“Ham?” she said again. Her chair didn’t seem capable of turning all the way; gears ground and a clicking sound came forth.
“Has she slowed down?” I asked the others on my intercom, hoping that absorbing half the wiring back here had helped.
“Negative, Unit Hermes, we will be through the cloud in minutes. Whatever you seek to do must be accomplished posthaste,” Jeeves answered.
Dusk chirped. I couldn’t wait for my energy to recover fully. How long had it been since we started? One minute? Two? How much longer did we have in this freakish storm with the [Stabinator] tearing us apart?
I became desperate and ran for Auntie Backstab’s control panel. She looked out of it, so maybe it was possible to remove her method of controlling this ship.
“Ham!” Seeing me move into her line of sight made the giant start shaking with eager rage. “Make you metal man soup!”
I ducked toward the floor and put both hands on a large panel’s base. It looked important, and just seconds ago, the half [Behemoth] had been pressing buttons while staring through a screen. [Material Conversion] dinged again, and the panel melted as metals were sucked out of it. I tried to grip tighter as she wiggled to get out of a large harness.
“You killed my ship!”
Her foot kicked me in the gut, and I lost part of my grip. The console she had been using started to fold like wet cardboard. I gave it a few swift kicks while trying to clutch my wounded side. Even a weakened Captain Backstab hurt like hell.
She got out of her harness, and I managed to absorb enough mass from the hull to spawn two Dusk-shaped minions. I saw the real Dusk leap in as well. All three tore at the large creature.
“Hermes?” Treasure said over our communications.
“Here.” I didn’t have the breath for more than one word. Being a [Mechanoid] didn’t override my normal mental instincts. When in outer space, I still inhaled frequently; when kicked, I still gasped with pain.
“The enemy vessel shows all navigation controls are offline. You need to return quickly before we exit the cloud,” she said.
I rolled away from a stomping foot. Lightning rippled by and my energy bar fell apart. The two metal Dusks turned into puddles and glommed onto Captain Backstab, slowing the giant down slightly. Her swings no longer had the strength to break them apart.
Dusk was busy clawing and stabbing. The boss’s health bar had been overwhelming on the [Knuckle Dragger], but now it took damage.
I didn’t have time to hang around and try to finish her off.
“Metal people will not escape!” She stomped at the broken control panel.
The ship lurched forward, and the vessel’s engines rotated us wildly. Both the boss and I were bouncing around the cabin. Spikes hung loosely off chains. I had no idea how this ship managed to spin while still retaining any sort of ability to chase the [Wayfarer’s Hope], but I needed to get outside.
It was too late. She grabbed my shoulder and dragged me slowly toward that grossly deformed maw. My free arm clawed at the ship’s side, trying to find purchase and keep using [Material Conversion]. The ability had saved me before; even now it was brokenly useful.
I threw out another metal Dusk as my energy rapidly recovered. The lightning bolts kept disrupting my [Core], but my recovery was oddly fast. The small metal being started biting. The boss’s eyes glazed over as she tried to pull me in. My fingers were absorbing enough mass that the outside of the ship could be seen. Auntie Backstab was near death and kept trying to eat my arm as we tumbled around.
“Ham.” She wasn’t looking directly at me. The monstrous amalgamation operated on vague instinct to pursue food.
My fingers kept trying to grab a wall but slipped. The vessel’s constant bouncing motion made it like trying to use chopsticks to pick up water. My [Messenger’s Pet] managed to jab Auntie Backstab in the face repeatedly, which delayed the monster. Another metal version of Dusk spawned from my [Mechanical Minion] ability. A fresh bolt of lightning disrupted my energy bar, and the accumulated metal bits fell onto Auntie Backstab. As the metal solidified, it seemed to trap large portions of the half [Behemoth]’s body.
Finally, she froze.
“Hermes! You must return!”
All around us, things still spun. I managed to get back to the rear hatch, and Dusk chirped behind me. I reached one arm out and grabbed on as everything whirled. It was too much, too sickening. A long tail wrapped around my neck.
“I won’t be able to make it!” I shouted, hoping the game would automatically relay my voice to the other [Mechanoid]s.
“Hold on. I’ve got something for this,” Eggman said through the comm. I heard him banging around in the [Wayfarer’s Hope]. “Ready for some nonsense?”
“What?” I put one hand in front of my face to block frozen pellets hailing on me.
Then my world fell in upon itself. My vision distorted, and my head felt pulled in two different directions. One eye saw the view from [Stabinator]’s outer hull, the other showed a confused Jeeves. I closed both eyes as my gut wrenched and noise about me shifted.
The large man laughed. “Ahhh, I’ve always wanted to save someone. Hehehe.”
Somehow Eggman and I had swapped locations. I panicked and tried to figure out why another player, one I barely knew, had risked his life for mine.
“Will you be okay?” I asked across our comm channels.
“Probably! I’ve got a few toys to try out! I’ll see you below, or not! Hehehe.” Eggman sounded a bit upset but managed to put out a good laugh.
“Jeeves?” I huffed rapidly.
That had felt weird, like being summoned to the [Red Imp] body months ago. The process only lacked a kaleidoscope of colors swirling around me.
“No time. We must complete this pattern before ejecting,” Jeeves said. Its fingers were poking at a screen invisible to me. That had to be a player interface that the AI was digging through.
“Eject?” My brain couldn’t wrap itself around the idea immediately. Auntie Backstab’s spinning vessel must have done more damage than expected.
“Like we did for the Leviathan,” Jeeves said.
Our vessel jerked again. The gravity was low, but I felt its pull as we dropped another ten feet. Engines sputtered on either side, trying to hold us aloft.
“Our ship won’t make it. We’ll be taking a damaged engine core and attempting to life raft. Even now we’re barely fighting off the downward pull.” Treasure pointed at a large spike in the hull. It was heavy enough to be tearing away at one side of the ship. No portion of our vessel had come out unscathed. Treasure rushed by me. Her hands glowed with a golden light as the walls of our craft were remade into their new shape. “It’s a simple pattern, and we don’t have time for more.”
I pressed against a wall as Jeeves ran over to help Treasure. They were busy trying to construct a blue engine like before.
“Okay.” I nodded hastily and looked at the blue raft. This resembled our earlier one almost to a tee. Round, like an upside-down cone with a ring for holding onto. “Will this be enough?”
“Landing will be tough. There’s just enough gravity to cause serious damage,” Treasure said. A frown seemed etched onto her face and the tired voice was winning the [Mechanoid] duet.
“What if I lose mass? Will that slow us down?” I was talking fast, offering to toss half a dozen Dusk clones out the window. My hand reached up to rub the original’s head. He chirped excessively at me, and none of it made sense.
“Mass does not impact acceleration, only force,” Jeeves said. “By using the engine, we will attempt to cancel out some of the acceleration as we descend.”
“What about a wingsuit, glider, flat board? Can we do anything quickly enough?”
I tried to figure out how much the three of us would weigh together. Seven hundred pounds? That sounded right. That human from the bar had been ready to lift and toss me through the door, so my weight couldn’t be too insane. Not in a fresh game like this, where humans were ave
rage, not exceptional in any skill.
“Like a panel? If it were thin enough, it might catch, but it would be fragile. We would tip unless providing it balance. Maybe we could wire the engines?” Jeeves said.
Even now we were getting ready to break through the final descent. I looked out one of the large tears in our ship and saw a landscape of obsidian-looking rocks below. Burned sand maybe? Were we flying over what had once been a volcanic layer?
“Make the suit and modify me. Pattern Smiths can do that, right? I gain mass, we balance, attach an engine to the bottom to break our descent. If nothing else, I can act like a cushion?” I felt desperate as I tried to figure out a way through. Our ship was ruined. The wing was tearing off as we debated. Soon we would go into a complete spin and the remaining vessel abilities wouldn’t be able to keep us afloat.
“Everything has a breaking point, Unit Hermes,” Jeeves said. It stared directly at me as if trying to make me feel how ridiculous my statement was.
I blinked and shook my head. The idea of using a jet at the last minute to try to cancel our fall was just as mad, but this way we would have both.
“Perhaps. We might be able to synchronize with the increased durability of your larger form. If nothing else, it will be harder to break.” Treasure nodded. “If you are willing to sacrifice yourself.”
“Neat. Let’s do it.”
I had been walking into a lot of pain since playing this game. Still, suffering all this was worth it to recover Xin. My mind had adapted to the idea that virtual damage wasn’t anywhere near the kind of lingering agony real life came with.
I tried to remember the durability of metals that fell. Only Galileo’s experiment with a marble and bowling ball came to mind. Two different-sized objects of the same material falling from the same height would reach the bottom at the same time.
Treasure shuffled around the ship. Parts of our floor looked to be shimmering and forming thicker lines. Jeeves nodded and grabbed at pieces around the room. We didn’t have much to work with, and every time we adjusted the vehicle, we started slipping.
Finally, she motioned to the floor. “Quickly, Hermes! Absorb what you can from the ceiling and lay here. Stretch out to touch these points.”
My fingers jabbed at small glowing points.
“Unit Jeeves, we need that engine,” she said. “Put it here! The vents on the bottom should spread out our force.”
We were attempting to form a robot hang-glider using this jerry-rigged hunk of metal. Low enough gravity might make this insane trip possible. I couldn’t imagine doing this on an original version of Earth.
I grabbed at the ceiling and activated the [Material Conversion] ability once more. We were lucky to be outside the lightning bolt zone. The air hung heavy with energy. My energy bar went away as my mass increased. Once at maximum, I sighed and tried not to think about how improbable this whole situation was.
“This is about the extent of what we can manage. I wished to repair the entire vessel, but there’s simply not enough time, and with only one Pattern Smith core, we could never modify an entire ship in time.” Her voice sounded extremely tired now.
While she spoke, our vessel started losing altitude. We tilted to one side abruptly as the wing tore away. Jeeves stepped in behind me and placed the small blue cone he had worked on. At some point, the two [Mechanoid]s had built a holster for where my legs would go. It clinked into place at the back end of our glider. Treasure lay down and locked her arms into a handhold. Jeeves twisted the blue cone into place and grabbed his own slots. I felt stunned these two had invented such an item after only a minute of conversation.
“Dropping, keep us steady, Hermes,” she said.
The panel fell out of the [Wayfarer’s Hope] like a cutout simply falling out of a large piece of paper. Only instead of paper, it was a plane, and instead of a cutout, we were on a constructed panel of metal.
The main ship lifted away, and our panel fired off blasts of energy as the remaining engine fought to keep us steady. I kept my hands and legs in place and tilted as forces drove me around. This was far worse than flying as the [Red Imp]. Jeeves weighed slightly more than Treasure, so I had to twist to the left.
All of us fell. Our spaceship was in pieces. The [Stabinator] descended nearby. Auntie Backstab’s large body stood dully in the middle, former Dusk critters turning her into a metal-gilded statue. The [Stabinator] automatically fired off weakened engines, the ones still functioning after my [Material Conversion] tore through portions of it.
“Hang on!” I shouted.
I prepared myself to be a cushion against the ground. We were all made of metal, and maybe if I absorbed the impact first, they would survive. My mass was easily four times the old size. My arms stretched out and held the flattened hunk of metal. Risking my life to keep Jeeves safe might just kill me this time. We had no parachutes, only the long slab I was holding down the edges of while engines fired to keep us stable.
“This is insane!” Jeeves shouted. Its actual words were lost as gravity pulled us down. Only the [Mechanoid] method of communication could be understood.
“Live a little!” I joked, but my heart wasn’t in it.
We were on course to collide with a path made of polished stone. The long road meandered through mountains. Our craft kept veering toward huge hills sloping down the path.
I focused on breathing to regulate my heartbeat. The sound encompassed everything. Another breath passed my lips, then one more. This wasn’t the sound of me breathing in a game—I could hear myself outside the ARC, trying to suck in a lungful of air and not die of fright.
Falling. We were falling. I wasn’t piggybacking on my niece’s ARC with a Second Player helm. This was me. How had she handled the drop? By watching the sky. My head turned to look over my shoulder at space. Trying to find a measure of peace in what might be the biggest failure of my life. Jeeves and Treasure were holding hands awkwardly over my back. They spoke words I couldn’t hear.
Air. We were badly gliding through an atmosphere. The [Wayfarer’s Hope] and the [Stabinator] veered farther into the electricity-generating clouds. Whistling grew louder. I turned my head around and saw Jeeves and Treasure staring at me. For a moment, they looked so tiny and helpless. I wondered briefly what would it have been like to be a father. Would it be like this? Worried that you were meant to be the strong one, while feeling utterly helpless against the challenges ahead?
“Final push!” Treasure shouted.
Pressure crushed against my gut. Our descent slowed notably but not enough. We veered slightly onto one of the sharp mountain ridges. Treasure and Jeeves had somehow collapsed over my back. My arms felt bent backward. Metal grinding overwhelmed my hearing, and a fresh dose of pain drove my eyesight blurry. I gasped. We slid, then rolled, then tumbled downward. Finally, the gray space of near death enveloped my screen.
Hit Rock Bottom
Total health loss: 99%
It felt blissfully quick. I glanced around at the empty landscape of near [Mechanoid] afterlife. I felt proud and sad at the same time. Sad that my own whims had brought things to this point, and proud that not once had I turned away. This was my trial of Orpheus, my ascent to bring her back. Like Xin said during our short time together, I had to keep moving forward toward the goal. To look back and worry about the madness of this course would invite failure.
Fading in were two other [Mechanoid]s: Ruby and Aqua. They spared no time for conversational chatter. I saw the red one nod slowly, and our androgynous blue companion wore a serene expression. I tried to wave, but they were already vanishing. In their wake, a new message displayed.
Key units respect reward:
+30 [Respect]
Item: [Aqua’s Key]
Item: [Ruby’s Key]
Session Sixty-Four — Everyone Matters
I got a pop-up notice from Jeeves asking to start repairs on my character rather quickly. Light whooshed around me and presented a blackened landscape. My neck refused to tur
n, forcing me to stare at an endless path winding through obsidian mountains. Above the horizon line sat a purplish haze of lightning and hanging water. There was so much of it. We had survived the descent through this broken planet’s orbit.
My voice didn’t work right. Health and energy bars were lined with static, like watching a television show through visual scramblers. Moments of clarity showed a [Repair]ing status and almost empty health bar slowly recovering. Treasure sat nearby, trying to funnel our emergency life raft into [Mechanoid] body parts.
“Can you hear me?” she said at least four times.
“Yes.” I felt relief as audio stopped sounding scratchy. “Did we all make it?”
“Affirmative, Unit Hermes.” Jeeves nodded.
I tried to move one arm, but it felt asleep. My legs weren’t responding, but the [Repair] process helped. Warmth wormed a trail down both limbs. The lines of green and iron that laced my being were coming together into a solid line.
“We must recover, even a little, then proceed down the path with haste,” Treasure said. Her body was undergoing a similar recovery process.
As my visual interface cleared, it became obvious how badly the other two were hurt. Using my body as a buffer hadn’t saved them. Part of me wondered why our ship couldn’t have just landed rapidly, but a damaged wing had probably screwed up the descent.
Maybe it had something to do with the gravity.
“Dusk? Did Dusk make it?” I asked, trying to complete my mental inventory. The little guy must be around somewhere—he always was. I didn’t think he had ever actually died on me, but that fall was huge and the creature had no wings in this game. I felt as though our chances at success were slipping.
“I have not seen your companion, Unit Hermes,” said Jeeves, the butler voice coming out on top.
My eyes closed. Where had the [Messenger’s Pet] ended up? I didn’t know how to figure out an answer, but usually, Dusk could take care of himself. I hoped.
“Ahead. The Mistborn should be about two miles down the path,” the female [Mechanoid] said. Her hand pointed to my left.
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