[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 33

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Part 32}

The flamethrower made short work of the shield. What little the grenade didn’t shred, that is. It also generated a surprising quantity of smoke between us, which the voice availed himself of, slipping away into the interior of the nearest building...where the other enforcer was waiting for us.

It seized me by the throat, the armor around which swelled to protect it. “Where is he? I’ll give you ten seconds.” I struggled in vain, kicking my legs at him as they dangled in mid-air. “Whatever” the obsidian behemoth grumbled. “We can just extract it from what’s left of your exocortex. Say goodnight.”

I repeatedly slapped my hand against the enforcer’s dented, shiny black forearm. It hesitated, probably expecting me to talk. Instead I pointed over its shoulder, eyes wide to communicate urgency but still unable to make any sound other than wheezing.

“Oh, that’s cute. ‘Someone’s behind me’, right? You must think I’m retarded.” I pried at its fingers, loosening its grip on my neck just enough to sputter “C..can’t it...be both?” My captor’s other hand split apart into a trio of serrated blades, which it readied to cut my skull open. That’s as far as it got before a projectile of some form I’d not yet seen impacted the back of its head.

In the span of a few seconds it burst into rapidly growing vines, which engulfed the panicked enforcer. In the confusion I knocked the rifle from its hands. The anguished tinny sounding wails grew muffled, then finally ceased once the process finished, leaving a brand new tree rooted firmly to that spot...in a conspicuously humanoid shape.

I approached the trunk, examining it from all sides in disbelief. I then knocked a few times on the bark, made a funnel against it with my hands, and spoke into it. “You stay in there and think about what you did.”

My last minute savior was revealed a moment later to be the chieftess, decked out in her own duplicate of my plant armor. “I thought you were a pacifist” I remarked. “I must avenge my people” she replied. “Besides which, it’s not like he’s dead.” She then pushed me against the left side of the door frame.

Poking her arm gun outside, she used its pair of beady little eyes to scope out the still burning wreckage left in the wake of the gun battle earlier. “How many?” I held up one finger. “Any idea where?” I shook my head, then whispered “He can hear us you know”.

She zipped her lips, then silently gestured for me to go out the back way and circle around. I couldn’t ask what she planned to do without blowing whatever it was, so I trusted in her judgement and did as instructed.

It did impart some measure of added confidence that I now had the enforcer’s rifle, in addition to the biogun still attached to my right arm. The mean looking weapon, stylistically identical to the enforcer who wielded it before me, was purpose built to take down fullmetals.

The same couldn’t be said for the gross fuckin’ thing I’m elbow deep in. But that’s because there hadn’t been any obvious way to communicate to the equally gross plant vagina responsible for its design that I needed it to be effective against machines.

It must’ve assumed I’d only be fighting purely biological enemies. “You still there?” I thought. “How come I can move my body now?” The voice returned. “I thought maybe you two were gonna have a moment or something. Didn’t want to interrupt. Ready for round two?” I wiped some of the blood off my armor and sighed. “Showtime”.

I could scarcely understand what followed. Just an incomprehensible blur of speed and violence. The second enforcer, curious as to what was taking the other so long, was caught by surprise by the chieftess on approach to the doorway.

Under the control of the voice, my body circled around back, surveying the battlefield from afar. From this vantage point I had the best seat in the house from which to spectate as the chieftess bitterly fought the sleek, angular mechanoid.

She shrieked. Not in pain as I initially feared, but with the rage of a mother whose children were snatched from the nest and eaten. The war cry of a wild-eyed Valkyrie from Hell. I doubted if I could summon a hatred so perfect and pure as to fight with such ferocity.

Mercifully I didn’t need to, once again on autopilot. A marionette with a relative stranger tugging at my strings, though I’m no stranger to the sensation. I’ve never properly fought my own battles, even back in the states I always let the AI built into my prosthetics take care of that ugly business for me.

“I sense a familiar essence fueling her spirit” the voice muttered. “There is no mistaking it. My lover Asherah fights by her side. They are one in the same. Look at how she picks him apart. Taking advantage of his every little mis-step. She always scolded me for my warlike predilections, but in truth she is never more beautiful than when she is enraged, claws out, and soaked in blood.”

What a touching, psychotic sentiment. Yet as I continued to watch her fight, driving the enforcer back step by step despite his superior strength, I had to admit she seemed like the natural counterpart to the voice now controlling me.

I wish I’d thought of praying to Asherah for help back at the village. I’m not sure what she could’ve done, exactly. The chieftess probably beseeched her for protection before I even got there. ‘Preseeched’? I think that’s right. It’s definitely not deseeched, anyway.

The chieftess launched another of the explosive vine pods, but it was roasted mid-air by the enforcer’s flamethrower. He then blasted another stream of flaming fuel onto her armor, which withered and blackened...only to secrete a foam which extinguished the fire, then rapidly re-grow every part that was burnt away a moment earlier.

Slowly, so slowly, I crept toward the fight. Moving from cover to cover, finally watching the two go at it from no more than fifty feet away. Being that I held perfectly still, the camouflage concealed my presence, and the enforcer was too busy holding his own against the chieftess to scan for my heat signature.

At last, an opening arrived. A long, flexible, whip-like appendage shot out of her bio gun. She drew the heavy tip behind her, then with a resounding crack, struck the enforcer so hard that his neck bent to one side at a severe angle. His flamethrower did nothing to stop it as the whip simply regrew faster than it could be burnt.

The second blow twisted the enforcer’s head around backwards...staring directly at me. The voice in control of me chose this moment to strike, forming a long, glistening blade which slid silently from the opening on my own biogun. There was no “oh shit” expression on its faceted, featureless face to savor.

Nevertheless it was profoundly satisfying to impale the fucker. My puppetmaster gave the blade another good push even after it was all the way through, then twisted it. As I learned from dissecting the fullmetals that died in the crash, their midsection houses much of the life support machinery needed to support their brain.

It spasmed weakly, then the light in its eyes faded away. “I like this game” the voice growled internally. “When do the opponents respawn?” He withdrew the bio blade, dripping a mixture of muscle gel, synthetic blood and lubricant onto the soil at our feet. Without the blade through its body holding it up, the pitiful monster collapsed between myself and the chieftess...who then spat on it.

I would’ve made some sort of cocky remark, were I able to. I don’t know what. A corny one liner or something. I’m sure it would’ve ruined the moment. For the best, then, that the voice still controlled my body, vocal chords included.

“Is it really you?” he asked. The chieftess slowly nodded, tears in her eyes. She was the next to speak. “What about you? Do you remember who you are?” I puzzled over the meaning of it, but the voice seemed to know. “The technological progress of this species is unusually slow, I only just woke up. Hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long.”

She laughed and embraced me, kissing me deeply. I felt every bit of it, and wondered briefly if I ought to. When at last she let me breathe again, I found myself transfixed by her smoldering gaze. “I’d have waited a thousand eons to taste your lips again, my eternal lover” she whispered.

“Too soon though, isn’t it.” Her expression changed from ecstatic to mournful. “...Yes. Too soon, I fear. If what I was told is true, mechanogenesis is still a ways off, and conscious machines are still well beyond their grasp. Slumber, then, until the dawn of your age arrives on this world. As ever, I will faithfully await you.”

Just like that, control of my body was returned to me. Likewise for the chieftess, who looked at once startled and bashful. I realized she must’ve been under the control of Asherah, even as I was being directed by the voice which called itself “I am”.

“What...the FUCK...was all that!?” I blurted out, still feeling shell shocked by the brutal ordeal I’d just endured. Now recovered, she smiled and answered simply “A glimpse at the shape of things to come. The day when all which has been separated will at last come together in a most perfect and timeless union. But today is not that day.”

I knelt and clutched my stomach, reeling from everything I’d just seen...and smelled for that matter, even tasting some of the blood soaked soil through the soles of my feet. The air stank of burnt flesh. When I closed my eyes, if only to escape from the horror for a moment, I was greeted with a flashing notification.

The black box data from my VTOL. How could it have decrypted already? It should’ve taken a good deal longer than this. There was a commented out line inserted at the beginning which read “For those with even as much faith as a mustard seed, mountains will move. Don’t say I never did you any favors.”

My heart began to race. This is it, isn’t it? It’s all here! I just can’t use any of it until the global network of navsats comes back online. Still, that should take what...two weeks? Three? Then it hit me. The other VTOL! A corporate transport, it would have its own proprietary nav system based on aerial imagery it captured on the way.

No telling if it would accept or correctly interpret GPS coordinates but odds seemed better than even. Those things don’t come cheap and are loaded with the really primo, top shelf hardware. “Listen closely, I need you to focus. Remember the flying metal thing?”

The chieftess nodded. “Where did you see it last?” She was about to answer when her mouth suddenly hung open, eyes bugging out. She wordlessly pointed over my shoulder, into the sky. I turned to see the enforcers’ VTOL barreling towards us, just above the tree line.

...Impossible. Impossible! In a fit of terror I seized the chieftess by the hand and pulled her under cover. The same building we’d been confronted by one of the enforcers in. That’s when I put two and two together.

For the humanoid tree which once stood in the center of the room, unruly prisoner detained inside, lay shattered into a hundred ragged pieces. While the chieftess and I were ganging up on his comrade, he must’ve torn his way out. The shadow of the VTOL crept quietly across the clearing between the buildings as I peered outside through a filthy, cracked window.

Then it began blasting everything with napalm. No regard for which building we’d run into, just laying absolute waste to the entire site. “We have to get out of here!” I shouted, barely audible over the conflagration erupting outside.

She insisted there wasn’t any safe place to escape to, but I knew better. I implored her then to put her trust in me, as the voice asked of me before. We locked eyes, pupils dilated with fear, and in that instant she made her decision.

The two of us counted to three, then bolted from the building. The VTOL swung around and began peppering the clearing with machine gun fire. Rounds big enough that, should one of them strike our heads or vital organs, there wouldn’t be enough left to regenerate.

The pilot must’ve expected us to head for the jungle, as the VTOL lurched in that direction. The miscalculation bought me the time I needed to lead the chieftess straight to the docks. There, I pried open the rusty hatch of the narco sub still peacefully floating in the murky water.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 34!}