The Cure - I

[Proto Man]

Whirda had left, and with her departure, Proto Man was left to serve as her shield, guarding his ally as she took care of business inside the village’s inn. With his teeth clenched, the android backed up as a collection of drow came at him in a semi-circle—their hands working to reload their handheld crossbows with another round of poisonous quarrels. With nowhere left to go, Proto Man summoned a shield and implanted it in the ground in front of him as a message popped up on his internal display.

Process Firmware Updated. Overclock function unlocked. Would you like to proceed? Y/N

Without skipping a beat, Proto Man replied in the affirmative. For a moment, there was nothing as the textbox minimized, but after a short delay, the android felt a surge of energy flood through his circuits and metal joints.

The drow on the other side of the shield hide their eyes as a violent white light surged up from behind the child’s bulwark. When the fleeting flare subsided, they turned to see that their adversary had changed. Gone were the cartoonish oversized boots and gloves, replaced with slimmer and more aerodynamic versions. Like a preteen starting puberty, Proto Man had gone through a rapid growth spurt. He towered over his shield by nearly a foot, and not only that—his muscle mass and definition had increased dramatically.

“Well this is nice,” he spoke aloud in a voice made deep by an increase in synthetic testosterone. With a degree of ease, the adolescent machine plucked up his shield and smirked at his adversaries, who wasted little time in firing their weapons. Proto Man responded by not only swinging up his shield but by twisting it sideways to intercept the majority of the quarrels, which either smashed off the steel surface or failed to penetrate the dense material.

Once the air was still, Proto Man charged his foes. The drow discarded or holstered their crossbows as they drew blades to prepare themselves for an android who had suddenly opted for frontal assault. With a red-white blur, the shield smashed into the chest and face of the center dark elf, throwing him back through a nearby hut. In the next beat, Proto Man pivoted and launched the shield like it weighed nothing, bowling over the cluster of drow coming at him from his left.

The android turned in time to have a sword graze the right side of his abdomen, but rather than wince, he simply used his elbow to pin the blade against his body. With his free hand, he cracked the drow on the side of the skull with enough force to knock the consciousness clean from the warrior. Hooking that same hand under his foe’s armpit, Proto Man took a step and threw the unconscious drow at some of his ‘friends,’ who dove to avoid the elf-sized projectile.

Falling back a few steps as more drow seemed to flow in from everywhere, Proto Man clenched and unclenched his fists. One of the dark warriors charged and slashed its blade across the android’s chest, tearing through the body suit but failing to inflict anything more than a surface wound on the synthetic tissue that lay beneath. As the drow reared back his sword arm for another strike, a red fist crushed his jawbone and loosened more than a few teeth.

Before the warrior had crumpled to the ground, Proto Man felt about a half dozen bee stings across his back. With a grimace, he reached around and grabbed at the shaft of a quarrel now half-embedded in his right shoulder. Nothing to do about that now. Turning to face his attackers, Proto Man slung up his left hand as the barrel of the Proto Buster started to shimmer. The drow managed to let loose with another barrage of bolts before they were all blasted back by the onslaught of energy bursts.

When he was certain no one was moving anymore, Proto Man let his gun-arm drop down to his side as his scanners picked up additional threats entering the vicinity. As he turned in the direction of what seemed to be two drow, he noticed that his shoulders, chest, and arms were burning with purple-pink flames. Although his first instinct was to start smacking out the fire, his system quickly informed him that he wasn’t being damaged.

“What is this?” He muttered just as the truck-sized black shape slammed into him.

Twenty yards removed from his original position, Proto Man clenched his jaw and kipped up off the ground. His focus immediately returned to the space in front of the inn, where a female drow with a scepter seemed to be commanding a massive spider. The tank-sized arachnid let out a skittering hiss as it reared up on its back four limbs. Across the way, Proto Man’s scanner slid into overdrive as the spider started to skitter across the street. By the time the creature was rearing up to smash the adolescent android, there was leaf-shaped shield to intercept the pair of bladed feet.

With a grunt, the android shoved up and promptly leapt back, creating enough of a gap to let him put some distance between himself and the spider. The creature landed back on its front legs and lashed out in an attempt to close its limbs around the robotic youth. Before it had a chance, Proto Man was gone—his spring-loaded pneumatic legs giving him the vertical pop he needed to vault over his opponent.

The android’s clicked back down a few yards behind the spider, but his focus was instead of the scepter-wielding drow woman, who seemed to be preparing to cast a spell on the building that served as Whirda’s momentary retreat.

“Hey!” Proto Man screamed as he lifted the Proto Buster. The drow glanced over just in time to watch as a burst of concentrated energy crashed into her shoulder, dislocating the limb and hurtling the victim to the ground. Spinning, the android grimaced and forged a Proto Sword as the spider tried for another go at him. Before he had a chance to skewer the spider, a drow warrior slipped in from the left and stabbed his curved blade through Proto Man’s right shoulder. The supercharged android swallowed a scream, but a moment later he was unable to repeat that action when a bladed spider leg ripped into his chest.

Red warnings erupted over the periphery of his internal display as the spider tried to use its giant weight to force Proto Man to bend backwards. Grinding his teeth together as his metal endoskeleton fought to resist physics, the android clutched a hand around the leg embedded in his chest. With his sword-hand, he slashed through the spider’s appendage. Twisting his body, Proto Man tore the bladed limb out and bashed the sword-wielding drow in the skull with it. The android then stumbled backwards, his sword fizzling out as a charged started to build in the Proto Buster.

“Goodnight,” he muttered as he swung up the barrel and released the torrent of energy into the spider’s face and head. When the flash faded, the arachnid slumped to the ground—its neck a charred stump. On the other end of the fatal blow, Proto Man let out a grunt as his legs gave out under him. A look down revealed that the two wounds had left less than desirable results. The sword wound had struck deep enough to compromise his shoulder joint, while the spider’s attack had managed to rupture some hardware that was integral to his ancillary systems. While the nanobots were working hard to make repairs, it would take them some time before they could produce substantial results.

… Fiddlesticks. Rising up to his augmented height, Proto Man scanned the scene and saw that the drow had vanished into the darkness. “Where are they?” He muttered as a popup indicated that his system was rerouting resources to areas of higher need. In a flash of light, the android reverted to his normal appearance, which only served to exacerbate the injuries. Once he managed to confirm that all his power cells were functioning properly, Proto Man deactivated his weapons and made his way back toward the inn.

The preteen machine managed to make it a grand total of twenty feet before he felt the very ground beneath his feet shudder. The heck? He had never read anything about seismic activity in the Pale Moors, but as the android made his way toward the edge of the village, a small part of him wished he had. While the sun was still sunken below the horizon, his vision was enough to provide him with a view of the scaled colossus lumbering toward the dead village. Its shape and gait gave it the look of a dinosaur, but Proto Man had never read about a tyrannosaurus rex as tall as half a football field. If its height and size wasn’t enough, the monster’s back was an assortment of spikes, and two giant horns jutted up from its scalp, as if it needed the ability to gore adversaries.

Proto Man didn’t need to the popup to tell him what was advancing toward him.

“The Tarrasque…”

Without a second thought, the preteen machine spun around and sprinted back into the village to find Whirda.