Chapter 21: The Doctor

Quote wasn't going to give any of their three enemies the chance to speak. He immediately drew Bubbline from its holster and took aim, hoping that the spread of projectiles could cover all of them. As he prepared to attack, however, Misery gave a loud warning.

"Not so fast!"

She held out her staff and muttered an incantation, at which point someone else was teleported into the room with them. It was a small Mimiga girl with a green sweater, who collapsed onto the floor in a painful-looking heap. The soldier frowned upon seeing her; she looked familiar…

"Toroko!" King cried to his left. Now he remembered, she was that girl who'd been kidnapped after being mistaken for Sue. He snarled fiercely, ready to tear them apart if they hurt her.

"Try anything funny, and the Mimiga will die," the witch said simply.

"Now now, Misery, let's not be hasty…"

The Doctor continued to survey the impromptu rescue party.

"Two soldiers from the surface world? And here I thought the war had ended long ago. Ha ha ha! No wonder my servants have been struggling, if our enemies are so formidable. What to do with you, though…"

His gaze traveled downwards, locking onto the red flowers sprouting from the ground. Quote felt a sudden knot in his stomach (which he wasn't sure if he even had).

"We've gathered all the seeds necessary, and there are still so many Demon Flowers left… let's test them, shall we? Balrog. Feed this girl a flower."

As he spoke, Toroko finally- and unfortunately- woke up. She looked around in fright and confusion before noticing King and the two robots. In a panic, she tried running to them but was stopped when Balrog grabbed her shirt. He held a handful of red petals and began trying to stuff them into her mouth, a deadly serious look on his face.

"NO!"

Quote watched as King charged forwards with his sword raised, ready to impale Balrog from behind. Before he could get close, a searing lightning bolt from Misery impacted him directly in the chest. The Mimiga was sent flying across the room, colliding with the wall and dropping to the ground. He wasn't moving.

"Amazing," commented the Doctor with a sickening grin, "that they are so weak before the anger takes them."

"H-help me!" Toroko cried pitifully, choking on the flowers as Balrog finished shoving them down her throat.

At last the soldier snapped out of his stunned trance and readied Polar Star. He couldn't risk using Bubbline, or else he might have hurt King's friend.

"Monsters!" Curly screamed from behind him. "You're going to pay for this!"

The Doctor cast one glance at the cowering Toroko, whose eyes had suddenly become a dark shade of red, and laughed to himself.

"We have what we came for. Misery, Balrog, let's go. The Mimiga will deal with our guests."

With that, the witch teleported them all away to parts unknown. Quote was seething with anger, but they had already left before he could attack. At any rate, Toroko was the primary concern now. He didn't know of any way to reverse the flowers' effects, and if experience told him anything it was that a fight was imminent.

A fight which would end in death for either side.

In a moment of blind panic, Curly ran over to the small Mimiga. It pained her to see just how much she looked like the Colons, even down to her clothing. She gently put her hands on the girl's quavering shoulders, praying that she could do something to help.

"H-hey, are you alright? Stay with me! Come on, you can beat this!"

"Curly, get away from her!" she heard Quote shout.

The female soldier paid him no mind, shaking Toroko's shoulders to try and bring her out of whatever trance she'd fallen into.

"Hurts… my head… hurts…"

"It'll be okay," she said desperately. "Please, tell me it'll be okay…"

The Mimiga's entire body went stiff for a moment, then Curly felt a sharp pain in her stomach as she was thrown by Toroko. She landed in a heap a good ten feet away, staggering to get up.

It was too late. The robot could only watch in horror as the transformation began.

Having only met one mutant Mimiga before (and wished to never meet another), Quote wasn't sure what the process of becoming such a creature looked like. In no way did he want a front-row demonstration of it, but that was about to happen regardless.

Toroko's body began to unnaturally stretch itself. Her arms and legs contorted with rapidly-expanding muscle mass, while her short snout extended outwards by a good three inches. Inside her mouth, row after row of razor sharp teeth tore from her gums, dripping with blood. Her clothes were reduced to little more than shreds when her twisted metamorphosis reached its end, as she was now almost four times the size she'd been beforehand.

Seeing that she wasn't alone, the rabid Mimiga snarled viciously at Quote. Maybe it was a good thing that she had yet to notice Curly off to the side, but Toroko was now lumbering toward him. Her once innocent and gentle eyes had lost any sense of kindness to them.

As much as he wanted to believe that there was another solution to this, that somehow they could reverse the transformation, reality was staring him in the face. Toroko was gone, and the only choice was to put her out of her misery.

Misery… the very word was enough to infuriate him. She was going to pay for this; they ALL were.

Quote fired at his target with Polar Star firmly gripped in his hands, aiming for her mouth and eyes. If this was anything like the Mimiga he'd battled in the Egg Corridor, then those would be his best bet for ending the fight quickly. Toroko- no, the beast (it would be easier for him to no longer think of them as the same person) met the shots head on, growling in anger. The fur on her forehead was burned slightly, but aside from that she showed little sign of injury. He took a step backwards and continued to shoot as the monster charged forward.

"I'm sorry about this…"

When his foe had gotten within arm's reach of him, he jumped high into the air and rained more shots down on her head. Landing safely behind her, he whipped out Bubbline to continue his assault. Crushingly, the storm of lasers and bubble shots barely even fazed the rabid Mimiga. Her mouth wasn't open wide enough to score a good hit, and her eyes had somehow not been struck by a single projectile. Worse still, she'd already reacted to Quote's dodge and was lunging forward again. This time, as he tried to jump she grabbed onto his leg in midair. With a loud roar, the beast slammed him onto the ground with all her might.

He wasn't sure why robots such as himself were able to feel pain, but at any rate he was definitely feeling it. The hard impact had left him stunned momentarily while he attempted to figure out which way was up. His enemy stood above him, ready to bring a foot down on his head. Quote reached for the Polar Star at his side, but inwardly he knew he'd never be able to ward her off in time.

Before he could be finished off, however, the sound of gunfire emitted from somewhere in the room. The monster was struck in the side of her head and stumbled, stomping her foot mere inches to the side of Quote rather than on him.

Curly had reacted rather spontaneously, with no guarantee that her surprise attack would do much against Toroko. It hadn't, ultimately, but at least she'd saved Quote. The enraged Mimiga turned its attention to her, finally noticing that another enemy was present. She kept firing her machine gun as much as she could, spraying multiple parts of her body with no apparent effect.

"Uh-oh, now what?"

For a moment, Curly thought about trying to throw Jenka's healing potion into her mouth, but the witch had already warned her that it wouldn't work. Toroko wasn't slowing down at all in her advance, even seeming angrier than before. She circled around the Mimiga with her gun still being put to work, although the soldier had few other ideas on what to do.

Shrugging off her blasts easily this time, Toroko lunged forward to strike. She caught the robot with a downward swipe of her paw, forcing Curly to drop to her knees. Another fierce roar came, only to be followed by a pained gurgling noise. Quote was firing his pistol into the Mimiga's mouth, giving his partner a chance to move to safety. She gave him a short nod to indicate her gratitude, but his eyes suddenly widened in shock.

"Look out, she's coming-"

He didn't get the chance to finish before agony tore through Curly's right leg. In her rage, Toroko had inadvertently kicked her knee from behind. She felt something snap and gasped in shock from the pain. As the soldier struggled to move further away, she wound up tripping over something on the floor. The impact of her fall only worsened the feeling in her leg, which was beyond use at that moment.

Rolling over onto her back, she realized what it was she'd tripped over: Quote's missile launcher, which had been thrown off his shoulder strap when Toroko flung him around. With her machine gun sitting too far away to grab in time, Curly picked up the launcher and aimed at the charging Mimiga. She'd never used one in the three weeks she was awake, and trying to be accurate with it while on her back was easier said than done, but somehow she felt familiar with the use of the weapon. Toroko was approaching again with her mouth wide open, ready to bite down on the injured robot despite Quote's continuous blasts.

Squeezing her eyes shut, Curly pulled the trigger on the missile launcher.

The explosion loudly reverberated throughout the warehouse, and the resulting cloud of smoke obscured both the monster and Curly from view. Quote shakily got to his feet to investigate, amazed that nothing had broken in him from how hard he'd been slammed onto the ground. He couldn't tell what had happened until he was close enough to wave some of the smoke away.

His attention was immediately caught by the sight of the beast's corpse, lying flat on her back with her head tilted to the side. A steady trickle of blood poured out of her open mouth, and he realized that the missile had actually detonated between her jaws. Given the force of the blast, it was a wonder that her head hadn't been blown off altogether.

"Unngh…"

"Curly!"

The blonde was laying not far from their dead foe with the missile launcher at her side. Her right leg was bent at an unnatural angle, appearing broken. He knelt beside her with a concerned expression.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm… I'm fine. Where is-"

They looked toward the corpse as it began to contract. Just like the Mimiga Quote had fought in the Egg Corridor, the beast was shrinking to its original size. Before long, the bloodied carcass of Toroko lay before them, appearing just as innocent and helpless as she had beforehand. She might have looked like she was sleeping if not for the countless red stains on her fur.

Curly was completely silent, just staring down at the floor with her hair partially covering her face. He didn't try to look her in the eyes, afraid that her expression- whatever it was- might be too much to handle. Instead, Quote left her there and limped across the room to where King had been thrown by Misery. There was nothing that could be done for him; the other Mimiga had been dead since before the battle started, a charred black hole in his chest. His sword was on the floor beside him.

Quote lifted the blade off the ground and stared at it curiously. He'd never used such a weapon before, and not even his programming appeared familiar with it, but at the same time he felt a certain power stir within him by holding it. Something about taking the sword made him feel guilty, yet he felt that he could at least use it to help take down the Doctor.

"King… Toroko… I promise, I'll avenge you."

Leaving their corpses there without a burial didn't sit right with him, but he still had to worry about Curly. Her mangled leg was busily trying to repair itself thanks to their auto-recovery systems, but it would clearly take some time for her to be in fighting shape again. He walked over to her, taking a moment to collect their scattered weapons.

"Hey, why don't you drink that potion Jenka gave you?"

"No… it's fine. I don't want to waste it now."

She was still looking at the floor and barely moving. Quote knelt down next to her and put an arm around her back. He helped her stand up, half-dragging her to her feet. Curly didn't say anything to him and merely allowed herself to be pulled along as they exited the warehouse.

The Sand Zone was eerily silent once they were out and staring across the vast empty cavern. For the first time since he'd initially woken up, Quote was completely at a loss for what to do next. He'd failed to destroy the Demon Flowers, the Doctor had escaped with the seeds, Malco was still missing in action, Curly was injured, and to top it all off two more Mimiga were dead.

Dead… what was he going to say to Sue, Toroko's friend? What about Professor Booster, Kazuma, and the other residents of the village? Would Jenka know what to do?

The last thing he heard was a sudden cry of "Huzzah!" All he felt after that was a sharp pain on the back of his head before everything went black.