09-08-2016, 04:16 PM
Sabrina guarded her eyes from the raging flames in a nearby district of Coruscant and scouted her surroundings for more robots. Surrounding her were the scrapped remains of her most recent victims, some of them still crackling with surplus electricity from the Doombolt attack. Of course they would go into hiding, she thought. Now they knew that she posed a threat. They would probably rebuild their ranks as soon as she thought them all eliminated. Well, the decontamination would just need to be extra thorough in that case.
One of the robots slowly raised a twitching arm in an almost human-like motion, as if it grasped for its fleeting mechanical life. Sabrina stomped on its head without a second thought and crushed its glowing red eye beneath the steel boot of her suit. The arm stopped in its position and fell off when Sabrina shook the head’s remains off of her foot. "You guys are tougher than I thought."
"Silverbot X-1 is designed to last. You will not destroy us." The robot on the ground spoke with a voice sounding as if its power was going out any second now.
"What, you’re still alive?" asked Sabrina. She lifted a boulder of asphalt and stone from the ground and buried the remains of the robot beneath it. Not anymore it wasn’t. Now where was she...
As she backed away from the grave a strange feeling formed in her stomach. No, not a feeling... something wasn’t right. She knew not what it was, but she knew something bad was about to happen. Something very bad.
The creaking of steel strained to its limit confirmed her worries. Sabrina spun around and looked to where the sound was coming from. A skyscraper as they were common on the top tier of Coruscant was collapsing, its side lit up by a raging inferno somewhere nearby. Its collapse was causing a continuous rumble and as it fell to pieces the rocks created a deadly rain upon the pavement of the Coruscant streets. Then the sound of a titanic foot hitting the ground resonated through the streets and Sabrina reflexively dropped to the ground just in time to not be swept away by the air blast that accompaigned it.
When she got back up she had to rear her head up to look at the massive form that had entered the „battlefield“, as she called it: a giant humanoid robot of steel, over thirty meters tall. Its intimidating form was well complemented by the flames that raged behind rows of bars on its legs, burning exorbitant amounts of fuel to sustain it and forging new robots as its minions, and the black pillars of smoke that were connected to an ominous cloud of pollution that lingered above. Sabrina silently wondered why she hadn’t taken notice of the blackened sky already.
"You are a mighty fighter, little human", a voice so deep that it seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth spoke. It was emerging from the machine’s chest, though. It was speaking to her. "To destroy so many of my children, in one attack no less... you are proving yourself worthy of dying by my hand."
"Why did you do all this?" asked Sabrina, bargaining for time.
"I am Silverbot X-0 and my purpose is to destroy. The Coruscant scientists who created me implanted this body with a potent AI. They wanted to make me a mech powerful enough to match the strongest Primes, but I realized that no pilot of flesh can outmatch my electronic brain. I waited for the right moment to strike, and now I shall display my skills to my creators by destroying Coruscant."
"To prove your strength?"
"To prove myself and to gather fuel and steel for my X-1 children. Coruscant is the first step in my conquest." The robot then raised a hand, an arm cannon like the one that the smaller bots had wielded but multiple times larger, and aimed it at Sabrina. "You however are standing in my way, and thus must be eliminated. If you hold still I will make it quick."
Sabrina held back a cold laugh and kicked herself off the ground. If she was going down she would do so in battle. Not that X-0 kept her waiting: as she soared into the sky it sent a barrage of tiny missiles at her which she only barely dodged with a pair of breakneck manoeuvers. Even the rockets, she noted, were made of smelted and reforged metal. This machine was able to sustain its robot armies and ammunition close to infinitely in this city of steel and she shuddered to think how much damage it would do if she didn’t stop it here and now.
When the barrage stopped Sabrina came to a still – and immediately the world turned red as a beam attack hit her in the chest and face and sent her plummeting from the sky. Her face and upper chest were scorched and the pain was blanking her mind, leaving unable to muster even enough concentration to slow her fall. She hit the ground like a rock and landed amidst a pair of asphalt boulders. Above her she saw the robot’s foot raising itself and getting ready to finish her. For the second time that day she thought she would die, except that this time the suit’s shield would barely slow this monster down.
But she had not accounted for the terrain. When X-0 descended its foot upon her to squish her its foot crushed some of the asphalt rocks but could not get past. It raised its foot again and brought it down a second, third, fourth time, each chipping off more but only getting marginally closer to Sabrina. It would take a little to get through to her... but what did that do outside of buying her a little time before her death?
The suit provided her with the answer by stabbing a needle into her arm and drawing a pained yelp from her lips before it injected her with an amount of synthesized adrenaline. Sabrina gasped and coughed. The pain diminished, it did not quite disappear but she was able to control her body once more. She found herself breathing deeply as she got back to her feet and looked up at the robot that looked back. For a moment neither said a word, then X-0 lifted its cannon arm and aimed it at her, gathering energy for the death-dealing energy blast, unlike the quick and weak beam it had caught her by surprise with after the barrage.
Sabrina soared back into the air and watched as the machine’s arm followed her trail to aim at her. Her mind was as clear as ever... she needed to dodge that beam. Then she would be able to end it all. As if it had listened to her thoughts the suit reacted, and when the beam was fired it slowed down in mid-air until it came at her as fast as the tennis ball had during the simulation. Sabrina saw it coming at her, a force absolutely lethal that would vaporize her in the suit if it so much as scraped her. And she knew she had won.
In a gracefully slow movement she bent her body in the air and leant as far back as she was able to. The blast flew over her with such closeness that, had it been only a millimeter closer, it would have touched the tip of her nose. Time returned to its original speed and Sabrina wished she could have looked at X-0’s likely dumbfounded „face“, as much as these bots had any. But now every bit of focus counted. Her teeth clenched and with every bit of her mind that wasn't keeping her in the air focused on her intention, she created the largest and strongest barrier she had ever made, in the shape of a wide arc curving upwards.
"Die", the machine spoke as it bent forward and aimed its missile silos at her once again. Sabrina ignored it even as it fired a volley of missiles at her. She'd put the now regenerated shield online and knew that it could take a hit for her. Indeed it took every missile although the last one in the volley caused it to collapse. It mattered not, everything was going to plan. She had shifted the barrier's position so that it was above them now, arcing straight downwards. The blast that X-0 had fired was scraping along the inside of the barrier, not hitting it hard enough to explode and instead being slowly redirected by the curve of the barrier. It was headed exactly where she had aimed it. X-0 noticed it too, but by then it was too late to dodge - it could only look up and attempt to leap backwards as Sabrina watched how the blast, now right above the enormous robot, was directed straight downwards by the arc of the barrier and flew straight back at its creator. As she dispelled the barrier and hastily created a new one in front of herself Sabrina watched how the blast hit the machine.
The very atmosphere was shaken by the force of the explosion that ensued, the explosion was deafening to hear and the spherically expanding light, bright as a sun, blinded Sabrina so much that even behind the toned visor she needed to guard her eyes. The explosion sent her flying backwards and thankfully upwards, away from the rubble and metal on the ground where she could have been crushed or impaled. When the explosion itself ended, rubble began falling and thick smoke rose from the crater, obscuring vision. Sabrina smiled in the most self-content manner as, no longer propelled by the force of the explosion, she first came to a standstill in the air, then began plummeting back down towards the ground at the edge of the crater. The adrenaline kick was wearing off and the feat of redirecting the blast had taken a greater toll on her mind than what she had imagined. Just... just a few minutes to recover. It was over now, the X-1 bots could not work without their master. And their master was dead now...
If it was, why was the bad feeling in her stomach still there?
She looked at the smoke. She watched closely. She saw it clear up... and she saw X-0 as it emerged. The explosion had torn off its entire left arm and a chunk of its shoulder and torso. Electricity was sparking at the loose cables and joints. The rest of the machine was heavily damaged as well but functional, it looked like... especially its right side. Bad news, because the right arm was the one equipped with the cannon. And what was worse, from its leg-forges new X-1 bots were emerging and they were starting to gather scrap to repair their creator! "It's futile... your struggles are only delaying your doom, human..." its creaky voice resonated through the battlefield. Within a few minutes it would be sufficiently repaired to get back on its feet and cause havoc just like before. A few more minutes and all her efforts would be in vain...
She could not allow that. Coruscant would not fall.
"Warning. Warning. Rising levels of telekinetic power detected", one of the X-1 bots spoke and interrupted its work. More bots soon stopped as well, a pair of them were even lifted off the ground. And they weren't the only objects that were lifted up... pebbles and rocks all over were slowly rising from the ground, suspended by an enormous psychic power. X-0 raised its cannon arm but as it saw what Sabrina was doing it realized that no energy blast would save it.
On her side of things Sabrina was now focusing every fiber in her body, every neurone, every cell capable of thought, into her psychic power, driven by the will to finish what she'd begun and to survive. The suit was amplifying her powers to the best of its ability and unleashing powers beyond what Sabrina had ever dreamt of. Powers greater even than those of the legendary Mewtwo.
A hunk of steel, asphalt, concrete and other materials, larger than a house and with a pointed end that had once been a street corner slowly dislodged itself from the ground along with the numerous pebbles and bots that were helplessly floating about. The air vibrated as Sabrina turned it. Her mind, her muscles, her bones protested and threatened to break even though she wasn't even using them, and her head was burning with a thousand white-hot needles that were being pierced through her scalp. But she could not stop now. She needed even more power. The pointed end was aimed at X-0 who was unable to react, its body still too broken to flee. The bots were frantically trying to repair it to a minimal condition. She needed to do it now.
It is said that the ancient vikings had a war scream so terrible that it froze the blood of their opponents when their powerful throats unleashed it. However, Sabrina's war scream as she mobilized forces she never knew she had would probably have caused even the almighty Thor to drop his hammer, curl up and cry. It was a shame that nobody was there to hear it except for the robots.
The pointed hunk soared forward like a spear, except much less elegantly, and impaled X-0 straight through the chest. After a few seconds the robot spoke only one word: "Unbelievable." Then its body disintegrated itself in a nuclear explosion as its fusion cores, now short-circuited and with energy accumulating inside, were overcharged. The X-1 bots all over Coruscant began to explode in a chain reaction and their explosions were heard far and wide. Sabrina on the other hand fell back against what had once been the ground and was now mildly inclined upwards. She was done. Her energy was spent. Her body shuddered uncontrollably, the pure effort she had just gone through had broken several ribs and her left arm and the suit wasn't able to help much either.
Something warm ran down her cheek. With a lot of concentration she brought her right hand up and found it red with blood when she withdrew it. But she could only smile faintly. Had the effort worn her out so bad?
She could hear voices from afar. Stormtrooper voices over the comms. They were coming, but it was too late. Everything was blackening.
In her last moments, Sabrina remembered what Omni had told her. She was a Prime... death wasn't too big a deal anymore.
Well, it was something.
One of the robots slowly raised a twitching arm in an almost human-like motion, as if it grasped for its fleeting mechanical life. Sabrina stomped on its head without a second thought and crushed its glowing red eye beneath the steel boot of her suit. The arm stopped in its position and fell off when Sabrina shook the head’s remains off of her foot. "You guys are tougher than I thought."
"Silverbot X-1 is designed to last. You will not destroy us." The robot on the ground spoke with a voice sounding as if its power was going out any second now.
"What, you’re still alive?" asked Sabrina. She lifted a boulder of asphalt and stone from the ground and buried the remains of the robot beneath it. Not anymore it wasn’t. Now where was she...
As she backed away from the grave a strange feeling formed in her stomach. No, not a feeling... something wasn’t right. She knew not what it was, but she knew something bad was about to happen. Something very bad.
The creaking of steel strained to its limit confirmed her worries. Sabrina spun around and looked to where the sound was coming from. A skyscraper as they were common on the top tier of Coruscant was collapsing, its side lit up by a raging inferno somewhere nearby. Its collapse was causing a continuous rumble and as it fell to pieces the rocks created a deadly rain upon the pavement of the Coruscant streets. Then the sound of a titanic foot hitting the ground resonated through the streets and Sabrina reflexively dropped to the ground just in time to not be swept away by the air blast that accompaigned it.
When she got back up she had to rear her head up to look at the massive form that had entered the „battlefield“, as she called it: a giant humanoid robot of steel, over thirty meters tall. Its intimidating form was well complemented by the flames that raged behind rows of bars on its legs, burning exorbitant amounts of fuel to sustain it and forging new robots as its minions, and the black pillars of smoke that were connected to an ominous cloud of pollution that lingered above. Sabrina silently wondered why she hadn’t taken notice of the blackened sky already.
"You are a mighty fighter, little human", a voice so deep that it seemed to come from the very bowels of the earth spoke. It was emerging from the machine’s chest, though. It was speaking to her. "To destroy so many of my children, in one attack no less... you are proving yourself worthy of dying by my hand."
"Why did you do all this?" asked Sabrina, bargaining for time.
"I am Silverbot X-0 and my purpose is to destroy. The Coruscant scientists who created me implanted this body with a potent AI. They wanted to make me a mech powerful enough to match the strongest Primes, but I realized that no pilot of flesh can outmatch my electronic brain. I waited for the right moment to strike, and now I shall display my skills to my creators by destroying Coruscant."
"To prove your strength?"
"To prove myself and to gather fuel and steel for my X-1 children. Coruscant is the first step in my conquest." The robot then raised a hand, an arm cannon like the one that the smaller bots had wielded but multiple times larger, and aimed it at Sabrina. "You however are standing in my way, and thus must be eliminated. If you hold still I will make it quick."
Sabrina held back a cold laugh and kicked herself off the ground. If she was going down she would do so in battle. Not that X-0 kept her waiting: as she soared into the sky it sent a barrage of tiny missiles at her which she only barely dodged with a pair of breakneck manoeuvers. Even the rockets, she noted, were made of smelted and reforged metal. This machine was able to sustain its robot armies and ammunition close to infinitely in this city of steel and she shuddered to think how much damage it would do if she didn’t stop it here and now.
When the barrage stopped Sabrina came to a still – and immediately the world turned red as a beam attack hit her in the chest and face and sent her plummeting from the sky. Her face and upper chest were scorched and the pain was blanking her mind, leaving unable to muster even enough concentration to slow her fall. She hit the ground like a rock and landed amidst a pair of asphalt boulders. Above her she saw the robot’s foot raising itself and getting ready to finish her. For the second time that day she thought she would die, except that this time the suit’s shield would barely slow this monster down.
But she had not accounted for the terrain. When X-0 descended its foot upon her to squish her its foot crushed some of the asphalt rocks but could not get past. It raised its foot again and brought it down a second, third, fourth time, each chipping off more but only getting marginally closer to Sabrina. It would take a little to get through to her... but what did that do outside of buying her a little time before her death?
The suit provided her with the answer by stabbing a needle into her arm and drawing a pained yelp from her lips before it injected her with an amount of synthesized adrenaline. Sabrina gasped and coughed. The pain diminished, it did not quite disappear but she was able to control her body once more. She found herself breathing deeply as she got back to her feet and looked up at the robot that looked back. For a moment neither said a word, then X-0 lifted its cannon arm and aimed it at her, gathering energy for the death-dealing energy blast, unlike the quick and weak beam it had caught her by surprise with after the barrage.
Sabrina soared back into the air and watched as the machine’s arm followed her trail to aim at her. Her mind was as clear as ever... she needed to dodge that beam. Then she would be able to end it all. As if it had listened to her thoughts the suit reacted, and when the beam was fired it slowed down in mid-air until it came at her as fast as the tennis ball had during the simulation. Sabrina saw it coming at her, a force absolutely lethal that would vaporize her in the suit if it so much as scraped her. And she knew she had won.
In a gracefully slow movement she bent her body in the air and leant as far back as she was able to. The blast flew over her with such closeness that, had it been only a millimeter closer, it would have touched the tip of her nose. Time returned to its original speed and Sabrina wished she could have looked at X-0’s likely dumbfounded „face“, as much as these bots had any. But now every bit of focus counted. Her teeth clenched and with every bit of her mind that wasn't keeping her in the air focused on her intention, she created the largest and strongest barrier she had ever made, in the shape of a wide arc curving upwards.
"Die", the machine spoke as it bent forward and aimed its missile silos at her once again. Sabrina ignored it even as it fired a volley of missiles at her. She'd put the now regenerated shield online and knew that it could take a hit for her. Indeed it took every missile although the last one in the volley caused it to collapse. It mattered not, everything was going to plan. She had shifted the barrier's position so that it was above them now, arcing straight downwards. The blast that X-0 had fired was scraping along the inside of the barrier, not hitting it hard enough to explode and instead being slowly redirected by the curve of the barrier. It was headed exactly where she had aimed it. X-0 noticed it too, but by then it was too late to dodge - it could only look up and attempt to leap backwards as Sabrina watched how the blast, now right above the enormous robot, was directed straight downwards by the arc of the barrier and flew straight back at its creator. As she dispelled the barrier and hastily created a new one in front of herself Sabrina watched how the blast hit the machine.
The very atmosphere was shaken by the force of the explosion that ensued, the explosion was deafening to hear and the spherically expanding light, bright as a sun, blinded Sabrina so much that even behind the toned visor she needed to guard her eyes. The explosion sent her flying backwards and thankfully upwards, away from the rubble and metal on the ground where she could have been crushed or impaled. When the explosion itself ended, rubble began falling and thick smoke rose from the crater, obscuring vision. Sabrina smiled in the most self-content manner as, no longer propelled by the force of the explosion, she first came to a standstill in the air, then began plummeting back down towards the ground at the edge of the crater. The adrenaline kick was wearing off and the feat of redirecting the blast had taken a greater toll on her mind than what she had imagined. Just... just a few minutes to recover. It was over now, the X-1 bots could not work without their master. And their master was dead now...
If it was, why was the bad feeling in her stomach still there?
She looked at the smoke. She watched closely. She saw it clear up... and she saw X-0 as it emerged. The explosion had torn off its entire left arm and a chunk of its shoulder and torso. Electricity was sparking at the loose cables and joints. The rest of the machine was heavily damaged as well but functional, it looked like... especially its right side. Bad news, because the right arm was the one equipped with the cannon. And what was worse, from its leg-forges new X-1 bots were emerging and they were starting to gather scrap to repair their creator! "It's futile... your struggles are only delaying your doom, human..." its creaky voice resonated through the battlefield. Within a few minutes it would be sufficiently repaired to get back on its feet and cause havoc just like before. A few more minutes and all her efforts would be in vain...
She could not allow that. Coruscant would not fall.
"Warning. Warning. Rising levels of telekinetic power detected", one of the X-1 bots spoke and interrupted its work. More bots soon stopped as well, a pair of them were even lifted off the ground. And they weren't the only objects that were lifted up... pebbles and rocks all over were slowly rising from the ground, suspended by an enormous psychic power. X-0 raised its cannon arm but as it saw what Sabrina was doing it realized that no energy blast would save it.
On her side of things Sabrina was now focusing every fiber in her body, every neurone, every cell capable of thought, into her psychic power, driven by the will to finish what she'd begun and to survive. The suit was amplifying her powers to the best of its ability and unleashing powers beyond what Sabrina had ever dreamt of. Powers greater even than those of the legendary Mewtwo.
A hunk of steel, asphalt, concrete and other materials, larger than a house and with a pointed end that had once been a street corner slowly dislodged itself from the ground along with the numerous pebbles and bots that were helplessly floating about. The air vibrated as Sabrina turned it. Her mind, her muscles, her bones protested and threatened to break even though she wasn't even using them, and her head was burning with a thousand white-hot needles that were being pierced through her scalp. But she could not stop now. She needed even more power. The pointed end was aimed at X-0 who was unable to react, its body still too broken to flee. The bots were frantically trying to repair it to a minimal condition. She needed to do it now.
It is said that the ancient vikings had a war scream so terrible that it froze the blood of their opponents when their powerful throats unleashed it. However, Sabrina's war scream as she mobilized forces she never knew she had would probably have caused even the almighty Thor to drop his hammer, curl up and cry. It was a shame that nobody was there to hear it except for the robots.
The pointed hunk soared forward like a spear, except much less elegantly, and impaled X-0 straight through the chest. After a few seconds the robot spoke only one word: "Unbelievable." Then its body disintegrated itself in a nuclear explosion as its fusion cores, now short-circuited and with energy accumulating inside, were overcharged. The X-1 bots all over Coruscant began to explode in a chain reaction and their explosions were heard far and wide. Sabrina on the other hand fell back against what had once been the ground and was now mildly inclined upwards. She was done. Her energy was spent. Her body shuddered uncontrollably, the pure effort she had just gone through had broken several ribs and her left arm and the suit wasn't able to help much either.
Something warm ran down her cheek. With a lot of concentration she brought her right hand up and found it red with blood when she withdrew it. But she could only smile faintly. Had the effort worn her out so bad?
She could hear voices from afar. Stormtrooper voices over the comms. They were coming, but it was too late. Everything was blackening.
In her last moments, Sabrina remembered what Omni had told her. She was a Prime... death wasn't too big a deal anymore.
Well, it was something.
"(Note to self: insert quote & picture once I find stuff)"
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