The Cure - I

[Proto Man]

The battle had been joined, and any advantage the two primes held would be sorely tested if their foes continued to reinforce themselves. With a grimace, Proto Man tried to evaluate their options as dark elves started to glide down the walls of the ravine—their blades glistening in the night sky as their red eyes honed in on their intended prey.

Pivoting sharply, Proto Man fired a burst of energy that knocked an oncoming attacker from the wall, causing him to plunge down the wall and land awkwardly a few yards away from the twosome. Whirda was more direct. She took a step forward and fired off a rolling gust of wind that threw her foes into a head-first plunge. Despite the impressive showing, another wave was scurrying down at them. Glancing at their other flank, Proto Man saw that the dark elves were working to circle them and pin them down in the center of the ravine.

“We’re going to go this way,” Proto Man shouted as he turned and readied his buster arm. Whirda released another gust of wind and turned in time to see the barrel of her associate’s weapon start to shudder violently as yellow light and even a few wisps of energy started to seep out from the front. “Get ready to sprint…” the red robot muttered as the dark elves dropped down onto the floor of the ravine and started to rush at the pair of primes. “Finish Buster!” Proto Man screamed as he released a terrifying burst of energy down the length of the ravine.

Just as he anticipated, the dark elves threw themselves out of the way, and with a tug of Whirda’s wrist, Proto Man was off, following in the wake of his own attack. While her gut instinct may have told her to finish off the confused and disoriented warriors who’d leapt and scrambled to avoid the somewhat horrifying blast, she followed along as the youth scaled the canyon wall in a few quick leaps.

By the time Whirda had joined him, Proto Man had channeled another attack, and with a grimace, he fired once again—this time aiming the stream of energy at the high cliff wall above them. Before the woman had a chance to question it, his hand closed around her wrist once again, and she was pulled away from the downpour of rocks. A final glance over her shoulder revealed that an entire chunk of the mountainside was crumbling down, its structural integrity a thing of the past thanks to her young associate.

“I think we’ve slipped away,” Whirda said after a few minutes of silent scrambling up a nearby slope. Her words made the prototype Robot Master pause and turn to survey what lay behind them. As far as he could see, the ravine they’d fought in was gone, but it was hard to tell as much of the landscape around the avalanche was covered in a thick cloud of dust and particulate. “Something tells me th—”

Before the woman could finish she was set upon by a bloody, dirt-stained dark elf. The white-haired woman let out a frustrated growl as she tried to stab a short, black blade through Whirda’s abdomen. Once she recovered from the initial shock of being tackled, the wind-controlling woman closed a hand around the hilt of her foe’s weapon, and her other fist slammed hard into a jawbone. The dark elf faltered for just a moment, and that was more than enough time for Whirda to disarm her and reverse their positions.

“You’ll all dead anyway!” The black-skinned woman’s words were harsh and manic as her own blade was pressed against her neck. “The Tarrasque will destroy the surface civilization… we’ve made certain that the beast is guided in the correction direction.”

“What is the Tarrasque?” Whirda demanded.

“You’ll all know soon enough.”

And like that, the dark elf actually pushed back against the blade on her throat with enough force to tear her own skin. Before Whirda could think to relinquish her vice-like grip on the dagger, her pinned foe twisted her neck, ripping through the flesh and blood vessels.

“Damn it,” Whirda muttered as she moved away to avoid the ghoulish spurts of blood from the torn arteries. “Do you know what she was talking about? What’s a Tarrasque?”

A preliminary scan of the Dataverse flashed up accounts of a giant monster slaughtering people out in the Pale Moors and devouring entire villages foolhardy enough to live in Darkshire’s hinterland. Actual details were few and far between due to the high mortality rate of those who encountered the creature, which was described for the most part in vague yet nightmarish terms. “Sounds like some sort of monster… If it wasn’t for everything in the Omniverse being real, I’d say it’s probably some kind of folk beast or boogeyman.”

“Whatever it is, it must be something terrible if the drow have sought to influence it.”

“Drow?” Proto Man asked, glancing up from the still corpse on the ground. “Is that what these elves are called? They are elves, right?”

“Yes,” Whirda replied as she stooped down to check if the woman was indeed dead. “In the world I came from, they lived in cities deep underground where they practice terrible, fel magicks and worship a spider goddess. They’re cruel, malicious, and rarely do they have any redeeming qualities. If they are in the Omniverse, there is little chance that their agenda isn’t wholly evil.”

“Those spider creatures?”

“Driders,” Whirda replied as Proto Man’s system filed the information away and prepared to take another audio recording. “They are what happens when drow fail to appease their goddess or anger someone higher on the social ladder. Like I said, it’s a terrible society that runs on betrayal, death, and the pursuit of power at any cost.”

The preteen machine nodded as his system started to do some Dataverse research in the background. Now that he had names and some details, it could crunch the numbers and try to get him a little more information.

“I’m surprised they’re not a larger threat than this,” Whirda muttered as she stood up from the corpse. “It almost seemed as if we were the first ones to goad them up out of their city.”

“It’s possible that they’re new here,” Proto Man answered as the two left behind the still body. Up ahead of the pair was the peak of the little mountain that they’d scrambled up on their flight from the lower reaches of the range. From there, they’d have a vantage point over much of the surrounding terrain. “It’s something that we may want to tell the mayor of Darkshire about when we return.”

“What of the Tarrasque? If our mission out here is to save the Pale Moors, we certainly can’t ignore this information,” Whirda asked as they reached the cramped summit and glanced out at the terrain on the other side. From the look of things, they’d be descending down into a little forest, and once they were through that, the landscape opened up once again as far as they could see. “… can you use your software to try and…” The woman trailed off, and from the look on her face, she was struggling to think of the right word for what she wanted to say. Proto Man knew the look—that of someone from a different world trying to rationalize what was, to them, fantasy.

“You want me to try and triangulate this creature’s stomping ground based on the public accounts of its atrocities?”

Whirda just nodded as Proto Man walked off and tried to pull up the requisite applications. After a few minutes, a new overlay popped up on his head’s up display.

“It’s a massive area, but it shouldn’t be more than a day or two walk from where we are at…”

“What about the mounts?” Whirda inquired as she glanced back down the other side of the mountain.

“Salsa can take care of herself, and with any luck, the horse followed her lead. Either way, I think it’d be foolish to rest on our laurels while we have a bunch of evil elves who want to murder us out there.”

“Of course,” Whirda responded as she turned back to face the youth. “As before… lead the way.”