You’ve failed a Notice check! You are burning! You are now Easily Trackable!

Hitpoints were boiling off me at 1 every five seconds and an awful smelling steam was rising up off my body.

Patches, luckily, had yelped and backed off, and was spared all of it.

“Crap,” I muttered, and dove for the nearest room.

I’d expected the alarms to start going off, or a series of jewelry-laden thugs to spring out and shoot me with a bunch of plasma blasts.

I was trailing paint, so the sensible thing to do would’ve been to double back, but a full-on panic had gotten hold of me. I didn’t have enough intel on their numbers or combat abilities to know if I was walking into a deathtrap.

Best to sneak around some more, find some–

“Aaagh!” I crashed through the floor, wrapped up in a rug. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to get a look at the room I’d come into before I was another basement level down. I took a good rap on the shoulder from the fall, and lost a good ten percent of the green health bar.

I did lose the blob debuff though.

I got to my feet and found myself fifteen feet down, on a polished metal flooring. Okay, no problems yet. It was dark, with only a shaft of light coming from above. It had that empty, nobody-around feeling. It was not ‘I can feel my mom’s downstairs even though I can’t see her’ and more ‘definitely nobody’s home.’

“Patches? Buddy, you there?”

His head appeared in the skylight I’d just revealed, and the whining followed.

“Good, good boy. Now, you ready to jump?”

He was not ready.

“Come on, buddy, you can do this. I’ll catch you.”

He hesitated at the edge, then made the leap, giving me a full on faceful of dog. He knocked me down and we had a good minute of just laughing and face licking.

“You did it! Good boy!” I gave him plenty of pets and some scritches, then got to business. “Now, let’s have a look at the trap we fell into.”

The room was actually full of mecha-suits, sitting like crouching superheroes in the darkness. They were lined up against the walls, facing each other, fading back into the blackness of the sewers.

I had no idea how they’d gotten all these down through the pipes or the sewer lines, but each one of them was a good eight feet high, kneeling down as they were.

All of them were sleek, metallic black with clear bubbles out front so you could see whatever you were about to crush like a bug. Two spidery legs were folded beneath each one, while two even longer, even more spidery arms held it in place. They also provided steps for you to climb into.

I estimated probably twenty or thirty, but it wasn’t difficult to tell given the darkness down here.

I lifted up the cockpit bubble and smiled down at Patches. “Go on, boy.”

Without any trouble, Patches leaped up into the cockpit. He turned and stared at me, tongue lolling and panting. His tail wagged joyfully, and I made a silly face at him through the cockpit glass.

He huffed at me, and started growling. I realized his tail wasn’t wagging any longer.

A big sweep of searchlight poured over the room, turning everything into an impossibly bright white.

“You there!”

The voice possessing the light was in one of these suits, because a number of servo sounds followed. The ka-chunk, ka-chunk of its big feet made that clear also. And the light was coming down from at least twelve feet up.

“Oh, crud.”

I slammed the cockpit bubble glass closed. Patches would be safe from this thing, for a while at least.

Again, time seemed to slow down for me while Cybernetic Enhancement kicked in, seizing initiative in combat. I spun out of the way and into the center aisle, away from my best boy, and back towards the way we’d come, tapping my new Roly Poly Battle Bot to bring me an additional combat ally.

It stopped, clicked, and beeped loudly before barely balancing itself on its bonkers overly large unicycle tread set while firing off a blast that slapped a previously unseen Brass Cross onto his back. He cursed loudly while the bot spun and beeped happily.

The searchlight of the enemy mech suit zeroed in on it. I ran into the beam and fired a plasma bolt from my MVS. It pinged loudly off of the hard armor of the suit.

“Follow,” I urged. “Come on, dick, follow me.”

The searchlight glued to me, the mech suit did just that, but he also clomped up to me on huge legs and cleared the distance between us faster than I could react. A sweep of an arm caught me in the middle and launched me off my feet into one of the other robo suits. I slammed into the cockpit bubble glass at a weird angle and went down hard, but luckily landed on my back instead of my head.

“Ow,” I groaned, realizing he’d taken another five percent of my health. I tapped my Iron Defense, replacing my lost health and raising my physical armor rating.

Still, it knocked the wind out of me, and I could do little other than try to catch my breath while the big spotlight hovered into view above me.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Over to my side, the brave Roly Poly fired a blast and I was surprised to see the mech suits leg spark and spit smoke. But return fire devastated the little droid, showering parts everywhere.

The cockpit was bathed in orange light, and finally showed me the pilot, a Japanese woman snarling down, with her hands stuck in some glowing digitized command gloves. The only indication she was in the gang was a shiny red nose gem, and a pair of brass earrings.

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

I quickly activated Good Cop, Bad Cop and hoped for the best.

“I took a wrong turn,” I told her.

“Wrong. Nobody wanders around in spider-infested basement levels.” Spiders? Patches and I had been mucking around somewhere teeming with spiders? What the hell? “Who sent you? Was it The Syndicate? The Boss?”

“They didn’t say,” I lied. “And I didn’t ask. Money, you know. They offer up the credits, I take the credits, and all my questions just drift away on the breeze.”

She spat something nasty sounding in Japanese. My best guess would be ‘idiot foreigners.’

The mecha arm grabbed me up around the waist, and I engaged my Aggressive Negotiations ability from To The Victor.

The two quick jabs I managed to get in did enough damage to put a serious crack in the cockpit bubble, but then she brought up a hand and squeezed. The mech arm followed the holographic bands of light surrounding her hand in bringing my body up away from the cockpit, and beginning to tighten around my whole body at once.

My health bar slid down by a third and the pain roared through my body. I couldn’t help but scream, which then turned into a triumphal shout when a loudspeaker broadcast Patches’s furious bark.

“Unhand my human!” the mecha-suit said in a flat, robotic voice.

Patches was piloting the suit somehow. Orangey light surrounded all four of his paws, and the suit leapt forward to grab onto the arm holding me. I was unceremoniously dropped about seven feet, but I was scooped up by Patches’s hand and deposited on the floor.

The lady with the nose gem and the crushing mecha-suit had spun away and now faced us with a mangled upper arm. For a moment, she and Patches stared one another down. Then she pressed a button and activated an alarm. One second everything was quiet save for the humming of the powered armor, the next klaxons were blaring.

“Let’s get out of here,” I told him.

“I have rockets,” Patches’s suit told me.

A notification shot up in my sidebar.

Quest Completed – Twice Crossed

THIS PLACE CONTAINS IRREFUTABLE PROOF THAT THIS GANG IS PLOTTING A HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF A RIVAL’S TURF. PLUS IT IS CHOCK FULL OF EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE AND MIGHT LEVEL THE WHOLE BUILDING IF EVEN ONE OF THE MICRO ROCKETS MISSES ITS TARGET.

Reward: LifeBomb

Level 1 Legendary

Activation on Death. An equipped lifebomb explodes over the afflicted individual, cocooning them inside a medical life-saving device that grants back 10% of health per round while transporting them to the nearest friendly held zone. Using lifebomb consumes the card forever.

'They killed those beings from the flying metal disc, digging through the debris to loot what they couldn't understand. Unfortunately for them, the beings came back.'

Learn Chance 20% Would you like to study this skill now? Y/N

I kicked the notification over to the side. That was a majorly powerful card and I would have loved to try to slot it now. But we were in the middle of something.

And, honestly, there had to be a way to up that learn chance. I did not want to lose that card.

“Let’s go!” I commanded and leapt onto the back of the suit. Patches, with the suit on all fours, circled around until we were near the middle of the room, while the suit adapted to my presence. Handholds and footholds both appeared where I was scrabbling for purchase.

Then, without warning, the suit launched us up through the hole in the floor. A second or two later, we were crashing through the hallways of the first basement level, which were almost too small for the ten-foot wide mecha-suit body. I was nearly crushed into the ceiling several times before Patches took us right, then left, then tore through the door we’d snuck through just a half hour or so before.

Me, still with the mask on.

When we stopped, I dismounted and ran around to face Patches.

“You can talk!?” I shouted.

He cocked his head. The suit said, “I think so.”

“What? That’s wild.”

“It will take time for the suit to accommodate this individual’s idiosyncrasies, mannerisms and typical responses. Your companion’s vocabulary may be limited, and this suit may initially make some mistakes, but we here at Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are committed to unsurpassed customer service. Please excuse our dust while we get acclimated to your canine companion’s mode of speech.”

I stared at Patches. He stared back, tongue lolling and tail wagging. When I didn’t get anything else, I opened the hatch and he bounded out for even more face licks.

“Yeah, buddy! You’re definitely the star of this one. Who’s a good boy? Definitely you.”

We headed home, me now riding on the mecha-suit’s back, and Patches loping along at a good clip. This thing could really go, and the suit itself constructed shock absorbers so I could avoid smashing my chin on the mech every two seconds. In a matter of minutes we were out of enemy territory and back in E. Gojira-X.

In the course of tracking down Eric Joel and the Griefers, I found my new kingdom pretty well in order. Several crafters had leveled up, and were now producing more sophisticated crafting parts. I peered through the crafting recipes as well, and found the healing items, armor, weapons, all of it was just plain better.

“Awesome work everybody,” I praised them as I picked through the gear.

Armor had increased damage resistance than before, weapons held more charges or bullets, for more damage, and without any warnings saying they might backfire or explode at any given moment. Healing items didn’t cause horrific pain while they healed, but instead just boosted your HP back by the hundreds.

So far, so good there.

The patrols had suffered, though. I found two of my people bedridden, one without an arm, the other with a leg that was burned to shit. Somehow though the crafters had built up a med bay of sorts, and the second bed sported a device which sprayed the burned leg with antiseptic and cooling saline solution. Still, she looked to be in bad shape.

These were nameless NPCs, but they didn’t look like fake people. It was a weird sensation, knowing they were made up of the same nano-goo smothering the globe, but also caring about them because they were under my command. Reality warred with the knowledge, and reality won out.

These were my people.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

“They’ll make it,” Eric said. “We have the crafters working on some cyber replacement parts. We could buy some, if we sold off some of the stuff they’ve been making.”

The guy with the missing arm was a rat person, and got up on one elbow to address me. I now noted a bandage on his head.

“Chuck came back,” he rasped. The name over his head was Tui.

“The dragon guy.” I nodded. “We were expecting him.”

The woman with the burned leg chuckled. “Serves his ass right. Bastard ate my neighbor.” The name floating over her head was Naoko, and she was level 3.

“Well he didn’t like it when we used a couple of tasers on him. Ruined his arm again.”

“Good work, soldiers,” I said.

“Need me a new arm so I can get back out there.”

“Take a rest for now. We’ve got new blood coming in, we’re going to reinforce patrols, and we’ve got some armor and weapon upgrades. Everything’s coming up roses for East Gojira-X. Now, I’m going to grab my enforcer here for a few words.”

Naoko and Tui both gave me fist bumps. Outside, I blew out a huge breath.

“That looks like it was too close.”

Eric nodded. “Chuck really has it in for you.”

“All right. We’ll stick around here, beef up defenses for a bit, and then we have a summit to crash.”