Axton and Thomas arrived at the situation too late to do anything about it. A few days had passed since the fight, which had, in turn, turned into a slaughter, or perhaps more accurately a one-sided massacre, and all that remained there were broken and beaten War Suits and the dead bodies of a few NPCs. Axton surveyed the devastation and tried to plot out what had happened, but he lacked all the needed info to do so completely.

As a result, he had to guess, and guess he did. While he was certainly no detective, he could tell that the War Suits of the ‘Kurds and Wei’ Company almost certainly fought together against a group of twentyish War Suits, though the former group was likely in a state of disrepair when the battle began. He could tell based on the massive blast scarring over a fair bit away, though, that something else had gone on, likely a fight between elites.

He tried to piece together any theories he could muster as to what made the explosion and what happened after, but his mind kept turning up a blank. He tried looking over the battleground a few more times, but he was unable to figure out what had transpired until he saw something that caught his eye.

Buried halfway into a massive tree that had already had a decent chunk of itself blown and scorched away, there was a heavily, and I mean heavily armored box. Axton immediately knew what that was and hurried over to jump into Franken, hoping he could use his oversized killer robot suit to pry the box free and, hopefully, open.

A bit of levering with one of Franken’s giant combat knives turned out to be enough to dislodge the box, but the thing was armored out the wazoo, and this left Axton in a bind. He figured that he knew exactly what was inside, but without any way to pry it open without also damaging the internal components, he couldn’t access the information stored inside.

And so, he hopped out of Franken once again and turned the thing over and over, looking for any place that he could slip one of his War Suit’s combat knives in to try and pry the Blackbox open without causing too much damage. It was on his fifth lookover of the box, though, when he noticed something that nearly made him facepalm at his own obliviousness.

He took a smaller knife from his inventory and wedged it in between a piece of the box and another piece attached to it, and with a bit of wiggling the other piece popped open to reveal a place where a simple wired connector could plug in. Axton looked around, hoping that nobody saw him engage in such a bit of embarrassing foolishness, and the coast looked to be clear.

Sighing in relief, he picked up the Blackbox and lugged it over to Franken before realizing that he was being stupid yet again. He dropped the box on the ground and got into his War Suit. Franken picked up the roughly 95-pound cube and held it close to its open cockpit, and Axton then pulled a cable out from his machine’s insides and plugged it into the Blackbox.

He looked down at the display in front of himself for a second before rolling his eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh of annoyance.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Fucking hacking minigames…”

…

Spider-Can skittered its way over to Franken before its cockpit opened.

“Hey, Ax, you haven’t responded in a decent while. You alright?”

Axton was rubbing his temples with his fingers to alleviate the stress that he had built up. Even an oblivious moron could see that he was in no mood to talk, let alone engage in any kind of action beyond something that would help him vent his frustrations.

“Ax, you aren’t planning on going on another rampage again, are you?”

“No. No, not yet.” Axton grumbled.

“Not yet, huh?” Thomas asked worriedly. “Anything I can do to help?”

Axton gestured vaguely at the box in Franken’s hand, the cable attaching it to Franken’s interior and the display that was letting him try his hand for the umpteenth time at a damningly annoying mandatory hacking minigame.

“Oh…” Thomas said in a voice that was a mix of confusion and astonishment. “May I have a swing at it?”

Axton threw his hands up and was about to get out of Franken’s cockpit, but Thomas stopped him.

“Just let me see what it is, and we can work it out together, alright?”

“Fine!” Axton yelled, and the two got to work.

…

“What in the goddamn fuck is wrong with this thing?!”

It had been over an hour since Thomas tried to prove that two heads were better than one, but now even he was pissed as fuck. As if the minigame hadn’t been annoying enough, the fact that each success made the thing go faster only made the whole thing that much more difficult.

Worse still, a single failure meant that they had to start from scratch all over again, and every fifth failure made the game randomize everything as well. They had tried to beat the thing at least eighty-nine times in exactly one hour, and both Axton and Thomas were now at their wit's end.

“God damn hunk of junk!” Axton spat as he slammed his fists into the controls. Reading this as a standard input, Franken dropped the box that it was holding, and the cable ran taught as it fell. The box swung towards Franken’s chassis and armor, impacting it before either Player could respond.

“FUCK!” both of them yelled as they winced. Now the data that they could have gained, which may or may not have shown what happened here, was gone forever! There was no way in hell that they’d get anything out of it now!

Axton tensed his fingers, his arms, his legs, his feet, and all the rest of his body as a grimace filled his face. He just had to let it go; there was nothing he could do, and he didn’t need the data, after all. Deep breaths… deep breaths…

Thomas began to laugh, which caused Axton to open his eyes and give a look that could kill.

“What is so funny?” Axton growled.

Thomas couldn’t reply due to how hard he was laughing, and instead, he pointed at Franken’s internal displays. Axton looked down and felt his rage boil up once again. The impact that had occurred between Franken’s leg and the armored Blackbox had seemingly performed a bit of Percussive Hacking, which in and of itself was an offshoot of the good old trope of Percussive Maintenance.

“FfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffUCK!”

Axton now had even more of a reason to be angry. Who wouldn’t be after trying for over an hour and a half to hack a machine, failing horribly each time, getting set back to the start over and over again, only for a bit of kinetic damage to make your efforts a meaningless exercise in futility?

Well, at least the data was now available, so there was that…