My beam crackles through the sky, striking him again as he fires two rockets in my direction at the same time.
The first whistles overhead, exploding the main entrance of Lethe’s fortress.
The second missile crashes to the concrete stairs too close to me and my vision turns to black.
My eyes open to a blurred reality.
A high-pitched ringing muffles noises I can barely make sense of, glass, hoarse howls of men in the distance, the cries of the injured on both sides, but over it all, the gunfire. The gunfire never stops. It never will.
Rocks and shards of metal return to the ground around me.
I landed on my stomach, blown from the fiery remnants of their last turret. In shock. Defenseless. My brain, buffering, unable to finalize a thought or find any sense of urgency.
Over the square the rouge enforcer spirals out of control, smashing to earth in a giant pillar of scrap and smoke.
The scene plays across my eyes. The Lethe pilot leaps into the air, last minute, from the crashing enforcer, slamming to the ground.
What in the fu..
At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing.
I didn’t want it to be true. How could it be?
He’s just a man…
Titanium fist denting the cracked asphalt as he lands, he looks at me unfazed. Staring directly into my eyes, Oriyen rises.
“Is this what you wanted, Eros? This the peaceful future you long for?” he says, his palms up, offering the death and agony surrounding us.
As I look around, I see piles of stray limbs and dead machines, destruction, pain. Once good men and women are now no longer recognizable as human or machine. Everywhere, blood, as red as morning sun peeking over the dunes of the Outlands.
“You created this! Alongside anyone unwilling to stop it! Not me! Don’t you put this on me, Oriyen! Injustice can only live for so long. This is the only future for tyranny!”
“Don’t you see? You let their lies blind you, Eros. Without Lethe, you’d be dead a long time ago! You are the tyrant!”
“That doesn’t give them a free pass to do whatever the fuck they want! They need to be held accountable for what they’ve done!”
He treads closer, stopping just meters away, loosening the cuffs to his suit. “Accountable to who? You? You are but a speck, a shit smear in the sand to the Lethe Corporation. A zero. You are a nobody! You’ve done absolutely nothing for humanity! Why should we all be held accountable to you or any of your worthless rebels!?”
“I believe everyone deserves equal rights and treatment regardless of our differences, and we’re no longer asking.” I leap for a dead droid’s blaster, but Oriyen grabs me by the throat with a speed I’ve never seen before.
“I’ve killed you once. I’ll kill you again.” He lifts me with one arm and throws me across the cracked pavement. At a distance of at least 6 meters of open space, he covers it in the time it takes me to blink and hits me. He strikes me twice with his metal fists and my face hits the ground. Before I can think to defend myself, he pulls me to my feet by my neck and punches me again.
The earth spins and my eyes decline to focus on anything.
Back to the ground, the face of Oriyen towering over me blocks my views of the whirling stars.
The grains of shifting sand on the concrete under his shoe grind at my ruptured eardrums.
He clears his throat.
I can’t get up.
I find his eyes, cold, dark. They lock with mine.
He places his shoe over my neck.
“All of this, for nothing.”
Before the words leave his lips, he’s pushing down, crushing my airway.
I’m choking.
I try to pry free, but he’s too strong.
Consciousness fading in and out.
I don’t have much longer.
My hand just barely wraps around the edge of the scorpion on my belt.
Seconds before the world turns black, I press the button and hit Oriyen in the heart with it.
The look of disbelief never left his face as the explosion ripped through him.
A twinge of remorse registers, but I’m too far away to feel it anymore. Too tired.
I stay there for a minute lying on my back soaked in his blood, wishing for this nightmare to end.
“Eros! You dead?” the tender but fierce voice of Selene.
Leaning up I see her running towards me. Niko, and Hector, a few paces behind. The war still playing in the background, a song no man should ever have to hear.
“I’m alive.”
“We have to get to the basement and shut down the brain powering these things ourselves if we’re going to end this. There’s too many of them!” The last of her words barely audible over the thunder of a smoking Lethe enforcer smashing into the tower above.
Niko helps me up, looks deep in my eyes, and pats me on the back, before turning to lead the way into Lethe tower.
The entrance is blasted, a huge hole with a few droids and a couple of Suits guarding it.
Selene kills them all but a droid.
Hector rips its head off with his bare hands to save ammunition.
We step inside Lethe Tower, smoke lingering at our ankles.
Emergency lights flash red.
Alarms from every piece of tech wail in unnerving unison.
Our path is direct. No hesitation in our steps.
With Niko at the lead, we round a marble fountain at the center of a room surrounded by smaller rooms, empty glass prisons, identical to the ones Leon described. A golden eagle is perched on top of the fountain. Water flows from its talons, the bluest water I’ve ever seen. DEUS EX MACHINA,engraved in gold around the base. We descend down the stairwell behind it, Lethe footsteps right on our ass.
Hector silently elects to stay behind and hold them off. No one dares argue with him.
The door at the bottom opens to a long corridor. Empty, a sole light at the end draws us closer. Mystifying shades of purple, blue, and green dance around the edges of the door, inviting us behind
