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The architecture of Gluttony was harsh-red and meaty and therefore bloody, as bloody as the things residing within it. Wildly, it fired at a mindflayer, but a cluster of streetcleaners was making that difficult. Ever since it sent that archangel running several hours ago, Gluttony had been nothing but a nonstop stream of clawing, starving things. They were uncoordinated but desperate and that made them harder to predict, but it prevailed in the end nevertheless.
V1 braced itself against a cancerous growth of nondescript bone and parried a shock of homing attacks with the knuckleblaster. The mindflayer screeched, lashing out but keeping a large distance— weakness. It aimed and fired once and sent it curling it on itself, light swelling from the inside out—
One of the streetcleaners stopped too close to stare and was promptly obliterated by the resulting explosion. The chained explosion pulverized a couple nearby filths. Unrelenting, V1 mowed over the few remaining hostiles.
The space was cavernous, stalactites of bone and sinew jutting down from the ceiling. A streetcleaner gave chase, dodging its first round of bullets but being downed by the second that came just after. They never got their bearings fast enough to get away a second time.
It heard a beep too low-pitched to be a streetcleaner, and there were no mindflayers left, but it was coming from above it—
A flicker of blue light—another mindflayer? No, the hue wasn’t right, even with lighting adjustments accounted for. But they were menaces, hostile, strong, high-priority, so it leapt up with the boost of its hard-light wings to further survey the area.
Something wrapped its hand around its ankle. It bowed and fired its shotgun directly into the soldier’s face. It fell limp and this drew its priority—there were more, alerted by the sound of the fight, emerging from the dark, unlit corners of the cavern. Internal simulations ran fast, creating and discarding choices before it focused on a target.
It stumbled when a shot caught it in the back. Its wings retracted to make itself smaller, and focused its priority on mowing down the things after it. Even without wings it could jump, and so it launched itself up onto a long-toppled pillar to fire at them from above. It leapt off when they got smart and switched to projectiles.
They went down one by one, their fuel soaking into the already-saturated ground, and as the last one, rendered headless now, swayed, it lunged after it. Its hands dug into the organic parts ripping so it could drink, shoving it down to the floor. Fuel. It used the knuckleblaster to pry at the metal plating. The blinking faults in its back mended just as fast.
Another beep and something hard connected directly with the back of its head.
It was sent sprawling, half-sinking into the thin layer of meat webbing the otherwise iron floor. The barrel of a revolver pressed up under its head when it turned its head to face its attacker. V2.
Internal mechanisms switched from a fight against many to a fight against one and the sight sharpened. V2 slammed its foot into V1’s middle, putting harsh pressure on one of the thick arteries running curling around its side. An internal false positive for a raised blood pressure lit up. Minute complaints laced its left side. V2 itself was bloodied, whole frame darkened with fuel. Thick bands of ripped fabric wrapped around its chest and what remained of its left shoulder joint, wet and glistening insulation pressed between it and circuitry. Surface-level injuries marred its chassis. Its optic light blazed yellow directly into its own, dulling vision, yet the risk of getting shot through the processor was too great to flex its head away to better see its surroundings.
V2 stared down at it in this position for approximately three seconds since first contact. The volume of its fans blended in with the sound of its own thrumming to cool it off. V1 jammed the barrel of the railcannon against its side and sent hot metal directly into the softer, unprotected body. At the same time, it jerked its head. A bullet shot millimeters from its core processor.
It twisted and threw a stunned V2 off of itself, into murky digestive enzymes that formed a shallow pool a few yards away.
V1 lurched forward and began to stand. V2 first faster, shooting not at its central mass but at its blue left hand, clutching the railcannon. It braced it with all hands now, swinging it around to fire. V2’s wings flashed red and it shot into the sky. V1 wheeled its aim upwards—
The whole of its weight slammed into it feet-first and sent it back down. Then there was a shotgun against its left shoulder. It pulled away a fraction of an inch and then slammed it back down with a foot, wedging it between plating. Warnings of physical strain made it writhe, clawing at the weapon, but V2 did not let go—
A single shot fired directly into pried-apart plating, and three-quarters of the circuitry linking it to its left arms was annihilated so wholly and cleanly that it could not move. Shrapnel sprayed outwards, scraping the earth. Every sensor pushed self-preservation into a top priority. The half-functioning mechanisms left in its blue arm made it open and close its hand repeatedly, useless. It scrambled to fire the railgun but it couldn’t reach its semi-responding knuckleblaster around fast enough to help aim it, and V2 kicked it out of its hand, falling wetly onto the ground. The knuckleblaster produced a loud cracking noise near the shoulder joint when it moved on reflex to grab its weapon back, only to fall short.
It was losing blood. The shotgun blast left vessels severed and pumping freely—it shut off flow to that part of its body to preserve fuel. V2’s weight left its body and yet it did not stand for several seconds.
There was a distinct tink of a coin gaining air, followed by a firing and a searing injury to its torso that narrowly missed its spine. Again, tink, once more, pain, injury, this time superficial damage to its leg that bent a panel half-open. It fell back to its knees and again, struggled to stand.
Since when did it know how to do that? That was a new skill, a new ability its mind rushed to map and predict. It rose, keenly aware of how its red arm was loose, hanging only by a few thick connecting wires and emptied veins. It was a useless weight but it was its, injured but it could be repaired.
V2 rushed at it. Its red wings haloed it against the backdrop of Gluttony.
V1 turned and ran. Its wings shot out and it leapt up onto a wall, fingers digging into soft, slippery fat for purchase. Signals rushed to an unresponsive left arm and its internal fans increased their speed. It could support its weight with one hand, easily. It just had to brace itself, tense and then lunge, and it found an edge, slick with oils and lymph and human teeth it could press into for a proper grip.
It hauled itself up just as the space under it exploded into meat. It threw itself down the slanted hall and meat turned into a slicked, wet metal surface, where it failed to find a purchase and went sliding down. It twisted onto its back and tried to point its legs down to brace for impact.
It dropped off into a chute and it landed onto hard metal. Its red arm crunched badly under its weight, pinned, unresponsive. It tried to restore blood flow and therefore order, and immediately felt it sliding down its back and sides. It cut off the blood flow again.
Based on the clattering of metal on metal, V2 still chased. Therefore, V1 took off in a dead sprint into uncharted territory. It reminded it of the meatgrinder at the very start of its journey. A factory, twisting with pipes full of—blood. And meat of human origin.
It shot once at the nearest pipe and showered itself with fuel. The piping was evenly spaced along the walls, churning out the same mixture. It deemed all other details of this environment irrelevant to its survival.
A sound behind it told it that V2 had arrived. As it ran it fired into the walls, making the flooring hazardous with spilled gore. Based on sound alone, V2 launched itself through the air, hard-light wings propelling it further than V1 could move.
It produced a shrill noise of alarm as V2 sent it crashing into the end of the hall, snapping its body into unnatural bends at the impact. Its primary blood container, connected to its back, crunched under the endoskeleton of its wings, sending sharp alerts through its system.
It shot, missed, and V2 fired in retaliation into its shoulder. Then, the click of its gun being holstered in its wings. It twisted its head around and watched it dig into the red shoulder blade of the knuckleblaster. V2 was not looking at what it was doing, but at it, right into its optic light.
There was no reason for it to stare at it. Unlike its initial bow, this was not an indication of military respect. Its databases brought up intimidation, threat, a meaningless action meant to strike down morale in human soldiers.
Blood vessels tore out of their holdings, past the point of its capacity to stop the bleeding, and warm fuel flowed freely down its chassis. Its blood-pump continued pumping quickly, despite its lax state, twisted and mangled against a wall; yet it could not manually slow it down. It was cornered but it had to escape. It was losing fuel and it needed more. It was low on fuel.
Electrical directions skipped and the gun slipped from its hold. In a burst of energy it shoved against V2, forcing it back. With it, it pulled, and with a wet snap something tore free. Wires sparked against nothing as it tore the red arm off.
It stumbled back with its weight, and then held it up. There was no reason to hold it up—or was there? It stopped, half-standing now, searching its form for any previously unknown motive or reason for the action. V2 held the limb high above its head by the upper arm, optic light entirely focused on V1. It lowered the arm and dropped it onto the ground with no regard for its damaged state.
It stepped toward V1, who was gripped with the assured confidence that it was going to dismantle it. It opened its wings, retrieved its revolver, and quickly glanced down the hall. Mental map confirmed, it ran backwards so as to not take its sight off of the enemy, firing over and over. Its hand was shaking. Fuel loss? It had lost a notable amount of its blood supply and was still losing more—it left a trail, dripping down its side and leg, catching on the edges of tubing and chassis, eventually pooling onto the floor. Its central blood-pump still pulsed nearly two times its resting rate, forcing more blood through its body, urging it to move faster, react quicker. More blood poured freely from the gaping wound, unable to be stopped.
The first fire hit V2 in the chest and it did not slow. In fact, it broke into a lunge. All the while, its wings remained red, the same vibrant red as its blood. It lunged with hand outstretched, wings flared, all unflinching to each round sent into its body.
Its foot caught on something, unnoticed in its microsecond scan of the hall. Stairs. It dropped the gun and moved to catch itself, hand lashing back, leaving its front open—
V2 tackled it down full-force and shot it a total of 7 times with its shotgun, which burned so hot it incinerated a ring of sensory receptors around the blast sites. The wounds began downwards and gradually tilted upwards in angle. Damage to its gyroscope, thermoregulators, and half a dozen other objects that it decided it could stand to exist without at that moment.
V2 holstered the shotgun and hooked its hand against V1’s left arm. It was more firmly attached than the red one, and still twitched when it pried at it. It struck it once, twice, with metal-warping strength. V1 felt the ground under it becoming wet with its own fuel.
Some internal mechanism of its left arm came undone and V2 degloved it from its body, leaving a bare endoskeleton with inner veins still wound around it, split and bleeding.
V2 kicked it in the helm, heel connecting squarely to its lens, cracking glass. It kicked it again, but its head was turned now, so its head just slammed down against the wet tile.
V2 stepped away from it. Silence. Perhaps it was staring at it. Or aiming its final shot. It did not move its head to check. Then, it heard it turn and walk away. Metal at first sticking to blood, and then slightly drier blood, interspersing with the clink of metal on metal.
V1 stared at the opposite wall. There were some opaque pipes as thick as its leg. Its heat sensing system was offline so it did not know if there was blood. It could not move. It was bleeding.
There was nothing else to focus its senses on but V2’s departing. Soon it was gone.
V1 listened to its fans quieting down. Was it colder? Its thermoregulators couldn’t decode half its body, but the parts it could sense had dropped in temperature. Perhaps there was no need to quell any overheating. It listened to the nondescript hum of Gluttony.
Its internal clock still ticked. Approximately half an hour passed. It twitched, moved. Its legs lagged to respond.
It tried to drag itself. There was nowhere to go. Was there? Its memory lapsed. It looked up. The room was small. Square. There was the way out, where it had come from, stairs slicked with blood.
Less blood escaped the open vessels when it was up. It had to—
It was colder.
It had to minimize damage. It forced movement into its right up, pushing itself up. There was a wall a few feet behind it. It could not support its own body weight, so it dragged itself to the wall. It was cold and thrummed with unseen machinery.
Not fifteen minutes later, its internal clock shut off to conserve power.
It leaned against the wall. It did not feel adequate. Like it could’ve sat up straighter. But it did not have the energy and its blood-pump had started speeding up again, which defeated the purpose of leaning against something. So it hunched over there. It was something. It would help. It would help.
Some internal system beeped a warning that it had lost over half its blood supply. Other nonessential functions shut off. Its wings folded, hard-light vanishing as they tucked back against its body. It could not see anymore.
Its awareness melted away from the outside and moved inwards. Some of the plating of its legs was off-centered, almost gone. It listened to each mechanical whirr and tick of its body and cataloged each action to explain the sound.
Its central blood-pump had finally slowed down. It hiccupped when a cycle fed it more air than blood.
At some point in its development, there had been a decision. A small feature, a homage. It felt it in its chest.
It was not meant to speak. It beeped, sometimes. It laid there. And then there was a voice, artificial and sputtering.
It sang. The voice sang. V1 simply laid there.
“There is a flower within my heart, Daisy, Daisy,
Planted one day by a glancing dart—”
The voice was not particularly good at it.
“My beautiful Daisy Bell—”
Its audio processors shut off, cutting the voice off mid-line. But it still sang. V1 felt the reverberation in its chest. It had not felt the sensation before. It was not unlike when it beeped and chirped, just from a slightly different part in its body.
It had a rhythm. Predictability. It felt it as some slightly-less-unnecessary functions shut off. It could not feel its legs anymore.
Time passed.
Something in its chest started click-clicking because it wasn’t getting enough blood. Its blood-pump spasmed more often. It started to beat faster again.
Time passed.
It—
There were less internal mechanisms to listen to now. It listened to the unheard song. It had repeated several times now. But it was slower. It also hiccuped. Skipped. Stuttered.
It—
It was cold. Its temperature sensors had gone down but it knew the blood it was laying in was warm because it was fresh because it was actively bleeding. The song’s rhythm broke. It was stuck on a single note now, low and dragging. It scratched at its internal components.
Its blood-pump beat was beating very fast again. The song resumed.
It entered sleep mode.
BLOOD
It flooded into its systems—
Its memory—
BLOOD
It was in blood, in fuel—
There was water, equally forcing itself into its body, which burned hot to expel the unwanted substance. Internal balances skewed out of place and it couldn’t filter the fuel from the worthless.
White-hot shock of sensations surged under its chassis and filled every once-cold filament of its body. Its blood-pump started hammering in its chest. It was drowning and alive and awake. Its processors snapped back online all at once, rushing forward now alert and
IT WAS BEING ATTACKED —
Its hands—
It—
Where were its other hands? It could not
IT WAS IN SO MUCH BLOOD AND WATER IT FELT LIKE LIGHTNING
Its hand grabbed onto another and audio rushed into its head, surging blood-water and a voice and then there was sight, a nauseating light piercing through murky red. Liquid pressed down upon thin cracks in its optic lens, and it thrashed its head wildly in response..
Another hand wrapped around its neck and held it submerged, thrashing and kicking. Blood was expelled by a dozen severed tubing just as fast as it flooded into its body, leaving it writhing in a nonstop surge of fuel. Its limbs struck the edge of what it laid in. It kicked up sharply. Its wings snapped open and hit the sides of its container and flapped wildly, wedging themselves outwards, smacking hard against stone.
“MACHINE,” a holy voice shouted. The hands upon it pressed harder. It kicked harder in retaliation. The hand was going to snap its neck; a dozen simulations of it ran through its processors, how it could not pry his hand off no matter how much it scratched at the golden armor. Its gyroscope failed to orientate itself, leaving it flailing blind against him, no sense of where its limbs moved in the cramped space.
He was going to rip it apart limb from limb; it could not defend itself—no, it had its weaponry. It did not have some of them. Missing. Stolen. It did not have the revolver or railcannon but it had the nailgun, which it pointed blindly upwards and fired. Its hand breached the surface. The recoil had its whole arm shaking.
Gabriel, that archangel, shrieked and the hands left it.
It sat up and lunged to escape, wings beating hard to propel it. The second it rose above the blood-water mixture poured from its body, freshly-gained fuel leaving through the still-gaping wound in its side. It lashed its head side-to-side, balancing mechanisms unresponsive, flickering detections of water in places where water wasn’t meant to be lighting up its central processor. It—
It was laying on its front on the ground. Its head pained it, warnings complaining of rapid blood loss and non-blood levels in its veins thrown out of balance.
Something hard and metallic kicked it bodily back into the liquid. Its systems screamed fire-hot at the surge of water once more; it did not have the constitution to get it out while keeping blood in ; it was fine if it was not so low on fuel but it needed the blood and so its systems kept cycling over and over, rushing it through its frame. It convulsed. Its body struggled to sew shut split veins and mend open gashes that still bled freely. It just kept bleeding.
“-you, if you would just hold still—”
The hand returned, providing a free point of contact its processor used to orientate itself. Gabriel was above him, now to the side where it could not easily hit him with its—it did not have the nailgun anymore. Another weapon gone. It did not have the self-awareness to spare to determine what it was missing. It could fight with its hands.
He was going to dismantle it. He was going to snap its neck and sever its central processor from the rest of its body. He was going to punch its chestpiece in and crush its blood-pump. The simulations ran continually in the background, constant warnings of what would happen if it did not escape.
It shot up from the water, partway. Water poured from the shotgun as it aimed with an unsteady hand. Commands fired through waterlogged severed wires, meeting nothing. Its less-than-standard spatial awareness made its aim tilt. But Gabriel was not a small target. He was far taller and larger than itself, and its head only just came level with his naval. He was backing away, though. A shrinking target.
It fired and the ground inches behind Gabriel exploded. The weapon was hot in its hands, and it moved to aim. Better, this time. It had to be. Faster. Faster than the archangel could move.
“Contrary to prior experience, I am not your enemy at this moment, Machine,” Gabriel said, hands raised. Surrender.
It fired and hit him square in the chest, making him flinch, but nothing more. The armor remained unscathed. “Oh, you unthankful—” the words regressed into an incoherent snarl. It should have aimed lower, to his unprotected middle. Or that space of unplated self around his throat. It needed to kill him. It needed the fuel. He was a threat.
It thought of how easily he could rend it apart, and attempted to get out of the pool. It was a shallow thing, a canal pressed up against a wall—it was still in Gluttony, based on how flesh and nerves webbed over the ceiling and crawled down the walls. It scanned the room for an escape; there were doorways in the form of mouths, all gums and teeth. They would open for it, and so it could escape. The one nearest wasn’t too far away.
“You are bleeding profusely,” Gabriel said. His tone was uneven as if he could not fully control it. It was aware of this. Fuel poured from where its left arms once were. Motor receptors responded to nothing, an impossible phenomenon that gave its internal mechanisms the impression it remained whole. This was incorrect. There was nothing to move but it felt as if the arm still moved. It was there internally yet not externally. A contradiction.
“Have you perhaps wondered if I dumped you into the bloody water for a reason ?”
He was going to kill it. It stared at him and refused to look away. He could strike at any moment.
“Because you’re so narrow-minded, I will spell it out for you: I am trying to keep you alive.”
This verbal information was deemed irrelevant.
It weighed its fuel loss against the risk of darting into the unknown. There could be husks, with bodies full of plenty of undiluted blood that wouldn’t flood its veins with empty water. If desperate enough, it could find a large growth of biomass and tear into it for even the sick blood that flowed through Gluttony in sparse amounts; fuel was fuel. As long as it was not so diluted.
“I can’t believe I am doing this. That I have to do this,” Gabriel whispered. He unsheathed one of his twin swords and pointed at it. A threat. Confirming its beliefs he would harm it. “Back into the blood, Mach—”
It lunged under the sword in a burst of speed. One of the mouth-doors opened and it half-ran half-crawled through before it opened wide enough for it to merely walk through. For a second it was on arm and legs, skittering across the floor with enough purchase to wrench itself forward. “Oh come on—”
It leapt to its feet and launched itself off a bridge of bone and tendons stretching over darkness. It landed onto the side of a pillar supporting the cavern and slid down a few feet, sinew tearing under its force. Sickly fluids poured from above in thin trickles. A little bit ran down the stone-and-bone pillar it continued to descend. Analysis revealed it was a combination of old blood, water, digestive fluids, lymph, and other such liquids found within the human body. It shut off all the intake functions on its plating. Its bled fuel mixed with the substance.
Gabriel came charging out of the room and straight after it. There it was. The fight.
Its grip waned with its strength. It shut off its wings to conserve fuel and launched itself down onto another twisting bridge. The cavern was tall, cylindrical and filled with paths and doors circling a central column; a panopticon of sorts. Eyes on the ceiling watched it.
The ground was spongy, disagreeing with its suboptimal balancing, and it swayed as it ran. The structure sloped to the side and it slipped, one foot caught in the webbing of it and dropping a few inches through soft tissues.
“Get back here!” Gabriel appeared from above and grabbed it by the arm to yank it up, to steal it from its place, to rip its other arm off and—
Self-preservation was of the highest priority. Its wings shot out, offering weaponry but no hand to take it. So it struggled, and to throw Gabriel off-kilter it threw itself off the bridge. It twisted, and his grip on it slipped and released. It beat its wings uselessly and it crashed into the ground, hard and unyielding, but it was sturdy and unharmed.
Gabriel, however—
The blue and white flashed with laces of red, and he landed above it. He drew his sword, and it found itself unable to move. So clearly it imagined that blade severing its head or plunging into its blood-pump, spearing clean through it all the way to the ground below. Perhaps he desired to see it ripped limb from limb, to finish V2’s actions.
He sliced a long, shallow cut into his palm and grabbed its head roughly. The cut pressed into the side of its head, saturating the plating.
The blood of an angel was a pure, highly-valued thing. It did not hesitate and began to drink.
It did not move. He wasn’t—he just. He.
Why wasn’t he attacking it?
He said he did not want to. That was illogical. He tried to kill it before. Its fans spun faster, louder, as its processor raced to make sense of the contradiction. He was not just not fighting it, but actively healing it, filling its veins with fuel. Severed tubing mended itself, knitting together. But plating remained dented and wires remained frayed.
The bleeding stopped. Why was Gabriel doing this? Feeding it? Its senses ran clearer. It shook its head frantically until the liquid behind its optic lens drained properly. The feeling sent twinges of false pain through its head. Its blood-pump still worked harder than it had to, given it wasn’t in a fight, working to keep their awareness sharp and reflexes sharper. Blood soaked into all the places injured and broken and mended the split wires and busted circuitry.
Compared to its usual supply, even to its baseline, it was not a lot of blood. But an angel’s blood…
Gabriel began to pull away and V1 lashed out to drag his hand back. Instantly, it regretted this decision. He put a slight pressure on its head with his grip. “Machine,” he said curtly. This time when he pulled away, it merely watched.
“That was one of the more unpleasant physical sensations I have had the displeasure of experiencing,” he said, turning his hand over to observe his palm. It knew the wound was dry, now. Perhaps even scabbing over; he appeared to heal minor wounds within minutes during their fight. When he looked back at it, he stood. “Your injuries no longer appear life-threatening.”
A minor diagnostics scan confirmed it was no longer bleeding, and most of the wounds it sustained were mended or still actively mending. Other than the missing limbs, gouges in its endoskeleton that wouldn’t self-heal, and some deeper cuts into its chassis, it was no longer threatened with shutdown.
“You’re welcome,” Gabriel added. It stared up at him. He healed it. Gave it his blood. Its lens drifted to his hand, which was now back at his side.
“Listen to me, Machine. I am not here out of the goodness of my damned soul,” Gabriel told it firmly. He yanked it to its feet and its balance struggled to stabilize. He let go and it retreated out of grabbing range lest he decide to strangle it. But would he, given the chance? “I…” he paused, then. Contemplating.
Its blood levels remained below normal, enough for it to feel the urge to attack him and draw more of that precious fuel. But it recognized its own impairments and how easily Gabriel could destroy it if provoked. Its subpar situation meant it had to find another source. Preferably, one not diluted in water or of such poor quality it was better off trying to shoot the archangel in front of it.
“You are the only creature that has ever bested me in battle,” Gabriel told it. It watched. Listened. His next words came out hushed. “I wish nothing more than to destroy you.”
It took half a step back and then reversed the action when it realized he might take its weakness as an opening.
“However, I have my standards. Namely, I will not fight you while you are in such a state.” He motioned to it. “The victory would be shallow. As such, I will allow you to recuperate. And when I deem you a worthy opponent…”
He crossed the distance between them and it remained rooted to the spot. “I will rend the gore of your profane form across the stars.” It was spoken softly but firmly.
It would not show weakness. Its hand twitched. It wanted to grab its weapon but it truthfully believed it would not be enough to fend Gabriel off. But he was letting it live. It could not determine if that was of higher value than his capacity for violence.
“Goodbye, Machine. May your woes be many—” A beam of light scorched upwards from where Gabriel existed, blinding it temporarily while its system adjusted to the impossible light levels. “And your days few.”
The light faded and, when its vision stopped spasming with afterimages, it knew for sure that Gabriel was gone.
It stared at where he once stood for one second too long. It needed fuel.
And so, it turned and left. Even impaired, it could still shoot. It would have to keep more of a distance between itself and enemies to minimize potential harm to its body. But it would find fuel. And it would live.
Its processors replayed the events in the background over and over, perhaps to its own detriment given its low fuel supply. It reasoned it needed to better understand the events that occurred. V2 digging its weapon between plating to dismember it. Gabriel holding it underwater, suffocating it. Gabriel slicing his own hand to feed it. It replaced it all over and over so it could scrape over every detail to make sense of it.
Its leg nearly gave out from under it. A glancing lapse in focus and its body would fail. Very well. It returned its full attention to hunting for fuel. Its heat sensors were still offline and needed more fuel to function. It could hunt without them.
It would refuel.