Rings of Rhea - Part 1.1

A/N: Please read the Prologue if you have not already.

Also, apologies for the length; I couldn't find another good stopping place.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Interim records corrupted.
Skipping 273 hours
Initializing…

Craig cracks open a door at the ceiling of an abandoned elevator shaft and looks up into a wide open space above him filled with fluorescent light. “Finally. The top of this level, by the looks of it,” he mutters to himself. Glancing around the vast new area around him, he finds himself on the roof of one of the near-infinite skyscrapers that he has been perusing for so long. Like stacked blocks, the horizon bobs and weaves with peaks of building structures as if on waves of a massive concrete ocean. A faded yellow haze obscures his vision after the first few miles of distance in all directions, but it does not block his view of the solid wrought iron barrier above. A mile into the sky, a flat slab of pure metal stands defiant between him and the next level. Massive pipes and collections of wires line the face of it like scribbles on a crowded map. Clouds of haze flow across the wall, curling into circles and blowing back into orderly lines like columns in sand being washed away by the waves.

Heavy winds push the tails of his jacket about like a pair of flags, and his eyes often suffer the occasional speck of dust or dirt chipped off the other rooftops around him. “Now where is that tower?” he asks himself, cracking his neck to loosen it up for the long search to come. A small storage room sits atop the building he just traversed, and a ladder sits upright against its side. The ladder is a refreshingly cool metal, painted white as if to make it stand out from everything else. From the top of the storage shed, Craig sees that his current location sits at the bottom of a dip in the rest of the rooftops around him, like an ant at the bottom of a bowl.

One of the adjacent buildings, sidling up against his own like fibers in a wire bunched together, stands roughly ten feet higher than his, though it is nothing a good foothold on the windowsill could not fix. With a short jump and a heave he scales the wall easily. Without much thought about the direction, he proceeds to the next rooftop with a running start, just to see if he has the strength to jump straight up to the next ledge. With a vault into the air, the lip of the skyscraper plants itself firmly against his shin as he stumbles across the cement. “Fucking--! Urgh!” He collapses onto the floor with a thud and clutches his leg. “Damn it, I’ve hurt myself already? Jesus!” Mentally kicking himself, he rolls up his tattered pant leg to assess the damage.

Already beginning to swell, his shin sports a stark red shade with some skin shaved off the top. However, he knows it will not remain so for very long. With a sigh as he slides his pant leg back into place, he mumbles, “I won’t even notice it’s there in a bit.” Standing up, and his mind on injuries, he peers at the round scar in the center of his left hand. A shudder crawls up his spine as he recalls the Snatcher that he encountered so long ago. It had pinned him to the ground and would have skewered his skull if he had not moved to make it pierce his hand. He no longer remembers how that encounter turned out after he received the wound, but his fingers move as well as ever despite it. Using the remains of a rugged cement wall for support, he tries his best to stand on his injured leg. As long as he does not fiddle with it or bump it against anything, it merely stings with each scrape against his clothing. Even if it hurt enough to make him scream, it more than likely would not impede his scaling of the skyscrapers. If anything, at least his strength has grown considerably since he began his travels.

As he makes a noticeable distance between his starting point and the lip of the crater-like bowl in which he began, a very slight whirring noise tickles his ears, tensing them up as his head reels around looking for the source. Nothing is crawling around on the rooftops that he could see, and the haze makes it impossible to see anything beyond a couple miles. Though rare, it would not be his first time seeing a mile-long snake of a machine careen through the city, mandibles clicking and consuming entire buildings. This sound, however, seems to come from inside one of the buildings. After several seconds of silence in every direction, Craig moves along. As he continues, the sound begins anew and moves around behind him like the buzzing of a hornet. Just to make sure, he pinpoints the building from which he hears it. Moving on to the next building, he listens for it again. It begins to emanate from the next one over, at the same pace that he has been going. As if proceeding along with him, it grew louder, though no closer or further away from him. A stark, continuous WHIRRRR.

Before climbing up onto the next roof, Craig stops himself. The sound persists, at the same distance behind him as always. He turns around and walks towards the edge of the ragged roof. The whirring noise remains in place, idling several buildings away from him. His hair has grown damp against his forehead. “Have to lose it.”

Turning back around, he bends down to ready himself and breaks into a run, crossing the wide rooftop in mere seconds and vaulting onto the next one in a massive leap. Adjusting the strap of his bag, he continues running. Pivoting back to better hear the presence of the sound, he finds it charging towards him through the innards of the skyscrapers. Pillars of dust and debris erupt from the thin spaces between the walls as it proceeds towards Craig, who whirls around to continue his flight once the vibrations reach his feet.

As he runs, Craig remembers far too late that each barrier between levels is host to a special machine of sorts; a “guardian.” He has never heard of a machine that could slip through solid walls with barely a sound, so there is no mistake in his mind that the guardian of this level has found him. With this thought in the back of his head, he redoubles his efforts, throwing himself up with hands outstretched to grasp the top edge of the building. The surges of dust and debris grow in frequency as he heaves himself onto the roof.

A single glance back is all it takes. In an explosion of cement and steel mesh, it tears out of the structure below Craig and reaches up with mechanical claws extended. A spherical monstrosity with a diameter larger than Craig is tall, and colored so deep a black that it feels as if nothing is there at all. From its equator extends several spider-like limbs, the two of which are larger with four-fingered dagger-like claws.

Craig’s hands release the edge of the building as the knives reach out for him. Just before his head is skewered, he drops down through the massive hole the machine created. The floor below is unscathed aside from the debris, but the dust keeps him from anticipating his landing. With a twist and a roll, he lets his legs crumple underneath him and lets his shoulders take the brunt of the floor afterwards. A cry escapes his throat as several sharp points from debris puncture and tear through the otherwise tough fabric of his jacket. Keeping his momentum from the roll, he scrambles to his feet and makes a break for the first door in sight. Using his less injured shoulder, he bashes through the flimsy barricade and into the next room.

A shriek emanates from the black sphere behind him as its limbs rotate around on its equator and renews its pursuit. As Craig frantically searches around the building, he notices the path that the guardian most likely took before. For quite a ways away, perfect circles to have been cut out of the walls like a cookie cutter. A quick look back at the machine tells Craig exactly how the guardian did it. Instead of a black void of mechanical limbs from before, a glowing ball of yellow heat floats towards him melting through concrete and metal alike, talons outstretched. Sweat having already formed on the back of his neck from the heat, he lunges out of the way before one of the glowing, sizzling arms makes a grab for him. Feeling the boiling air of the swipe at his back, he sprints towards the series of holes.

“Nothing to smash it with, it’ll just melt through,” Craig says to himself. “It knew that I was there and followed me, so it can see through walls somehow. What is that, infrared? Radar? Fuck!” His mind reels as his thoughts turn to the weapon in his bag, to the machine, to traversing the path in front of him, and to the noise and dust and cracks in the walls and the sweat on his brow. He leaps over the bottom lips of each hole in the structures, sometimes having to leap over gaps several yards wide between buildings, and does his best to wrench a steel pipe, a stray slab of concrete, anything he could find in scattered debris piles to use as a weapon.

Just as he manages to get a hold of a loose and exposed piece of pipe not unlike the one in his bag, a chunk of concrete on the floor catches his foot, causing him to careen into the next room like a sack of bricks. Letting out a scream of pain from the sharp rocks that embed themselves into his back, he looks upward. The machine, having reverted back to its empty black color, makes another reach for Craig as he struggled to get up from the floor. His very core trembles as he does his best to scramble further way. Any direction will be been fine, as long as it is safe. His hands fumble among the rocks on the floor until he finds the pipe he tore out of the hole in the wall. With a grunt of exertion, he swings the improvised weapon at the machine with all his might. Over and over, he bashes the machine, feeling its shell give away a little more every time. A visible dent begins to develop, and an enjoyable jingle of loose machine parts echoes from the inside.

The guardian, however, has other plans. One of its smaller arms snatches the pipe out of his hand mid-swing with the precision of a light-speed surgeon, and tosses it aside. The inner workings of the machine let out a groan and, before Craig’s eyes, the dent begins to push back outwards. By the time the groaning ceases, the dent and scratches and scrapes are fixed as if they never happened.

Slipping and scraping his hands across the floor and kicking bits of rock with each attempt to push himself away do nothing to free him from the threatening sphere that hovers mere inches from his nose. His eyes clamp shut as a shrieking crash penetrates his ears like a lightning strike in his skull. A rush of air and dust blows against his front as the machine produces lurching mechanical noises the likes of which he has never heard before. Expected a black void to take him as an epilogue to a universe of pain, he pauses after he finds himself to be very much alive

Wondering why the sweet embrace of death had not overtaken him yet, he cracks open an eyelid. The guardian, once a perfectly round piece of equipment, had become bent out of shape in every angle, as if someone had taken a hammer to its outer shell for an hour from the inside. It lets out creaks and rattles, but continues to move despite bits of its innards spilling out through a hole in its encasement just under it. Craig pushes it away, mostly using its massive weight to help him stand up, and steps back to assess the situation. Smoke had begun to waft out of various cracks and divots in the spherical housing that used to contain its fragile inner mechanical organs. For a moment, Craig almost thinks he hears a slight whimper from the machine, not that he could tell with his ears still ringing from the crash earlier.

With a lurch forward, the machine extends its arms once again, this time using them as makeshift spider legs to drag itself towards Craig. Knowing to save explanations for a later date, he grasps the wrist of one of the fragile-looking limbs supporting it. With a crunch, he kicks in the joint with all of his weight and reverses it with a spray of metal and sparks, letting the rest of the sphere crash down under its own weight. It nearly rolls right over Craig and careens into a wall like an out-of-control pinball. The wall of concrete buckles against its weight.

It is only after it had rolls away that Craig notices a small singed hole in the floor. Roughly large enough for him to stick his hand through. Just as he thinks of how it got there, that very same crash from before breaks forth through the floor right underneath the guardian. As if with a lance thrust up through the building, the rest of the machine’s once-pristine housing is pierced from the bottom up like a piece of wet tissue paper. After floating in space for a moment, the machine comes crashing down in a heap of metal and gears, Smoke and foul smells billowing out of the core of the steel abomination. Taking a step back, Craig lets himself collapse back onto the floor, his breaths finally catching up to him in deep huffs. Sweat drips down his body in torrents, soaking his underarms, legs, and forehead. For another day, he has survived an encounter with a machine, and thinks only of closing his eyes to rest.

“Verdammt noch mal!”

His eyes shoot open and his head turn towards the sizzling holes in the floor. The singed remains of the concrete that was left flake off as he scrambles against the floor on all fours to get to it. His hands quiver as he sets them on either side of the hole and peers through it.

His voice nearly cracking in the process, he calls out, “Hello?”

Scrapes and shuffles sound from the floor below. “Wer ist da?”

Craig’s brow furrows in confusion. “I-I’m up here! It’s okay, I won’t hurt you! Uh, h-how do I get down to you?”

“Wa…” The voice is feminine, though with some heavy guttural tones in her words. “Wer sind Sie?”

He cocks his head at the language she speaks. As he thinks about it, he knew of only a single language ever since he awakened in the city. Whether there has existed any other language that he was unable to speak, he hadn’t the foggiest notion. Looking around to find a way down into the next floor, he cannot see any doors in his current building, and wonders if this room was completely isolated until the guardian burned through the walls.

“I’ll find a way down, just let me find you!”

Pushing off of the floor so that he could get going, he turns towards the closest broken down wall. The row of identical holes throughout the buildings at least gives him a reasonable path to follow. He stomps against the floor with his boot, checking to see if she would respond in the next building over.

Thump. Thump. A smile spreads across Craig’s lips without his knowing.