"COMBAT CAPABILITY, SEVERELY COMPROMISED. PLEASE REPORT TO THE NEAREST STRONGHOLD."
A robotic voice announced for the umpteenth time, once again breaking the silence that accompanied its bulky metallic frame and its assigned combatant.
The bot stood 2.5 meters in height, with two metallic legs bigger than a human torso that carried its square-like frame. A gatling gun protruded from the bulk of its chassis. In front of the bot, a man with a strong athletic build, dusty brown hair, and weary eyes led the way. His left arm was gone from the shoulder, the empty space unnervingly stark, and his right leg ended in a makeshift metallic pole.
His left eye was shut, blood dimly weeping from it.
Mmmghhh…
Another grunt escaped him as the crude prosthetic he had fashioned dug into the fresh wounds on his leg.
"COMBAT CAPABILITY…"
"Stop it already," Marcus barked as the announcement began to play again. Not minding his revolt, the bot played the announcement to the end.
"Damn combat bot!" Marcus swore as he made his way to the back of the machine, hitting the panel that hid the maintenance hatch.
His actions caused the tall bot, which weighed several hundred kilograms, to wobble forward. The military tags he had hung on the gatling gun rattled, a few falling to the ground. As Marcus saw them fall, memories came flooding back—memories he immediately suppressed. But one of them lingered the most.
The feeling when that thing struck their ship. It had been so fast that all he ever saw was a blur, but the suffocating feeling it radiated remained. It wasn't hate, and it wasn't anger; it was an indifference born from absolute supremacy.
Like their airship was nothing but a bug to be crushed.
Marcus's hand found the hidden kill switch he was looking for. "CAPTAIN MARCUS," the bot began its programmed protest. "UNAUTHORIZED TAMPERING WITH THE…"
Its protest was prematurely cut short.
"AUTOMATED GUIDANCE OFF… ENGAGING INSTRUCTION-BASED MODE."
Marcus winced from the pain as he bent and picked up the fallen tags, hanging them back on the Gatling gun. He barely knew most of these men, but that did not make their loss any less painful.
He was not a resident of Bastion Genesis. He had been here for the last six months in an effort to refine his battle art. He had achieved his goal, pushing his greatsword technique to the third realm, only for the Bastion to be attacked. He would have gone home and begun processing to join the rank of the Kaos Initiates—the true fighting force of humanity.
Now…
Marcus took a brief look at his missing leg and absent arm. The Kaos Alliance would not invest in a broken warrior like him.
"Valria will be pleased with my retirement," he joked to himself, trying to lighten the heaviness on his chest.
As he looked upward, a dark, circular body that didn't belong in the sky hung silently there.
"Hell's Door." That was the name it answered to.
He had not been born when it appeared. It predated even the Gated Continents. They said that was when it all began—animals mutated, gates began to appear, spilling the Alienoids into our reality. The threat in those histories had always felt so overblown. The Alienoids were strong, yes, but the Kaos warriors could handle them. That all ended today.
"A pity I won't be able to wet your blade with their purple blood, WillBreaker," he murmured to no one in particular.
He continued to trot forward, his hulking bot trailing behind him.
It had been three days since the fall of Genesis Bastion. He had been ordered to join the ranks as they boarded the airships, still grasping the suddenness of the march, when that thing appeared, tearing through their vessel like it was tissue paper. That was the last thing he remembered. When he woke from the crash, all that surrounded him was the dead, colossal weight of their airship and the husks of a ruined city, buried in human and Alienoid corpses.
Reaching another peak formed from dilapidated buildings, Marcus let himself rest. His eye darted across the ruined expanse, a flicker of sadness glitching across his face.
"Say, Tin Box," he spoke, referring to his assigned combat bot. "It has a certain kind of peace about it, right?"
Its metallic being had survived the crash with him, though with several indentations from the fall. There was no reply. He had turned it into nothing but a dumb machine with his action, good only for performing the set of tasks linked to its combat mode.
His ear twitched.
He had caught a foreign sound—sand and debris shifting as something unburied itself. With a perception value of 20, more than double that of an unenhanced human, he easily pinpointed the source. About 80 meters from him, a green-skinned being had unearthed itself, a brutal blend of reptilian features and a humanoid structure.
Marcus's eye immediately honed on its features: green eyes and obsidian-black nails. It wasn't one of the inferior mutant variants that Second Grade Warriors like him considered their equivalent. It was a True Alienoid, a being with might equivalent to a Kaos Initiate. Dark purplish fluid wept lightly from a gash on its abdomen; it was wounded.
"Well now, Will," Marcus spoke with a grin. "I might have concluded too early. Your blade may yet receive its taste of purple blood."
He could order Tin Box to unload a round on the Alienoid—play it safe—but he was too vexed to do this the easy way.
"Disengage WillBreaker," he ordered.
Thump.
A loud thud resounded before he even finished his order, as a greatsword over six feet in length and a foot in width disengaged from its holding on the side of the bot. Its blade lodged into the ground from its sheer mass.
He grabbed the hilt of WillBreaker. Even with his enhanced physique, the weight of the blade was formidable. He pulled it free, dragging its tip across the floor as he poised for battle.
It will be a very brief bout. He was already simulating the battle in his mind, sampling all the different ways it could go. He only needed it to go one single way; with a missing arm and leg, he couldn't afford to be careless.
He looked into the eyes of his foe. That rage-like madness they were known for was there. It wouldn't retreat; it would charge at him. I can make use of that.
Marcus studied the ground on which the battle would unfold, and it did not take long for him to find what he was looking for: a hole in the ground, barely a foot deep. It was more than enough.
He continued to move in a circle until he came to stand a few meters from the hole, 37 meters to be exact. His actions weren't as random as he made them seem. His peak dash speed with two legs was 30 meters per second. Missing a leg, he had done the calculation with half of that; it would take him 2.45 seconds to reach that hole.
He spat in the direction of the Alienoid.
"Come get some."
The Alienoid seemed to understand his provocation, or maybe it simply saw his lack of movement as an invitation. It shot forward. Marcus didn't flinch, his grip on WillBreaker tightening.
"Not yet," he murmured, calming his nerves. This was the first time he was entering combat since his Greatsword Art entered the third realm—the Realm of Dominion. Theoretically, he should be able to handle a True Alienoid, but he was currently handicapped. Yet that did not make him feel in any way that he would lose. He had a certain confidence about him, a confidence born when his sword realm advanced.
This battle he would win because he could do something his foe couldn't. He fought not just with his body and blade; he fought with the very environment he was in.
Now!
An instruction resounded in his mind as he shot forward. The Alienoid continued its onward dash towards him. In two seconds, he was within the depression, the Alienoid barely in melee range. He adjusted his speed, letting his prosthetic leg fall into the hole the moment the Alienoid entered his range.
The Alienoid's claws shone with a dark, murderous glint as its hands shot backward, gathering momentum to bore into him. There was no panic on Marcus's face, only a naughty smirk. All chess pieces were in place.
He let his weight tilt towards his left leg as it fell into the depression.
A searing groan left his throat as the part of the prosthetic in contact with his wounded leg dug deeper, his height abruptly reducing with the tilt. The clawed hand of the Alienoid shot past, missing him by inches. The opportunity was not wasted. His greatsword was already on the move, biting deep into the chest of the Alienoid.
Marcus used all of his weight to bolster the speed of the greatsword. As it dug in, he let go of the hilt, allowing the extra momentum to send the Alienoid flying backward. At the end of its fall, it lay unmoving, its hands twitching. It was not dead yet, but it was no longer a threat.
"Ten out of ten," Marcus rated himself amidst the tear that had found its way down his right eye. The pain from the prosthetic had been excruciating.
Using a dagger from his belt, he finished his assault with a single, powerful thrust into the creature's head. Then, using the same dagger, he cut open the middle of its chest and, with practiced expertise, harvested its Chaos Ampulla—a sac containing the Alienoid's chaos essence, an essential ingredient for the Kaos Serum used by Kaos Warriors. He dumped the sac in a specially made compartment in his bot.
That was when he felt it.
A mind-numbing aura, the same one he had felt the moment that creature had attacked their ship.
For some reason, Valria's bosom was the first thing that came to mind before the gut-punching fear arrived.
"Guess I won't be having any more of that," Marcus murmured as he poised for combat. It might be stupid, but this was his last stand. He was a Limit-Level Second Grade Warrior; he wouldn't die like a chicken. He would die baring his claws, no matter how pathetic they might be compared to the enemy he was about to face.
Seconds stretched into minutes, yet the expected death did not come.
What the hell is going on? Marcus wondered, but he did not dare to tempt fate by moving needlessly. He steadied his breathing, opening his senses to feel as much as they could.
Nothing. After several minutes, the feeling disappeared as abruptly as it had appeared.
With nothing else to do, a temperament that sought anger, and a taste for mystery, Marcus chose to explore in the direction he had felt the aura coming from.
After a fruitless three-hour trek, just as dawn was approaching, something caught his attention: a corpse with a bald head that reflected the sunlight in a comical way.
"Get a load of that, Tin Box," Marcus joked, but just as he was about to move on, he noticed the boy's chest rise and fall. He instantly shot forward, the very first survivor he had seen since he woke from the crash.
It was a young boy; he seemed to be in his mid-teens. His hair must have been burned by fire during the turmoil, Marcus thought. But the condition of his cloth suggests otherwise.
Using the vital sensors on the bot, he checked the boy's health. It was stable. As he picked him up, he couldn't help but note how intense the boy's expression was, even in sleep.
"Must have been one hell of a trauma," he commented. It had been so long since he had seen such an intense expression on a human. Seeing it on a sleeping child, he couldn't help but imagine how deep the boy's pain must run.
"BAH… BAH… BAH…"
A loud, blaring noise from the bot broke his concentration.
"They're finally here," Marcus murmured. The noise was the bot's SOS call, triggered once an allied military radio was in sync.
Help had finally come.
"Can't wait to get you off me," Marcus said, looking down at the metallic pole jutting from his right leg.