Day 3 Morning

[Proto Man]

Was that a victory?

Proto Man frowned as he came to a stop in the shadow of a rock outcropping. In the distance, the horizon was starting to brighten from black to violet. Before long, streaks of red and orange would shatter the night sky, and the sun would rise above the collapsing island for a third time.

Already, the day was not starting as the machine would have wished. His trio’s goal to unite Teucer’s armor had been met with a giant roadblock in the form of a giant robot, some sort of magician, and an elf wearing the imprisoned hero’s breastplate.

The elf looked so familiar, too… The android’s memories weren’t clear, but he was certain that he’d spotted the blonde-haired warrior once or twice in the past. Had it been Dante’s Abyss? Or perhaps on the fields of Camelot?

Regardless of his true identity, the man in the breastplate had been unwilling to relinquish the relic or coordinate with their group to locate the remaining pieces of the puzzle. Did the elf not understand the gravity of the situation?

And what if he did?

Wasn’t the goal here to reunite all of the armor? Wouldn’t it make sense to work together?

Unless people are selfish…

But what type of person would take advantage of Teucer’s plight to further their own agenda?

The image of the three warriors popped into Proto Man’s head another time. Whoever ‘Kopaka’ was, his appearance had triggered something almost feral in the robot’s diminutive ally.

The sight of Mickey nearly frothing at the mouth in anger answered the machine’s early quandary: His friend did deal with rampant emotions. What the preteen robot didn’t expect was to see those very same emotions turn Mickey into their slave. In a fit of rage, the mouse would have been willing to charge head-first into what would certainly be an ambush further down the path. The trio with the chainsaw had executed an orderly retreat… they hadn’t been routed. It wouldn’t have made a lick of sense to try and rush after them into the unknown.

At the height of his madness, it had taken a crowbar shot to silence Mickey. The same crowbar that had tasted the blood of two blonde-haired men in the last hour had now blackened their friend’s eye. Although he didn’t seem to harbor any ill-will toward his partners, it seemed pretty obvious that the blunt force trauma hadn’t elicited a chance of opinion in the mouse’s head. From the scowl on Mickey’s face, it was clear he wanted to pursue the trio.

Someone who second-guessed sending a tyrant to prison was now willing to run head-first into a chainsaw.

The world had turned upside down, and once more, Proto Man found himself struggling to hold on.

Somewhere a few yards away, Mickey Mouse continued to skulk in the shade of a tall tree. The mouse had taken a few hits during the scuffle, but the real damage was on the inside. On the other side of their ‘camp,’ Belle was resting her eyes. While she had suffered another blow to the head, a quick examination revealed that she hadn’t been concussed again.

Proto Man lifted his hand and pressed it against the tender flesh of his chin. A desperate blow from the elf had bruised his skin and probably done some damage to the bone underneath. Near the base of his spine, he also had some additional discomfort from when a tree had attempting to break his backwards flight. How many more bruises could his body absorb before it stopped functioning? What if this quest devolved into some sort of free-for-all?

How many other ‘heroes’ had Teucer collected from the Omniverse?

The thought of having to defeat all of them was enough to make Proto Man want to curl up into a ball and forget himself. If Mickey didn’t return to his senses, the machine was afraid that things were going to get a lot more complicated.