Heat of the Moment

[Android 17]

The machine-hybrid dragged himself forward on bloody, skinned knees and palms dotted with scrapes and tiny pieces of loose rock. He kept going long after he started to lose feeling in his feet, and after about a minute of hustling like an overactive toddler, he reached an area where the tunnel opened up into a larger room.

Flopping out from the passageway, Seventeen skidded a few feet before coming to rest against a large rock jutting up from the center of a room the size of small studio apartment. Although he still had some light from the magma chamber projecting into this space, the cyborg had enough common sense to see that he was staring at an ore deposit. Reaching out a hand, he knocked his knuckles against the stalagmite-esque chunk and wondered if he’d found what the astronomers required.

Looks like coal to me, I guess?

After deciding that he didn’t give a shit at this moment in time, Seventeen glanced around the area and spotted another passage leading to parts unknown. While he wasn’t sure where that would go, it gave him the freedom he needed to charge up an energy blast and collapse the tunnel he’d used as his entrance. As the passage collapsed, he was certain he heard the frustrated screeching of the giant volcano insects. Without the light of the magma chamber, the cyborg had to sit and wait for his vision to readjust, but once it had, he allowed a faint smirk to reappear on his dirt-smeared features.

All right… business. With some peace and quiet, the machine-hybrid turned his thoughts inward and focused on some images in his head. Within a couple of minutes, he had a backpack, a crude pickax, and some gloves to slip over his scraped and bruised hands. Once he had his equipment, he went to work breaking off a chunk of the black ore and sliding it into the backpack.

“Now where’s the exit?” Seventeen asked aloud as he set his focus on the only remaining exit to the little room. After securing the pickax to his belt, he made his way to the passage and made leave of the peaceful chamber. Since he smelled like a barbeque grill, the cyborg felt some confidence that he’d found what he needed. Even though the tunnel was starting to constrict around him, Seventeen kept his sights set on the near-blackness that lay before him.

A few minutes grew into over a dozen before the raven-haired spelunker started to realize there was a non-metaphorical light at the end of his tunnel. With an objective in sight, he dragged himself through the cramped stone corridor with a little extra gusto, until the faint glimmer of light grew into a shining beacon of freedom. After about a hundred additional feet worth of bloodied knees, Seventeen reached out from the tunnel, clasped his blood-soaked palms around the outsides of the mountain, and dragged himself into the half-sunlight of the Ashen Steppes.

Once free, he just let gravity take its course as he half-slid/half-tumbled about thirty feet to a stretch of earth that wasn’t sloped. When a glance revealed that there were no slobbering, magma-spurting monsters lurking nearby, the cyborg dropped his head back onto the ash-coated ‘ground’ and let out a groan. “Fuck this.” The fresh air was a nice change from the staleness of the underground, but there weren’t any daisies in the Ashen Steppes. Even if there were, the machine-hybrid doubted he’d be able to smell them over the stench of coal and blood that hung heavily in the air around him.