Idea of Robert wearing prosthetic limb
Hi sorry probably not what you were thinking for this but I wrote some of the opening fight with this idea in mind
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On the rare occasions the suit shuts down, Robert feels small.Â
The suit hangs suspended, its right leg hooked by something heavy and unkind. Every system in the Mecha Man suit goes dark at once, a hard, total blackout followed by white-hot agony as a villian’s electric current tears through the frame. Robert screams into dead comms, the sound swallowed by the cockpit as his muscles lock and his vision strobes.
He gets a moment to take stock of his body, ignoring the nine feet of hulking metal mech around, maybe about to become his tomb.Â
Power: zero.
Mobility: zero.
Pain: exceptionally online.
“Great,” he gasps, teeth clenched as systems stutter back to life. The HUD flickers, then explodes into overlapping warnings as emergency power crawls through the frame.
SYSTEM RESTART_PROGRESS 22%
BARRIER SHIELD: OFFLINE
NEURAL FEEDBACK: SEVERED
He forces his hands to move, fingers at home against the controls, dragging the shield interface open. His head rings as he clears the fog. Focus. Shields first.
Something whistles through the air.
Robert looks up just in time to see the second hook arcing toward him, fast and precise. In another life, where he’s just a nanosecond faster, the barrier would already be up. A clean intercept. A smug little percentage drop and nothing else.
This time, the shield comes online a fraction of a second too late.
The hook punches through the beaten front of his hull and keeps going.
Metal screams. The impact jolts the cockpit so hard Robert’s teeth crack together, and then the pain arrives in earnest. Sharp, total, consuming.Â
The hook spears through the suit’s lower frame and into the cockpit, tearing through his knee and burying itself in his thigh. Something warm splashes across the controls, across his hands and face and he tastes copper.
Robert howls.
The HUD loses cohesion, alerts stacking over one another in frantic, unreadable layers as his vision swims. Â
“Hull breached.” The soft-spoken voice of his suit warns him.
“No shit.” he grits out.Â
CRITICAL STRUCTURAL BREACH — LOWER LIMB
RIGHT PEDAL OFFLINE
PILOT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED
WARNING: NEURAL FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED
This is supposed to be the pause. The beat where he breathes, plans, calculates angles and exits and power diversion like he always does. The moment where Mecha Man proves he’s still in control, turns the shitshow around one more time to put away the bad guy.
Instead, all he can feel is his leg screaming, the smell of blood and melting metal, servos whining as they try - and fail - to compensate.
A voice echoes through the chamber, bright and delighted.
“Just a little too late on those shields, huh?” Toxic lounges somewhere out of sight, voice bouncing off the metal walls. “Boss man here thought you’d be faster than that.”
Robert swallows hard and keeps his eyes on the HUD. Don’t look. Don’t engage. Fix it. He forces his shaking hands back to the console, pulling up shield diagnostics as the percentage ticks down.
BARRIER SHIELD: 31%
His heart stutters.
He hadn’t noticed the second presence until Toxic shifts aside.
There’s a hole in the suit’s plating, jagged and obscene, and through it Shroud stands there, perfectly still. The mask's eyes spin, calculating, watching him.
Robert’s pulse spikes so violently he thinks he might pass out. Fear creeps up his spine, cold and intimate, wrapping around his ribs. Fifteen years collapses into a single, awful second.
“So?” Toxic continues, cheerfully oblivious or deliberately cruel. “Whadda ya got left on them shields? I said forty percent, but Shroud says just twenty-eight.”
The shield indicator drops again.
BARRIER SHIELD: 29%
“And he is not wrong about these things.”
Robert grits his teeth, fingers flying over the console. Before he could even think of powering boosters, another impact comes from behind. A brute force slams into the back of his barrier shield and it drives the suit forward with a bone-jarring lurch. His injured leg lights up again, pain cascading until his vision whites out at the edges.Â
He screams. ugly and involuntary, echoing inside the cockpit as the suit shudders. The HUD flares red as the shield buckles, and the feedback spikes so hard it feels like someone drives a spike straight up Robert’s spine.
“Good news, buddy!” Toxic sings, voice bouncing down from the stairwell. “Shroud says he just wants to Astral Pulse, which we all know isn’t even yours anyway.”
Robert forces air back into his lungs in sharp, shallow pulls. His hands shake over the controls. The shield percentage drops another notch, alarms chiming over each other in a way that suggests they’re no longer confident anyone is listening.
His eyes fall to the jagged hole in the plating again. Through it, Shroud stands, head tilted slightly, eyes locked on Robert through layers of ruined metal and glass. Watching. Waiting. Not saying a word.
Robert jerks his gaze away, nausea rolling through him. He shakes his head once, hard, like he can dislodge the image. Maybe it’s better to listen to Toxic’s fuckboy voice, than whatever Shroud’s silence has been doing in his nightmares for the past fifteen years.
The shields percentage drops again. “Calculate how many seconds I need to divert Astral Pulse energy to rocket boosters.”Â
The suit speaks, calm as ever. “12.89 seconds of damage before critical.”Â
“Hey!” Toxic calls, leaning over the railing like this is all deeply entertaining. “If you’re planning on diverting puss - sorry, pulse - power to your boosters, it won’t work!”
Robert’s jaw tightens.
“I’m just the messenger here,” Toxic continues, wagging a finger at the suit. “He says you’re not calculating for the shit stuck to your leg, dumbass.”
He pauses, glancing back toward Shroud. He was so close, but he was so outmatched.Â
“Oh,” Toxic adds, grin widening. “Oops. Maybe both your legs. Yuck.”
The HUD blurs as Robert pulls up the power routing screen anyway. Numbers flicker. Calculations lag. The suit is compensating for the extra mass, the drag, the foreign object tearing into its frame. Hopefully the blood leaking into its interior.Â
He can’t control the speed of the thrusters without the right pedal. He doesn’t have time to fix this properly. He doesn’t have time to be clever.
The percentage ticks down.
Ten seconds.
Robert exhales, sharp and shaky, and makes the call.
“Fuck it.”
He slams the command through.
He’ll deal with the humiliation of failure when he’s not bleeding out.Â
The shield drops. It doesn’t feel like a part of some elegant maneuver. It just dies, percentage slamming to zero as Robert reroutes power with a shaking hand and the world rushes back in all at once. Blasters and powers quickly burning through the mech. The suit lurches as the barrier collapses, the sudden loss of counterforce yanking hard against the hook buried in its leg. Metal shrieks. Robert gasps, vision tunneling as the pain spikes so violently he nearly blacks out.
“Great!” Toxic claps from somewhere above him. “All according to plan. Now get outta there, babe!”
Boosters spool with a sound that is wrong (too slow and uneven) as power floods systems that haven’t finished recovering. The suit lists to one side, dragged down by the weight of the hook and whatever else is still tangled in the frame.
The timer screams.
SYSTEMS CRITICAL — 6.21 SECONDS
Robert doesn’t think. Thinking is a luxury for people who aren’t actively being perforated. He slams the thrusters anyway.
“Come on!”Â
The boosters fire with a violent bang, throwing the suit forward and ripping it free of its suspension point in a shower of sparks and torn metal. He screams again.
The hook tears loose with a wet, grinding sound that he feels more than hears, and suddenly the suit is airborne. Airborne and unbalanced, overcorrecting, boosters flaring wildly as the stabilization system fights to keep nine feet of damaged mech from cartwheeling through the building.
Robert barely manages to angle upward before smashing through the outer wall.
Concrete explodes outward as Mecha Man bursts into open air, debris tumbling past him as the city drops away beneath his feet. The sudden openness makes his stomach flip violently, but the suit catches itself at the last second, boosters roaring as it claws for altitude.
Wind screams past the cockpit. Open air and sky are all that’s before him.Â
“Oh, fuck yeah,” Robert pants, hysterical laughter bubbling up despite everything. Relief crashes through him so hard it’s dizzying. The city blurs beneath him as he climbs, adrenaline drowning out the pain, the blood pooling warm and slick around his mangled leg. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s- Okay. That’s fine. We’re fine.”
The suit shudders, struggling to stabilize, but it’s flying. He’s out. Shroud is a rapidly shrinking problem somewhere behind him and for sometime in the future.Â
Robert sucks in a shaky breath and forces himself back into pilot mode.
“Hull status,” he says hoarsely. “And nearest hospital. Now.”
There’s a pause.
A fractional hitch in the HUD makes it static before another warning flashes before his eyes.Â
ALERT: FOREIGN DEVICE DETECTED
Robert’s stomach drops.
