Kahli watched Lloyd's alien body continue to pulsate and glow as the countdown to his self-demolition marched.
[Lloyd will self destruct in 7 seconds.]
7 seconds? That would be over in less than a minute! What was Kahli supposed to do?
"Lloyd, you're not really going to kill yourself because I punched you in the nuts, are you? The pain can't be that bad."
"First of all, Kahli, it is. And second - BWA hah hah HAH - is the fact that I regenerate my corporeal form after destroying it intentionally. So, I guess I'll see you five minutes after I explode, or well, maybe I won't, since you'll be dead then. BWA HAH HAH hah hah HAH HAH huh HAH!"
Kahli sighed.
[Lloyd will self destruct in 3 seconds.]
What was she to do? What could she do, at this point?
"Get out of the way, tauman!" shouted the metallic voice of Unit 5a23.
"Unit 5a23, you're here? But I thought you were a staunch pacifist!"
"Shut up and get out of here, I've got fighting to do!" spat the robo-man as he activated his [skill] and levitated up near Lloyd. His head swiveled 180 degrees in half a second. "GO!!"
Kahli kicked strongly off from her big rock to propel herself away from the robot and the alien. Then, she resumed her 'hovering' technique of slowly kicking off the rock at minimal intensity in order to watch how the rest of the scenario unfolded.
Unit 5a23 started charging up some energy. He was using his [Robo-Blast] skill. Which was questionable, considering the ticking time bomb that was Lloyd.
[Lloyd will self destruct in 1 second]
Kahli braced herself for what seemed to be mutually assured destruction between Lloyd, Unit 5a23, and (potentially?) herself. But then, she gasped.
Kahli watched Unit 5a23 reshape himself, methodically, into a sort of an orb. To Kahli, it seemed to take a long time, but it must have happened over only mere moments, because it was before Lloyd managed to self destruct that the vile alien foe was completely encased in a strange, robotic shape.
And then, there was a boom.
Small puffs of smoke emanated from cracks in Unit 5a23's assumed form. But then, the robo-man reconstructed himself into the shape of a taumanoid, and there was nothing left of Lloyd but dust in the wind.
Kahli gasped as Unit 5a23 hovered on his jets towards her.
"Unit 5a23! You saved me!"
"I saved us, Kahli."
"But Unit 5a23, you said you only acted in self defense."
"And that's because I did," he replied.
For reasons somewhat unclear to herself, Kahli pictured for a moment Unit 5a23 describing to her in all the ways that her dying from the alien's self destruct explosion would've psychologically and emotionally damaged him.
"S-self defense?" stuttered Kahli.
"Yes," said Unit 5a23 triumphantly as he hovered due to the powerful jets emanating from his feet and back. "You see, Kahli, unbeknownst to yourself, I was paying discreet attention to this fight you were having with Lloyd whilst I was meditating, mainly in order to ensure that no threats to myself manifested."
"Okay," said Kahli.
"And along with that, you see, I noticed when he decided to employ his [skill] of [Self Destruct], a rather cowardly [skill], if you ask me."
"...Okay?"
"And what I noticed most about this particular [skill] of his was that, to put it bluntly, it had an enormous blast radius. A blast radius that would've easily included myself. Surely you see where this is going?"
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Kahli was starting to get the idea, and she felt a little annoyed.
"Yes, that's right, I launched after him specifically in order to save myself. You see, if I was able to contain his explosion, I knew for a fact due to the calculation abilities of my system that it would not kill anyone other than Lloyd, whom it would only kill of course due to necessity. And as we both know, the only other person who would've been negatively affected would've been and truly was yourself because he told you (and myself due to eavesdropping under the guise of meditation) that he'll just regenerate in a few minutes anyway. So really, the whole thing is a bit of a no harm, no foul situation where nothing was lost and nothing was gained except a little of my energy. And I guess some of Lloyd's energy. And of course all the stress you doubtlessly experienced."
"Yes, of course my stress," replied Kahli with a sigh. "The last point in your long list."
"It wasn't that long of a list, it was only, what, like three things?"
"It felt like an infinity."
Unit 5a23 paused for a second. "I'm having troubled processing your request, please try again later."
Kahli sighed and rolled her eyes. What was with all these explosions, anyways?
----------------------------------------
Boombario lit his big bomb and set it by the door that was carved in such a way that at some angles it looked like an old man, and at other angles it looked like a burlesque dancer. Kahli backed up, noticing at other angles that it almost looked like a praying mantis. How Theseosian.
Boombario scurried away to watch as the rope burned up and, with a great shattering boom, the room shook and the tops of the cavern split, creaked and crumbled as the door blew open. And there it all was.
A cornucopia. A literal cornucopia, with food in it that looked very old and very freezer burnt considering the fact that it was of course in a tomb inside of Old Snow Mountain. But other than that there was so, so much more than just a meager, frozen cornucopia.
There was gold. There were jewels and gemstones. There were beautifully tailored outfits, ethereal and genderless, all of which were extremely too small for anyone in the room to presently fit into. There was incense that itself was worth more than Kahli's life in the mind of financiers. There was, of course, tons of ice. There were statues of old Ice Conquerors, which were huge in the Nomachiattan Ice Age but also extremely irrelevant to the memory at hand. Yes, the Ice Conquerors had created many key pieces of Nomachiattan culture that persisted to the present day. It was of course all thanks to the many horrible slaughters they committed along with ruthless use of systems to create powerful means of mass production for survival in, once again, an Ice Age where everything was so painfully cold in the world of Nomachiatto that only the meanest and chilliest of sadists thrived.
But nobody was interested in any of those things other than Kahli. There were but two things immediately identified as points of interest to the Trash E Scapaders.
One was the large, porcelain elephant occupying half the room. It was gloriously crafted, exquisite even. All of the Trash E Scapaders flew to it like moths to a flame.
"Why are you so interested in that white elephant?" asked Kahli.
"Because it's the structure that holds the Bark of the Conglomerate! If you'd read any documentation at all, you'd already know this!!"
And so it was that the last thing Cagio said to Kahli was something about documentation. Because when he and all of his lackeys rushed to the big, white elephant in the room, they immediately started touching it. Much like the aforementioned moths to a flame - only literally instead of figuratively - as each bandit touched the elephant, they found themselves lit aflame and soon after extinguished. Extinguished from life, that is.
It was all that Kahli could do to watch in horror as all the masked men died. It was a shocking sight to behold, seeing so many cloaked men set on fire at once. Kahli pondered how if only one of them had waited half a second before rushing forward, they might have been spared. As they'd all acted at the same time, they all lay inexplicably face down on the marble floor of the tomb, deader than something that had never been alive.
With a deep breath, Kahli looked for something in the room that might not immediately kill her the second she touched it.
Considering what had just happened, it took a lot of work to reach that point, and in fact for a decent amount of time Kahli refrained from doing anything more than looking at anything, because she had no real way of knowing whether everything in this tomb would kill her like the elephant had killed the Trash E Scapaders.
Only, she was optimistic that it wouldn't be knocking her off so quickly, as long as she didn't suddenly get a hankering to touch the big, white elephant. After all, the Trash E Scapaders had stumbled and bumped into many a different historical artifact on their path to the murder elephant, hadn't they?
Kahli had asked herself the question, but she knew the truth. Clearly, the answer was yes, considering the books and jewels and paintings that were strewn across the path to the elephant and that the rest of the tomb was so neatly and perfectly arranged that it could've been a Flimpressionist painting.
Flimpressionism was an art movement in Nomachiatto characterized mainly by the appearance of effortless put-togetherness, which was as a term coined 'Flimpishness.' Yes, the jagged, painful way that artifacts were strewn around on the path to the elephant were more in line with a stampede than they were with Flimpish principles, whereas the rest of the tomb room exuded the finest Flimpishness. Of course, all of this theory came from Hogarth Flimpler, but that was a subject that was more full of holes and questions than the burned-to-a-crisp corpses of the bandits that presently laid on the floor.
And then Kahli saw it. A beam of light forcibly drawing her attention as if by design. And, considering concepts of Flimpocity, it most likely was intended to draw her attention, though that intention might not have been clear when it was first crafted. Either way, she saw it.
The scroll.
As if guide by some sort of invisible hand, an invisible beaded thread of curiosity, Kahli watched herself in an almost depersonalized state as she walked towards the scroll and grasped it in her hand.
And, thankfully, she didn't die. Yet.