The Foundry | Part One | Chapter Eight
the next chapter of my forthcoming novel
The Foundry
by Daphne Garrido
Part One | Thrice Bled Heart
Part Two | Rebuilt; Refound; Reclaimed
Part Three | Dominion
Chapter Eight
Jagged remains of the cityscape were smoldering, its buildings actively crumbling in fits and spurts with tremors from the planet below. Everything was cast in deepest red — the sun here burned like a fire.
Echo had been a bit scared of this one the first time around. She’d never a chosen to practice with, and knew her focus was more rightly needed upon The Gauntlet. Still, this simulated machine with which she was now a part would be most familiar, it was a warship unfolded, the mech inside let out; a warrior.
There was no intelligence within, and Echo’s immersion into its senses were far more muted than the ‘real deal’, but she’d have fullest control over this beast of war. It would be an equal to that one seen directly ahead of her, in that farthest distance, with Rory inside.
A timer was counting down in the bottom-left corner of her heads-up display. Echo could move her craft’s arms, turn its head, futz with the controls she’d have over its many means to maneuver and wield brutality.
She let it get to her head; what Instructor Salus said.
Rory had this installed into the curriculum personally, and that meant she’d spent plenty of time here. This worried Echo. Tings did feel a bit different — more density to the city, a higher level of reality to it all, something quite unlike before. There were even tools hidden within her mech she’d not realize until far after the fight.
Echo let go of the worry, it wouldn’t help her now. She was going to use this opportunity to take every bit of the hurt she’d stowed inside, from the way in which this woman had chosen to discard her, and she was going to use it to send a message.
When the timer hit zero she’d begun transformation, jetting straight up with those thrusters at the base of her mech’s feet, while they still appeared to exist, before folding them in as she took the form of speed. Echo noticed Rory had begun charging, only to hold back in recognition of what she’d chosen as her opening move.
She so enjoyed setting the stakes ajar with a bit of the unexpected. It drew out opportunity, and that could be exploited for her gain. This was where her plan ended, however, from here it would be a matter of flow. Under that dark ruby sky, she’d cut a path around the circumference of the city while rapidly taking on elevation.
Rory had begun to open fire, three ways, all at once. There were missiles borne from the left and right flanks of her mech’s rear plating. She’d also let loose some swerving little devil only seen in the moment as a glint reflecting in the crimson sun. From their mech’s chest had come that last piece of the salvo, a crackling beam of energetic destruction, one which seemed to have no end once it blasted meters past the nosecone of Echo’s warship.
Rolling, knowing it wouldn’t be enough as that constantly streaming blood-red death ray tore after her, there was only a prayer inside this would work.
Echo launched countermeasures, and she began transformation mid-air, choosing to lose the rear thruster harness entirely within the process. It’s plasmic-octane flames still burned as Rory’s beam had struck it directly upon that hyper-reactive blue inferno.
Twisting in air, having a briefest moment to catch the richest detail in that gradient of darkness and light within the clouds above, mass lost from parts which would only serve that jet-fighter form she’d shed, Echo dove.
She’d heard it first, the burst of fury above and behind, then saw its doings upon the beam still hoping to track her down. Return fire, shot down the length of its scarlet pipework, a cobalt force of retributive wrath which would make its landfall long before the ray might catch her.
Rory released its streaming from her chest, realizing what was about to befall the planet. They’d fired jets on the backside of their warrior’s form — making just enough distance, getting only that needed bit of air to clear the rooftops — before the blast of falling plasma released an explosion which threw them half across the city by its force.
She rode it like a wave atop the ocean’s of Atreya, carving a smoothest arc out of the propulsion it wrought from her craft.
There was clink quite heard. Echo felt it too — on the left-side of her mech’s torso — that was the last sense she’d had of the machine before its systems cut clean out.
Tumbling in freefall, no control without her thrusters to wield, watching the city pass by the sky, pass by the city in repetition, she’d been glad to witness the release of those missile’s devastation far above, having taken the bait of her countermeasures left behind.
Echo realized this could be it, and she hadn’t been able to see Rory once in her many rotations, especially considering she’d needed to close her eyes and breathe in prayer she not get sick by the sight of motion. She’d just waited, falling, some stillness recognized in her energy — separating consciously from the craft she’d been controlling so intimately in preparation for its violent demise — repeating to herself the manta, “You’ll be fine.”
There was a sputter of clicking repetition, a rising whirl of electronic awakening, and she was pleased to find the booting mechanisms on this craft quite capable of a brevity she’d not ever discover in herself.
All the better. To have control back, halting that dreadful spinning death-drop into a contained fall — wondering if there were some mechanisms within this fighter-form which could hold her from the certain doom rushing in from below — Echo fired all of its newly earth-facing thrusters, realizing they’d be far from enough.
A newest bad idea formed in her mind, and she’d not have time to consider another. There was weaponry stowed withing the lower-arm shielding which she hadn’t time to test. One in particular had her heart thudding in a most resounding sense of precognitive recognition as she’d scrolled through them in those final moments.
Pointing each fist towards the furiously encroaching earth, and without a single notion what it might do, Echo fired that weaponry at the ground below her, watching its seismic ripples reverberate the air beside her mech’s matte-grey leg armor.
Something in her knew to hold that mental-trigger, to let it pour by sight of its workings, realizing it a flowing force most pertinent to her current needs. The weight it bore back into her craft’s hands and wrists, arms and shoulder, up into its back and neck was unlike anything she’d felt in such a simulation.
Her thrusters had blown smoke and debris widely before impact. She’d landed with the force-gravity still blasting from her gauntlets; hard, fists crushing into the earth and even throwing her shoulders back as she held fire a second too long. Only one of its knees had taken to the ground before she’d risen back up to stand.
No time to react, they’d cut right through the fog of war, taking Echo’s mech by the throat and driving her straight back by force their thruster’s might.
Echo’s head made first impact. Rory was maiming a building with her — grip most firm, forcing her backward, having taken their other arm under her shoulder to prevent its workings against them, and making sure she’d felt every one of those crushing series of impacts.
They’d bore a whole through a couple of buildings in that run they made together, at least, it felt that way to Echo, as the time past in such a blur. She’d been scrambling to orient herself through it all somehow. Realizing her plan to take off so boldly had been awful. That she’d been ‘fucked from the very beginning’, as she would insist in abundance for such time to come.
Rory threw her down in some square of this disaster zone of a city, itself still quaking beneath them, more debris having fallen about in the thirty-three seconds since this all began. Her mech was ruined, but she’d not want to go like this. There was no hope. Rory was coming in for the kill. It would’ve been wise to dissociate more from the craft, instead of struggling and insisting at her attempt to stand back up.
Grabbing the back of Echo’s skull with their fist, Rory dragged them through the street. They’d struggled at first, until she’d used a concerted blast of that same force gravity to blow her legs clean off.
Rory wasn’t done. They’d not let her off without putting on a show. They took her apart piece by piece. Echo could hear them laughing — she hadn’t even known they could speak to each other in this battle.
Struggling there to find a way she could shout something back, wishing like hell there’d been an instructional session before all this, Echo’s head was finally removed in whole — Rory ripped it off.
This apocalypse was over.
Echo rested in the hardchair with her eyes closed for a longest time. There was so much residual pain, and layers of post-traumatic stress she’d be unpacking for the rest of her life, but the reason she hadn’t opened them was only shame.
This hadn’t gone at all like she’d imagined.
There was a ritual in ceremonies like these, however. While she was sitting in horrified reflection of her failure, listening to the dead-silence of her classmates — except that briefest laughing eruption, from whom Echo had correctly guessed was that tattoo-faced creatin — she found relief in knowing there would at last be a chance to look this woman in the eye.
A handshake was to be had after a battle.
Just taking that deepest sighing breathe she needed, uncaring if it made her sound or look any worse, Echo finally opened her eyes.
Rory was talking the Instructor Salus; shaking his hand. They hadn’t made the move yet. Echo didn’t know if it was in their body language, the energy of the room, or from her knowing the evil ways of this woman like the back of her hand, but she could feel exactly what was about to happen.
They just started to leave. Rory gave a little wave to the class as Echo unbuckled her belt as fast as she could, not realizing what was overcoming her, yet finding it most important to her every sense of being.
Dimitri Salus got knocked right on his ass, and Echo had done that on purpose, though she’d later pretend it was an accident; she’d known he would try and stop her.
Maybe they didn’t believe her capable of such a thing, perhaps they’d not heard any of what was happening behind them, but Echo swore Rory was goading her by their complete lack of reaction as she’d chased them down.
Her mind had been set, upon setting this explosive bearing, to grab one of their shoulders and spin them around. Yet, with the rage she felt, how they continued to taunt her with their indifference, Echo had just put her shoulder right through their back.
There was a flash of thought what Cameron might be thinking just before they’d hit the ground, but that impact sent Echo sprawling in such a way the notion would leave her almost immediately. She’d gone too hard. Having forced Rory into a nosedive herself, she’d been sent into a spiral, legs flailing as she lost all semblance of balance.
Rory had gotten onto the back of Echo in an instant, furious, struggling with both of her strongest hands to contain their arms from behind. They’d tried to roll and she pinned them with her knees, taking a fistful of their hair, gifting a fiercest sense of déjà vu from the way she’d dragged her through that street.
Echo wasn’t a fighter, but she found some knowing urge within her. She’d used what little movement she had in her restrained arms to slide as far back as possible beneath Rory’s legs, and planted her feet and palms to push, lifting them onto her back and into the air.
Standing completely erect, feeling how Rory had left her own feet, Echo threw herself back as hard as she could. There was a wrist around her throat before they’d crashed to the ground. A cracking was heard, then a growl from their mouth, and a clawing swipe of nails across of Echo’s face.
She’d screamed then, with such force upon her eyes in the action causing a fear of lost sight — twisting towards them in the blooming realization of horror at what she’d done here, grasping at the arms of Rory now pushing themselves away.
“Fuck you!” Echo shouted.
“I fucking hate you!”
Recognizing the sensations of blood on her hands, having no idea where it came from, she’d felt the presence of others joining the space around her. Venturing to open her eyes, Echo discovered them only blurred.
As she’d blinked through tears, and searched through the crowding mass of those too late to make a difference — she’d regathered enough focus just in time to see. And there she’d been, walking right out the door, never once having looked Echo in the eyes how they’d felt such a right to demand. Holding firm in the way she cut them out, and in glory of how she wiped the floor with them in such efficiency before their peers, leaving them in broken dishonor.
Despite those words which hung on the air, and how much hate was burning through all of that chest surrounding her heart, she’d found herself internally resolving something most familiar regarding that dreadful woman.
‘She’s so fucking cool.’
