She couldn't muster the strength to move for a long time after. Minutes? Hours? She couldn't know. Her eyes remained rooted to the spot of darkness the eyes had glared from. Half of her wanted to see them again, and the other chilled to the bone at the possibility.
Who? What? Why? How? There was no point in a when or a where; the others became throbbing question marks in her skull, spiraling and pulling her attention.
Wait. Pa-5 wrenched her mind back. The blood. Right there. More than enough to grab some samples.
The WAV wasn't a specimen collection and analyst vehicle, though. After deliberation, she opened one of the suit's external plates. Underneath were a wealth of liquid and gas stores, all hooked up to IV lines that led further into the WAV. Some would go to the mixing faculties as ingredients to make the cocktails. Others were standalone treatments, already prepared for injection.
She painstakingly removed one of the vials at the edge of the host of glass and IV lines. This one, identified by the HUD, was a standalone injection to fool the body into thinking it wasn't injured. Aclofen-B903 was the first of an experimental drug that targeted connecting nerves between the spine and brain; it temporarily severed the link by making those nerves seem like they had inexplicably died en masse. She hoped the number attached to the end wasn't an indicator of how many trials the drug had undergone before being approved for unmonitored injections. If so, talk about waste.
Useful, and without any consequences. But the basic explanation was deceiving. It didn't fool the body into thinking injuries didn't exist. It stopped the pain signals from reaching their destination, was all. She sighed, hooking it back into the IV line.
The HUD offered, "Notice: Injection of Aclofen-B903 accepted. Estimation: Average duration of relief effects around twenty-four hours."
So she had a day. With hindsight, she might've realized doping herself up with so many cocktails and injections would make recovery one of the hardest things she'd ever attempt. But in the moment, her thoughts were more so focused on avoiding waste.
The vial--or was it a capsule? She pulled it free again, leaning down to scrape it through one of the new puddles of purple. The HUD offered further input, detecting trace amounts of toxic material. It recommended avoiding physical contact or breathing any fumes. She could work with that. The refilled capsule was slotted back in, although not before being terminated from the HUD's list of prepared injections. If both physical contact and the fumes would leave her with a bad time, she'd rather let the brains back in the capitol puzzle out what injecting it directly into the bloodstream would do.
She looked around. Nothing was missing, none of her injuries--all, thankfully light--could be treated with the limited resources she had on hand, and there was no corpse to collect further samples from. A shame; something told her there was indeed the corpse of a purple Aud somewhere in these tunnels now. That something was also quite liberal in sharing that she had no chance of survival if she went back now to find it.
She resumed trekking the path, her mind newly occupied.
The questions could now be puzzled out. Answered? No, she knew too little. But she could take her guesses, and keep herself busy. Okay, not a terrible arrangement.
So. Who? No easy way to tell. She supposed that also applied to what. It could be human. It could also be something entirely new. As difficult as it was to believe something capable of leading a purple Aud along on a rope existed, it had happened right in front of her. Several of the cocktails had light hallucinogenic side effects, which were an extremely slim chance of explaining away what she'd seen. She dismissed that possibility without much thought.
Assuming her savior was human, there were still plenty of humans living behind the walls of the Last Light. She'd be hard-pressed to find the right one, especially if they didn't want to be found.
Abandoning the first two, she turned to how. This was the simplest of the four. Blades. Using blades that replaced their arms, this individual had pierced through the hide of a purple, nothing short of a legendary feat. Where all but the most devastating of humanity's weapons had failed, two swords put everything they'd developed to shame. What were they made of? Nothing the 5th or 6th Rays could churn out, no doubt.
They were durable enough to withstand breaking against Aud fur and musculature when thrust or slashed with force, yet they possessed enough sharpness to tear apart the aforementioned elements like paper.
They danced, too.
They. Danced. While even higher-tier Auds were somewhat predictable with their movement patterns since they followed the same preferences as all the lower tiers, their bodies had developed so heavily beyond their starting points that the sheer speed they displayed made up for it. It was hard to dodge a mass of fur out for blood when it was moving hundreds of kilometers per hour. But her savior had danced around the devastating like the Aud was a training animal.
Just thinking about it made her head hurt. This left one last avenue for exploration: why? Why did it come to fight? In what world did any sane creature--human or otherwise--choose to confront an Aud, even of the white tier?
Did it come with the express intent of saving her? If so, why? Was it some secret project of the 5th and 6th Rays they had deployed for a test run?
And if it wasn't explicitly there for her, was it merely a case of being in the right place at the right time? Or was it at the wrong time? Or the wrong place? She was reminded of all the deaths and disappearances over humanity's history in the Gaiss Hollow when another human bone crushed underfoot.
Maybe the reason why there wasn't common knowledge of that thing's existence was because it left no witnesses. For the first time, Pa-5 physically checked behind her, suddenly paranoid with the thought of those yellow eyes reappearing from the darkness.
Think glass half full? Or glass half empty?
That was an easy choice to make. One didn't survive long outside of the capitol or Beacon Outposts--well, now only the capitol from the looks of things, if they expected the best from any situation.
So. Assuming the dancing blade-person, or thing, or whatever they were, would be back, she had two kinds of things to look out for. No, three. The HUD was already geared toward detecting traces of Aud fur in the environment. She manually shifted around some parameters, increasing the audio sensors' range for footsteps too; she trained the optics to catch any forms of unnatural light and report to her.
With those measures in place, she felt more secure. Slightly. Alright, barely. This wasn't working. She needed to think about anything else, or some kind of distraction--
Speak of the devil. She reached a break in the tunnel path. Instead of the usual fork leading in different directions, she was met with a single, segmented path. The cavern flooring was cracked and frail here, several patches having already fallen. She approached the edge, risking a quick flash of light. Nothing.
As in, she couldn't see anything, even with the light. How far down did they go? When checking the diagram again, it was with amusement that she realized she was directly above the segment of the Greater Tunnel System she'd been aiming for. Unfortunately, she wasn't connected to the walls of the massive space. No, that'd be too easy.
The HUD'd path wanted her to pass over the failing patchwork of flooring and continue on the stable ground further along in the tunnel. It continued to snake along for a time before making a sudden, sharp declining curve and reconnecting with the greater tunnel at its base. To do this, she needed to pass right over the ceiling of the greater tunnel.
The HUD was already doing its duty, warning her plenty of the hazards. Oh, she knew. One wrong step, the pressure of a WAV boot applied to the wrong spot, and she fell. Nothing but open space, so nothing to catch her fall.
She took a breath. Now would be the time to wish for good luck, if there was any left in the world. Before her nerves failed her, she planted one boot on the next path of rock. It crushed, bending under the weight. She licked her lips. Pressed a little.
Something broke loose below and tumbled away. It felt like an eternity before the echoing crash flew up to her audio sensors. Hopefully, the locals would mistake it for one of their own. She took the leap of faith, so to speak, and brought the other boot away from safety. The patch bent even further, crunching. But it held her WAV.
Heart in her throat, Pa-5 inched along, each second expecting a void to appear under one of her feet and claim her. One. Two. Three. Four…
Each step the floor withstood brought her further from safety, making her shoulders painfully tight. She couldn't help it. The HUD did its best to locate safe points to step on, the path dissolving into a long trail of neon footprints. It sometimes made errors, beeping an alert while correcting the path. She waited in fear of those alerts, every one sounding like a gong in her ears.
Half of the time she had to perform a balancing act, the suit's arms flailing miserably while she walked along a thin stretch of rock. The rest of it, she was walking between a crumbling catwalk, legs stretched further apart than was comfortable. Between them was a jagged hole, the edges caving deeper into the unknown with each of her steps.
She became aware of her breathing. It was ragged and short, a part of her diaphragm remaining compressed and a portion of her lungs remaining full, half expecting she'd need the stored capacity when it came time to scream. The thought of falling scared her.
What scared her more was that she already expected falling to be an inevitability. She lost her balance, tipping to the left. The stone support cracked, a spider web forming effortlessly to tear it to shreds. Compensating, she shoved both arms the other way, using the momentum of the move to stay upright. The downside was that she was now putting her entire weight on one of the stone beams when it had only been identified as capable of carrying half.
She leaped, imagining the cavern winds rushing over her scalp as she made the jump, landing on one of the stabler-stopping points at the edge of the path. It rumbled and crunched like the others, but it held. Looking back, she could see she was about a third of the way.
Where she'd been, the stone supports had crumbled away, leaving a new, wider patch of darkened void. It was easily large enough to swallow three of her WAVs without scraping the edges. If holes could speak, this one would have a deep baritone.
She didn't know where that thought came from. Shaking, she refocused on the path, stepping off the oasis of safety. To the casual eye, each stone beam was just as frail-looking as the rest. She once again thanked whatever project development head that stuffed the HUDs into the WAVs.
Well, more than that, the HUD was the most important equipment she had in her arsenal. It gave her a path to escape the danger. Already, the number of times she could've died was uncountable on a single hand, and most of them weren't solved by quick thinking or a weapon. The HUD gave her direction and support in an arguably mundane fashion; this meant nothing.
Of course, she was still grateful for having the comforts and protection of the WAV itself. Her journey to this point would've been much rougher at certain parts, and outright impossible at others.
Pa-5 bent under a low stalactite, one almost reaching the segmented ground. It was the first one she'd encountered. Even in the lesser tunnels, the ceilings were high enough that the stalactites that hung from them weren't in any danger of becoming an obstruction.
Her helmet brushed against the bottom. It evoked an ugly scraping sensation that made her cringe, but she continued onward, feeling the stalactite grate against the plating. In the process, she heard two cracks. One above, and one below.
Eyes widening, she dashed forward, the knees of the WAV clunking. The mad sprint upset the ground even further, groaning and bending with such fervor it was a miracle--or maybe several--that larger chunks or the entire thing refused to crumble away. As it was, dozens of new holes were forming.
Her rear visuals captured the sight of the stalactite drop from the ceiling. How was she supposed to know the mass of hanging rock was connected to the ceiling by a thread's worth of rock? Her heart, already in her throat, pushed the back of her uvula as she watched it wobble, then fall imperiously.
It crashed through the floor with as much ease as an Aud claw through flesh. Disrupting the strained unity of the floor, it left its mark, passing into the depths below. The impact was lost to her ears. Instead, a rushing wave of oncoming void was all she could hear.
The floor crumbled away, the darkness speeding closer and closer, passing a meter every second. She abandoned every thought of caution, pushing the suit's limits as she raced against the collapse.
She pressed her foot down in the crook of one of the surviving beams. She gasped when instead of meeting a surface, it was left in the air. She flailed, arms desperately grabbing. The other end of the tunnel was suddenly higher than her. The safe, solid ground was at her knees. Then at her waist. Then at her neck.
Before she knew it, it wasn't there at all.