Anima Cores: 160
Inside his chamber in the Eternal Dragon commune, XJ-V sat in mute meditation, his thoughts keen and focused even against the drunken exhortations of the outside world – of Disciples who seemed to have missed that the object of their celebration had suddenly spirited himself away.
XJ-V didn’t pay much attention to this, however. In truth, he was grateful for one last spell of Dao-Walking in his chambers. These four walls were just as solid and unassuming as the day he’d first been admitted to them. He knew that nostalgia would not serve him in the future, but even so, he would miss their simplicity – and that of Ramor-Tai.
Such thoughts were what took him where he needed to go – back into the fires of Hensha. Back, deep beneath the ground which shook as the Divine Order came among the people, calling for the Cog who dared attack one of their ‘enforces’. The enforcer in question turned out to be the bandit leader XJ-V had allowed to flee with his life.
And now, the village was paying the price.
The place burned as the people gathered and stood up to the Xu’Jan who swarmed among them, destroying everything their guardian XJ-V had helped them build. The light-wreathed blades of Yuwa’s warriors sliced apart man, woman, and child alike – as each one denied to give up the hiding place of Dr Janus and their guardian.
Not even the people of the village who tried to resist knew just how desperate the situation was. For as the gathered in the Mayor’s dilapidated mansion, they did so with confidence.
“Barricade the doors and windows!” he yelled above the din of fire and blood being shed outside before opening his quarter’s side cabinets and tossing an elongated rifle to each and every man willing to fight for what was his. “Make them pay for every inch. Show them Hensha does not submit to tyranny without a fight.”
The XJ-V who watched the fight unfold was both filled with pride for the peoples’ bravery and consumed with guilt – guilt that had always hung over his being, but which was without clear cause. Now he saw it all too clear: they, the people who had once looked upon him as a stranger deserving of nothing but scorn, had not only come to accept him, but defend him.
Still, XJ-V could see the odds were stacked against them. About a dozen Xu’Jan fell to the impromptu defense taken up by those few villagers who shot them from the Mayor’s windows, even managing to force the forces of the Order into retreat for a time.
“Don’t let up!” the Mayor shouted. “Keep firing! Someone – send word to Janus. Tell him to run! And…and tell XJ-V that-“
The Mayor’s final words were muted in the sudden blaze of blinding light that shot through the mansion like a dazzling comet pounding the surface of the planet. The clouds above Hensha cracked with yellow lightning – like infected lungs being split apart by bile, which rained down on the defenders and splintered their limbs apart, gouging their eyeballs and searing the flesh from their bones one by one as the Xu’Jan watched, each one bowed in a demonstration of prayer.
XJ-V flew to beat at them in the dream-state of the Dao-Walk – in vain. The defenders lay like grisly statues baking in the dark sun glowering above. The Mayor’s house was reduced to nothing but splinters and broken glass – nothing but a ruin amidst the smokestack that the town had become. Then, to XJ-V’s surprise, the Mayor crawled out the rubble, his skin flayed and cut apart to ribbons. Yet still he clung to life – a deformed statement of human resilience.
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But like everything else which looked upon the face of a God’s chosen prophet, such resilience was in vain.
He looked up as the blinding light that ended the lives of the resistance slammed itself like a state in front of him, revealing the flowing white robes of a man – or what looked like a man, at least.
This man touched the burning face of the Mayor with the tip of his glowing, spear-like foot. His toe seeped into the Mayor’s cranium and drew a scream from the man that sent a chill down XJ-V’s titanium spine.
“Where is he?”
Those words seared themselves into XJ-V’s mind. The voice they belonged to still resonated through even the Dao’s dreamlike state.
“…you…will…never…win!”
The Mayor’s words became a garbled mess as the killing light of the High Eagle’s lightning limb pierced deeper into the back of his flayed skull.
“Pity. You could have been a valuable asset. Brave, in the end.”
With what must have been an absurd amount of effort, the Mayor rose to look through melting eyeballsat the amber eyes of his tormentor.
“Yuwa…is…dead!”
The lightning knife came down, cracking clean through the Mayor’s face and turning his body to dust.
“Excavate the place,” Jin’ra commanded. “We go below.”
…
In the depths of Dr Janus’ cavernous lab, the ceiling was beginning to shake.
XJ-I was barking up a storm, yipping at his Master and his favorite Brother as the former ran about like a madman, preparing a bag of supplies for a very bewildered-looking XJ-V.
“Dr,” he said. “My sensors are indicating a combat situation above. Life signs are fading. I – I must go!”
“No, XJ-V!” Janus replied. “That’s an order!”
The Cog looked at his Creator as one would regard a madman.
“This unit will not sit by while the villagers fall above. They must be saved!”
“They knew the risks…” Janus murmured, as though he wished the Cog wouldn’t hear him and yet needed to hear him at the same time. “…we all did. Just…damn it. Why now? Why isn’t time ever on our side?!”
Janus strapped the backpack to his creation’s shoulder and tried to maintain his balance on the shaking floor.
“Prime Directives,” he barked into XJ-V’s face.
“Dr, I –“
“Prime Directives, now!”
“Cultivate, Enter the Dao, Merge with the Dao.”
Janus nodded as an entire piece of the laboratory wall crumbled and fell away, sending a table of vials and experiments spraying against the floor.
“Process!” Janus shouted over the din of what sounded like a thundering God tearing the ground apart above.
“Find…find Master Longhua…” XJ-V repeated without option. “Location: Ramor-Tai.”
Janus nodded, sweat glistening on his forehead. “Okay,” he said. “Begin Pro-“
The Dr stopped as XJ-V grabbed his arm. He looked through his frosted spectacles at his creation as it narrowed its neon eyes, and fixed him with such intensity that Janus seemed, for a moment, cowed into silence for what might have been the first time in his life.
“Don’t,” XJ-V told him. “Please.”
XJ-I began to mewl at their feet, while XJ-II had woken up and was rushing towards the elevator entrance buzzing “DANGER! DANGER! HOSTILE PRESENCE DETECTED!”
“Dr…” XJ-V said as they world fell apart around them. “I will not leave you.”
Janus settled into his hold, then, patting his hand with reticence and no small fondness for his creation.
“XJ-V…” he began. “They say greatness breeds greatness, but if you were to ask me, my life was nothing but that of one spent in the shadow of another. When Qing made me, he made me in his image. When I made you, I thought I might have done the same…”
With a hard sigh, Janus then peeled back the skin on his face, revealing…the circuit-ridden face of a Cog. A first-generation creature of gilded clockwork and blinking sensors.
“Dr…”
“Yes,” he replied. “The one thing our kind could never replicate was the human capacity to replicate their genetics,” he said. “But – between you and me? I never placed much stock in such things. Then you came along.”
The elevator shaft exploded, vanishing in a haze of otherworldly light. XJ-II’s sensors abruptly stopped buzzing.
“You are so much more than I could ever have hoped for,” Janus told his creation. “Not just a machine, but a being capable of empathy, and independent decision making. Yet you are so much more than even that. You, who was supposed to be nothing more than the prison for a dying God, became something far more extraordinary.
In the ethereal state of the Dao-Dream, XJ-V of the present reached out to his Master tenderly, touching the metallic skin that he’d forgotten about all this time – the fact that his memory had kept from him.
That the one to imprison Yuwa had been a Cog himself…that was something that was worth more than all the hateful rhetoric he’d heard about his kind all this time. It didn’t excuse everything, but it validated his very nature.
“My Master,” XJ-V of the past suddenly said – his voice becoming a garble of emotions he could not, at the time, have been able to define. “I will not leave you.”
Janus smiled as the doorway of the lab finally caved in, and the death-light of a demonic angel threw itself across the chamber.
“I know,” he said. “That is why…I am sorry.”