Chapter 13: The Fourth Stop (7)

Theo sat in Luna's empty office chair, spinning incessantly as there really wasn't anything for him to do there.

He thought he could find some sort of entertainment from watching the security cameras, but the piles of supercomputers that sat at Theo's disposal had well ascended from his brain as the screens were all progress bars and the keyboards were too complex.

Just after a single attempt of key clicking on the keyboard had left Theo scared that he would screw everything up, so he left it there and didn't touch it.

Vint wasn't any fun either as he was stuck in some informational mania, scribbling and writing with a concentration impossible to break, even if there were papers stacked on top of his head.

And so, Theo was just spinning in circles, wondering about how Carmina was doing with her last-minute mission.

[Vint! We got a big fudging emergency! Get off your bum shuckle and start powering up the darn teleporter!] Luna's voice boomed throughout the room from the intercom, making Theo jump from his chair while Vint simply turned his head.

"Huh? What's the emergency?"

[Everything went exactly as we thought! Everything went and gone fucked up!]

Vint took a moment to think, "How long until they get here? How much time can you provide with the distortions and employees?"

[Thanks to Carmina, we got the inspector to fuzz out and partly interrupt his message to The State. Although it was done a bit later than I wanted, she still bought about an hour's worth of time for us.]

"What happened to Carmina? Where is she?"

[Theo? Oh, uh, I got her to take a different emergency route outside the laboratory, don't worry about it.]

"Oh, alright...?"

Standing up from his own office chair, Vint took a calm approach to the emergency and promptly pushed Theo away from the supercomputers.

In a quick tip-tap away at the alien keyboard that Theo had no idea on how to function it as he slowly rolled away to the wall, an elevator came up from behind him without any prior notice or sound, sort of just popping up behind Theo.

Then, Luna rammed through the front doors of the office and speedily ran to the supercomputers that Vint was manning at to operate whatever emergency exit they needed. She pushed him out of the way as he did with Theo and began tip-tapping away at the keyboard with incredible speeds.

Luna clicked a button on the keyboard and summoned a microphone, "Attention all employees! Urgent times call for urgent actions, which means I authoritize everyone to work on every distortion in this lab! No, I order you to!"

"All of them?! Like, the class five distortions too?" Theo questioned, having never faced the tribulations of working on a class five distortion, but know full well the threat of lower ones.

"Yes, them too, but you don't need to go. You have the special job of staying here and keeping that bar---" Luna pointed to the progress bar screened on one of the supercomputers, "---going until it hits 100%! Do you understand?"

"Yes ma'am! Wait, if this whole building is gonna explode or whatever, what about my escape plan?"

"Don't worry about it, this teleporter/elevator thingy will pop right up when that bar hits 100%. So just sit tight until then, alright? And let no one screw with the supercomputer!" Luna demanded, taking Vint's hand and dragging him into the elevator.

"...is he gonna be alright? Can he even face a single military soldier?"

"Pffft, he's an entire ass Manifestor and you're a nerd freak with a love for science, what do you need to worry about?"

"Yea, I guess you're right."

Luna fiddled with the elevator pad and closed the gate, its mystical workings coming to life as faint, blue particles danced all around the two. As they slowly filled the elevator, the grinding of metal and whirring of instruments gradually grew until a click was reached in its mechanism.

Pvvvutt! 

In the next instance of time, 3D space parted ways from the elevator as it traveled through the ocean hyperspace without a single bit of turbulence. In another, Vint and Luna had reached their destination within the decrepit bunker of an unknown building.

"First thing's first, we need to hop out of these clothes. They're too white and too noticeable to be sneaking around the city like this." Luna spoke her thoughts, trashing her lab coat into a nearby dumpster and prompting Vint to do the same.

Vint followed her lead, dumping his pride and joy as a scientist into the dumpster without a second thought.

Once he was done, Luna pulled out a map on her phone and began analyzing it, quickly concocting an evacuation route towards a privately owned train station capable of going wherever its inputted coordinates lead to.

"Move it! Move it!" A loud shout reached the ears of both Vint and Luna, platoons of soldiers moving on armored utility cars as they made their way to the laboratory.

It was The State's military army, most notable for their ruthless fighting tactics and relentless aggression. They were easily recognizable for their black suits of armor that were empowered with a destructive energy, allowing for an orange glow to emanate from their body.

To avoid their attention, Vint quickly grabbed Luna and hid behind the dumpster they threw their lab coats in.

"...are they gone?"

"I don't think they would have an incentive to suddenly slow down right around our alley, so yea, probably."

"Alright then, let's move."

Luna stood from their hiding spot and began followed the path she had set on the map, Vint following right after her. Although every twist and turn they made into their city's advanced framework, it seemed to prove no issue to Luna's masterful memory and deduction skills.

It would only be until their climbing session over a short chain fence that they would face their first trouble.

"Don't break your kneecaps climbing over that chain fence now."

Luna retorted, "Vint, I am not gonna go knees first over this chain fence. I'll have you know I am a very cautious person who pays attention to their---AH!"

Having climbed over the chain fence and jumping down, a metallic hand wrapped its rusted fingers around Luna's ankle. From that grip, a half-salvaged, half-destroyed robot dragged its dismembered body closer to Luna.

[#$#!!#%#!#*%&!#%#*%&@?] An electronic voice let out an incomprehensible screech that rivaled a scratchy record, although its tone was unmistakably a cry for help.

"Oh great, we made our way into the backstreets. Hurry up Vint, I'd rather not stay here for long enough to be picked away for our body parts."

"Aren't we human though? What kind of freaks would they be if they took our skin?"

"I don't know, Vint, but God forbid we find out if Fernando likes to spread his kink." Luna warned, shaking off the rusted hand and trotting along the ever-so darkening alleyway.

The sight was nothing short of depressing---scrapped robots who were too uncared for that even their ends couldn't be met, the stench of old oil rotting off any kind of nose, and the sheer neglect of the place in general could nosedive anyone's mood.

Well, it would be if they were actual conscious beings, but they were nothing but robots trying to follow their broken AI guidelines to continue doing whatever outdated task they were made to do.

Nothing but discarded metal, deluded by the eternally unfulfilled purpose they've set out for, marching with cooked feet to finally reach a conclusion

The homeless robots looked at Vint and Luna with their broken sensory systems, a faint light beaming from their soulless eyes as they, too, began dragging what was left of them towards the two, who now paced themselves a lot faster than before.

What started out as a simple fast-walk through the alleyway became a jog and soon enough, that became a sprint for their lives as the robots dragged themselves with fraudulent desperation.

"I knew we should've taken a detour!"

"And run the risk of being shot down by military soldiers?"

"Yea, run the risk of getting shot down by military soldiers! Because, right now, we're running the risk of being dismantled right before our very eyes!" Luna yelled to match her frantic behavior; nonetheless, she led Vint with pinpoint accuracy.

From small jumps so as to not slip to incredible callouts to avoid outreaching hands that could swipe away at their heads, Luna let no such thing as panic to mud her reasoning.

"Duck! Jump! Duck! Duck! Goose!"

"Huh? What kinda callout is goose?!"

"You're it!"

It seemed that Luna still had it inside her to make a couple jokes or two along their sprint to escape doom.

But that optimism couldn't last forever, as the moment Luna took a left to navigate through the backstreets, a mound of discarded robots blocked their path. Immediately knowing how time consuming it would take to climb it, both Vint and Luna turned around to reroute their path before a rampant river of broken robots slammed into the two-way split and blocked off their escape, trampling onto each other to renew their body.

However, it didn't seem that their intent was to dismantle Vint and Luna on instinct, as the shifting pile of crawling robots grew nearer to the two, they stopped right in front of them.

Then, a robot came from the heap of rusted iron and said with its barely functioning sound system, [S-P-A-R-E---P-A-R-T-S-?]

"Uh, nope, no spare parts that can be donated! I mean, we'd die of blood loss, right Vint?"

"...yea."

The mountain of metal took its moments to process the auditory information that they just took in, working at a snail's pace as their CPU chip worked full-time to understand.

But as one robot fully processed the information given to them, a red exclamation point popped up on their face, as did another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another---

Before long, every single one of them lit the dark alleyway with their red exclamation marks, beeping as though the response wasn't something they had in their vocabulary range...

...and soon, they began screeching in a high-pitch electronic voice, just as the first one had done.

[!*&$^#&!$&#$@$*#$^**!$^$$!^&&^%$#@#$%^&*&^%$@#&!^$%#*!^$^@^$!] A symphony of scrap resonated their visceral-like screeches, soon reaching a decibel level that had well exceeded two hundred.

"...run, Vint."

"What?"

"Fucking run Vint! Climb the damn---!" Luna tried to shake both her and Vint out of their shock, but it far too late for that warning to have any value.

In the few split seconds the two could barely comprehend, a lightning bolt fell from the black sky and crushed the mound down to a sheet of metal, tendrils of orange electricity escaping from their body.

It was one of The State's high-end military soldier, coming down to investigate the disturbance.

"Source of the commotion unknown, seemed to be a bunch of scrap riling up for some poor worker bot's metal." The soldier spotted the two scientists trying to frantically climb the slippery pile of rusted parts, "You two! Identify yourselves and tell me what happened!"

Vint and Luna had promptly ignored the soldier.

"Identify yourselves or I will resort to force!" The soldier ordered, aiming his gun at the two as they scrambled away over the pile.

However, that possibility didn't come to fruition as Vint and Luna had finally hopped over the pile of loose parts, the soldier lowering her gun as she concluded it wasn't worth the energy to spend after shooting the two strangers.

But like a strange twist of fate, the soldier came to another conclusion from a momentary thought about Luna's height.

"I never knew they made models so little..." A sudden conclusion came to the soldier's mind as she radioed into her team's intercom, "We have intel on Dr. Little's positioning! Beginning pursuit immediately!"

Boooom!

A burst of orange thunder ran down the lines of the soldier's armor, her body vitalized by its empowering energy coursing through her veins.

With the strength capable of surviving a countless-hundred-feet drop from the air, the soldiers rammed through the pile of loose parts as they flung far and visible to Vint's and Luna's eyes.

"Argh! They're all monsters! Dodge to the left! Duck!" Luna complained as she made callouts, sharp rods piercing the ground Vint was just running on.

Running right behind the two was a trail of orange that threatened to catch up, the soldier readying her finger over the gun's trigger for the moment she came into range.

With the pressure of certain death looming right behind their backs, Luna could only work her brain overtime to try to find a way out of their horribly inconvenient circumstances before Vint spoke up, "Luna! I have an idea, where's the nearest open street?"

"The next left after this turn, why? There's bound to be military soldiers lingering around over there."

"Trust me! That's the cherry on top! Lead us to the streets!"

Luna gave no further comment as she rerouted their route to the open streets, giving her full trust in whatever genius of Vint had spoken up. It was either her idea to run a losing game of cat and mouse, or Vint's risky idea of running out in the open.

It was obvious what she was going to choose, especially with the soldier's guarantee that she would catch up.

Curving around another corner to not interrupt their running speed, Vint and Luna spotted the turn they needed to go around and marked it inside their heads. With a spin of their heels, they dashed into the open streets to the sight of soldiers eagerly waiting for action.

"Oi! Look at me! The oh so mighty head manager of Luna Labs! Right over here!" Vint screamed to get their attention, the many soldiers turning around to raise their guns.

Without a single moment of hesitation in their judgement, the soldiers let out a rain of orange energy bullets that was more akin to hellfire than actual rain. But with both Vint and Luna well across the road, they missed their bullets, giving the chasing soldier no choice but to stop and wait for a ceasefire.

"Woo! I'm feeling awesome right now!" Vint celebrated over their miniature victory, veering around another corner at Luna's heeding.

Luna didn't celebrate with him, however, and just stared with laser focus on the map presented on her work phone, the red line that they were following was being shortened by the second. True to those words, a square trapdoor was protruding through a dirty blanket that covered it.

The two stopped their momentum and opened the trapdoor with urgency, creaking from its rotting hinges as Luna quickly closed the trapdoor behind them.

"How long do you think they'll take until they find the trapdoor?"

"Long enough for us to hop on the train, that's for sure. This bad boy can stop most, if not all UDPE particles trying to go through it!" Luna spoke as she punched the trapdoor, creating an echo that reverberated through the staircase.

"Okay, maybe don't do that."

"Agreed, now let's hurry up before I jinx myself."

The two kept a sneaky but otherwise fast pace down the staircase until they hit the bottom of its steps, a railway platform presenting itself as though it had been waiting eons for it to be used.

Resting on the only bench that was built there, Vint and Luna sat exhausted from their mad dash to this desolate train station, clearly constructed only for the two to use.

"How long does the train take to arrive here?"

"Considering you initiated the emergency exit plan on my supercomputers ten minutes ago, I'd say it'll come pretty soon."

"Huh... what are we going to do after this?"

"What?"

"We flunked our chance to do a government rebellion, so where do we even go from here?"

Luna took a minute to think, "First, we'd probably need to lay low until we're off The State's radar. Maybe we can find a nice suburb somewhere, if urbanization hasn't taken over everything yet."

"Then what? Lay low for the rest of our lives?"

"Probably. I mean, unless you wanna do another revolution against the government, I'm all for it. It's a bittersweet ending, I know, but do you even remember why you wanted this?"

"I thought you wanted this? Aren't you, like, antigovernment?"

"Racism packs more of a punch, but no, I wasn't the one who incited this whole thing. You wanted this, and it's been that way ever since the beginning."

"I... don't understand."

"Whatever, you won't even remember it in the first place, so leave it alone. Look, the train is almost here, you can even hear it in the distance."

A faint rumbling could be heard in the far distance, the train traveling at hyper speeds through a dimension between the third and the fourth.

For every swing of Luna's short legs due to the height difference between floor and foot, Vint could slowly imagine such a life. It's something completely foreign to him, who worked long hours in an office chair on the unsurmountable amount of calculations to be done, but Vint could slowly imagine it.

Maybe they would wake up with breakfast on their table, maybe they would see children playing around their house, maybe they would start their own garden together---every image that flashed before his eyes had urged only one thought...

'...what a pointless life.' Vint thought, finding such a way of living to be so utterly unfulfilling.

Screech!

The train had arrived through a flash of purple, its wheels grinding to a halt on the railway as it exited a spatial rift.

Luna hopped off the bench and went on her merry way to the nearest train cart, Vint walking right behind in with an awkward stride to it.

"Hm? What's wrong?"

"Just... weird to leave behind everything you've always known your entire life. Or maybe it's that bittersweet taste on my tongue, like you said, but I don't know. Let's hurry up."

"Nono, we can stay for a bit, reminisce for a while."

"But didn't you say we needed to hurry up? What if that soldier found the trapdoor and catches up with us?"

"Pfft, and give us the lamest cliche there is in the book? Where we stall for just the right amount of time for them to catch up? Naw, we can stay for bit, deal with the thoughts you have going through your head right now."

"Haha, yea, you're right. But really, I don't know these feelings. Something is itching at my heart and I don't know what it even is. It's like I've lived a life entirely alien to me all along."

Luna held her shaky breath, "But you've only lived one life, how can it feel alien to you?"

"I don't know, let's just go." Vint avoided the question, continuing to walk to the train cart before it was too late, if reality could even work that way.

"We can't!" Luna tried to grab Vint's hand in an attempt to stop him, "If we don't deal with this now, then you won't ever find that purpose you've set out to get in the first place! I don't want you to go into this without a proper grounding to hold yourself on!"

"Luna, what kind of bullshit are you even---" Vint spoke with annoyance, knowing full well of the increasing possibility that soldiers could be down there at any time...

...something he now knew all too well.

For when Vint turned around to confront the bizarrely desperate Luna, the sight of a platoon of soldiers running down the flight of stairs that lead the two of them down there in the first place.

Thus, in the split seconds that he used to both register the sight and think about a possible choice, Vint picked up Luna by the collar of her shirt and threw her into the train cart.

"Vint..."

The whistles of flying bullets was the only sound Luna heard from Vint.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

"What the hell do I do now?"

Theo dawdled around in the office, either occasionally spinning in the office chairs or just short-circuiting his brain by trying to understand the papers written by Vint, only to throw them into the air and watching them flutter down to the ground.

But even that grew old in a couple minutes or so.

"76%... bada dopa gala dooch, opum Magnus, badum tch... 76.5%..." Theo spewed with gibberish, counting the percentage bar as it progressed at a crawl.

Every ongoing minute that passed by, Theo grew more risky with what he tried to do to kill boredom. From making paper airplanes of the research papers that could win someone a thousand Nobel prizes to dramatically holding back his finger from touching the keyboard, Theo was so bored that he could eat a horse.

'That is definitely not how the saying goes...'

Beep! Beep! Beep!

"Ahh! Oh God, that wasn't me, was it?"

The supercomputers he so daringly tried to use were now blaring with screens of red, giving Theo enough of a heart attack to beat the ones he had made with his fire axe.

But very quickly, Theo could conclude the fault wasn't with him but rather the sudden breaches of countless Distortions that broke free from their cell, glossy with oil and spiky with metal. As a result, the entrance doors to the office were locked shut with countless metallic reinforcement, all while the energy progress bar having substantially increased.

It was both much to Theo's delight and displeasure, contradictory as it is.

It was like looking at the Dream controversy, knowing that although he's a horrible person with all things he's done...

'...wait, what the hell am I talking about? He's just a horrible person in general. Horrible analogy, Theo, horrible analogy. Nono, I can make an analogy---people have the mixed feelings of Dream being both horrible and super terrible! Yea, I'm totally passing my English midterm exams.'

Theo confidently concluded with a hint of ambivalence, like trying to eat days-old fried rice that hasn't been refrigerated, subconsciously knowing you're going to get a stomach ache but also knowing that the next best thing are ice cubes between a hotdog bun.

'Okay, now I just know I'm not going to pass that English midterm.'

But nonetheless, the urgency of the situation hadn't decreased at all as the computer screens began switching to the escaping Distortions, many of them foreign to Theo.

[Warning! The Sixth Trumpet has been blown! If Head Manager Vint or Assistant Manager Luna is not on the scene, GTFO outta there! No, wait, doesn't GTFO already have---] Luna's prerecorded message echoed throughout the laboratory.

"Oh, shit, uh, hurry up progress bar? Pretty please?????"

The one screen that showed the progress bar gave Theo's word no heed, the singular burst of energy now gone as its percentage continued on its slow pace, just barely hitting 84%.

Right after, however, another wave of red screens blared their warning sounds loud enough to pierce Theo's robotic ears. This time, it wasn't just about Distortions, but rather a completely different threat.

[Warning! Those government scums finally sent their tangerine-lookalikes at us and oh boy, if you're hearing this, we're royally screwed! GTFO immediately! Wait, does GTFO come with a---] Another of Luna's prerecorded messages echoed throughout the laboratory.

"HUH?!"

Theo, who was now in an exceptional position of panicking, pacing around the office without any kind of exit possible other than that awfully slow progress bar.

The many computer screens, save for one, were now switching over to the laboratory cameras; soldiers in suits of black armor suddenly charged with orange electricity were now raiding the laboratory with any and all disregard to the property.

Soon enough, many of them began encountering the breaching Distortions that had escaped from their cells soon after Luna's initial announcement.

But the soldiers were not shaken with fear by the Distortions' dreadful appearance; in fact, they were more than ready to fire powerful beams of orange at the Distortions without a single thought of hesitation.

In mere moments of encountering each other, the soldiers brought a rain of hell onto the Distortions as the camera was so utterly flooded with orange that Theo couldn't even see what was left of the Distortion, but after that kind of gunfire, it was obvious that he wouldn't see anything anyways.

It only left a wandering thought for Theo---why wouldn't they save their resources for higher-class Distortions?

The conclusion that The State had a surplus of energy reserves was an extreme overstatement, as the longer the raid had gone on, Theo noticed that some of the soldiers were entering combat without any empowerment whatsoever.

But another conclusion could be drawn as, the longer Theo observed the increasing casualties from Distortions that could easily be dealt with if they had the correct information, the more he realized either Vint or Luna had fully invested into strategic warfare.

Despite the obvious presence of spies lurking in Luna Laboratories, it seemed that they were well misinformed on the Distortions that were contained there, though Theo couldn't quite understand why they couldn't advert the spies from discovering what reason of treason they were committing.

Even so, the conclusion that the soldiers raiding the laboratory had no knowledge on the Distortions they were encountering was becoming more and more possible.

"Oh, hey, I know that one!" Theo said as he pointed at the screen.

The Star Spore, having now awaken from its cocoon of blue membrane and was more than hungry enough to snack on a couple soldiers, was more so an intertwinement of blue string that spun together to make a humanoid figure.

Sparkling spores were emitted from its nerve-woven body as they glistened in the air, which was soon to be replace with an overwhelming amount of orange as The State's military shot the distortion until every part of it was reduced to a smother of ash on the ground.

The Star Spore's death was not without value, however, as some of its nerve strands managed to sneak into the crevices of the soldiers' armors. Those infected flew into a rabid frenzy as they began attacking those around them, though they were shot down before anyone else was infected.

"Aww, I was personally cheering for you, not that I support manslaughter, but I would imagine they would do things a lot worse than what a Distortion would do to me."

Theo slanted further into Luna's office chair, assuming that the Distortions would be able to dwindle down The State's military forces before they could reach the office. After all, with the Distortion-to-soldiers death ratio, it seemed like a plausible hypothesis.

That would be until a very unique presence made himself known to all the deaf ears that Distortions have.

[Y#u're al# ch##p chan#e, gr#en ho#ns. Sho##dn't yo# be #ore reso###eful tr##ng #o fac# a co##orati#n? I ca#'t bear to se# this a##more.]

"Aw ssshhhh..." Theo took a moment to change his words, "...sssccchhhhnitzel! Their guns blew out the fucking audio system!"

Theo crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at the computer screen.

Emerging from the organized crowd of soldiers was a man whose build was far bulkier than the others, his helmet expressing a threateningly cold bloodlust as its eye holes glared with red.

As proof of his veteran prowess and combatant skills, countless military metals decorated his body and while he began charging up his suit, they glistened in a beautiful hue of orange.

However, the detail that had really set that man apart from the rest of the soldiers was that he didn't use a pulse rifle or energized blade as a weapon...

...but rather a pair gauntlets that were exploding with energy and power.

Boooom!

Commander Axel, as Theo would learn from the many callouts to his name during combat, slammed his gauntlets onto the ground and threw up a cloud of dust, leaving a hole that went straight into the lower floor as he and a couple of other soldiers jumped down.

"...oh no." Theo whispered, realizing the horrifying speed this military excursion could be done in from the implications of such an action.

But ease quickly came to Theo's mind as he observed that the laboratory's infrastructure got stronger with each descending floor, as well as the fact that it had a self-repair function to close off any destruction made to the building.

Theo breathed a sigh of relief, "...oh, YEEEAAAAA!!!"

[W#'ll mo#e ah##d. ##nd an a##ilable pa#h dow# wit##ut wast##g any m##e of #ur energy.]

[Y#s si#!]

With that, Commander Axel gave his order as the hole closed itself, marching forward without any interruption to their plans to raid the laboratory.

However, what was thought to be an easy shortcut for the commander and his troops would soon turn into a fatal mistake, as the floor there were traversing held class two to three Distortions that roamed the hallways, far more stronger than the ones found on ground level...

"Okay, what the hell? How in God's name am I gonna---" Theo glanced at the progress bar, "---finish 13% when they're going at that kind of speed."

...the mistake being that Theo had very much guessed wrong and that there were going to be fatal consequences to such an action, not that it mattered what he had theorized beforehand.

For every Distortion that Commander Axel had encountered, he simply wound up his fist to deliver a frightening blow, splattering so much colorful blood around on the walls and floors of the laboratory that he could entirely fight off all demand for tie-dye shirts in terms of production, and also fight off every demander of those shirts.

Simply ten minutes into subfloor one, Commander Axel had reached a weakly barricaded staircase that could be punched into atomic particles. Doing that exact thing, Commander Axel and his small platoon of soldiers ventured further down into the second subfloor.

"And the class four Distortions?!?!"

They held on as a brief challenge for the commander and his platoon, though they were swiftly decimated in a couple blows.

All in a Blue Moon, Birds n' Bees n' Vint what the hell are you saying into the naming panel Vint that is a Distortion that literally rips out ribcages to play them like xylophones to turn people into music notes Vint don't click ent, The Court Of You---it didn't matter what kind of fancy title those Distortions had, they were everything but their actual existence the moment Commander Axel's fist had punched them six-feet silly.

Theo's head-turning from the progress bar to the security cameras was frantic enough to the point where one could actually worry his neck snapping from the panic. It was like the progress bar was getting slower the closer it came to 100%.

Needless to say, Commander Axel and his platoon had reached another staircase at record speed, the titanium shutters to the staircase being nothing but tin foil inside his eyes.

"The class five Distortions... they have to take them down, right?! RIGHT!?!?" Theo spoke with incredible distress, uncaring for whatever apocalypse that might come after if Commander Axel couldn't beat the class five Distortion.

Yet, with that statement came its rights and wrongs---yes, the class five Distortion would prove to have leaps and bounds in terms of difficulty, but there was no such thing as the plural use of the its classification.

Mix n' Mismatch, the only class-five Distortion, had shown itself before Commander Axel and his platoon.

With a simple look at the Distortion's appearance, the few soldiers left inside the platoon felt their insides twist at an agonizing angle, its immediate presence enough to strike fear in the most hardened hearts of The State.

It wasn't like Mix n' Mismatch was a ferociously ugly beast that oozed with disgust and horror, but rather, the Distortion was a conjunction of abstract design loosely shaped into a humanoid figure, its only pattern was that it had no patterns.

Similar to looking at an optical illusion whose potency was severe enough to melt someone's brain to mush, the Distortion's appearance could configure a person's eyesight to see a different awareness of reality as their biology contorted to the Distortion's liking, most often losing their sense of self in the maze of abstraction and becoming Distortions.

Quickly after their encounter with Mix n' Mismatch, most of the the platoon that stood weak-kneed to the Distortion's passive ability exploded into bits and pieces of flesh, the few that stood strong were now watching in horror as the fragments of their comrades warped to be disproportionate puzzle pieces that grew arms and legs.

"Soldiers! Make some distance and fire from afar!" Commander Axel ordered his soldiers as they ran backwards, firing a storm of orange lasers at the Distortion.

{-...? Simple- -solve- -to-}

The moment Mix n' Mismatch had spoken those words, the orange bullets fired from the soldiers' pulse rifles dispersed into itty bitty sprinkles of puzzle pieces that had made up a plasma bullet.

Commander Axel quickly came to a conclusion, "Retreat! Now! Wait until reinforcements come from---"

But the time between the Distortion's attacks were next to none as just a few moments later, the walls of the laboratory pushed their meaty, irregular selves out of the disproportionate holes that housed them, the camera quickly cutting off any footage as it too became a Distortion.

"...uh, I'm cheering for you Commander Axel! Yea! Go beat that Distortion up!"

BOOOOOOM!

"Ahh! Holy shit!" Theo spoke in a startle, reinforcing his sudden team switch from Distortions to The State military as whatever he had just saw was absolutely terrifying.

Boom! Bam! Wabooooooosh!

As more and more bombardments of sound echoed throughout the laboratory and into the office he was staying in, Theo paced around the room in alarm, checking the impossibly locked door and bashing his head into the supercomputer's keyboard like there was no tomorrow...

...which was, more or less, the truth.

"Oh schizzel, oh schizzel, oh---" another thunder of sound reverberated throughout the room, "---shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! Hurry the fuck up progress bar and get me out of here! How the hell have you barely gotten to 91%?!?!?!"

The roars of battle soon turned from explosions of sound to genuine tremors inside the laboratory, despite it being countless meters beneath the ground and then...

...there was silence.

What felt like an hour's worth of time, the conclusion of the battle had finally been reached.

Needless to say, the sudden absence of sound had given Theo more anxiety than the actual battle itself. After all, if the Distortion won, that means it could focus on toppling down the whole laboratory if its capabilities didn't have a max, and if Commander Axel won, he would be going straight to the office to presumably stop whatever the supercomputer was processing.

Step... step... step...

As human footsteps tapped against the surely-bloodied flooring of the level, an indescribable sense of dread filled Theo's eyes as he knew it to be Commander Axel, now coming to make him scrap metal to wipe some robot's oily ass.

Dropping down onto his knees, Theo started praying to whatever God that he could pray to, wishing from the bottom of his heart that the door could hold itself from a super gorilla whose muscles were boosted with enough steroids to make King Kong look like a feminine twink.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord isn't with shit! Uh! Uh! Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be my fucking soul because I'm about to ascend to your crib! Shit! Religion doesn't work for a rat's ass when you're actually in trouble! Uh! Uh---!" Theo spoke in hysteria before a certain 'God' figure came to mind, "Wannabe Savior! Full of grace! Hallowed be your name because you want to help me out, right? Right?!?!"

And so, in Theo's desperate plea for an escape out of death, his words reached the ashen ears of a man whose cheeky grin could reach those very corners.

{Dude, what? No.}