Ever the more anxious, she checked again, peeking her head out the wall; both knights' gazes locked right at her. She screamed and jerked back, clenching her heart to catch her breath. The scream echoed across the Armory, but it faded into silence. Despite the chaos below them, the Armory remained silent, not even the clangs of metal or the whizzes of arrows could be heard down the stairs. The longer she stood there the harder it was to move. Closing her eyes in a cold sweat she started to count to three aloud.
"One…" The stillness in the room revealed the panicked voice of a scared little girl.
"Two…" She clutched her daggers and took a deep breath, steading her voice into a more calm and collected delivery. She opened her eyes, and confidently...
"Three!" Without hesitation she darted into the middle of the room. Her steps echoed across the chamber as she clambered not on the bookshelf, but the knights themselves. Despite this risk, the knights remained stationary as if she wasn't even there. With a desperate lunge she grabbed hold of the second floor with one arm and grabbed the floor with the seconds soon after using the momentum of her jump adjacent to the wall, hanging on helplessly. As she struggled to hoist herself onto the second floor to start searching for the crystal, she heard a faint humming sound, almost like a hum of electricity or a power-up. She checked behind her to witness a faint red glow begin to gain luminosity below her. Her eyes widened and she used all the will she had to pull herself onto the level but to no avail; her strength was fading. The red light invaded the first floor, reflecting off of her pale face as the sounds of motors tearing through gearing sent chills down her spine.
"INTRUDER DETECTED. THERMAL SIGNATURE LOCATED ON TOWER ARMORY LEVEL 2. STATUS OF SUPPORT: NONE. DETERMINING THREAT LEVEL...CLASS 5 INTRUDER. DETERMINING DETAINMENT LEVEL...CLASS 5. PROCEEDING WITH LETHAL EXTRACTION." In sync, both "knights" erupted to life from their stations, violently breaking the cemented brick that contained them, sending tremors up the wall, bouncing her with just enough force to launch off the wall onto the second floor with a thump. Dazed, she gathered herself and quickly ran along the edge of the catwalk, searching the shelves and vaults while the two knights rose to their feet and unsheathed not lances, but tree-trunk sized swords, which the lances were mere ficads to hide them beneath the ground. However, the two knights were rather slow. Purely mechanical and electrical as well as enormous, their individual gears and joints could be heard during their tasks, methodically maneuvering the mechanical beasts. She stopped to study them, puzzled and minimally frightened. The two knights head jerked instantly at her stationary position, glowing red eyes piercing through a traditional medieval helmet, startling her as she lost composure.
"TARGET ACQUIRED. ACTIVATING FLAMETHROWERS."
"Gutterwash!" She yelled as she ran from four shoulder-mounted flamethrowers spewing hungry flames from each of the two knights' shoulders. The flames engulfed the Armory, setting many bookshelves ablaze along with all known methods of ancient sorcerers who often unethically obtained limitless power beholding their even older incantations - connections to another world. As the books burned, the flames took colors of blues and purples, and maniacal laughing could be heard amidst the blaze behind her. Ignoring her curious inquiries of the Armory's secrets, only guided by fear, she kept running as fast as she could on the catwalk.
As she ran one of the knights turned around unexplainably. It seemed as if they were trying to corner her in the circle she ran in. Little planning occurred, however, when the knight in pursuit went for a massive strike with its sword halfway through the catwalk, attempting to slash her with a horizontal strike opposing her path. Slow as its stroke may have been, there was no stopping the sword from tearing anything in its path by its sheer size and weight alone, the dense and cold steel ravaging anything in its path from guardrails to foundation pillars, trained directly in front of her.
Instinctively, the girl leaped onto the knight's sword arm and ran along it, heading for its head! Parkouring up the massive robot, she jumped off the top of the knight's head and just across from her the other knight stood with its flamethrower trap away from the girl, expecting her to pass on the other end. Shy of enough distance to make the other knight's head, the girl snatched its neck, hanging onto it, getting a free nonconsensual piggy-back ride. But the knight was only slightly perturbed by her, and it jerked its neck back to respond, hitting her hard and square on her chest, making her lose her grip, releasing and plummeting towards the concrete. The girl violently smacked the ground on her back, hardly hearing a crunch, now clinging to life as both knights slowly turned around to finish their job. She felt a sting in her chest as she could hardly breathe, as if needles were poking at her lungs.
"SUBJECT INCAPACITATED. ACTIVATING PRE-MORTEM ANALYZATION FOR DEBRIEFING." A tiny camera emerged from both knights' chests and wireframe scanners blanketed her mortally wounded body. "SPECIES: UNKNOWN. ID: UNKNOWN. ATTIRE: OF CRYSTAL ORIGIN. SCANNING FOR RELATED SUBJECTS." The knights turned and started scanning the Armory.
Blood escaped the girl through a vigorous cough; she saw several black dots along her peripheral vision - each object appeared cloudier and cloudier. Her neck and arms still seemed to work as she twitched them desperately. She looked at one of the knights: it faced the wall. Motors and pistons sang as its torso gyrated around, their wireframed scanners piling on a great distance across the Armory. But as the knights turned more and more, she saw a giant power pack, or some kind of battery, on its lower back. The knight she was looking at mysteriously halted, battery now fortuitously exposed.
"RELATED SUBJECT ACQUIRED. OBTAINING." Its enormous hand reached up to level three, tearing through the brick and mortar like a hand into a box of packing peanuts. Its hand ripped through a steel vault and seized, from what the girl could see, a glowing, blinding pink light.
"SUBJECT-RELATED OBJECT OBTAINED. ANALYZING." It scanned the precious cargo oblivious to the girl behind her, holding a nearly dull, shotty dagger aimed right at the battery. The girl even managed a sly grin as she whipped the dagger at the knight. With luck, it lodged itself right into its power supply! Sparks wickedly consumed the machine, exacerbating it, as its whirring motors powered down in a violent, desperate fury of motion.
"CRITICAL DAMAGE." Its bassy robotic voice started slowing down as it gently and methodically knelt, its motors in agreement with its voice as its servos overloaded for the last time. "SHUTTING DOWN INTERNAL SYSTEMS. MO-O-O-OVING A-A-A-ALL SYS-SYSTEMS TO TO K.N.G.H-H-H-T: MODEL 2. POOOWERING DOOOWW…" The knight toppled to the floor, dropping the light near its head. It hovered and beamed its radiant light brighter still until the helpless girl on the floor felt a strange force invading her. With her body laying belly-up on the floor, her torso was completely dysfunctional, unable to move or even feel. Tilting her head up she noticed her longcoat glowing brighter than it has ever been. Startled, through immense pain in her ribs she tried to flip herself over to no avail. An eerie, gusting sound seemed to emanate from the crystal, and - perplexingly - her eyes started to regain their vision. The darkness surrounding her bloodshot eyes faded away as she saw twisting misty streaks of different hues of pink from the crystal jostle into her coat, into her body.
"TARGET UTILIZING CRYSTAL TECHNOLOGY. DECIMATING." The second knight was moving to face her.
"Come on," she pleaded through blood, cold sweat and tears. "Come on!" She reached her hand to the pink light and it began to move towards her. The longer the crystal was attached to her, the more damaged parts of her body, to her surprise, began to heal. It hurt tremendously. She felt her ribs mending together again, veins reattaching. "Argh!" she yelled, but she knew what was happening. She could now catch her breath - her nose finally fixed - and she hopped to her feet, pink dust flowing into her from the might of the floating crystal beside her.
"ACTIVATING ELECTRO-SWORD."
The sword in the knight's hand slowly gathered electricity as the knight prepared to chop her in half, but before she could run away, the crystal fused erratically into the seam on the back of the coat that bore its shape.
Immediately, the girl's perception of time slowed to a crawl, the flying debris, the pink mist surrounding her, the knight's attack: they now slowly etched towards her overwhelmed yet frightful eyes.
"Maeeeevvvveeee…"
"Who's that?" She determinately searched for the source of the voice. "Who's there?" The voice sounded a lot like her own, but resembled a loud whisper, ambient and omnipresent, echoing around her - an invisible wisp or spirit floating at her side.
"I am now, Maeve."
"Wha-" She choked on her words. "What? Who..." Time quickly recovered, the girl's eye widened in realization, and the knight sharply chopped at the girl's location, tearing the floor like a newspaper, revealing the countless warriors still waging their battle, yet no sign of the mutilated corpse of a girl showed. Recoiling, the knight looked to the adjacent catwalk, where a once-feeble little girl stood.
Shocked and confused, the girl frivolously pondered on how she moved so fast and so quickly, almost like the pounce of a cat.
"I…" She looked at her hands, feeling soaked with energy - power. "What did I…?" Her coat glowed like never before, and her senses invaded her judgement, and she habitually started running. She darted inhumanly faster than before, keeping pace as the wind flowed beyond her skin until the knight swung its sword horizontally at her. She leaped over it with tremendous ease like a jump rope, but, to her surprise, she bounded again by accident, only this time it was IN MID AIR.
"Ahhh!" She panicked as she plummeted 7 feet to the ground. "No!" Yet again to her surprise, she landed on her feet!
"THREAT IS HIGHLY MOBILE. ASSIMILATING." The knight's motors pitch increased and it started moving faster as if it activated overdrive, sparks flying and twitching, pushing its limits as it moved its sword with twice the acceleration towards her.
Maeve's eyebrows narrowed. She jumped on the sword as it moved and tore through the tower's architecture in desperation. Maeve scampered along the knight's forearm as the crumbling stone and cement bricks cracked and failed as the knight tore into the wall relentlessly in a wild attempt to incapacitate her. She pulled out a dagger and dove off the back of the knight. Gritting her teeth, she impaled the back of the knight and slid down the behemoth as the knife slashed its electrical systems, wires and copper filaments oozing out of its exposed back. As the knife slowed down against the integrity of the metal she leapt off the knight and landed on the second floor. She turned around to watch the once-towering knight topple to the ground; she reached an epiphany as the giant therapeutically collapsed down the broken flooring of the tower.
Hardly acquainted to her newfound abilities, she had no choice but to try and escape. She also only had two daggers left, and the building-
CRASH! She stumbled but kept her balance. Tumbling stones and debris surrounded her as she started heading down the tower. As she ran she heard not only her footsteps but also an ambient prowl-like noise accompanying her that resembled the climatic tremors of a cougar's primal bounds. It was unintelligible and daunting, making stealth completely out of the question. A pillar dropped in front of her so she leaped higher than before, trying to recreate the second jump on purpose this time. Coupled with a sound that felt like a faint whisper of her own voice, but completely unintelligible, Maeve bounded against the air once more, gaining further height as she descended towards the ground, landing on her feet. Her endurance, she noticed, had phased too; she did not feel as tired as before when she ran. Rubble surrounding her, she dashed down the parts that remained: foundations, rocks and stone, and certainly not flights of stairs. The fate of the building was sealed; the Magistrate's Fortress Keep will not hold much longer. Fleeing inhabitants of the first and second floor fought less and less as the main objective became clear: survive the onslaught of debris from the upper levels. Staying clear of the deserters, Maeve wanted out the way she went in, and spotted the window on the balcony towards the Inn. She held steadfast for it; however, the ceiling hosting the window to the small scout hut collapsed in front of the window, blocking her exit. Startled, she fled in another direction, pleading for a new exit on that level to no avail until a pillar plummeted away from the primary direction of the Keep's collapse softly onto an adjacent building, effectively creating a bridge. Lucky once again, she serpentined across the disjointed floor, keeping herself in the air as much as possible, only bounding off falling debris or skeletons of the Keep's architecture. A grinding sharp piece of limestone slashed at her coat slicing almost her entire left sleeve off, disappearing into the debris, exposing her left arm as she clutched her scratches in pain. But without hesitation she leapt onto the makeshift bridge and climbed her way down the adjacent building. Turning around she witnessed the entire half of the Magistrate's Fortress Keep finally give way to a catastrophic plummet on the side away from her, blanketing the surrounding area in smoke, debris, and chaos, consuming her in a cluster of smog. She felt the ground crumble beneath her, blind, desperately losing her balance as she felt her descending gently. Eventually, her boots gripped solid ground.
Maeve kept her eyes closed as crumbs of stone scratched at her forehead, poking her face as they flew away for what seemed like ages. With her eyes closed and her arm shielding herself, she walked aimlessly away from the cluster of debris that continued to thunderously crash to the ground. The deafening noise eventually - slowly - faded away, and as soon as she felt the morning dew of a nearby garden against her leg, she stopped to open her eyes. The district was known for their abundant flower gardens, with one nearly at every building's doorstep, and the girl caught her breath at the edge of the carnage one final time.
