@prtntious / for darius
as she pelts down the street, energy cannons blazing, alice cusses more than she's ever cussed in her life.
"get out of the fucking way!"
okay, so it's not that helpful. nothing she does seems to help.
she'd love to know what she's fighting. scarab has confirmed that it's a tech unit, gears and wires through and through, not a person in a suit. but who programmed it, and whether it's doing exactly as intended or not? she can't get a fix on it. even the shape of it—when she got here, it was a hulking tank plowing through streets at ground-level. now, like a transformer or something, it's flowered open into a figure recognizably person-ish. chromatic, at least a foot taller than anyone she knows, but with a recognizable head and arms and legs.
whether it sees and hears out of the head, or feels, or thinks, she can't tell.
and she's lost sight of it again—crazy, for something so big. she hit it. she knows she did. but the buildings are too close and the people don't stop coming. she can't keep track of them all. when scarab tries, the stream of data makes her brain feel like it's frying.
<< SUGGESTION //: BIRD'S EYE VIEW? >>
fine. fuck it. bracing herself, alice lets scarab's wings extend. her stomach lurches as they take off above the chaos, and the nausea lingers as they stabilize at a hover. scarab scans the crowd below for the tech—
<< IDENTIFIED. >>
—just a moment too late to do anything before it jets into them at full flying speed. they clash in midair.
scarab, what the hell? alice demands. could it fly before?
she knocks herself free with a blast to its torso, goes spinning out, and narrowly misses the side of a building before the wings catch her. she unleashes another, but that one doesn't push it as far back. so on instinct, she goes bigger, firing off faster. more power behind the cannons running up her arms.
the tech unit redirects an attack that should have hit, or maybe absorbs it into itself. it happens so fast. the shock wave impacts the building behind it instead. glass ripples and shatters. screaming joins the harsh buzz of mechanical wings and the blood pounding in alice's ears.
it's learning. they're the dataset.
<< ALERT //: ALERT //: ALERT >>
i know. i saw.
<< NOT THAT //: LANTERN! >>