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“It's raining." Buster Gallon said absently. A distant rumble, and suddenly the windows were under siege, hard pellets of ice began plundering into the glass. The emergency lights installed across the ceiling flickered on, one by one, as looming clouds gathered outside in a dark and unforgiving cluster.
It wasn’t as bright as he’d liked, but it was enough to see.
A crackle of lightning flashed across the dark sky, followed closely by a deep, rolling boom of thunder much closer, and even heavier downpour. Buster Gallon’s vocalizer clicked on and off, growing agitated. "The others are going to be soaked when they get here.”
He doesn’t comment on the traffic. Perhaps unwilling to jinx it.
Mega Ambler didn't bother to look. There’s little use in denying likely misfortunes, even if human weather forecasts cannot be fully reliable. They mostly were.
For one, the weatherman claimed it was going to rain heavily at around five.
His chronometer read quarter past.
"It's raining on and off till nine.” He recalled, feeling his mood sour even further.
It was a small mercy that the rain started to let up a little at just that, after the aggressive downpour moments earlier.
Shadow X was flying back to Mowtown as fast as he could, but for now the owner of the Metal Brace was travelling with frame types bound to the ground.
As the pitter-pattering sleet ceased into wet but only occasional slaps against the glass, Mega Ambler refocused on the security footage, replaying the last few moments Buster Gallon managed to pull from the corrupted system.
The audio was completely busted, and it was a miracle the footage could play at all. The retrieved sequence began with Phoenix Fire struggling up, berth-bound, and leaning towards the right, until his assailant strolled into view. The weapon card he summoned was a large showy scythe that materialized within half a blink, expertly spun and pressing against Phoenix’s neck cabling.
Mega Ambler’s fuel pump began hammering harder, his digits creaking deeper into his fist.
The scythe would come away at some point, but with every loop Mega Ambler had to consciously unclench his fist when warnings about his cramping joints popped into his HUD. He heard audible creaking as he forced his digits to unwind, and shook out his hand with a slight grimace, before setting it in the table ledge, careful not to dent it with his grip. Or actually, crack it, since the table was made of marble.
The recording was just as hard to watch as it was the first time.
Words were exchanged between them, he assumed, though for the first few watches he’d mistaken for the frame to be frozen. The running timestamps at the bottom proved that to be untrue.
Once more, it took too long for the dark mech to remove his scythe, and something ached deep inside his core as he watched Phoenix catch himself on the berth with trembling arms.
Or perhaps he was imagining those tremors.
The grainy footage had the barest licks of color, but Mega Ambler had little doubt that their kidnapper wasn’t a Wild Cardbot.
Weapon cards tend to be a dead giveaway, but the scythe captured on scene was dark as shadows, and nothing definitive came off from inspecting it frame by frame. But the latest incidents plastering all over Mowtown Times was enough proof.
He could respect Blue Cop and Jun’s wishes, and honour their promise to bring a peaceful alliance between Wild Cardbots and Metal Cardbots.
He could.
But stealing, not to mention attacking his patient that was under his care— such act was simply unforgivable.
Any responsible medic would think so.
If it wasn’t too bold to say, this offense should warrant nothing but the most painful death.
If not, he was always amiable to give them the near-death-experience, as a fitting punishment instead.
Either way, he would have absolutely no qualms about being the doctor to announce that assailant’s official deceasement, untimely or otherwise.
Blue Cop can arrest him all he wanted afterwards, jail him even, and Mega Ambler would have no regrets.
By the second review of the footage, he’d already confirmed the clawed digits that tapered and glinted slightly from the moonlight, and he didn’t need to wait for the test results to identify the dried droplets of pink near Phoenix’s empty med berth to be a heavy sedative.
What he was interested in were the contents within that made it so uniquely pink.
But there was something else was gnawing at him, chewing and biting at the outer layers of his background processing, leaving a scraping trail of incomprehensive static in its wake, as he struggled to sort through the fraying mess of emotions, held barely in check, all sharp edges and grinding bits that wore at his dwindling patience, with each passing moment.
“I’m checking on Sebastian,” Buster Gallon announced, moving out of the room. Mega Ambler gave a vague noise of acknowledgement, optics still glued to the small monitor.
With most of the power still down, only independent devices separate from the main power line were operational. So he wasn’t able to port the visuals over to the holographic projector just yet.
Which was unfortunate, given it was one of the novelties of working with Crest— his facilities were nothing short of a luxury, and surprisingly Cardbot-user-friendly.
He could only imagine what Crest could have access to beyond this villa. But that was irrelevant, unless it could grant him instant access to some infallible tracker and reignite the cold trail, or some sort of weapon that could bring a satisfying end to whoever took Phoenix away.
A full day and a half had passed by the time Mega Ambler and Buster Gallon arrived at the villa, when Crest realized Sebastian hadn’t been forwarding updates and remained unresponsive to his hails.
Fuel and electricity was physically drained out of the little drone until he was completely depleted and forced into protective shutdown, and the unnatural siphoning left a mess within the circuitry. Buster Gallon had repaired what he could, and left the butler at his designated power station, deciding to let him come online at full charge.
The attempt to salvage any evidence from Sebastian’s visual input had been unsuccessful. Phoenix’s kidnapper had been throughout in his cleanup— it took Buster Gallon an entire hour to retrieve that short recording, and the attempts so far to recover data from the central security systems had been a complete failure.
When he had to explain how energy was siphoned directly from Sebastian’s mainframe, fuel lines punctured from two outer wounds compromising his outer shell, Mega Ambler had shared Buster Gallon’s distasteful grimace.
He didn’t want to imagine what Phoenix could be going through right now.
Every once in a while, some sharp edge of emotion would stab at him as his thoughts circled back carelessly, unconsciously— to the missing firetruck. Mostly unpleasant, intrusive notions that would disturb him if he dwelled on them any further.
Pushing down the welling frustration was a familiar practice to him, to exert that conscious control over his cognition and to send a deliberate, manual override over his system’s urge to throw him into panic and unadulterated rage.
He'd had never felt such insatiable urge to summon a weapon card he doesn’t have access to, never had he needed such conscious control to tamp down that ridiculous impulse to go berserk and completely desecrate the forest with his bare hands, to unearth that Wild Cardbot from whatever crevices he’s hiding within, or had he to shake off the growing temptation to grab a handful of melting sleet, wringing it back to the heavens, like some deranged animal— to relieve the unresolved storm of resentment and to sate that burning desire for vengeance and beyond.
Controlling his emotional state in the face of emergencies was a matter of professionalism, and was in fact something he’d consider himself fairly intimate with. Not something worth wrestling control over using what remained of his processing power.
Yet, he couldn’t think past the messy, unbridled scenarios and thoughts of pure violence rummaging through his mind, upturning each drawer of morbid and intrusive ruminations he'd painstakingly shut away.
That lingering, background stress from an unfinished vaccine despite it being now complete, to wrestling uncooperative anti-vaxxers with shots he had to administer in series while holding down his temper, and the unforgiving passage of time that made him seconds too late to prevent Phoenix’s infection; everything consumed at him and piled onto that growing interference, a mental block taking up a visceral and physical shape in the form of a throbbing headache drilling into the side of his head, opening an ugly wound so raw and unbelievably annoying in every possibly way.
Impatient and agitated were both excessively generous ways to describe the toiling tsunami plundering away at the walls of his processor.
Grasping at the last straws of sanity for Phoenix’s sake, he dragged his mind back to the present, and examined the security feed with a harder eye, though not with a lighter mind.
The video recording fizzed out when something dark and winged latched onto the camera, cutting it to darkness once more.
He was still getting nowhere with what he had at hand.
Mega Ambler couldn’t really dismiss the nagging thought he was missing something— missing something critical that could let him to pry deeper into the logistics when Buster Gallon reentered the room, declaring the test results for the pink sedative to be inconclusive, only to suddenly cross the room in hurried steps, yanking at his arm, speaking with a rare tone of urgency. "Hold on, something’s… look at the tiles, Ambler—"
Mega Ambler pulled his attention away and looked to the patio outside, gaze narrowing at the slab tiles Buster Gallon was pointing at.
Buster Gallon began moving for the sliding doors, but Mega Ambler overtook him and shoved the sliding doors apart, stepping outside, past the roofed section of the patio, heedless of the falling rain.
Six pillars anchored to the concrete base, the patio supported rows of rafters and lumber loosely spaced atop as shade bars. Semi-shielded by the adjustable roofing attached at the ledger, only the smaller half of the floor tiles was drowned, but the strange phenomenon was only growing more apparent.
There were faint lines and squiggles across the tiles that remained light grey instead of wet in a darker shade, seemingly untouched by the rain. The strokes were half hidden by the dryer tiles shielded by the shade bars and the roof. The puddle that gathered on the patio wasn’t enough to flood the whole floor, but the creeping edges of the seeping rain was revealing enough for Mega Ambler to grab the garden hose.
“Move the shade back,” He told Buster Gallon, who flicked some switch from the inside, and the patio roof began to fold and retreat onto itself, the rain invading onto the dry tiles left exposed.
Water from the moving roof drizzled on his helm and streamed down his frame, and he gave his head a slight shake to dispel a fat droplet lingering on his scanner lens like a welled tear.
Twisting the garden faucet to the highest output and spraying it across the entire floor, it rapidly revealed glyphs detailed over the concrete, faster than the rain could, unmasking light grey characters bright against the darkened floor.
“This… It looks like Machinan.” Buster Gallon’s confused scowl soon morphed to a grimace. “...Okay, it's definitely Machinan. But what is this handwriting—?”
“Bloodwing." Mega Ambler read.
“What?"
“That Wild Cardbot, from the security feed. His designation is Bloodwing.”
Buster Gallon looked between his friend and the abhorrent writing. "You can read that signature?”
"It's not a signature.” Mega Ambler said, a little absently. “It's a message.”
From one medic to another.
"Wait, is this the doctor's cursive you told me about? What does it say?"
Rendezvous with me before midnight. Follow the glowing pebbles 30 yards East, and I will come and retrieve you. Bring guests if you wish, but they will not be coming with us alive.
At the mention of glowing pebbles, Mega Ambler's gaze landed on something with the faintest of luminescence, on the edge of the patio.
Pinching it between his digits, his HUD identified it as a fluorescent stone, one of many that were available for bulk purchase.
But it took directly shining a light at its surface to make the pebble glow as bright as its preview images.
Not much of a good bargain for its price.
Such cheap decor definitely didn't belong to Crest.
When Mega Ambler remained crouched in a half kneel out in the rain, Buster Gallon pulled him inside, and handed him a towel he barely registered holding and started to wipe at his face.
“Ambler?” Buster Gallon prompted.
“He wants to meet— sometime midnight. Alone.”
“Alone?” Buster Gallon scoffed.
“Or the ‘guests’ will die if they tag along.” Mega Ambler explained, opening his palm and showing him the stone. “There’s glowing pebbles to follow in the East.”
Buster Gallon made a face but said nothing for a moment, as he hauled the sliding door shut.
Mega Ambler forwarded the full message over comms with a ping.
“I’ll relay that to the others,” Buster Gallon told him, a digit pressed to his audial, and Mega Ambler gave a small nod, mind swirling.
With mounting certainty, Mega Ambler realized every action Bloodwing had enacted were all likely to be intentional and meticulously calculated.
With the message that would only activate under the rain, Bloodwing exploited the time frame of the weather forecast, only revealing his words of parting at a specific time slot, leaving them with little choice but to follow this single lead under a little less than seven hours.
That meant somehow, he also knew Mega Ambler would stay at the villa long enough to notice the message on the patio.
Did Bloodwing rightly guess that he’d rewatch the security feed, again and again?
Did he purposefully leave that specific section of the camera feed behind?
Mega Ambler scowled.
Or perhaps the video feed was never deliberately tampered with. The section they dug up contributed little to nothing about the Wild Cardbot, and their brief interaction was not particularly noteworthy, unless its sole purpose was only to bring his cables into a twist, and take his fuel temperature over the boiling point.
Mega Ambler exhaled forcefully, taking a deep vent to compose himself, and mentally listed his current and newfound revelations.
Phoenix Fire was specifically targeted. That was undeniable.
Sebastian was taken out first, followed by the cameras that lined his path to Phoenix. Sebastian was unnaturally drained of his power, puncture wounds resembling awfully like bitemarks from a set of sharpened fangs.
The security system was brought down methodically, and deliberately planned. Bloodwing must’ve familiarized himself with the villa intimately, to be able to drain each and every surveillance camera around it so efficiently in turns, cleanly forcing the shut down all at once without activating any of the inbuilt alarms.
Bloodwing then even managed to target the hidden cameras used as security backup, corrupting the systems files with nothing but fleeting moments left to recover.
Regardless of how Bloodwing procured enough fluorescent pebbles for Mega Ambler to supposedly follow a path, the sun was barely out for the past two days, meaning if he had to see the faint glowing stones, it had to be pitch black.
The threat about wiping out his entire team could’ve been a bluff, but it would be unimaginably dangerous to assume Bloodwing operated alone.
It was obviously a trap, but what Mega Ambler found endlessly puzzling was why Bloodwing orchestrated this in such a convoluted way.
Even with the current information at hand, Mega Ambler failed to come up with a reason why Bloodwing went to such lengths to lure him out, single him out, with Phoenix Fire’s capture as a pretense.
The team’s involvement is definitely unfavourable to Bloodwing and possibly his associates, yet the confidence in his parting message doesn’t sound ingenuine.
In spite of everything, all he knew was that Bloodwing’s actions so far had nudged him to travel during the darkest time possible, alone or otherwise.
The intention was so obvious, and Mega Ambler would definitely go against his wishes out of spite if he could afford to, but there must be some other element that made Bloodwing so certain that he would concede in the end.
The deep gnawing unease returned. But a singular thought cut through with such striking clarity and it had Mega Ambler snapping his head up and throwing the towel down, making a bee line for the monitors again.
Buster Gallon noticed and nearly tripped over himself to follow. “Wait, where are you going again—”
Bending over the screen and furiously typing the desired input, Mega Ambler punched the keys with a little more force than he should, expression pinched as he dragged the two points of selection and restarted the looped feed, starting it just after Phoenix forced himself onto his forearms, peering through the dark and ending just when Bloodwing stepped out from the shadows. He watched silently, the loop replaying itself over and over again.
Buster Gallon sighed behind him. “Mega Ambler…”
He shushed him. "I’m close… let me focus.”
When the loop played itself ten times, it stopped, prompting Mega Ambler to rewind the security feed and hit play again.
Buster Gallon hovered behind him uneasily. “Ambler, why are you watching this again?”
Mega Ambler squinted at the screen, face nearly pressing against it. “Something's not right."
The fleeting suspicion only now came into harsh focus, sharpened into something undeniable.
Mega Ambler paused the video, and straightened away, pulling Buster Gallon forward, who went with a slight stumble.
“Look.” Mega Ambler pointed at the screen almost aggressively, nudging Buster Gallon closer. “Why is Phoenix leaning forward like he can't see him?"
“...Cause it's dark?” Buster Gallon guessed, sounding exasperated. "Or he’s invisible?”
Mega Ambler shook his head.
"Phoenix isn’t trying to see what he looks like, he's moving like he doesn't know where to look.” Mega Ambler replayed the section, pointing at Phoenix this time, guiding Buster Gallon to his movements. “Phoenix can't see in the dark, but he doesn't need to." Mega Ambler said with greater emphasis, waiting for Buster Gallon to catch on.
When he did, Buster Gallon faltered, and staggered backwards. He shared a look of shock with Mega Ambler, who had drawn to the same, unnerving conclusion. The air of unease bloomed into something more sinister than before, crystallising into jagged shards of something undefinable.
Because, it had never mattered whether Bloodwing could turn invisible or not.
“Bloodwing didn't appear on his heat sensors…” Buster Gallon realized with dawning horror, voice hollow. “B-but that's impossible. Even if the fuel in his frame is different, he should still have a heat signature. Unless he's—"
“We can't fight him at night." Mega Ambler concluded urgently, moving away.
Especially not at midnight.
“Forget fighting him at night, you can't fight him without a weapon card," Buster Gallon started, then his face morphed to regret when Mega Ambler's optic brightened sharply.
Mega Ambler turned and left the room, before reentering with a prototype rifle Buster Gallon made on a whim as a side project, something he’d brought with him in hopes he could complete after finishing with the vaccines.
Buster Gallon made a face, finger hovering in the air. “Yeah…That is not tested—”
Mega Ambler ignored him, moving for the front porch in quick strides. He exited through the garage and turned, stepping outside and facing the barrage of forestry that surrounds the villa.
Adjusting his footing, he fell into a shooting stance, pulling from memory files long idle and nearly forgotten. He lined his aim to the furthest trunk of the surrounding woodland, finger curling over the trigger.
Buster Gallon caught up with him. His hands moved up to hover placatingly, in his peripheral vision. “Ambler, let’s think about this…”
Mega Ambler fired a rolling barrel of shots, the deafening noise drowning out the rest of Buster Gallon’s words. Yet, Mega Ambler thought he could still hear the hammering of his chest, despite the endless ringing that accompanied the numbing recoil, and his core spinning painfully out of its casing.
Mega Ambler fired another rapid succession when Buster Gallon looked like he wanted to speak, and only relaxed his stance to zoom in on his scanner, watching the splinters snow down and the smoke wisping away, confirming that all his shots landed to make a medic’s cross neatly in the middle.
When he turned, Buster Gallon still had his hands cupped over his audials with a grimace.
“It’s tested now.” Mega Ambler told him, though he can’t really hear his own voice. “Your rifle is more than sufficient.”
“Are you done?” Was probably what Buster Gallon was asking him, with a slight jut of his head, optics dead with exasperation. It was frozen with shock and maybe a little fear, a few seconds ago.
Mega Ambler has forgotten to mute his audio receptors when he fired the first round of shots, only to do so in the second round, when he was making a horizontal line of shots on the bark.
“I can’t hear you.” Mega Ambler pointed at his audials, reloading the rifle balanced on his thigh.
Buster Gallon nodded along, throwing his hands into the air and looking twice as done with him.
The vague noises of his ranting complaint only started to filter in when they returned inside the villa, with Buster Gallon hot on his tail.
“—still pretending you can’t hear me or what?”
“I can hear you now.”
“Oh! Now you can finally hear me!” Buster Gallon exclaimed dryly and loudly. “Can you stop— what are you doing right now?”
Mega Ambler stuffed a pack of ammo and took out the syringes from his thigh straps, replacing them with red glass vials with tapered ends.
"What are those?”
"Don't worry about it.” Mega Ambler said. "It's not lethal. In light doses.”
“Ambler, let's think this through. Let's wait for Jun and the others before we do anything drastic." Buster Gallon tried, but Mega Ambler just side stepped around him and began shopping for more weapons off the his work bench. It was Buster Gallon's fault really, for bringing so many of his side projects with him. Mega Ambler’s gaze landed on a missile launcher.
Buster Gallon’s optics narrowed. "Ambler, don't.”
Moments of unsuccessful wrestling on Mega Ambler’s side, and Buster Gallon won with a hard wrench backwards, confiscating the firearm and dropping it on the far desk behind him.
Which was fine because he wasn’t aiming for that anyway, and that little scuffle gave Mega Ambler the opening to reach for the next most promising weapon.
But Buster Gallon had the audacity to stop him and Mega Ambler received a mean slap on his arm, then he was dragged away from the table, with two hands stronger than they looked, gripping his shoulders and shaking him.
“Calm the hell down or I’ll sedate you, I will.” Buster Gallon warned. “Calm down.”
"If cloaking his heat signature is his special ability, then we are running out of time. We'll be at a disadvantage the longer we stay here.” Mega Ambler said, reaching for the table behind him and palmed more ammunition into his subspace, slipping another round of bullets into his hip compartment too. Buster Gallon’s optics flitted over and saw, but didn’t stop him.
Buster Gallon looked out the windows. It had stopped raining for now, but the sky was beginning to darken again with clouds hanging ominously over them. The brief reprieve wouldn’t last for long.
“Ambler, then we can't go, especially not now,” Buster Gallon said hurriedly. “Blue Cop and the others aren't here yet. And you don't even know where he is—”
“I’m going. He wants me to follow the glowing pebbles.” Mega Ambler interrupted, brushing off Buster Gallon’s hands. “It's dark enough now, with the rain and clouds. There’s still six hours until midnight. If I move now it might get brighter when the clouds disperse.”
“You’re not fighting him alone,” Buster Gallon scrambled in front of him. “You’re no good to Phoenix Fire dead.”
“I sincerely doubt they want my corpse,” Mega Ambler told him. Or at least, he was fairly certain about it. “This might be my only chance to find Phoenix.”
Buster Gallon’s face grew increasingly irritated. “And what then when you get kidnapped too?”
“I’m counting on it, actually.” Mega Ambler said mildly. He unsubspaced a vial and showed it to him, and returned the tablet he borrowed from him nearly a year ago. “This is a chemical tracer, specific to me. I’ve synced it with the tracking agent you use in your detection system. You can check the tablet in real time.”
Buster Gallon stared at the vial, then at the screen of his long-stolen tablet, and smoothed his free hand over his face, grumbling. “Unbelievable. When did you—? Nevermind. Did you have chemical tracers for everyone all this time?”
“Unfortunately, no. Not at the moment. I had one made for Phoenix in the past, but after his infection, his genetic makeup was becoming increasingly unstable.” Mega Ambler explained, a dark feeling curling around his core like a squeezing fist.
Consciously he forced a deeper vent, before continuing. “The vaccine doesn’t stop this, which was why I had him sedated, to slow it even more. The tracer becomes useless as he destabilises further.”
He turned for the patio doors, stepping out. Stray droplets of water from the shade bars dropped onto his frame.
Buster Gallon pinched between his visor. “Ambler, this is madness.”
“Noted with thanks. Don't follow me until the others get here.”
Buster Gallon grumbled his reluctant assent.
There's no use transforming, the trees only got denser the deeper he'd venture into the forest clearing. He'd have to travel on foot.
Hopefully by the time the team has gathered, Shadow X would've rejoined Jun and the others, giving them the element of flight and stealth. “Tell the others to use infrared when they reach the coordinates you tracked me to.”
Buster Gallon blanched. “Infrared? I thought he doesn't show up on heat sensors?”
“If my suspicions are correct, that cloaking ability only works when he's idle, not in motion…” Mega Ambler murmured thoughtfully. “If I fight him hard enough, the exertion could reveal him on our sensors again. Given stealth modes aren't forever, I doubt Bloodwing could hold out on us by the time I’m done with him.”
Buster Gallon’s face scrunched up. “That sounds great and all, but that's all just your assumption.” He pulled at his arm, but Ambler pushed his grip off.
Buster Gallon stopped reaching for him. “What if he still stays invisible on our sensors after your fight?”
“Then use the tracking agent.” Mega Ambler said over his shoulder, not looking back. “Use me and find Bloodwing’s hideout."
Mega Ambler adjusted the rifle slung over his chest, feeling the hefty weight of it in his hands, and tightened his fist over the glowing pebble.
“I have an appointment to attend to."