(Third Person POV)
Time had passed in the space between spaces though measuring it in conventional terms would be meaningless. The cosmic game continued its eternal dance, pieces moving across the board in patterns that represented the rise and fall of civilizations, the birth and death of stars, the endless cycle of conflict and resolution.
The Father sat differently now, no longer quite as rigid in his ancient chair. His weathered hands rested on the armrests, but his fingers drummed occasionally a new gesture, one that suggested anticipation rather than mere observation.
The Daughter had shifted her position as well, leaning slightly forward, her luminous form casting different shadows across the game board. Several of her pieces had been moved to new positions, bright tokens clustered in defensive arrangements that suggested concern about something yet to come.
The Son lounged in his chair casually, but his dark fingers gripped the armrest with enough force to leave impressions in the ancient wood. His shadow pieces on the board had spread wider, testing boundaries, probing for weaknesses in his sister's formations.
And the wooden doll still sat impossibly small in her massive chair, but the shadows behind her had grown. They writhed and twisted with barely contained energy, occasionally reaching out to caress the edges of the game board before retreating. She had been patient, watching as the others moved their pieces in response to her initial gambit.
Then the wooden doll straightened.
"Oh?" The Mother's voice carried notes of dark amusement as her wooden form tilted forward. The shadows behind her chair writhed with anticipation as she turned her carved face toward the Daughter's luminous throne. "Aren't you going to let him out to play? Or do you keep your faithful ones hidden away like guilty secrets?"
The Daughter's form pulsed with irritation, her light flickering in patterns that suggested barely contained frustration. "I don't keep my followers as slaves, Mother. Unlike you and your shadow-bound servants, mine choose their paths freely. They serve because they believe, not because they're chained by corruption."
The Mother's wooden form rocked with silent laughter. "How noble. How wonderfully self-righteous. Yet if they're so free, why does he lurk behind your throne like a beaten dog afraid to show itself? Unless, of course, you're ashamed of what you've created—"
Movement interrupted her next words.
From behind the Daughter's throne a figure emerged that stood perhaps three meters tall, its form a blasphemous fusion of the divine and the mechanical that would not be out of place in some other universes.
The being's body was primarily composed of tarnished metal that might once have been white or silver but now bore the wear and tear of ages past. Tubes and cables ran through its form like exposed veins, but instead of blood or hydraulic fluid, they carried something that flickered between light and data streams. Its head was elongated, almost helmet-like in design, with a crown of antennae and sensory equipment that resembled both a technological array and a saint's halo by machinery.
Joy, ever attentive to the needs of cosmic guests began moving toward an area where additional chairs were kept, but the mechanical being raised one hand in polite refusal before she could get far
As it walked forward, something happened.
Small robotic creatures emerged from recesses and joints in its body. They swarmed over its form with purpose, what they used for hands working with impossible coordination. They removed panels of metal, revealing different configurations beneath. The removed pieces didn't simply fall away they went through a visible cycle of transformation. Shining metal went from shine to rust in seconds the rust then crumbled to dust, and from the dust, new metal seemed to generate, only to repeat the cycle.
Some of these pieces, as they fell, didn't dissipate. Instead, they began to cluster together on the floor beside and slightly behind the Daughter's throne. The small robots that had removed them followed, adding their own mass to the growing structure. Within moments, they had assembled themselves into a throne not matching the chairs of those already present, but something uniquely lesser.
The being settled into this self-created throne, and as it did, its form shifted dramatically. Two additional arms unfolded from its torso, from its lower body, a second pair of legs emerged, arranging themselves in a meditation pose that suggested transcendence to those who watched.
The Son leaned forward in his chair, shadows coiling with barely restrained excitement. "Can we finally bring them out?" His voice carried the weight of eons of patience finally reaching its end. "If Mother has returned, if the game truly changes—"
The Father's gaze moved from the being to his son then without speaking, he simply nodded a single, deliberate gesture. Then, with the same careful movement, he raised one weathered hand and pointed directly at the Mother.
The Son's face split into a grin that sent distant star systems into darkness as the stars holding the systems extinguished.
______________________________
(Embers POV)
"I wish to win."
The moment the words left my mouth everything began to slow, then before I could react she spoke. Her voice was honey poured over broken glass, sweet and sharp and ancient beyond measure.
"If that is your wish little one, then the cost shall be one."
I nodded. A simple gesture, but one that carried the weight of acceptance, of contract, of irrevocable change.
"Then it is done," the Mother's voice whispered, and I could hear the smile in it.
Reality hiccupped.
The Starweird appeared without transition or warning one moment it was empty space, the next moment it was there as if it had always existed beside me. It stood three meters tall, its body composed of what looked like spatial distortions wrapped in funeral shrouds that had been soaked in the void between stars. Its head was an elongated skull, the bone not white but the absolute black of deep space, with eye sockets that contained swirling galaxies in miniature entire stars born and dying in those hollow depths. Its hands ended in claws that seemed to exist in more dimensions than the standard three, shifting and overlapping in ways that made my eyes water.
Time was still moving slowly, but the Starweird moved at normal speed or perhaps it existed outside of time's normal flow altogether. It raised one impossible claw, the appendage leaving traces of itself in the air like a badly tuned hologram. I tried to move, to raise my hammer in defense, to dodge, to do anything but my body was caught and would not respond at all, I could only watch as the claw descended toward me.
It passed through me, the claw phasing through my clothes, my skin, my bones, touching something deeper than flesh. The sensation wasn't pain, exactly. It was a hole. Like having a tooth pulled, but from my soul rather than my mouth.
The starweird vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, reality snapping back into focus. Time resumed its normal flow with a sensation like breaking through the water's surface after a deep dive. But as it disappeared, my vision was consumed by a flash of pure white—not light, but the absence of everything else. In that white void, I saw/felt/knew what had been taken.
Gratitude. The ability to feel thankful, to appreciate kindness, to recognize when others had helped me. It was simply... gone.
The white flash faded, and I was back in the scrapyard, my hammer still humming in my grip, the blue barrier still crackling around us. But something fundamental had changed. Every memory of someone helping me—Vex training me, Cherry's innocent affection, Sera's patient guidance—they were still there, but the emotional weight had vanished. I could remember saying "thank you," but couldn't recall why it had mattered.
"LeT's... BeGiN!"
Miss Gasket's distorted voice crackled through damaged speakers like a declaration of war. The instant the words left her mouth all around us erupted into chaos.
The droids came from everywhere pouring from behind salvage piles, dropping from overhead chains, emerging from beneath conveyor belts. Not the shambling approach of mindless automatons, but the calculated assault of a networked intelligence given singular purpose: converge on me.
My hand found the control switches on my warhammer's grip—three toggles hidden in the wrapped leather handle. I clicked the switch till it was equal on both sides and hefted the weapon onto my shoulder, feeling its comfortable heft of maybe thirty five kilograms. Through my Force sight, I could see the energy signatures of dozens of droids converging on my position. The first wave would hit in three seconds.
Two seconds and a wave of gratitude hit me like a stimulant injection, flooding my brain with appreciation.
"Thank you, Vex!" I shouted suddenly, the words torn from me as the first maintenance droid lunged with welding torches blazing. "Thank you for teaching me that kindness is just manipulation dressed in pretty clothes!"
My hammer came off my shoulder in a arc down, the head crushing through the droid's chassis with a sound like a tin can being stepped on. Sparks erupted as its power core ruptured, but four more were already closing in.
The words came to me not from memory but from somewhere deeper, as if the corrupted shrine and my paid wish were feeding me knowledge I shouldn't have. My mouth opened, and sounds that predated clocks emerged:
"GHR'NYA Tch'Sha!"
The shout rippled outward in a visible cone of pure Force energy, distorting the air like a heat mirage given substance. The advancing droids caught in its path were lifted off their feet tracks, wheels, and all and flung backward with tremendous force. They slammed into walls, other droids, and salvage piles with crashes that echoed through the chamber.
More droids pressed in from the sides. I clicked the hammer to its lightest setting and spun, the weapon becoming a blur. The head caught a sorting droid in its legs sending it spinning. The backswing crushed a loader's manipulator arm. The follow-through caved in a maintenance bot's chest cavity.
"Thank you, Academy instructors, for teaching me that strength is the only truth that matters!"
Movement from the furnace caught my attention. Miss Gasket had reached into the inferno itself, her heat resistant chassis allowing her to grasp a bar of metal that glowed white-hot. As she withdrew it, the metal was already cooling to orange, then red, its surface rippling with heat distortion.
Her vocalization unit produced sounds that shouldn't exist the same language that had emerged from my throat:
"AZH SHA VR'L NYA MH'R BPH VOR NYAR FTH!"
As the words echoed through the chamber, something happened. I watched as the droids she swung the heated bar through didn't just melt or break they adhered to it. Pieces of their bodies, their circuits, their mechanical components flowed onto the bar like magnetized liquid metal. Within seconds, she wasn't holding a simple heated rod but a weapon part club, part sword, part technological nightmare. Gears formed serrated edges. Sensors became power nodes. Hydraulic fluid channels became cooling systems. And she was growing.
With each step toward me, Miss Gasket's massive frame absorbed more material. She didn't just step on the smaller droids she consumed them. Their mass flowed up her legs, adding layers to her armor, extending her reach, increasing her height. six meters and slowly work her way to seven meters. Her six arms remained proportional, but now each one was the size of a small tree trunk.
"Thank you for the dramatic entrance!" I called out, diving aside as her weapon now the size of a support beam slammed down where I'd been standing. The impact cratered the floor, sending shockwaves through the metal that made my teeth rattle.
I clicked the hammer to maximum weight and brought it up to block her follow-up swing. The collision was titanic—two hundred kilograms of hammer meeting probably twice that in her improvised weapon. The shock traveled up my arms, through my enhanced skeleton, making every joint protest. My feet slid backward, leaving grooves in the floor.
"THANK YOU ROBOT!" The gratitude burst from me with genuine enthusiasm as her blow lifted me off my feet. "Thank you for showing me that size does matter!"
I flew through the air, the scrapyard spinning around me in a blur of colors but still I was able to see what was about to happen. My landing was less graceful than intended I slammed back-first onto a moving conveyor belt, the impact driving the air from my lungs. My mask's medical systems flooded me with painkillers and stimulants, keeping me functional.
A tracked droid was already on the belt, reaching for me with magnetic demolition grapples. I flicked the hammer to lightweight and swung upward from my prone position. The ascending swing caught the droid perfectly, launching it into the air like a ball hit by a bat. It sailed over Miss Gasket's head and directly into the furnace, where it vaporized with a brief scream of tortured metal.
I rolled to my feet, riding the conveyor belt as it carried me toward certain doom. More droids were climbing onto the belt from both sides, and Miss Gasket was wading through the mechanical tide toward me, each step making the ground shake.
Time for something different.
I began spinning the hammer around me it not in combat swings but in a controlled rotation, building momentum. The weapon became a blur, its head creating a disc of motion that hummed with energy. When I released it, the hammer flew like a discus, its rotation creating a devastating path through the approaching droids. Heads separated from bodies, arms were torn off torsos split open all in a perfectly straight line of destruction.
The hammer embedded itself in a support pillar fifty meters away.
"Thank you, universe, for this opportunity to try something stupidly dangerous!" I shouted, spreading my arms wide.
I spread my arms wide, fingers splayed like antenna reaching for invisible signals. The knowledge flowing into me wasn't mine it came from that deep place where the wish had taken root, where payment had been made in the currency of human emotion. My hands began to move in patterns that felt both ancient and impossibly advanced, like conducting an orchestra that played in electromagnetic frequencies rather than sound.
The electricity didn't come from nowhere. I could feel it gathering from every source around me static from the conveyor belts' friction, residual charge from the droids' power cores, even the bioelectrical field of my own nervous system. It all flowed toward my hands, visible as crackling blue-white streams that danced along my arms like living tattoos. The sensation was intoxicating every nerve ending sang with power, y somehow able to channel power that should have fried me instantly. The electricity pooled in my palms, condensing into spheres of ball lightning that pulsed with barely contained energy.
"Thank you, metal!" I shouted unable to stop myself.
I thrust both hands forward, and the lightning erupted in a spreading wave of destruction. The droids in front of me didn't even have time to process the threat before the current hit them, the smaller maintenance units simply exploded, their power cores unable to handle the massive surge. Larger droids convulsed and sparked, their systems overloading in cascading failures. Eyes burst like light bulbs. Hydraulic lines ruptured, spraying fluid that immediately ignited from the heat. The air filled with the acrid smell of burning insulation.
Miss Gasket skittered backward on her six mechanical legs, her massive form moving with surprising agility. The electricity licked at her arms, making her chest spark, but her sheer mass and whatever upgrades she'd absorbed seemed to dissipate the worst of it. Her multiple sensors focused on me with something I couldn't figure out but didn't like
Without breaking her backward momentum, one of her six arms swept down and grabbed a piece of scrap metal a hull plate from some long-dead starship, two meters long and wickedly sharp along one edge. She hefted it like it weighed nothing, her servos whining with the motion.
"Thank you for the incoming projectile!" The words burst from me even as my brain screamed danger.
She threw it the metal plate spinning through the air like a massive throwing star. It cut through the space where I stood with a whistle that promised decapitation.
But I had problems of my own.
While I'd been focused on the frontal assault, droids had been circling behind me. I felt them before I saw them—cold metal hands grasping at my arms, my legs, my torso. A maintenance droid's manipulator claw locked around my left wrist. A loader's magnetic grapple caught my right shoulder. More were piling on, their combined weight and strength beginning to immobilize me.
The spinning metal plate was three meters away. Two meters. One.
"Thank you for holding me still for my execution!" I laughed, the sound slightly hysterical.
My right hand, still crackling with residual electricity, came around in an arc not aimed at the droids, but at myself. I pressed my palm against my own chest and discharged everything I had left.
The shock was extraordinary. Every muscle in my body contracted simultaneously. My vision went white. The electricity passed through me and into every droid making contact with my body. They jerked and spasmed, their grip loosening just enough. I bent backward, feeling the metal plate pass so close that it sheared through several of my mask's external sections. The wind of its passage ruffled my hair through the suit's torn sections.
The droids behind me, still twitching from the electrity provided the perfect stepping stones. I planted my boot on a maintenance unit's head and pushed off, using it to launch myself over a loader that was reaching for my legs. My fist connected with another droid's head infront of me with clumsy force. Pain shot through my knuckles as they met unyielding metal.
The droid I'd punched was still functional, still reaching for me. I drove my shoulder into it, using my body weight and momentum to push it back. We crashed into another cluster of smaller units, metal bodies tangling in a chaotic pile.
I scrambled over them, stepped on what might have been a head or a torso hard to tell with some of these cobbled-together units and tried to create distance but they kept coming.
Behind me, I heard Miss Gasket's massive form beginning to move again, each footfall making the floor shake. She spoke out again multiple voices going off at once.
"SHA K'TL NGH VR'L NYA / MH'R SHA ZUL!"
The words seemed to energize the droids around her. They moved faster, their actions more coordinated. Some began to combine, smaller units climbing onto larger ones, creating beings that shouldn't have been possible with their programming.
I ducked under a cutting laser, rolled past grasping manipulators, and found myself backed against a conveyor belt that was carrying twisted metal toward the furnace. The heat was overwhelming even from here, making my mask's filters work overtime.
More droids closed in. Miss Gasket loomed behind them, her weapon leaving molten grooves in the floor as she dragged it along.
"WHY... DO... YOU... CONTINUE?" she asked, her voice almost curious now. "YOU... CANNOT... WIN... WITHOUT... YOUR... WEAPON..."
"Thank you for the tactical assessment!" I shouted, already moving before the words finished leaving my mouth.
I leaped onto the nearest conveyor belt, my boots hitting the moving surface with a clang that reverberated through the metal. The belt was carrying twisted fragments toward the furnace jagged pieces of metal that could serve as weapons if I could just grab the right one. My Force sight expanded, showing me the energy signatures of everything around me in overlapping waves.
The belt lurched under my weight, and I had to adjust my balance as it continued its journey toward incineration. Behind me, I could hear the smaller droids scrambling to follow their various systems struggling with the moving surface.
A maintenance unit managed to pull itself up, its cutting torch already igniting. I ducked under its first swipe, grabbed a piece of sharp metal from the belt and drove it through the droid's wiring. Sparks fountained as it toppled backward but two more were already climbing up right beside the falling droid.
I ran along the belt, jumping over gaps where the machinery had worn through, dodging grasping hands in various forms from droids that had begun to climb along the sides. My Force sight pulsed, searching for something—anything—that could serve as a proper weapon.
There. Three conveyor belts over, moving perpendicular to mine. A piece of equipment that blazed in my enhanced vision with stored energy. It looked like a modified mining laser, probably salvaged from some asteroid operation. The power cell was still partially charged, and the focusing array seemed intact.
I just had to get to it.
A loader droid lunged from my left, its massive arms trying to encircle me in a bear hug. I dropped to my knees, sliding under its grasp on the belt's smooth surface, then kicked upward into what would have been its chin if droids had chins. It stumbled backward, buying me seconds.
The gap to the next conveyor belt was two meters doable under normal circumstances, but the belts were moving in opposite directions. I'd have to compensate for the momentum shift or risk falling into the grinding machinery below.
I sprinted toward the edge, calculating distances and vectors through my HUD's damaged displays. A spider-droid dropped from above, landing directly in my path. No time to stop. I planted my foot on its central chassis and used it as a springboard, launching myself across the gap.
Mid-leap, a manipulator arm caught my ankle.
"Thank you for the assisted flying lesson!"
The droid's grip threw off my trajectory. Instead of landing cleanly on the next belt, I hit the edge hard, my ribs slamming into unforgiving metal. Pain exploded through my torso—something definitely cracked. I scrambled for purchase, legs dangling over the mechanical abyss below where grinding gears waited to reduce anything that fell to component atoms.
The droid still had my ankle, trying to pull me down. I grabbed the belt's edge with my good hand and kicked viciously with my free foot, feeling satisfaction as my boot connected with something important. The grip loosened, and I hauled myself up spitting blood against my mask.
Two belts down, one to go.
Miss Gasket had been tracking my movement, her massive form keeping pace despite the cluttered terrain. She opened her vocalization unit and spoke a single word in that ancient tongue:
"CTH'YOG!"
The effect was immediate. Space seemed to compress around her, and One moment she was twenty meters away, the next she was directly beside the conveyor belt I was on, her massive weapon already swinging toward me.
No time to think. The words erupted from my throat in pure instinct:
"GHR'NYA TCH'SHA!"
The Force shout met her weapon mid-swing, the collision of energies creating a visible shockwave. The massive club-sword slowed, its momentum disrupted but not stopped. I threw myself backward, feeling the weapon pass centimeters from my face, the heat from its still-glowing core singing my exposed skin through the suit's tears.
But Miss Gasket had anticipated my dodge.
Her arm the one that had just swung the weapon suddenly separated at the elbow. Not breaking, but designed to separate. A smaller, more agile appendage emerged from within like a doll. Before I could react, it fired a energy burst that hit me before I could dodge.
The stun blast hit me like a hammer, and suddenly my body weighed three times what it should. My fingers, reaching desperately for the conveyor belt's edge, couldn't maintain their grip against moving material. I fell backward the world spinning in slow motion as my reflexes tried and failed to compensate for limbs that suddenly moved like they were made of solid lead.
I hit the ground hard. Really hard. The kind of impact that drives every molecule of air from your lungs and makes your vision go white with static. My spine met the metal floor with a crack that I felt more than heard, and for a terrifying moment I couldn't feel my legs at all.
Then the droids were on me.
Metal hands grabbed my arms, my legs, my throat. A maintenance unit's manipulator claw locked around my left wrist with crushing force. A loader's massive hand pressed down on my chest, pinning me to the floor. More were piling on, and with the stun effect still making every movement feel like swimming through concrete, I couldn't throw them off.
"Thank you for the group hug!" I wheezed through my damaged mask, the reverse gratitude making even this assault feel like a twisted gift.
A sorting droid's fist if you could call the blunt metal appendage a fist slammed into my ribs. I heard and felt the bones move simultaneously, followed by a sharp, stabbing pain that made breathing instantly harder. Another blow landed, then another. They weren't trying to kill me quickly; they were systematically breaking me down.
Through my Force sight, I could see more droids using the conveyor belts like elevated highways, riding them to get into position faster. They moved with disturbing coordination, surrounding me in circles and waiting for any opening where they could fit in.
I started moving any way I could, my fist connected with an arm shattering it in a spray of glass and sparks. My knee drove up into a maintenance droid's chassis, denting the metal but probably breaking something in my kneecap too. An elbow to another's voice unit, a headbutt that made my already-damaged mask crack further.
The stun effect was finally wearing off, but I was taking too much damage. Every breath was agony from my broken ribs. My left arm hung useless, the wrist crushed by the droid still holding it. Blood ran freely from dozens of cuts where sharp metal had found gaps in my torn suit.
I needed something more. The words came to me and my mouth opened and my voice whispered out.
"Wgn Xoth Azh Tch"
The effect was immediate and bizarre. My skin didn't change color or texture, but it suddenly took on a quality like polished metal. When the next droid fist connected with my stomach, it rang like hitting an anvil. The impact still hurt but my skin didn't break didn't bruise and most didn't yield.
I rolled to my feet, droids still clinging to me like mechanical parasites. With my skin hardened, I could be more reckless. I grabbed a maintenance droid's head and squeezed, feeling the metal deform under my grip until something important ruptured and it went limp. A headbutt to another actually worked this time, my steel-hard forehead caving in its facial sensors.
But Miss Gasket was watching, learning, and I could see her massive head tilting as she processed what was happening. She spoke in that grinding mechanical voice, not in the ancient tongue but in corrupted Basic:
"EVOLVE..."
The droids around me began to change.
The first one I noticed was a loader that had been about to grab me. As it reached out, its arms shifted, the metal flowing like liquid before solidifying into something different. When it hit me, my fist didn't ring it thudded, the force dispersing differently.
Another droid's hands became something rubbery, able to grip without being damaged by my hardened skin. A third sprouted spikes of some ultra-hard material that could actually scratch through what happened to my skin.
The fight became more desperate, more brutal. Even with skin like steel, I was taking damage. The ceramic-fisted loader caught me in the jaw, snapping my head back. The rubber-handed droid got a grip on my throat, squeezing slowlye. The spiked one raked across my back, its talons through my clothes even more I could feel the scraps of my jacket fall off.
I grabbed the rubber-handed droid's arm, twisting with all my strength until something gave way. Not a break but I could feel joints separating, connections failing. With a final wrench, I tore the entire arm free from its socket.
But what I found inside wasn't what I expected.
Instead of wires and hydraulics, there was a solid steel support rod, probably the droid's original structure before its transformation. Without thinking, I gripped the rod and pulled.
The steel rod came free with a wet, mechanical screech about forty centimeters of solid metal, one end jagged where I'd torn it from the droid's internal structure, the other smooth but slick with hydraulic fluid. Not a sword, not even a proper knife. More like an oversized shiv.
'Perfect.'
A maintenance droid lunged at me, welding torch blazing. I didn't try to dodge instead, I stepped inside its reach and drove the jagged end up under what looked like a large fan. The rod punched through thin plating, severed something important, and emerged through the the other side of the robot sparks shooting up and down the metal.
I wrenched the rod free and spun, slashing across another droid's reaching arms. The metal wasn't sharp enough to cleanly cut through, but with enough force behind it, I could tear through lines and damage enough joints. Black fluid sprayed across my already-ruined suit as the droid's arms went limp.
The droids were learning my patterns already. A large fisted loader waited until I was mid swing before attacking, timing its punch to catch me when I couldn't dodge. Its fist connected with my face, right against my mask.
The crack was audible even over the combat noise. Spider web fractures spread across the bottom edge of my field of vision, and then.
Hissing. The telltale sound of seal failure.
I could see wisps of the gas mixture escaping, the red tinted vapor dissipating into the scrapyard's air. My next breath came less satisfying.
"Thank you for the ventilation!" I wheezed. "I just got this thing earlier today!"
No time to panic. Even as I parried another attack with the rod, driving its jagged point through a shoulder joint, my eyes were navigating my HUD's interface.
[Menu]...[Medical]...[Emergency Protocols.]
A droid raked its hand across my back, its talons finding gaps where my steel skin was fading. I stabbed backward blindly, feeling the rod connect with something solid.
[Adrenal Surge - ACTIVATE? Y/N]
[Y]
[Stim Boost - ACTIVATE? Y/N
Warning: Multiple compounds already in system. Risk of—]
[Y]
The effect was immediate and overwhelming, the mask dumped everything into my bloodstream at once. Synthetic adrenaline that made my heart rate spike to dangerous levels. Combat stims that sharpened my reflexes but would leave me crashed and useless in about ten minutes. Painkillers that didn't remove the damage but made me stop caring about it.
The broken ribs? Still broken, but now they felt like distant memories. The crushed wrist? Numb and irrelevant. The dozens of cuts and gouges? Just interesting patterns on my skin.
"Thank you, pharmaceutical industry! Thank you for making legal combat drugs!"
I moved with renewed vigor, the steel rod becoming a blur of violence. Stab, twist, rip free. Slash across optical arrays. Drive through chest cavities. The forty-centimeter length meant I had to get dangerously close for each strike, but the drugs made me fast enough to close distance before they could fully react.
Through my Force sight, even as I fought, I was scanning the broader battlefield. The waves of droids that had been pouring in from the edges... they'd stopped. No new signatures were approaching. The ones around me—maybe twenty still functional—were all that remained. Either Miss Gasket had run out of fodder, or she'd decided to see how this would play out with current resources.
"Thank you for the limited engagement! So considerate of you!"
I ducked under a odd colored fist inside the loader's guard, and drove the rod up through its lower chassis at an angle that hit three separate vital systems. It toppled backward, twitching. Only nineteen left.
Eighteen droids left. I slashed through one's knee joint, toppling it before finishing it with a downward stab.
Seventeen. The jagged end found a gap in armor plating, severing the primary power conduit.
My steel skin was completely gone now. When a maintenance droid's claw caught my shoulder, it tore through suit and flesh alike, leaving three parallel lines that immediately began bleeding down my body.
Sixteen droids. Fifteen. The rod was so slick with fluids that I had to constantly adjust my grip to keep from losing it. Through the haze I was carving a path toward Miss Gasket. She stood like a mountain beyond the diminishing circle of droids, watching with those multiple sensors cataloging every movement.
Fourteen droids. A perfectly timed stab through a vent sent steam fountaining around my fist.
The rod bent slightly from the last impact but still held. The metal had deformed just enough that when I pulled it free and stabbed again, it twisted as it entered, the bent section shredded the droid's internals tearing through circuits.
Fourteen droids left. As I turned one had developed what looked like more vents along its body As I moved toward it those vents flared open.
Fire.
Actual fire engulfed my right hand and the rod I was holding. The pain should have been excruciating would have been if not for the cocktail of drugs flooding my system. Instead, I watched with detached fascination as the metal rod began to melt, the superheated steel flowing like water over my clenched fist.
"Thank you for the metalworking lesson!"
The rod was destroyed, but as the molten metal cooled rapidly in the air, it formed something else a crude, lumpy mass of steel wrapped around my knuckles like the world's ugliest brass knuckles that were still hot enough to sizzle against my burned skin.
The droid was preparing another blast, vents glowing as it built up pressure but before it fired again I rolled left, the movement clumsy and desperate, more falling than rolling. My shoulder hit the ground hard, but I kept the momentum going, coming up behind the droid.
My other hand or what was left of it grabbed one of the droid's vent ports. The metal was scorching hot, adding more burns to my growing collection, but I didn't let go. Instead, I spun the droid around like a turret, aiming its fire at another approaching unit.
The droid fired and the stream caught the approaching enemy square in the legs. The loader went down as its legs started liquefying and falling as it stopped moving once it hit the floor.
The droid in my grip was struggling, trying to break free, but I used it as a battering ram slamming it into another droid before it ran dry. When it stopped I dropped it and kept moving over it making sure to stomp on its neck.
A spider-droid skittered toward me, low to the ground, going for my legs. I stepped forward and swept my leg in a arc. The impact when my shin met its chassis should have hurt probably broke something in my leg but all I registered was the sound. A wet crack, like stepping on a large insect. The droid tumbled, trying its best to stabilize but unable to.
Before it could recover, I brought my right fist down, the metal connected with its neck joint, the extra mass and hardness turning my fist into a hammer. The joint shattered, severed, and the droid's head rolled away while its body twitched uselessly.
My left leg wasn't responding properly anymore. Each step was a conscious effort, dragging it forward through will rather than muscle. Blood ran freely from too many wounds to count. My breathing was getting worse, each breath seemed like a struggle against lungs that weren't getting what they needed.
Nine. Eight. Seven.
The numbers blurred together as I fought through the remaining droids. Trying my best to keep my forward momentum going. The metal fist helped turning my punches into something that could crack armor and metal. But each strike took more effort than the last.
I couldn't see properly anymore. My left eye had swollen shut from some impact I didn't remember. The right eye was obscured by blood running from a gash on my forehead. But my Force sight still worked, showing me the outlines of my opponents even through they never stopped moving.
The last droid fell more from its own mechanical failure than anything I did. I'd damaged something critical three strikes ago, and it seemed like it had been fighting on borrowed time until its systems finally gave out.
'One. No, wait. Zero. Zero droids between me and Miss Gasket.'
I stood there, swaying like a tree in a hurricane, trying to focus on the massive figure before me. She had changed while I fought. Not just adapted but fundamentally transformed. Her six-armed, six-legged form had consolidated into something more humanoid but no less imposing. Four arms now, but each one was the size of my entire torso. Her height had decreased to maybe four meters, but she'd gained mass, density. The salvaged parts she'd absorbed had been refined, integrated, optimized.
She looked less like a cobbled together junkyard market and more like something purposefully designed for war.
My mask chose that moment to alert me to its status, checking at the display I could see the gas reservoir indicator was at 45% and dropping. The cracks were spreading, actual chunks of the mask were actually missing now, fallen away during the combat. I could feel outside air on my face specifically on my right cheek, where a palm-sized section was completely gone.
"Thank you, mask, for lasting this long..."
With clumsy fingers, I navigated to the emergency protocols menu. There was an option I'd been told about. Emergency sealant foam. It would spray a quick hardening seal around breaches, buying time but not fixing the problem the mask would still leak, just slower.
I activated it.
Foam
sprayed from hidden nozzles, filling the larger cracks and forming a rough seal around the missing section. It hardened in seconds, feeling like cold clay against my exposed skin. But I could still hear the hiss of escaping gas quieter now, but persistent.
Miss Gasket was speaking. I could hear her saying words, probably important ones, but they washed over me like white noise. I could see her head moving, her multiple eyes focused on me, her gestures suggesting she was making some kind of point or observation. But my brain couldn't process the meaning. The words were just sounds, no more significant than the roar of the furnace or the grinding of the still-running conveyor belts.
I brought my palms together, blood squelching between them and spoke.
"Fth Fth Ng Ix."
The effect was immediate and deeply wrong.
The blood on my hands didn't drip away it became something else, something that shouldn't exist in reality. Pale tentacles almost translucent, with a skin texture that seemed to shift between scales and flesh with each movement. They emerged from the blood itself, writhing with purpose and intelligence that wasn't mine.
"Thank you, eldritch horrors, for the healing help!"
The tentacles moved toward my arms first, their touch ice-cold despite coming from warm blood. They didn't wrap around my limbs—they pushed into them, through skin that parted without breaking, through muscle that accepted them without resistance. I could feel them inside me, not as foreign invaders but as something that belonged there, had always belonged there, was just coming home.
I shivered, a full-body convulsion that had nothing to do with temperature. The tentacles were in my bones now, wrapping around fractures, fusing breaks with something that wasn't quite flesh or bone but served the same purpose. They spread through my legs, reinforcing torn muscles, rebuilding damaged tissue.
Then, as suddenly as they'd appeared, the tentacles vanished. Not retreating, but absorbing into me completely, becoming part of my body. My broken ribs were not healed exactly but functional. My crushed wrist could move again, though it felt different, denser. The countless cuts and wounds hadn't closed, but they'd stopped bleeding, sealed with something that looked like scar tissue but pulsed with its own subtle rhythm.
Miss Gasket had been watching this transformation with what might have been fascination or disgust hard to tell with a mechanical face. She took a combat stance, her four massive arms spreading wide, each one ending in hands that had been modified into different weapons. One had become a massive blade. Another sprouted industrial-grade cutting torches. The third had transformed into what looked like a hammer. The fourth remained a hand, but one covered in spinning saw blades.
I began running toward her, my legs responding with power that surprised me. As I moved I mumbled what I spoke trying my best to not let her hear.
"Wgn Xoth Azh Tch"
The iron transformation began as before but something was different this time, as the iron spread across my body I became heavier causing me to stumbled over my next step.
Miss Gasket's blade arm swept toward me in a horizontal arc that would have bisected me at the waist. But I had to lean into my stumble, I dropped my center of gravity and let myself fall forward under the blade, my shoulder hitting the ground with enough force to crater it. The blade passed overhead, but I was already rolling or trying to. With my new weight it was more like the floor was rolling under me. I came up swinging, my steel-wrapped fist connecting with her blade arm as it passed.
The impact was devastating. Not just to her though I did leave a fist-sized dent in her reinforced armor but to the entire structure around us. The floor shook causing debris fell from the ceiling. The furnace behind us stopped its roar before continuing again after a moment.
Her hammer arm came down fast in an overhead strike that I couldn't dodge. Instead, I planted my feet, feeling them sink slightly into the floor, and raised both arms to block. The moment the hammer hit my arms it drove my feet fully into the floor sinking my ankles into the metal.
Her cutting torch arm came around from my left, blue flame hot enough it looked like staring into a engine. I couldn't block it without dropping my guard against the hammer. So I let it hit me. The moment torch went across my iron skin it only left a glowing line of heat but no pain at all.
The blade arm which I'd forgotten about, swept back in a reverse swing. It caught me in the ribs the same ribs that had just healed. The impact didn't cut through at all but the force lifted me off my feet.
I flew backward, my weight turning me into a wrecking ball that demolished everything in my path. I hit a support pillar, went through it, and finally stopped when I slammed into another piece of industrial equipment.
"Thank you for the flying lesson! Always wanted to know what being a cannonball felt like!"
I pulled myself free from the twisted metal looking for a moment at my hand as it flickered the iron look fading in and out.
We clashed again in the center of the scrapyard. Her hammer arm met my fist. Her blade sparked against my blocking forearm. The torch tried to find gaps in my defense while the saw hand probed for weaknesses. I was fighting a running battle, using my smaller size to stay inside her reach where her longer arms were less effective.
At one point, she caught me with a perfect combination—hammer pinning my left arm, blade pressing against my right, torch and saw coming in from opposite angles. I had nowhere to go, no way to block.
So I didn't try.
I planted my feet, feeling the floor buckle slightly under the pressure, and took the hits. The torch scored across my back. The saw ground against my shoulder. But I held position, weathering the assault like a rock weathering a storm but before she let up she grabbed me with her saw hand the blades had been mostly destroyed, leaving it functional enough to grab me.
She began moving toward the furnace, her intention clear. The massive industrial incinerator roared with hunger, its mouth glowing with temperatures that would reduce me in moments if I got close enough.
"FLESH... ALWAYS... BURNS..." she stated with certainty. "EVEN...
I SUCH AS YOU"
"Thank you for bringing me exactly where I wanted to be!" I laughed, the sound manic even to my own ears. "Thank you for not noticing what that gas actually is!"
Miss Gasket's optical sensors refocused, confusion evident in the tilt of her head.
I reached up to my mask with my free hand, finding the emergency vent control. The mask still had about 25% of its reserve left after everything thats happened.
"Boom," I whispered, and pulled the vent trigger.
The reddish gas erupted from every port and valve on the mask simultaneously, creating a cloud that spread fast as we both watched. It mixed with the superheated air around the furnace, and for a single heartbeat, everything was still. The reddish cloud hung in the air like frozen smoke, beautiful in its own toxic way.
Then it ignited.