The thundering headache struck Leila Lincoln again as she turned in his bunk bed with a painful grunt, her fingers clawing against her dome with enough strength to put a dent in it. Thinking back to the breathing practice that she had always used to calm down his racing mind and breaking body, she forced air in through his nose and out through his mouth at eight-second counts.
It took around a minute of breathing practice until the pain has subsided, and what sounded like a repetitive clanking and slamming of a fan mechanism has now been reduced to nothing but a series of light taps fading into the ambiance.
She turned once more to face the ceiling which had lost most of its paint and pondered her THEORY once more.
It is common knowledge that the world has ended with the appearance of the killer robots, and those that lived above in the skies come down every ten years to harvest the superhumans remaining on the earth's last few remaining cities. It has now been nine years, eleven months and twenty-five days since the very last harvest.
Biting down on her lips, Leila Lincoln sat up on her bunk bed right at the same time as a tray of stinking food was thrown through her prison cell door.
'Yo, crazy girl!' The guard said, leaning against the doorway and looking eagerly at the thin shirt that she is wearing with her breasts poking through it, 'nice dreams? Want to share it with me today?'
Ignoring the guard, she clawed the tray with her toes and dropped it onto her bed. She ran her fingers through the soup dark as ink and ran it across the calendar that she has made on the wall.
Today is when the harvest will begin once more, and the sense of unease about everything around her is coming to a climax ten years in the making.
'Do you not have defense duties?' Leila asked, and the guard chuckled once.
'Thanks to you, I have an excuse to stay back here and look after all of you criminals while the ELITES take care of the HARVESTERS.' The guard said, bringing out a burger from his pocket and dangling it through the cage, 'I can give this to you if you give me something in return~'
Picking up a rock hard piece of toast, Leila threw it like a shuriken as it shot through the air and slammed into the guard's wrist tendons, causing him to lose his grip and drop the burger inside of her cell.
'Thanks for the treat.' Leila said, reaching out with her foot and transported the burger the same way she did with the tray of food. She was expecting the guard to scream out in pain and anger and come in here to assault her straight up, and yet there was no response.
'I.....read your files.' The guard said at last, 'everybody else in the prison is taking the day off to see to the defeat of the HARVESTERS, so I get full access to everything in the warden's office.'
'Huh.' She said, unwrapping the burger and biting into the juicy patty like a ravenous beast.
'You know...all these things about the harvester that comes down to kill every ten years...' The guard said, looking through the prison window and onto the blue sky above where the HARVESTER robots are soon to be dropped down from the sky, 'maybe the resistance leaders are wrong, maybe they are hiding something...'
'All of the resistances are wiped out every harvest since the start of it all,' Leila said, mouth half full with the burger practically gifted to her by the guard, 'and yet more and more angry people joined, thinking that their entire purpose for living is to fight and die. But what are they dying for, anyway?'
'What differences do they make?'
'That's why we got the ELITES now, right?' The prison guard said hopefully, 'they are way more powerful than the average superhuman soldier, and they can even access Escalation 3's at times. With their addition in this cycle, things will be different.'
'Do you believe that?' Leila asked, finally looking over to the guard now that burger is no more.
The prison guard didn't say anything, instead, he clasped his hands together and leaned against the cell in silence.
'What was your category of superpower again?' Leila asked.
'Non-combative.' He said, poking his finger into the bars and easily bending it with his finger, 'I can make things softer, which means it's harder for all of you to commit suicide....guess that's my purpose this life.'
'Does it all matter?' Leila said, tossing the empty tray back towards the prison cell door and lying back on her bunker. She usually begins her daily exercise right after breakfast, but what is the point when today is the day of harvest and death?
'Say, you want to look at the battle?' The guard said, lowering his voice, 'We can look at it from the warden's tower.'
Leila's eyebrows raised, and she sat up on the bed.
This might be the chance she needed to get out at last.
'If you touch me, I will kill you.' She threatened, and the guard lets out an earnest chuckle.
'Come on now, I haven't done anything to you since you got here three years ago!'
The other inmates whistled when the guard lets out Leila and the pair started heading away from the current level, and Leila did her best to ignore it. It is hard enough being the only female prisoners on this level, and she didn't need the extra bullshit from the others.
The prison guard kept his promise to her surprise still, and the pair of them took the chairs up to the warden's tower where there is an opening that overlooks where the designated battlefield is.
The prison is located near a mine that uses prisoners as laborers, and that mine directly supplies the battle against the Harvesters which meant the prison is going to be practically next to the battlefield. If the superhuman army failed here, all of them in the prison are likely to be harvested too.
But again, does it really matter?
This is likely their last day on earth regardless.
Leila had given up on the fight a long time ago. Being born with a non-combative superpower is akin to being born powerless, and she was relegated to performing labor, maintenance and back liner duties, which actually suited her personality quite well. Then, her powers manifested at last, and she was able to feel everything.
Her eyes now see the strands of light carving out paths through the fabric of space-time, the waves of sound pushing and pulling the air particles as they traveled, and the essence of power around them that was the seeming origin behind the emergence of superpowers itself and the sense of dissonance with existence all around her.
It was a sickening feeling of constant unease, and it took her years to realize that all that exists around her perhaps isn't as it seems.
Maybe humanity is all destroyed, maybe they are not the last survivors of it all or the HARVESTERS are more than strange creatures that descend from the skies...maybe....
Maybe the skies aren't true either. Their entire existence created around a singular narrative felt wrong, and Leila was feeling the push back during every moment of her living.
She spent all of the following years trying to get to the bottom of it all, and yet she never succeeded. The city leadership threw her in prison due to her sacrileges and treacherous claims and 'lack of evidence', and instead of pursuing truth until the last day of her life, she simply closed her eyes and stuffed up her ears.
A gaping black hole opened from the skies from far away, and the wave of harvesters arrived in the same way as they did ten years ago. Black robotic creatures coming down from the heavens in a rush akin to the opening of a flood gate, and the returning fire from the Elites filled the entirety of Leila's visual field.
To her surprise, the Harvesters seemed to have been caught by surprise by the sheer amount of resistance coming out from the last remaining humans as many fell onto the ground like fallen angels with bodies piling up all across the battlefield. Then, the two sides exchanged fire as the battlefield were turned into an endless blood bath.
'What did you see?' The guard asked with squinted eyes, 'it's a mess down there....'
What the hell...If this is her last day on earth, what did she have to lose to open up everything again? Activating her superpowers, opening her eyes and clearing her ears, she began to capture all of the information going her way. The mechanical clicking sounds made by the harvesters are matched up by the battle cries of the elites and normal soldiers as the screams of humans and snapping of metal combined to create a symphony of death and destruction.
Then, more holes opened up from the skies as the harvesters are now raining down from all around. A force shield was held up briefly over the city before it was all over, and the end has finally come.
A single harvester landed on top of the warden's tower next to the watching pair as neither of them had any intentions to fight, with Leila being completely oblivious to her fate and the guard too scared to do anything.
The harvester walked directly towards Leila and raised it's a weapon when the prison guard slammed the side of his baton against its body.
'Get out of here!' He screamed towards Leila instinctively, forgetting that she was a prisoner around here.
The harvester robot kneed him in the chest, but his powers activated to majorly soften the blow. All of the harvester's body had become soft and limp.
'There are nowhere to run too.' Leila shrugged, looking up when suddenly, her eyes widened.
The holes that the harvesters came down from were always thought to be a portal of sort, but with her heightened eye sights, she knew immediately that the portals are bullshit.
Planks of screens are moved to the side, and the harvesters are actually coming out of a hole.
'Just run!' The guard said, his voice abruptly cut off as the harvester instead pressed the softened tip of a syringe against his body. An eerie red glow surrounded the syringe, and the guard's body was reduced, liquefied and turned into a single red drop stored in the body of the syringe.
'Shit!' Driven by a will to survive that Leila didn't know she still had, she sprinted towards the harvester robot and climbed onto the back of itself. Reaching her hands inwards through the tiny cracks, she popped the helmet off.
A shocked human was revealed underneath it, and Leila froze momentarily before snapping the human's neck.
What the fuck...
There is no time to process what has happened, and Leila dragged the dead body out before putting on the suit herself.
Then, going against the raining parade of harvesters, she flew up into the sky through the opening.
Everything was just as she expected up here. This was no sky.
Instead, she found herself in the massive opening of an empty compound. Scrambling to get rid of her armor, she found the nearest airway and crawled through it.
Dragging her knee through the dry area until the skin over her knee cap started bleeding, a mixture of sweat and tears obscures her sharp vision when suddenly she saw someone else crawling in the airway just like her.
It was an ordinary-looking black-haired man with a camera hanging around his neck and a red-haired muscular man who is barely fitting through the airways.