Previously…

Rain, freezing cold and wet, cascaded down upon the great wall that surrounded the inner citadel of Drakonia. It stood many tens of thousands of feet tall, the wall, with its lifeless grey construct of steel, plastic and ceramic. Its thickness measured within the region of 100 to 250 feet wide, and the top was littered with repulsor shields, spiked pulse relays and large coiled tubes that spilled over both sides of the wall. In the gaps between were several shanties; slums and squatter settlements that had been raised long ago by people exiled from the glittering sea of light on the inside of the wall. Now most of them lay abandoned and empty, deserted by their makers as most of them were forced to leave the confines of the inner citadel. In the middle of one such shantytown was a well, a few hundred feet deep and about the width of ten full grown men, its mouth wide open as it guzzled down the floodwater from the downpour.

With a final gasp of effort, a young man heaved himself out of the well only to collapse on his side just inches away.

For a long time, Zendar could only lie there, panting and shivering as the cold got to him through his soaked apparel. Metallic shards pierced through his left shoulder, right eye and left leg, drawing blood that was washed away by the pouring rain. As he lay there, skittering sounds and strange inhuman cries drifted out of the well, amplified by the near-smooth cylinder of steel. He grimaced with pain as he forced a shaky hand to the solitary egg-shaped device hanging off his belt and detached it, letting it drop out of his fingers and into the well. Then he rolled a few times away from the lip of the pit as a shout of blue-tinged flame blasted out of the tunnel. A small satisfied grin creeped across the golem’s face as he lay back with eyes closed, too tired and too numb to think of movement…

In the shadows of one of the shantytown’s buildings, a figure watched him.

“Zendar.”

It was her voice again, her lap that his head was resting on. That much he could tell with his eyes closed as they were at the moment. The air was warm, pleasant even for the time of year in these parts of Drakonia. Their scalebound overlords had deemed it fit for them to have this weather, just as they judged every aspect of the lives of the citizens of the citadel. The thought made his stomach churn, a hot spark in his chest smoldering and burning like molten metal.

“Zendar? Time to wake up.”

“Not yet,” he mumbled.

“You have to, Zen.”

“Why?” He tried to open his eyes, but the light…the light blinded him, searing his eyeballs with its intensity and he shut them again. “Why me?”

Somehow he knew that she was smiling without knowing why. “Because you’re the one who picked up the sword…big brother.”

Zendar blinked as the vision fell away from him. The rain had thinned to a mere drizzle while he had been out, and as he tried to sit up, his soaked clothes weighed on him like a suit of heavy armor.

It was only then that he noticed that the sword was gone.

Time went by without notice as he dragged his feet through the ruins of the village. The sensors that had been grown into his body shrieked silent alarms at him as he trudged along, warning him of the dozen-and-a-half and counting chiral threats that were encircling him at the moment. Zendar had already killed three of them since he had woken up in the middle of the seemingly abandoned shantytown. It had been quick yet inefficient work without his weapon. Using the shards of metal that were stuck in his shoulder and leg like daggers, he had decapitated the first, then tussled with the second before splitting it in half from shoulder to hind-leg. The third had tried to latch onto his wounded leg with a mouth full of black fangs, but he put the monster out of commission with his gauntlet-sheathed left arm as a bludgeon. After the battle, he had simply sat on the ground for several thousand seconds, the drizzle washing him of the blood and tar-like gore of chiral meat, out of breath.

The catan’s loss was a vulnerability Zendar knew that would be exposed sooner or later. The chirals seemed to sense it somehow as they began to swarm around him, moving from shadow to shadow just outside the visual range of his remaining good eye. The new body he had customized would hold for a time, if he fought efficiently and minimized the power-to-biomass ratio with deliberate prejudice, but eventually the body would fail as the numbers tallied up, self-preservation became paramount and the injuries took their toll. He was no scalebound’s enforcer to keep fighting forever.

A metal bar poking out of a nearby pile of rubble tripped him as he meandered aimlessly, and he landed facefirst in a pool of dirty ash-colored water. Zendar rolled over onto his back, gasping for air. Sensors screamed at the proximity of danger, and with a tired mental flick, he shut down the alarms as well as half his internal systems and the combat subroutine that had been running in the background. The sudden explosion of warmth underneath the skin informed him of the impending fever from the cold persistent rain.

Feeling very, very fatigued, the golem closed his eyes. The mysterious girl from his vision waited for him underneath an alien honeycombed tree.

The chirals stalked towards him, popping out of the darkness like ghosts from the old tales. He felt their presence like a sickening knot of wrongness in his gut, as if they were an infection that his body feared on a primeval level. Zendar lay absolutely still in the large puddle with eyes still closed, waiting for the end. Waiting for the cumbersome existence to finally leave him be.

“FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING NANTS!”

There was a low whine, then a crackle of heat and continuous thumping sounds as timed bursts of daser fire was pumped into the pack of chirals. Zendar opened his eyes, and in a flash, was on his feet again with all systems coming online simultaneously – all thought of conservation and efficiency cast aside. A young woman stood outside the ring of monsters that surrounded him, the barrel of a daser minicannon in hand as it drew power from the large apparatus mounted on her back.  Her gun sparked and wheezed after the fifteenth shot, a belch of smoke rising out of the power unit on her back. The stranger cursed as she smacked at the weapon, yelping as her hand got burned by the overheated metal of the gun shaft.

Already the chirals had turned on her, making their odd dissonant screeching-hissing noises. Diving near-completely into the combat subroutine, Zendar exploded into motion, an eerie ringing in his ears as time appeared to writhe before his eyes. He took a running jump over the heads of two chirals, landing in a crouch that broke the spine of the monster at the end of his trajectory. He spun around, driving a fist into the muzzle of another chiral that was leaping through the air at the stranger, fangs being bared in glacially-slow motion. A swift kick discouraged yet another chiral from taking the same action, and even as it was swerving the blow, Zendar reached up to yank the metal shard out of his right eye, hurling it a designated target. The chiral trilled a subsonic howl as the shard penetrated the soft spot between the neck and left shoulder blade, spraying its companions with black blood.

Zendar settled into a wide martial stance, placing himself protectively between the stranger and the monsters that were eyeing them both with sudden indecision. A flicker of pain suddenly shot up his spine like a stab of an icy blade, nausea and a splitting headache making him drop down on one knee.

<-ICAL RUNTIME ERROR DETECTED. ERROR 907: CRITICAL RUNTIME ERROR DETECTED. ERROR 907: CRITICAL RUNTIME ERROR DETECTED. ERROR 907: CRIT->

The message scrowled over and over before his eyes as he cried out, the combat subroutine’s unexplained crash leaving him naked to the torrent of pain and fever it had blocked out only seconds before. Dimly, he heard the thump of the minicannon going off five times, eliciting angry and hateful yelps from the chirals as more of them died. One of them – just inches away from Zendar – exploded in a shower of dark goo as a lance of blue light shredded its constituent atoms apart. The remainder beat a hasty retreat from the scene, deciding in their protozoan way to live to fight another day. Zendar cried out as the pain seemed to double in intensity, and he found himself writhing on the floor. A stream of blood leaked from his good eye and nose.

Just before he slipped into unconsciousness, a cool female hand touched his feverish forehead. “Hey are you ok?” The stranger sounded concerned, even frightened. “Hang in there, we’ll get…”