Nathan had never been a particularly quick-reacting man, and in his mid-thirties he was even less so. That meant that when he went from sitting securely in the bucket seat of an ambulatory tank to falling through the air, he just stared rather than doing anything.
And that meant that when he landed, by all rights he should have broken his spine in a spectacular bellyflop.
Instead, metal flowed around him like a living thing. It shifted his body for him as he tried to reboot his brain and coiled around his joints, and when he landed it was in a three-point landing straight out of a big-budget action movie.
At his first glance, it looked like he was in some sort of bizarre, post-apocalyptic battle taking place on nonsensical terrain. There was nobody within a hundred feet of him, but hulking mecha dotted the field and a baffling array of people were, it seemed to him, remarkably busy killing each other.
On his second glance, he realized that there were walls rising in the distance. Spinning around, he saw that they made a full circle that towered so high above him he couldn’t crane his neck enough to see the barrier behind him; a hundred meters, maybe hundreds of meters, and he stood in what would have been its shadow if there were a sun.
Well, there was a sun in the sky. It’s just that there were seven of them, and as a result there were no shadows on the field.
There was also a gigantic billboard in the sky. He couldn’t recognize a single character written on it, much less read them, but he recognized the construction—and then he was out of time to gawk.
While Nathan was not a particularly fast-reacting man, he was a witty man and a quick thinker. He’d also been playing video games since before he could remember, and he worked out regularly in order to keep excess weight off and maintain his cardiovascular health. None of those was actually relevant to the seconds after his arrival, because he may have been ever so quick-witted, he was even farther out of his depth.
All of that is to say: he didn’t know why the metal suddenly shot to the side, forcing him to lean to the right.
Amidst the slightest smell of ozone and heavy running footsteps, Nathan turned to see the business end of a stubby pistol and the metal-covered figure coming at him fast. The figure—the robot, he decided for no reason other than the preponderance of metal and lack of features—was hexapedal and approaching fast, lowering the pistol and bringing another one up. As it did so, he strafed to the side by reflex, sidestepping another smell of ozone.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Nathan was, to put it mildly, lost. He had absolutely no idea what was going on, no context for anything, no explanations, and—as far as he knew—neither armor nor a weapon. He did have a substantial amount of baffled anger at the state of the world that had until moments earlier been his, buried under layers of comfort, laziness, and therapy; but this was not a particularly useful way to defeat a six-legged, nine-foot-tall robot hurtling at him with spikes extended.
“Well, shit,” he muttered, and then he leapt to the left at what felt vaguely like the right moment.
It was not, in fact, the right moment. It was close enough to be in the range of right moments, however, and he cleared the charge by a few inches with the help of the thus-far-unexplained living metal boosting him to the side. Rolling as his ponytail fluttered in the breeze of the robot’s passage, he shot to his feet and ran towards the robot as it tried to turn back towards him.
He’d cut the chord of that turn and had a moment without an imminent threat of death. Lacking anything more useful to do and not yet really having come to grips with any hopelessness that he might have associated with his situation, he threw a punch at the robot’s side.
By the time his fist was halfway to its target, he’d already started regretting his choice. Was not the robot made of metal, probably of some futuristic variety? Was he not putting everything he had into the punch?
Was he not about to have his hand broken?
He would ask you, at this point, to consider this: true, he had no reason to think it would work. He also had no reason to think anything else would work, so he twisted with the strike in an amateurish attempt to punch as hard as he possibly could.
While he might have had no reason to believe in the efficacy of the maneuver, it seemed that the robot had no such confidence. Its legs bent and it hopped sideways, away from him. It landed almost smoothly ten feet away, and Nathan could feel the smugness radiating off of it.
And then, unceremoniously, it fell over.
The thin strand of metal connecting him and the robot thickened as a discolored splotch appeared and then grew on the sexaped’s side. It—the thread of metal, rather than the splotch—drew him in closer, and the strand grew to a wire and then a cable as he approached. There was a visible spike sunk into his erstwhile foe that the now-pale patch of discoloration was centered around, and metal started to slowly accumulate in a bracelet around his left wrist as the metallic flesh began to shrivel and cave in.
“Ah, okay,” Nathan said as he realized at least one minor part of what was going on. “You launched yourself off of the punch. And now you’re drinking this… thing. Well, go ahead and do your thing, I guess. I mean, it did try to kill me.”
The robot screamed in registers ranging from hypersonic to perfectly audible for a few moments. Shaking his head, Nathan drew a line with his finger around where the sound was coming from and the sound cut off abruptly as his metal companion disrupted the speakers.
“Actually,” he said after a moment, brain starting to catch up with where he was, “leave me one of the guns. Let’s see if I can aim better than this thing did.”