Chapter Thirty
Thoth stared at Steven's last message in confusion. Its processors worked furiously to unveil every potential meaning behind those words. "I can break the pipes." Did he have a tool that the porygon didn't know about? Or was he making sure Thoth got away despite his capture? Either way, Thoth knew the only path to take involved fighting his way out.
"We must get to the west gate," Thoth told Set and the magneton. "There, Horus can disable the guard towers, and we can fly right over the walls. Set chuckled. The magneton sent a faint radio signal that Thoth took for an affirmation.
"Magneton, you'll stay front and center. Nonlethal attacks only. Set, cover the rear. Focus on causing confusion. I'll concentrate on giving orders and finding the way out. Let's go."
With a powerful discharge, Thoth fried every computer in the room, reducing them to hunks of molten plastic and metal. The magneton drank the excess power and flung the door open. A cop, planting a breaching charge on the door, got pinned to the wall. Luckily for him, he hadn't started its countdown. The magneton left him there as it flew into the hall. A crackle of electricity shot from its magnets and coursed down the hall, leaping from man to pokemon. Two dozen fell to the ground, arms twitching, but a sandslash darted forward, claws reaching for magneton's eyes. Set floated in front of it and sent a whirling rainbow sphere from his hands. When it hit the sandslash's eyes, it stopped and clawed at the air around it.
A fireball soared through the hall, flying straight towards the magneton. Thoth flew in front of it and surrounded itself with a glowing blue barrier. The fire slammed against it and went out.
As they raced away from pursuit down the other hall, Thoth messaged Steven again. "Please tell Horus to hold position and disable the nearest guard towers at my signal."
"Alright." The reply came quickly. "We're moving down the pipes. It's a straight shot to the exit point, right?"
Thoth wrenched some processing power away from battle analysis for a moment to review Steven's situation. Ra couldn't break them. Maybe they forced one of the officer's pokemon to help them? Police pokemon are well-trained, taking orders only from their trainer. Maybe if they were confused… no, Set's with me. How did he do it? Is he lying to me?
A fist flying through Thoth's peripheral vision snapped him back to reality. With a small discharge, he made the attacker, a scrafty, tumble to the floor. The porygon darted forward just in time to block a crackle of purple thunder. Magneton fired back with a solid sphere of gray light, but the gardevoir teleported away. Instead, the attack slammed into an ursaring and knocked it unconscious.
While they raced through an empty hallway, Thoth answered Steven's question. The porygon craved information about Steven's situation, but the fight ahead demanded all its attention. An absol lunged from the shadows, swiping at Set, but the magneton swatted it out of the air with a crackling magnet. It fell with a sharp yelp and didn't move. Blood trickled from its broken horn.
Farther ahead, Set possessed one of the officers and had their graveler explode. Thoth grimaced as four officers were knocked back by the blast, but a quick scan told it that they would live. In the same officer's body, Set threw more pokeballs to the floor. A shiftry blew officers and pokemon down the hallway, while a glalie froze the ground beneath their feet.
When Set got vomited out by the officer, the woman reacted quickly, setting her two pokemon on them. Overclocking his processors, Thoth taught himself signal beam while it ordered magneton to incapacitate the glalie with flash cannon. Before the pokemon could react to their new orders, they fell to the calculated attack, and Set put the woman to sleep.
Thoth ran another calculation. At the rate they were heading west, they would arrive at the walls in ten minutes. As they rounded a corner, a wall of officers, wielding riot shields and semi-automatic pistols, barred the way. Better make that fifteen. He decided to contact Horus anyway, giving the order to disable the western guard towers. By the time he looked back, the shield wall had fallen apart, scattered by two confused officers raving about crobat and ariados attacking from above. One officer was down with a bullet through the leg. Blood seeped through his legs, but it missed his femoral artery. Another took a bullet in the shoulder, and despite the wound, fought to pin the two raving officers to the floor.
While they were distracted, Thoth and the others floated over them. The magneton crippled them with a thunder wave before it left. Set cackled loudly as they moved through another empty hall.
"I haven't had this much fun since the bank robbery!" he shouted.
"Be quiet," Thoth hissed at him. "We're not out yet."
"Don't be such a spoilsport, Thoth." Set's grin widened, and his white eyes sparkled like diamonds. "They're never going to catch us!"
As the words left his mouth, a huge scythe, glowing with purple miasma, swiped at Set. The blade passed through him, leaving a jagged black tear. On impulse, Thoth fried everything in the darkness of the adjoining hallway with a max-volt discharge. A scyther hit the floor like a sack of grain. A roserade's cry of pain echoed down the hall, and Thoth fired at it with a signal beam.
Set floated in the air, severed in two pieces that drifted away from each other. As Thoth watched, flakes peeled off and disappeared. The porygon scanned its databases, hunting for any technique that might save Set's life. Then, it found a move. Pain split.
Throwing all his processing power at the download to hasten it by a few seconds, Thoth stopped itself from thinking of the odds it would work. Once it learned the move, Thoth used it. Its body, composed of electrical signals suspended in plasma, rippled as a jolt of pain shot through its delicate circuits. Meanwhile, the two severed halves pulled themselves together. Eyes and a mouth emerged from the mass in odd places, making his smile impossibly grotesque.
"Wow, I thought I was really gone there," Set said with a nervous chuckle. "Neat trick."
Thoth's own circuitry was in complete disarray. The extremities, housing many of Thoth's spare processors, were a blue smear in the air, and the red core had cracks running through it. Though damaged, Thoth had enough power left to download another move. Activating the program, the porygon breathed a sigh of relief as a green glow reassembled its peripheral body components and knitted its core back together.
Meanwhile Set had grabbed his eyeballs and stuck them back in their proper place. Adjusting his smile like a human would adjust a coat hangar, Set scrunched up his face into a wobbly smile.
"Mind doing that again? I still feel a bit torn up inside."
Thoth complied. This time, the burden to his systems was far less, and the damage faded even more quickly. Set flexed his hands, and eerie blue flames flickered out from between its fingers.
"Uh, thanks, I guess." He chuckled softly and went to help the magneton. It had nicks and dings in its metal plating, and one of its magnets hung limply at its side. Thoth healed it and blocked a boulder before it could scuff the magneton's freshly buffed body.
As it recovered again, Thoth's thoughts drifted back to Steven. It asked for a status report, and a few seconds later, Steven told him they were still crawling. Were they keeping the police from opening the doors and dealing with the crowd of Rockets trapped in the lower prison? Or were they really free? Neither explanation made any sense to the porygon. It felt as though he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Mulling it over, Thoth realized the "piece" was the way out. Before it could stop to think, Thoth asked Steven how he broke the bars.
A long silence followed. Thoth jerked his attention back to the fight long enough to paralyze a flareon and heal Set's charred hands. There still wasn't a reply when Thoth got wrapped by a vine. Magneton shocked the tangela, which caused electricity to ripple through Thoth, but it also freed the porygon. As it recovered, the response finally appeared.
And it read, "Secret by Giovanni's order."
So he did break the bars. And yet, the doubt remained. Perhaps he was still keeping up the charade? But why? He had nothing to gain by letting the four of them escape, and had his freedom to lose. And what would be so important that it would be kept secret by Giovanni's order? Was it some sixth pokemon Steven had? It had to be.
Satisfied with its conclusion, Thoth consulted the map. They were approaching a set of service doors leading to the western wall. Two officers, a nidoking, and a hariyama blocked the way out. Magneton fried the hariyama, Set put the nidoking to sleep, and Thoth disabled the two officers with a small discharge to their chests.
When they made it outside, Thoth was dismayed to find that the guard were still standing in their posts, attentively scanning the grounds. But Horus was perched in the nearest tower, looking down at them. The guards, though looking, never saw them.
Bullets followed them over the wall, dinging off of magneton's sturdy body and Thoth's shield, and passing through Set's gaseous body. Horus dove down the other side of the wall. Thoth and the others followed, and together, they wound their way through the trees, losing the pursuing police.
Once the clatter and clamp of police boots faded to silence, Thoth led them to the sewer's emergency exit, in a squalid part of the city populated by low-rent apartment complexes, chain restaurants with broken windows, and rusty warehouses. The exit was blocked by a solid metal door. One tug from magneton tore it free from its rusty lock and hinges. Musty air wafted from the exposed room like a freshly opened grave, and the sensory data made Thoth's programming prickle. With a grimace, Thoth led the way down. Cracked pipes, rusted, dry, and dusty from decades of idleness, lined every wall and the ceiling.
At the far end of the hall, a round hatch, marked "Emergency Exit," sat between a dented boiler and a fire extinguisher. Magneton latched onto the hatch's wheel. Chips of red paint drifted from the wheel as it turned. Squeak by rusty squeak, the wheel crept in a slow circle, until, at last, the hatch swung open.
Light shone. With a wet, squelching plop, Steven Sun tumbled out of the sewer. He and a hundred grunts crawled through five hundred yards of shit that Thoth shuddered to imagine. Five football fields. Just short of half a mile. He and a hundred grunts, drenched in filth that coated abandoned pipes for decades, cheered as old musty air, clean as a mountaintop gale compared to the sewer stench, filled their lungs.
As Thoth was called back into its pokeball, one last thought flickered through his mind. How the hell had he done it?
Changelog
10/28/18 - minor edits