EP.2 — Mountains of Corpses, Seas of Blood (10)
Underland.
By its very nature, Underland was a gloomy city — dark and hushed, a place where every element of desolation had been rolled into one suffocating whole.
If Sanctum was a dazzling city that never slept, then Underland was the shadow cast beneath all that light.
But not today.
Ear-splitting thunder and scorching flashes of light drove the darkness back. And at the heart of all that chaos thundered an armored vehicle by the name of Revenant.
"Hold on tight!"
"To what?"
"Anything!"
With a deafening roar, the Revenant's massive frame charged headlong into Voltech's makeshift barricade. The gunmen still squeezing their triggers, along with the vehicles they'd arrived in, went pinwheeling into the air like bowling pins.
KRA-BOOOOM!
"GWAAAAH!"
Pelted by a baptism of bullets, the Revenant burst out of Underland's darkness — and the moment it did, Ash shouted.
"Miss Siren! Guide the way!"
Siren, still dizzy from the brutal impact, snapped back an answer.
"To where?! Where are you going?!"
"The surface levels!"
Ash worked the wheel, eyes locked on the road ahead, and continued without missing a beat.
"Up there, they won't dare show this kind of hostility! Sanctum's unwritten law binds even Voltech!"
Sanctum's unwritten law.
It referred to the highest-tier protocol that ZOT, the AI governing Sanctum, applied universally to every citizen and corporation alike.
Its contents were devastatingly simple.
Of course, ZOT didn't control every last act of violence within Sanctum.
Interceding in the brawls and murders unfolding in back alleys would have been pointless — they happened far too often.
But one thing was certain.
The moment chaos exceeded a certain threshold, ZOT would — without fail — dispatch the elite enforcement corps of the Sanctum Administration: the Safemen, to sweep it all away.
And right now, Voltech was indisputably causing chaos well beyond any such threshold.
There was exactly one reason they could get away with it.
Because this was Underland.
Which was precisely the loophole Ash intended to exploit.
Siren, having grasped the situation at once, nodded vigorously.
"Good plan! I'll guide you right now! First, turn left at the intersection ahead!"
The instant Ash moved the wheel at her instruction, Zero, riding in the Revenant's rear compartment, shouted out.
"They're on us!"
Voltech's pursuit squad had closed the gap before anyone noticed.
"Everyone, brace yourselves!"
Gripping the wheel with one hand, Ash drew a pistol with the other.
It was the Bloody Heart Mk.7 — a weapon he carried like a talisman, yet had fired so rarely he could count the occasions on one hand.
VROOOOM!
Just then, a motorcycle pulled up alongside the Revenant. Its rider drew a compact SMG and thrust the muzzle forward.
RATATATATAT!
Sparks skittered across the reinforced armor plating. At the sound, Ash pulled the trigger without hesitation, out the window.
BANG! KRA-KOOM!
His two bold shots sailed straight into empty air. Only then did Ash remember that his marksmanship was utterly abysmal.
So rather than waste precious bullets, he chose the surer path.
Ash wrenched the wheel.
The Revenant's heavy frame heeled over and slammed into the biker who'd been spraying SMG fire moments before, crushing him flat against the wall.
CRUNCH!
With a hideous sound of tearing metal and flesh, the biker became an unrecognizable mass of scrap and meat, dwindling to a speck in the side mirror.
TAK! TAKATAK!
They were not pursued by one attacker alone. This time the Revenant's right flank came under fire.
Ash tossed the pistol he was holding to Siren, practically throwing it at her.
"Use this!"
"What about you, Master Ash?"
"Better unarmed than trusting my aim!"
At his blunt reply, Siren hastily grabbed the pistol, thrust the muzzle out the window, and squeezed off shots at their pursuers.
Perhaps she had a genuine knack for shooting — her bullets punched straight through a bike's frame, crippling it outright.
"Wh-whaaagh!"
The bike lost its balance, skidded sideways, and plowed into the other pursuers behind it. A chain of explosions followed, and two motorcycles rolled across the ground as burning scrap.
Watching it all in the side mirror, Ash murmured under his breath.
"...There's definitely something wrong with that gun..."
"Sorry? Master Ash, did you say something?"
"Nothing at all."
Just then, as if to mock their exchange, an engine note rang out — sharper by an order of magnitude than anything they'd heard before.
KEEEEEEEING!
A vehicle as sleek as it was agile, nothing like the lumbering Revenant — and fast in exact proportion. In a blink it overtook the Revenant, and from its cargo bed two pale shapes emerged.
Two humanoids, scattering pale-blue optical sensor light.
Without a moment's hesitation, they hurled themselves at the Revenant.
"Oh no you don't!"
Ash spun the wheel hard. The massive body lurched sideways, and one of the leaping humanoids failed to land on the vehicle at all, tumbling to the ground instead.
Which meant, by the same token, that the other one had made it aboard.
THUD!
The humanoid that had finally clambered onto the hood deployed its arm blades and went straight for the driver — Ash.
KAANG!
But the blade never came within a hair of Ash — it never even touched the reinforced windshield. Because in that split second, a shuriken came flying in.
A moment later, another figure appeared on the hood.
Zero.
At some point he had opened the top hatch and climbed outside.
KAANG! KAKANG!
Atop an armored truck tearing along at full speed, the grotesque ninja and Voltech's humanoid traded sword strokes again and again.
Then, in an instant, the humanoid's pale-blue optical sensors flared. Its blade carved a straight line, hurtling toward Zero's heart — but Zero read the movement, and his hand moved even faster, striking the arm blade aside.
TANG!
Riding the rebound, he spun his whole body through a full rotation and sheared the humanoid's head clean off.
Shff!
The crippled machine wavered for a moment, then toppled beneath the vehicle and was shredded to pieces under the Revenant's wheels.
Through the reinforced windshield, Ash's and Zero's eyes met — the two of them nodded to each other — and then Zero suddenly glanced back.
Far behind them, a laser pointer was blinking atop a light-armored vehicle.
An unmistakable targeting signal.
"Damn it—! It's an anti-tank cannon!"
At those words, Ash slammed down one of the buttons on the center console. The exhaust vents at the Revenant's rear cracked open, and a choking, acrid smoke erupted outward like a burst of furnace fumes.
FWOOOSH!
In an instant the road was swallowed by a smoke screen so thick the end of the hood vanished from view.
"Zero! Hold on tight!"
At the call, Zero crouched low on the hood and clamped his hands onto the Revenant.
SCREEEEEECH!
A hard turn of the wheel, a slam of the brakes. The heavy frame shrieked as it slid sideways.
And beside the Revenant, now slewed out of line, a single rocket tore through the atmosphere, punching straight through the empty air where the vehicle had been a heartbeat earlier.
"Holy... sh—"
While Zero, still clinging to the hood, let out something between awe and a groan, the Revenant hammered its pistons once more and spun its tires. It burst free of the churning smoke — and Voltech's light-armored vehicle, following close behind, emerged right after it.
"They just keep coming!"
Ash barked the words and yanked the wheel again — this time toward the light-armored vehicle hugging the Revenant's flank.
CRUNCH!
Amid a hideous shriek of tearing metal, the enemy vehicle was wedged between the wall and the Revenant and crushed beyond all recognition.
The violence of the impact made Zero, still clinging to the hood, stagger and nearly fall.
"Brother!"
His younger siblings scrambled up through the top hatch and hauled the teetering Zero back to safety just in time, while Siren leaned out the window to cover them with gunfire.
All of it — every bit — happened atop a vehicle racing at full speed.
Then, watching the scenery streak past like ribbons of light, Siren suddenly called out brightly.
"We're almost there! Once we round that corner, the tunnel up to the surface should be right there!"
Her cry was a ray of light to every one of them.
But hope is a fragile thing.
The moment they rounded the corner, what greeted them was a Voltech barricade — dozens of vehicles and scores of men, wall to wall.
They had figured it out too.
They knew that if Ash and his crew escaped Underland now, there would be nothing Voltech could do to them on the surface.
The Revenant, which had been tearing through Underland like a madman, slowed to a crawl. The Voltech forces that had chased them so relentlessly likewise ground to a halt, keeping their distance.
Ahead and behind.
They were surrounded on all sides.
"Damn it...!"
Just as despair began to settle over them all—
Ash's optical sensors whirred busily to life.
He was staring not at the barricade, but at the massive, rusted pipeline that ran diagonally alongside it.
Zero, who had made his way back inside by then, looked through the windshield at the massed Voltech troops and spoke.
"...Pushing through like we did in front of Inferno looks beyond us, I'm afraid."
"So it would seem."
"Shall we dismount and prepare to fight, then?"
Ash shook his head.
"There are hundreds in view alone — and I doubt that's all of them. The moment we step out, it's over. We'd be throwing away our mobility on top of it."
A grimly pessimistic assessment.
"Then... what do you intend to do?"
Ash pressed the accelerator.
The Revenant, idling in place, rumbled and spun all four wheels.
"What else? We gamble."
At the sudden surge forward, Zero and Siren cried out in unison.
"Wh-whaaat?! Young Master?!"
"Master Ash?! Master Ash?!"
Ash offered no answer of any kind. He simply put his weight into his right foot.
VROOOOOOOOM!
The massive frame shuddered violently, the tires shrieked against the ground, and a wall of smoke billowed up. Then, driven by full throttle, the vehicle hurled itself forward.
"Everybody grab onto something! From here on, we fly!"
Even as the words left his mouth, the Revenant left the road entirely and charged at the heap of collapsed rubble heaped slantwise alongside it.
VROOOM!
Using the rubble mound as a springboard, the Revenant shot into the air like a shell — and set all four wheels down squarely atop the sloped pipeline.
CRUNCH!
The ponderous body teetered precariously atop the round pipe before, at long last, finding its balance.
While everyone in the Voltech societies stared up in open-mouthed disbelief at the impossible feat, the performer of said feat burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! So this driving business — it's actually rather fun!"
As if riding an ordinary road, the Revenant climbed the slanted pipeline without end.
The pipeline was enormous.
It was also perfectly round.
For all its scale, a great steel pipe was hopelessly narrow and unstable footing for a multi-ton armored vehicle. One slip — even the slightest — and they would plummet, beyond any doubt.
At the vertigo-inducing acrobatics, Zero and Siren squeezed their eyes shut, clinging to whatever their hands could find, exactly as Ash had ordered.
But the hands on the wheel never trembled so much as a hair. This was one of those times when being a machine had its uses.
No matter how his emotions surged, he could always make the finest of adjustments!
When at last he reached the point he wanted, Ash hammered one of the buttons on the center console.
HISSSS!
In that instant, the Revenant's body sank so low it nearly touched the ground — then exploded upward as the compressed hydraulic pumps fired all at once.
It was an emergency escape function, built for when a vehicle bogged down in mud while crossing the treacherous Outer. Ash had just made that same function his launching pad.
While the Voltech soldiers gaped upward in horror, the enormous armored vehicle leapt free of the pipeline and sailed through the air in a graceful arc.
And where it was falling? Directly before the tunnel — inside the line of Voltech's barricade.
"Waaah, WAAAAAH!"
"KYAAAAAAAH!"
Siren and Zero screamed, making no attempt whatsoever to steady their airborne bodies. With their shrieks as his background music, the Revenant performed something that could generously be called a landing.
KRA-BOOOOOM!
It came down like a dropped anvil amid a colossal roar — even managing a rolling tumble or two on impact. Sparks showered wildly through the interior, and people went flying every which way.
Thus did the Revenant perform the Lazy Donkey Rolls to Escape (Lazy Donkey Roll), shedding its momentum until, at some point, it stood stock-still.
"Everyone all right?"
No one answered Ash.
Most of them were simply wedged somewhere inside the vehicle in grotesque postures, unable to move. Taking in the scene, Ash nodded a couple of times and turned to the dashboard.
A good number of warning lights glowed steadily — but that was all.
Against all odds, the Revenant hadn't been badly damaged. As though, compared to the brutal wastes of the Outer, this much was nothing at all.
Its engine — its heart — was the same.
RRRrumble...!
Ash cast one last glance at the Voltech barricade in the side mirror, then stepped on the gas.
The Revenant glided forward.
And with that motion, one of the right-side armor panels — torn loose by the brutal shocks it had endured — clanged dully to the ground.
With that, the Revenant vanished into the darkness of the tunnel.
The Voltech men drawn up before the barricade could only stare after it, faces pale with panic.