Chapter 14: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Woods

The next few days were uneventful. What happened was mostly just me tagging along and occasionally answering questions from the other two, who also kept a vigilant eye out for threats, and then setting things up for camp in the nights. It seemed like with every turn from light to dark, my mood shifted as well — perhaps some other side effect of the portal device, or something, but I did a good enough job of hiding it during the daytime and moving to a private area at night.

On this day in particular, the atmosphere was jovial and cheery. We'd nearly made it out of the open, easy plains and into the slightly-more dangerous woods, but it also marked a notable milestone the other two had briefly explained to me — the 100 mile mark. Kilometers were apparently not standardized here yet, unfortunately, but on a map we were now about half the way there. Excepting the fact that we had a forest to go through (which would slow down our progress), we would make it in maybe another three days. Which marked the halfway point of this particular excursion!

It didn't really make my anxieties and nighttime freakouts much better, but it seemed to greatly cheer my comrades. Something that did cheer me up was the steady, slow progress on my spellcrafting application — I was now able to make extremely rudimentary spells with different elements and the like. There were unexplained aberrations in the UI, though, and weird additions to the code I seemed unable to change... probably just code creep from the system? This wasn't intended, probably, but I was able to work around the changes reasonably enough. For now it seemed like garbage data. I'd have to wait and see.

We were at the edge of the forest now. A break of trees surrounded us, slowly growing thicker until the canopy blocked out most of the light. Everything was... fucking green. The leaves above seemed to shadow everything in dappled myrtle, and the area around us was ripe with ferns and smaller vegetation soaking up the limited amount of sunlight that still passed through the trees. Quiet chirping of birds (a different breed and variety) and rustling of miscellaneous small animals backgrounded the soundscape of rustling leaves and branches. It felt heavy, as if life itself was weighing upon me.

Well, for me specifically. My companions seemed to drink in the nature around them, looking at all the different types of tree and bush and flowering vegetation in the nearby area. This felt... transgressive in a different sense than the nighttime conversations they had. I wasn't really alive, and everything around me was. If I laid down in the grass for a while, would it try to claim me as part of itself?

Existential horror as a robot is weird.

In any case, the trip through the forest went mostly well. It was darker than normal, but that was really not a huge deal. Until it got to nighttime, at least.

There were howls in the distance, and the nearby sound of scattering birds and prey animals. The sun, by my account, had set to a low level on the horizon — but the canopy of trees made it difficult to make out any sunset through the copses and copses of plantlife, and the hushed cries of animals around us made discerning direction via anything but objective markers more difficult than it really had to be.

We were absolutely about to get attacked, I thought, and brought out my sword from my inventory. I'd held off from actually holstering it into the sheath I'd been given by Moira, just... to avoid any weird shit from happening mostly. But also to avoid making a big scene. Damn style-based powers and their flashiness.

The blade was perfectly sharpened, and laid comfortably in my hands. Nora and Flurry, for their part, seemed nonplussed by the sounds. No movement came out of them beyond the unholstering of a torch, our friend on many darker afternoons.

I could sense something was up, though. It wasn't just... like this on normal days. So I made a note to myself to up my sensor usage and start using some of the more energy-intensive ones when we set up camp.

It wasn't much further until we really couldn't find our way, anyways. So the three of us quickly started to set up a small campsite, with a tiny firepit trailing smoke into the sky like a worm tunneling to the surface in a thunderstorm. Our tents were simple canvas things, with bedrolls inside and not much else. When we were sitting around the fire, I finally decided to spool up my sensor suite and seriously figure out what was around us.

All of the machinery in my head was complicated, but it was very useful to have multiple bands of vision for a testing robot. The sonar and radar detection stuff was a happy byproduct of wanting many scanning methods, but it was used sometimes to detect the radar detection range of a scale model aircraft or bus or car. Now, I was going to use them to get a somewhat good sense of what was happening nearby us.

The 360-degree cameras housed in my skull spooled up, and my vision cut out. Only the crackle of our small fire and the banter of my two companions made me aware of my false humanity, now, but I'd have to take a few hits for the team to make sure we were safe.

I could send up to three video streams to my consciousness at a time without starting to bog down my actual processing power. It was... well, overkill, realistically, but I still wished I could have done more. First was radar; which returned too much visual noise to detect anything specific. Sonar was next: similar results. Infrared, processed last (but effectively immediate in comparison to a normal person's vision) gave some more interesting results.

Interesting because there were at least four massive heat signatures stalking up to our group in the darkness. How far was difficult to tell with infrared — it was difficult to parse the data my sensors were giving me when I'd been using purely visual light for so long — but my question was answered when the signatures leaped out of the darkness at us.

It took me a millisecond to re-set my vision to normal, and in that time I could only watch the fire get brighter and brighter as the enemies grew closer. Something was happening there, some kind of magical horseshit, but I swapped to normal vision as soon as I could to get a true visual on my (and our) opponents.

Four huge hounds with coal-black fur and rapidly-brightening eyes stared back at me, cutting off my view of the rest of the group. I could see the fire through their legs, growing hotter and bigger by the second, and then they made their attack.

Nora and Flurry screamed and yelped respectively, rolling over backwards to put some distance in between them and their aggressors. I jumped to my feet.

Well, I jumped to my "feet" — at the last second, I intensified my leap to get out of the way of the closing jaws of the hellhound lunging at me, landing on its neck and promptly somersaulting backwards to not be on its neck.

Okay, mental checklist time. What were my goals in this exchange? What did I need to do in this combat?

Protect Flurry and Nora if they needed help. Kill the canines if necessary.

With my goals established, I surveyed the situation once more (landing at a distance from the hellhounds in the process.)

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My two companions were struggling but succeeding to keep the enormous beasts at bay, with one each to their name. Nora had already unsheathed her knives — her swords were stored in her tent, I supposed — and Flurry started to cast jets of flame into the faces of the hounds. After seeing their energized expressions, the mechanic quickly swapped to ice-slinging, frosty icicles spearing into the path of the mutts. Quick thinking on her part.

But I'd have my work cut out for me. Two of the big fucks, their haunches up to my nose, trailed around me, observing me from all sides.

I thought back to what I knew about Earth's wolves, before they were... well, before GMACH happened to them. They were pack hunters, and generally tended to only go for the kill when they could see the prey's flee instinct overriding everything else — as long as I stood my ground, I'd probably be giving the coal-black dogs a harder fight simply due to lack of experience.

Then, I thought, the battle would start on my own terms. I slowly rested my sword in a ready position, making sure to not move suddenly, and focused in on the sounds of animals fighting around me. Rustling of leaves assaults me, the crunch of dry and charred branches on the ground as the wolves jump and weave around my companions and their weaponry. It smells like smoke and flame. Familiar, but not exactly.

The scent and moonlight streaming down through the leaves spurs me into action, as the leftmost hellhound from my position leaped at me with its fangs bared. Time to be stylish, Cylinder. Let's spin!

There was a loud clacking as the hellhound's teeth gnashed against empty air, having just barely fell short of my acrobatic twirl-dodge. The other dog snarls and sprints for me, but I was able to duck underneath its wild swipes by the skin of my teeth; my sword flashed upwards, slicing at the thing's throat. A shimmer of sparks shadowed its glancing hit, signalling that something about my form was off — blade alignment or otherwise — before the wolf tries to leap further on top of me to crush me with its weight.

I didn't let it. It was a good thing that I'd been saving up my style meter with all the cool shit I'd been dodging and dishing out, because that wind spell Flurry had taught me was going to get some more mileage. I blasted the hellhound with a D-class burst of air shortly before slashing upwards with the correct form this time. A great cleaving cut slew the hellhound across the breast and lungs, tracing the path my sword had swung through. Dark-red crimson with speckled orange embers flowing through started seeping and pouring out of the wound, but I wasn't there to feel it — I'd already dashed to the side, jinking around the blood and guts that threatened to blind my senses. The other wolf began to pounce, not grieved by the loss of its packmate (at least, not then), so I started to shift to a defensive position when an icicle impaled it through the skull.

Several more impacted it in vital organs, a low whistling sound having permeated the air while I was focusing on my own fight. Flurry and Nora had finished off theirs already, cleaning up the fight on their end in half the time it took me to take down one of mine. Adventurers indeed — and then they'd sent icicles like homing missiles into the spine and sides of the final hellhound, killing it before it had the chance to even try to attack me.

Kind friends. I think that they're kind friends. And efficient soldiers or mercenaries or heroes. In any case they've dispatched the threat, so I took one last scan of the forest (clear!) and inventoried my sword again. Things had gone surprisingly well. Considering they weren't really prepped.

Or, well, were they? Maybe levels had more to do with combat prowess than simply hitting harder. Whatever. Nora and Flurry had already started casting cleaning spells around our camp — I tried to help out, too, but my style meter didn't really allow me to do much more than rekindle the fire. After the work was finished, we all sat back around the fire exhausted. I'd known there was something coming. Hadn't said anything, so I couldn't exactly make light of the situation and do a shit one-liner like "I told you there was something behind us!", but my companions quickly returned to jovial banter.

Oh well.

I was, mentally speaking, tired out of my gourd. While my body was perfectly ready to go for another three hours, the paranoia and hyper-alertness of the past few hours made my head spin and my eyes gloss over. Maybe I just needed rest? But what if there were more threats around, more eyes in the darkness eagerly waiting and watching our camp?

Maybe it was a better idea to extinguish the fire early. It's not as if the night got too cold, and if everything went wrong the others still had sleeping bags that'd keep heat in well enough. There was this thing called the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox — a paradox relating to the overwhelming likelihood of intelligent alien life and the fact that we had found none — that stated that the reason everyone was undetectable was because any meeting with another species inherently carried an existential threat to it. You knew they likely had (or would have) the capability to destroy your planet, but you didn't know what their intentions were or their culture or language. Every possible conversation becomes a nerve-wracking knife's edge situation, in which extinction is the only possible solution beyond a miracle.

In this solution, everyone is quiet because they worry that revealing themselves could be considered a threat by other intelligent life. As for our motley crew, we were literally in a dark forest right now. Any threat could be our end, especially if we went to sleep with that fire signalling our position to everyone with vision-based senses. 

Ah. My hands were shaking. Was I scared?

I wasn't sure, but it wouldn't do to be displaying this insecurity in front of the others. They had enough on their plates. And, well, I wasn't supposed to have these kind of emotions anyways. I was just a testing android.

Trying to stand up stealthily proved futile, as I should have expected. Gah. Tears threatened to slip from my eyes — when had those got there? — and Flurry looked up from her shoulder-hug with Nora. The jig was up. I needed to explain myself as soon as possible. "I promise I'm—" I wince. My throat felt tight, and it made my voice sound strained. "I'm not actually sad, I'm just—"

Flurry interrupted me with a scoff. "Dumbass. Sit next to me."

I sat next to her. My heart and CPU clocks felt like they were redlining beyond what was normally possible for a corpo android. What was something I could do to distract myself? Maybe I'd do a little more coding on the UI for my spellcrafting application.

Yeah, I think that'd be a good idea. I opened up the writing GUI for my coding language of choice in my vision, opting to instead run it through the game's visual processing drivers this time. Made it a little easier to do this time. For some reason.

I felt a hand on my shoulder pressing me into Flurry's side. It'd be rude to refuse, right? Or, well, to resist her pulling me into a side-hug. Yeah. She wanted me to do this so. I leaned into her a bit — only until she stopped pulling me in — and continued coding on the keyboard-window interface in front of me. The night started to while away, fire crackling in front of me and crickets chirping in the distance. Smoke trailed into the sky. Flurry's heartbeat slowly thudded away in her chest, as did mine.

It was pretty clear that tonight was gonna be a late night. But I'd forgotten my tears already, everything washing into gray and the sound of softly-clicking keyboard buttons reciprocating artificially when pressed. When it was like this I could slip away, pretending to not be me for just a while longer. I could stay in the shell I'd been put in — just a coder pushing the bounds of magic; just a warrior resting its body before the next fight; just a girl, under the stars with her two friends. I stayed up all night, even as Flurry's tired eyes slipped shut (still focused on my coding window, somehow) and Nora's breathing grew slow and steady. Until the dawn came to rise me from my daze, I stayed as just an android watching out for her compatriots through the dark and unknown night — soft and content with the world, daring any enemy to try her.

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