With a loud groan, Blake Myers exited Hyper Mode, leaned back, and rolled his stiff shoulders. Absent-mindedly, he reached over and massaged what remained of his sore left arm with his right hand. Even though he could adjust his custom prosthetic arm at will, it still made his shoulder ache a bit after wearing it for long periods. The support of his exosuit helped alleviate that burden, but it also meant wearing the suit.
These days, he found himself removing as much of the upper half of the armor as he could to let his body breathe more. He couldn’t remove too much before he lost back support and things went sideways, often literally, but it was better than nothing.
It went without saying, of course, that he only did this when alone, and often not even then most of the time; who knew when Arlette or whoever would randomly barge in? However, down here in the crystal vault, where dozens of meters of earth and rock stood between him and the surface, he didn’t have that worry. Down here, he was alone.
Well, almost alone. The one other person down here didn’t exactly have the luxury of locomotion these days. She wouldn’t be bothering him unless he chose to liven up his evening.
Arlette and Sofie wouldn’t be bothering him today either. They’d rushed out this morning, heading south. His loyal employee had told him where they’d be going, but he hadn’t really been paying attention—he’d been too focused on a certain project to bother with lesser concerns.
Since the day he, Sofie, and Gabriela had discussed his very correct and well-founded explanation for their presence on this world, they’d split the responsibilities between them.
Gabby was the muscle. Her job was to go out and get the things they needed, be it material or people, by force if necessary. Her skillset matched well with the tasks required.
Sofie was the researcher. Her job was to read and translate any new manuscripts they could find in search of new information. Even a sliver of extra knowledge could be the difference between getting home and turning into a crater. Her skillset also jived perfectly with what they needed from her.
Blake’s job was... everything else, or as he thought of it, ‘the hard stuff’. As the only person with even the slightest bit of understanding concerning ancient technology in general and the dimensional piercers in particular, it was up to him to find a way to transport them back to Earth in one piece. Given his lack of degrees in theoretical physics or dimensional mathematics, Blake didn’t feel like his skillset fit with the job much at all.
Figuring out entire fields of theory with little to study but millennia-old machines and the occasional reference found in their tiny collection of ancient writings was a rather unfair ask, but nothing about his last few years had been fair. It wasn’t like he could trust the others to pull something like this off. Still, there was a big difference between being the best man for the job and being the best man available for the job, and he was very much the latter.
That being said, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride as he gazed at the fruits of his labor. Down here, far beneath the surface, stood the world’s only non-ancient dimension-piercing device. That he knew of, anyway.
Though he lacked theoretical comprehension, Blake didn’t need any of that to just copy the work of others, so that’s what he’d done. What stood before him, beside the back wall of his crystal vault, was a near-complete one-to-one recreation of the technology found in the bunker that had brought him here.
He’d studied the bunker at length already, to the point where he knew its structures practically by heart, but he’d found long ago, as far back as middle school shop class, that he learned far more from building something than from studying the completed item. Building something piece by piece forced him to reconsider each piece’s place, its function, how it fit in with the pieces around it, and more in ways that he otherwise wouldn’t have.
Now that he had done all that he could, Blake felt like he understood what was going on much better than before. It was enough for him to lament that he couldn’t recreate all facets of the devices. Everything in the main chamber had been recreated faithfully, along with the machines in the various side chambers that connected to the central apparatus, but what was missing was the non-physical aspects of the setup, like the programming that ran on what were clearly ancient computer consoles. All of that had been lost during the apocalypse all those years ago when the unforeseen loss of the civilization’s power source had wiped everything for good.
Not for the first time, Blake cursed the ancients’ hard-drive-free, all-RAM approach, though he understood the appeal of lightning-fast storage speeds—it was why he’d been an early adopter of SSDs with his personal computers. If he’d lived in a world with seemingly eternally available, steady energy to power technology, he could see himself making the same mistake they’d made. It was like designing for a world without air; why would anybody think to bother?
Still, their lack of foresight way back then meant that today he had a body for his autopsy but very little brain inside that skull to work with. If he were to rig up some hacked-together controls onto this bad boy and fire it up, would it even do anything? He wasn’t sure. Without programming, the machines had managed to scoop him and the others up, after all. Still, he didn’t dare test it and find out. If the system were to fail, there might be catastrophic results; who knew what a partially pierced dimensional wall would bring about? Or maybe the accumulated energy would just explode in his face.
And yet, were his machine to somehow succeed as it was now, the consequences would be even worse. Even if he had never discovered the terrible truth of their existence here, he would never willingly subject another person to what he’d been through. It was the biggest reason he’d never tried to activate the bunker on his own, even though he thought he had more than enough crystals to power the devices there. With what he knew now, though, the thought of willingly pulling more bombs into this world struck him as utter lunacy.
All this was neither here nor there, anyway, because his goal was not to build a machine to suck energy or people from their world to this one but to do the reverse, which would be far more difficult. If the current machine was like a hose using gravity and water pressure to drain water from an above-ground pool, then his machine had to somehow fight against gravity and pressure to blow that water back up into the pool. How exactly he was going to do this still eluded him.
Or, at least, most of it did. One thing he felt pretty confident in was how he was going to get the power needed to stuff himself and the others back up that hose. His gaze turned to the massive cantacrenyx crystal that loomed over the rest of the chamber, a wry grin pulling on his lips.
“Just you wait, you beautiful thing, you,” he cooed to the huge stone as if it were a beloved pet. Walking up to the behemoth, he ran a hand along a smooth side. He could almost feel the power within it thrumming against his palm. “Your time to shine is coming soon. Patience.”
The largest crystal Blake had ever integrated into a device was the one that powered the Flying Toaster. That stone was the third largest he’d ever seen, and yet the second largest, which sat on the opposite end of the chamber near the door, dwarfed it like a full-grown adult dwarfed a four-year-old. That crystal, however, was like a pebble when compared to his darling right here.
Ever since he’d acquired these three gems, the myriad possibilities they presented had been enough to make his mind swim. Yet, he’d held off on using either of the two largest for anything—it wasn’t that he lacked ideas, but none of them felt like the right applications; they lacked the majesty befitting a stone so gargantuan. Now, he was glad for his hesitation. After all, what function could have more magnificence than saving the world?
Like it had a will of its own, the metal of Blake’s suit flowed up from his torso to once again encase his entire body. Bringing up his suit’s clock, he found it was already the early evening. He’d been in his zone longer than he’d thought.
Quickly zipping through menus, Blake activated a function he’d named PrisonCamSummary_3 and waited as the server did its business. Though he was constantly recording audio and video of the guest in his dungeon cell, that didn’t mean he wanted to watch hours of her fidgeting and breathing. He wanted just a rundown of anything notable, and PrisonCamSummary_3 would do just that.
A few moments later, a video began to play before his eyes. It began with a view of Chitra sitting against the left wall of her cell, the cords binding her to the far wall slack enough for her to roam most of her prison; treason or no, Blake wasn’t going to force anybody to stand spread eagle for days and days without end.
Part of him pointed to this and declared that he was going soft; that the old him who’d conquered this place would have subjected Chitra to all sorts of pressures until she gave him what he wanted. He gave that part of him the finger and shoved it down the stairs.
He hadn’t gone soft, he’d just recalibrated to meet the needs of the moment. He didn’t need to break Chitra to get the info he wanted thanks to Sofie, anyway. She had to tell him what he wanted to know. He just needed to figure out what it was that he still wanted to know—or what he, Arlette, and the rest wanted to know.
Maybe he should have paid more attention to what Arlette had come to tell him earlier, after all.
As he watched, Chitra’s head swung gently from side to side as she softly sang a slow, melancholy tune. He found her singing voice to be as mesmerizing as the rest of her—haunting and ethereal, nearly transporting him to another realm even through the less-than-studio-quality microphone in the cell. Though the song struck him as bleak, even perhaps mournful, she did not seem to be sad—rather, she seemed wholly at peace. A traditional or ceremonial song of some sort, perhaps a vestige of her childhood that brought her comfort in trying times?
Abruptly, the scene cut to another one with an altogether opposite vibe. Chitra stood near the back wall, the cables to her ankles and wrists pulled out far longer than necessary for her proximity to the wall from which they came. With the hand furthest from the wall grasping the metal ropes, she began to swing them up and around in a circle and... Was she doing jump rope? Okay, perhaps he needed to be harsher on her after all.
Another abrupt cut—Blake really needed to add in a half-second black screen between these or something; this was getting hard to watch—and this time the Ubran was on her back in the middle of the cell, as far out toward the front and the cell bars as her restraints would allow. She had a thoughtful look on her face as if considering some deep philosophical concept. She muttered something under her breath.
Taking manual control, Blake rewound the video and boosted the volume, hoping to hear what she’d said, only to get mumbled gibberish. Oh, of course. She was speaking her native language, and he’d momentarily forgotten that meaning did not survive recording.
Thankfully, Blake had a speech translation module he could plug into the video playback to give him subtitles. The translation software was still in a sort of long-running beta state as he worked to add more local languages and dialects while he smoothed out the various wrinkles, but it worked well enough.
This was in large part thanks to Tehlmar, of all people. The elf’s spy training had included the ability to use the ‘speak’, as the locals called it, of multiple cultures, including Ubran. It was the most useful the elf had ever been—perhaps the only time he’d been useful, really.
After a few moments of processing, the video resumed with subtitles. Strangely, the program labeled the Batranala’s speak as ‘Otharian’, not ‘Ubran’. It seemed that the language recognition was still a little buggy. Perhaps it was because of how unintelligible her mumbles were?
Still, the program managed to suss out and translate some of it. Most of it was just a word or two in a sentence, surrounded by untranslatable garbage—too little to glean anything from. One sentence, however, made it through intact, and he couldn’t help but fixate on the words: “Hmmm, perhaps he just doesn’t know?”
Who was ‘he’? Was she talking about him? And what was it that he didn’t know?
The rest of the recap didn’t feature much worth remembering. Within moments, Blake was marching out of his crystal vault and down the hall to the nearby prison. The door slid open upon his approach, and he strode in to find Chitra already standing up against the back wall. With an annoyed grunt, Blake triggered the motors in the wall to pull her restraints tight, holding her to the surface.
“How is it that you’re always waiting for me when I show up?” he grumbled.
“I can feel the vibrations of your steps running through the floor,” came the immediate response.
Ah, right. She had to answer his questions, even the ones that were mostly rhetorical.
“Oh, it’s not the sound?” he followed up, marginally curious.
She shrugged. “That too, but not until a bit later than the first vibrations. You’re a rather beefy boy, after all, and all this solid metal is very good at conducting vibrations.”
“Cool,” he flatly replied, reminding himself that he wasn’t here to idly chat. What’s more, something about her was throwing him off a little, and he wasn’t sure what it was or why. “So anyway, what is it that I perhaps don’t know?”
As soon as that devilish grin appeared on her face, Blake knew he’d fucked up somehow.
“Nothing. Why, Lord Ferros, you wouldn’t be spying on a helpless maiden such as myself, now, would you?”
Dammit. He’d let himself be played, and that damned grin only widened as she watched him realize it.
“Yes, nothing,” she continued, snickering. “I simply wanted to know if you were observing me with your oh-so-advanced technology. I never expected you to give me the answer so easily. I’d thought I’d have to put in far more work in the coming days, but alas, it seems your gadgets are the only advanced thing about you.”
“Says the dope who bumbled into every single trap trying to break into my workshop,” he shot back. “And here you are, provoking the one man who holds your life in his hands. Much genius. Very wow.”
“Please,” the Ubran scoffed, “spare me the empty threats. You won’t do anything and we both know it. You might put on a good show, but one peek behind the curtain reveals the falsehoods.”
“The hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I’ve ventured around this piddly, pissant excuse for a nation. I’ve seen your reign and what you call dominance, and I would laugh if it wasn’t so pathetic. The rumors call you a tyrant, but all I find are the actions of a child mimicking an adult, a poor imitation of the ‘what’ without any understanding of the ‘how’ or ‘why’.”
“Hold up... your critique is that I’m not tyrannical enough? Are you serious?”
“Do you think I can lie right now?”
“Bullshit! I conquered this whole place on my own, killed a whole score of people, and now rule the whole nation with a tucrenyx fist!”
Wait, why was he defending his savagery? Eh, that was a question for later. He just didn’t want to lose an argument to a prisoner in his own dungeon! This was about the principle of the thing! It was about defending his honor!
Chitra laughed mockingly, a look of absolute derision in her eyes. “The desperate words of a paper tyrant clinging to the scraps of his self-worth. You know nothing of what tyranny really is!”
“Oh, and you do?”
“Must I remind you once again that I cannot speak falsehoods?”
Suddenly, the mockery on her features vanished, as if she had become a completely different person. She stared at him with solemn eyes, her gaze unrelenting.
“I know true tyranny. I’ve witnessed the depths of its cruelty, the way it twists you into something your old self would not recognize. At first, you fight it, but it is like struggling in quicksand. Soon enough, you find yourself suffocating as you are dragged inexorably deeper beneath the surface until you wind up bargaining with yourself and everything you thought you were—your principles, your hopes and dreams, your very identity—abandoning each and every piece, one at a time, for a momentary gasp of air. True tyranny takes everything from you, and when at last it deigns to allow you a mere handful of meager scraps—that which it deemed so worthless and unimportant that it never even bothered to take from you in the first place—you find yourself thankful for its gracious generosity.”
Blake rolled his eyes. “Jeez, enough with the sudden theatrics. You’re laying it on thicker than a triple-stuffed Oreo.”
“I see your childish mind cannot grasp the vast chasm that separates you from what you believe yourself to be. Perhaps I should dumb it down further for you,” she scoffed. “To put it in words even you could understand, a false tyrant like yourself wants to dominate the mind; a true tyrant dominates the soul. You care about controlling what people think; true tyranny controls what they are.”
“Sure, sure, whatever. Look, I understand that you’re trying to get under my skin and junk,” Blake groused. To his annoyance, her attempts were somewhat working. “But the whole ‘child’ bit is just... you do know I’m older than you, right?”
The haughty, mocking smile returned, and the heavy atmosphere she’d cast over the cell evaporated so quickly that one might think they had imagined it.
“Are you? In some insignificant metrics, perhaps. Yet I can say for a fact that, in all the ways that matter, you cannot even compare. I am the epitome of grace and refinement; you clomp around like a newborn garoph not yet used to standing upright. I have traveled the world, partaking in the grandeur and wonder of the land and the societies that live on it; you barely leave your house. I am an expert in myriad arts; I’d be surprised if you could even handle fingerpaints. I am a world-class consort, a master of the intimate, while you, well...”
Her smile grew so wide that Blake thought it might split her head in two, transforming from disdainful and mocking to downright malicious.
“...I know a virgin when I see one.”
“WOAH WOAH WOAH, HEY!” Blake immediately protested. “Don’t you fucking say that! I am NOT a virgin!”
Chitra responded with a single laugh, harsh and derisive. “Sure, you aren’t.”
“It’s true! I had plenty of girlfriends back on my world!”
“Ah yes, the ‘my girlfriend is real, she’s just in another province so you can’t meet her’ excuse,” she jeered. “Never before met anybody desperate enough to take it to such extremes, though.”
“F-Fuck off!”
“No need to be so hostile,” the beautiful woman chuckled, her voice dropping closer to a whisper. She leaned forward as much as her restraints would allow, her hips swaying subtly but just enough to catch Blake’s notice. “Maybe if you did me a few favors, I could do you one very large favor—that is if your dick even still works.”
Dick.
It was a harsh word, with hard consonants that really stood out to the ear. That was how, at long last, Blake realized what had been bothering him since the start of their interaction.
“Wait, you’re speaking English!” he gasped.
“Ah, you finally noticed? I’ve been doing my best to learn. My honey had to help me with most of it, but you’ve been a wonderful teacher as well.”
More accurately, Blake found that the Batranala was speaking a mix of English and Spanish, though mostly English with a few of the most rare words reverting to Español. As apparent proof of the woman’s claims, even her English sounded as if spoken by somebody with a Mexican accent.
“What’s your game?” he asked warily, eyes narrowing.
“Game?”
“Learning English? Is this another way you’re trying to mess with me?”
“Pah, who says that everything has to be about you? I’m fluent in dozens of speaks; learning them is a hobby of mine. It’s easy. After the fourth one, you realize they all fall into a few categories with shared patterns—even otherworldly speaks, it seems.”
“Bullshit. Why bother to learn the language of a place you will never visit, spoken by only one person in this entire world?”
“But that is exactly why I would want to. A speak spoken by only a single person is the rarest, most valuable speak a collector could ever hope to find—a true miracle, and here I have found several.”
Blake didn’t quite know how to feel about her treating languages like limited-edition baseball cards.
“But still...” he argued, still in disbelief. “To get anywhere this fluent, you would have needed to listen to every word I speak, paying attention to the sound of each one and connecting it with the meaning provided, and committing it all to memory...”
“Do you not? It’s not like it’s that difficult, and it teaches you so much about a culture. For example, have you noticed how much emphasis Stragmans put into speaking verbs, especially those that denote a physical action? A remnant of their past aggressive warrior culture. Conversely, Drayhadans have an absurd number of adjectives to describe the placement of items in a room because they’re a society obsessed with finely-tuned control. Otharians have a startlingly limited vocabulary when it comes to topics of a sexual nature, for reasons that I think would be clear to both of us.”
“And? What does this tell you about English?” he couldn’t help but ask.
“A mess of words that don’t have any coherent aural consistency, leading me to conclude that it is little more than a crude hodgepodge of other more coherent speaks. Also, I couldn’t help but note that like Otharian, there is a startling lack of words related to intimate acts, but that is likely because the only available native speaker is lacking in experience with such—”
“Yeah, okay, that’s enough out of you for now,” Blake grumbled, turning away and heading for the door to the sound of more mockery and laughter.
“Where are you going, big man?” she called after him. “Going to fetch that girlfriend of yours?”
The door closed behind him, bringing a blessed silence with it—aside from the metallic clomps of his boots against the floor as he marched toward the elevator, fuming the entire time.
He wasn’t running away. No, this was just a tactical retreat. He’d come back later after he’d had some food and stuff. Yeah. She’d see.
As he rode the lift up toward the surface, he quickly wrote a new variant of his Chitra monitoring routines, this one designed to monitor her musings live and stream the audio and video directly to his suit—with translation if needed—should she say anything he deemed worth listening to, and immediately activated it. That harlot didn’t know it yet, but she was going to regret pissing him off.
Revenge was a dish best served cold. Chili con carne, on the other hand, Blake preferred warm. Craving something spicy, he’d been pushing the cooks that manned the fortress’s cafeteria to work on a Scyrian equivalent for the last week or so. Today, at last, they’d managed to cobble together something that he judged to be at least a rough facsimile of proper chili. While there was still a long way to go, and the difference in ingredients meant it would likely never get quite to the ideal chili in his mind, this was the first attempt he found good enough to sate his cravings—for the moment, at least.
Bowl in hand, he started to head for his chambers to eat when a notification chime rang in his ear. Damn, it was already time for his lessons with Samanta? It had been some time since he’d last gotten so into the flow that he’d lost nearly a full day. Grabbing a second bowl for the tyke, he made tracks.
Blake found Sam waiting for him outside his rooms. Well, to be more specific, he first found Alpha, the mini-skitter who tagged along wherever she went, as he approached the final corner before the hallway where his rooms currently were. The tiny machine scampered around the bend, said hello by running several laps around his feet and letting out a series of electronic chirps, and then galloped right back around the corner and once again out of view.
Giving the tiny robot to Sam as a pet of sorts had been one of his better decisions, he thought, even if he’d never intended for this outcome. The first robot he’d ever built, Alpha had not originally been designed for such a role. It had not been designed for any role, in truth. Nothing more than a miniature proof of concept, experiment, and training exercise, the purpose had been in the act of creating something that could move and navigate environments on its own. Outside of simply walking, Alpha had not been designed to actually do anything at all.
At first, he’d planned to recycle it after testing its locomotive capacity. Only, the sight of it climbing up on a distressed Sam, who was trying desperately to hold herself together as this unknown thing took a seat atop her head, gave him other ideas. Blake would have loved to say that he’d gifted the little creation to the child as an act of benevolence, but his original motivations had not been remotely so pure.
Initially, he’d found dark amusement in the way she would cower from it like an elephant from a mouse. He’d only reworked it into a true pet later on, vastly upgrading its processing abilities and even throwing in some experimental adaptive learning subroutines to see how it fared. Even then, he’d viewed its primary purpose at the time as a way to monitor the rebellious Otharian child, with being a pet being its ‘cover’ of sorts.
The way it behaved in the present—the way it had bonded with the girl and seemed to bring her some measure of comfort—was not something for which Blake could take much credit. The pair had built that themselves over the course of several years, all on their own. He would still take as much credit for it as he could, however. As Alpha’s creator, it was only his right, after all.
Unlike the jubilant robot, Sam was her usual dour self. Picking Alpha up off the floor and cradling it against her chest, she sent him a displeased scowl.
“You’re late.”
“My bad, my bad. Let’s get started, then.” He held out his bowls for her to see. “I brought lunch.”
Samanta silently inspected their contents, though her dubious expression said plenty. He didn’t blame her. One of the consequences of the Scyrian ingredients was that this dish swapped out the appealing red-brown of Earth chili for a rather sickening brown-green hue, which gave it an appearance regrettably close to vomit. Maybe he could get somebody to figure out food coloring? Eh, too much work for too little reward.
“Trust me, it’s pretty good,” he assured her. Willing the doors open, he entered his chambers and moseyed into the lesson room, Sam quickly trailing behind him.
The lesson room had changed greatly over the months, morphing to fit whatever subject was being taught at the time. Currently, it contained two chairs, a large chalkboard for him to draw circuit diagrams, a smaller handheld chalkboard for Sam to do the same, and a big block of tucrenyx and a bucket of cantacrenyx crystals, with which he could demonstrate all sorts of mechanical concepts.
Sitting down in one of the seats, handed one bowl to Sam and began to tuck into the other. “Eat up so we can get started,” he said between mouthfuls.
She eyed it warily as if it were going to jump out of the bowl and bite her. “...What is it?” she finally asked.
“It’s an attempt at a dish from my world,” he explained, spooning another load past his lips. He closed his eyes and savored the flavor. “Still has a ways to go, but not bad at all. Needs more salt, and too sweet, and the kick isn’t quite right, but still, for something so out of their wheelhouse, not a bad effort.”
Sam gingerly spooned up a small amount and, after a long moment of hesitation, put it in her mouth. The effect was almost immediate. First, her eyes went wide, nearly bulging out of her head, followed by a series of coughs interspersed with gagging. Her face grew red as a beet and he even thought he saw the glistening of sweat forming on her forehead.
“It’s good, right?”
A few more seconds of gagging and spitting later, she looked at him with disbelieving eyes as if he were insane. “Poison!” she gasped out between her desperate panting. “What is this? Everything inside me feels like it’s burning!”
It took all of his self-control to not crack up then and there. Instead, he stood up and entered the nearby restroom to grab her a cup of water. “What do you mean?” he asked as he went. “This isn’t even that spicy. A four out of ten, at best.”
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
He handed the cup to the child, who immediately began to gulp it down as fast as she could.
“Man, you Otharians really can’t handle a lick of spice, can you? That’s just sad.”
“S-shut up!” she sputtered as the last of the water went down her gullet. She let out a single cough, her face looking to Blake like she was about to hurl. “You people are crazy! Why would you ruin perfectly good food like that? Blech!”
With that said, she shoved her bowl as far away as she could, never to be consumed again. “Can we start now?”
“Of course!” he agreed with a smile.
Blake had spent many hours a week for maybe two years now struggling to ‘teach’ this one Otharian child, and to say it had been a struggle was like saying that The Divide was just a few oversized hills. Though her active resistance had faded after a while, nearly every lesson had been like pulling teeth. Blake was not so oblivious that he couldn’t recognize just how unwilling to engage with him and learn she had been, whether she fought him, retreated into passive aggression, or pretended to cooperate to just get through it and then immediately forgot everything.
Still, he persevered. This was too important. This was him winning the argument, the one that had started all those months ago in a run-down farming village the day after his arrival on this world. The one that was him against the entire country of Otharia. The one that had cost him his legs. That argument. As he’d told Samanta long ago, he was going to open her eyes to all the knowledge and glory that she had nearly ripped from this world until she could not help but weep over the horror of what she’d done, and he had never lost sight of that.
Finally, at long last, he felt like this was an argument he was starting to win. The scales were starting to fall from her eyes, and it surprised him not in the slightest that the subject that had brought such a shift about was Engineering, the coolest subject of all no matter what those jocks back in high school said.
The Samanta in Blake’s little two-person classroom was like a totally different kid than the one that used to sit sullenly and say as little as she could. She engaged with the subject matter. She asked questions. She was eager to start every lesson and often asked to continue past the usual stopping time. She would even ask for homework and actually complete it!
At long last, somebody else in this godforsaken realm—other Earthlings included—saw value where he did. Finally, somebody understood. Engineering was badass. Machines were badass. Soon, she would discover that programming was badass too.
“Alright, let’s see what you did today,” he began.
Samanta fished out a folded set of papers from inside her shirt and handed them to Blake. Unfolding them, he inspected each circuit diagram with the discerning eye of a strict professor and smiled at what he saw.
“This is excellent. No corrections. I think it’s time we combined this and the mechanical concepts from before into building your first working, powered machine. A mid-term project of sorts.”
Sam nodded enthusiastically, her little hands balled into fists that quivered with excitement. “What are we going to build?”
“Well, we’ll...” Blake thought about various contraptions that could be built with the basic-to-intermediate knowledge she’d learned so far but stopped himself as a better idea came to him. “Actually, instead of me telling you what to do, let’s make figuring out what you are going to create be the first part of the assignment. I want you to go out there and find a problem that needs solving, and then I want you to design a machine to solve it.”
“Huh? But—”
“Ah, ah,” Blake cut in, “what is the point of machines?”
Sam sighed. “To solve problems and make life better,” she recited in a tired monotone.
“So, if you don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve, how can you make a machine to solve it?”
“...I guess...”
“Great. We’ll take this in three phases. First, find your goal and determine the scope of the problem as well as the scope of your solution. Second is the design work. Be ready, because I’m going to make sure that you properly optimize everything before it gets my approval. Third—”
A thunderous crash drowned out the rest of Blake’s words, joined by a tremor that shook the room with such force that it nearly knocked Blake off his feet. He looked toward the direction of the sound, though of course, he only saw a wall. The sheer force of the sudden event had knocked him mentally off balance, but now his thoughts were starting to catch up to—
A second crash, even more powerful than the first, destroyed Blake’s train of thought and threw him to his knees. The cacophonous outburst rang in his ears, muting the world to all other sounds, but he had heard enough to grasp the situation. The first had told him the fortress was under attack. The second had ruled out explosions as the cause. Behind the initial hit, he’d heard the sound of tucrenyx straining and failing against force beyond what it could handle. It was a familiar sound, one he’d recognized anywhere after several years of working with and fighting using the Scyrian metal—hell, just his battle with Gabriela alone had permanently seared the noise into his memory. No, these were not explosions. These were the sounds of something buckling and punching through the walls and floors of his home.
Blake could tell that these booms were coming from within the central area of the fortress—he wasn’t quite up on his fortress terminology; the keep, perhaps?—where he lived and most of the administrative offices were located, rather than from the large fortress walls. That meant, what, somebody was throwing them over the wall? With a catapult, or maybe even a trebuchet?
But, surely there was no way that anybody could get something like that close enough without being noticed. They’d have to somehow bring the weapon deep into the city, which seemed nearly impossible—and that didn’t even include carting in the ammunition itself. Whatever was hitting them had to be large, conspicuously so.
Still, just to be sure, Blake began to quickly check the streets on that side of the fortress, but saw nothing out of the ordinary—
A third impact rocked the facility, this one farther away than the others and on the opposite side, but still violently loud.
What in the hell? He switched his view to the streets on that end and, just like before, sees little he would deem noteworthy. No large objects that don’t look like they belong. In fact, the only out-of-place sight were the people fleeing from the area around his fortress. On second thought...
Zooming in, Blake looks over the retreating Otharians. Most are watching where they’re going or glancing back toward the fortress, but a significant number of people seem to be looking in one other direction—up, as in, high up. Nearly straight up.
A chill ran down Blake’s spine. Had the dragons finally made their move? But he had dragon detection systems in place now. Surely he would have received warning ahead of time... unless he’d fucked up with the design or implementation of the detectors. Surely he hadn’t, right? Blake had great confidence in his creations—after all, he was the one who’d designed and built them—but when dealing with a force like giant lizards capable of turning a city into a crater, it paid to triple-check.
A pit of dread building larger and heavier in his gut by the second, Blake frantically skimmed through the notifications for his nationwide detection system, entering Hyper Mode to blaze through as fast as possible. Finding nothing that seemed relevant, he switched over to the debug logs and began poring over the sea of detailed output from the last hour. For the first fifty-seven minutes, he couldn’t find anything that appeared out of the ordinary. It was only in these last three minutes, just before the start of the attack, that he found something odd.
High above the fortress, directly atop it, the system had detected the appearance of four large objects and a fifth smaller object. Given that none of them remotely resembled a dragon, the system had not considered them a threat. The four large objects, appearing to the system as roughly spherical, had been marked as likely balloons of some sort and would appear in the night’s automatic report as non-threatening. The smaller object had been determined to be a fairly large bird, which meant it had been deemed entirely unremarkable.
Maybe he’d have to reexamine the design of his systems after all.
Luckily, being deemed report-worthy, even if otherwise determined to be non-threatening, meant that the system would save a picture for later viewing. Blake instructed the system to bring up the images of the four ‘balloons’ for his inspection, finding his impatience growing as the server took a few minutes—for his sped-up mind, at least—to bring them up. His system was not designed to be used in this sort of way, so he had no choice but to wait.
At last, the pictures flashed into his vision. At first, Blake just felt confused, unable to parse what he was seeing. Everything looked rather low resolution, which he quickly realized was because the objects were so high up that the only way to get a decent image of them was to zoom in on the full image rather heavily.
The small object thought to be a bird was little more than a dark blotch of pixels, nearly impossible to make out. The other four, however, had just enough detail that he could at least try to figure out what they might be. Though their outlines sometimes jutted out a bit one way or another, they all generally shared the same ovoid shape.
They shared the same general color palette as well: grey and tan that seemed to run through them all in relatively straight lines. The colors reminded him somewhat of hikes he’d taken as a college student through some of the more beautiful parks in states like Utah.
Wait...
Suddenly, Blake knew where he’d gone wrong. You see, when it comes to designing and programming systems, it’s impossible to build something capable of handling everything that could ever happen. To make any system feasible, you have to set limitations and work with assumptions about what is possible and what is not.
Writing something to predict the path of a baseball? Then you would assume that gravity exists. Writing a store for a website? You might assume that any purchase would have person with a name and credit card as the buyer.
Faced with the impossibly complex task of analyzing thousands of images every minute to find a dragon, Blake had been forced to rely on several rules and assumptions. Writing something that could identify any object in an image would be nigh impossible given how many things existed in the world.
But, he’d reasoned, the system would only ever be looking up at the sky, so the only things it needed to recognize were things that would be found in the sky: clouds, birds, his flitters, the Flying Toaster, dragons, etc. If he pared down the list of objects to look for to only those things, the task became feasible.
That was how he’d erred. His failure had been, in a sense, not poor logic, but rather a lack of imagination. On his list of ‘things to identify’, he had failed to put ‘boulder’, because that was not something that would be found in the sky.
Except, those were definitely boulders—huge ones, from what he could tell—and they were most definitely floating in the air high above his fortress. Or, at least, they had been. But wait, there looked to be four in that image, but the fortress had been hit by only thr—
He almost felt the sound of impact before he heard it. With a pained gasp, Blake was thrown—both literally and figuratively—out of Hyper Mode, falling flat on his back hard enough to send a spike of pain running up his spine. The crash of rock slamming through metal echoed in his deafened ears as he stumbled to his feet. That last impact had hit close by—maybe just a few rooms away from his quarters—with enough force to send his head spinning. Quickly looking around, he found Sam huddling fearfully in a nearby corner of the room, Alpha clutched tightly against her trembling chest.
“Run down to the lower floors! As low as you can go!” he hollered, hoping she could hear and understand him, given that he could barely hear himself. With that said, he sprinted out of his quarters and down the hall, signaling every door to open as he went.
Three rooms down, he found the site of the last impact: Sofie’s quarters. The door at first refused to open properly, so he had to melt it away. What greeted him on the other side was less of a three-room apartment than a large pit with half a bathroom still attached. The evening light leaked through a massive gaping hole in the ceiling, illuminating the bent, buckled, and torn metal above. It looked like the remains of a sheet of tin foil after having a pebble shoved through it. No, he thought, more accurately, it looked like the metal of a car door with a bullet hole in it, viewed from the inside. His fortress had been shot four times.
The massive rock, perhaps thirty-five to forty feet in diameter, made quite the bullet. It had punched right through the roof, the three floors above, Sofie’s room, and come to a stop in the floor below—which meant, if it was as tall as it was wide, it had broken through another few floors below that, nearly making it to the ground floor.
Tucrenyx was an incredibly durable metal with high tensile strength, and his floors were each about two feet thick on every storey, with the roof being about three feet thick. Blake’s intuition told him that, even falling from a high height, there was no way that a boulder even that large would penetrate so deep. These rocks hadn’t been simply dropped; they’d been thrown—hurled, even—and with great speed.
The sight blew away the hazy, confused urgency that had filled his mind, replacing it with indignant fury. This was his home, his creation. Somebody was attacking his home, and he would not take that lying down.
But who was responsible? Looking up through the puncture, Blake failed to find anything but the open sky, its blue beginning its evening transition towards yellow and orange. He’d have to get outside, or maybe quickly repurpose some of the flitters that surveilled the area to look up rather than down. Actually, the latter seemed smarter right now. No need to go outside and make himself a target. Just because they’d detected four boulders didn’t mean that there weren’t more.
A moment later, four flitters zipped down through the gaping hole above and came to rest by Blake’s feet. The task of modifying the main cameras to stick out of the top of their bodies instead of the bottom took only a few seconds. He just had to flow the cameras up, flip them around, and rewire the logic that had previously filled those spaces to run through the now vacated areas. He didn’t even need Hyper Mode for this one.
As he worked, the ringing in his ears finally subsided enough for him to hear the outside world again. At first, he wasn’t sure what the sounds gracing his ears were, but as the ringing grew ever softer, he realized what it was: screams. Terrified screams, sobs, and wails coming from seemingly all around.
Right, shit. There were more people in this place than just him and Sam. The working day had ended a little while ago, so hopefully most people had left, but apparently enough people were still around. How many had died already? What about the injured? What about the rest of the people still here? What about those who’d left for the city, for that matter?
The city... Well, he had set up the emergency siren signal system for just this sort of thing, hadn’t he?
One quick moment of focus later, and Blake could once again barely hear anything as the siren installed atop the fortress’s observation tower began to howl, its message clear to all: get as far away from the center of the city as possible, now.
A moment later, his four converted drones buzzed up and out of his perforated castle, eyes pointed way up and searching for something, anything, that seemed to defy the laws of gravity. Worryingly, the seconds ticked by as the siren wailed its urgent cry, yet none of his converted drones seemed able to find anything up above the city. Taking manual control of one of the flitters, Blake began a frantic visual search, only to join his robotic minions in failure. There seemed to be nothing in the sky but air and the occasional cloud.
Now what? If his attackers weren’t in the sky, then where had they gone?
The answer came in the form of the fortress’s alarm. Without warning, its cry changed, its tone warping and rising in a way that brought the image of somebody being choked to death to his mind. Then, a heartbeat later, with a decisive crunch, the noise cut out altogether, leaving nothing but an uneasy silence.
With a curse, Blake rotated the drone he was currently controlling to look lower; he’d had his cameras focused high in the sky, looking right past where the attackers might be! The view panned down, and he blinked and rubbed his eyes.
Something hovered just above the top of his fortress’s observation tower. It took him a moment to realize that that something was a person—or, at least, part of a person. He could make out a head, as well as what looked like a torso wrapped in filthy, tattered rags, but that was about it.
His mind struggled to understand. Who this person was, what they were doing here, and how they were doing all of this. Along with that came a related and perhaps even more important question: was this another person from Earth? He suspected that was the case, which greatly complicated things. Apartment-sized boulders aside, the feat of levitation they were casually displaying at this very moment was alone more than anything he’d ever seen a Scyrian pull off.
He thanked the stars that Sofie wasn’t around; she’d probably run out and try to talk, and then end up dead—or, in that Sofie-like way, somehow survive anyway to his utter befuddlement. Blake wasn’t fully discarding all thoughts of communication, but he had no plans to try face-to-face contact until he had the upper hand—the upperiest of hands, honestly. But when they at last turned their gaze directly toward the drone under his control, something about their gaze didn’t give him much hope for success.
Without any sign of warning, the feed cut off, leaving him in blackness. A split second later, the sound of his robot’s demise worked its way down through the gaping hole in his fortress and into his ears. This one sounded far higher-pitched, a crinkling crunch that reminded him of the sound of somebody stomping on an empty soda can.
Before he could even register his surprise, the second of his converted drones went offline, another crunch following right after. Then, the third. Crunch! The fourth. CRUNCH! In the span of a few seconds, all four of his modified drones went offline, and none had been closer than a few hundred feet from the attacker.
A foreboding set of possibilities began to take form within his mind, years of comic book and anime consumption serving as fertile ground for a bevy of increasingly unlikely explanations for all he’d seen so far. Then again, it didn’t much matter what it turned out to be; his countermeasure was always the same, regardless: an army of autonomous death machines, of course.
With just a few commands, every active skitter from the fortress to the city limits turned toward their new target, ready for battle. Their scattered deployment would prevent any real semblance of order and coordination between them; the when and where of each of their arrivals would be too random unless he purposely held units back, and that meant delays in a situation where that seemed a bad idea. He’d just have to make do.
Another quake shuddered through the floor beneath him, showing that his adversary wasn’t going to just sit around and wait to be shot. Starting almost imperceptibly but quickly gaining in strength, the low groan of straining metal filled his ears and filled him with sudden dread. Before he even knew what he was doing, his feet were pounding down the hall and up a nearby stairwell, sprinting toward the source of the dreadful noise.
Blake knew that sound. As an engineer, he was very familiar with the different sounds of metal pushed beyond its limits—and there were different sounds. What he heard now was quite different than the screeches of boulders tearing through fortress floors. No, this was a sound he’d come to learn intimately during his years in college as he worked through mistake after mistake on term projects and assignments. This was the groan of metal being stretched beyond what it could bear - the squeal of it being slowly pulled apart. And, judging by just how low it sounded, it was a lot of very thick metal, like that of a bridge about to collapse.
Every step brought him closer, the shaking intensifying, the volume of protesting metal growing louder. Though it was hard to tell without something else to compare against, he got the feeling that the hallways were starting to slope upward the further he went, the thought of which only pushed him to move faster. Just a few moments later, he arrived at the floor’s central elevator and found that his fears were more than justified.
The scene was a mess even though he stood several floors below the top of the fortress. The floor, walls, and ceiling ahead were warped and stretched almost beyond recognition, the formerly straight path twisting up and to the right. The far wall with the elevator doors was just as bad, if not worse. The door frame looked like something out of a funhouse mirror with how distorted it appeared, the top more than two feet to the right of the bottom.
The groaning intensified, and Blake watched in horror as the elevator wall twisted even further with an ear-splitting screech. Metal buckled in places and began to tear in others. With his ability, Blake did his best to repair the damage, liquefying and resolidifying the metal in an attempt to reset the molecular structure and strength even if he couldn’t fix the shape, but what he could do here was limited. This one hallway was just on the periphery of the damage. The real disaster was far greater: a lunatic was trying to rip the entire observation tower and the elevator shaft right out of the fortress, and they were somehow succeeding.
The sound of metal shearing apart somewhere above made Blake cringe. With his breath hissing through gritted teeth, he watched as the single most iconic feature of his fortress, the one part that he made sure to alter as little as possible whenever he felt the need to redesign the rest of the fortress interior, was torn off like a weed in a garden. His whole world shook as the metal shaft rose floor by floor, grinding against the rest of the structure as it went. And then... there was another hole in his home.
With the mindset of a man forcing himself to look at a dead body, Blake approached this latest perforation and looked up. His beloved observation tower, now horizontal, hovered almost lazily in midair beside the mysterious attacker. The still-confusingly shaped thing seemed to be looking around the fortress for something from above, though he couldn’t say what for.
Suddenly, the attacker’s head whipped to their left, and they zipped behind the floating tower just as a hail of bullets punched into the tower’s thick exterior. Blake smiled. His first skitter had arrived on the scene.
Now, how would the enemy respond?
To Blake’s initial confusion, the attacker responded by rotating the tower back upright and ducking inside from the open bottom. Then, the tower wall began to tear above them, the rip circling the cylinder as if it were being cut by a giant, invisible can opener. Once the break finished circumnavigating the tower, the new piece detached from the tower’s bottom end and floated around the being, a ring of metal ten feet tall forming a sort of three-hundred-sixty degree shield of metal many feet thick.
Blake clicked his teeth with dissatisfaction. His skitters had some very powerful guns, but very few could punch through that much metal. Even the ones that could would need to fire at the same spot non-stop for several moments before breaking through.
At least he still could rely on the power of numbers; that ring could be angled, but it still left its top and bottom unprotected. More skitters would be arriving any moment now. As long as the one already there could keep them pinned down—
The tower rose high, almost as if gripped in the hand of an invisible giant, before slamming down on the out of view skitter like a rolled-up magazine in the hand of a housewife splatting an unlucky roach. The blow struck the fortress like a drumstick against a drum head, the blow reverberating through the structure with such force that Blake instinctively put his hands to his ears even though his helmet was in the way.
Blake staggered down the hallway, away from the hole. Though his ears rang, he thought he heard the sound of more gunfire somewhere over the din. This was answered a moment later by a second blow, then a third. Head pounding, he found himself needing to put an arm against the nearest wall to keep from falling over.
How did that saying go? “Discretion is the better part of valor”? Suddenly, Blake found himself feeling especially valorous. Yeah, perhaps it was time for him to beat a strategic, temporary retreat—get some distance first before mounting a counterattack. Let his robots handle this for now. It was time to make tracks.
Blake’s new plan lasted all of twenty seconds. He’d barely gotten down the hallway when something seized him, pinning his arms to his sides and flattening him back-first against the hallway’s side. It was like a weight was pressed against his chest—not enough to crush him, but enough to keep everything from his hips to his neck immobile. Blake twisted and thrashed as hard as he could, to no avail. Struggle as he might, even Blake's enhanced strength proved impotent against this unseeable force.
So... it turned out to be telekinesis after all--maybe the worst of the various explanations he'd considered. Invisible, long-range, versatile, and hard to counter. Well, shit. Why couldn’t his life ever be easy?
Then he saw them, floating within the former elevator shaft, their gaze locked right on him. A circle of tucrenyx, much reduced to fit inside, hovered around them like a bulletproof cloak. A single vertical rent in the front was the only gap through which they could see each other, but it was enough.
Smoothly and silently, as if they were a ghost, the attacker floated closer, until they hovered right in front of him. At last, Blake got an up-close look at their invader, and his first thought was that he felt like he was going to vomit. His second thought was that what he saw explained just why he hadn’t been able to make sense of them at a distance.
Levitating before him was, without a doubt, the most mutilated person Blake had ever seen. They were missing not one, not two, not three, but all four limbs, severed right at the hips and shoulders so not even a stump could be seen for any of them. That alone was enough to throw off his recognition from afar and make him want to retch, yet somehow, something else made it far, far worse.
Almost the entirety of this person’s body, or what remained of it, was marred by horrid-looking burn scars from what must have been terrible third and even fourth-degree burns in the past. Much of what he could see, especially the entire right side of their face, looked like their skin had melted from the heat, giving them the horrifying appearance of a half-melted human candle. A fogged white eye stared blankly at him from amidst the charred flesh.
Only the upper half of the left side of their face seemed entirely unscathed, running from just beside their nose up past the eye and covering some of their scalp on that side. Judging by that small untouched area, they seemed to be of African ancestry, and by the lack of wrinkles, fairly young at that—under forty, at least. That was about all he could safely say with nothing more to work with than a small patch of bare skin, a few wisps of curly black hair, and a single intact brown eye.
All-in-all, beneath the disgust, Blake couldn’t help but feel a pang of empathy for somebody who had somehow been dealt an even worse hand than he had. He had trouble believing that this person was even breathing. Then again, they had busted up his home, probably killed some of his workers, and were currently pinning him to a wall, so there was only so much sadness he was capable of at that moment.
Then again, this person had the telekinetic strength to lift and crush tons of metal, and yet they had not killed him. The fact that they hadn’t pasted him the moment they saw him meant there was the possibility of dialogue, right? Shouldn’t he at least try? Sofie would castigate him if he didn’t even try.
“Well, this is not exactly how I like to meet new people,” he chuckled with false bravado. “You break into and bust up other people’s homes often? How about maybe you introduce yourself?”
The person looked at him almost robotically with that single working eye, showing no signs that they’d even heard him. Their gaze felt vacant, as if they stared at him through a different sort of fog, one more metaphorical than the literal sort afflicting the other eye.
“Hello?” he pressed. “Anybody in there?”
Some invisible force latched onto his helmet and began to pull, trying to rip the metal mask away. Before they could do so, and wrench his neck in the process, Blake gave in and let the metal melt away, revealing his face to his assailant. The pressure vanished, and they paused to take a good look at him. After a few moments, they let out a gargling grunt that Blake’s mind interpreted as nothing more than, “Yes. You.”
Without another word they turned and headed for the elevator shaft, Blake being pulled along behind them. He mentally shrugged. He’d tried it the peaceful way, but there were limits. There was no way he was going to let this weirdo kidnap him or whatever their goal here might be.
Their tactic of surrounding themselves in a cloak of tucrenyx was an effective one to protect themselves from bullets coming from outside, but unfortunately for them, it also came with a critical flaw. The cantacrenyx crystals remained inside like small hidden bombs, waiting to go off, and Blake had spent the time while they’d held him to the wall rewiring them all to go off on command. The moment he felt the energy within them reach the breaking point, he triggered the switch, dumping a final surge of energy into the circuit and causing the crystals to rupture all at once.
A swarm of shrapnel filled the interior of the assailant’s little safe zone, and they let loose a high-pitched cry—so, a woman, then?—as metal punched into her from all sides. The psychic grip around Blake’s body faltered before falling away entirely.
The moment his feet touched the ground, Blake threw himself backward through the wall behind him, using his control of metal to let him pass through without creating a hole. As he did, he grabbed a bit of extra building material and reconstructed his helmet around his head; while it wouldn’t offer much protection, he needed the surveillance and control capabilities that only its heads-up display could provide.
Momentarily, he debated returning to the fight but decided against it. From what he’d seen, the wounds he’d inflicted, while painful, were not deep enough to be anything more than superficial. He’d succeeded in getting free at the cost of, from the sounds of the shrieks coming from the other side of the wall, royally pissing off the mutilated woman. If he got caught again, there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t pop him like a pimple the moment she had him in her clutches. Best not to let that happen.
Time to book it. He momentarily considered being bait, leading her on a wild goose chase through this fortress while his forces gathered and flanked her, but decided it was too much of a risk to his life without providing much in return. Instead, he decided on a safer plan:
1. Get the fuck out of Dodge and away from Miss Smashy—currently in progress
2. Gather a critical mass of skitters somewhere they could overwhelm her defenses—also currently in progress
3. Get her to enter the trap
4. Win
Simple enough. If he managed to lose her, it wasn’t like he wouldn’t know where she was. His fortress was chock full of security cameras. He’d be able to find her easily through their feeds or just by watching to see which cameras went offline most recently.
WHAM!
The wall he’d just passed through buckled in like a car door in a side-on collision, reminding Blake that ‘if he managed to lose her’ was a very iffy contingency, and he had to get a move on now while he still could if he wanted to make it happen. Taking off for the opposite wall, he risked a glance back just as he passed through the metal, and what saw only spurred him to run faster. The thick wall was being pushed aside much like somebody would push aside a window curtain. It looked to be about as easy too, with the metal crumpling like tin foil. And behind the folding metal floated the woman, now even more messed up than before.
Blood dripped from all over what was left of her form, at least a dozen shards of metal embedded in her front alone, including two in her face, and one especially large one jammed into her ribcage. Somehow, her single working eye made it through untouched, though a dribble of blood ran from a cut above it down into the eye, lending it an especially demonic appearance—not that such embellishments were necessary. Her eye practically glowed with wrath so scalding that it honestly terrified him.
This was different than the somewhat cold, controlled, terminator-like rage he’d faced when fighting Gabby. This was an unhinged, white-hot, abyssal fury of an almost berserk nature, the sort that didn’t care what happened as long as the objects of their ire suffered. The sort where setting the whole world aflame wasn’t just a price they would gladly pay to get what they wanted, but was a goal in and of itself. The sort that wanted to inflict pain for pain’s sake alone. The sort that could never come into being from just one event, but had to be built up over years and decades, bubbling just under the surface like a geyser, waiting to erupt.
Blake saw anger that put to shame even the burning rage he’d felt when he’d lost his legs, and it chilled him to his core. Immediately calling an audible, he abandoned his initial route—which started with him weaving a path through the current storey for as long as possible—and quickly sank himself through the floor instead.
That decision potentially saved his life, as the wall he’d just put between him and her lasted all of two seconds before it, too, was little more than scrap thrown to the side. His head passed through the floor just as the remnants of the wall flew through the space he’d just occupied, and he caught one last glimpse of his wrothful pursuer before he was through.
It was that glimpse that told him that he couldn’t stop, so he let himself fall through a second floor. Pain shot up his spine as he hit the metal awkwardly, but he couldn’t let that stop him now. He could hear the crash of the floor two stories above falling onto the ceiling above his head. That ceiling would be next. He took off in a sprint, weaving through rooms and hallways with barely a plan, relying on his knowledge of the fortress’s layout and instinct to guide him.
And so, he ran, the incessant pounding and breaking of walls and floors right behind him a constant indicator that his plan was not exactly working out; he couldn’t even manage the first step! And, while he wasn’t quite sure, it kind of felt and sounded like Madam Torso was gaining ground on him, slowly but surely.
The act of ‘liquefying’ a metal was one of the foundational techniques that allowed Blake to work his magic and was the big reason he was still breathing today. It would be an oversimplification to say that liquefying was simply a matter of reducing the metal’s viscosity, but only a bit of one.
In a sense, especially for the situation at hand, he was effectively doing exactly that: turning a hard solid into not just a liquid but as thin of a liquid as he could. The problem was, that didn’t do anything about the tucrenyx’s mass. Whether you had to run through a wall of water or molasses, you still had to push the matter aside to move through it.
Lower viscosity helped ease that burden, but it could only help so much. Every wall and floor fought his passage just enough to slow him down by a fraction of a second. The other options were to use the doors or to just melt holes in the walls and run through them. The former would add extra steps that would only slow him down more, if there even was a door there to use, while the latter would just create a trail for Floaty McCrush to fly through, and she was surely faster than him when there was nothing in the way.
Meanwhile, his pursuer was getting better at punching through walls as she got more practice.
Heart pounding in his chest, blood pumping in his ears, Blake took a left, then a right, and then another left before skidding to a stop. Changing the floor beneath him from solid to liquid, he began to fall through like before. As he did, he took advantage of this short moment where he wasn’t sprinting for his life to set up the second step, diving into Hyper Mode for a split second to coordinate his units and summon every one nearby to the ground floor pillar room—the same room which had been the site of the conclusion to his intense battle with The Monster. The chamber was just about the only place that would work for his idea; no other one was large enough to hold the large number of robots he would need, and his creations were too big to get up to higher floors, anyhow.
Returning to normal reality as his helmet finished slipping through, Blake looked down just in time to spot the pair of upturned chairs and the knocked-over table occupying his landing area, their protruding legs ready to turn a clean landing into a disaster of twisted limbs. After the initial split second of panic, Blake remembered that this was his turf, where even the chairs and tables were entirely metal. With a thought, they turned soft and melted against the bottoms of his boots like they were made of silly putty.
Blake took a deep breath and tried to quickly center himself. Looking around, he realized that he’d ended up back in the lesson room where he’d been with Samanta before they’d been so rudely interrupted. Thankfully, Sam had listened well and was no longer present. All that remained was a single still-upright table with an uneaten bowl of chili con carne perched near the closest edge.
Well, no time for reminiscing. Blake decided to pass down another floor before continuing on his escape. He made it halfway through before the ceiling caved in on the other side of the room, the force and noise so strong that it sent his helmet rattling. The crumpled floor crashed down like a meteor, slamming into the floor and crashing down upon the far end of the one still-upright table. The table flipped, the side closer to Blake hurtling up as the bent ceiling drove the opposite into the floor, flinging the bowl of imitation Mexican cuisine right toward the newly opened gap. The chili, as if it were the final payload of an overly elaborate trap from a Home Alone movie, splashed all over the descending woman, from her face down to what remained of her hips.
It was the kind of luck normally reserved for main characters with plot armor, the type that people like Sofie seemed to take for granted, not the sort of luck that had followed Blake since his arrival on this damned world. To think that somebody had even worse luck than he... Just how many kittens had this woman kicked in her past life to get this sort of karma?
With a furious growl, Madam Torso began to wipe away the uneaten stew with her telekinetic powers, pausing in her pursuit. That image was the last of her that Blake saw before he was through the floor and running through the empty lobby of the Ministry of Finance’s offices.