As Rory got within tentacle-thrashing distance of the skull-fortress, the situation began to escalate. Shutters and hatches slid aside on the fortress’s superstructure, hangar doors on the various outbuildings clattering open to disgorge an ever-greater number of ramshackle robots. There was something almost childish about them: brilliantly utilitarian but with the kind of madly skewed simplicity and overly-bright color-palette that most people outgrow around age eleven. With the sparking pits of missing optics and jagged yawning rust patches that covered their creeping, shambling, madly scuttling bodies, they hit that special sweet-spot of discomfort reserved for broken animatronics and childhood nightmares.
Or it would have, if Rory was of a size and a mind to notice.
The Last Emperor bellowed. Its tentacles thrashed, and the rainbow laser-light of an Antarctic midnight flickered from their terminal prism-nodes, on and off in a deadly light-show performance, almost rhythmic, accompanied by the screech and moan of ionized air. Aurora beams cut glowing scars across the faceplate of the death’s-head fortress, sliced surgically precise sections off the outbuilding factories, shearing through brick and mortar like cheesecloth. The unbroken vectors carved swathes through the ranks of the robots as they swarmed like ants, charging into the thresher-maw perimeter of the Emperor’s crashing tentacles and blazing eldritch lasers.
Rory swung one of his city-park-sized flippers, a vast, drooping expanse of feathers, miniature tentacles and albino flesh, and an entire formation of autogyro drones exploded against it. The light in the sky was growing brighter, the whispers growing louder with every passing moment, but oh he
did not care.
This was what it was all about, mang. It was a metaphor, or something. Rory had the muscles, and these guys most definitely did not, but they still wanted a piece of him – and it was not going well for them.
Your power is fallen, darkling – a shriveled and stillborn parody of the glory which should have been yours.
Make them pay.
Embrace the carnage.
Be an icon -not of vapid celebrity, but of ancient terror and awe.
You can sell t-shirts with your face on them.
Or just sell faces. Mortal identities are impermanent.
I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GIVE PEOPLE NEW FACES, MANG, Rory protested.
We will show you how.
Rory liked to think of himself as the underdog – but he also kind of hated being one. There was something irresistibly intoxicating about a fight that was utterly unfair and completely in his favor.
The tide of robots began to slacken. The Last Emperor prepared to surge forward, to close the final distance rip tear open the bony façade of the mighty technological keep – to hollow it out, to collapse it from within, and to
make of it a throne.
Then, the skull-fortress blew a snot-bubble.
At least, that’s what it looked like. A liquid saffron mass began to swell from the causeway within the fortress’s main entrance, beyond its skeletal jaws, vaguely spherical, but formless, and possessed of tremendous force. Robot penguins exploded as it rolled over them. A little flying helicopter-drone dispensing miniature robotic turtles was caught in its path and swatted aside. Powerful humanoid frames with green bakelite armor and cyclopean red eyes, inexplicably equipped with throwing-hammers, scrambled to get out of the way as the blob rolled forth.
It sprouted an arm, devoid of fine detail but possessing a functional three-fingered hand. It sprouted the suggestion of a leg, but lacking real knees or toes, just a foot attached to a flexible tube of rubbery glop. Another arm. Another leg. The thing stood up, towering above the surrounding robots, the size of a five-story apartment complex.
PFFF. WHATEVER, MANG. THIS IS MY HOUSE NOW.
Rory, looming above it by more than two hundred feet, hit it with a tentacle.
Boing!
The recoil nearly unbalanced the penguin abomination as the blow bounced off, his massive strength entirely redirected. The bizarre yellow creature opened a single eye, nestled in the center of its globular body, and unleashed a barrage of buster-shots before breaking down into a cluster of yellow spheres and bouncing away under their own power, ricocheting off the Last Emperor’s flailing tentacles and changing direction in the air.
Then a giant shuriken, still comparatively tiny but almost the size of an adult man, hit Rory in the face, sticking in an equally enormous barnacle just above one bloodshot eye. He swung his enormous head this way and that, but amidst the thronging robots and his liquid tormentor he couldn’t determine where it had come from.
AAH! HACKS, D00D! NOBODY SAID ANYTHING ABOUT NINJAS!
Further attacks followed in rapid succession, erupting from the crowd of walking robot wreckage, from the shadow and crannies of the fortress and the roofs and doorways of its various outbuildings: A storm of little metal thorns stitched a line across his chest, as little mechanical snakes slithered in amidst his tentacles and exploded. A beam of blue light seared a scorching path up the side of one flipper. An entire robot, humanoid, armored, and spinning like a coked-out figure-skater came flying out of nowhere and bounced off the Last Emperor’s cracked and blasted bill. Little tiny missiles with magnets on the end, which presumably would have tracked their target if Rory wasn’t the size of a skyscraper – as it was, they just exploded against the side of his neck and made his feathers itch.
One of his attackers threw a lightning bolt at him, and this one he saw: Humanoid, but stylized, with a body that suggested a spark-plug and two needle-shaped electric probes in place of hands. It shared features with the bizarre spinning machine that had bounced off his face, similar feet and similar faces.
Another barrage of needless erupted from amidst the ubiquitous buster-cannon fire, and Rory fired back, his questing Aurora-beam rewarded by a crackle of burning circuitry and an echoing starburst-explosion. The monstrous penguin caught a glimpse of his victim as the attack struck home, another humanoid robot, with pauldrons and booted feet, and a cannon for an arm. There was a whole
gang of these d00ds!
Then the bouncing yellow spheres all came together to strike him on the underside of the beak, changing direction in the air for a perfectly timed counterpunch. At the moment of impact, the yellow devil reformed, sliding down the Last Emperor’s chest and bouncing away as the abominable waterfowl thrashed his flippers and flailed his tentacles in an ultimately successful effort to keep his balance – though the undertaking shifted him several dozen meters further away from the skull-fortress.
ALRIGHTY, MANG. I SEE HOW IT IS - EVERYBODY PICKS ON YOURS TRULY. WELL –
He had intended to say something about their marketable likenesses and how thoroughly he’d be sure to cheapen their personal brand after they were gone, but it mostly came as a burbling stream of maddened elder-speak.
With weapons-fire still rippling across his body, Rory paused. Two more shuriken thudded into his back.
….D00D, he boomed.
It would have to do for now.
1122 more words.
Needle man is weak to gemini laser <3
