Shadowbane

A couple of these cars look like they're in pretty good condition. Although, even if they remained untouched all these years, it'd still be really difficult to get them to run again, right? Or maybe even impossible.

I stopped halfway through the lot when I began to hear heavy footsteps from behind the building. At first I wasn't sure if they even were footsteps, since it just sounded like snow was being crushed enmasse, but once whatever it was stepped onto the lot's cement, it was obvious that it was a machine walking around.

About a minute later a familiar looking twelve meter tall machine walked around the right side of the building. Ahh shit, this is the half-dead machine I saw on the beach when I first arrived in Caedrus. A fully functioning one looks far more frightening...

While a butcher looked like a machine designed to match a medieval torturer, it was still full of openings that could be exploited. Its armor really didn't look all that protective. However, the machine in front of me was clearly of a much higher quality. Thick armor plating covered nearly every part of it, and the gun it had in its right hand was almost six meters long. I didn't know what kind of damage a weapon of that magnitude would put out, and I wasn't interested in finding out either.

I tried looking this machine up on the console at home, but there was no record of it, so I assumed it was a half-broken machine from the dead zone that somehow ended up in the high danger zone. A zone the people of Arcadia are known to frequent thanks to the forts. And yet, here I am seeing another one... Is it because nobody has ever made it this far? Nobody mentioned machines guarding emblems before, but what if...

I watched as the machine circled around the building, slowly disappearing behind it on the left side. Once it was out of view I hopped up onto the roof of a vehicle and waited for a little while, and sure enough, it re-appeared around the right side as it continued to circle the building.

It's definitely guarding the building... This doesn't bode well. I hope the inside isn't filled with machines, but it probably will be.

Once the large machine was out of view again I ran through the lot until I reached the front doors. I stopped in front of them and slowly made my way inside through the broken glass doors, finding myself in a normal looking lobby. A row of chairs (toppled and broken) lined the walls near the entrance, while there were two large angular desks placed against the walls in the middle of the room. Behind them was four separate doors, although only one door actually remained intact.

I brought the console up again and it read '0 Meters'. Bah, I know my Uncle warned me that it'd only give you an approximation of where it was, but still, I couldn't help but hope it wouldn't be this abstract.

Just then a warrior machine knelt down and entered the lobby through the right-side door before ducking into the middle door. Yep, of course they'd be in here... And the damn thing was carrying an energy weapon.

I walked to the left door (the only one that was intact) and turned the knob but it was locked. So for now I settled for looking through the small glass window on the door, which revealed a set of stairs going up and down. Hmm, I'll stick to this level for now, but it's nice knowing where the stairs are already.

I swiftly looked through the two desks behind me, stopping for a moment every time a warrior passed through the lobby. There was a bunch of drawers (and a few hidden ones for some reason), but sadly, I didn't find the emblem anywhere.

With that out of the way, I waited until the next Warrior patrolling through entered the open double doors in the middle and I immediately followed behind him, but I had to stop barely a few feet into the hallway because of the glass lining the floor. My feet would probably absorb enough noise to prevent Humans from hearing it, but I didn't want to risk it with a machine.

Once I could no longer hear the Warrior I walked through the hallway until I entered the next room which was the main factory floor apparently. Rusted machinery filled the room, and it had a thin layer of snow in it too since large portions of the roof had caved in.

I hopped onto the wall behind me so I could get a full view of the room. One, two, three.... Seventeen. There is seventeen Warriors patrolling this room. But that's not the biggest problem. The real issue is the other machine in the middle of the room.

An Observer. My 'mortal enemy' according to my Uncle, and I agreed with him after finding out what they were capable of. It's a large floating ball with a mechanical red eye that can see for miles and just so happens to have the most powerful soul scanner they've encountered to date. But you only need to worry about that when it's looking in your direction... Supposedly.

This was far riskier than the Sniper encounter, but I decided to wait until the Observer had finished spinning around. It was spinning ever-so-slowly toward the right as it looked around the room, and it was about to look in my direction.

As soon as the corner of its eye had reached me, the entire eye whipped to the right until the center of its eye was looking directly at me. I saw the black lines in the eye changing positions, almost like a lens focusing on something, and that's when all of the Warriors in the room turned to look at me. Oh hell no, I'm out!

After seeing that horror scene play out in front of me, I quickly leaped onto the floor and sprinted back toward the lobby.

I could feel a massive vibration rocking through the air. The sound was low in tone but the vibration was so powerful that the entire building was shaking. This was obviously the Observer's doing, and it was made even more apparent by all of the stomping I could hear as the Warriors inside the building all converged on the main factory room.

I stopped multiple times to hug the wall as several Warriors ran past me, and once I reached the lobby I could see the large machine from outside was ducking low so it could look inside the building.

I was going to hide in a corner of the ceiling until the machines calmed down, but I noticed that the locked doors to the stairs were wide open. Some of the Warriors must've came from another floor and opened them for me. I guess I'll head up for now and pray I find the emblem on a floor that doesn't have a fucking Observer in it.

Going up however, lead to the walkway above the factory floor, and while I did see a few rooms that were probably used by the higher ups back when this was an actual factory, I decided to check them out last. The room was filled with Warriors and they were jumping up and down from the walkway, training their weapons on every little noise, including those from other Warriors.

I headed downstairs this time, and came upon a heavy metal door with a keypad next to it. Fortunately, the Warriors had already opened it for me.

The inside of the room was filled with completely different types of machinery. These ones were made of the same alloy used to build Arcadia, and all twelve of them were the same. There was a podium holding the bottom half of the mold up, and the upper half was attached to the ceiling. And thanks to how they used molds, it was easy to figure out what these contraptions created. The very same energy weapons that the Warriors were holding. Plus, an even more worrying fact was that it was really hot in the room because several of them were currently creating more weapons while releasing a lot of heat in the process.

So this was a car making factory that coupled as a weapons factory? But this room is really small and only houses twelve creation units, isn't that a bit low? Or maybe that's all they needed... I'll show this to my Uncle and Bertram later. They'll understand all of this far better than I can.

I made my way through the room toward the door at the end, but I already knew what I was going to find since there was a bright white light on inside of it.

After walking through the door I glanced around for threats and found nothing, so I quickly looked through the desk in the 'office' but came up empty again. However, I did find a weird button attached to the underside of one of the drawers.

... Should I leave this for last? I feel like the Observer is associated with far more risk than this button, but I suppose this could lead to something even more dangerous.

After a minute of contemplation I just said 'fuck it' and pushed the button, which lead to part of the concrete wall sliding away, revealing a dimly lit-up passage behind it.

I waited a bit to make sure nothing dangerous was approaching before entering the passage. From there, I walked for what felt like fifteen minutes (and was confirmed through my console) as it constantly wound slightly down and toward the left, before finally opening up to a large open cavern full of walkways with old-school lights hanging off of them, and machines. Lots and lots of machines.

It looked like the Warriors were filling a rusted-up train full of boxes while two Observers spun around slowly in a way that would allow them to look at the ceiling too.

There were many exits out of the cave, with four of them having train tracks, but the only 'building' was a large cement one in the center of the cavern. One of the Observers was hovering on top of it.

I watched silently for ten minutes, making sure the Observers spinning wasn't random or altered as they moved, but it became clear that their movements were static and easy to read, so all I had to do was wait for the moment when both of them were looking away for me and then make my move.

As I was getting ready to jump down, the train began to move, releasing a lot of steam as it went. Again, none of this makes sense. These monstrous machines with some form of artificial intelligence are using an old steam train?

The Warriors and one Observer left soon after that through one of the non-tracked exits, resulting in only one occupant remaining in the cavern. The Observer on the roof.

Once it was looking away from me I jumped all the way down onto the cavern floor below, which was about a two hundred foot drop. It only took a split second to pass by the Observer and hit the ground, but in that moment I saw the Observer whipping in my direction again, so I quickly ran through the open door in front of me and hid behind a file cabinet near the wall.

It was hard to tell since my hearing was nowhere near as good as my sight, but it sounded like the vibrations the Observer gave off were right outside the door.

I snuck a quick peek from the corner, which just barely allowed me to see a tiny bit of the open door, and I could see part of the Observer behind it. It was definitely outside the door now, either looking around the Cavern or inside the building.

Soon after that the vibrations calmed down (I was late to realize that even the wall was vibrating), but I waited a couple of more minutes before peeking out to look through the door. There was nothing behind it, nor could I hear any vibrations anymore, so wherever it was, it wasn't close to the building.

Now that I could finally look around, I saw that the building was one massive warehouse with a single smelter covering the entire back wall. It was currently cooling down, but the temperature in the other side of the warehouse was still over eighty degrees Celsius according to the portable console.

After exploring the warehouse I found that most of the metal containers were empty, while a few had large shiny ingots lined up inside of them. They were silver or gray, but past that I didn't know what kind of metal they were made from.

As I neared the smelters I could see a yellow door on the right wall with a medium sized glass window next to it. The lights were on and it was clear that it was another office.

I walked up to the door and tried to turn the doorknob. Surprisingly, it opened right up.

The inside was just as basic as the other office above, with one exclusion. There was a Human skeleton sprawled out on a couch with a large metal rod piercing straight through his ribs into the couch. There was dried blood all over the couch as well, but it's not like I needed more evidence to know that whoever it was had been killed. Probably in their sleep too.

I closed the door behind me and sat down at the desk. Just like I had done previously, I attempted to turn on the console, and shockingly, it actually worked. I could see the monitor scrawling through lines of code as it booted up.

However, the first screen that popped up was requesting a password, which I obviously didn't have.

I tried looking through the drawers in the hope that he was the type to leave his password laying around nearby, but I couldn't find anything.

I really didn't want to leave it at that though, so I attempted to look up some way around this with my portable console, and it suggested booting up in 'safe mode'. I didn't know what the difference would be, but I followed its instructions and the console did in fact boot up in this so called 'safe mode'.

The portable console had warned me that I'd have limited access, but I was still happy to be able to look through the desktops folders. That is, until I saw what was actually in them.

There was a folder full of pictures showing a man in different aspects of his life. Work (this place), fishing, shoveling snow, etc. And the other folder had a few text files written by the foreman here, but he sadly didn't talk about anything that wasn't already known in Arcadia. He was mostly griping about his wife and how his kids don't appreciate him. I could've found this hard-hitting commentary literally anywhere else in Aetheria.

I attempted in vain to open everything else, but anything that wasn't on the desktop wouldn't load thanks to the safe mode, so that was all the information I could pry out of the console. The other option was carrying back the entire console and letting the people in Arcadia break through its encryption, but I really didn't want to lug the large work console all the way to the dead zone. The area around me was already dangerous enough as is, and I fully expected the Inoue emblem to be much more dangerous.

I was about to turn the console off when I noticed something. The photos were all named a long string of numbers, but it cut off after four letters. 'Hoth'. I looked at the photos properties and saw the name 'William Hothgar Sr.'

So the foreman was a Hothgar huh... He might have information about the emblem on the console but I can't fucking access it.

I stood up and started combing through the room. There was a large contraption with a blank piece of paper laying on the top of it, but I wasn't sure what it was for, and a cursory glance proved there was nothing there anyway.

I then opened the large locker next to the couch and froze when I saw what was inside of it. The emblem. It was hanging on two notches sticking out of the back of the locker, and it was only half visible thanks to William's extra work outfit that was hung up inside the locker.

It wasn't easy to find, but it also wasn't hard either... But hey, I'm more than satisfied with this kind of mild victory.

I reached out and picked the emblem up. Two things happened in quick succession after that. A clicking noise occurred when I picked it up and a second later a very loud alarm began blaring all throughout the factory. But it wasn't just that though. I could also feel the building vibrating as the Observer began to call for help.

I removed my invisibility and powered my halo as I pulled the pipe out of the couch. I then blasted through the door and ran through the warehouse until I was outside, upon which I immediately spotted the Observer about thirty feet away next to the warehouse looking at me. I powered my arm up and threw the pipe at the center of the Observer's eye. I wasn't sure of how powerful its defenses would be, but they weren't enough to withstand my attack, as the pipe went straight through the Observer's eye and exited out the back. The Observer stopped vibrating and went dark as it fell onto the ground.

I knelt down in preparation to jump back to the top level just as Warriors came running out of two different exits, firing their energy guns at me all the while. I ignored them and jumped all the way up to the ceiling, where I swiftly pushed myself down toward the walkway below.

I landed on it and dashed toward the door I came in from earlier. Down below I could see half of the Warriors leaping onto the walkway below me while the other half continued to fire at me, hitting a few of their allies in the process.

As soon as I reached the stairs I could hear a cascade of stomping above me, so instead of running up the stairs I repeated my ascent I just did a moment ago, I knelt down and leapt up to the ceiling, flying past dozens of Warriors. Three of them managed to grab onto me, but all they did was drain some of my mana as their arms were torn off.

I hit the ceiling and launched myself forward, smashing through two Warriors before my feet hit the ground. I slid forward until I reached the lobby and that's when I realized that my plan to just power through everything and then hide outside had a fatal flaw. Something I had forgotten in my haste.

The Machine outside was looking through the lobby again. This time its red eyes were glued to me, and while I could ignore the Observer advancing toward me from the factory, the problem was that I could see two other Observers surrounded by Warriors out in the vehicle lot coming this way. They obviously weren't there earlier, and I don't know where they came from, but that was something I either had to quickly deal with, or attempt to run away from, and I chose the latter.

I ran toward the lobby exit and the large machine straightened itself out in preparation to fire at me, and fire at me it did. It was close to one round a second, and each impact would result in a mini-explosion. I dodged the first one and was propelled forward as it exploded. I rolled along the ground for barely a second but the amount of Warrior's weapon spray and the impending second shot from the large machine made that second feel like an eternity.

I righted myself and bolted forward, this time managing to not get knocked down by the blast. And completely by chance I dodged a Sniper shot from ahead of me as I shimmied to the right to avoid the large machine's third round, which had just blown up four vehicles on impact. Shit, shit! This isn't going to cut it!!

I could see that there were two Snipers now charging up in the distance, and several Butchers were running through the snow toward me. I sprinted toward the right as the end of the building came into view, giving me what I thought was a nice shield from the large machine for a moment, but apparently he didn't care if the building was in the way, which also resulted in another revelation about the rounds he was firing. They were exploding when they hit the building, when they exited the building, and when they hit the ground around me. Needless to say, the building wasn't going to serve as a visual impediment for very long. It was already partly collapsing after only six seconds had passed.

It only got worse from there though. The Butchers were close, too close. So I decided to risk it and flew up into the air. Dodging the large machine's rounds and the Snipers was easier in the air, but the spray from the Warriors was finding their mark quite often purely by default. There was just no way to dodge all of the multi-colored beams flying past me, and it wasn't long before I saw nine different large red lights flare up in different parts of the environment.

The second all of the anti-air guns began firing at me I angled down toward a large home with an Observer on top of it. It tried fleeing, but I blasted right through it and into the house.

I then frantically searched for a basement door, which took me only a few seconds to find but I'll be damned if those four or five seconds didn't feel like two years.

I ran down the steps into a carpeted basement with two couches, a console, and a large TV placed in a divot in the wall. I was about to move the TV forward so I could punch a hole out behind it while praying the machines didn't find it, but then I saw a sliding door that led to a washer, dryer, and two large boilers.

Between the dryer and boilers should work! I began punching the ground between two appliances, swiftly creating a deep hole that was big enough for me to fit in and continue digging, but not big enough that the dryer would fall through it. So I pulled the washer back, and then got into the hole and pulled the dryer over the hole. I couldn't see anything as I began punching deeper and deeper. The ground above me began to vibrate as I punched one last time. However, instead of merely making the hole deeper, my fist went straight through the rock and I had to stick myself to the side of the wall so I wouldn't fall down through the new opening.

Below me was a tunnel with minimal lighting and a set of train tracks lining the ground. There weren't any machines around so I took this moment to turn invisible and crawl along the ceiling until I reached the wall.

I created a camo mesh and pulled the pack off my back before settling into it so I could eat and drink for a bit.

It's highly likely an Observer could see through my camo, but if this area is reserved for the trains and only the trains, then I shouldn't need to worry about Observers for the time being. Although, if they find the hole I created in the basement then things could quickly become problematic. It's unlikely they would though. Only the Warriors can fit through the home's doors, and if they decide to destroy the house looking for me, then that would only help conceal me.

I broke open several of the blueberry cereal bars and began eating them.

Well, I think it's safe to say that even if a group did manage to make it all the way to that factory, there's no way they would have survived long enough to secure the emblem. And I may have been fine this time, but I can't be repeating what just happened near the dead zone... There's no guarantee that I'll even have the option to stay stealthed the entire time, but even so, I need to avoid making a scene again.

I slowly twisted open the cap to one of the sodas so as to avoid the sound of decompressing air echoing through the walls of the tunnel. Once it was open I drank the entire bottle while thinking about a specific machine that I truly never wanted to see again.

... The Observers have a simple design and yet they were still far worse than I expected, so I really hope there isn't a 'dead-zone' equivalent of them waiting for me over there.