The water let me go reluctantly, its healing warmth a ghost on my skin. When I stepped out, the cavern's chill was a slap. It was the real world reasserting itself, and it was cold.
A Metropian was waiting, leaning against the rough-hewn rock. Not a soldier. One of the mechanics. The kind who kept the lights on and the guns firing. Its humanoid chassis was a tapestry of weld-lines and carbon scoring, one optic sensor a dead, dark circle, the other flickering a weak amber. It didn't speak. It just held out my things.
The bamboo-copter. The Air Cannon. The Repel Cloth.
They were clean. Not just wiped down, but repaired. The Copter's bamboo leaves, usually frayed, were smooth and tight. The Cannon's grip felt solid, the chipped paint touched up. The Cloth was folded into a perfect, sharp square. They looked like museum pieces. Artifacts from a life I'd borrowed and had to return. At least i wished I could.
My hands took them.
"Thank you," I said. The words were flat, empty of the debt I felt.
The Metropian responded with a single, precise dip of its head, a whirring servo the only sound. Then it turned and limped back into the shadows of its workshop, a cave-mouth filled with the skeletons of broken machines and the smell of ozone and oil.
I attached the Copter to my head. The familiar weight was a cage. I slid the Cannon into my belt. It felt like a stone. I tucked the Cloth into my pocket. Each movement was oddly tiring.
There was only one path out, a wide tunnel leading down. The air grew thicker, carrying the low hum of generators and the faint, tinny echo of many voices layered into one murmur.
I saw Riruru about halfway down. She was in a small alcove off the main path, a flickering holographic map painting her face in shades of desperate blue. Her wings were tucked tight against her back, the feathers ruffled and dull. She was talking to two older Metropians with command-struts on their shoulders, her finger jabbing at a flashing red sector on the map.
"...flank is completely exposed. If we don't pull back from the crystal spires, we'll be encircled. They're using the Chimeras as a screen for their main force..."
Her voice was tight, stripped of its usual fire, all sharp edges and grim calculus. The hope she'd had when she saw me was gone, burned away by the reality of a losing battle. She never looked up. She never saw me standing there.
I came to meet her and the one who sent the message to me here, no? I should talk to her.
I changed direction immediately, my feet carrying me off the main path into a narrower, darker side tunnel before the thought had fully formed. I couldn't control my body's need to turn away.
In front of me, tunnel opened up, and the world fell away.
It was a cavern so vast the ceiling was lost in a soft, bioluminescent haze, like a false sky. Giant, glowing mushrooms dotted the landscape, casting a gentle, blue-green light. This was the sanctuary. The place the war forgot.
Makeshift shelters clustered together like nervous sheep, built from salvaged ship hulls, woven reeds, and tattered royal banners. The air smelled of damp earth, cooked grains, and the faint, metallic scent of ozone that always clung to the Metropians.
I just stood at the entrance, watching. My mind was a still lake.
A few meters away, a human man with a bandaged arm,his uniform marking him as one of the Kingdom's soldiers,sat silently with a Metropian whose left arm ended at the elbow. They weren't talking. The human just passed a canteen. The Metropian took it with its one good hand and drank, a soft hydraulic hiss the only thank you. 'Did they lose their vocal cords?' Was the only thought that came to mind looking at the unsettling wiring around their necks.
I moved further in. A Metropian with a badly dented chest plate was using its one functioning manipulator claw with impossible delicacy, carefully combing the tangled hair of a small human girl who had fallen asleep leaning against its cool metal side. Her breathing was even. She felt safe.
And there were kids playing. A little girl with leaves tangled in her green hair,definitely from the kingdom,was giggling, chasing a small, six-legged mechanical pet that chirped and scuttled just out of reach. Their laughter echoed, a sound so pure and out of place it felt like a dream, or a joke I wasn't in on.
I started walking, my feet moving on their own. I didn't know where I was going. A group of children, a mix of human and oddly-shaped alien youngsters, ran across my path, playing tag. One of them, a boy with scales on his cheeks, collided with my leg.
He stumbled back, looked up at my face, his eyes wide. He didn't say sorry. I didn't say it's okay. I just stood there, a statue in their world. After a second, he scurried off after his friends.
I was a ghost here. I could see the strain on every face, the exhaustion in every slumping posture, but beneath it was a current of… something else. A quiet determination. A shared burden. They were all broken, in their own ways, but they were trying to fit their broken pieces together into something that could survive.
Or maybe I was just projecting.
I reached the center of the hollow, near a small, still pool of water that reflected the false sky. I just stopped. There was nowhere else to go.
The stillness here felt like a poorly maintained pressure seal, ready to blow. I wondered how long it would take for their shared delusion of peace to fracture.
A small, blue bird, its feathers the color of a summer sky I hadn't seen in days, hopped onto a moss-covered rock near my foot. It was preening, utterly ordinary. Then it stopped. It tilted its head, one bright, black eye fixing on me with an intelligence that felt… old.
Its beak opened. It stuttered, a tiny, raspy, almost mechanical sound, as if trying to remember how to form a word it hadn't used in a long, long time.
"...Nobita?"