As the armored car pulled to a stop, Yue was already opening the door; bent on getting this next stop over with quickly. She considered, for a moment, just taking to the air and doing the rest of this without the armored car... her own ability to fly, something to do with electromagnetic fields, was much more sophisticated than her brother's rough and brutal approach of using high-intensity jets of flame to fly around like a jet.
Neither of them tended to actually do that; while it was safe enough; she could build up so much charge that a fired bullet would be blasted out of the sky by lightning on its path towards her; and Tai was even safer; he could get the surrounding air so hot it would flash-vaporize lead.
They couldn't fly -together- however. Each of them would kill not just their surrounding environment, but also their sibling, if they did this too close to each other. Riding in the car let them be together, relaxed, protected from any stray sniper rounds. Even now, a dozen soldiers would be patrolling the village before they launched the next wave, making sure no machines were ready to ambush the twins.
This place... was quaint. A small village, middle of nowhere. Nothing important, nothing anyone would care about aside from whoever had lived here; and they were either dead or had fled south into guatemala. Not a single building was intact. Nothing had survived. As she could hear Tai stepping up behind her, she reached down to pick up a beautifully carved slab of stone that appeared to have once been mounted to someone's roof...
There were hundreds of them. Most broken. This building had its entire roof covered with these beautiful carvings while it was still upright. This must have taken years of work. Did they carve them, then put the roof together? She regretted the destruction for a moment; she would have liked to see this home standing upright. She struggled for a moment with the panel.. and Tai chuckled, stepping in close, and helping her lift it up.
"Are we collecting souvenirs there, sister?"
A soft click sound. Yue stared at Tai, open-mouthed. Shocked at something...Tai looked confused for just a moment.... before there was an abrupt, sharp pain in his back. As something started to burrow into his flesh, he let out a scream of agony, the temperature began to spike...
A bright flash of light, of intense heat. The machine and its wires rapidly became so hot they went from solid to liquid to gas in a matter of moments, the control box meeting a similar fate. His blood dried around the injury site.
Moments after the controller had started to attach to Tai, he was standing there, naked, alone... in a blast crater, shockwaves expanding in every direction. The only remaining sign of his sister, or the guards who had been there to help, were shadows on the walls formed during the moment of intense heat.
Tai looked at the spot his sister had stood, moments before. Dropped to his knees, staring down. Horrified. His hand went to his shoulder; the nasty wound that had been flash-cauterized by his own instinctive reaction.
He looked to the north. To the countryside filled with these... machines. These errant gadgets given life by some soviet lunatic.
He closed his eyes. He'd been so set on taking it slow, following orders, preserving the lives of these civilians, he'd put what really mattered at risk; his own family, the people of the middle kingdom.
Yue had been right. This approach was a mistake. He should have been moving along in the air, running so hot that nothing could reach him and actually hurt, with Yue coming in from the north, doing the same thing. Turn this entire country into ash, cleanse it of this horrific infestation, and start over anew. Every moment they held back put their entire species at risk.
As more soldiers started to move forward, to attempt to check on the vanguard, and on the twins... they saw a ball of brilliant blue-white light rising into the air.. and start moving forward; making a steady path, east to west, incinerating a miles-wide path as the sphere steadily rolled along the landscape.
****
Far overhead, troops were advancing south, alongside villains, heroes, mercenaries; anyone the government could find that was willing to fight to save humanity. Mexicali was a nice start; but if the Lord of Iron could repeat his performance, and the machines continued to follow their existing pattern and cluster in cities... they would continue moving south, one town at a time.
Even better, if the machines didn't cluster in the cities? there were metas and weapons that could clear them out even more effectively. And as awe-inspiring as The Iron Lord's performance turned out to be when he really went all-out, he was far from the only impressive hero or villain. While there were casualties, they were fairly limited; as it turned out, Fade had been accurate; Eyeball's simple advice and guidance concerning armor and tactics against them had saved thousands of lives so far.
A solitary Humvee and a handful of soldiers with a 20mm MG mounted to its top were waiting by the hole, to give those descending a ride to the front... and to provide power to the pulley system to let them retrieve the soldiers more easily when they were finished. And beneath them...
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The tunnel was very precise in its dimensions; an almost perfect circle, aside from the extrusions that were clearly natural caves.
Their initial descent had come to an abrupt halt; as Eyeball sent Kin and Brees back up to get respirators; as soon as his feet touched down, his helmet warned him it was filtering something out of the air; and had activated his rebreather system, just in case, sealing off completely. It would give him about two hours of air in an emergency situation.
Cobalt seemed unaffected, so far; and decided to stay down, while the other two returned minutes later with gas masks of their own.
As Kin settled on the floor, looking down the seemingly endless tunnel, he glanced at Eyeball. "What do you think sort of gas this is? Harmful?"
"If this tunnel was built by the machines, the easiest way to make it harmful for humans would just be to vent the gases caused by production in here. You run any sort of large-scale production in a confined, unventilated room, and pretty soon the only thing that could breathe in there would be a cockroach. Failing that... I'd fill it with an inert, unbreathable gas that limits ignition. But this is a soviet-era AI built by a madman. Who knows how it thinks."
Raising his grenade revolver, with a Breacher Cam in the barrel, he started to advance down the tunnel, just a meter or two behind Cobalt; with Brees and Kin trailing behind, rifles at the ready. Brees was looking at a handheld camera, watching the feed of a tiny drone floating hundreds of meters away, scouting the tunnel; and a second moving the opposite direction. A few minutes down the hall, Eyeball stopped; raised his arm.. and slid out an EMP grenade. "Back up, back up!"
As the men sprinted back towards the entrance, Eyeball timed things precisely, tossing the grenade forward... and just as it landed, a hatch in the roof, looking almost perfectly seamless with the rocks, dropped open; and dozens of controllers fell through. At first, starting to crawl towards the men.. only to stop, as the grenade went off; and the nearby lights all shorted out.
Eyeball tested his helmet; he'd made it far enough away, good, it all still worked.
Brees gave a chuckle. "Shit, Eyeball. Nice to be working with somebody literally psychic. Couldda used you back in the desert."
"I was in the desert. I was discharged against my will. Didn't you see the news?"
The laughter came to an abrupt stop. "Oh. Sorry, man."
"Ehh. They didn't think I was valuable enough to keep, at that point. If they had... who knows. I might have the Black Death as my biggest kill instead of Lightning."
For the next few minutes, they continued to move forward, a bit faster, more confident now. Brees called out an alert; there were doors up ahead. Heavy-duty, metal doors the drone couldn't see through, on either side of the hall. As they approached that section of tunnel, Eyeball stopped, holding the breach cam forward... and glanced back at the others. "You got anything that can pop this tunnel? Make the whole thing collapse? A few of my AP shells might do the job, but..."
Brees reached into a backpack, and withdrew two cylinders, each about the size of his fore-arm. "A bit of C-4 do the job for you? Pick the right spot and these babies will make the whole thing go down."
Eyeball nodded. "On the other side of that door? There are about twenty racks of fabricators. No design I've ever seen; I suspect they've been customized, purpose-built for making more machines. There's another hole leading straight up, and probably hundreds of bots. If we go any further forward, they'll probably jump out at the ideal moment to get us from both sides. I bet if we start running, machines are going to start flooding out of that place like ants. I want you to set them both off, throw them as hard as you can; one now, one after we get further down the tunnel, and then we get the hell out. We'll have to take it slow, and be shooting machines the whole time.... but if it collapses the tunnel behind us, the only ones we'll need to kill will be the ones we advance over to get out."
Kin muttered a muffled curse. "So you're telling me they've got a whole machine factory buried underground? We could've burned the whole city to the ground and barely done an ounce of damage to the bastards."
"Any moment now they're going to realize we stopped advancing and spring the ambush. Brees, throw it. Now. The moment he throws it, everybody run like hell; I'll warn you just before the machines start to shoot at us so we can prep."
Sure enough, one of the doors started to open, machines already deciding it was time to end this intrusion... the first machine to move out pegged in the face by a white cylinder; it didn't seriously damage the machine, but knocked it down, causing the second machine to trip over it; catching itself, raising its rifle to point down the tunnel.
Eyeball started to run... and after glancing back, turned to Cobalt. "Cobalt, behind me! Kin... get behind Brees! Keep running!"
Just after the first few bullets slammed uselessly into Cobalt's back; and painfully but not seriously into Kin's; there was a loud detonation. Intense heat and pressure, shards of metal, rock, and debris flying in every direction; and the tunnel collapsed at that spot, burying the abruptly broken machines in rubble.
The shockwave, passing through the narrow tunnels, slammed into the team; Cobalt literally lifted off the ground and slammed into Eyeball, sending them flying down the tunnel; and the same happening to Kin and Brees.
When the group rose to their feet, Cobalt was perfectly fine; Kin, while stunned, was visibly repairing, Eyeball shook himself and nodded... while Brees looked.. confused. Blood was leaking out of his ears, and he absently reached his hand up... jarring his respirator loose as he felt at the sides of his head.... and almost immediately collapsed.
Eyeball stared down at him. "Well, fuck. Kin, can you drag your buddy?" He reached down, taking the second C-4 cylinder, and pressing the respirator back in place.
"... He weighs almost four hundred with all his gear... It won't be fast enough."
"Alright. It'll take em a few minutes to get through that. Hopefully enough time for us to get to the surface. Got some belts?"
In a disturbingly familiar action, reminding him of numerous events back out in the desert... he and Kin each strapped a single belt under eachof Brees's shoulders, and started dragging him forward as quickly as they could; Eyeball aiming a rifle one-handed forward, Kin watching behind... and Cobalt, a few of the machine slugs falling from his semi-permeable flesh with audible clangs on the ground, taking the lead, trying to stay between the group and any oncoming fire.