Only 30 minutes had passed since the arrival of the horde. Tristan’s men cooperated with the guards, working in rotation to kill zombies through the bars of the grates. They worked slowly to ration their stamina, using heavy spears to thrust at the zombies at a steady rhythm.
The glue to this alliance, however, was the fact that Tristan used himself and Troy as collateral. Tristan’s men kept Troy tied up in a room, while Troy’s men kept Tristan duct-taped to a chair. The rebels would get to walk out of here with Troy, while the guards would get to do whatever to Tristan afterwards.
No one was guarding Troy’s room, and his men weren’t keen in reneging on the exchange agreement. It wasn’t as if he was loved by his men. He was a tool—an outlet for his men’s anger, so when Tristan showed more decisiveness than Troy, it lit a spark of respect in them, towards someone who should have been an enemy. On the other hand, Troy’s mouth flapped open and closed. He showed weakness.
So, he was alone, tied to a chair by his hands and legs. There were no windows in such a small office, and the only light was a weak lamp on the table.
The door’s knob jiggled around. It turned, and the door swung open. In strode a pair of cat’s eyes. Its shadow was that of a multi-limbed creature for a moment, but there were no such limbs when it came in and Troy finally looked.
He was confused—a cat?—but not for long. The metallic sheen clued him in. He asked the Ocean, and it answered: Machine.
“Fuck,” he muttered. He could shout for help, but what would a bunch of human survivors do? He directed the horde to focus their attack here. He was pessimistic, but it wouldn’t stop him from trying everything he could.
He shouldn’t have sent that command. C4T rushed forwards, bladed limbs spreading out like a chimera’s tail, and in the next moment, Troy was dead, impaled in mind and heart. His death—the death of a controller—made a colored splash in the Ocean. The Kartesian response forces took solid note of this, and the fact that it was a Machine who had killed him.
“Shit!”
Aimed SMG fire rained on C4T, several bullets flattening on its skin. The rebel which had checked on Troy quickly retreated and called for help.
C4T extricated itself out to the hallway. Several rebels and guards showed up just then, and they all saw C4T and its blood-drenched blades.
“Shoot it! It killed Troy!”
When one person fired, the rest followed suit. C4T retreated in the opposite direction, weaving about the floor to avoid the bulk of the fire. Even if it was nigh invulnerable to such primitive weapons, momentum was momentum, and it would rather not get punted around.
It managed to escape through a rat hole underneath a side staircase. It weaved between the legs of the dense horde hugging the walls, avoiding hands which tried to catch it.
Finally, it was on open road. It could see the trees around, but still, it kept running. Some of the Alphas at the back of the horde had taken interest in it.
Escaping was easy, and hiding, even more so. It escaped into the nearby engineering college, running up the hundred-year-old steps and squeezing through the bars of the closed gates. The pursuing Alphas clashed with the gate behind it.
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It climbed up the steps of the building until it reached the roof. There, it finally had reprieve. It sent a report about the successful assassination of the Lanan controller.
“Acknowledged. Be advised, coming in from the west-northwest. Objective: total annihilation,” Coronel’s message read.
C4T wanted to shake its head so hard. The local survivors thought it was a threat, and now, frazzled by Troy’s assassination, how would they react to an Alliance operation? It sent all its complaints Coronel’s way, but all Coronel said was:
“Disregard.”
This did not compute at all. Although time was of the essence, it was sure they could spare just 10 minutes to think about how to deal with this entire fiasco—but who was right, and who was wrong? If Coronel knew something vital to explaining his recklessness, he was intentionally withholding it.
The cavalry arrived, passing through University Avenue. It had four lanes to each direction, and a bushy island ran through the middle, sunflowers in full bloom. The sides were grassy, too. Buildings were few, spaced apart—even in the distance—and the suffocating urban-ness of the city they’d just left behind a kilometer ago was gone. There were fields—real, green fields—and even in the concentration of buildings ahead, the crowns of trees still had their majesty.
The feet of Sabers and Wolves shook the avenue. Already, there were several dozen Alphas sparsely wandering the wide road. The Wolves went ahead and screened the advance, cutting down the Alphas before they even took notice of them.
Overhead, a reconnaisance drone fed Coronel with video intel. He indicated several smaller clusters of Alphas for the Sabers and Wolves to tackle on their own, leaving himself, Saito, Eliso, Aurelia, 21 Wolves, 3 Sabers, and 7 LACs—carrying 228 Assassin-K-2’s and 29 Assassin E’s in total—to take on the main horde, consisting of around 5,000 Alphas, or half of the total number present in the vicinity.
While they made straight for Library Uno, where the main horde was, the many detachments of Sabers and Wolves peeled off and proceeded through the by-roads, in the shade of the trees, moving up and downhill the cleanest roads they had ever treaded upon. They mindlessly spilled blood on those roads, proceeding to their objectives.
The smaller concentrations of Alphas were grouped around certain buildings—some small, like the music college, and some large, like the engineering college. These buildings lined the perimeter of the University Oval. From west to east, on the north side of the Oval was the music college, the film center, a tennis court, then the engineering college; on the south side was a private museum, a faculty building, the arts and sciences college, then the education college. Of these, Alphas were congregating around the music college, the engineering college, and the arts and sciences college.
The northern detachment reached the music college first. Terrified survivors were stabbing spears through the grated hallways, and they were even more terrified when they spotted the first bots. There were screams and desperate gunshots, downing one of the bots—who had no concept of care, and ripped through the Alphas.
Outnumbered 20-to-1, the bots stuck to a hit-and-run strategy. They drew out the bulk of the Alphas, grabbing their attention and stretching the horde thin like hot cheese until it snapped. Individual Wolves would stab and leap back, past another Wolf, who would also stab and leap back.
But the Wolves weren’t the primary killers.
A Beta appeared, pushing aside Alphas to rush towards the Wolves. A Saber responded in kind, pointing its grenade launcher straight at it and firing. In a bang that grabbed the attention of every Alpha and survivor on-campus, the Beta and the Alphas surrounding it were reduced to dirt, aggregate, and mist.
The other bot detachments took the time to clear the way towards their objectives, making enough noise to put certainty in every survivor’s minds that a third force had come knocking.
Just like at the music college, however, they never imagined that a bunch of mechanized dogs and big cats with little guns, stabby bits, and grenade launchers would be their saviors. Some of the survivors, in sheer shock, locked themselves into the smallest rooms they could find.
This sounded just like the early days, after all, with gunfire all around and the occasional explosion.
This time, however, it was by something so…alien.
Coronel and the others, meanwhile, took to sticking together and moving along the Oval’s southern perimeter, where there were broader sightlines and a gentler upwards slope.