That TV-head! And... Shock was here, crouched in front of me, absolutely covered in black filth? What was going on?
"Um... how... how did we get here? What's happening?" I looked around, my eyes meeting a terrible sight. Machines like us, all hooked up to these sinister stations? Was I one of them?!
"Hey, it's fine, calm down," Shock reassured me, obviously reading the panic on my face. "You're okay now. We were, well... both thrown into the hole that machine shot in the ground after CITE, or SCAN, or whatever it's called buzzed around in front of that goliath's face. I don't know how you ended up in here... but Nōne and I fell into a corruption yard way up in the cave over there," she explained, nodding towards what I assumed to be the direction to this "corruption yard."
"Okay, okay," I said, not particularly reassured. "Was I plugged into this machine?" I glanced behind me.
"Y... yeah."
"Um?!"
"Don't look at me! I have no idea what this is or how it happened... but you're out of it now, at least."
Shock pulled me up to my feet, and I looked around at the little wires coming from the station behind me. A couple of them were leaking black fluid.
"What is this?" I warily asked, holding up one of the wires.
"I think it's corruption," Shock answered.
"This is corruption?!"
"I think? TV-face, you have anything to add?!" Shock waved an arm at Nōne.
"Yes, robot-face, that is corruption in a physical form."
"Y-you're covered in it, Shock! And, and you're telling me this was hooked up to me?" With growing apprehension, I checked the panel on my arm, which was still open.
It was oozing this same pitch black corruption.
"Oh no," I shakily muttered. "Oh no. Guys, get it out, I don't like this-"
Shock took my arm and looked at the port in my arm. "Ah, fuck... hey, TV! How do we fix this?!"
"Are you saying the chief medical officer of Zynima has no knowledge of how to treat corruption?" Nōne sang, walking over to them.
"Don't screw with me, dipstick, just fucking help her! She's going to be corrupted!"
"Doubtful," Nōne commented, bringing his face up close to my arm. "She wasn't here for long. Corruption doesn't take that long to break a robot's programming, but she will probably be fine."
"Probably?!" Shock and I both chimed in.
Nōne shrugged. "Probably." From the left pocket in his coat, he produced a small handkerchief, matching his coat in colour, and from the right, a small, blue energy packet. He wrapped the packet with the handkerchief and then crushed it between his hands.
...What was he doing?
He unravelled the cloth, now covered with the blue fluid from the packet, and he gently wiped the affected area down quite thoroughly.
...That was his solution? Wiping it down? At least that gross stuff was gone from my exterior, but, I didn't want to know how much of it was already inside me...
"A-and what about you, Shock? You're-"
"Yeah, let's not talk about that." Her eyes were flat with obvious displeasure. "It's not inside me, so, I'll be fine. Right?" She looked at Nōne.
"Indeed," he responded, walking back to the doorway. "We'd best be off. We-"
"What about these other robots? Can't we save them?" I interrupted him.
"Long gone. You were in here for less than half an hour. These ones... much longer."
"H-how do you know that...?"
"I've been here before."
"So you don't want to even try?"
"It seems as if you need to place more faith in me. They're gone. If I had a single doubt about this, then I would free them. But I don't."
Spooky man... don't know how much I trust him.
Before I followed him out of the room, I looked over the bots hooked up to the machines. If only there was a way to save them...
We walked out onto a bright, white alcove in the face of a cliff. A horribly thin bridge was on our right, a pathway around the cliff in front of us, and another door on our left.
Nōne turned to me and started up before I could speak. "A word of caution. This place is hostile by every definition of the word. Treat everybody you see down here as an enemy on first glance."
I glanced over at Shock.
"He's been here before," she added. "Not exactly a happy place."
"If the robots hooked up to those black, goopy machines are any indicator, yeah, no kidding." I shivered, remembering that I was one of those bots minutes ago.
Nōne led the way, walking up to the tatty bridge on our right.
"Hold on," I began, stopping dead in my tracks. "You can't be serious about walking over that."
"Do you have an alternative in mind?" Nōne retorted. "Would you like to walk through the front gates in front of an array of autocannons?"
Well, no, but I didn't want to say it aloud.
It was the bridge from hell, really: a few dozen feet long, held together only by four metal wires on either end, a thin guard rail and rickety, rusty platforms making up the bridge's surface. No supports in sight. Down below was a drop into an abyss of red fog.
I couldn't help but look down. "You really are pulling my leg, right?"
"Let fear control you and this place will eat you alive. Stay focused and just don't look down, Aural." With that, Nōne stepped onto the first rusted platform, gently holding onto the left railing.
I glanced at Shock again. She didn't look much more confident than me, but she stepped ahead and slowly followed right behind Nōne.
If I could breathe, I'd have let out a huge sigh. Instead, I synthesized a similarly anxious groan and followed Shock, grasping tightly onto both railings.
Every step we took resulted in a hideous creak from the bridge, as if to announce its imminent collapse. Creak, creak. I was entirely ready for our lives to anticlimactically end in the pit beneath us.
I caught myself looking down into the red fog. Stop that, don't look... don't look...
Instead, I took a moment to look up. Just above us was that creepy fortress, and just to the right where I could see the main bridge leading to it...
Dozens of those mining bots were staring down at us with glowing eyes, totally and utterly still.
Shit! If their objective was to make me paranoid enough to slip and fall, it almost worked. I stopped for a second to look straight ahead and collect my thoughts. They couldn't break me. No way, unfazed, they-
The bridge teetered back and forth in a jarring motion as I lost my footing, desperately hanging on to the flimsy guard rail. Shock and Nōne both followed suit, gripping it tight.
"Christ, what-?!" Shock cried.
I couldn't bring myself to say anything. My right leg was hanging down below the bridge, but my left leg was still on one of the rusted platforms. Angling it just right, I got my foot onto the platform, and I slowly and carefully hoisted myself up.
Shock and Nōne were both looking back at me.
"Aural, for fuck's sake!"
"Shut up. Go, just go," I snapped back at her, uninterested in being barked at after I nearly dropped straight into hell. "Straight ahead, straight ahead..." I reminded myself, keeping my voice down.
I took it one step at a time, slowing my pace way the fuck down. Those bots up there didn't have guns or anything, so... no pressure. Just focus.
Contrary to Nōne's advice, I braved myself to look down again, but not at the drop below. With a death grip on the railings, I focused on the platforms comprising the bridge, stepping only where it looked like I'd have the most balance.
Step...
...step.
Just take it easy. One step... then another.
I heard Nōne mumble something far ahead, but Shock quickly shushed him.
No time to think about that. Step. Step. Take it slow.
Only a handful of seconds later, I found myself near the end of the bridge. A glance upward told me that Shock and Nōne were already standing on solid ground again. Against my better judgment, I sped up a bit, finally placing my feet on rocky ground again.
I vocalized a huge sigh of relief.
"Aural, buddy," Shock heaved, "you just about killed us."
"I- w-well, sorry! That was horrifying!"
"What's horrifying is what I would have done to you had I have fallen," Nōne quipped.
I dared to give him a reply. "But... uh... if you fell, you'd be dead."
"I would find a way." He pointed his scythe to an open doorway on the rocky outcrop we now stood on. "Make haste."
The TV-head led the way with me in the middle and Shock taking up our six.
"Ah, wait," Shock said. "Oh... damnit. Nevermind."
I turned back to see her. She looked confused, trying to reach her back.
Shock grumbled. "If my beams were still here, there'd be no way I could fit in there." Another groan. "Guess there's a silver lining to everything. Come on, Aural, let's go," she finished, hustling me forward to catch up with Nōne.
The dark, musty entrance to the bowels of this enormous facility was adorned with pipes and heavy-duty mechanisms along the walls and ceiling, forming narrow pathways through the room. It was an industrial maze; there was no clear direction to get to the fortress's ground floor from here.
"Do you know the way in here?" I asked Nōne.
"Yes. Keep your voice down."
"Sorry," I whispered back.
With the TV's guidance, we hugged the left wall, quietly creeping through the eerie chambers. The place was only illuminated by red lamps periodically dotting the ceiling, leaving areas of total darkness where the lights couldn't reach.
As we walked further, the sound around us went from a low rumble to a cacophony of machinery. Whirring, clanging, hissing. I could barely hear my own thoughts.
We took a right turn at a corner of the maze. Every junction we passed, I found my head darting around, ready to see some hostile machine standing in wait, eyes glowing in the dark, ready to pounce. It would be impossible to hear footsteps in a place like this; I could only rely on my optics.
Nōne suddenly jerked to the left and hit the wall, bashing the side of his head on the pipes.
No. He didn't do that himself. Something did that to him.
He twisted around and held his scythe sideways in front of him, hardly blocking a blade from smashing his screen in.
I turned heel with a plan in mind. "Shock, move!" I shoved her to the side as best as I could in the cramped space, looking for the last junction we passed. "Come! Hurry!"
I ran through the halls, looking for an alternate route to get to Nōne. It didn't take long for me to find one in the mess of junctions, and I got into the hall he was being assailed from.
There was a tall, skinny robot standing in front of me, entirely focused on attacking Nōne.
No guitar. Gotta improvise.
I lunged forward and grabbed the robot's neck with both hands, jerking it back with my full strength. It lurched backwards with me with surprising ease.
It started swinging multiple blades at me with several thin arms, but couldn't reach behind itself well enough to strike me.
I kept dragging it back until we were about to enter the middle of a four way junction. Fantastic - Shock was in the opening to my left.
"Kick his ass!" I yelled over the industrial soundscape. With another powerful yank backwards, I forced the bot to lose its footing and fall backwards. I jumped back, prepping myself to stomp on its head.
Shock beat me to it. Its visor was smashed into countless pieces.
Not a second later, a curved blade pierced straight through its chest. It was Nōne's scythe.
Stammered, glitched words rang out from the machine's dying body, just barely loud enough to hear over the machinery.
The robot shut down.
...But I recognized its voice. I looked down at it, confirming my suspicions.
It was the news bot we encountered multiple times in Zynima City.
Did we just kill an innocent robot? No, no way... it attacked Nōne without any warning. So then... was it... working for Upsilon this entire time?
"We no longer have the luxury of time," Nōne explained with utmost urgency. "Hurry." He turned back to our original path.
Shock and I followed without a word.
Without any further incident, we hustled through the hallways until we eventually saw a white light illuminating a stairwell out. And, as we approached it, the ambience died down to a quiet rumble in the background.
"Quiet as ever," Nōne whispered as he raised a gloved hand to us. Continuing to follow his lead, we began up the long set of stairs, eventually stopping once we were just far enough to peek up onto the ground floor. "When we emerge from here, we will be in a server room with four passages: the fortress's main entrance to the right, a power plant just behind us, an armoury on the other end of the room, and a tram station to the left."
"Armoury," I thought aloud, "we need to go there."
"You're in luck; I see only one machine, and it's a mere server worker. No threat, but that won't last with that damned machine down there notifying its security teams. Hold on..." he suddenly paused, "two machines. Lavil II just came from behind a server tower. They're-"
I brushed up past Nōne just enough to look myself. Sure enough, Lavil II was skating down the spacious room, straight to the armoury we happened to be after.
An uneasy thought crossed my mind. He wouldn't betray us, would he?
"We need to move. Go." Nōne slapped my arm, prompting me to hop up the rest of the stairs. "Armoury, straight ahead," he pointed out.
Lavil had already disappeared into the armoury's entrance. Throwing caution to the wind, I bolted forward across the huge room, quickly alerting the server worker that Nōne mentioned.
"Aie?! Zzt... zyaah?!" it screamed in surprise as we charged through the room. "Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!!" It ran away and hid behind a server tower.
Despite the size of this place, there really was nobody else here. It didn't feel right.
The three of us reached the other end of the room, where we hid behind a corner with the armoury door right next to us.
"No time like the present," Nōne sang.
I opened the door to the armoury and stepped inside.
Among gigantic shelves holding every handheld weapon I could possibly imagine in lengthy, heavy-duty racks were two robots at the back of the room.
Lavil II and Lavil III.
II was holding an assault rifle to III's head with just one hand. And yet, III looked incredibly calm and casual.
"Lavil!" I called out, praying that II wasn't about to turn that rifle to me.
"Aural. You made it. And Shock, ha, holy shit, look at you! You look like you just crawled out of a sewage tank!" Lavil stopped for a moment as Nōne walked up with us. "Ya, okay, who the fuck is that beside you?!" Lavil II reached for a nearby weapon rack, pulling out a gun of some sort, pointing it at Nōne with his free hand.
Shock stepped forward. "He's a friend! He wants Upsilon dead just as much as you do. Don't shoot!"
"Hmph." Lavil lowered the gun pointed at Nōne. "Doubt that."
I was just relieved that Lavil II was still on our side. However...
"What the hell's going on here? That's Lavil III, right?" I asked, as puzzled as ever.
Lavil II chuckled. "Ya, it is."
"So, uh, why do you have a gun to his head?!"