Starting the day off with a bang.

John heard behind from him, “If you won’t accept our offer, we might have a problem here.”

And a slight pause before, “We just might have to **** you to take it, one way or another.”

John stood up fully, with the Mana Battery in hand, making sure Faith saw it, and lifted his hand with three fingers raised. And then he slowly began lowering one at a time to form a countdown.

Three. Faith glanced at him and simply nodded.

A second passed.

Two. “Yes, I do think we have a problem here, but you know what my response to that is?”.

A second passed.

One.

The man in the red suit began to say something, stepping forward as he did so, but was interrupted by Faith flinging herself across the ground, aiming at what John assumed was one of the supporting pillars of the courtyard for cover.

Zero.

Simultaneously, Faith got behind the cover of the pillar and John threw the Mana Battery, followed by another, right into the middle of the group. Ducking under the short wall supporting the railing a moment later, all John could feel or hear was his heartbeat in his ears.

An instant later all that could be heard was a massive BOOOM as the jars shattered. The air was ripped out of John by the accompanying shockwave, followed by the dull thud’s of many objects suddenly hitting the railing he was hiding behind.

John then stood up, ears ringing intensely, and looked down at the courtyard but couldn’t see much, due to the dust in the air, but what he could see were fragments of glass, which he gleaned from the jagged inch of glass embedded into the pillar next to him.

A few minutes passed, and the ringing in Johns ears slowly subsided

The courtyard was a mess, to put it simply. The once gleaming white tiles of the floor were now covered in a combination of dust and glass fragments. Where the men in suits had once stood, there were four lumps of sparking remains, which were clearly not human. Under the torn suits were twisted bones, protruding out of the red tissues that made up the evident outer shell, sparking with blue flashes of light. The odd combination of broken machinery and ruined flesh continued struggling to move and escape, but failed utterly.

John assumed that they were intending to rely on numbers alone to intimidate Faith into giving them the influence with her father that they wanted.

The fifth man was nowhere to be seen, but the area where he had been standing was covered in blood, and a trail of smeared blood led out of the courtyard and into one of the downstairs hallways.

The robot that had once stood tall was now covered in dents as well as an obvious hole in its chest and had an arm missing. Where it once had been was now an empty socket, with frayed wires that poked out, sparking occasionally. John spotted the spiked arm embedded in the far wall. This robot was still in much better condition than the other ones; it wasn’t completely incapacitated just yet, and as John watched, it slowly recovered, standing up, twitching slightly as it completed the motion with obvious effort.

After a second, it seemed to get its bearings and instantly looked right at John.

With a shudder, it took a laborious step towards the stairs that would lead it straight to him. With a flash of sparks all across its body and another shuddering movement, it suddenly began to move much quicker. It began to pour out steam from its already ruined body, which rapidly began to glow red hot.

With the Robot coming at a nearly sprinting pace up the stairs, John did what was natural to him. He cast Observe on the Robot and attempted to engage Machine Mind in order to try his hand at controlling it.

His Observe certainly got through, but as John attempted to hack into the robot with the sixth sense granted by Machine Mind. His mind rapidly assembled instructions to inject into the Robot all within the course of a second. However, as he was just about to inject them , it felt almost as if his mind hit a barrier, seemingly bouncing off it, leaving him with a slight headache and some wasted mana.

Upon seeing the health of the thing after the two batteries had gone off near it,
John fell back on his common sense and sprinted as fast as his Agility could take him towards the remote, which he quickly spotted face down on the floor. John estimated it was roughly 10 meters away from the bottom of the nearby stairs.

John was only focused on one thing: getting the remote and shutting the robot off. As his legs pumped down the steps, he could hear the rhythmic beat of the Robot’s footsteps getting ever closer, a fact that pushed him to go even faster.

But as John got closer to the remote, he noticed the pieces of plastic scattered around where it had fallen. Is it broken? I really hope it isn’t, it’s one of the only way to get rid of this damned robot on my tail.

On the ground floor now, with glass crunching under his shoes, John glanced back and saw the robot just getting off the stairs, still gaining on him. Panic began to set in, pushing John even further.

After desperately grabbing at the remote and failing to find leverage, John just took the item into his inventory before summoning it to his hand. However, John was dismayed to find that it had, in fact, been almost completely destroyed by the shockwave. The plastic and metallic covering had been utterly smashed, and the display remained dark in his hands.

It’s ok! I can fix it, right? John thought, **** to make this work. But a glance behind himself completely dashed that hope, for the robot would be within arm’s reach in less than a second, with its arm already raised to stab into his chest.

Stashing the smashed remote, John lowered himself into a fighting stance and summoned a Mana Javelin in each hand, backing up but still facing the robot that was rapidly barreling towards him. He steeled himself to the very real possibility that he once again might die in just a few moments.

However, just as the robot had almost reached him, it suddenly slowed and sagged towards the ground, not entirely incapacitated, however. John looked around for the cause of this and saw Faith, standing to his right, with a look of **** concentration and effort on her face, presumably due to her dragging the golem down.

Not wanting to waste an opportunity to kill the thing as soon as possible, John pushed his body beyond its limit, used Overclock disregarding the pain it caused, and proceeded to fire as many Mana Javelins as quickly as he could directly into the gaping chest of the thing.

One by one, four Mana Javelins shot from John’s hands, plus one from discharging his gauntlet. They each impacted soundly in the Robot’s chest, destroying more and more with every hit.

However, by the end of it, it was somehow still functioning; it was weaker but miraculously not dead just yet.

John could feel that his mana was almost completely gone; the amount left was nowhere near what he needed to cast another Javelin.

Looking at his gauntleted hand, John decided to try and finish the damn thing off. Suddenly running forward with a burst of speed, he sprinted towards the robot, careful to avoid the bladed arm, and sunk his hand deep into the gaping hole in its very damaged body. Closing his hand around something that seemed important, John began to pull on it, and it slowly but surely began to power down, despite the Robot’s vain struggles to stab him which were conveyed by the sound of its ever straining servos.