Heat of the Moment

[Android 17]

With a thump, Seventeen landed hard on the small of his back and slid down on a diagonal slope for a few more feet before settling into a moist, stony ditch.

“…fuck me.” He groaned as he tried to calm his breathing and heart rate. After a few moments, he was able to peel himself up off the ground of the cavern. Reaching back with a shaking hand, Seventeen slid it up under his shirts and winced as he felt the thick slick of blood alongside the small of his back. Blunt force trauma? Something scraping against him on the way down?

“Or a sharp rock?” The cyborg asked aloud as he tried to will his eyes to adjust to the nearly absolute darkness. After a few moments, he started to get some rudimentary assistance from his extra-human senses. Crude thermal overlays told him little more than he already knew—he’d fallen about forty feet and slid down into a ditch filled with lukewarm water.

Planting his palms into the slick stones around him, Seventeen winced as he pushed up off the ground and shifted his legs up under his body. Although they wobbled, his battered muscles didn’t give out on him, and he was able to look up at the path he’d taken down into the cavern. While the collapsed tunnel appeared easily out of reach, the cyborg spotted what seemed to be an opening about eight feet above his head.

Better than nothing. With a grunt, Seventeen crouched and leapt up for the roughly manhole-sized opening in the cavern wall. Once his hands found purchase on the ledge, he was able to pull himself up and into the passageway. Planting his eyes on the path ahead, the machine-hybrid started to drag himself forward into wherever the path would take him.

After about a half minute of crawling, Seventeen started to see some light up ahead accompanied by a strange sound he couldn’t quite place. It was almost as if someone was churning mud. The raven-haired fighter kept guessing until he realized that he was starting to sweat and that he was starting to get tendrils of high-temperature thermals radiating out from down the passage. Twenty seconds later, Seventeen poked his now sweat-stained head out from the end of the tunnel and looked out into the massive magma chamber. From where he was, there was a gradually slope down to a churn, bubbling pool of molten rock that entered and exited the chamber through various holes in the chamber walls.

Overhead, the chamber extended up for northwards of sixty feet before terminating in a variety of jagged stalactites. Throughout the non-lava laden parts of the chamber, there were several other passages like the one that Seventeen had crawled his way through.

So what is this? Some kind of… Do volcanoes have cores?

With a scowl, Seventeen tried to figure out what his next step would be. Despite the fact that he was lost inside an active volcano, he still needed to find the minerals for the astronomers, lest they once again turn him back at the gate.

“So if I was coal, where would I be?”

Before he was able to answer the question for himself, Seventeen caught a subtle motion from the corner of his eye. Craning his neck, he watched as the little handful of pebbles skittered down the wall of the chamber and sank into the magma, leaving behind little puffs of black smog.

“I mean… Rocks settle all the time. All this pressure is bound to do that sor—”

SKREEEEEEEEE

Whatever it was, it dropped hard onto the cyborg’s head, back, and shoulders. Chitinous appendages dug into Seventeen’s sides and tried to rake at his face before he managed to shrug off the initial surprise.

With a grunt, the cyborg shoved off the ground and toward the roof of the tunnel. There was a dull crunch as his assailant’s exoskeleton crumpled between the rock above it and the bony superhuman beneath it. Despite the ichor dribbling down over his back, Seventeen still had to contend with the half-dead creature tearing into his skin. His shirts failed him and became moist with blood before he managed to repeat the upward lurch and break enough of his attacker’s body to neutralize it.

Seventeen rolled out from under his assailant and turned to figure out what it was. While the Omniverse had proven itself to be a strange and bizarre place, the monster that lie dead next to him wasn’t any more complex than a spider blended with a praying mantis. Although it was certifiably dead, Seventeen couldn’t catch his breath because he could hear the skittering of talons on rocks along the walls of the chamber.

Bloody hell. Black appendages scraped into the roof of the machine-hybrid’s tunnel as one of the creatures came skittering at him. He was ready for this one, and it managed a shriek before he fired a condensed energy blast through its skull, bathing himself in a thing layer of mucous-thick bile as the headless corpse toppled down into the magma.

With one of the insects falling out of view, two more came screeching into the tunnel. Seventeen clenched his jaws to hold back an obscenity as he shifted backwards. His fingers tingled as more ki started to built up, but since he hadn’t been the same since arriving in his new home, the cyborg couldn’t mount enough of a charge in time. A chitinous leg smacked him in the side of the head with the force of a steel baseball bat. Seventeen’s skull smacked into the wall, and his vision went dark for a brief moment before it returned in dulled colors.

Discharging the half-hearted ki blast, the cyborg grabbed for the Power Sword and wrenched it free just in time to bash the pommel against the nearest subterranean creature. Although it recoiled and seemed to emit something that sounded like the noise of a pained insect, its partner came crawling over it and lunged at Seventeen. Black claws hooked into his shoulder, and if not for the cyborg managing to flip and thrust with his sword, his assailant could have easily torn off his shoulder.

Seventeen twisted the sword and tore it up through his attacker’s thorax. As that bug collapsed into a heap of twitching limbs and ichor, the pale-faced fighter shimmied forward and bashed the skull of his second adversary into a meaty pulp with the flat end of his sword.

“Fuck off,” the machine-hybrid rasped as he turned the Power Sword into a makeshift broom and swept the slimy corpses out from the passage and into the belching magma below.

While he could feel the adrenaline screaming through his veins, Seventeen also heard the skittering of feet behind him. Scrambling forward, the cyborg planted his hands on the walls of the chamber, pinned his feet to the ledge, and shoved off with everything he could muster. Although his legs burned and fresh wounds opened up on his palms, his lithe form had enough momentum to traverse the magma chamber. His right side crashed into the wall just below another passageway, and despite the breath being knocked from his lungs, he managed to find purchase on the wall. A beat later, he was out of the chamber and back into the moderate security of another side passage.