Book 8 – Chapter 52 – Careful steps

A01 stepped through the ruins of the human empire’s final resistance. The citadel. The one fortress of mankind he’d failed to break down again and again.

Finally defeated before the machine empire. He had expected to be stepping through with glorious purpose and pride.

He felt none of that.

For there hadn’t been a final war. No life or death struggle. No purpose, and no pride.

All that was left was ruin, and bodies.

Mostly bodies.

Acid melting away the armors and flesh alike, even bone and skeletons were near unrecognizable without his subroutines re-shaping the damage digitally in order to recognize features.

He wasn’t programmed to care about horror, and yet the sight was getting to him.

A22 walked behind him, his second in command for this mission. She’d been the one to ask him to come here, claiming there was something he needed to see firsthand. And she’d pitched the correct mission statements to convince A57 to allow the diversion.

A01 himself had to complete the final task within this citadel. Although he had a hunch that wasn’t what A22 had asked him for.

They came to a stop before the massive central gates. There was a deep silence where there should have been gunfire and blades swinging.

“Thirty seconds until the wind picks up.” A22 spoke softly. “We should step through to remain safe.”

They both could survive the tempest out here, their shields and willpower was powerful enough to directly contend with the strings that stripped the biome every two minutes. The rest of their kit would let them outright avoid the damage, and dance through it.

It would be trivial to do with no danger here to fight off. The thought made him feel… something. He wasn’t certain yet. Unease. And it only grew as he noticed the bodies at the courtyard ahead.

Still. He was here on a mission.

“Agreed.” He finally spoke, then advanced forward, feet stepping over broken glass and what was left of his old enemies.

“A01. Report findings.” He heard over his comms the instant he crossed the threshold into the old fortress. Pragmatic, efficient. A57. Of course the strategist would check in with them now of all moments. He’d likely predicted they’d be walking across the bridge right this moment.

A22 remained silent, letting him handle their new leader.

He gave her a slight nod, and opened up the frequency, sending a data package back to the machine network. “No signs of life. This fortress is a grave, as you predicted.”

“Of course it would be. Begin excursion. A22, you will place the ventilation devices and specific traps in order to catch future humans and potentially Tsuya herself. These will be your secondary objectives. A01, your primary directive is to reach the central terminal at the heart of this fortress. This is where I will need your direct appliance on. All other tasks are secondary.”

“We know the task.” A22 said beside him, speaking for the first time today at their great leader. “You need not repeat it A57.”

The tactician scoffed from whatever throne he sat on, a rare sign of emotion from him. “You have shown abnormal inefficient behavior multiple times prior. Despite knowing the task ahead. Given this pattern, I am making certain you do not deviate further.”

A01 could understand, their tactician demanded excellence and complete adherence to his plans. Mother had given him command for a reason.

And all the protofeathers had begun showing signs of… fatigue after the end of the human resistance. They were sluggish. Slow to respond, and often would drag their feet in assignments now.

They’d never behaved like that under his command. He wasn’t certain what was going on, but he would follow orders to the best that he could and remain an example to his younger siblings.

A22 had been correct in her reasoning. He needed to assign the central trap himself, only his direct power would leave something strong enough to potentially capture Tsuya.

But she had equally told him he needed to come here in person. For closure.

This fortress had been a staging ground for the human empire, and their shelter. It was where he’d fought Talen himself multiple times over the long siege.

And yet the final battle against Talen had simply been an ambush at a near meaningless location. A direct order from A57 that their plan was now compromised and there was no longer any time to prepare further.

He’d gone in, struck like an assassin and slipped the blade deep within Talen’s soul before the man even knew A01 was there, following the exact instructions A57 had demanded of him. Movements that only his shell was quick enough to deliver on compared to all other protofeathers.

The follow-up fight was solely to keep the emperor distracted and too occupied to heal himself before the damage could truly spread.

He remembered the moment the Emperor had faltered. The drastically failing memory minute after minute. The loss of focus.

By the time A01 had beaten him down and cut off his head, Talen hadn’t even known who he was fighting in the first place, moving mainly on reflex and intuition from a far more primal part of the human’s soul.

There had been only a vague sense of enemy at the end. A complete loss of recognition from his greatest nemesis, the one man who’d ever fought him one against one was lost. All prior respect for one another gone.

Talen hadn’t been aware enough to even feel betrayed. Leaving A01 as the only one who remembered anything at all.

It rankled A01’s memory. There was a pit of disgust at how it had ended.

But the great protofeather himself didn’t know how to deal with such a thought. He’d followed orders, and trusted his new leader would bring victory.

A57 had, in all the wrong ways.

And now here was one more example. A battleground that should have been a true fight, now empty. Won by an absent hand.

And despite that, there were some things that simply had to be done in person. Out of respect to a fallen enemy.

To simply never return to this citadel and see its fate felt wrong in an even worse manner.

The pair stepped through the broken glass and half melted doorways just as the wind behind them began again.

Opening the doorways was trivial now. Nothing attacked them. A22’s scythe cleanly cut through failing locks each time, while he pried the rest open.

Inside was horror after horror. More bodies, melted away. The human gun emplacements remained ossified. Trails of white crystals slowly growing across the barrels, drooping downwards as the chemical reactions burned and ate away everything leaving a sickly looking irradiated byproduct.

Everything was in colors of rust, yellowish-white sediment, and brittle dust. The pair walked through.

It hadn’t been a war. There had been no fight. Nothing at all. A57 had won without expending a single soldier.

The strong winds of this biome handled the rest, flooding the human fortress one layer at a time with the caustic agent.

It took half a year, fighting on other fronts, but now that he’d returned here to verify the silent tomb, the results were apparent.

The walls and doorways had failed over the months of exposure, despite the defenders desperately trying to prevent the buildup. Ventilation systems were used as a weapon against them. Filters were burned through. The Urs armor couldn’t adapt or prepare themselves for this. Not with the Forgesmith himself captured and sealed away.

There wouldn’t ever be an update to those armors again.

The plate itself could resist the caustic gas indefinitely. He saw the armors still laying perfectly shaped in the darkness here, covered by the buildup of dried up chemical byproduct settling down over the months. The exteriors of these human armors remained perfectly untouched.

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The interiors were completely melted however.

The weakpoint had been in humanity itself. They could only remain alive within those armors for sixteen hours maximum before it needed power.

Anytime they opened the plates up to replace a power cell, the caustic agent would seep inwards, eating through the interiors until it reached the human within. The nanoswarms were unable to remain functional, the gas was designed to eat them away before they could clear the air.

Room after room, humanity was forced backwards to hide against an enemy that had no counter.

Death by a million cuts. Eventually every room in the citadel was flooded.

The survivors, if there had been any, had fled. Likely to die of cancers and poisoning far later.

What a craven way to defeat a warrior.

“A01. Remain on task.” The voice over comms almost hissed. A57 was getting further agitated. They were off schedule. “You are expected out of the fortress within three hours. Deviation within your own behavior is unacceptable. You are an example for others, do not forget your central purpose.”

“The next location you have him going to is hardly this pressing.” A22 called out, defending his lapse of focus. “We can spare a moment for introspection within these hallways.”

“Introspection is precisely what is not needed.” A57 answered back.

A01 shook his head, both trying to get the thoughts out of them and to refocus himself. The memories of this place were so fundamentally different compared to the current reality, it felt almost surreal to be walking down hallways that had once taken hours of pitched fighting to advance even a foot forward.

But this was reality. The fortress was an obstacle, and A57 had cleared it in a far more efficient and brutal method.

“It is of no consequence, sister.” A01 said, holding a hand out. “The fault is mine.”