Knights Apocalyptica
Chapter 178: Sterile Tile Road To Oz

“’They surely will never do for a long journey, Toto,’ she said. And Toto looked up into her face with his little black eyes and wagged his tail to show he knew what she meant.

At that moment Dorothy saw lying on the table the silver shoes that had belonged to the Witch of the East.

‘I wonder if they will fit me,’ she said to Toto. ‘They would be just the thing to take a long walk in, for they could not wear out.’

She took off her old leather shoes and tried on the silver ones, which fitted her as well as if they had been made for her.

Finally she picked up her basket.

‘Come along, Toto,’ she said. ‘We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again.’”

-L. Frank Baumt, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900, 2nd Era.)

Enide’s Uncle twitched like a drugged-up Vega street rat in the middle of the hallway. Though he’d only seen a couple, the sight had left an impression, and out there, sans being completely nude, this guy would fit right in. The man’s skin was pale. The type of pale that only the people in the deepest part of the Caverns got; those that never had time to see a sun hall and spent their entire life in dim light.

It was only an instant before Enide broke from the group, along with Rochester. The two lit up with excitement and ran towards the guy. Sᴇaʀch* Thᴇ NøvᴇlFirᴇ(.)nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of nøvels early and in the highest quality.

“Uncle!” Enide repeated, this time with much more joy and less shock. She shook his shoulder, but he didn’t pay it the slightest bit of mind. Erec circled to get a look at the guy’s front. And the guy’s eyes were completely black, unnatural.

“Get it together, Bors!” Rochester shouted, moving Enide out of the way to shake the man much more aggressively.

Bors cried out, and Enide shoved Rochester right back, getting him away from her Uncle as she laid into the Pack leader.

Erec thought about joining in; he’d already stood up to Rochester once, but one look at Enide’s glare told him all he needed to know. This was her fight… And there sure were a lot of open doors around the hall. A whole row of them; with the Pendragons gawking at the young member fighting their leader, there wasn’t nearly enough securing their perimeter as there should be.

Right. Erec gave a look to Dame Juliana, and she nodded her head, they split off to do work if none of the Pendragons would.

The first suite Erec peeked into was… Dire. To say the least. The room's wallpaper was ripped to shreds; long dents and rends scored the metal beyond it. And then the floor was a trough of blood and waste. In the corner was what looked to have been a bed once upon a time. Now, it was nothing but shredded fabric and wild feathers scattered from a ruined pillow. And in the middle of the room was lay the body of a massive and furred man. The ‘man’ had massive claws and teeth and was very clearly dead. Evidenced by a hole the size of a soccer ball right through its stomach and the puddle of blood around it.

Since the blood wasn’t dried, this thing was freshly killed.

A quick look at the damage in this room told Erec it had been little more than an animal and died little better than one.

“They made me do it!” Enide’s Uncle cried from the hall, startling Erec, his voice dripping with sorrow. “I killed them all! They begged me! I didn’t want to kill them, but they begged and begged, and begged, and begged. I killed them!”

“Get yourself together, man, explain. We’re looking for the rest of our family,” Rochester demanded.

He was met with nothing but sobs as the tortured man broke. Erec retreated from the room and went to another—this one contained a woman with pale skin like Enide’s Uncle but with a massive cube-like growth on her head and bulging yellowed eyes. She, too, had a hole through her chest, the same size as the wolf-man from before. A quick sweep of another suite yielded a man with rock-like skin, also dead—a hole right through his chest. The pattern repeated in the nearby suites.

People, some of them so far away from humans that giving them that description would have been a stretch had he not the horrible suspicion that he was looking at the remains of the Pendragons. None were as human-like as Enide’s Uncle, and all were twisted mirrors of what may have been a human, but the roots were there. In the same way, monsters with humanoid appearances disturbed Erec; these triggered that same reflex. Close, but not quite.

Out in the hall, the crying continued.

Erec confirmed his thoughts with Dame Juliana as they finished their look-about, and then the woman cleared her throat to deliver the report: “The rest of the Pendragons are dead.”

She went into a detailed description of what she’d found, and with each piece of evidence, Rochester’s face grew darker. Rochester demanded to see the woman with the cube-like growth, and Erec pointed him in the right direction.

When he came out, the man’s face burned with hate, an unfiltered and raw hatred borne of pain. “It’s Maria,” he announced as he walked back out, his voice thick with grief. “Bors, did you kill our people?”

“They begged and begged, and begged,” the man continued to cry, rocking himself in the hallway.

“I-It’s okay—we’ll...” Enide said, “We’ll get ya out of here.”

Rochester watched them in silence. Erec noticed his hand sat at that holster on his side, resting near the revolver, but he said nothing. He watched the scene play out as Enide tried to bring her poor, tortured Uncle to some degree of semblance. They’d found the Pendragons and their last survivor. In the end, only two of them had survived this place.

Enide began to cry, clutching her Uncle, sharing in a feeling of sorrow that only they could understand.

They would have revenge. This Erec swore.

— - ☢ - — - ☼ - — - ☢ - —

Rochester sent a detachment of Pendragons with Enide’s Uncle to rejoin the rest of the group for treatment and safety, which suited them fine. From what VAL said, the rest of this was a simple cleanup. Granted, it was a dangerous cleanup, but they had a Master Knight and Commander Knight with them, along with Erec to provide some support.

Boldwick radioed the group to let them know that the only survivor would be returning and that they would return once they’d dealt with the remains of the AI.

What he didn’t expect was Dame Robin to radio them back, five minutes later—telling them the news that the Arch-Magi had vanished from their group.

“That bastard,” Rochester sneered as he unloaded another bullet from his revolver into the corpse of a monster they’d slain. One of the ‘experiments,’ from another world, now they knew none of the things left down here were Pendragons. “Betrayed us—Vega Rat! Probably scampering for that tech y’all are after; then… Ah fuck, he’ll leave us inside. Aint that it?”

“Calm down,” Boldwick said, shaking his head. He gave Erec a look. “I don’t believe we’ll be locked in here, as long as we deal with the remaining Artificial Intelligence. Don’t forget, we have a secret.

[He is correct. I’ll take control of the facility and be able to take us out of lockdown after we decommission the outdated tech.]

Erec gave Boldwick the confirming nod he was looking for.

“You should know better than that, Boldwick. Aint worth relying on the same sorta crazed tech that trapped us in here. If anything, that boy is a liability.” Rochester asked.

“I trust my Initiate. If he believes we’ll be fine, then it’s the confirmation I need to carry out this operation. Regardless, the Arch-Magi will need to find it as easy as he thinks to grab what we want, and then escape. I have a contingency plan. The Unbroken General guards the exit, and if getting in taxed the Arch-Magi, then leaving will do as well.”

“You planned for this?”

“There were multiple reasons to leave him behind. If, perhaps, we didn’t find our way out. But yes, I did not trust the Arch-Magi. He’s an outsider; one without any sense of honor from what I’ve observed—only his own self-interests. For now, we’ll focus on our current goal: eliminate the remaining threat. Then we may worry about the Arch-Magi.” Boldwick gave Erec a look and started walking down the hall in the way they’d been headed.

Rochester and the rest of the Pendragons fell in line; Erec giving directions to Boldwick and Juliana… They were lucky not to run into any further monsters, and ten minutes later, they reached the suite they were searching for.

And they were screwed.

The door to the place was made of the same material as the shutter outside; locked and sealed. It seemed the AI hadn’t been making ideal threats, since its contingency plan within a contingency plan involved entombing itself outside of the grasp of any living thing, aside from perhaps an Arch-Magi.

Once more, an unbreakable barrier.

Within him, that sea of silver only started to pull together again. Erec wasn’t confident that silver axe would have the power to crash through this place, not right now. Not while running off nothing.

“VAL, if you enable power—“

[It will keep that door closed, and we’ll get into a wrestling match over controlling the facility. Since it's been waiting for us to reach here and likely figure out that we’ll need power and controls to get at it, I’m willing to wager that it’s got some cards stashed up in its hard drive.] VAL answered with a monotone buzz. [Though, it looks like dealing with that might be the only option. Not that I like it, Buckeroo. It’s out for blood, and if we give it an inch, it’ll take a mile and probably kill multiple someones, somehow. Probably you, in all honesty. It really hates you.]

Erec ground his teeth at that and narrowed his eyes at the doorway. A little more power, just a bit more resiliency and Strength, and he’d be able to deal with this door without putting anyone at risk.

Of course, Boldwick gave it a go. Slamming the barrier with his sword and glyphs, but it didn’t make any progress, other than a couple of scratches and dents, but the Master Knight held back. Erec suspected he couldn’t unleash with everyone around him, but as he let the barrage of fire stop, he didn’t seem eager to clear the area.

Their options were to try to track down the Arch-Magi before he found what he was looking for, then somehow convince him to let them through here—a proposition that seemed vanishingly unlikely. Besides, if they did so, they stood no chance of catching up to the Arch-Magi. Booting up the power and letting VAL play tug of war with the other AI while they put everyone inside in danger again was a horrible solution, even if Erec was working himself up to give Boldwick the option.

“Hey, psycho, do ya trust me?” Enide said, slinking up next to him; her face had a sour frown as she stared at the Master Knight, considering the door.

“Yeah?” Erec asked, feeling the pieces in his head twisting and shifting.

“I can get us in. But just us.”

“How?”

“Can’t really… explain why. But you and me, we have a connection to this place. More than the others, and I feel it. To me, it's like a tunnel, one that’s small and right through that door there, and I can pry it open. I think it’s because this thing is much slimmer than the shutters. I’ve never tried before… with another person, but…” she let it hang, then softened her voice. “I saw what you did to kill this thing the first time, how you tore yourself apart to kill it. That fire in you lit something in me. I can push. I dunno what it’ll do, but I can try to make it work. But it’s gotta be just us. We’re the only ones who have that narrow opening. Dunno what it'll cost, so if I did it alone, I don’t think I’d stand much of a shot on the other side if it’s got a stash of robots in there. So, hero. Do you have it in you for a round two?”

[Interesting. I wonder, does this correlate with your Kingdom’s theories on stable Rifts? I’d thought it to be rudimentary science, but the conservation of energy in subspace travel does appear to correlate to environmental relationships. Though it transcending to this nonsense of you two being ‘tied to Vortex Industries’ is ridiculous emotional babble.]

Erec stared at Boldwick slamming another flamming wave into the doorway. If Enide said, she could slip them past…

“Do it.”

“Take my hand,” she smiled at him, a forced smile that tried to hide away her worry beneath. With all they’d seen today, he was impressed she was still together enough for this.

Erec took her hand.

Then, the world twisted up.

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