An alarm, high and piercing, began shrieking in the room, accompanied by strobing red lights. Brock froze, baffled by the flurry of motion all around him.
KB (Administrative) had taken a crouched stance on four of its legs, cannons now expanded and flanking its core, their bulky mechanisms held in place by the other four limbs and surrounded by fractal pearly armor. A foreboding green glow was building in the cannons’ stygian depths. Outside the arena, Cap was chanting in an unknown language, left hand overhead, right fist clasped at her side, progressively larger rune circles appearing above her in concentric layers of light, silver charms extended straight out from her wrists. The sound of multiple guns cocking and Fiona swearing could be heard from the upper level, along with the steely rasp of a sword clearing its sheath, and ominous looking cylinders crackling with ozone, acid, and other, darker magics, were swiveling towards Brock from hidden recesses in the walls and ceiling. A series of small vine tendrils began crawling down the sides of the arena and along its circumference, pale buds sprouting periodically along their lengths.
Uh oh, Brock thought. This doesn’t seem good.
At the very top, inside the workstation, Yuriel was frantically tapping in commands at the various terminals, muttering to herself with feverish intensity, strands of purple hair worked loose from her ponytail, seemingly unconcerned with the ramping up of imminent violence going on around her.
Next to her, the Director gazed at Brock dispassionately, thick arms folded across his chest.
Something must have gone wrong with the testing. He’s waiting to see what I’m going to do.
Hesitantly, Brock held out his hands in front, palms first, trying to calm the situation down. He didn’t feel any different than before.
“Uhhh-”
The response was overwhelming.
A forest of piercing brown thorns extended towards Brock from every part of the arena wall, waves of bullets, grenades, rockets, and multicolored lasers blasting down from above them. Riding in behind was a series of steel slashes, devastating crescents of force slicing their way along molecular-thin black-red lines, and malevolent purple hexes burst around him in runic sigils. Surrounding it all was a sickly green glow from the pair of light-bending orbs slowly homing in, an impenetrable spherical lattice of scorching white fire beyond them shrinking and condensing everything into a single point.
Brock did not enjoy the next tenth of a second.
Not in the slightest.
As the combined armageddons around him dissipated, releasing a sooty plume of charred smoke up through the hole KB had created in the ceiling earlier, Brock held one hand up, the other covering his crotch.
His clothes had, once again, been annihilated.
“Hey! Please sto-”
A tsunami of flashing metal limbs pounded him into the arena floor from all directions, quickly joined by more of the ultraviolet slashes. The sand fell away beneath a bed of impaling ironwood stakes stabbing upwards, their lengths tracking his every move, relentlessly impaling each time he was driven down.
“-p doing that, it rea-”
Arcane, primal energies of earth and fire, sea and sky, pummeled him savagely through multiple dimensions. His bones grew vast, then disappeared; his viscera dwindled into nothing, then turned grossly tumorous, enveloping his entire body; all that was normal became unmade, then made again.
“-lly does not feel good, I mean-”
Nebulas ignited around his implosive appearance in the vacuum of space. A pair of neutron stars circled his head, descending orbits wrenching meaning from reason, and their consummation rent reason from existence. What pitiful aftermath remained vanished beneath the supernova glare of a dying celestial ancient, its sacrificial bloodshower brighter than the birth of universes, its pitiless eyes flensing him to the core as they perished in conjoined annihilation.
“-what the hell, I wasn’t doing anything!”
The rifts in reality faded, and smoke slowly drifted away from the arena.
Brock chanced a glance around. The building they’d been conducting the tests in was now completely obliterated, nothing remaining but their ground floor room, and somehow, Yuriel’s workstation on its raised quarter. Secondary explosions rumbled overhead, the various dissipating magics and munitions combining in unpredictable and spectacularly violent ways. The other three buildings seemed untouched, but Brock saw a golden shimmer fade along with the last of the percussive secondary fire, and figured there was some sort of shield keeping each one isolated.
Surrounding him were the clearly hostile forms of Cap, Fiona, Mikael, KB (Administrative), and Verdant’s doll. Every face was grim, set in the stony expressions of those unsure of their ultimate chances at walking away alive, but willing to fight nonetheless. Past them, the Director had his hands outstretched, flickers of coruscating energy sheathing his fingers, like a composer preparing to conduct a symphony of destruction.
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Brock didn’t know what to do. He crouched a little lower, still trying to cover himself.
“Look-”
Another conflagration engulfed him, unspeakable horrors partnering with divine avatars in an endlessly exploding fountain of irresistible force. Their unholy blades flayed his thoughts to the marrow.
“-can you please-”
He appeared in a realm of absolute nothing-
-but it’s only the barest shadow of the grey place-
-where time and flesh had no meaning-
-kind of restful, really-
-and then re-emerged in the arena once more.
“-stop doing that?”
The faces surrounding him now looked mildly nonplussed, and the slithering vines circling the arena drooped a bit.
“I just,” he yelled, upstretched hand reaching even higher, “could really use some clothes right now, okay? Please? I don’t seem to regenerate those.”
There was another awkward silence, then a slight cough came from the direction of the workstation. Brock thought it sounded like the Director.
“Yes, well, go on, KB. The clothes.”
KB (Administrative) reached past the lengths of vines into a locker on the arena wall, and withdrew a pair of grey sweatpants and a sweatshirt. It tossed them gingerly a few feet in front of Brock. He crouch-walked forward awkwardly to grab them, still trying to cover himself with one hand.
“Thanks, I-”
More cataclysmic energies filled his immediate area, crowded with sights Brock had only ever seen browsing sketchy online art albums at three in the morning. They eventually finished attempting to dismantle him, and he looked down in horror.
His clothes had been murdered once again.
This time, when the ectoplasm and dust wafted away, he simply stood there with his shoulders shrugged and hands extended to the sides in a questioning posture. His nether regions were a bit chilly, but at that point he didn’t care.
“Are you done yet?”
“I don’t like it,” Yuriel shouted from her workstation. “The data I’m getting here is all over the place. I still don’t have enough to pin down what’s happening with those temporal fluxes - hit him again!”
Brock sighed, anticipating another round of ultraviolence, but nothing happened.
“The meatbag,” KB (Administrative) said slowly, “is not attacking us. Has not attacked us.”
“KB’s right,” Cap snarled, lowering her hand. She bit her lip for a second, then whirled in place, now facing the workstation. Runes flickered into life around her clenched fists. “If you risked Starak’s life for your research, Yuriel, so help me-”
“Easy, Captain,” came the Director’s firm tones. The energy covering his hands winked out. “Let’s all take a deep breath, and just get him some clothes for now.”
This time, the workout gear landed directly at his feet. Several seconds later, Brock was once again clothed, and feeling much less self-conscious.
“So, uhhh, what’s the deal?” he asked, carefully sitting down. The pain from the attacks was still a weird ghostly after-image, like he was remembering something that had happened but then also hadn’t, but it wasn’t a sensation he was eager to resume experiencing. “I don’t feel any different.”
It was true. Brock felt the exact same he’d felt at the start of the tests - lost, afraid, confused, and vaguely hungry. Whatever had tripped that alarm hadn’t done anything to improve his general state of mind. He yawned.
“Whatever that unique skill is, it’s still active,” Yuriel screamed, ignoring the Director, “and now all his ultra skills are ignoring the Limiter! I’m engaging the Godhammer! Clear the area!”
A constellation of ominous red lights appeared beneath the roof of the Bell, and Brock started doodling aimlessly in the sand with his index finger. He wasn’t looking forward to being naked again after another round of attacks, but there wasn’t much he could do about it at the moment. He felt like his current indestructibility was really the only thing going for him. Hopefully the others would eventually get bored with trying to kill him, and they could all have an actual conversation.
Strangely, though, no one else was moving, and he saw Cap’s eyes widen, as if she’d just realized the energies that had been unleashed against him over the previous five minutes. She threw her shoulders back and stomped up to Yuriel’s workstation, her voice rising in volume as she went. The theme appeared to be ‘Top Ten Coworker Betrayals Against A Fiance’s Body.’ Fiona and Mikael were quickly pulled in to the diatribe, followed by the Director, and eventually even Verdant’s vine doll. The crimson lights overhead sputtered and faded, and Brock felt strangely disappointed he wasn’t going to get a chance to see whatever a ‘Godhammer’ was.
For the moment, everyone seemed to be ignoring him.
Well, everyone except for one.
Brock felt movement to his side, and looked over to see KB (Administrative) settling into a crouch on the sand several feet away, four of its limbs folded beneath itself. In that stance, it seemed almost not terrifying. In rapid motions, it began disassembling the extended forms of its cannons, tucking the extra parts away neatly within its body, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.
“Heya KB,” he said morosely.
“Meatbag,” the robot responded, still busy putting away the extra cannon bits. “It seems you are slightly more complicated than you appear.” Beyond the arena, Cap’s shouting grew louder.
“Yeah, I guess.” Brock continued poking at the sand. “Why did you all try to kill me? It’s not like I did anything.”
A metal limb waggled in front of his face.
“That alarm only goes off when something is seriously wrong with the Appraisal process and a Sekkie’s about to break loose. Last time it happened, we ended up having to banish everything and everyone involved to the Murder Dimension. It is not a pleasant place.”
“Uhhh, I would imagine not.”
“So many teeth.” The robot seemed to shiver, then resumed its grooming process. “Did you do something to your Limiter, meatbag?”
“I wish I knew,” Brock grumbled. “Then I’d tell you so you’d stop stabbing me.”
“Perforation does lose its appeal when it leaves no lasting impact,” KB (Administrative) admitted reluctantly. “You are more resilient than anticipated.”
“I don’t feel very resilient,” Brock said sadly. “None of this makes any sense. All I ever wanted was to just be good at sports. Now I’m stuck in this weird world where everyone I’ve met has tried to kill me at some point. It’s kind of a bummer.”
“You are the strangest Sekkie I have ever witnessed, meatbag. You seem almost human.”
“Thanks, KB.”
Over by Yuriel’s workstation the shouting finally died out, and a procession of figures led by the Director, Cap close on his heels, filed down toward the arena sand. They paused next to the smoldering remains of one of the esoteric machines ringing the pit, and the Director cleared his throat.
“I think,” he said gruffly, “it’s time for lunch.”