Chapter Text
19.
The lower levels of the network that wound under and over and through the human world had grown fast. Its true dimensions was magnitudes greater than the surface network stretched over it miles above. Attempts by humans that police the growth had been aborted and confined to the surface of the network many years before in light of the simple fact that the network’s growth was no longer something that could mandated, not by its creators nor by its users. Every day, more information was added. Every day, new sites were created, new accounts used, then summarily abandoned in the matter of hours.
Byte by byte it swelled.
The network generated massive amounts of electronic debris—terabytes of junk data, wayward signals, unused system registries, broken battle chip data, now-useless links, outdated information, shells of deleted websites, ghost navi-core data, there had to be somewhere for it to go. Data cannot be destroyed. Not truly. Not on the network.
However, it could be lost. It could be hidden. It could be discarded, broken apart into neat little fragments. Easier to handle that way. Cram more information into less space. It had to go somewhere eventually.
And so, subsequently it all flowed downward to what was below the surface plane.
To be dumped into the Undernet.
(Ah, the Undernet. The vast, sprawling underside of the network.)
After bypassing the Undernet’s upper network of paneled pathways, covered in the glow of synthetic lights, chunks of the data converged into solid here, congesting circuits. Cubes and triangles with sharp edges and straight lines. Wastelands, windswept deserts with sharp spikes stabbing upward, loops and warped twirls and curves and arrays of rock formations verging on realistically organic, other logically and geometrically impossible structures that towered over the wastes.
Interlocking blocky columns towered, forming into a mimicry of basins and canyons. Fields of spires rose out of indistinct, white-blurred oceans of what would have looked like fogbanks to the human eye, bare and left standing lonely in the endless streams of light. The fog strobed darkly with color here and there, calling to mind the undersides of a stormcloud—then went back to soot, white, dimness.
Some of the data drifted in aimless clumps through the air as would clouds of rubbish and smog. Stray panels littered the distorted world’s horizon, forcing the smog to part and flow over them.
(Further below that even the layers of the Undernet. Below the hole in the network’s underbelly (which some smartass had dubbed the Underground since said hole tunneled down underneath the Undernet.) And below even the solemn, grey graveyards of discarded data and the remnants of deleted NetNavis, down further there, down, down, down: there was where solidity of a network proper with a floor, with its established directions of ‘up’ and ‘down,’ was lost, and all light was merely fed speck by speck to the deep blackness.
A yawning abyss under the Underground that was part of the Undernet but not, where there was no variance in the darkness: just a void full of trash data. Perhaps something lived down there. Perhaps something did not.
But let’s not go that far down yet.
The Undernet network proper, solid and messy and chaotic. Panelled pathways and wasteland and grime and junk and data nobody had any use for. That’s where all the fun is. That’s where the life is. Let’s start there.)
The internet city had been constructed out of the mesa that loomed up imposingly out of the wastes, the burning, hazy lights of windows crawling up the cliffs, the face of which was pockmarked with roads and holes and the arches of metal doors; perhaps calling it a city was too generous. In parts, it was more slum than city. Once, as a smaller cluster of rest-stops around an Undersquare situated on a high traffic-node for the occasional electronic being that dropped by, it might have looked nice.
In the years to come, some parts of the inhabited Undernet would develop into thriving if seedy metropolises, filled with activity and life; it was clear this place would not be among them.
It was dusty and ramshackle, unmemorable
Buildings snugged up against one another, packed tight into neat, geometric lines in the center before going askew into haphazard rows further out. In the narrow streets that burrowed downwards into the crust of the ground, the movement of illegal business was threaded throughout the city. Malware traded hands in back alleys; tamed viruses were the least dangerous of the wares on sale if one knew where to stick their nose.
A shadow detached itself from the horizon of the badlands that edged the desolation that made up the majority of the environment, picking its way down the rocks to the outskirts of the city, sending pebbles and iridescent bits of rubbish tumbling downward. It was unaccompanied. It was quiet.
It crept closer.
The shadow glowered up at the buildings looming up before it. The pitch black windows of the closest one leered back, indifferent.
The lines of its shoulders tensed, bunched in readiness, and then with a grunt, it launched itself high into the air, hitting the side of the building, feet slamming into the wall; another bound, and the shadow was over the lip onto the rooftop and disappearing into the recesses of the city. The only evidence of its approach left was a long scuffed line of footmarks between the rocks, soon wiped clean by the hand of the wind.
It darted from building to building; one last leap and it was sailing over a wide gap between roofs. The roof shuddered slightly under the solid force of the impact of its feet before the framework snapped itself to a halt and stilled again. A few bits of the structure succumbed to pre-existing cracks and broke off. The shadow paced down the edge of the building underfoot, instinctively gauging the final drop to the lower levels now that there was a clear gap to be measured, then jumped, dirty cloak flaring out behind him.
Forte dropped down to one of the panels of the metal pathways lightly with a soft thud, cloak billowing, then settling noiselessly around his ankles.
He straightened up. Glanced around.
The black maw of the streets yawned below, an open depth running between the balconies that clung as fungi would to the sides of buildings.
Once or twice, vehicles veered past, the blur of their lonely lights tracing lines in the air above the abyss. In its depths, more lights hung. The support pillars underneath the tangle of pathways stood weathered, rusted together, the metallic shine of the metal gone dull and dented with lack of maintenance, stained with corrosion at the joints. At some point a NetNavi, possibly operating under a delusion of artistry, had once tried to cover the rust up with a bright coating, graffiti patterns of painted-on blocks and hexagons, to make a select few of them look polished and colorful. Like the city, it too might have looked nice one time ago, with its muted tones and curling, cubic lines.
The coating was stripped away entire now, leaving again exposed to the air crumbling blocks of base code and worn circuits.
A wordless twitch crept across the corners of Forte’s mouth.
He went past the pillars of the higher walkways, the pulse of traffic lights, the city lights falling in bars across the metal pathway. Forte stepped into one crosshatch of thinned, yellowed light, fully visible for a scant moment, then back into the shadow laying thick between them in the next breath where he was only an outline against the gloom. The city has a coldness to a NetNavi’s senses, its shadows warmer than the open areas. A human would have failed to notice it. Forte doesn’t think much of anything of it.
Below the higher, elevated branches of pathways that jumped the streets, the traffic was thicker.
There were no crowds as densely packed as the term would call to mind for human cities, of course. Only a few raggedly clusters of Undernavis moved down the web of twisting pathways, most of said pathways deserted at this hour—some had hoods pulled up over their faces, granting themselves the safety of anonymity. They kept close to each other. They were moving in eddies as small crowds do, bound towards unnamed destinations. Bulky machines that stood taller than the Undernavis, loaded with goods to transport, trundled past, little green programs floating twittering around them. But there was a hint of hot excitement in the air, a thrum of that collective, happy bloodthirst that came with a communally-sanctioned spectator sport, regarding the upcoming bouts in the arena perched above. Makeshift virus-fighting pits on the weekends to kill time didn’t truly compare. The faint buzz of who do you think will win this time? My zenny’s on —
— hope they put on a good show for the masses, whoever’s the losers. Deletion’s quite a cold comfort otherwise. A laugh. Boots stomping across the ground. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Hey, if the Under-ranker’s actually coming to watch, do ya’ think we’ll get a chance to see ‘em challenged?
— 700 zenny anyway, on the bastards getting their fraggin’ faces fragged before the hour’s out, never mind living to see the tournament, don’t they know you don’t piss off the gang like that —Fingers snap. The hiss of grainy sound escaping a mouth. It might be a laugh.
—whoa, HEY, come back here, you, you snot-nosed, DATA-DECAYED’ scumbag, that belongs to me, NOT you, don’t—
—running into a babbling din, Forte brushed aside like he would cobwebs. It was not important to his business here. It was not needed.
Forte’s feet against the panels was a quiet patter as he descended.
Overhead the sounds of machinery clattered, energy circuits humming away in the walls. (In a few years, the machinery sounds would fade away and there would only be the droning of electricity left. The unfading brightness of cyberspace.) Further down, a couple of Undernavis loitered at a junction, hanging over the railings and hooting to each other. One hit its boot into a cyber-ball aglow with lines, and guffawed when it nailed another in the face. Two others on the side, a deactivated torso and an arm that was missing most of its fingers lying between them, being shelled of its programs, its core functions too crushed to salvage, look up from their work and clap.
Sore-faced, the NetNavi shook its fist and chased after the first one, shouting. The first one backed up and fled in a half-hearted attempt at gaining distance. Feet thump against the ground. There’s a tussle over the cyber-ball, won by the second NetNavi dribbling it away laughing, three other weaklings tailing it in hot pursuit.
Forte flicked his eyes over them without turning his head and assessment was done, dispassionately. They are secure in their numbers, deluded into thinking there was safety in it instead of more weaknesses. They are unguarded and puny; they are not paying attention; they are not threats; they are not worth anything.
Forte strode past them as if they were smoke, looking straight ahead of him, eyes unblinking. The NetNavis don’t look at the threat passing them by on a whim. They were too busy squabbling for possession of the ball, two pinning the second Netnavi on both sides while a third went in for its feet.
There wasn’t anything about Forte’s ragged appearance to take note of in a city thronging with far more peculiarly-customized NetNavis who considered as common practice betting and swapping away programs—and the less civilized cousin to that practice, disregarding the pretenses at mutual agreement and ripping them clean out of each other. To the victor goes the spoils, after all. That was only fair. That was to be expected. (It tended to result in some mishmashed design combinations.)
The anger smouldering in his eyes wasn’t so significant as to make him stand out.
Forte had learned the basic courtesy of coiling in his energy signature tight into his frame and not letting a single bit of it leak out did wonders for his ability to travel incognito.
Their voices receded swiftly into the distance, covered up by more noise, different Navis talking.
Forte left the main streets behind him. The pathways broke apart and branched as he slipped through the openings between buildings hanging suspended in the air. He slowed to a stop beside the metallic base of a bent sign-post pole. The signs hung transparent, letters scrolling slowly across the holographic surfaces. He swept his scanner over the area; a handful of weak viruses scampering about, nothing to spare attention for. Assorted signatures—NetNavi signatures—three buildings down, several more behind the doors five buildings down, a bunch more in the building with the tacky billboard on the other side of the street. A repeated, quick scan rewarded him with nothing different. Checking his second built-in radar revealed little else. Forte eyed the broken-teeth rows of buildings stretching down the cramped alleyway.
There.
That empty warehouse.
That would do.
The rusted cyberlock clamped over the handles of the back entrance troubled him no more than had a wad of plastic been in its place, and gave way when Forte casually slammed a fist into it, and let its heavy pieces drop to the ground. It broke into a flurry of data particles upon impact, vanishing.
Forte ducked out of sight inside, tracking digital sand over the threshold.
Whomever its users had once been, legally or illegally, the building was long abandoned, the hollow metal inside of it littered with all of the small traces and signs of the neglected and the dilapidated corners in the network. The digital goods it had housed were gone. The foot traffic was delightfully non-existent, promising a sharp decrease in the chances of somebody being sufficiently reckless to try their hand at putting the occasional ‘welcome-to-my-territory now-get-out’ blade in Forte’s blind spot when he was trying to unwind. Under the dust, the square-tile grid of the floor was lit with a soft glow, the yellow of dying electricity. Thin slants of city light come dripping in through the holes in what was left of the ribs of the vaulted roof. Viruses had been picking away at it for awhile now.
Humans had built this place, designed it from the ground up, and then abandoned it to rot with a laugh.
There was probably a joke somewhere in there, something about humans playing god and diligence going to waste and carelessness, but he cannot place it.
A search turned up junk, half-rusted empty metal containers tipped on their sides, and an old, bugged-up piece of compressed mystery data that flickered and buzzed like an especially maniacal fly in a corner, but without a delocker program on hand, Forte had to pick it up and manually hack through it; it was just an old subchip. He turned it over in his fingers, running a scan. No malware.
He didn’t need the data. He took it anyway.
Not inclined to be picky outside of paranoia demanding he ensure there were easily accessible exit routes aside from the back and front doors (there was, exactly, six possible exits, seven if he counted all of the window panes in one sweep)—and his scanner be left on in the background of his systems to perform the infrequent low-priority proximity sweeps—Forte pushed rubble out of the way, cleaning a spot behind a wall of the metal containers. Shifting his cloak so it fell behind his back, he sat down. Checked his internal clock. The fighting tournament was not for several more hours. Forte hmphed, cross. He supposed he could use that time to catch up on his often-neglected sleep mode, since training like he was used to within the cramped confines of the internet city wasn’t an appealing thought.
(Too many structures in the way, for one thing.)
Forte didn’t want to go into sleep mode.
He couldn’t relax.
Forte got up, stalked around the structure’s perimeter. Completed the circle twice before sitting back down in the spot he’d vacated. Tension didn’t drain out of him. This was nothing new. He checked his internal clock again. The hours between now and then had not been inexplicably sawed in half.
So. Time. He had time to kill.
Lots of it. A few hours.
Forte turned his attention away from his internal clock program. Data required sorting. He pulled up a floating data screen and pressed a hand flat to the surface. It lit up at his touch. Here were the bug reports. Here were the extra files that were best deleted to clear space. Other files could be shuffled around. Here was the feedback from his subroutines. Here were the records of he’d kept of where he had previously sustained physical damage and when and how it had been repaired, tagged with notes on how to prevent it from happening again. Here were the readouts on past fluctuations in his energy output and when the spikes from the baseline had occurred. Here are a dozen small details Forte must attend to if Forte was concerned with keeping himself functioning at full capacity like he should.
Forte set to work.
Survival is mundane in the end. Unremarkable things, simple things, repeated, ceaselessly.
It wasn’t a complicated undertaking to compact life down to a series of repetitions.
Fight to survive, struggle, and keep moving, and walk, and fight, and steal, and fight, and keep moving, moving, and walk and walk and walk. It wasn’t much of a task to scratch out of yourself anything wasn’t a prelude to finding what you needed to survive and taking it. It wasn’t hard to not give a damn about anything else.
Forte was used to resting in suitably small corners like this whenever he found them, recharging, performing the basics of the maintenance he required in solitude, leaving them with little sign of disturbance when he moved on.
Staying too long in a single place would leave him itching.
He already missed the empty places of the Underdesert—missed its quiet. The city was not quiet. There was a reason he tended to go out of his way to avoid the populated regions of the Undernet.
...
Okay, fine. Fine. Maybe the way sand got into everything out there in the wasteland was annoying.
Forte didn’t enjoy occasionally having to temporarily detach his armor pieces from his frame so he could better shake out the sand from the crannies formed by their sharp edges, didn’t enjoy having to wretch off his helmet (it would snap free of his audio receptors with a click) and wipe off the finely-rendered but accumulated dirt from the fins and the grooves where the fins seamlessly joined the helm.
The golden metal—the black metal, too—wasn’t pristine anymore; his hands would often find slight nicks, small scratches scored in its surface when Forte turned it over in them, carefully, inspecting it for damage to be repaired, for where he ought to apply the (stolen, copied) recovery data.
And sometimes how the desert’s wind cut right through him (even after he’d tugged the collar up higher and wrapped his cloak tighter around his shoulders, burying his nose in it as he plowed forward through the gusts) was most unpleasant.
Why had the humans been so preoccupied with those sort of details when they’d programmed it years ago? What was the point?
And even there, even out in the Underdesert where the weak and the foolish were swift to perish and only the mighty remained to triumph, as was right, as it should be, it seemed to Forte events conspired to personally spite his quest to find something, anything at all equal of him—worthy of presenting a true challenge to him and engaging in combat, worthy of him subsequently snapping their neck and drinking down every drop of their power once they were dead. That was something anybody could desire, he was sure, something that might test their abilities to the limit and get their core racing.
Something new. Something worth dredging up excitement for.
The Underdesert was leagues of wasteland and yet, not a hardy challenger to be found anywhere in any square inch of it.
All that aside, the Undernet was a quiet and lonely place. Forte preferred it there, the pitiless solitude of it. It didn’t hate him but it didn’t care for him as well. It had no need of him. Once accustomed to being either loathed or dotted upon, Forte found indifference comforting.
He could work with indifference.
The data screen blinked out.
The planes of his face no longer illuminated by its synthetic glow, Forte leaned back, air cooling in the back of his throat.
It had been two hours.
A little longer….
Biding his time like this entailed suffering himself to sit through periods of hanging around and doing nothing, and Forte found it dull. It wasn’t bad nor unpleasant, it was simply… dull. Boring. He had nothing else to do. He didn’t want to wait. He certainly wasn’t going to waste it fooling around like those weaklings he’d seen back at one of the junctions, young and laughing, careless and stupid. He briefly tried to imagine the feeling of what living in a mind like theirs must be like, fumbling along without the clarity rage lent him—lacking the clear cold sense of purpose that was what drove Forte on.
It’s almost beyond him to picture it.
To stoop so low as to depend on others…
Heh.
Idiocity, plain and simple. Forte didn’t need such soft things to survive; maybe they were too pathetic to stand on their own feet, but he could get by just fine by himself. He depended on no one. He was strong. He wouldn’t let himself falter. He had the power to do so. He would use it. Forte knew what became of those who had no power. People spared no mercy for others; people treated people the way they allowed themselves to be treated. The moment you let slip weakness that could be seized upon, you were done for. To feel pity for others, to be malleable to others, to be weak, was to give them excuses to heap misery on you. Forte had no interest in misery.
The moment you had the sufficient power, people would know better than to dare cross you and would leave you be to get things done (unless they were complete idiots.)
That was all that mattered. The more of power you had, the better. If one wanted to be feared, if one wanted to be respected, one needed to give people a reason to fear you.
Power was as good a reason as any.
Of course, power was not something other people handed over. Power was not something other people gave you. (Not without a price tag attached. That was power on a leash and therefore pointless.)
Power was something one took. Permanently. You won it, you killed for it, you earned it.
In the right hands, power could make what you wanted reality.
Forte understood power’s sum total: a tool.
A means to an end. Not the end itself. It was there to be mastered by whose with a strong will, and how useful it proved in practice towards achieving one’s ends rested solely on how its usage was done; power with no will, no direction behind it was not mere weakness; it was tantamount to wastefulness. Tools were crafted to put in somebody's hands. Power existed to be used. There was no more meaning to it. You used it or it used you. There must be momentum driving you and your usage of it forward.
There was no reason why Forte wouldn’t be able to put to far superior pursuits the powers he seized from whatever unfortunate NetNavis who crossed his path.
Fabric rustled, folded.
Forte stretched and crossed his legs, metal leg-guard slung over metal leg-guard, and craned his head back. Without him working away at the screen, his corner of the warehouse had gone dark. Not dark as the darkness the human world could be plunged into. The cyberworld ran on different mechanics. There was no such thing as true nighttime in the cyberworld, not even in the Undernet. It was always bright day in and day out, smooth edges tinted a gleaming overlay of blue or yellow or green or red, the air suffused with the background hum of electricity.
One had to go far, far down to find a place where it was not.
(And Forte was yet to try and go that far down.)
This corner, it was lit by the virtue of the indistinct streams of light that dotted the tiles with pale pools through the holes in the roof; through the holes, beyond the city lights, the sky was its usual tone—the milky-bright flickering expanse of noise, an endless flurry of grey-black-white static-snow like a broken television set. He trained his eyes on it.
Once, Forte had childishly harbored the notion that he could assume obtaining the power to wipe humanity off the face of the planet would be a simple task, a work of a three, four years at the longest.
Get himself back into fighting shape, locate said power, seize it for himself and then condemn the humans to the destruction that was everything they deserved. A quick end yes, but it was a kinder fate than what miseries Forte thought they ought to be rightly dealt.
Then reality had proceeded to set in.
(There are a lot of humans, a lot more than what he had thought there were back in the labs, and they multiplied… really, really fast.)
Steadily accumulating power was all well and good, if Forte had been willing to settle for stopping at becoming the strongest NetNavi in the network. Yet for the purposes of getting rid of the human filth, it was not an effective method. No, this scheme demanded some… some decisive stroke, a power so great the humans’ options for retaliation would be made simple for them.
(Said options, distilled down to the basics:
Cowering and dying. Or futilely fighting back, and then dying as well.)
But where such a power could be found eluded him still.
What a pain in the rear.
It would be a labor of a decade, at the earliest, and that meant Forte had to bide his time and wait for his opportunity to get what he needed done without too much interference. He still didn’t have a solid plan. Forte had plenty of vaguely-defined, cruel ideas that congealed into a messy assortment of plots aimed towards revenge. No strategy for it. Which was a problem. Very much so a problem. But, tch, that wasn’t too important. It wasn’t like how he was collecting power at the moment necessitated plans.
He’d cross that bridge when he came to it. The plan would come. He had nothing but time for that. The black NetNavi wasn’t in a hurry.
The network wasn’t going anywhere.
And neither were the humans and neither was Forte.
It came down to this, a baseline for accomplishment—he would have his revenge on humanity. Forte would not be stopped, not ever, and he would continue until there was nothing left of the humans, and the NetNavis fool enough to side with them, nothing but ash and bits of junk data. It warmed Forte in his core, a charge of voltage soaking into him and pooling thickly inside, just thinking about it.
He smiled at nothing in particular and longed for things preferably left undescribed.
.
.
20.
The fighting tournament was a disappointment.
The untrammeled violence, the battles he desired, the slaughter, the challenge, would not be found here. Forte had been courteous, there, in his opinion, in the arena. He had entered himself properly into the tournament as a competitor. He had waited his turn. He had been nothing but fair to the opponents he had faced. Come on. Come and get me if you dare. I’m right here. Come and try your luck.
But his opponents were all weak and unsurprisingly disappointing. They didn’t win. Of course they didn’t, they never did, they never could, not against him. Forte had thrown himself against them, against everybody who came up against him, but they broke easily and lost with even less effort.
It was —it was —it was, laughable was the word for it. None of them are strong enough.
He had crushed them.
So easy.
It was pathetic.
In the distance the smoking wreckage of the arena sagged and sank into the mesa’s sandy top, debris falling out of sight off the edge of the mesa to doubtlessly smash into unsuspecting buildings below. Its outer walls had buckled around the multiple crater-wide, gaping holes blown through them. The inner stadium seats uttered the metallic shriek of bending, tearing metal, being crushed under the jags of rubble. Flames leapt up. Plumes of smoke poured forth and crawled up towards the far-away circuits of energy that crackled here and there above in the static-ridden sky.
Fingers curled loosely around a handrailing that was cool to the touch, Forte watched from the ledge that he was balancing atop. His cloak swayed around his ankles.
Through the smudges of heat mirages, NetNavis shouted to each other. They were like ants crawling about a disturbed nest. He wondered if the visiting Under-ranker was among them. Forte could pick out the thin, widening lines of the data blocks that made up the arena’s structure slowly cracking apart from each other, exposing slips of the base code, outer and inner walls succumbing to the damage. The arena tumbled down on itself.
The collapse raised another wall of dust and louder shouts. Shouts booming up, screaming, chaos.
The breeze carried the noise well.
Forte scoffed, contemptuous, turning his back without a second thought. He followed the ledge to the other corner of the building’s side. The ragged edges of his cloak whisked around the corner and went of sight with the rest of him.
It wasn’t enough, none of it was ever enough.
The want of more thrums through his circuits, a low hum, creaseless. Destruction was like drinking down salt water to sate a dry throat; it only made him thirstier, doing nothing to truly satisfy him.
He would have to look elsewhere for an opportunity to quiet the need.
.
.
21.
He made good time; Forte was down the other, jagged cliffside of the mesa that was threaded through with data streams and leaving the city crouched on the opposite side of it behind him before long. The breeze too, had stayed behind with the miserable little internet city and its crooked corridors. The wind would come back in time the further out he went, billowing and rushing at his face.
The traces of other NetNavis’ presence soon melted away.
It was Forte’s footprints that marked the rolls and dips in the Underdesert floor, no other. Silence settled in. Slabs of craggy data jutted out of the ground in places to break the monotony and grope upward as the fingers of a giant’s hand would, as if the crags were seeking to snatch the floating boulders from where they hung above. Their shadows stamped shapes across the landscape.
The wind met him with a bite.
Hours later, Forte hopped up onto a spire taller than a building that jutted sideways on an angle and strode up to the end where rock gave way to air. One of the shadows caught him as he went under it, dipping across his face and slashing down across his shoulders.
His red eyes scanned ahead.
As always, the thin edge of the sky meeting the horizon was the same barren, rocky frontier stretching out before him. A thought flickered up: his to grasp.
Forte jumped down and walked on.
Where should he should search next?—he asked himself this abruptly.
Forte had scoured this continent's network top to bottom. Scraped through the dregs. Deleted scores of challengers, scores of combat NetNavis, run-away navis, civilian navis, security navis, plus a handful of NetNavis who has the simple misfortune of irritating him. Bores, every single one. Boring tactics, boring powers, boring struggles when they tried to overcome him. That city had been the last stop he’d planned on making in this region. Why linger longer than necessary? There was no reason to stay. There was nothing to stay for. He went where it pleased him to go. There seemed to be a few promising rumors over in Australia’s Undernet of new strong Undernavis prone to talking themselves and their combat programming up that might be worth investigating.
It’d be fun to smash their heads in at least if they weren’t able to live up to his expectations—
All the better if the fools turned out to have power worth claiming.
Forte nodded to himself, lips twisting into a smirk. Head-smashing always had a good taste to it; like he was stepping on an empty soda can. It was a pleasing thought to be shelved in his logs for later execution.