Pen lets out a frustrated shout through her pursed lips as she grabs hold of the fabric fringe of the bottom of her ragged dress and rips off a large stripe of the dirty, oil and dust stained cloth. Pulling her leg forward, she winces at the sharp pain as she looks at the deep cut. It reaches down to the bone. The wet in her eyes stings from the biting of the cold, dusty air.
With a whimper, she wraps the cloth around the tender, oozing wound, the agonizing sting of the deep cut shoots through her, even through her otherwise numb legs and feet. She twitches her foot to see if anything is broken. It barely moves an inch; hurting all the same as before. It’s either broken or just numb and near frostbitten. The fabric is just enough for two passes around her bony leg, but already the blood from inside seeps through the cloth, as she ties the ends together; adding a new stain to the material that barely manages to ebb the flow at all.
Shakily, Pen rises to her feet. What else is there to do? The stone walls are ice cold, as is the stone floor. Neither offer her any comfort. Neither offer any shelter from the steady stream of cool air, blowing down the way as it seeps into the collapsed shaft behind herself, rising up to a place higher still. For a moment, she looks back the way she had come from. She looks at the abyss without taking a step closer towards it. Then with a quiet sniffle as her only consolation, she turns and takes a step down the only way left to go, pushing against the subtle breeze.
Pen lets out another yelp right away and falls down to the left, leaning against the wall that she is still next to. She braces herself back upright. The burning of a new pain had shot up her injured leg and into her body the moment she placed weight on the hurt limb. Ignoring the crying that she can hear around herself, echoing around the hall, Pen purses her lips tighter still and takes another tender step forward, holding one hand against the stone surface to stay upright.
Tenderly taking another step with her teeth biting into her lip, she moves forward, ignoring the stinging in her leg, in her eyes. Pen ignores the missing warmth of the crystal that she had held onto so dearly. She should have just left the ruins with the one. She could have just left with the one but she got greedy, she always gets greedy.
She knew that dying down here was a real possibility. She had come down here knowing that, she had pressed forward further, deeper knowing that. But now that she is here, now that there really is no way to go back, now the thought of it isn’t so easy to argue away in her mind. The statements of her rather dying than going back up empty handed from before now seem meaningless all of a sudden, in the face of this new situation.
The reality is that she doesn’t want to die. Pen doesn’t want to die.
As she takes another step forward and presses down on the foot again, receiving a fresh jolt of pain, the thought of going back up to the surface seems like a very welcoming idea. The thought of returning empty handed. At least with all of the things that happened to her up there she could keep walking, keep breathing. She was a wretch and lived a wretched life; but at least she was around to live it. Depression, desperation all fade away now in the heat of this moment; overpowered by the singular animal drive of survival.
Pen grits her teeth and takes another step forward and returns to her senses, her emotions fluctuating wildly in the face of this ever changing situation.
No. She reassures herself. This is it. There is no going back now even if she wants to, even if some dumb, stupid, cowardly part of her wants to. No. She is going to get out of here and that horrible town, or she’ll die down here trying. That is all that there is to it. She will see to it herself that it doesn’t end in any other way than either of those two options. She still has that much resolve left in herself, despite the back and forth shifting of her inner monologue.
So, she walks forward, raising her hurt leg once more and takes another step. Then another. Then another. Wincing with each movement, wincing with the aching burn of each step; Pen keeps moving.
‘No rest for the wicked’, she repeats in her mind over and over, not even too sure what it means. She just wants to fill the void. To fill the empty space of her mind with noise, with words to take her mind off of the hurt. She walks like that for a time down the massively wide and tall hallway.
*‘Kssch’*
She stops, listening to the hiss of the steam in the distance. Her gaze turns around in fear, looking back towards the darkness behind herself, which seems to stretch on forever. The hiss of some piston winding up in preparation of a movement to follow slithers down the darkness. The ground shakes, she shakes with it as the thundering step rings out, as the strike of the heavy metal appendage against the stone floor of the tunnel strikes out behind her, strikes out in the distance she left behind not that long ago at the precipice.
*‘Kssch’*
The rumble shoots out through her bones as the mechanical creature takes another step with one of its many legs. They always have a lot of legs.
Gritting her teeth, she turns back straight ahead and moves with everything that she has left in her. For every step that the creature takes, she takes two. But she knows it’s larger, much larger than she is. Every step it takes is worth five to six of her own. By the sound of it, it can’t be just a D-class. It’s larger. Bigger. The tunnel shakes again as it takes another step forward. It won’t take long for it to catch up to her at this rate.
If there is one saving grace it is that it doesn’t seem to be hunting her. It would be much faster then, it would be running then; sprinting. No. It’s still just patrolling, it’s just sheer dumb bad luck that it decided to go this way just now. Right? Or did it notice the collapse of the staircase in the cylinder? It had to have…
No, she reminds herself. D-classes aren’t capable of spatial memory. They just exist. It’s just a dumb automata. No. It’s just dumb, bad luck. Typical. Despite the pain, she still manages to build a small smile, even though she is unaware of it herself. It’s just typical she thinks to herself, not surprised in the least that the bot had decided to go down the same path she had. There is a shifting in the air that is audible in her sensitive ears, the chilly breeze always blowing past her this entire time sounds different, feels different. She can hear it up ahead from where it seems to whistle, to press together as it enters the corridor she’s in. As the sound lets her know that there’s a room ahead.
Two dim, old-world lamps shine out before her with a pale, cold white light from their square fixtures high up on the smooth concrete walls. The dull, buzzing hum of the strange devices is barely audible however, over the crash of each of the booming steps of the heavy bot approaching from the far distance. Each rattle sends a shake through her body from bottom to top, her already chattering teeth smashing together. Standing on the precipice of the room, Pen looks inside with wide eyes, scanning for anything that could pose a threat, for any other bots.
But there is nothing to see. Just darkness. The light from the hallway strains and fades away just past the archway that she stands inside of; into the room on the other side where it dissipates and vanishes into the overwhelming lightless void after only a few feet. Heavy thudding steps continue to ring out from behind herself, growing closer and closer with every second that she stands there and dallies.
Mustering her resolve, Pen steps inside the room and then takes a step towards the heavy shadow, which seems to have swallowed everything in here eons ago. She steps into a slumbering darkness that had been waiting for anything, for anyone, for eons.
*‘THOOK’,‘THOOK’*
A series of loud, impact sounds ring out from the room ahead, which suddenly comes to life the very second her sore foot steps into the darkness. From the rows of hundreds of downward streaming, white lights, which are perched up high on the ceiling, that activate one after the other, shines a bright conjoined ray. Each one illuminates a new segment of the floor beneath itself. Each row comes to life with the heavy metal clicking of the machinery and then illuminates a further new segment of the giant room. The great, large rectangular room lined with catwalks, lined with dusty windows far up in the heights that look down on the large open space before herself that is filled with collapsed rubble and debris.
Pen had never seen a room like this before, but the girl knows she has little time to examine it, as a fresh step of the coming machine returns her to action. Hobbling in as quickly as she can, she looks around for a place to hide, for a place to duck into. Rubble is everywhere, parts of the collapsed ceiling. Of broken windows and broken electronics. Dead machines fill the space, great mechanical limbs sticking out of piles of collapsed bricks. Shredded and mutilated bodies of old bots that look as if an animal had torn into them, that look like skeletons of the dead, ravaged by a hungry beast litter the area. Pen can’t help but look at them in morbid curiosity, as she ducks into the empty warehouse of a chamber. The lights continue onward, still row after row activating as they vanish down into the distance, further than she can see, the echoes of their birth resound around the grand hall like the clap of so much thunder in a heavy summer storm.
Something catches her attention in the fray, something familiar, a hum. The buzzing sound of a crystal nearby. There’s a crystal in here, somewhere close, judging by the sound of it. But the hum of the treasure is overpowered by the crash of the heavy steps now close behind herself. Pen drops down to the side and slides behind a fallen pile of rubble, ducking down as low as she can to the ground behind it. She holds her breath.
The heavy steps grow louder and louder, the debris shaking, tiny rocks tumbling downward from the heaps of collapsed rubble all over the space as the thudding steps of the pursuer come closer and closer. A single, shining reflective eye of a long since dead bot shines out at her from her side and she looks at the shattered red glass orb, looks at the reflection of the entrance of the chamber, without having to peer out over the rubble herself.
*‘KSSSCH’*
The pursuer emits a loud hiss as it comes to a slow, a thick cloud of piping steam jets out from its front, creating an almost nebulous smokescreen. Pen looks in horror at the reflection that she sees in the dead, glossy, red fish-eye before her. The distorted reflection of the giant, four legged bot. Its low hanging body is roundish and flat, hanging down beneath its arched, spider-like legs that are spread wide. The head is attached to the front by a series of large struts and thick black cables and it is thinly rectangular and tall, the fore-side of which is covered in round, red glass eyes. The head sharply turns from left to right in quick jolts that only take a second each as it looks over the entire room. The spasming motions give it an otherworldly appearance like that of a twisted apparition. Its movements are janky and unnaturally sharp like many of the older bots’ movements were. The newer models are much smoother.
Pen can feel her heart beat faster and faster with every second longer that she looks at the reflection of the giant with fearful eyes. This isn’t an F-class, it’s not even a D-class. It’s massive, taking up the entire span of the gargantuan hallway that it now blocks. Its legs are even pulled together to squeeze itself in the, for it, tight tunnel. Easily, she can see that if it spread itself wide that it could span the cylinder, span the vertical tube from before that she could barely see across. No, this was worse. Is this a C? She’d never seen a C-class before, only heard stories from the divers. Horror stories. Even they had no chance against a C-class. She would die. There is no hope if it sees her, if it finds her.
Another hiss of steam escapes the pursuer like the exhalation of a long held breath and slowly it lurches to life again; having scanned the room and found nothing by the looks of things.
Pen silently thanks whatever powers that be, as it lurches a step back into the tunnel. The massive creature opts to walk backwards rather than take the effort of turning around. With another sharp snap, the long, rectangular head of the bot pivots around in an almost full turn to look behind itself, the many cables stretching taut as it does so and it vanishes back down into the darkness of the passage.
