"Well done," Heather said without a second thought. Well, it wasn't her who stupidly thought she had something to prove.

Feeling strangely pleased, Sylvester tried to repeat the same trick, that is, to make it hit himself like that child's game. But, of course, the same trick didn't work twice in a row, unfortunately. He was rather of the opinion that you didn't have to fix something that wasn't broken (the most obvious thing in the world, but he hadn't made up the expression), but since it was....

What the hell would he do now?

Good question.

The robot raised an arm. The hand attached to that arm disappeared inside, then the stump, so to speak, opened up. An energy began to gather there, preparing to fire. But it was okay, the attack couldn't have been more telegraphed. He could simply dodge it...

And let it explode somewhere behind him, killing hundreds more people?

"Fuck."

Sylvester couldn't afford to. He was here and had come this far to save people, not to let them die. Otherwise he would have stopped fighting a long time ago, because his own life, well. His own life didn't have much meaning, he wasn't doing anything with it, good or bad, it was empty.

He had no other choice.

Sylvester flew towards the energy shot, hoping he was strong enough to not be reduced to ashes.

"What the hell are you doing?" Heather didn't understand, of course.

She looked human, but she wasn't really.

She was his ally, at least for the moment, but not his friend. He had to remember those things well before he found himself becoming attached to her. It would be a fatal mistake. She was a monster that had to be exterminated like all the others.

Sylvester swung the katana towards the energy shot and managed to parry it, albeit mere inches from his face. Things shouldn't work like that. Under normal circumstances, the energy shot would have swallowed his sword and then him hopelessly, giving him no chance to flee.

But his sword was special in many ways.

It had been designed to contain and shape energy from satellite barriers, and it turned out to be sufficient for this alien technology, too. It turned out that fixing what was broken was very simple: not changing the method, but the tool.

In other words, he redirected the shot toward the robot.

He could almost smell the surprise of whoever or whatever was operating the machine.

But, for such a big thing, it dodged fast and the result was the very thing he had feared and risked his neck to attempt to avoid. That is, the energy shot exploded in the middle of the city, reducing hundreds of lives to ashes in the blink of an eye.

The robot was off-balance from its dodge.

Heather lunged against its side, plunging the black crystal sword there, and flying off before it could even think of swatting her like a fly.

He, on the other hand, went for the leg.

The same one that he had been attacking from the beginning. Everything would be easier if at least they managed to cut off one leg.

Destroying the robot seemed practically impossible, but they didn't have to. Once it was immobilized, it would be trivial to take out the pilot & the team that was handling the machine and kill them, then it would be useless even if it was intact.

He attacked it several times in the same area. Meanwhile, the robot aimed the arm cannon at him, charging the next shot.

He wouldn’t be able to dodge it at this distance.

Sylvester made sure to fly low; an explosive of such power could do a lot of damage by shooting at the ground as well, but it was easier for the citizens to be saved that way than if he let him fire it at the city. Of course, he intended to redirect the shots with his katana as much as possible. But good intentions weren’t enough, something more was needed.

The robot fired again.

The shot penetrated the ground. He wondered, too late, if the shot would be able to reach the core of the earth and end it all.

He concluded that if that were the case, they wouldn’t have bothered to attack in this way.

They would have tried to deliver the coup de grace to the planet before they even knew they were here on this world. The worst hadn’t happened, so he had to be correct.

He swallowed saliva.

Still, the destruction was terrible. The discharge had wiped out progress, returning an area of about twenty meters to before industrialization. It was more than that, in fact. Not a blade of grass was left growing, just a wasteland.

He could do nothing to counteract something like that. Sylvester would die slowly, floating in the infinite darkness of space. Alone with his thoughts and regrets. He couldn’t imagine anything worse.

A death before dying. An essentially eternal suffering, since it would be the only thing he would experience before he would be extinguished forever.

The robot jumped. Its gigantic shadow engulfed him.

Sylvester hit the ground, using [Mountain of Needles]. The mountain grew right where it should have been its landing point. However, thrusters on the soles of its feet allowed the big robot to change trajectory quickly and pursue him relentlessly.

"Wow, wow."

Sylvester clicked his tongue.

It seemed to have an answer for everything he could throw at it. Well, Sylvester hadn't tried everything he could do. Not yet. The robot didn't shoot him a third time, but tried to punch him, and went back to its attempts to crush him.

He didn’t like to do this, but he dodged the attack by melting into the shadow of his enemy.

It was very similar to what he had experienced in the belly of that beast, only even worse. Although Sylvester had lost his sight and hearing, he had at least retained the sensation of his own body. But now, since he was a shadow, he naturally had no such thing.

He had only his conscience left. But only vaguely.

It was as if he had become a real shadow, except that he was aware of the last order sent by his brain. Of the purpose that had led him to use this ability. It was like daydreaming, in a way.

So, in any case, he went up the robot's leg.

That was his exit point. As he emerged, he caused some damage, but not as much as he had hoped and expected. He just sent it staggering backwards, more from surprise than structural damage, he'd wager.

Sylvester landed well.

Heather attacked the same leg, finishing his job. Half of the leg rolled across the floor and the robot fell, but not head first. it broke its fall with one hand. With the other, it caught Sylvester’s partner in this battle and proceeded to smash her into the ground again and again, like a child playing at pulling the wings off a butterfly, he didn't know why he thought of that but he did, and not content with that it aimed the arm cannon at her. It had to pull its hand out again to stop her fall, of course, sealing the inevitable cannon, but the change took less than a second.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

She was going to die.

And if she went down, he would go soon after. He couldn't do this alone.

He wasn't sure about a lot of things, but at least that much he was sure about. It was probably a bad idea, but he walked over to the opening of the cannon and took a deep breath, while Heather scrambled, trying to free herself. To no avail.

"What are you thinking?"

Thinking? If I allowed myself to think I wouldn't be doing shit.

Laughing, Sylvester raised his own arm and did the same as the enemy. He was the first to fire even though he had started earlier. The giant robot, for obvious reasons, had much more energy to muster. But he managed to fire, and the shots collided in the middle, inside of the arm.

He felt pain and then nothing. The resulting explosion had painted his mind white. He regained consciousness surrounded by the pieces of the robot, like an elephant graveyard where only the bones remained, melting day after day under the merciless sunlight.

He had said the pieces of the robot, but that did not mean that he had torn it to pieces completely, that he had already won. No, only its arm had ended up shattered like that. Only.

He and Heather had survived the explosion after the energy shot by pure chance.

Especially him, even though she was the one who had been beaten. He saw her struggling to get to her feet, legs shaking, almost falling over and doubling over to vomit blood. That son of a bitch had hurt her more than he had in their only fight so far.

(fuck, fuck!)

He was no better as he had already established, but at least he was able to swallow the blood (without choking by a miracle) instead of vomiting it up. That was something.

He took flight. Even if his legs could not support his own weight, at least he could fly.

He had to act. Hurry.

It would be really stupid if the robot only had that cannon on one of the arms. If he gave it a chance to fire again, now, they would be screwed. As he suspected, the robot was already preparing to fire again, this time with the only arm it was missing. It had one leg and one arm ripped off, enough was enough.

It would have to be enough, he would have to make it somehow.

Get the pilot out of there. Kill the son of a bitch and probably the crew, considering the size of that thing.

Sylvester landed on the robot's head. It wasn't much of a landing, he went back to the ground and kept rolling, almost sliding over the edge. It felt like he was climbing a big mountain, reaching the place where the oxygen was so thin that the human body began to shut down.

There was nothing as obvious as a hatch, but he could only think of two places where the pilot could be. The head, to get a wide view of everything. But it could also be a hoax and would actually be in the chest.

Sylvester doubted it was anywhere else. But if he was wrong, Heather would have to save herself. He didn't have time to look in more than two places.

He took a deep breath.

Using [Shadows of the Night] was very unpleasant, but he had no choice. He melted into the shadow cast by the robot's arms (it had chosen, instead of finishing shooting Heather, to try to get it off him, so they were very close).

He could go out...

But also inside.

That's why Sylvester landed on all fours in the cockpit. The second prediction turned out to be true, it was a crew, not a single pilot. Six people. Six of those giants in the same armor.

It would all be over very quickly.

The one right in front of him abandoned the controls of that god made of steel to raise one of those rifles to his chin. Sylvester managed to dodge even in the cramped cockpit and attack another, hurling the katana at his head. It slipped between his eyes and killed him without trouble. None of them were wearing helmets, they hadn’t expected his visit.

The closest one tried to shoot him again.

Sylvester kicked the rifle away and the shot just bounced off a wall and ended up on the ground.

He then struck the control console, activating the [Needle Mountain].

The only one who was saved by sheer miracle was, again, the one in the seat directly in front of him.

He wasn’t unharmed, not even well, he had a needle in his stomach, another in his chest and the last a few millimeters from grazing his neck and cutting him open like a pig. But the important thing was that the enemy was still alive. There was no room for doubt. Without the helmet, it was visible to the naked eye, Sylvester didn't even have to check his breathing. He was alive. And furious.

Sylvester stepped back... and his back hit the wall of this damn robot. Of course.

He also had no chance to escape.

The last surviving giant punched him in the chin, so hard that it sent him flying up and through the ceiling, opening a hole in the robot's head. He fell and kept rolling on the floor, like a soccer ball. He could have tried to stand up with his wings, but he didn't have them.

They had disappeared in the same instant that he used the [Mountain of Needles], it had been the last straw that broke the camel's back.

Aside from not liking to use [Shadows of the Night], worst of all was its high PM cost. Now he was dry. He stopped himself with his hands, clawing at the ground. And good, and good, because otherwise he would have ended up plunging into a sea of flames. Something in the robot had caught fire, so now the head was decorated by a crown of flames.

He saw the giant rise up in the midst of the flames, chasing him.

Heather swooped down on him from behind, barely making a sound despite her wings. Any noise she had made in the process should have been drowned out by the roar of the flames.

But one way or another the enemy had felt it. He was prepared and reacted with blinding speed.

Before they had time to process it, Heather found herself on the ground, screaming as the giant drove a boot into her back and tugged at her wings. Not only that, he was ripping them off. Fuck!

The enemy managed it and Heather let out a horrible shriek.

If it was like his ability, the wings felt like part of your own body, making flying as natural as moving an arm. So it must have been as if the enemy had ripped off both her arms.

Wait, she wasn't even human and from the beginning he had seen her with those wings. Was it a skill or were they really part of her body?

In any case, Sylvester understood that agony. He had lost parts of his body to spare. It was a pain that went beyond the wound itself, the incapacitation, or the realization that you may have bitten off more than you could chew and now you were in distress.

Sylvester understood this intuitively, perhaps because he had lived most of his life (in terms of the weight of each half's memories, weight and space allotted) watching people lose their bodies and consequently lose everything at a staggering speed without a second's hesitation.

In any case, he would have helped her, but he managed to get up only afterwards. His legs were still shaking a bit from the punch to the chin, the bad landing and, of course, fatigue. That no doubt was a factor as well. The only rest he had was the short trip here and to call it rest was being very generous.

It was hard not to see her as a human despite what she was and what she had done, especially now.

Suffering.

He assumed that everyone was more human when they were suffering... and that’s why the world got worse every day.

"You are better than I thought, I admit," said the giant in perfect English. "But this is the end of the line."

"So you speak our language."

For some reason, Syvlester was not too surprised. Maybe because he could see his face and it was a human face, even though he was taller than any human being on Planet Earth (or at least this Planet Earth).

"Now I do.. It took a while for the software to decipher the languages of this planet. Our worlds are not that far apart, but the language developed differently."

"Why are you telling me all this?"

Good question.

And why was he listening to him and even asking him questions? Well, for the same reason they had developed such a program. It was always important to know what the enemy was thinking. And what they could do.

"So that if you kill me, you can take the device from inside my helmet. It will be useful in future battles. And at least there will be something left of me."

What?

That didn't make sense. The least Sylvester would want, anyone would want, after being defeated and killed was for his opponent to make good use of his remains.

It would be like spitting on his grave.

"You don't seem to understand," the giant continued, and yes, even Heather looked quizzical in the midst of her pain, trying to focus, to understand. "That's how this death match works. Although the rest of the world is free to intervene, this is a fight between champions with special abilities. I am one of those champions, as are you. If you kill me and my companions, our universe will disappear without a trace immediately. What you take from me will be the only thing that will last. Besides, I have no reason to hate or fear you. It's nothing personal, it's just that I have no choice."

A single punch of the enemy was capable of sending Sylvester flying through the robot's head, leaving him with his legs shaking, struggling to get up. And he didn't have the katana within reach.

He'd left it on the head of one of those sons of bitches of the crew. He didn't even have his Skills, nothing like that. He was dry. At the moment he was dry.

But...

“Okay. You said it. I don't have... We have no choice.”

It didn't matter. Sylvester prepared to fight anyway, raising his fists to his eye level, a basic stance and unrefined by training because he had never needed it. Until now, he thought. Too late to rectify anything, in any case.

Heather was still on the ground, suffering from her torn wings, blood flowing down her back like a waterfall.

And, around and above them, the flames.

Roaring and churning as if they were alive, like the flames of hell itself.

One way or another this would end here, but they had no chance of winning.

A God Made of Steel (4): END