Looking back at Alexander, I told Rowan “No time to worry about that now. We still got business to finish up.”

“R-Right…”

“What’s with you and relying on magic?” Alexander asked me.

I glared at our opponent, and activated both my swords.

“W-We don’t have to d-do this Father…” Rowan said.

“You know it’s pointless to try and help me. Everybody has their roles in the world. You two are the heroes, and I’m the villain. Now… we doing this or not?”

“Definitely,” I replied, running forward.

I brought my swords down onto Alexander, but he slid to the side, did a sweeping kick to trip me, then stepped back as nanobots popped off his suit and crawled onto mine.

The nanobots pushed into my suit, and tore off the pieces in a battle between the nanobots of both suits.

I stood up, only to immediately get kneed in the face, throwing me backwards into the wall.

“You know, you could help me here Rowan!”

I looked up, and Rowan was still staring at the ground, oblivious to everything around him.

Groaning, I watched as Alexander leapt into the air, and I rolled forward out of the way, preventing my face from combining with the concrete.

I sighed, and threw a bunch of white-striped disks across the ground, which shot out holograms that looked exactly like me.

As they distracted Alexander, I ran over to Rowan, placed my hand on his shoulder, and tried looking him in his eyes.

“Hey, look, I know this is a big revelation and shit… but if you just sit here, something bad could happen.”

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“I-I… can’t f-fight him… as much as I w-want to hurt him…” Rowan stared at his palms, very small amounts of green electricity covering the middle of them.

“Alright, it sucks. Yeah. But do you really want… do you want him to kill me? The both of us?”

“I-I… I don’t k-know anymore…”

A dagger flew towards Rowan’s temple, but I snatched it out of the air and threw it back.

Grabbing both his shoulders, I took a quick glance at his hot pink lips… and the unwanted thought of kissing him formed.

“I… you know what? Fine. We’ll… we’ll try to talk things out with your father, when we get the chance,” I lied, “But right now… we have to defend ourselves.”

“That okay?”

Rowan nodded sheepishly.

I helped him up, then we both turned to face our enemy.

Suddenly, a purple laser shot out of Alexander’s shoulder, so I pushed Rowan away and cartwheeled back.

When the laser moved towards me, I ran to the reactor in the center of the room, luring it away from Rowan.

Once I was behind the reactor, a floating red orb appeared, blocking the laser. After a few seconds of the orb absorbing the laser, the laser disappeared, and the orb multiplied dozens of times before they all fired lasers back.

While Alexander was distracted, I took out a couple C4s from my belt and placed them on the reactor’s glass.

Then, I reached into my belt, pulled out my teleportation disks, and double tapped one of them before throwing it, causing it to phase all the way through the reactor.

When Alexander was knocked back towards the reactor, I teleported and roundhouse kicked him in the back of the head.

As Alexander tried to recover, Rowan pushed him back to me, so I unsheathed one of my swords and put Alexander into a headlock, while stabbing one of the swords into his leg.

“Wow… who would’ve guessed. The lovers can fight together. What a surprise.”

I slammed Alexander into the reactor, and after a moment, he started laughing.

Fed up with every breath he took, I forced him to face me, tightly gripped his shoulders, and slammed his whole body back.

“I’m not even gonna ask why you’re laughing.”

Rowan took a quick glance at the c4 just barely visible through the green electricity storm in the reactor, and stepped back.

“Do you have even the simplest bad destroying this reactor will fuck you over?!”

…

“Where. Is. Robert?”

“Rowan Coliseum. Don’t be late,” Alexander replied immediately.

Gritting my teeth, I pulled the sword out of his leg, activated it, and rammed it through his skull. A black, almost gas-like liquid pooled out of the wound and dripped from the sword.

Heavily breathing, I slowly pulled the sword out, taking in every bit of satisfaction of the moment. Once the sword was free, I shook any of the remaining material off, and turned to Rowan.

“Can you teleport us to the pick-up point?”

Rowan nodded, struggling not to look at the body. He then closed his eyes, and red electricity covered our bodies until we were back in the desert.

Seeing the rest of the unit in front of us, I turned to see the factory just beyond the horizon, then, I pulled out a detonator, and pressed the button.

Boom!

“What the hell?!” Isabelle screamed.

“What?” I asked, turning to face her.

“You said yourself we were ordered to keep this secret! Not blow the whole place up! Why in the fuck did you do that?!”

Looking at Rowan, who was distancing himself from the others, I looked back at the seething woman in front of me. Deep, deep in her eyes, I saw… fear. Fear I couldn’t quite place.

“I couldn’t let their production of robots continue. Or, if this isn’t the only factory… I want to at least slow them down,” I lied.

You know what time it is?! Flashback time!