Signal Noise: Legacy of Napyarn

[Serak]

[OBJECTIVES CONFIRMED. SUBJECT-64 LOCATED. POWER GREATER THAN ANTICIPATED. APPREHENSION WILL REQUIRE EXCEEDING SAFETY LIMITS.]

“Approved,” a voice, across the stars, spoke into an unseen microphone. It sounded deep, but scratchy with age. “Keep her alive long enough to access the facility and strip all the data on her. Find out what happened to Napyarn.”

[PARAMETERS CONFIRMED. PROCEEDING.]

High upon a flat-topped residential building, not quite a sky-scraper and not quite a short apartment block, stood a figure roughly the height of the average Human male. Primarily a body of grey armor and white metal underneath, all trimmed in gold. Robotic, clearly, though finely made, with dark eyes like a Saiyan and long, white hair that stretched down to the back. A sleek model, the exterior shining and free of the slightest blemish. The face indistinguishable from Humans, Saiyans, Konatsians except for the lack of long ears, and many of the other races of the universe.

Carved into its grey ‘breastplate,’ if it could be called that, a designation: G-01.

Complete with a red cloak that hung from around its neck as it stood and stared down at the figure of a pale, one-horned woman wearing a form-fitting black dress. Were it not for the skin tone and the horn, she looked Human. However, G-01’s data told him the truth of her.

A creation of genetic engineering from Dr. Avondall Napyarn, a colleague of his master’s – and now missing.

He wasted no further time. Steam began to rose from his elbows, knees, and other joints. His head twitched as internal heat growth exceeded warning parameters. He vanished with a rush of air from atop the building and left cracks in the rooftop where he had stood before. The world bent and blurred around him as exceptional movement efficiency, and rapidly growing power, translated into sheer velocity.

Crack!

Index and middle finger pierced not through the flesh of 64, but instead the wall of the building she walked past upon one of the endless-city’s sidewalks. Thick cracks spread up the wall like branches of a tree. As G-01’s boots gently touched on the concrete beneath him and his target, who reacted with an uncanny precision to avoid that first strike, his eyes slowly turned to her as if time itself moved more slowly.

They locked gazes for a moment, until tiny spheres of white Ki no larger than a half-fist appeared all around his body. He pulled his fingers from the concrete wall, and their glowed a crackling green.

A moment later and the dozens of spheres rushed forward, scatter-shot, and began to explode against everything they touched. Heat washed over the street and the countless other civilians – Changelings, Humans, Saiyans, even a Namekian! – all screamed and began to flee.

G-01 did not flee, G-01 charged into the fray as 64 answered the sudden, wordless assault, dealt with the rush of destructive energy-orbs headed her way, he added to the chaos with sharp kicks and elbows to cut off her every avenue of escape.

 

[Failure-64]

I wonder if that Human vendor will be out today, 64 though as she weaved through the streets, eyes glazed over and uncaring of the world around her. Those sugar-crusted snacks were delectable. What did he call them? Churr--

The hiss similar to that of a steam engine. Before she even registered it as odd, she moved. Black hair whipped to the side as she pivoted, twisted on her heel and watched as the glint of metal pierced into the building beside her. Her first reaction was that it had been some sort of primitive throwing weapon, but as the cracks spider-webbed up the side of the building she realized it was a very different sort of weapon.

Fucking clanker.

Its stare, neutral and completely emotionless, met hers for that moment. It saw how her eyes flashed and began to glow, flickering not with fear, but irritation. She was more inconvenience by this than worried about why some Android was jumping her in the middle of the street.

Bolts of pink-red Ki erupted from her open palm, wild and untamed for only the split second of their creation. Then, with a whip-like crack, it condensed around her fist and up her forearm, taking the shape of a brightly colored gauntlet.

Just as her hair had began to settle against her back, she twisted forward. Just as it was resetting after its miss, she ducked low, threw her fist forward, and felt her knuckles--

--graze against a metal surface that had suddenly vanished. Where once stood that bucket of bolts, a storm of red lightning erupted from 64's fists, ripping the building and ground asunder with violent lashes.

Then, it was her turn to be caught wide open.

An explosion of Ki that, quite honestly, was far too excessive for her liking, tore the ground asunder, flinging debris and large chunks of concrete into the air. Dust billowed into the air, only to be immediately blown away by the whistling of fists and feet clashing against each other. Black marks burned against 64's arms, proof that it had ultimately gotten the first hit. However, with them now both aware of each other, it was a much even fight.

They traded successful blows, most onto 64; it moved so effortlessly and without tell, as if a machine could have "instincts" that guided it into unpredictable locations.

64 hissed, irritated, as she narrowly avoided his fist from being introduced to her temple.

"Fuck on back to whatever back alley, used parts shop you came from!"

Another strike against her chest, then grazed along her arm as she twisted out of the way. Her own fist met an iron wall that served as the Android's lower stomach, unyielding and unaffected by the recoil that would come from a truly living being. For every hit she landed, it landed two. Until, right as the Android's fist pulled back from a recent jab into her gut, 64's eyes flashed and Ki crackled around her fist. That fist lurched forward, whistled in the air as it passed by its chest yet aga--

--Her other fist cracked against the side of its head. The Ki around her fists shivered, electric and cackling, before shooting straight into its body.

 

[Serak]

[SCATTER BURST SUCCESSFUL.]

Burns layered across 64’s arms and front, putting small holes in a now-smoldering dress. She backed away and G-01 pursued through the smoke and lingering explosions. An elbow followed, avoided, and then the introduction of his lower leg right into her ribs.

That slammed her into the wall, cracked and collapsed it, but she didn’t fall in. Instead, as if she had not simply been attacked for no discernable reason, she leaped right back into the fray. Around them, the panicked screams continued. Emergency sirens began to blare throughout the district as word of the altercation spread fast.

Then, a light cast itself across G-01’s expressionless face.

Ancient armor made of 64’s red-pink energy constructed itself around both of her arms. She struck with it, grazed against the side of G-01’s head, and then it vanished. Combat routines and the electro-mechanical equivalent of neurons, firing trillions of times per second instead of dozens, fired, and he moved through the air like a whistle.

Blows traded back and forth. Each time, the heaviest of blows from 64 sent plasma-like tendrils of energy whipping out into the environment. Floating streetlights exploded. The energy carved through the front walls of the buildings around them. Strays sailed up into the air and destroyed flying vehicles, sending them crashing down as a fiery disaster upon the world below.

She spoke.

[TARGET’S ENERGY UNCONTROLLED. WORDS BETRAY UNCERTAINTY. ENGAGE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUBROUTINES.]

G-01 caught one of her energy-gauntleted wrists in one of his hands and squeezed. Normal steel would have bent and groaned under his grip.

Those black eyes stared into her crimson.

[DETAILS UNNECESSARY. EXTRAPROLATE. REACTION WILL BE INFORMATIVE.]

“Did you think you could get away with it, Failure-64?” He spoke in a voice entirely normal, organic, downright Human.

“Did you believe Napyarn had no failsafes? No insurance policies?”

[INCOMING.]

A blow from her other fist, suddenly faster than all the rest, struck the side of his head – right in his temple, clean. He felt something under his synthetic skin break and, for a moment, the black irises and pupils vanished from his eyes. A split-second later and there was a flash of 64’s red-pink light out the other side of his head, like a mist as something penetrated through his artificial body.

[INTERNAL DISRUPTION ATTEMPTED. …]

He stumbled, twice, towards the street.

[…]

Caught standing on just one foot, he listed to the side.

[COUNTERACTED.]

His weight shifted and he reeled back his leg and kicked it forward with the boom of ancient cannon fire from the sudden snap of his knee caps. His joints, still steaming, cracked and sparkled as the blow caught the woman in the gut and crashed her through one of the residential buildings they fought next and continually shook and damaged with each strike.

He heard her crash through another faster that.

Another bent had sparks crackle and snap in his knees. Energy rushed through him and he lifted off the ground and flew through the building – plumbing, electrical, concrete, support beams, all mangled and destroyed – and after her. His eyes gave him vision beyond what any normal organ could do: heat vision, liquid awareness, automatic interior mapping, all in addition to scanning for life energy.

He saw her the entire time, even when she would have been obscured from normal eyes.

As the first building began to collapse, he exited out the back and went into the next on the opposite end of the city block. This one, 64 did not crash straight through. Instead, he located her power within the dust, the debris, somewhere on the first floor of the building.

[RE-DEPLOYING SCATTER BURST]

More of those all-white orbs appeared around him and exploded outwards. Some crashed around the exterior hole in the back of the building. Most went in exploded somewhere in the center of it, sending beams of white out the windows before the interior blast destroyed the entire building.

Rubble and debris crashed into the city around. More took out vehicles in the air above, the blast wave itself nearly collapsed the neighboring buildings to G-01’s right and left. In the place of what had once been a home to countless, of a myriad of spaces, a cloud of black – glowing orange inside – appeared instead.

G-01’s sensors already told him what his eyes alone could not: She escaped. Out the front, before the explosion, into the air.

An aura of all-white appeared around his mechanical body as he raced through the air, outpaced her, and suddenly came to a stop before her. Eyes locked onto hers, and her momentum too great to stop.

Just what he wanted.

[DATA SPIKE ACTIVATED.]

He struck forward with two more fingers, glowing a faint green, and she barely twisted to the side – only for his boot to connect with her chin and send her hurtling upwards, through the clouds above the moon-wide city.

 

[Failure-64]

Her vision blurred, head spun, for what felt like a deadly amount of time. Yet, she righted herself before the Android could chase after. A burst of red-pink Ki caught her, flaring up around her limbs. Without the chill of the wind whipping against her, she could feel warmth on her lip. Down her chin.

Blood.

She sneered and rubbed her mouth with the back of her forearm.

"This is about the fucking Doctor?!" She called in a moment of stillness. "He was dead before I even woke--"

Steam hissed, forming trails of white clouds, in the Android's wake. The distance was closed before she could finish her thought, and its pointed fingers shot toward her chest. This time, the back of her arm bashed against its, deflecting the strike to the side just enough for white flashes of Ki to burst from its fingertips.

Another near miss. Far, far too close for her comfort by now.

"What do you want? His lab? His projects?" She asked between deflects and dodges -- no counterattack came from her at all. Everything dedicated just to not getting hit like that again. "All you had to do was ask. I would have given it to you!"

Its foot impacted her crossed arms with enough force that she felt her bones tremble within. Even in the air, she was forced back a few feet -- a distance that was instantly closed by the Android.

She could keep up with it now; its patterns were showing and her body adapting. But that didn't change the lead it had gotten in those first precious moments. While she was winded, it barely had dents. Ki fizzled around her body, like sparks of static growing larger, denser by the moment.

If she didn't end this quickly, then she would have to...

Its fist grazed along her cheek so fast that the wind alone drew a line of red. Another opening, finally.

She pivoted, lowered herself to dodge its follow up while getting herself into position. Her arm reeled back, tight against her body, and both Ki-infused fists cackling with anticipation. With a grunt, she threw the first forward, toward his gut. The second followed a split second later, swinging upward to catch the Android's chest or chin as it doubled over.

 

[Gehn]

“Sixty-four!” Gehn’s voice boomed just as Failure counterattacked.

Floating in the air, with his red aura raging around him and lashing out in all directions, appeared Gehn. With an arm cannon attached to his left, he held the blaster forward, the wrist-mounted rectangular barrel pointed down straight at G-01.

In front of it, an immense, red orb of gathered energy. Far larger than what he used to ever be able to gather.

“Move!!”

The orb shot forward and both fighters rushed away from it. The orb flew between them before it curved upwards and disappeared into the upper atmosphere of the Interstellar Market. The red light of the sphere continued to cast shadows across all three fighters, now high in the air, until it punched through a series of clouds. Beams of light continued to give it away until it vanished from sight entirely.

Enough time that, with his power still flaring out wildly, Gehn began to surround himself with dozens of marble-size points of red energy. They grew from dozens, into hundreds, then into thousands, then into tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands…

---

It appeared like a beeping in his head.

The scouter that was now part of him warned him of unusual activity. A Power Level that Gehn classed as familiar within its systems had not changed, but become associated with extreme energy outputs. The kind that one saw in battle. Yet, no other Power Level with her.

For a moment, Gehn just sat there. Countless thoughts ran through his head: Did he not warn her of the risks of going out so often, beyond the concealing confines of Napyarn’s facility? Yes, he had asked her to go out to run errands, but not today. This proved yet another one of her personal outings.

He didn’t need her. He could continue without her just fine. The matter of his ship was settled. Now it was just time for reconstruction with placeholder engines until he could make it to Earth.

He hadn’t told Tabelle of Failure yet, either. It would be no complication, no loss, and he would not risk himself against a foe that his scouter could not even detect.

His boots clicked across the floor as Gehn ran for the door.

---

Swarms of those red ki points flew through the air in coordinated patterns. They swirled after the strange, white-haired, grey-armored figure fighting Failure. They struck by converging onto various points: his elbows, his knees, shoulders, hips, anything to take off a limb with a forced detonation.

Or, failing that, they exploded against the target en masse.

Gehn controlled them all. He had always been able to manipulate many at once, but never had the energy to put it to the test. Now, he had the energy, the raw power, but found that his mind could hardly keep up with the scale.

That is, without the scouter guiding him.

A wave of his hands had the swirl, like flocks of countless birds, streaking through the air in the shape of massive arrows. They swirled around the target, G-01 based on the symbol Gehn saw on his chest, while he avoided Failure.

Whatever this thing was, Gehn watched him moved: fast, powerful with each strike, a match for Failure and then some.

Being here was suicide if that thing turned its attention on him.

One of his swarms of Wrathseeds started to crash against it as it continued, determinedly, to fight Failure. The burns were minimal, as was the weight of each impact, but they weren’t nothing.

Gehn could settle for that.

One, however, could not reach him. Even as Failure retaliated, with her arms still wrapped in red-pink gauntlets – like Earth armor of old – and struck, G-01 avoided him.

He raised the arm-mounted cannon again and a series of rapid-fire, individual ki blasts followed. G-01 darted through the air around each, moving, at times, so quickly that Gehn lost sight – as if the white-haired assailant teleported through space.

None hit.

He weaved through the volley as Gehn struggled to track, whistled through the air, and stabbed at Failure with two fingers glowing green and crackling with arcs of matching lightning. It caught her in the gut and, for a moment, she froze.

And began to fall. The light around her vanished, her own aura gone completely, and she crashed into some of the rubble below from what appeared to be their earlier battle. Gehn rushed down, screaming through the air, but it was too late:

G-01, now clearly an Android of some sort, summoned a series of white orbs – larger than Gehn’s Wrathseeds, but larger and far more luminescent – in front of him. They crashed down like falling anvils each and the resulting blasts carpet-bombed the city below and filled the moon’s air above with acrid, black smoke.

No! Gehn shouted only in his mind!

Inside, flashes of orange as the last few explosions boomed.

No, no, no!

Gehn vanished, despite how the soundwaves rocked him as he raced through the air, into the smoke.

Above, G-01 pointed a hand down. In it gathered a mix of green and purple energy that hummed unnaturally, metallic and machine. That first hum struck with force, enough to disperse the black cloud below.

It revealed Gehn, not quite to the ground. Mostly-concrete debris, crushed into small rocks or even dust. Flames, still feeding off the latest energy, danced along the rocky material as if an invisible layer of gas or alcohol spread across it.

Gehn looked down, then up. He knew what he had to do. Red light flared to life around him, wind whipped his black hair about in a storm, and he charged straight up towards G-01 still higher in the air.

“Cinder Root…!” Gehn roared as he raced as close as he could get to the machine.

His arm, the skin itself, began to steam and sizzle. In just a second, red light appeared under the skin, visible from the outside.

“Suppression Pulse,” G-01 intoned flatly, despite the steam and now sparks and black smoke coming out of its joints.

A green-purple wave rushed down, humming, surrounded by countless green rings along the full length of the blast.

“…Wave!!”

To answer, a crimson wave rushed back up from the palm of Gehn’s glowing arm. High above the debris, where Failure laid, the blasts connected. Countless flashes of all three colors spread above the city. Gehn felt the air vibrate and shake as he endured the sheer weight of such a strange, alien blast.

The skin of his arm ruptured, flares of red licked out of it instead of blood. The blast, the Suppression Pulse, although slowed, continued its descent. Gehn floated in the air and held it back all the same.

He refused to lower.

He refused to pull off and avoid it.

Steaming-hot blood from his own arm splattered across his face.

And he roared as the ringed blast crashed down onto him and detonated. The boom alone collapsed a couple more buildings around the main stretch of rubble below. A new black cloud hung in the air, glowing purple instead of orange.

Out of it fell a single streak of smoke, wrapped around Gehn’s body.

He collapsed into one of the newly-destroyed residential buildings.

The Wrathseeds still in the air, no longer redirected, missed and fizzled out into nothingness.

Slowly, gradually, G-01 descended. Failure, who laid there, body wracked by arcs of green lighting from that earlier finger-strike, slowly rose. G-01’s boots crunched the dusty remains of the concrete apartment complex. He drew his arm up, two fingers up once again and already crackling with more of his green energy.

Then he suddenly stepped back with such force that his body cracked and groaned and screeched. Between him and Failure, another blast wave of energy – this, a much darker red – separated them.

A moment later and, brighter, red ki blasts crashed into G-01. Each one hit just enough to put him back a half step, and the volley continued. Their source: Gehn, on his feet, one steaming hand raised, and his arm-mounted blaster on rapid fire now, right where he knew G-01 would dodge to.

Failure, up and on her feet, fell back through the debris they now stood upon – still able to fly as she lifted off the ground.

G-01 pursued, finally pushed through Gehn’s volley of blasts, and raced up at Failure with that strange technique still ready.

Gehn appeared in front of him again, between G-01 and Failure once more, the machine’s single-minded determination making his plan obvious enough. Except, now: his once-streaming hand glowed with another of those exceptionally-dark-red blasts of energy.

It crashed down onto G-01 and split apart on just two of his figners. Gehn expected as much, he was just too strong. Even against a technique clearly not designed around raw power, he struggled against it. His muscles, now exposed with his white shirt mostly burnt to rags, bulged. Veins popped from the strain. His grit his teeth.

Another scream echoed across – what felt to Gehn – half the moon as the Android’s technique gave way and Gehn’s Blackroot Cannon washed over the machine. IT crashed him back down into the rubble below and detonated. The explosion carried backwards through the rest of the city block, across the street, and then through a few more city blocks afterwards.

As Gehn lowered his arm, still burnt from the Cinder Root Wave, he gasped and panted. Sweat dripped from his chin and streaked down his mostly-exposed upper body. It steamed off him as much as it fell.

“Sixty-four, le—” Gehn began to speak through his breathlessness, only for Failure to fly back down at G-01, right past him, as a streak of inky black.

 

[Failure-64]

Twice.

Twice Gehn had put himself in the way of blasts many times his own strength just to save her. Even as she lay helplessly on the crumbling remains of a building, blood spewing from her with each body-shaking hack, he chose to shield her.

Why? Why even show up? Why protect her when he realized she was useless, near dead? Why?

It was a sort of selflessness that she hadn't experienced and couldn't begin to comprehend. Freeing her from her cryostasis was just curiosity that turned beneficial. Their relationship mutual and professional. The moment he saw the state she was in, there was no reason to...

She watched as Gehn's near-black red Ki overwhelmed the Android and exploded point blank against it. A smoke stream followed as the Android fell to the ground, cratering what had once been the foundation of a recently-leveled building.

Blood tickled the back of her throat. She coughed, deep and chest shaking, and spat it off to the side. Her body was bruised, pale skin marred by deep bruising, and splotches of her own blood decorated her arms and face. Each breath was a test of willpower to ignore the sharp pain in her left lung.

If it weren't for Gehn, she'd be dead. Dead many times over. He, too, was able to finally put the Android down for go--

The Android twitched -- a tiny motion that only just barely registered.

She lurched forward, propelled by instinct, and moved with every intention to not slow down. The speed, the force, would build onto her reeled back fist, already glowing with Ki like before.

The Android's eyes flashed to life like a computer completing a reboot cycle.

An explosion rocked the city once more. The crater nearly doubled its depth, wild Ki flickering in the cloud of debris and dancing along the streets beyond the maw. At it's center: 64, her fist pulling free of the rock. The Android, a few inches from the ground just beside her.

She missed. Again.

With a roar that stretched her jaw much too far, she kicked from the ground and threw herself at the Android. Wild, unpredictable. Pissed off. Her fist thrust forward in a pattern alien to her previous motions and found purchase on the Android's lower stomach. The force lifted it a few inches higher and a gale erupted from its back; her punch landed with such force that the excess energy was pushed through its body.

Then, she swung a leg back and then kicked at the same spot her fist had landed. This time, strong enough to send the Android flying into the air.

Gehn, despite everything he had already done, moved to meet the Android right when it reached the peak of its ascent. An already raised leg cracked against the Android's back and sent him right back down.

64 jumped from the center of the crater, Ki blazing behind in a long trail. The Android shifted, attempting to correct itself, but it was too slow. Her fist landed square into its chest.

And came out the other side as Ki surged from the exit wound.

The Android slid along 64's arm and collapsed against her.

 

[Serak]

His joints no longer sparked, his body no longer creaked and whined. He laid there, head on 64’s head, bleeding from the mouth – a product of the artificial blood of the synthetic skin, tongue, and other Human analogs that made up his face. He “felt” the fist and arm through his chest, but not the way an organic creature might.

[CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE DETECTED. RECORDING, ANALYSIS, AND TELEMETRY SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. OPERATIONAL MOBILITY COMPROMISED.]

It sounded, and felt, like that.

Synthetic blood splattered out onto 64’s pale skin, something like a cough. G-01’s dark eyes shifted, moved, but he faced away from her. He couldn’t even look at her. Couldn’t even look at the mysterious cyborg, judging by the green-glass eye, that had come to her aid and risked his life for hers.

The weak one.

“You should have won, G-01,” that voice reached him from across the stars, audible only in his mind. “Subject-64 was defeated. You could have overpowered that interloper. Why? Give me an analysis before you shut down. Quickly.”

[PROCESSING FINAL REQUEST. TRANSMITTING FINAL TELEMETRY BURST.]
[…]
[…]
He knew. He simply didn’t want to say it, think it, process it, generate it. The core issue that all cyberneticists faced when creating something sufficiently advanced, intelligent, or both – the problem that seemed inescapable no matter who or what race attempted it.
[…]
Yes.
[…]
Will.
[…]

[I WANTED TO WIN.]

“Ridiculous. Every time,” the voice scoffed. “I have enough from you, I’ll deal with Napyarn and his leftover later. Now die a failure, just like her.”

[CONNECTION TERMINATED. ACCESS DENIED.]

Slowly, gradually, still impaled on her fist and arm, G-01’s eyes faded into grey – lightless.

Within its body, waiting for Gehn and Failure-64 and anyone else who examined it to find: a transmission module sending a signal to an untraceable specific location, but a determinable planet.

M-1.

 

[Axar]

Rubble shifted under his weight. Half-gravity held the dust longer than it should have, fine particles catching firelight and drifting sideways through smoke.

Axar stepped through what had been a wall.

True Form. The bulk of his lesser shapes stripped away to what lived underneath: compact, precise, built like cooling magma pressed into something deliberate. Red-orange skin sharp against grey wreckage. The polycarbonate at his skull and chest caught ember-light and kept it.

Thirteen thousand and change, unsuppressed. Every scouter and Ki sense in range had him now. He was counting on it.

The crater yawned three city blocks wide. Sirens wailed from districts that still had power. Fires chewed through exposed wiring, and the android hung slack on 64's arm, grey-eyed and draining synthetic blood down her wrist. Its hair stirred in the heat. The rest of it was done.

Above the debris field, shirtless and burned: the Saiyan.

The Ki signature that had pulled Axar across half the Market. Different now from Earth. Threaded with something mechanical, heavier, reshaped at a depth beyond muscle. But the core of it was the same energy he'd tracked through a collapsing building while the boy used a damaged pod and every second Axar gave him to turn a killing walk into a foot race.

Still breathing. Still less than he ought to be.

Axar's tail swept once behind him, low and deliberate. Stilled.

64 was nine kinds of dead and too stubborn to fall over. The breathing that favored one side. Blood drying on skin too pale to spare more. She'd put her fist through a machine that had her beaten and done it standing on the edge of nothing.

Done it standing next to his open contract.

She'd known. The bar. The spar. The word he'd tossed out on his way through the door, the one she'd let land without flinching. The whole time.

His tail twitched. He caught it. Stilled.

He stopped at the lip of the crater. Close enough that what he was settled over both of them like a change in pressure. Arms loose at his sides. Face giving nothing.

"Gehn."

His eyes moved from the Saiyan to 64. Held.

"Impressive work."

He turned and walked back through the smoke. Rubble crunched twice under his feet, then the sound stopped, and there was only the sirens and the slow drift of ash.

 

[Gehn]

Slowly, Gehn and Failure returned to the ground. The city block that saw most of the fighting had become something of a crater. It had expanded, from the Suppression Pulse and more, to something even larger and wider now. Gehn’s final Blackroot Cannon had, too, spread the devastation even further beyond when it impacted the ground and dragged across a few more city blocks.

The metallic body fell off Failure’s arm and crashed into the craterized ground. Gehn landed next to her, the burnt rags of his shirt hanging from him, similar holes in his gray pants. His black boots crunched on the dirt as he walked over to her.

Battered.
Bruised.

He dared not imagine what she looked like where that two-fingered strike had landed, somewhere in her ribs, and under them another time.

“S—” he started again, his breathing still heavy, only for his blood to run cold before his integrated scouter told him of it.

A Power Level over 13,000 and rising.

His eyes swung to the edge of the crater they stood near the very bottom of it. Black smoke hung in the air and slowly settled. More rose from the ground, some smoke from the battle, some dust from the destroyed buildings and part of the moon-wide city. But what he saw defied understanding: A tall, muscular Changeling, with red as his predominant colors, and all-black legs.

It was over, Gehn realized in that moment. All the fighting. All the care to keep himself hidden. He felt a hand clench into a fist and shake as he stared up at the Changeling.

All because he tried to save Failure when he knew he should not.

Axar spoke only his name, and it carried the weight of knowledge. Now he knew, after all these months. But then, too, he turned to Failure.

Impressive work? Gehn’s thoughts parroted the words, confused.

Gehn’s arm mounted blaster rattled as he slowly lifted it. He knew that what he did for Failure would not be reciprocated, not against a monster like this. He knew, too, that he would not be able to escape so easily now.

Axar would not make the same mistakes. And with the power he now possessed, in that form they stared upon?

It would, effectively, be just as easy.

“Don’t fight,” Gehn spoke quietly to her. He decided, in that moment, to finish accomplishing the one thing that brought him all this way.

That was the very least, and the very most, he could do in these circumstances.

“I’ll hold him off, you r—"

Axar turned around and walked into the black smoke that still lingered around the crater’s rim. Gehn still detected his Power Level through that scouter, and it still told him that he was walking away.

“What the fuck?”

 

[Failure-64]

The Android -- G-01 she only just noted on his body -- slid forward as 64's arm began to relax. Jagged edges of torn metal chewed at her arm just enough to leave red lines from her elbow to her wrist.

It hit the ground with an unimpressive thud.

Her gaze lingered on it, jaw tense but otherwise void of emotion. Only when Gehn spoke did she lo--

Her head snapped to the side, adrenaline waking muscles that had just begun to relax. A power greater than anything she had sensed before approached. A part of her brain made light of it somehow: At least it wasn't at least another clanker.

Stepping onto the edge of the crater was a slender, red-orange Changeling. Refined into something better suited for battle than their traditional form. She hadn't seen him like this before, but she knew instantly:

It was Axar.

He knew.

Her mind raced -- was he here to finish what he started with Gehn? Did her consider her a threat now? If he did go after Gehn, would she defend him? Could she even do anything for him in her state? What if--

He spoke. A single word intoned.

64's knees trembled, too exhausted to even feel the rush of energy shooting through her veins. Gehn said something to her, but the words were muddied by the kicking of her heart and the sound of blood pulsing through her head.

Then, their eyes met. His flat, bearing no clues to his thoughts. Hers tight, forcefully controlled, and betraying the attempt to hide her apprehension.

He didn't linger longer than a beat before turning on his heels and walking away. His Ki growing more and more distant with every pace.

She stood firm, expecting him to return the moment their guard was let down. Expecting some sort of trick despite him needing no such thing to deal with them both. Just as she couldn't understand why Gehn even showed up in the first place, Axar turning away the easiest kill of his career made no sense.

Only after a few more moments did her shoulders reluctantly began to relax.

Gehn spoke, equally as confused.

64 nodded, and echoed the sentiment: "What the f--"

The world spun, blurred and warped until she saw nothing but the abyss of unconsciousness.