>L98 BFrame: Loading ER-Madec internal layout...
The man squeezed in through the door and vanished into the mess of tubes and railings inside. She couldn't follow him there; it was far too small a gap for the battle-frame.
She followed him along the corridor and found the main door to the section he was heading towards. It had a big door with the name "Networking" plastered over it in yellow letters.
She used the same blueprint key and found that it had all the privileges needed to open this door. Brenvalo hadn't slacked off on that part. The key was actually an all-access pass to the entire facility. That in itself was worrying. If he wanted to ambush her, why would he risk giving her access to something that she could use to communicate directly with anyone in the galaxy?
"Oh, this place is...crazy," Calan broke her out of her thought chain. The networking section was full of rows and rows of towers. They were all rigged with cooling systems with a complex mess of pipes.
"I'm here, please don't kill me," the blackened man appeared from an exhaust tunnel. A black tar trail led from this opening all the way to the center of the room. It was likely that this man got infected in this section; he had followed the same trail.
“Why is he being weird?” Calan asked her, puzzled about this man’s entire existence. It reminded him of Linan, the way he acted after he went crazy.
"He's not all there, inside his own head. He's somewhere else"
"Is he asleep too? Like you?"
"No, half dead, I think"
The man wove his way through the networking towers, and they reached an opening in the room. There was another body there, but this one was immediately different.
"What in the world..." It was Liera's turn to be surprised. The 'tall man,' as the blackened man called him, wasn't human at all. It was hard to tell at a glance what it was, but she couldn't mistake those skin panels and vent lines for anything else.
It was a Red Sect sovereign, just like her.
"Lira look it's a robot isn't it? There's lines like your-" The boy was sharp.
>L98 BFrame: Red Sect ID nearby
- designation: A-1.6
- name: Anarul
Liera pointed the gun at the body immediately. This was the most unexpected discovery she could have made.
“I know him,” the words came out of her slowly. This was Anarul the First. The first priest. He had many of himself, hence the 1.6 designation—the sixth replica of the first.
She couldn't tell that from the appearance. All of the skin panels on his upper body were broken or missing. His head was muscles and skeleton, and he only had one eye in its socket. Coolant had leaked from his systems around him, and every gap and crevice was full of solidified tar.
>L98 BFrame: requesting logs from [A-1.6]
- Transmission failed
"Is it a robot friend of yours?" Calan found this curious. He didn't think robots had robot friends. He couldn't imagine two robots doing the things the red lady did—that was definitely twice the explosions. In his opinion, nobody needed that many explosions.
"He's not a friend. He disappeared long ago." Liera circled around to the back. The blackened man stood next to Anarul's body.
"So, he came here?"
"He has many bodies. 12 others. Each one is a slightly different person"
"What! But you only have one?" Calan found this outrageous. Why would anyone need 12 bodies that could do such huge explosions?
"So what is this one?"
"This is the sixth one"
"Please don't kill me. I was here. He talks" The blackened man recited out of nowhere.
"He talks?" Liera repeated. She couldn't tell if Anarul's body still had its field generator intact. The battle-frame's lack of scan functionality was the worst impediment at times like these.
"Please don't kill me," the man repeated. He bent down and shoved his blackened hand straight into Anarul's abdomen. His muscles collapsed, revealing a deep hole.
Liera aimed the gun and primed it, seeing fresh tar ooze from within. It was in its liquid form. This could only mean one thing: considering how everything had been frozen all this time, for tar to remain liquid, the internals had to be hot. His field generator was operational!
The blackened man squeezed some component inside, and Anarul sat upright from his hunched posture. His single eye twitched and fell directly on Liera. His lips moved a couple of times, and he slowly wiped his mouth.
"Y-you're here" He said in a deep, calm voice. That was indeed Anarul that she knew. "What brought you here?"
"Long story. I need your logs" Liera demanded, keeping the gun leveled at him. She could never trust him even when he was normal.
Anarul's eye danced across the battle-frame.
"Why did you bring your biologics?" He stood slowly. He had all the functions she lacked. He just used the scan and saw through the battle-frame. "Why do you insult me with your presence?"
His Klin shield spread from his lower half and his forearms. He had no protection for his upper body or his head. All the emitters were damaged. She couldn't tell what broke him to this level. It would be impossible without Klin weapons, but she hadn't seen any lying around.
"I only need to know what happened here, There's no need for violence"
“You all left me to rot!” He frowned, rage snapping into his face. “And violence—isn’t that all we ever knew?”
She stepped back, noticing his lower legs tense up for dashing. "Calan, don't panic."
“I’m scared!” He squeaked.
“Close your eyes”
L-98 Vellek positioned itself 13 km away from the AUM galactic destroyer. The invisibility bubble ate a lot of energy from its reactors; the demand was outstripping supply at an alarming rate. Sineul had to switch it off when it had drained half the stored power.
It served him well. The missile he ejected was silently making its way toward the destroyer. It used no propulsion and approached the destroyer at a steady speed until it got within range.
Commander Brenvalo watched it approach with adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was confident in his fleet's ability to counter such a simple threat. It was just a projectile weapon. He waited and waited for it to be detected, for the destroyer to deploy countermeasures, and increase its adaptive shield.
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He watched it with an air of retribution; the priestess’ pet had made a mistake. He had underestimated AUM Galactic in his machine arrogance.
His expression only worsened from there as he watched the missile get closer and closer to the destroyer. It breached the shield radius with no resistance at all.
“Why aren’t they shooting it!” he erupted, pure rage taking over the pain from his cauterized leg. “Shoot it! You fools!!! Shoot!!!” he cried. “Why won’t you shoot!!!” he howled at the top of his lungs.
“They think it’s you,” Sineul told him after he pinged the order for the child cloning that he composed using Brenvalo's identity. This insufferable idiot was getting on his nerves, and he had less and less patience for his loud outbursts.
"How did you-“
“I copied your little ship when you first came here. That missile has the exact same signature. They think it’s you coming back to them. It doesn’t look like your ship visually, but…they’re still afraid to press the button"
“You!” Brenvalo shouted, trying to jump at the ball. His rage blinded his actions, and he fell on his amputated leg, letting out a loud cry.
The missile dashed once it acquired all targets for each warhead. The slip drive thruster took it to the dispersal point and shattered it into 8 long splinters.
‘’You're deplorable! how is this honorable! how is this fair!”
“Why would I ever corner myself into a position where I have to fight fair?“
Eight bright balls slammed the destroyer from back to front, their superheated plasma expanding out at incredible speed. They were small tactical warheads, but they crippled the destroyer, making it a floating residential building. All of its thrusters were disintegrated. The command bridge was completely decimated, with everyone in it. Brenvalo knew some of them personally.
“You just killed hundreds! They were just following orders! I’ll never forgive you!”
“And what do you think I’m doing?” Sineul approached him with three lasers trained on his face. “I'm also following orders.”
The fleet’s interceptors pinned a lock on the Vellek again, and Sineul made the necessary preparations to engage in a high-speed chase. They were coming at him with renewed resolve now that he'd crippled their destroyer, and he had to make sure such foolish bravado was punished appropriately. He used the slip drive at full throttle to put a lot of distance between them.
As the ship performed these predefined actions, Sineul knocked out the hysterical Commander by simply bumping the ball at maximum speed on his forehead. There was no harm in letting the helpless man watch, but he was completely beyond reason. While he was dazed from the heavy impact, Sineul quickly restrained him with a roll of highly adhesive tape.
"Kill me!" Brenvalo muttered in his utter defeat.
"I'll leave your fate up to the Priestess." Sineul used his brain-dive port to banish him to the void. He didn't have to care about neurobit damage this time; he'd done plenty of regular damage when he cut the man's leg without anesthetic. Disembodiment was the least of his concerns.
> L98 Vellek: transmission received
- look what I found
- attachment: Log
He couldn't receive anything while the Vellek was shrouded as using the signal array could pinpoint its position.
The first transmission he received was a log from the battle-frame. It shocked him to his machine core. The Priestess had found vervid and something he never imagined: the sixth of First. That was the last thing he expected to find in an abandoned resonator at the galactic frontier. He changed course immediately, circling back toward the resonator.
The priest launched himself at her in a frenzied sprint. She fired at his exposed torso, but he quickly covered himself with his shielded forearms. He was broken, but he wasn't any slower for it. She switched the firing pattern to cluster, firing thousands of fine-grained beams to exploit any gaps in his flawed defense. He countered most of it with his forearms, but he got 11 holes through his shoulders and sides.
Some of the beams he deflected refracted off the klin shield and hit the blackened man. He watched the priest blankly as the lines punctured several holes through his torso.
“Please don’t kill me!” he uttered at no one in particular. There was no emotion behind it, no acknowledgement of pain.
Liera fired a super-concentrated klin round at the priest. He moved erratically to deflect it, and jumped several steps back, using his shield to bring him to an abrupt stop. The blackened man was swept away in the aftershock.
She increased the output from the gun to its maximum and fired a continuous cutter beam, pushing him off with its larger radius. He crouched to counter it, letting the beam deflect off his back.
>L98 BFrame: transmission received
- Sineul: priestess! retreat! you can’t fight him with your biologics!
She barely saw the message before the crouched priest dashed forward in a single devastating leap.
A klin beam hit her directly on the chest and sent her flying. The priest continued his onslaught, following her closely. His barrage sank her gun arm into the network tower and sent the gun flying. He was following the hand-to-hand doctrine to perfection, his entire existence focused on extinguishing hers with maximum efficiency.
Calan screamed as she was trashed by the priest. The battle-frame's shield held up, avoiding major damage to her biologics, but it couldn't keep her biologics comfortable during the relentless assault.
The boy experienced it completely differently from her. A rude, broken robot was giving him the beatdown of a lifetime. He got kicked, burned, and punched three times in the stomach. He didn’t even see where most of these came from. The rude man emerged from the darkness to beat him and retreated back into the darkness after beating him.
None of these actually hurt him. He just felt the dampened shockwaves through armored plating. This hurt his ego more than anything else.
“I wanna go home! Lira! He’s beating me!”
“He’s beating me too, Calan” She reminded him.
“He’s scary!” he cried as his body moved in defiance of his impulse to run. Liera stood from the rack she was thrust into and flexed her arms. This took some getting used to. She couldn’t manipulate her biologics the way she could manipulate her base frame. The battle-frame relied on her to make fast, reflexive movements. It was capable of matching her 1:1, but it only had a limited biological body to match.
This called for drastic measures. She couldn’t afford to run out of power and have the priest decimate her body with Calan inside it. The stakes were as high as they ever could be.
> L98 BFrame: located AG87 klin rifle
“You all left me here to rot!” the priest yelled, dashing towards her. She allocated more power to shields and barely avoided his mad dash. “You take and take and take! I had nothing, and you took it all!”
She couldn’t tell if he was making any sense or not. She hadn’t been close with Anarul when he was around. He was made nearly a century before her, as he was the oldest. He had his own group of followers within the Red Sect, even before he was replicated into more people.
She didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure if this was coming from the vervid. Clearly, he was dripping with tar. He had no biologics for the vervid to convert, but it had done something to him; something inside him was a biomass equivalent.
She rolled away from his onslaught of dashes and dodged most of his attacks. She slapped one of his punches, redirecting it towards a network rack. His klin-shield-reinforced hand sank deep into the rack, immobilizing him. Taking the opportunity, she picked up the gun and fired a barrage at him.
“Shoot him! Shoot him!!!” Calan shouted excitedly. They finally had the upper hand again.
The priest took some hits to his left side as he used one arm to shield his vulnerable torso. He launched himself at them, extending his klin shield from his legs. His right hand crushed the gun barrel as Liera used her left hand to push him off the wall.
She fired the broken gun at his arm, sending reflected beams in every direction as his shielded arm pushed further and further, destroying the gun. She managed to grab his right shoulder, and she crushed and twisted it, ripping a gap across his torso. His right arm fell limp. He came to a stop and dashed backward.
She followed him closely, using the broken gun to fire at him while shielding herself.
Anarul let out a deep, guttural roar and slapped her with a gigantic klin beam. She went flying for the second time and shattered a pillar upon landing. The gun was completely crushed, leaving only the rear end of it tangled in her hand. He followed up with a relentless barrage, pushing her deeper and deeper into the small crater.
Calan screamed, these heavy blows actually hurt him this time around. Liera managed to dodge the worst of it, but they still landed where she moved away from, digging a deeper hole for Anarul to push her into. As he hammered on her with both his hands, she noticed the shield distribution better than she could from a distance. The klin shield was thinner on his thighs. Whatever damage he suffered before she met him had obliterated a large amount of emitters. She couldn't be sure if that counted as a weakness, but that was the only one she noticed. She used all the strength she could muster in her legs and spread them in a wide arc. Then, using the momentum of her left leg to twist her lower body, she managed to position her right leg for a wide, off-angle kick.
She managed to slam her shin on his knee. The impact was hard enough to crumple metal floor panels beneath feet. His left leg bent inward upon impact, his klin shield unable to maintain consistent reinforcement across his leg.
"That hurt!" Calan complained, only to be cut off by a second, third, and fourth swing at the same intensity to the same spot. The battle-frame's klin shield caved inwards and dented the armor plating. This was the most Calan had ever used his leg in his entire life. He felt pain crawling up from his ankle to his hip.
Anarul toppled to the right, his knee disjointed.
Liera took the opportunity to elbow her way out of the hole.
"That hurt me Lira!"
"I know, I'm sorry" She had no lies to tell him. "But this is still better than being dead"