The hanger was bright and larger than the inside of any building I’ve ever seen. There were probably over five thousand clinks in the hanger, minus the row that was destroyed from the first railgun blast. Some of them looked brand new, others had slight dust and paint variations on them, then others looked weathered. All of them were standing up dormant, unaware that I was running through their ranks towards the balcony that overlooked the North side of the hanger. There were a series of doors up there that would most likely lead to where they were manufactured, hopefully where Norman would also be.

Gunfire rattled the walls of the hanger from the ensuing gunfight, the occasional beam of light passed near me into the side of the hanger or into the ground before taking down a few more dormant clinks. There was a service lift that led up to the balcony from the hangar floor. The lift was already engaged when I reached it – heading down towards me. I hid behind a nearby pillar and readied my rifle for whatever was going to come off of the lift.

Within a few moments the steel lift dropped to the floor and slowly opened up its doors. Something was standing in the center of the platform.

A massive clink, close to seven feet tall, stood in the center of the platform. It had a large frame with reinforced armor on its joints – most likely impervious to anything my rifle could fire at it. The strip in the center of its cranial piece was glowing red as it scanned around it. It was carrying a long, tube looking apparatus on its right arm and the barrel of a large caliber rifle in the other. Unlike the other clinks, it was more natural in its movement and was looking frantically at the rows of clinks in front of it. It wasn’t long until it noticed me standing behind the pillar.

We both fired at the same time – the bullet from my rifle scrapped along the side of its head, flying off into the distance of the long hanger. The giant fired from the long tube in its right hand that sent a projectile the size of a fist flying through air only inches off from the pillar I hid behind. The projectile landed a couple dozen meters behind me and exploded on the ground, sending floor tile and chunks of clink machinery into the air around it.

The weapon on its left arm was firing now, bending the shape of the steel pillar. The apparatus was loading in a second projectile. If the pillar gets hit by that large of an explosive, I would most likely be turned into powder along with it. Looking above me I noticed that the balcony was shaking with each bullet that rattled the pillar, the giant had left from the platform on the lift and was walking towards me right under the balcony.

I was standing at the corner of the pillar waiting for it the canon to fire again. They were a delay between the transitions from machine gun to canon – I watched as the giant shifted its weight to its right side to compensate for the recoil of the blast. In the instant that the canon fired – I ran and jumped for cover in the rows of clinks, pulling one down with me to shield me from the impact of the blast.

The pillar imploded and fell down upon itself, bringing the balcony down with it. In the split second it took to fall down – the giant was extending its hand upwards to catch the balcony. Its metallic palms caught both sides of the falling balcony and suspended it in the air above it. The weight was barely buckling the giant’s strength as it held it above it. While immobile, the giant was a big open target for me.

I aimed my rifle towards its joint which was clearly being stressed by the weight of the balcony, firing every round in the rifles magazine. 7.62mm rounds smacked every visible surface of the giant aided by the electrical current in its adapted barrel, but to no avail. The bullets barely left a dent in the thick alloy of the giant’s armor – I needed something more powerful.

All around me were thousands of armed clinks carrying a variety of weaponry. Unless the giant managed to crush itself under the weight I needed to find something to better equip myself. The rifle I was carrying laid on the floor from where I last fired as I ran down the rows of clinks inspecting the weapons they carried as I went along. Most were carrying similar rifles to what I was firing before, what I was looking for was a railgun.

By the time I created some distance between myself and the giant clink – it was able to move the balcony off from itself and regain its footing. Through the rows of clinks I could see the top of its head moving back and forth through the rows looking for me. Since I had no thermal signature it would be near impossible to track me down– he would have to inspect my physical appearance through the hundreds of clinks that stood between me and him. The unfortunate part was that the clinks weren’t standing in any order making it more difficult to track down the stronger armaments.

The gunfight was starting to pick-up outside as more and more rifle fire went off – I just hoped that Henry could hold them off long enough for me to get past the giant – Henry was lucky that the giant hadn’t gone straight for him along with the other clinks.

My retinas raced to find something powerful enough to fight it off. As I searched what was in the hands of the clinks a burst of gunfire erupted from behind me. The frames of dormant clinks dropped to the floor as the giant fired aimlessly at the ranks of clinks in front of it – destroying them to create a path through the rows. The machine gun on its arm was strong enough to penetrate through a few clinks before the rounds went flying off into the distance of the hangar. It had no way of knowing where I was, but it knew I was close and didn’t mind taking down hundreds of its allies to find me.

I could see something heavy hanging from the hands of a clink fifty meters away from me – it looked like a railgun. Unlike the one Henry was using, this one looked longer and bulkier – hopefully this meant higher damage input.

As I ran the sudden movement of doing so must’ve alerted the giant to where I was because large caliber rounds began flying over my head and hitting the clinks within 5 meters of me. One of the explosive balls flew overhead and exploded to the left of me- sending me flying into a nearby clink. I was on the ground over top of the clink, looking at its head that erupted into a ball of flame as one of the giant’s rounds hit its head.

Racing towards the railgun now, freshly off from the destroyed clink, more and more clinks dropped around me and I could sense the edges of my clothing being torn from the force of nearby bullets pacing me. The railgun laid in the hands of a clink only a meter away from me now, but before I could grab it another explosion went off nearby and sent me flying forwards.

When I got up from the blast I saw that the railgun was laying on the floor now and the clink who was once holding it was filled with shrapnel that made it look like a piece of shredded sheet metal. That’s when I looked down at myself and saw that there were holes that littered the front of my clothing. Upon feeling my back I felt that most of the fabric was torn off and shrapnel pierced straight through me. My sensors reported no fatal damage, but my chassis was breached and my synthetic shell was severely cracked. The damages weren’t enough to deter me from picking up the railgun from the ground and facing it towards the direction of the giant.

Henry and I briefly worked together to figure out how the railgun works while we followed the convey. There was a switch in front of the main trigger that was used to select the energy capacity of the blast, level 1 being the minimum of 15% while level 5 was 100% charge capable of piercing through almost anything. The tablet on the side of the railgun displayed all the info of the weapon; ammo count, remaining power and even best suitable distance of the shot.

I pressed the switch to its max power and watched as the barrel became heated with strong currents of electricity. It took approximately thirty seconds for the railgun to reach to maximum capacity – it would dissolve everything in its path.

The head of the giant was nearing my position – fifteen meters if I had to guess. Clinks crumpled as the giant pushed them aside to get closer to where I was – no longer firing it’smachine gun aimlessly into the crowd that stood between us. Ten seconds remained to fully charge the weapon and I could feel the vibrations of the giant growing near. In the last five seconds the giant was almost two meters away from me, staring me, while it aimed its machine gun straight towards my head.

A snap and flick sound came from the machine gun, but no smoke or flash came from the barrel. The feed on the side of the weapon was flickering waiting for ammo that was no longer there – it must’ve blown through its ammunition while clearing a path. The moment the railgun signalled that it was fully charge – my finger squeezed the trigger in a millisecond unleashing the full force of the railgun.

The beam from the railgun took a few pieces of skin from my hands as it fired – most likely a prototype that was never tested at this high of a charge. The electricity created a bright red beam that flew from the barrel like a shooting star. The beam shot straight through the giants shoulder where half of its arm and part of its torso completely evaporated from the railgun blast – sending its weapon crashing to the ground along with the few remaining clinks that stood behind it. The shot crashed in the hangar wall that the rest of the balcony was attached to – causing that section to warp and distort from the implosion of the blast. I just hoped Norman was nowhere near it.

The giant was leaning now on its other arm – it’s optical were flashing red and white as its internals were no doubt being fried from the blast of electricity running through it. Alerts were flashing in the corner of my vision alerting me to the both physical and electrical damage that my body was facing – it was miracle that the railgun didn’t explode in my hands while I fired.

I lifted myself off from the ground that I found myself sitting on. The railgun in my hands was still buzzing from the shot as I held it. I thought everything was over – I was wrong.

The giant was now attempting to shift its weight to the arm that was recently dissolved, the same thing it did before to shift it’s weight between firing the guns. The canon that remained was sliding backwards on the giant’s wrist as another large shell was loaded into the barrel.  The optical of the giant was still flashing the white and red which meant that it still couldn’t properly function, but at this range it wouldn’t have to aim that hard if it wanted to succeed in hitting me. By this time I was already holding down the secondary trigger that charged the blast of the railgun – only to be alerted that power levels were unstable and couldn’t calculate maximum energy output. The giant fired the canon – shooting at least five feet above me and only succeeding in flying off towards the roof where it exploded in midair.

There was no telling if the railgun was charged enough to fire again – the tablet was melting and the electric buzzing was rising sharply. Once the giant managed to regain its balance it was already loading another shot into the cannon aimed close enough to rip us both to shreds if it fired again. My finger pulled the trigger of the railgun and nothing happened – the buzz grew sharper and I could feel the rifle vibrating in my hands like it would fly off any moment. The only indication of what was happening was the tablet screen vaguely flashing a red “ERROR” sign across it – the battery was about to explode. 

Before the next shell could ever be loaded into the clink’s canon I took the opportunity to run up right next to it, without it even knowing I was there, and jamming the barrel of the railgun into the hole in its shoulder. Before either explosion went off – I was sprinting as fast as my body would let me towards the lift. One of the railings from the balcony was blocking the door of the lift and would need to be removed before entering, behind me the buzzing from the railgun roared so loudly that I could no longer hear the frequency that it was on. The gunfight on the other side of the hanger was drowned by the loud sound of the buzzing – the final swan song of the plasma core before it erupted.

The railing gave away after some struggle – but the lift was taking off slowly from the weight of the collapsed balcony on top of it. As long as I managed to get above ground and into one of the rooms on the balcony floor I should be far enough away from the blast. Looking above me I could see a hole in the wall created from when I fired the railgun, showing a dark room lit only by red light. The giant was scanning frantically around it most likely looking for its target before it fired the canon again. The lift was still a few meters away from reaching the level of the balcony, but I knew the core of the railgun would explode at any moment. Right before the explosion I jumped off from the edge of the platform towards the opening in the wall – trying to catch its steel edges as I did so. Before I had the chance to grip the edge the explosion went off and sent my body flying straight through the opening of the room.

The last thing my memory managed to record before making impact with the ground was that I was now flying through a glass room that connected to a series of others down a long hallway – then my vision went blank.

Next Chapter: Chapter Sixteen: Lucy