BOOK 2: THE TALE OF THE CHOSEN KING
CHAPTER 23 – EPISODE PROMPTO
He could barely see where he was going.
Even since he had ventured out from that refuge where he had woken up, he had no means to know his location, nor where the nearest settlement could be. Following the railroad tracks seemed like a good idea at first, until he remembered that they could go on and on for miles before reaching anything resembling a building. At least he had found warm clothes which fitted him and some rations, aside from a blade he could use for close combat, but they didn't seem very useful in the middle of nowhere.
His face was already numb from the constant, icy wind, and plodding through the knee-high snow and against the strong wind was depleting his energy dangerously fast.
But even with the storm raging around him, the only thing playing before his eyes, as he arduously made his way forward, was the way Noctis had called him a traitor, how he had chased him along the train, accusing him of giving them away to the empire. The murderous intent in his eyes.
That was something he couldn't forget, and what made him wonder, each time he fell, face first in the snow, why he stood up again and kept going.
He had lost sensitivity from the knees down, and now walking felt like moving with stilts. What little daylight the storm let shine was quickly going away. Soon it would be nighttime, and Prompto doubted the daemons minded the cold as he did.
The young man fell again. This time, mixed with the howling wind, there was the unmistakable hum of an assault craft. He laughed bitterly, trying to get up again.
"What a way to go," he said to himself.
All his strength spent, he fell again and couldn't get up. The sound of the MTs falling on the snow reached him as muffled thuds through his vanishing senses, and the last thing he saw was a forest of boots surrounding him.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
The Citadel was ahead of him. A red carpet ran all the way from the ironwork gates to the stairs to the palace. He marched on, not knowing if he should be there at all.
His body felt small and heavy; looking down, his belly was round and soft again, his hands chubby and clumsy.
"My whole life, all I ever wanted was friends…"
He now stood at the foot of the stairs. A group of people walked down towards the plaza, laughing and chatting.
"…but no one ever wanted me back."
Noctis, Ignis and Gladiolus walked past him, all adults, all dressed in their black Crownsguard attires. They always had that aura which set them apart from everyone else: A Crown Prince and two men born from families with a long history of service to the Crown. But him, what was he?
"So when I finally found people who did want me, I did everything I could to make them stay."
He tried following them, but his chubby legs couldn't walk faster. Besides, what was the point? He finally sat down in the stairs, alone.
"And ever since then, I've lived my life in fear: That, one day, they'd find out who I really was, and they wouldn't want me anymore."
Images of their travels flashed before his eyes. They were laughing, playing cards, taking photos while goofing around. Then that train to Gralea, where Noctis attacked him while Prompto had Ardyn cornered.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
It felt warmer, though one of his cheeks felt cold. Opening his eyes, he saw he wasn't in the snow anymore, but laying on a metallic floor, on a strange, circular room. All around him were computers and working stations, chairs, metal boxes, tall crystal cylinders…
His surroundings mattered little, however, when he noticed that his right wrist was bare. He instinctively covered the place with his other hand, and then tugged at the sleeve and the glove, trying to cover the offending flesh underneath.
What was that place?
Pieces of paper laid scattered over the working stations: data charts and reports on experiments Prompto had no idea what they meant, only that they had something to do with biology. There were also audio tapes where the masculine voice of a scientist narrated the results and developments of the experiments they carried out at that place.
In 722, the voice of that scientist narrated how he had been tasked with the production of magitek infantry. The empire wanted to substitute human soldiers with magitek-powered robots. They used sublimated daemons as fuel, but that resulted in a too unstable infantry unit at first. The scientist also talked, without giving a name, about another man who provided the exact calculations to make the sublimation stable. The scientist sounded hopeful and even happy to know that he was helping his country rise.
Sublimated daemons. That was what Aranea told them about. Was he on an imperial research facility? The current year was 756, so that would mean they had been doing that for over thirty years, if the dates were correct.
He kept exploring. More scattered paperwork, more charts and more reports, all from decades back, recounting how a strange illness had appeared centuries back in the far reaches of the empire. After many years of investigation, they drew a correlation between the daemons and that illness, but Prompto couldn't gather any more information from those papers.
The only door in the room was closed shut, though there was a touch panel attached to its side. Prompto brought his hand close to see if he could tamper with the buttons. Besides, if he wore gloves there was no way he could trigger any alarm. As the hand got closer, the scanner emitted a green light and a female computer voice started reciting:
"Scanning production code. Unit 05953234 confirmed," the door opened with a swishing sound. "Warning: this unit has been compromised. Initiating retrieval of compromised unit."
"She still remembers you, after all these years."
Prompto spun around, covering the barcode tattooed on his right wrist.
"You!" Prompto tried summoning his gun, but his hands remained empty.
He tried again and again as the chancellor approached him with a stalking gait. When the young man raised his eyes, he saw Ardyn playfully waving around the gun he had dropped at the train.
"We can't have you spilling blood here," the chancellor teased. "Although to most this compound is known only as the First Magitek Production Facility, birthplace of the myriad magitek troopers and daemons the empire holds dear, to you, this place should have some sentimental value. After all, it is your home sweet home."
"Shut up," Prompto hissed.
"I'm not the one who almost killed you."
"You're wro-"
Ardyn pushed the gun against Prompto's chest so he could take it.
"You really ought to take a rest," he gloated. "Perhaps the estimable Chief Besithia will help heal that broken heart of yours."
"Who the hell is that?" he growled.
"Oh, how quickly they forget," Ardyn lamented in a theatrical tone. "But fear not: I've no doubt a reunion would refresh your memory."
Prompto looked at the gun in bewilderment for a moment and, while he quickly took aim at the chancellor, he was already gone. He didn't want to admit it, but Ardyn's words had shaken him. Nevertheless, he forced himself to think about his friends.
"I'm gonna find 'em… wherever they are," he repeated to himself.
Before going out of that room, he kept exploring. There was a newspaper from 723, where a man named Verstael Besithia had been appointed as overseer of the compound Prompto had been trapped in. The face staring at him from the old clipping was that of a middle-aged, cruel man.
That was the face of that Besithia person, then. Good to know whom exactly he had to avoid.
The door he had opened led him to a short hallway which died at an intersection. Piles of books and papers were left here and there, some inside boxes, some on the floor. It reminded Prompto of the last day they spent on Insomnia, packing Noctis' things to ship them to the palace. Where the scientists also packing to move?
Turning right at the intersection, he reached a small space with chairs and an Ebony vending machine. It was modified so the staff didn't have to insert coins. Instead, any user could get a can of coffee with the press of a button. If only Ignis could see that.
Continuing left form the intersection, he came upon a long corridor. Prompto ducked behind a barrier when he saw a soldier patrolling the far end.
He checked his handgun. Even though he couldn't summon it, the enchantment, which prevented him from running out of ammo, was still active.
"Ready or not!" he yelled, getting out from his cover and running as fast as he could while firing.
The MTs was dead when he reached it. It had been easier than he thought.
The next door opened to a different corridor. This one had a big glass window to the left. Peering thought it, Prompto could see a vast room, bigger than a concert hall. A central platform had been built in the middle, surrounding a core of some sort which slowly rotated and glowed with a red light. Many giant pipes connected that platform with the metal walls and, on top of said platform, many MTs stood with their heads down, still dormant, either waiting to be activated or infused with energy.
"Shit… Was he telling the truth about his place?" Prompto murmured.
He knew the MTs could hear him, and he wasn't so sure about not being any humans there, but when he was nervous he became very talkative. It sometimes got in Gladio's nerves, but it was something Prompto could not control. Now he had to talk aloud, even if it was to himself.
Prompto hurried past that corridor with the window and into the next one. There was another intersection and, at some distance, a soldier patrolled the area. This time, he stalked his way towards the MT, trying to slow his heartbeats as he crawled his way forward. He felt his knees trembling when he peered around the corner, where the MT stood. Pouncing, he locked his arms around the soldier's neck, holding it in a bind. He pressed harder, until he heard a snap, and the MT's body started twitching and buzzing, once the cables on its neck had been torn.
Cor had taught him that trick, back in the day. MTs resembled humans, so the same tactics could be applied many times. Any other day he would have been overjoyed that he could do it perfectly, just as Cor had tried to teach him, but that day he was too focused on surviving.
Thad soldier had an undamaged submachine gun, which Prompto took for himself. Its more potent firepower was worth the reloading and the additional weight.
Discarded on one of the benches ahead, Prompto found another recording. It was from the same scientist and the same year, 722. In that tape, the scientist explained how he sublimated daemonified humans to infuse the MTs with the miasma, and how the soldiers suffered from mental breakdowns afterwards. He hypothesized that there were still remnants of the human's ego on the daemonic essence, and that sense of self was what caused the problems.
"Why not inject infants with the plasmodia instead?" the scientist wondered. "We've little time. If we are to combat the Lucian threat, we must explore new options. I, too, will set aside my personal misgivings and do what I must for the empire."
Prompto stood frozen after the recording finished playing, feeling as he had been left stranded at a house of horrors.
Trying his hardest to dismiss the cold sweat bathing him and his slightly trembling knees, he continued, turning right and then left, arriving at some stairs guarded by two soldiers. Strangely enough, being able to fight made him lessen his revulsion at what he kept discovering.
Taken by surprise, but still capable of defending themselves, the soldiers put up a harder fight than their previous companions did, but Prompto got the upper hand. Even though he never boasted about it, he was the best shooter in the group.
Continuing on, he encountered more soldiers and he had to use every trick he knew to fight against them. It was good that the corridors had so many crannies for him to take cover, and that no one had thought about programming that behavior on the MTs. He, too, was behaving strangely. Perhaps not having his friends around to rely on made him more reckless.
More corridors and more soldiers, and Prompto found himself running and firing without thinking. His mind had gone numb.
He reached a warehouse: The door opened to a catwalk which wounds it way above an open space where several MTs stood dormant. Right on his line of sight, Prompto saw that a patrolling MT carried a different weapon than those he had encountered earlier. Crawling behind the plied up crates and boxes, he snuck behind that soldier and disabled it, snatching a sniper rifle from its hands.
There were more MTs at the other side of the warehouse, blocking the path to the exit. Gunning them down at a distance was almost a blessing, until a hovering robot, a sentinel unit, discovered him and activated the alarm, making the dormant soldiers become active.
Even more soldiers arrived through the exit door, and Prompto had to make good use of all the weapons he carried. His lucky stroke was being cornered against a gun rack filled with submachine guns and ammo. As he shoot his weapon and disabled the MTs, he felt nothing. His mind had gone blank, and only when the stairs leading to his position were filed with the scattered carcasses of the soldiers, did he allow himself some respite.
Sitting by the near empty rack of weapons, something clicked on his brain: Now he understood why each time an MT fell, there was that dark mist coming out of it. If they were infused with daemonic stuff, it was logical that they released that miasma. And, what about the sound they made when they were killed? It was as if someone was screaming. He shook his head: the creepiness of that place was getting to him.
In the next corridor, the air was decidedly colder. He gasped when the next door revealed, finally, an exit.
To the left, the rocky mountain wall rose and disappeared in the mist overhead and, to the right, there was a deep fall into a white void. The path ahead of him wound a short way around the mountain until it reached another complex. Prompto's spirits fell when he encountered the same kind of corridors inside that building, but he was also glad to be on a warm place.
There was a room ahead with benches, chairs, shelves and another Ebony vending machine where he could rest. He also found another audio tape among the scattered paperwork. Hesitant at not knowing what kind of horrors he might listen to, he finally played it. The recording was from 736. The scientist complained about the lab's security and how a spy had made off with one of his experiments.
"Absconding with a single infant will do nothing to enlighten them of the grandeur of my research," the scientist stated arrogantly. "That said, I will see to it such an incident never arises again. I've posted magitek troopers around the facility and instructed them to keep a vigilant watch. It is their home, after all."
So, they were already experimenting with kids. And what was that about infected kids? Prompto would have felt revulsion, but there were other thoughts which troubled him.
736 was the year they said he had been born.
"Does that mean I…? No, it couldn't be. There's no way."
There were some papers which caught his eye. One of them, dating from 746, instructed how to number the prototypes. There would be a distinction between troopers and infants, but all would be tattooed on their right wrists.
"We… We've all got the same barcodes," he murmured, gazing at his wrist.
Another tape lain forgotten among the piles of papers. This time he feverishly took it and pugged in his player. It was from 723; the scientist still pondered about how he could find a high enough number of infants for his experiments.
"Then it dawned on me: why not make them myself? If I could clone them from my own genes, I can eliminate the pesky process of breeding them. Mass production remains a pipe dream for now, but I'm confident I can create a massive infantry once the process picks up. If everything goes according to plan, the empire will boast a million-man army in no time at all."
The floor swayed before his eyes. Prompto sat down heavily, trying to keep his breathing under control.
"All this time," he whispered. "Those things I've been fighting have been…"
The scientist's tapes kept repeating in his head. He tried stopping his train of thought, but to no avail. It took him a long time until his hands stopped trembling, and he could stand again on his feet. Reminding himself that he had to continue, for he had no one else who would do it for him, he opened the next door.
Behind it stood an MT. Red sparks flew from its body, as if it was malfunctioning. The soldier swung the axe it wielded, trying to cleave at Prompto. It knocked him to the floor just as the young man had taken his handgun off, and fell of top of him. The struggle was brief, ending when Prompto pulled the trigger and blew the soldier's head.
"Target detected. Eliminate immediately."
The security system had been activated. Finally awake, his first instinct wasn't that of cowering and seeking and exit. Instead of that, Prompto pursed his lips and tightened his grip on his handgun.
"I can't take this anymore," he murmured through clenched teeth as he made his way forward.
At the previous warehouse he got his hands on a bazooka and some flares, useless in close quarters, but in the next storeroom there was space enough for him to fire to his heart's content.
That warehouse was filled with MTs and sentinel spheres. Many blew up with a satisfying explosion after he made good use of the bazooka.
"Commence elimination of compromised unit," the security system announced.
Hiding behind crates, dodging and scurrying away, that was how Prompto fought best, and it that place he felt in his element. He had found stocks of potions in other rooms, but decided to use them sparsely and avoid as much harm as possible.
His fighting style had always been very different from the other guys, Prompto thought as he disabled the MTs and hid from the sentinels. But that was maybe because all the fights were always in open space, with your opponent charging like a roaring bull at you. Give him enough room to plan an ambush and a good sniper rifle, and he could take a whole army down.
Prompto's mind had gone strangely numb, and his hand was as steady as ever. Part of him had wanted to go back to the path around the cliff, but there was another side of him: Prompto was nothing if not tenacious, ridiculously so at times. That side had pushed him to do things that he would have never done in his right mind. It was like being on a trance: One second he refused to do something, the next he was jumping headlong into what he claimed terrified him.
The same thing was happening during those moments: he had to live, no matter what. He had a desperate need to survive, and he didn't know why, nor he bothered finding out.
Once the room fell silent, he stepped his way over the metallic carcasses of the MTs towards the exit. Said door wasn't like the others, but guilt like a camera's shutter. Prompto looked at the touch panel at its side, and then at his arm. He approached his right wrist to the panel, and a green beam of light read it.
The door opened without setting any alarm off.
"…Lucky me," he whispered with a mirthless chuckle.
The barcode worked, and the first door he had opened hadn't been malfunctioning. He closed shut his eyes, keeping the tears at bay, and kept going.
A round tunnel opened ahead, which went down on an incline. He crossed the door at the end of the tunnel, and entered a half-lit room.
Rows of giant, crystal tubes lined up at each side. At the far end of the room, a flight of stairs climbed to a platform with computers and work stations. Beyond that, a giant glass separated that room the next, where there was a power core, a smaller version of the one Prompto had seen in the previous building.
Unlike the ones he had seen in the room he had woken up in, these crystal tubes were filled with some sort of liquid, and, floating inside, he could see human bodies.
Prompto forced his legs to move towards the tubes and, with a titanic effort, he raised his eyes to look at the vats.
The humans inside were all young, male, and the flesh in their bodies was partially blackened and rotten, no doubt an effect of the plasmodia the scientist kept talking about on the recordings. Then Prompto looked one in the face, then another, and then he feverishly ran around the room, looking with increasing horror at each one of them.
Even devoid of hair, he could recognize the bodies' facial features as his own. Some were like drops of water to him, some others looked slightly different, but the likeness was there.
"Who… What am I?" he whispered, feeling panic rising up his chest, and as if the whole room began to spin around him.
There were some cleaning utensils propped in a corner, used after one of the vats had broken and spilled its contents. Prompto hurried to one of the buckets and emptied his stomach there.
Why Ardyn had taken him there? What was the purpose behind it all? If it was Noctis the one he was after, why not bringing him too? Prompto was a pleb, a nobody. Did he want to break him so he turned on Noctis?
Wiping his mouth, the young man sat down on the floor, pushing the bucket away from him. He brought his knees to his chest on an instinctive reflex and, covering his mouth with his gloved hands, he screamed until his lungs hurt and his throat was sore. Then he wept, slightly rocking back and forth.
All his life he had known he was different, that he had to cover his tattoo. He had pushed people away so they didn't know the real him, until he met the Prince. He wanted to be friends with Noct, no matter what, and bent backwards, not only to make it happen, but also to keep it that way.
But he couldn't imagine it would be like this. When his parents had told him the truth, on one of those rare occasions when they talked to him more than two sentences, Prompto had imagined that he came from a place where kids were brought up and marked as property of the empire, like in those orphanages one could see on television dramas. He wished he could have kept clinging to that version of the story, no matter how fake it was. But, remembering the exact wording from his parents, they actually never lied to him. They just said that he had been found in a place with many other babies and that he had been rescued and brought to Insomnia, and only him because only one could be taken.
Many questions crowed his mind: Were his parents his rescuers? Why bother taking him in if they largely ignored him? Were they an actual couple at all? Did they keep their distance in fear that, he turned into a daemon someday and they had to put him down?
His tears dried because there were no more to shed. His head throbbed and his eyes stung. After the adrenaline rush from before, and the emotional shock he had suffered, his strength had abandoned him.
After some tries, he stood on his feet, but his knees buckled a couple of times. Taking a deep breath, he approached the stairs to the upper level of the room. There was another report thrown on the floor: A list of barcodes, deemed compromised, set for incineration to avoid daemonification of personnel.
He had to run away from there.
As he climbed the stairs, Prompto saw that the glass window opened to a test chamber, where the smaller core slowly rotated. Around it were lined up many vats, connected to the core with tubes and cables, and all filled up with infected test subjects.
He ducked under a desk when he noticed two people inside that test chamber. Peering cautiously over the console, he saw the clones turning into a black mist inside the cylinders, and that mist being seeped into the tubes. That was the fuel the reports talked about.
The two people in the test chamber were talking; edging closer, he had to make a tremendous effort to distinguish the words over the thumping of his own heart.
"My friend," Prompto recognized the chancellor's voice. "Do you recall the child who was stolen from this facility?"
The other man grumbled something but, when he spoke, Prompto could identify his voice as that of the recordings.
"The one those Lucians absconded with?" the old man spat.
"Precisely," the other said with a smarmy voice. "I thought you might like to see the fine young man he's become these twenty-odd years later. So, as thanks for bringing your pets to Insomnia, I've brought the boy to you."
Ardyn suddenly turned to the window and extended his hand in a dramatic gesture.
"The time has come to meet your maker," he announced. "Any questions for daddy dearest? Father and son! Oh, how I love bringing families together!"
"No…" Prompto couldn't keep his voice down. "It's not true. You're wrong, damnit!"
There was no other way: he had to go through that room. That would be a showdown between him and that old man.
"I don't care what he says," he kept repeating to himself as he stomped his way towards the door. "This place will never be my home. My home is in Lucis… not here."
There was another Ebony vending machine inside the antechamber to the experimental room, aside from a place to sit on and relax. Prompto saw some documents scattered over a coffee table: Sketches of a giant daemon called "Diamond Weapon". Besithia had created them to unleash destruction upon Insomnia, according to the description. Scribbled in another piece of paper, Besithia raved about getting the Crystal for himself.
"So he's the one behind the attack on Insomnia…" Prompto thought. "He planned the whole thing. Everything we lost that day is gone because of him."
His queasiness was gone, as was the trembling on his hands. Knowing who had been directly responsible for the destruction of his city boosted his courage again, at least in part.
Carefully stepping into the chamber, handgun drawn, he saw Verstael gazing at the clones being turned one by one, not paying any attention to him, while the chancellor was nowhere to be seen. Rising from the center of the device, a spiral-like structure, like two intertwined snakes, revolved silently. Around the far wall, MTs stood dormant.
"What's the matter?" asked the old man without looking at him. "Have you never seen a man turn before?"
Then the old man turned around, and Prompto almost dropped his weapon: his right face was as darkened as the bodies inside the vats, and the eye on that side, with black sclera and golden iris, moved independently from the left, blue one.
"If those Lucians hadn't intervened, you could have turned too," Besithia accused.
"Why me?"
"Because you were cloned from this genius' genes, born of my own flesh and blood. You are but one of millions created to serve our great empire in the magitek infantry."
"Created…" suddenly, Prompto's strength waned and the room started spinning around him. "To serve you?"
"Yes… and now you've finally come home to Niflheim, my son," Verstael opened his arms. He was about to say something more, but Prompto fired a warning shot.
"Shut up!" the younger man screamed. Tears streamed down his cheeks. "You're wrong… I'm a Lucian! I'm not one of your experiments!"
The scientist smirked, slowly edging towards him.
"Not anymore. Now you're nothing but a failure. I ought to return you whence you came. Perhaps then you might serve some useful purpose."
Black miasma poured from his right eye. He was already at an arm's reach.
"Never!" Prompto regained momentarily his courage and aimed to the head, but his hands shook so badly he almost dropped the gun.
The man, however, was unfazed by his threat and kept approaching. Prompto didn't want to shoot at him. He had never killed a human before, they had aimed his training at fighting MTs, beasts and daemons.
"With your help, my ascension to divinity is now all but complete," Verstael raved, miasma and little black particles oozing from his infected skin.
Prompto froze at that sight. The man was now so close the putrid stench of the Scourge assaulted his nostrils with full force.
"Soon, neither the kings of Lucis nor the gods themselves will be able to challenge my reign!" Besithia reached out with his hands, taking Prompto's face between them.
He shot.
The old man staggered backwards and fell, miasma and black mist rising from his body, instead of blood. Prompto dropped his gun and fell to his knees. He had killed a human.
A voice boomed through the lab's speakers.
"Look what you've done," Ardyn gasped. "You've gone homicidal… no, patricidal!"
"No…"
"You lose your friends and murder your family. Now you've no one left!"
Prompto screamed at him to shut up, but the chancellor's laughter echoed through the chamber. Crying in frustration, the young man barely heard the computer's announcement.
"Vital functions decreasing. Plasmodium activity index increasing. Daemonification complete."
When he looked up, he saw through his tears the black smoke rising from where Verstael had been, leaving only his clothes behind, scattered on the floor.
"Initiating transfer to Unit XDA-1002: Immortalis."
An alarm started blaring and red lights illuminated the room. He couldn't find the strength to move anymore. Everything was useless at that point.
The wall to his right exploded and a gigantic beast fell from the hole. On top of it stood a warrior with a spear.
"You always play hard to get like this?" the warrior said.
"Aranea?"
"Save it, Blondie. On your feet!" she commanded, then went to a table to peek at some blueprints. "So this is that new model they're working on."
Seeing that he didn't move, she sighed, walking towards him.
"I dunno what's got you so shook, but you can deal with it later. Let's move."
He still didn't raise his head. She grabbed him by his lapel.
"I'm gonna say this once," she growled, pulling him to his feet with a single yank. "Lose your will to live, and you lose all hope of me helping your sorry ass. Got it?"
The computer issued a warning:
"Target detected. Capture and retrieve immediately. Commence capture and retrieval of compromised unit."
The few MT guards at the far back activated. Aranea swung his lance against them to take them off her back for a moment, trying to open a path towards the door to the right. Prompto saw her running without looking back, and he knew he had to follow her. Taking his gun, he dodged an attack from an imp, and ran as fast as he could.
With the turning of Verstael and the releasing of the miasma, daemons had spawned on the whole laboratory. They arrived at a hangar just in time for the computer to announce that the doors would be sealed in three minutes.
MTs, MAs and daemons swarmed around them. Running was more important than fighting at that moment, and so Prompto dodged and scurried his way forward, along with Aranea until he reached a snowmobile parked near the doors. She shoved a map into his hands.
"Head first… I'll catch up later."
"But what about you?"
"I said I'll catch up," she said, positioning her spear to strike a fighting pose.
"But what if y-"
"Just go!" She yelled.
He got on the snowmobile and sped through the exit tunnel.
The brightness of the snowy landscape blinded him for a moment. Looking at the map, Aranea had marked the location he had to go.
The path was filled with obstacles and MTs. Assault cruises flew overhead, raining fire over him. The mountain slope gave way to a forest that covered him from aerial assault, but driving through the trees was almost as dangerous.
The forest ended and he came into open space. A missile hit close enough for the shockwave to throw him over a ledge. The fall knocked the air out of his lungs, and he was left laying down on the snow.
He lain there, half-buried in the snow, waiting for the MTs to approach him, or an assault craft to land nearby. He knew that, if he started running, he would be a sitting duck, while the snow helped him to hide.
After a while, the only thing he could hear was the wind, and the distant sound of wolves, or maybe it was the same thing. He got up, turning the snowmobile back upright.
"Catch ya later, Aranea…" he whispered as he started the vehicle.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
The path ahead of him seemed clear from soldiers. Savage beasts prowled the snowy plains, but they lost interest on him as soon as they saw he was faster.
A lake appeared behind a promontory. At the north shore, the rock formed a natural shelter from the elements and, inside it, a haven. That was the rendezvous point.
It didn't take long for him to find the necessary wood to make a fire. Spending time with Gladio in the wild taught you one or two things.
Sitting alone with a can of preserved food, however, wasn't the most cheerful thing in the world. Even so, he tried to lift his spirits.
"Almost as good as Iggy used to make," he said to himself, laughing weakly. "Well, at least it's quiet for a change."
Humor had always been his coping mechanism each time he was worried or scared, or anyone near him was angry or sad. There were times, however, that it didn't work. This time was one of them.
Prompto looked at his tattoo, that bothersome mark he had spent all his life trying to cover. He clawed at it in vain and cursed, then his eyes fixed on the bonfire and an idea dawned on his brain.
Taking a burning stick, he approached it to his arm. The wood crackled even away from the fire, and he could feel its heat through his thick clothes.
He took a deep breath, and pressed the wood against his arm. The pain was almost unbearable. His hoarse scream resonated in the valley bellow, and he held his arm in agony afterwards.
When it subsided, he looked at it and laughed bitterly. Under the bubbly, burnt flesh, there were still clear traces of the tattoo.
"…Branded for life."
"Don't tell me you thought that would work."
He looked up. Aranea stood at the edge of the haven, with the body language of a stern teacher. Only her expression was a bit softer.
"Prompto, right?"
She approached and took his hand without even asking for permission, while holding a potion on her other hand. In a moment, the flesh on his arm was healed.
"You could at least look happy to see me," she joked, sitting at his side.
He stammered something, but he was at a loss for words.
"I ran into your buddies in Tenebrae."
At that he finally looked at her in the eye. Surprise was a good alternative to moping, Aranea decided.
"You've got 'em worried sick," she insisted. "You gonna go see 'em or what?"
Prompto had lowered his head again, like an embarrassed child.
"I… I can't," he managed to say. "I'm not like them. I was born here… in Niflheim. All this time and I've never told them. And that's not even the worst part. I wasn't born into a happy family. I was made… created in some laboratory. The entire reason why I exist is to make Noct and all of them miserable. How could I possibly see them? They'd never accept the real me."
"You spent all that time driving around together and you still don't know what kinda guys they really are," she smiled softly at his surprised face. "In case your forgot, your princely pal and I weren't always on such friendly terms. But you know what? He put all that aside and asked me to make sure you were safe?"
"…he did?"
"Think he'd do that for someone who makes him miserable?"
It took a while for Prompto to build up the courage to ask something to Aranea.
"Did they say anything else about me?"
"Not that I can recall."
"...Right."
"His Highness was so worried about you he could barely speak, but don't worry… I whipped him into shape."
Prompto managed a weak smile.
"So… he doesn't hate me after all," he said, the images of what transpired in the train still vivid on his mind. "Is everybody okay?"
"All things considered, I guess. Sounds like they've been through a lot since you left, but they're still dead set on getting to the capital."
"…Hope they make it."
"They'd have a better shot with you around."
He grunted something, but refused to make eye contact again. Aranea sighed and got up, dusting her clothes.
"Look," she said. "I can tell you want to get back together with them. So why not let them know?"
"You think they'd let me back? After all this? And even if they did let me back, I'd probably cause them nothing but trouble. I don't know how I could live with myself…"
Aranea groaned loudly.
"Because you're doing such a great job of living with yourself now," she shoved him with her foot, making him fall on his back, to then kneel over him. "What do you want, then." Her green eyes flashed with fury. "You worry so much about what other people want from you that you can't even know what you want anymore! Your life isn't yours to live! Forget about what everyone else thinks for a second and figure out what it is you're really after here."
She stood up and walked away. Prompto didn't move from where he was.
"I'm going after that new model in the morning," she said. "You're on your own now, kid."
When he gathered the strength to sit down again, she was long gone.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
The following morning, he woke up upon hearing a dog barking outside. Stepping out of his hideout, Prompto saw a white dog running away. He shook his head, wasn't that Pryna?
It had been a long time since he took care of her, but he had seen her growing up thanks to the photos Luna took and sent to Noctis on that notebook. That dog was her spitting image.
He tried following the animal, riding the snowmobile even but, somehow, the dog was faster.
Prompto saw the canine stopping at some distance, by a prone figure on the snow. Thinking it might have been an injured person whose dog was seeking help, he ran towards whoever it was. However, he skidded to a halt when he saw that it was an MT.
The young man sat down heavily by the metal soldier and closed his eyes. Too many things had happened lately. He should have felt relieved at the "dead" enemy, but knowing that the MTs were his lost family threw his entire world in disarray. What was he supposed to feel at that moment? He had been trained to kill them, to hate them, to fear them. Now he knew that, thanks to a capricious twist of Fate, he had been able to grow up instead of being kept in a vat, sleeping, waiting for others to harvest his life. Never knowing, never feeling. He tried to suppress his imagination, but he couldn't help wondering how it would feel to be wrenched from the peaceful darkness of their deep sleep, to then being thrust into such unnatural bodies and being sent to sow death and destruction. Perhaps they didn't feel anything except confusion and fear, he thought. They were programed to kill whatever they encountered, and their fate was to be massacred by those who only wanted to survive.
When he opened his eyes, the MT was gone and he heard footsteps behind him. Jumping to his feet and turning around, he saw Noctis, sword in hand, edging closer. Prompto held a hand before him and tried to say something, but he had no voice, and the hand he saw was clad in metal. No, it was a metal hand. He ran away, as fast as his artificial body would allow him, but Noctis was very fast and he could warp. Nevertheless, the prince always seemed to miss him by a hair's breadth.
Suddenly, the noises and Noctis' voice stopped. Prompto turned around and saw he was alone again. His hands were back to being flesh and blood. Everything was normal now, though the sun had already set down and it was night time.
The white dog barked again near him and beckoned for him to follow. Now that the animal let him come closer, Prompto saw that it was, indeed, Pryna.
She guided him to a clearing which had been the site of a skirmish, and now it was filed with the scattered carcasses of several MTs. One of them still moved, though. The metal joints creaked and protested as it shook in mechanical spasms. Prompto gasped when the soldier reached out his hand towards him, as if pleading for help.
And suddenly it wasn't an MT the thing on the ground. It was himself.
He shook his head and the illusion was dispelled. It was an MT, an enemy, a mindless puppet. Slowly, with trembling hands, he took his gun and aimed at the MT's head. With tears rolling down his cheeks, he pulled the trigger.
He stood now among what remained of a raided camp: chairs and utensils had been toppled and overturned, the tent had been brought down and stomped and torn to pieces. Prompto's heart skipped a beat when he came closer and realized everything was the brand Gladio insisted on using. At a distance, sitting near the edge of the ruined camp and covering his ears, there was a small, plump kid.
Whether if this was a dream or not, Prompto didn't know, but he instantly recognized that kid as himself. He walked towards the child, and put a hand on his shoulder.
He was now sitting again at the stairs leading to the Palace, and he was a child again. A thick mist had fell on the Citadel, and he couldn't see the other side of the plaza. Blue petals fell around him like snowflakes. Then he noticed Pryna waiting patiently for him, carrying a letter in her muzzle. The piece of paper smelled of perfume and the handwriting was elegant. It was a long letter, but all he could read was this:
All I ask is that you continue to support Noctis, and hat you remain ever at his side.
That was the letter Luna had sent Prompto when they were kids. It had only taken a single act of kindness with a puppy for a princess to go out of her way and write letter of thanks.
"How does she expect someone like me to support him? Am I good enough?"
There was a stack of photos under the piece of paper; the first one was the picture Cindy had taken with the four friends and the Regalia.
"Does he want me around?"
Another photo. A selfie Prompto had taken at the Wiz Chocobo Post with the others behind him. Everyone was smiling, even Ignis. He remembered that day, after they had defeated Deadeye and they could ride Chocobos for the first time.
"Is that really what Noct and everyone else want? For me to be with them?"
Another picture, the one they took right before setting sail for Altissia with Monica, Dustin, Talcott, Cid and Cor.
Prompto never knew why his parents adopted him in the first place, or what kind of place in the empire could keep babies, and for what, but never asked. With time, as he grew up, he assumed that they might have had pity on an abandoned kid no one would want because of that barcode on his writs, and did everything they could for him.
Truth be told, he had everything he needed: He had a comfortable home and enough money to buy the food his parents wouldn't cook because they were always away. When Prompto shown an interest in photography, his foster father gave him a digital camera, the first he ever owned. When he shown interest in computers, they bought him one.
Then, why did he always feel so empty?
He never had anyone to talk to, yet he would always avoid any contact with other children for fear of them discovering his "secret". His childish mind recoiled at the thought of being branded a foreigner or, worse, a spy.
One day he met Pryna, whom he named "Chibi", and from that moment nothing would be the same ever again. Lady Lunafreya wrote him a letter, and asked Prompto keep being a good friend to Prince Noctis. Keep being! They had never been introduced, in the first place! Besides, what could a pleb offer a prince? And, Prompto was a foreigner, for crying out loud!
But a princess had asked her to do it. Prompto felt he couldn't let her down, no matter what.
He ended up befriending Noctis, by a matter of chance, perhaps. The prince was a cool guy, and funny in his own way. Prompto did everything he could so Noctis kept him at his side. Sometimes fear clung to his chest like an icy claw; fear that, someday, the prince would tell him that he could no longer hang around with a pleb, but that moment never came.
One day, Prompto began his training as a Crownsguard, so that he could accompany Noctis on his way to Altissia and protect him, only because Noctis had requested that he, Prompto, had to accompany him. Weeks went by as they traveled around Lucis, seeing new places, meeting new people.
"You think I'd make time for a loser?"
Prompto remembered Noctis' words, back when they sat at that motel's rooftop. Aranea's stories when they were searching for the mythril had disturbed him more than he wanted to admit.
There had been a few times when his parents had been talking at the living-room, thinking he was asleep. The only time he eavesdropped, he overheard something about him coming out of a "laboratory", and experimentations with "daemons". He plugged his ears and refused to keep listening, but that single sentence had been etched in his childish mind, and he started having recurring dreams about it, until he convinced himself that it was just nonsense: Kids came from either families or orphanages. Aranea's story, paired what he had heard, made sense when put together, but he still refused to believe it.
Now he knew the truth: He had been produced to be harvested but, again, Chance had it that he would be rescued. Only him, from the million lives sacrificed to power up a war. He wound up in Insomnia and befriended a prince, of all people. What where the odds?
And yet… Noctis said he wanted him around.
"Wait… but what about me?" he said aloud. "What do I want?"
Try as he might, he couldn't imagine any other life for himself. Traveling with Noctis, Gladiolus and Ignis had taught him a great deal about life. They had accepted Prompto without question, and that was far more than what he had expected from anyone. Even when he knew he was being obnoxious, they still had room for him in their group.
He got up, noticing that the ground wasn't that close to his eyes anymore. He was taller and felt nimbler.
"It took me a while, but I finally found my answer."
He took his beloved camera from the stairs and looked up to the palace's door. The mist had lifted and the sun shone bright on him.
"It's time." Prompto said, and he climbed the stairs to a set of doors he knew would always open for him, no matter what.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
He opened his eyes to see he was sitting still where he found the first fallen MT. His camera was in his hands. Gripping it, he stood up and came back to the refuge. He had only walked a short distance, despite his visions. The snowmobile was when he had parked it the previous night, and Aranea stood near, waiting for him. She seemed surprised, though.
"I'm ready," he declared. Then he pursed his lips and added: "I thought about what you said, and I've decided to face my fears once and for all. I can't choose where I came from, but I can choose where I'm going."
"Alright," she smiled. "But slow me down and you're going to get left behind."
Aranea's words were harsh, but the expression in her face was kind. The lesson she wanted to teach him wasn't lost, however, and he squared his shoulders, ready for whatever she intended to do.
She filled him about her plan: He would drive the snowmobile to the research factory, a complex not far from where they were. There they would fight against the guards to gain entry. She warned him about it being a dangerous mission, but he accepted the challenge.
On their way to the factory, they noticed that most of the fauna had disappeared, as if the magitek soldiers had scared them away.
The research factory wasn't unlike the imperial bases he had helped dismantle with his friends. Tall watch towers flanked the entrance, and several soldiers patrolled the area. He wished he had Noctis' warping abilities.
Prompto soon discovered that Aranea and himself made a good team. He could sneak around without being detected, and she could do all the muscle work. The factory was indeed as heavily guarded as Aranea said, and once or twice he thought they were about to be overwhelmed.
Once they cleared the access, Prompto used the touch panel to scan his barcode. It opened slowly, and it let them enter a tunnel burrowing into the mountain in a steep slope.
"According to my intel, they're housing the new model here," said Aranea as they both hurried down into the underground factory.
"It's some kind of magitek armor, right? What's so new about it?"
"This one's got a ghost in the machine: Chief Besithia himself. Managed to fuse his soul with the core."
That was the process he witnessed, and that was why Besithia didn't care if Prompto aimed a gun at him or not. Dying was his plan, either from the infection or from any other cause.
"The daemons this guy created destroyed Insomnia," she continued. "If we don't take him out now… He's liable to destroy the whole world."
They reached an elevator and took it. Prompto gritted his teeth and suppressed his claustrophobia, trying not to think how deep inside the mountain they were traveling.
Crossing through an antechamber, they reached a warehouse. Disposing of the soldiers and sentinels there was far easier now that he had Aranea at his side. He either distracted them or delivered the killing shot, and it would have taken less time if reinforcements hadn't arrived constantly. It was after they had disabled the third wave of robots that they could finally continue their way into the lab.
They followed another corridor going deeper into the mountain, which led to another room with benches and an Ebony vending machine where they took a brief rest. There Prompto found some logs from a former lab worker. The author was a young man who felt pretty happy to start working there under the orders of Besithia; the following entries showed how the worker's enthusiasm soured, as he had trouble coping with the experiments within the research facility and, in the last entry Prompto could read, the nameless scientist complained about having to clean a leak of plasmodium in one of the labs, and the scolding he received from the Chief.
Prompto found also two more recordings from Besithia. One from 724: Mass production of the MTs was a success, and they had cornered the Lucian army and surrounded Insomnia. He also rambled about the daemons born of the sublimation process, and to which ends they might be used.
The other recording was the final one, dating from that very year, 756. There, Besithia announced that his life's work was complete.
"Not only have I found a way to preserve the ego, I've also managed to sustain that consciousness through the sublimation process and transfer it into my magitek troopers. The prototype had proven slightly less powerful than the Diamond Weapon, but this presents no real problem. After all, one's consciousness can be transmuted again and again and again. All that remains is to fully surrender myself to my research and become my own final test subject. I will conclude my mortal life by offering a word of thanks. Chancellor Ardyn Izunia, your assistance had proven invaluable. You have my eternal gratitude. It is through your aid that I have completed my work and begun my ascension to an existence beyond divinity."
Of course it was Ardyn. Everywhere they went, his name kept coming up.
They continued their way, coming upon a giant chamber. A grunt made them look up.
In another life it must have been a giant ape of some sorts. Now it was a half-beast, half-machine monstrosity what looked at them with artificial eyes while it hung upside down from the ceiling.
Using the same tactic of distraction from Prompto and hard hitting from Aranea, they could kill the monster. It took them a long time to wear it down, and the battle seemed to take a turn for the worse when the organic parts of the beast caught on fire and threatened to burn them too. Killing it seemed more like an act of mercy.
"Made it out alive," Prompto huffed edging closer to the giant corpse.
Their joy was short-lived. Suddenly the ground started shaking.
"Unit XDA-1002: Immortalis. Plasmodic miasma transfer complete. No psychic obstructions detected. All systems operational. Activating Immortalis."
Whatever it was, it was happening outside. They ran as fast as they could back to the access door and out of the factory. The ground shook so strongly it almost made them loose their balance once they were outside. Looking back, they saw the whole building exploding as a gigantic, mechanical worm slithered out of the mountain. Its head, divided in seven smaller segment surrounding an eight, central one, was as big at the whole factory's entrance.
"So that's the new model," Prompto said aloud. "And that means… he must be inside that thing."
He heard a snowmobile behind him. While he had been distracted, gawking at the mechanical monstrosity, Aranea had gone to fetch a vehicle. This one had a machine gun at the rear.
Thinking that a simple machine gun could beat a gargantuan monster would have been ridiculous, but the truth was that it seemed to work. While Verstael chased them down the mountain, raving about becoming a god in that perfect form he had created, the machine gun proved to be extremely effective against its heads, whenever they intended to gather energy and shoot. However, those were the only weak points, for the armor covering the rest of the body was immune to any type of weapon.
That small flaw hadn't been overlooked during the research and development of the Immortalis. Verstael had voiced his concerns when he first saw those weak points but Ardyn, who had advised him during the process, brushed them off and wove a subtle tale of possibilities and immortality. Besithia had always been a brilliant man, though his hubris knew no bounds and, like the Immortalis, that apparently unimportant flaw was his undoing.
One by one, Prompto destroyed the worm's heads, which were especially vulnerable during the energy-gathering phase. Once they were all disabled, the worm fell down heavily on the snow, to rise again with a roar of fury from Verstael, its magitek cores in the head and all along the body flaring dangerously.
Prompto focused his aiming on the central core. It seemed to be even more vulnerable, but it also gathered a bigger amount of energy. A single misstep could cost them their lives.
Aiming carefully, the young man stopped each incoming wave, and each time Verstael tried again to gather energy. Prompto's hands felt clammy inside the gloves and, as he shot, he prayed that the snowmobile's tank and the ammo lasted more than the giant worm.
The central core finally exploded, and the whole construct went off, falling to the valley and raising a wave of snow and dirt. Prompto closed his eyes, finally resting his head against the machine gun. His arms and hands felt numb. Nevertheless, he afforded himself a little smile when he heard Aranea shouting in celebration.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
They looked at the devastation the worm had left behind it. At least it was really dead now. Aranea looked at Prompto, who stood some steps ahead of her. Even from behind, the kid looked like he was about to barf. Didn't surprise her, considering what they had gone through.
"You alright?" she asked.
He straightened up and squared his shoulders.
"Yeah," he said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. "This is what I wanted."
"Then say it like you mean it. You did good, kid."
He turned to her and made a pointing gesture, his whole demeanor changed. Now he was again the kid she met at the ruins, back at the Vesperpool.
"Couldn't have done it without you, gurl!" He said. "Seriously, though. Well, I'd better catch up with Noct and the guys. He's got a lot on his plate, and I figure he could probably use a hand taking back the Crystal and all that. And who knows? Maybe I'll take it back before he does."
That was better.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," Aranea warned him, though she was smiling at him with something akin to pride.
"Honestly," Prompto admitted as he checked the snowmobile. "I don't know for sure if they're going to accept me for who I really am. But I'll never know if I don't speak up, so I'm gonna tell 'em. After all, it's my life to live."
The confidence in those eyes spoke louder than any word he could say, and that was enough for Aranea.
"The boy has become a man," she declared, then she pointed at a direction with her hand. "Anyway, Gralea's straight ahead."
He hopped on the snowmobile.
"Aranea!"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks!"
She couldn't help a smile. It wasn't every day that you could see someone growing up in a few hours.
Prompto sped away towards Gralea with a new purpose and feeling how a weight had been lifted from his heart.
Standing at a hilltop, a man with a long, black coat had witnessed everything, and would continue to keep an eye on the fleeing gunslinger. Smiling, he hummed a victory fanfare.
xxxxXX-0-XXxxxx
The clang of a closing metal door woke him up. His head hurt and throbbed as if he had been hit very hard. Even trying to shake it to dispel the grogginess resulted in agonizing pain.
Opening his eyes, he could see his feet. He was strung up to some metal device. Looking up, he could only see the bars of a holding cell and beyond, a corridor which disappeared into darkness.
He thrashed against his restrains, but it was futile. All his physical strength spent, he cried out for help.
His voice echoed through the empty corridors and into the darkness. No other sound could be heard.
