Click. Click.
She growled in disbelief. Of all the things, why the launcher? The noise had caught the attention of one of the Aud. It left her legs to move upward, growling at the helmet.
One of the hooves pressed onto her stomach. As the pressure increased, she fumbled with the launcher, one hand clenching helplessly. Come on. Come on. Come on! Come on!
Unlike the flash cylinders, she couldn't force a detonation without passing the concussion orbs through the launcher. It peeled away their outer layers while firing, exposing the volatile contents inside to the oxygen needed for the explosions. Without it, they were just bouncy orbs. A kinetic impact wouldn't do much good, since those flexible, hardy outer layers protected the WAV and its pilot from possible accidents.
Click. Click. Click. What else could she do? She resolutely pulled the trigger again and again. Each time, that click signified her failure, and seemed to enrage the Aud further. She was grateful she couldn't see. She wasn't sure she wanted to see what its eyes looked like.
Click. Click. Click. Click. She pulled the trigger again. This time, she grinned. The orb was primed. And just in time, too. She punched upward, catching the Aud off guard. Something snapped back, and it yowled in annoyance.
Before it could avenge itself by crushing her, she released the trigger.
She heard the telltale whistle of the orb and the splatter. She imagined the slick goop seeping into the green fur with anticipation. At the height of this, she might've even felt glee.
The explosion sounded, sending her tumbling. No, tossing her would be a better description. She flew down the tunnel, each impact, regardless of intensity, driving the air from her lungs. She skipped off rocks, ledges, and steps, and crashed through several boulders.
The HUD did its best, controlling the arms to take the brunt of the impacts whenever another object appeared in her path. Miraculously, one or more of the visual sensors survived. Her front feed was dead; although she couldn't focus long enough to see anything. The world dissolved into a dark tumble, sending her crashing further and further away.
The noise and the trail of destruction would attract even more Aud. Never mind the heat or the explosion itself. She groaned, struggling to sit up before she remembered her legs.
Like before, she wanted to push away the thoughts. Tough luck. Like a can of paste, her thigh plates had been ripped open. When the explosion went off right above her, she had no doubt what was left of her legs was utterly eviscerated.
She was free of the Aud, but the ground hadn't collapsed. The goal hadn't entirely been accomplished. Then again, she couldn't have survived another fall of that height anyway. Before the HUD could tell her how many injuries she'd sustained this time, or her likelihood of survival past this point--that one program felt like it had more redundancy than the rest of the WAV put together. She wondered if the explosion had cauterized her legs.
She…needed to hide. The chemical scents of the concussion orb--her last--should have hidden her scent now that the suit was breached. So long as she could hunker down and tend to what wounds she could, there was a chance she might eventually encounter another of the suicide runners.
So she dragged herself. Plated fingers scraping over the rocks and digging for cracks to find purchase, she pulled her broken body along in the darkness. She couldn't be sure if she moved toward the tunnel's center or its walls, but she needed to create distance. Any distance, no matter how small, was surely helpful.
The edges of her vision were turning dark. At first, it'd been hard to notice due to the blood loss and the fact that everything was also dark, but she was clued in when the HUD warbled weakly in her ear.
Her blood pressure and BPM were dropping at an alarming rate. She chuckled, feeling more blood dribble past her lips. If she wasn't careful, she could drown in her fluid. How ironic. There wasn't a body of water large enough to drown a person anywhere in the Gaiss Hollow except within the Last Light's walls, yet here she was. She angled her head to the side and continued.
She imagined the trail she must've been leaving behind her. The best-case scenario was that her legs were the only missing parts. And that the explosion cauterized them. She shivered, scarcely wishing to imagine the agony she would be in without the suit's injections.
As an afterthought, she let one of her arms fall back. It pawed weakly at the suit's compartment. The one that held the vials and the triangle emblem. She wondered if either had survived. The compartment was built into the suit's hips more so than the legs themselves, so while it wasn't as impossible as she first thought to escape the worst of it, she found herself surprised. Enough so to push back the darkness for a little longer.
She had a mission. She couldn't die until she'd delivered the news of Fort Io's fall. She was an engineer, but also a soldier of humanity. And without knowing the status of the other suicide runners, she couldn't rest until she completed her duty.
The other runners. She hadn't thought about them in a while. More broken chuckles. Had any of them made it? Or were most of them still alive, and was she just the one with some of the worst luck? The thought didn't hurt as bad as she thought it would.
She would be abandoned here in the darkness, her remains feasted upon until she was nothing more than a forgotten soul, leaving behind another skeleton for a human to discover. Maybe she never would be. Perhaps her eventual fate was to be joined with the walls, her bones fossilized.
But not yet. She watched the screen displaying her vitals run flash slower and slower, tracking meticulously even now. It was such an odd feeling, watching the proof of her body slowly failing become more severe before her eyes. And those eyes didn't work perfectly in the first place, but they conveyed enough.
She pulled up a diagnostic of the suit. It must've been held together by nothing more than scraps of scutumsteel and the last dregs of a power core dying just like her. The legs were gone, like she'd suspected. The mount on her surviving arm had been blown off too. Not that there was any further use for it. The chest had caved a little--more than a little, and the stomach plates were close to falling out on their own.
The condition of her WAV could be considered almost as bad as her own. Not like it was a competition.
The darkness was more oppressive now, clawing not only at her eyes but through her head, making the sluggish thought processes somehow even slower. If she didn't know better, it almost felt like somebody was pressing down on her shoulders, making each agonizing pull forward a greater struggle than the last.
Had the Aud caught up? Or found her? She didn't think so. She was still moving freely. Or was she? She shook her head, wishing she could scratch it through the helmet. There was a concussion somewhere inside, wasn't there?
"Notice: Vital signs bottoming out. Conclusion: Impossible to save body with current measures. Addendum: Remaining chemical contents include liquid sun. Proceed with injection?"
She wouldn't live long enough to survive the consequences anyway, so what did it matter? "Proceed."
She gasped, feeling a burst of energy. It slid all over her body, creeping into every nerve and cell with a fury. She was hot, no, burning up. But it was a good kind of burn. The kind that told her her body was still fighting to survive, even now.
Liquid sun was a state asset, doled out to the soldiers under the purview of the First and Eighth Rays relatively liberally. The two branches of the One-Light Directory used it as an emergency recovery method, and it did its job well.
But like all things, too much of it did more harm than good. After a certain threshold, excessive entry of liquid sun into the body orally or via the bloodstream would burn it up from the inside. Like a sun had taken root in her chest.
She could draw strength from its heat to keep going. Her exhaustion would fade, her mind would retain greater clarity, and her wounds would even begin to heal.
But that heat grew the longer it remained until it became a harmful force that stole the temperature equilibrium a human body maintained. Then it continued until all that was left was ash.
She had started a clock with a time limit she couldn't gauge. She needed to find another of the suicide runners before then and hand over her memory and her physical findings, or find a place to hide that would be hard for Aud to find, yet easy for a human, if they ever came looking.
She would soon be too dead for any other option to matter.