Aloy dismounted the Strider she had ridden on to get here. She had stopped HADES and HEPHAESTUS from causing more extinction events and after a brief stay at Meridian, the capital city of the Carja, she heard rumors that an influx of Rockbreakers and Tramplers had overrun Plainsong, home of the Utaru tribe.
Erend had suggested that she ask High Matriarch Teersa about Plainsong on her return home so Aloy that done just that. Teersa didn't know much since the Utaru were so far away but said the land was flat. Aloy restocked what supplies she could and set off on her overridden horse like Strider.
As it would take days to get there, she used the time to go over what she knew as she set up her temporary camps. Even now, after everything that she had done and seen it was still a bit unbelievable to her.
As she rode, she listened to the diary files that she had made on her Focus the last time she visited Meridian. The Focus that had been on her ear since she was a child was a piece of Old One technology. She had made over thirty such files since HADES was defeated mostly because she was alone now but also… also in case, something happened to her.
She knew that the Focus allowed her to see things others couldn't like the path a machine would take before it started, marking enemies so she knew how many there were before she snuck into a bandit camp and what she used it most for, scanning datafiles and interacting with the world in a way that others simply couldn't. It was the one real piece of "jewelry" that she allowed herself other than the necklace that had once belonged to Rost's daughter.
Ted Faro reached out to his old friend Elisabet Sobeck regarding a glitch in one of his corporation's lines of peacekeeping robots, named Chariots, wouldn't obey stand-down orders and had gone rogue on October 31st, 2064. A day later Elisabet delivers the news that due to the swarm's sentience and the convertors that allowed them to consume biomass the Earth would be bare in fifteen months. Two days later, Zero Dawn and Operation Enduring Victory were greenlit.
July 15th, 2065: The colony ship named Odyssey exploded upon leaving the solar system.
By November of that year, the atmosphere was so toxic that environmental suits were required for travel and civilians live in sealed shelters.
January 15th, 2066: Operation Enduring Victory collapses but buys Zero Dawn enough time to be successful.
Later that day the main facility reported a malfunction leaving a gap of ten millimeters in the port seals which was enough for an energy signature to bleed through and to let the swarm discover the facility, enough to let them destroy Zero Dawn. Elisabet Sobeck sealed the facility… from the outside.
3021: A child is discovered inside of a Nora Holy site and given to an outcast to raise as his daughter… Her story began there.
After days of traveling, she made it to Plainsong and began her search. Eventually, the red-headed Nora brave found what she was looking for.
She had figured that DEMETER was buried underneath the ground and she would have been glad to be right except for the fact that she was currently overlooking a gigantic sinkhole. "Well, at least it's not a volcano," Aloy muttered to herself as she activated her Focus.
"Rubble in a doorway looks like a way around. Need to be careful descending." Aloy took a running leap and dove into the hole. As she fell, she twisted and threw her grappling hook into the ground.
The rope tightened and Aloy made it safely to the ground. "Now, let's see what we're working with here." She traveled through the Old One ruins and didn't see anything more dangerous than a couple of scurrying rats.
Which was a relief after having had firefights with Eclipse members in a ruin similar to this under Sunfall, capital of the Shadow Carja. She had to squeeze through a couple of small passages that she wasn't a fan of but whatever allowed her to get closer to her objective.
When she got through the last passage Aloy gasped. "Wow, Here I thought that the volcano from Firebreak was impressive… but this…. This is magnificent."
She was on a ledge overlooking a MASSIVE, underground, overgrown city. The main cavern that Aloy was in had skyscrapers that spanned the entire length of the cavern. It looked like the city used to be lived in… before the machines… before the Faro Plague swept over the world and rendered the surface uninhabitable. They must have eventually run out of food… Aloy felt bad for them because they survived a swarm of robots but succumbed to starvation.
As she rappelled down into the Dead City, she felt a shiver shoot down her spine. Something about this place made her uneasy which was peculiar because she had explored ancient ruins before… although usually, she had Sylens in her ear and she didn't this time.
"Best get this done quickly… Hopefully, DEMETER isn't hostile like HADES and HEPHAESTUS." She muttered to herself as she started walking.
After… walking who knows how long Aloy came to a familiar-looking door so she stepped up to it. "Hold for Identiscan." The door said in the same synthetic, monotone voice that the one that guarded GAIA had.
"Alpha Registry recognized. Genetic identity confirmed. Entry Authorized. Greetings, Doctor Sobeck. You are cleared to proceed."
Once the door was completely open, Aloy walked through and saw a facility that was very reminiscent of the FIREBREAK facility. But while FIREBREAK was inside of a volcano and had all the traits associated with it this was more… green. What Aloy saw reminded her of The Jewel, the jungle south of Meridian, there was plant life everywhere. Thick plant growth covered nearly every surface, the walls, the ceiling, the windows, and the floor.
There was still a part of her that couldn't believe that this entire journey had started with something as simple as The Proving. She had been born an outcast, a motherless girl in a fiercely matriarchal society she was found inside All-Mother Mountain, which was the most sacred holy site within the Nora's beliefs.
She had been raised by a fellow outcast named Rost, who taught her everything. He had taught her to fight the machines that they shared their world with, to scavenge off of dead animals and said machines, to craft arrowheads, tripwires, and more, and most importantly to survive.
He had lost his wife and daughter to raiders before setting off on a suicidal mission to get revenge, he hadn't expected to survive but he had.
After a yearlong quest he had stumbled back to Nora lands bloody and nearly dead, according to tradition, he should have died where he rested but he was saved.
Years later, he had saved her from being left out in the cold. He trained her for a singular purpose. Win the Proving, become a brave of the tribe, and get answers about her mother.
But her quest for knowledge about her mother had cost her the only family she had ever known. Rost had saved her from a madman named Helis and sacrificed himself to ensure that she didn't die in the explosion that followed their fight with the crazed general.
She still had the shallow scar from Helis' knife on her neck, and it had burned whenever she got near him, whether it was just her imagination or not she didn't know, at least until he had been killed by her hand during the Battle of Meridian. A battle to prevent HADES from unleashing waves of FARO robots.
She had learned about her mother, who she was, and her role in saving the world. Elisabet Sobeck, the genius behind the project known as Zero Dawn, she had organized the smartest of the Old Ones in a feat of engineering that was unheard of to Aloy's mind.
When the FARO plague was set to wipe the world out by stripping the biomass to use as fuel and their creator, a man named Ted Faro, couldn't shut them down he had begged Elisabet for help.
Using her genius and his unlimited bankroll, she had gotten the best of the best of scientists, engineers, biologists, programmers, and countless others in an insane gamble to create GAIA. A hyper-intelligent, sentient AI whose purpose was singular; to restore Earth to life after the FARO robots wiped it out.
GAIA couldn't do such an extreme task alone though; HADES and HEPHAESTUS were two of the nine subordinate functions that were created to help GAIA in her mission.
HEPHAESTUS was in charge of creating all kinds of machines for any purpose that GAIA needed them. Machines of land, sea, and sky were created in Cauldrons, which were able to create any such machine that was needed for any purpose.
However, much like the rest of the subordinate functions, HEPHAESTUS received an unknown signal and became a fully, sentient, and sadly hostile AI.
It had taken over a volcano in "Yellowstone" as its base of operations and had been cranking out Hunter-Killers. Hostile, feral machines designed to kill the tribes.
HADES meanwhile was… interesting. The AI was designed as a kind of reset button for GAIA in case she didn't get it right. HADES was only designed to be a last resort; in case the Earth wasn't hospitable. HADES was the cause of Aloy's journey, though she didn't know that until a lot later. The hostile AI believed that Elisabet Sobeck was a threat, so it had ordered its followers, Helis included, to eliminate Aloy.
But GAIA had a plan of its own. Since GAIA self-destructed in an attempt to stop her subordinate functions from getting free, she implemented a failsafe, a plan to stop HADES without actually being able to do anything herself due to her mandates.
She took Elisabet's DNA and created a genetic clone. A baby that would be raised to adulthood by the tribe outside, and who could one day use the Alpha Registry that was coded into the functions to rebuild GAIA.
A daughter of Elisabet Sobeck, A hail Mary plan to avoid a second apocalypse. Aloy had been momentarily shattered by the revelation of what, of who she was.
She then realized that she would be continuing the legacy that GAIA and Elisabet left behind and sacrificed everything for, she owed it to them both to finish their mission, they had given her an enormous undertaking.
But she would see it through to the end. She'd rebuild GAIA, no matter how long it took. It was her world now, and she wouldn't, no, she couldn't fail them, or their sacrifices would be in vain.
She spied a ray of light far above her on the roof of a building and some ledges nearby, so she made her way over to them and started to climb.
She expertly maneuvered her way up to her destination and easily made her way up onto the ceiling with a roll. She thought back to her lessons with Rost and he had taught her how to gauge the sunlight.
She knew it was almost midday by the time she had left the settlement that she had been staying in so she figured that it was probably close to nightfall.
Once she made it back down to the ground, she began to prepare her the fire so that she could cook the meat that she'd have with picked berries. She made sure that the embers couldn't leap onto the grass that she was sitting on before she turned her attention to the text files that she had collected in her exploration.
As she moved through the Dead City, she scanned thirty different data files with her Focus. Most of them were audio and holographic files so she decided to save those for dinner and afterward so she could do other things as she winded down for the night.
From the text data files alone she learned that the city had been a black site for some of Faro's more… experimental projects and that while it had been disclosed to Elisabet and Zero Dawn when the project started Faro also told the FAS staff that while some would work on Zero Dawn most were to continue working on the project that he assigned them.
None of the text files disclosed what project he was talking about so Aloy stopped reading them and chose to focus on eating her dinner. For the time being. When she was done eating the squirrel meat that she had cooked she started listening to the first of the audio files.
What she heard was certainly interesting, while some of the audio and holographic files were more informational than others, she learned about the project that the scientists and engineers here were working on.
When the FARO plague was made public the two main alternatives that were proposed were Zero Dawn and the Odyssey project.
The Odyssey Project was originally a "multinational" attempt at a colony ship before it had become a corporate venture. By the time the FARO plague incident reached critical mass and Zero Dawn was being worked on the colony ship launched. Unfortunately, it exploded once it left the Solar System and was lost. The loss of the Odyssey left Zero Dawn as the only viable alternative.
But if what Aloy was listening to was correct Ted Faro had ordered the team here to work on Project REBIRTH. A project to see if there was a way to go to another world without the need for a colony ship.
Aloy thought it sounded insane but so did creating a highly intelligent AI that would remake life after the world died so she supposed that it was entirely possible. She was a rational person but she had learned when she first started unraveling the mystery behind her birth that her definition of rationality needed to be expanded upon.
But the mystery of project REBIRTH could wait a few more hours for her. Once all the files had been listened to, she removed her Focus from her ear and set it next to where she had put her boar skin bedroll along with her weapons. Slowly, she drifted off to sleep, her thoughts on what she had learned.
She wasn't sure how long she slept but she felt rested. She had been a light sleeper since she had set out on her journey and had reluctantly learned to operate on little sleep. Thankfully, this was not one of those times.
Once she had eaten and her bedroll put away, she set off deeper into the city. Her bow and spear were on her back, her tripcaster on her left hip, and her sling on her right. She didn't see anything unusual on her journey aside from a scattered handful of data logs.
Well, that was until she came to the barely open door. Aloy had just barely enough room to fit through it before it creaked softly and slammed shut behind her. "Not returning that way." She muttered to nobody but herself and the ghosts of the past.
The hallway looked like it went upwards a bit before it got to the door at the other end. Aloy had no idea why a hallway traveled uphill when everything was level beforehand, but she wasn't going to question it. It was something that she didn't care about. She moved to the door and let it open before looking inside. Once her brief sweep of it was over, she gawked slightly.
The room was a lot bigger than it had seemed from the hallway, the ceiling had to be at least thirty meters tall and the large circular device that rested in the center of the room was six meters wide. There was scientific equipment scattered around the room but nothing else.
"Well, that's new," Aloy murmured out loud as she took a deep breath, and that's when the scent of the room truly hit her for the first time. For some reason, the room didn't have the same stale, dead air smell that every other ruin had had. Instead, it smelled oddly of salt, the sea, and roses which was such an odd combination that she briefly wondered if she was actually still dreaming.
Aloy shook her head as she dismissed the thought. Green eyes scanned the room as she absentmindedly moved a few strands of braided red hair out of her eyes with a finger. The leather armor that she had on was well-worn but was also well maintained. The fur collar was nice for the cold nights of the lower parts of Nora lands, metallic armguards were the only part that wasn't made of natural elements as they had been made from machine scraps. There were decorative beads that were sewed into the leather itself were quiet which was great for sneaking through the underbrush. The 1.7-meter-tall, nineteen-year-old had learned to be completely silent in the hunt.
Her callused hands from a life of training and combat ran over the empty frame of the entryway and hummed a soft lullaby to the air before activating her Focus. She scanned the room with both her Focus and her eyes, which led her to the device.
It was large, large enough to touch the ceiling and the two walls on opposites of the room with only a very narrow gap. It was a dark, almost oppressive shade of black and strange red runes were carved into the metal itself weren't in any language that she knew of.
Despite her eyes, her Focus, and the lack of anything concrete, Aloy couldn't shake the feeling that the device wasn't completely offline. Aloy's instincts had helped her survive more than once and right now they were telling her that there was something more to that device than she knew.
Aloy paused as she thought she heard soft voices from behind her, her hand instantly traveling to her bow and arrows. She drew back her bowstring and readied herself to fire but there was no one behind her or in the room at all.
"Is anyone out there? Come out if you are!" She called out to the emptiness of the room. If the voices really were real and were hostile, they undoubtedly would've attacked her when her back was turned. If they weren't hostile, they had nothing to fear from her.
She shook her head before releasing the tension on her bowstring and put the arrow back in the quiver. As she stowed her bow she turned around again.
A frown was on her face as she scanned the device which had a holographic display which she slowly moved towards. Now, she was keeping her ears open for any noise from behind her but the voices, if there had been any at all, had ceased. She waited for a couple of minutes before she determined that there was nothing to worry about so she turned attention back to her task.
She saw that the lines that gave power to the device were currently inoperative, but they led underneath the floor so that's where she let her gaze go.
Her guess was right as her Focus automatically lit up a series of rotating connectors. Having done this more than once during her trip to FIREBREAK, she knew that she had to rotate the connectors so they connected to both each other and the main source of power which was the device.
Figuring out the proper way that the connectors were supposed to go in tandem with each other that connected to the device was something that had absorbed a few minutes of her time.
As she rotated the last connector and it clicked showing that it had been put properly into place the voices returned. They were loud enough that she could tell that at least one of them was a male and there were at least two female voices.
Aloy sprang backward and glanced around, but once again there was no one in the room aside from her. The smells of salt, the sea, and roses became even more pronounced and part of Aloy was telling her to abandon her mission, to leave and go back to Meridian and forget about this ruin so it was left alone once again.
She shook her head again; she hadn't come this far to leave now and would see this through. She was an explorer and a truth-seeker, so she'd continue to do both for as long as she could.
The flame-haired young woman realized that the device was partially on, the holographic display panels were proof enough of that but there was something else that wasn't allowing whatever the device was to get power.
Aloy grumbled a curse as she raked her gaze across the room. This ruin would be a lot like solving Deep Din, a ruin that she had had to navigate heavy, rushing water to traverse through. To the Old Ones, it had been a dam but to the Banuk people, it was an instrument that had been flooded. One that was used to tell many tales.
Of course, this was not a dam that was full of rushing water. It was a sinkhole that had a very unusual device in it that wasn't receiving all of the power that it should. She activated her Focus again and followed the power sources. "Okay, what am I missing here?" She muttered as she worked her way down so she started at the ceiling.
Having been raised on her own with only one other person, who only really spoke when he needed to do so, was quite lonely for a little girl. She had taken to talking to herself while she was exploring and just making small comments to nobody but herself. It was better than doing everything in silence, at least this way she could pretend there were other people around.
Aloy's eyes narrowed slightly as she gazed behind the device. There, hidden by the shadows of the room, was a grate. "Well, weren't you a difficult thing to find." She smirked slightly as she spotted it with the help of her Focus as it showed via visual overlay where the grate was. It had blended in so perfectly with the wall she wouldn't have seen it otherwise.
Using the acrobatics that had come so naturally to her to get up there would be the easy part, the hard part would be getting the grate open. She circled behind the device, examining it after a few light taps with the butt of her spear.
The meshing of the grate was heavily corroded as were the screws that kept the cover attached to the wall. It was tempting to use one of her blast bombs to blast it open, but the pressure and the proximity to the strange device itself made it a less than favorable outcome.
So, the hard way it was. Aloy sighed at the upcoming effort before she jammed the tip of the spear into one of the corners and began to work at removing the corroded screws.
After perhaps twenty minutes, she was on the last screw and wondering how it was possible for the smells of the room to become even stronger yet again.
It was times like these, when she was alone and surrounded by the past, that she actually missed Sylens. The former Banuk shaman had been a guide to her throughout her search for answers regarding what happened to the world, how it was saved, and why it was threatened again.
He was like her in the one way that he cared about, they both wanted knowledge and would go anywhere to get it, but she was not foolish enough to think he cared about her. It was an alliance of convenience nothing more than that. He wanted answers about the world and she was the person who could make it possible for that to happen.
She wasn't concentrating on how much force she was putting into the act of using her spear as a fulcrum before the final screw shot outwards. It landed on the other side of the device with a ping. "Well, that works, I guess," She muttered as she put her spear into the sling on her back.
She had explored many spaces on her journey, but this was ridiculously spacious. Soon enough, her exploration revealed why. The labyrinth of ductwork led her over abandoned living spaces, storage rooms, and a seemingly endless number of alternate pathways that she could go down and explore.
Finally, after a lot of traveling, she made it to a grate that overlooked a room that had three doors on the three walls that she could see. She wasn't sure if there was a fourth door below where she was, but she couldn't rule it out.
She had been in these ductworks for who knows how long and this was the only room that was designed the way that it was so she figured that this was where she'd get the answer to what that device. Or, at the very least a possible clue to where she could figure it out.
Aloy maneuvered herself so she was facing the way back before pulling out an unfinished bomb and placed one of its small components by the grate, marking her path when she returned.
Aloy knew she spent days down there, under the earth, but she wasn't sure how many. She had even lost count of the foraging trips up above. She wanted to know what the device did and it was a matter of personal pride now. But she also knew that it had waited hundreds of years to reveal its secrets and the time that frustrated her meant nothing to it. She had waited twelve years to get answers about her past, she was determined to get the secret of these ruins. She could wait a few more days.
She used some of the metal shards for her arrowheads to create a map on one of the walls in her basecamp which she marked as a star. The room with the three or four doors was designated as a question mark. The rest she methodically investigated to make sure that they were clear.
The bedrooms were undoubtedly for the staff of project REBIRTH. They must have abandoned the city above to the FAS staff and the Zero Dawn workers and sealed themselves in this part of the facility that's what she guessed from some of the datafiles anyway.
It wasn't just bedrooms and storage rooms though, there was what she guessed was a place for them to get food, a few science-related rooms, and one room she couldn't figure out the purpose of but it had an odd table with holes in it, sticks that were hanging on a rack and a lot of balls, some were solid colors and some were striped but all of them had numbers except for a solid white one.
Aloy figured it was just a game the Old Ones played like how Nora children played Pin the Horns on The Grazer and left it at that.
Finally, after days of exploring the other passageways and rooms, she made her way back to the chamber that held the three or four doors that piqued her interest. But it wasn't time wasted by any means. One never knew what was around the corner, good or bad. She had learned from experience to never take ruin delving lightly and especially if it was related to the mystery that you were trying to solve.
The first door led to nothing special other than a handful of heavily corrupted data files that once her Focus started attempting to restore once she scanned them.
The second door led to a passageway that was caved in and impassable. Not an unusual find in ancient ruins by any means.
The third one sent a shockwave down her spine as she moved to open it. Something caused all the hair on her arms and neck to stand up straight and that scared her. She moved down the corridor until it made a left turn and saw a wider corridor than the one that she had just come from.
There was a very loud, very mechanical sounding hum that she heard before she even entered the hallway, whatever was behind the door at the end of the hallway was massive. It didn't sound like a Corruptor or a Deathbringer but it didn't put her at ease.
What also didn't help was that corridor felt colder than the one she just left so she put two shock wires on the ground using her trip caster before grabbing three arrows and putting them on the bowstring as she moved slowly towards the door.
The noise only became louder as she approached the door which had been sealed from the inside and she could feel her nerves, which were already on edge, go on high alert. "Warning door integrity at two percent." She heard from her Focus.
It shuddered as a howl sounded and there was a slam from the other side. "Door integrity at one percent." Aloy's amber eyes widened as she ran back down the hallway away from it before the warning sign flickered and died as a large, black claw pried the door open.
It wasn't just black though there were white marks interspersed on the paw and leg as it moved its head, glaring at her with gleaming red eyes that were full of unbridled hatred. They reminded her of HADES and HEPHAESTUS's voices.
The wolf-like creature charged at her and she fired three arrows that sunk into its shoulder and leg. Quickly switching to her sling, she put a Chillwater bomb. A liquid chemical reaction that froze on contact as its vessel shattered.
It spasmed uncontrollably for a minute and she fired her Chillwater bomb at it which hit it point-blank covering it in frost and it almost creaked.
Chillwater, like Blaze and Sparker, was an element for creating a specific type of arrows or bombs. It could freeze machines in their tracks until she used her fire arrows. Many of the machines had this on their forms in some way and she speculated that it acted as a coolant to prevent them from overheating when they were first created.
At least for the machines that weren't the massive, combat-oriented, raptor-like Thunderjaws. She knew from experience how useful Chillwater could be as long as she didn't directly touch the liquid since it was freezing cold even in its storage containers.
It slowly shook its head before it charged. Thinking quickly, she dropped her sling before putting three Blaze arrows on her bowstring and firing. The creature howled in pain before it loomed over Aloy and batted her away.
She didn't notice that it knocked her Focus off of her ear as she pulled her spear off her back and charged towards it. The dark thing charged at her and pounced. She slid and stabbed it upwards into its chest causing it to howl again before flying into the wall.
Before it could get up, she stabbed it in the head and it crumbled completely. She began to circle it and observed it, it was unlike anything she had seen before it looked like a wolf but it was stronger and meaner. Her eyes widened as it dissolved into nothingness.
"What in the world just happened, that was bizarre." She spoke into the charged air as she moved into the doorway, the small hairs on her arms and neck lifted slightly again. Then just as quickly as it had come, the static vanished.
The room she stepped out into was massive, dwarfing the one that she had made her temporary home by far. The first thing that she noticed was the claw marks that were on the walls and floor, and the skeletons that were interspersed throughout it.
They looked like they had been mauled by… that thing since the corpses and the walls had the same, deep slashes in them but nothing else looked damaged.
Aloy was no stranger to seeing skeletons at this point but something ached inside of her. Maybe it was because they had survived the end of the world and were working on finding a new one but that they had been killed by whatever thing she had just fought before finding it made her pause for a moment.
There was a device that looked similar to the one in the room where she was except it was smaller, a lot smaller than its counterpart above. This one was white instead of black and where the strange red glyphs rested on the first, identical blue glyphs rested on this one.
The other side was dominated by a massive power transformer and substation that had wires carrying the power upwards. Aloy had no idea why this would be so far below the main complex but her best guess was that it had been constructed down here for REBIRTH. She wasn't entirely sure why but she was going off of the knowledge that she had acquired.
She was amazed that this was still working after all this time, she just needed a way to figure out what to do. Aloy circled around the transformer and substation until she came across something that didn't fit. A glowing green button that flashed silently in the middle of the panel it was embedded in. "Well, I imagine that this does what I think it does. Otherwise, I'm probably dead." She whispered before resting her hand on it and pushing down.
The transformer and substation, which had been loud beforehand, suddenly became a lot more deafening. Aloy put her hands over her ears in her a vain attempt to block it out. She moved to leave the room entirely and that's when she noticed that the smaller device was flickering slightly with blue sparks. It seems that it had begun to acquire enough power to turn on.
As she scrambled to leave the room and the door shut behind her, she didn't notice the device glow with a bright blue light and the middle of it had gone from a view of the wall to a shimmering canvas of white.
Aloy moved back to where she had first come into this section of the caves and hoisted herself back into the duct system using her grappling hook to climb.
She could hear the transformer and substation even as she crawled through the cramped ducts and until finally, it subsided. By the time it did, she had reached the place that she had called home for the last several days. As she started to exit, she noticed the device has begun to flicker with red sparks much like the blue ones from the one below.
She carefully dropped onto the floor and had just made it to the center of the room when the device shook. The soft voices that she had heard before were back except now they weren't soft anymore. They were loud, loud enough to be heard. The device shook violently as Aloy grabbed her head and winced, her vision going blurry.
One of the female voices called out, it was loud and full of concern. "BY? BY? BY!" Then a low, raspy, male voice sounded. "IRT! ONG?" like the female's voice it was full of concern. There were more than two but she couldn't tell what they were saying because they all seemed to be speaking at once.
Aloy dropped her spear and put both of her hands on the side of her head as they became even louder. She doubled over and swayed as she tried to remain on her feet. The last thing Aloy saw before her vision went black was the device turning a bright red color. Where nothing but a view of the wall had been before was an oppressive pool of black.
Finally remembered to port this from my AO3. The summary is a bit different but it can't be helped.
Anyway, Horizon is a series that is very near and dear to my heart. I 100% completed the first game and the Frozen Wilds because I love it that much and I am so excited to get Horizon Forbidden West when I'm able to.