Stone, Salt, and Steel

Despite looking almost identical to the villagers, the mech-humans assigned to the cave were nothing like their counterparts. More machine than man, Tim could hardly sense even a shred of emotion from the steel on their faces. Five of them approached at once. Zero hesitation in their being.

Were they even alive in the first place?

“We’re not the intruders.” Tim raised his hands, believing the bots to have mistaken them for Zaffre. “Old Gold gave us per—”

Stalactites shot down from the cave ceiling, impaling the robots from the top of their heads to the bottom of their metal jaws. Lynn cut the conversation short with a single stomp of her foot.

Tim shot a glare at her. His eyes, sick and tired of her violence-first approach, tried to infect her with his disapproval. She shrugged. That annoying curve at the corner of her lips almost seemed to suggest that she fixed the problem before it was solved.

Only, she just made it worse.

The bots “abandoned” their heads, leaving them skewered on the rocky stakes as their decapitated bodies pushed forward. Cables in their necks stretched. Spilt. Snapped. They charged at the trio like animals, crawling on all fours, leaping from cave wall to cave wall. Ungodly screeching erupted from the disembodied heads. Even Lynn was briefly paralyzed by the possessed, outright demonic machines in front of her.

Cursing under his breath, Tim rushed ahead. He bit his thumb. Blood flowed, attracting the broken machines as if they were sharks in the water. But that was exactly where he wanted them. Going after him—the bait.

One mech-human pounced at him, only for his hand to punch clean through the entire length of its steel spinal cord. Three more joined in, swarming him, going after his legs, torso, and head at the same time. Almost a ton of pure, mechanical rage crashed into him. But he stood there like a tree even as the headless bots clawed, wrestled, and pummeled him.

One was disabled. Three were occupied. The last remaining one went after Mia. It galloped towards her, hungry for human flesh. Unable to switch to the assault rifle slung around her shoulder in time, she quickdrew her pistol. Her reflexes were like lightning, only matched by her aim. Several shots struck the mech-human’s joints dead center. An inhuman feat of accuracy under pressure.

Even as her target stumbled and slid on the ground, it made one last-ditch attempt at her life, jumping at her like a four-legged spider. Mia drew her knife. Legs bent, ready to counter. But she would never have the chance to.

The undying robot was blown out of the air.

Even as he was torn apart by three at the same time, Tim raised his arm. The arm that was still stuck in the metal corpse, replacing its spine. The bleeding thumb deep inside turned into a fuse. Blackblood ignited his hand. The corpse wrapped around it found new life as a rocket, propelling into the bot that jumped at Mia. Both bots slammed into the cave wall beside her, dropping to the floor in an utter mess of mangled parts and cables.

Tim’s only concern was his daughter. He paid no heed to the three mech-humans tearing away at him. Even as his bones broke and his limbs dangled on frayed sinew, he turned around, walking back to Mia and Lynn, body regenerating with each step. He was free to do so. The vicious metal beasts that assaulted him simply “gave up.”

The three robots around him slid off his body like slime. They failed to understand his blood’s corrosive appetite. Be it meat, metal, or mineral, Blackblood devoured all the same. The more they ripped his skin and shredded his tissue, the more they melted away. By the time he stepped away from them, there were hardly any parts left. Just puddles. Body fluids and engine fuel fused into one as iron and silicon crumbled into residue.

Tim was more annoyed at Lynn than being ganged up on by murderous robots. His eyebrows furrowed. Wrinkles on his forehead turned into frowns together with his lips. The stunned look on the Immortal’s face told him everything he needed to know.

It was an expression he saw many times before. Panic. Worldview falling apart. The sinking realization of a young Immortal learning that there were more flavors to immortality than what was served on The Surface. Just because Antediluvian Immortals like her were the dominant type didn't mean history had erased the older forms of immortality.

Mechanical Immortality. That was how the machines of old emerged victorious in the Aberration War. While the ones they just fought were shallow imitations of Byzantium and other Warbots, they still displayed the same relentless, almost zombie-like persistence in battle. Until their engines were destroyed, they would fight down to the last limb, and then some.

Even though Lynn made the mistake of targeting the robots in the head instead of their weak spot, he didn’t let his frustration flare too much. His younger self urged him to berate her. Shove a piece of humble pie into her arrogant mug and rub it all over. But he couldn’t be bothered.

“Aim for their ‘heart.’ Or focus on Rockbind instead of spikes.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “This is a cave. You’re the strongest one here. Take point. I’ll protect Mia.”

His words weren’t mere praise. They were facts. Pointing them out seemed to steady her breathing.

Lynn clicked her tongue. Not at him, but at herself.

-----

Subject: Terilynn Veranos | Classif.: Barzakh

They’re just tin cans. Nothing else.

They did not come back to life. They were inferior to her. It didn’t matter if they could keep moving without a head. Conventional means could still put them down. Crushing. Petrification. Hitting their weak point.

Stepping forward, she reminded herself of her superiority. Her Regalia was unsheathed with a metallic hiss. The cave echoed her declaration of newfound confidence.

She marched forward, leading the way for the father-daughter pair, blade in hand and Acritae flowing in her feet. Despite the dim lighting from the torches, she felt right at home in this confined, craggy environment. This was her element. And it spoke to her.

With her senses sharper than before, movement on the side of the cave wall further down was translated into the sensation of crawling skin along her lower left leg. Lynn swapped to a reverse grip before hurling her sword like a pilum into the darkness. The clanging of metal against metal confirmed it—a direct hit.

But the princess scowled. Though she struck her target, the sword landed below where she aimed, embedding in its abdomen. Unable to move, the robot clawed at itself, performing a bisection. Its upper and lower halves separated, running towards her on hands and feet respectively. But they didn’t get far.

Lynn clapped her hands once. The cave walls defied logic, “clapping” alongside her. At first, there was a sharp screech. Then there was none. Both sides of the wall stretched and slammed into the two halves of the bot like a horizontal hydraulic press. By the time she let go, they were flattened beyond recognition, metal collapsing like a piece of paper.

She continued. The ground “slithered,” carrying the sword that she threw back to her. Tim and Mia followed behind, giving her and her Gift the space to make quick work of the robots that came their way.

It didn't matter how many or how frequently these subterranean foes tried to ambush them. It was as if the cave itself bore a vengeance towards robots. The ceiling trampled them. The walls unshaped them. The ground swallowed them. This very space evolved from a long, hollow network into a veritable digestive organ with a taste for metal and polymer. What was left behind could hardly be called waste; they became part of the cave itself. The line between natural and unnatural resources blurred.

At the same time, Lynn’s mind was clearer than ever. Emancipated in a state of flow, her emotions spoke as the earth listened. Every clap. Every stomp. From the wave of her hand to the shifting of her feet, she was like a conductor who led a symphony of soil and stone. Through her guidance, even rock itself moved like water. Crashing into her enemies. Receding into calm stillness. A truly divine work of art, one met with applause in the form of mechanical death rattles.

The sheer number of enemies that came her way was like a never-ending encore. Lynn started to understand why Old Gold needed a factory. But she wondered how they “sealed” the dragon. Perhaps some form of Alchemy was woven into the enchantments carved into their bodies. She could only theorize. The art of Alchemy was as mysterious as Ancient Magic, both predating the Spire itself.

But they weren’t the only thing that eluded her. The hunter that Mia mentioned was like a ghost. Navigating the cave network was simple thanks to the arrowed-down corpses, but the deeper she went, the more disturbed she became. There was no trace of this Zaffre other than the arrows that were left behind. With the sheer number of Old Gold’s bots patrolling this cave, and with so many long passageways without room to hide, how could one mech-human be this stealthy?

And how could these waves of ravenous cave bots be so primitive as to mistake her for the intruder? Even the less-than-bright residents of Byzantium Village had a better grasp of where they stood. The double standard between the bots there and the bots here could not be more obvious; Old Gold did not love its “children” equally.

Just as she came to this realization, the cave began to transform. And not because of her doing. No longer were the surroundings dark and narrow. She descended into an unrecognizable cavern of luminous gemstones. In stark contrast to the Red Rainforest outside above ground, varying shades of blue greeted her vision from one corner to the other.

Despite the drastic change in environment, the composition of the earth around her remained the same. Mostly. If anything, the magic within some of the rock formations in this chamber flowed even better than the torch-lit cave above. Massive calcified arches towered over her, the size of each one tapering off towards the middle of the cavern. Smaller, milky-white structures throughout the area appeared as warning blips in her mental radar.

Pillars of pure salt.

Protruding out of the ground, these columns came in various shapes and forms, the tallest never reaching the ceiling. Most were a lot closer to her in terms of height. But more confusingly, she could not call them “rock formations” the same way she could for stalactites and other speleothems. These salt pillars were not formed through natural erosion. Made of pure sodium chloride, it was as if someone conjured or teleported them here. There was no carbon, not even a trace element of impurity within the pillars that she could manipulate with her Gift.

Lynn turned around, hoping Tim had an answer somewhere hidden behind his lifetime of being a living dinosaur. All she saw was despair.

She had never seen such anguish on the face of that traitor. The color of his skin was drained to the point it looked as pale as the pillars of salt. Even Mia was confused. Just what did the Aberration sense that both of them didn’t?

“Talk to me.” Lynn’s voice echoed all around. “What’s wrong?”

“Harlow’s… dead.”

Before she could even process that statement, a large section of the cavern wall on her left shattered. The ground beneath her didn’t just shake; it was trying to run away. Bursting out of the broken wall was the mangled body of a robot. Battered, but still functional, as indicated by the light flickering in its single camera-eye. But what worried her more was the bow that fell out of its grasp.

That damaged bot was Zaffre. The hunter that slew its cave-dwelling brethren with extreme prejudice. Just what kind of creature damaged it to this degree?

Floating out of the hole that was just made was no creature. A being made of pure metal, yet, it was not a robot either.

Lynn could not believe her eyes. That thing had a human soul.

Could it even be called “human” when so little was left?