Underland

The machine was right above her, stalking her, hunting her.

Marianne could hear the clinks and clanks of its armor reverberating through the thin metal ceiling separating them. Though her gaze remained obscured by blindness, her mind visualized the creature from the sounds it made: a gaunt, two-meters tall skeleton of steel, with syringes and needles for fingers and a metal mask for a face. She heard the gears and servos grinding in its elongated limbs and the biomechanical organs pumping nutrients into its artificial brain. Her Blood-enhanced nose smelled the scent of oil and rust that followed it everywhere. Her hand sensed the sound of the machine’s feet traveling through the walls.

But the only taste in her mouth was that of her own fear.

Lord Bethor had guessed correctly. Pain was a great motivator to learn.

A drop of blood traveled down her cheek, but Marianne didn’t dare to move. She was already holding her breath the best she could, in spite of the scars, the bruises, and the metal needle in her chest; a parting gift from her last encounter with the monster.

The noblewoman knew that running wouldn’t save her. She had tried before, when the creature cornered her after Lord Bethor taught her how to use her hearing to walk straight and find her path. First she attempted to fight, only to discover that neither her fists nor bone bullets could get past the creature’s iron shell; it didn’t even have enough blood in its synapses for a telekinetic strike.

Marianne had tried to escape after realizing how outmatched she truly was. But the machine moved with superhuman speed. Even after she called on the Blood to strengthen her legs and lungs, it swiftly caught up to her. Its metal hand had grabbed her head, smashed it against a wall with enough force to break her nose, and carved a scar on the left side of her face; one deep enough to scratch the cheekbones.

It mauled Marianne the same way a cat would have played with a rat, tossing and kicking her around. And when it got bored after a full minute of that brutal treatment, it stabbed her in the chest with a metal needle right between the ribs. It hadn’t struck any vital area, but it impaired her breathing and hurt whenever her muscles contracted. Marianne hadn’t been able to remove it and doubted that anyone but a trained surgeon could.

Afterward, the machine had stopped beating her and fell inanimate for a few minutes. It gave Marianne a short window of time to put some space between them.

How long had she haunted this maze, unable to find an exit while pursued by that thing? Hours? Days? With only Lord Bethor’s occasional advice to rely on, Marianne had long lost all sense of time.

She controlled her breathing and slowed her own heartbeat to a crawl. It wasn’t a skill Lord Bethor taught her, but one that she developed on her own while trying to avoid the machine. Its hearing acuity was downright superhuman.

Marianne’s efforts seemed to pay off, the machine walking along the tunnel above without any change in behavior.

Then the drop of blood fell from her face and onto the cold iron floor.

Marianne immediately heard the machine’s servos grinding to a screeching halt, its metal head snapping down to look in her direction. Could its eyes see through the floors and ceilings? Marianne didn’t think so but she felt its gaze all the same.

Think, think, she thought as the machine froze like a cat trying to hear a mouse’s breathing. Marianne called upon the Blood, and though a ceiling of steel stood between her and her foe, her magic ignored it.

There was little to target though. The machine had no heart, only pumps; no veins, only cables. In a way, it was the perfect killer. It didn’t need to feed or sleep, and it had no higher thoughts to distract it from its purpose. It had none of the usual frailties of a physical body, nor an opening to exploit.

But it still had a brain and synapses. And if it could hear Marianne, it must have had ears.

Desperation gave her new strength and allowed her to focus like never before, with even the pain in her cheeks and chest unable to distract her. Using her enhanced hearing in combination with the Blood’s psychometric insight, she formed a biological map of the machine’s nervous systems. She noticed the neurons linked to a biomechanical labyrinth of steel inside the creature’s head; its inner ear.

The Blood couldn’t alter metal nor the sound that entered this artificial organ… but it could alter the signals traveling to the brain. Marianne was no neuromancer or illusionist. She wouldn’t be able to make an elaborate deception.

I just have to… slightly alter what it hears, Marianne thought as another drop of blood fell down from her face. Same sound, different direction.

She imagined the drop falling up rather than down, reaching the ceiling above the machine’s head rather than the floor underneath its feet. She clung to this illusion so much that she started to hear it inside her own mind, the Blood echoing her lie. Believe, believe…

The drop fell onto the floor and the machine looked up.

This time, it didn’t remain still. It crawled down on all fours, the joints in its limbs twisting until the creature looked more like a lizard than a humanoid form. It dashed at impressive speeds through the tunnels, but in the wrong direction. Believing Marianne to be above itself, the machine moved further and further away from her.

Once the machine was too far away to hear her—a distance she had learned through trial and error—Marianne allowed herself a breath of relief.

“Good,” Lord Bethor’s voice echoed in the corridors. “You have learned this spell well.”

Marianne knew better than to answer. While the machine ignored the Dark Lord’s words, it always picked up on her own.

Her teacher hadn’t expected a back-and-forth anyway. “Illusion magic and telepathy are not so different,” Lord Bethor explained. “In both cases, you must conceptualize the input that the individual must receive and send them to their brain through the Blood. Obviously, it is easier to trick a fellow human than a dragon, as these beasts use different senses than our own.”

Which implied that the machine had been intentionally designed to be targeted by illusions.

“The more you can put yourself in your target’s shoes, so to say, the better your illusions. To function, telepathy and mind-reading demand you understand the signals in the target’s brain and the oscillations of the soul. Enhancing your senses is a necessary step towards mastering both arts.”

When Marianne grew certain that the machine was many rooms away, she returned to exploring the maze. She gasped as her chest ached each time her muscles contracted to breathe, the metal needle embedding itself deeper and deeper into her flesh.

Turn left and go deeper, Marianne thought as she remembered her mental map of the maze. She had explored a good chunk of it, though each dead-end made her paranoid. She always wondered if the machine would sneak up on her from behind, leaving her with no way out.

“This ability to gather information through the five senses and tuning it with the Blood can go beyond mapping a monster’s innards,” Lord Bethor continued to dispense his wisdom. “It can be used to learn the history of an object by studying its structure in-depth. If you escape this maze, I expect you to refine this power. You will find it useful for your investigations.”

If she escaped.

The Dark Lord’s words said it all.

I mustn’t lose heart, Marianne thought. Despair is the death of the spirit.

She refused to bleed and starve away in this tomb of metal with only a mindless machine for company. Marianne hadn’t accepted death beneath Verney Castle and she wouldn’t start now.

Her quest led her into a single corridor longer than all the others so far. Marianne considered changing her route, as it was too long for her to detect where it led. For all she knew, it might be a dead-end, a trap.

But her Blood-enhanced senses detected a few things. The smell of blood. Hair on the floor. The distant sound of a thick liquid traveling through plumbery.

Corpses were dragged here, Marianne thought. More than one.

Lord Bethor had said that the machine caught the best of his students three times. Which meant the facility had been used by multiple people in the past; and considering the Dark Lord’s methods, not everyone had made it through the process alive.

Which meant the corpses had to be disposed of. Lord Bethor didn’t waste resources so Marianne doubted he would use an incinerator. In all likelihood, his failed student’s remains would be repurposed into undead soldiers or their blood extracted to fuel his tower.

Maybe the corridor led to an exit. Maybe it led to a bloody pit. But it was a potential escape route all the same.

Marianne walked into the hallway with a steady rhythm. She had grown better about walking without her sight, relying on her inner ear to keep her balance. The echo of her footsteps bounced off the steel walls, giving her a crude vision of the room.

Marianne wondered how the world would look once she recovered her sight. Her eyes itched to the point she had to blink repeatedly to avoid crying tears. She thought Lord Bethor had taken her sight with a spell, but now she was convinced he had instead used an alchemical concoction. She had noticed foreign substances traveling through her eyes and blood, altering the frontal areas of her face.

She worried the blindness might become permanent if she didn’t escape. Her enhanced senses could cover this handicap but sightlessness would cripple her swordsmanship. That was her greatest fear. To see all her efforts and sacrifices she made to become a warrior worthy of the Reynard legacy go to waste.

Is that what matters most to me? She thought. Not to honor Jérôme or to protect Valdemar as I promised… but to be the best? When stripped of everything, is that all that remains inside me?

Her questions went unanswered.

Or rather, Marianne knew the answer within herself but she was afraid of vocalizing it. She didn’t want to face the selfish desire inside her heart, the one that lurked beneath her words of remorse or her promises to help others.

And for now, it didn’t matter. Questions would wait until after she secured her escape and survival. Lord Bethor had been right, doubts and hesitation didn’t have their place in a dangerous situation. Her mind had to remain clear as freshwater.

After a few minutes, Marianne finally reached the corridor’s end. As she worried, it led to a dead-end… but not the kind she had feared. Her fingers slowly trailed on a reinforced door of steel so thick that artillery would struggle to bring it down. She knocked on it with her fingers, focusing as the noise traveled through it and echoed a wide space beyond.

She had found the exit.

But it was locked.

“No,” she whispered as her hands traveled along the door. She tried to find a handle to seize, a lock to pick, a hole, anything. But the exit was airtight and smooth as a mirror. “No…”

The door only opened from one side, and she was on the wrong one.

This had all been a trick.

“I must make my own exit,” Marianne realized out loud. Could she break down the door? Could she reinforce her body enough to bend its steel? What other choice did she have?

Lord Bethor’s voice echoed through the maze, but he neither confirmed nor denied her conclusion. Instead, he only harshened the test’s difficulty.

“I will remove the fetters binding my warbeast,” the Dark Lord declared. “Now it will hunt you to the full extent of its abilities. And if it catches you, it will kill you.”

Now that Marianne had completed one part of the test, he moved the goalpost further ahead.

The noblewoman held her breath as her enhanced ears picked up a clicking noise echoing through the maze. Was the machine trying to intimidate her with mechanical roars or cries? Somehow Marianne didn’t think it was capable of scare tactics. Its mind was unclouded by emotions or distractions. If Lord Bethor had given it the order to kill Marianne, all its actions would serve this end.

But how would making noise help that creature locate its prey?

Bats, Marianne realized in horror. Echolocation.

The machine was sending noises across the tunnels and analyzed how it bounced back. Marianne tried to hold her breath and remain still, to no avail. Unlike when the machine tried to detect her by listening to the noise she made, it didn’t matter what she did. Sounds bounced off her body and the creature registered a human-shaped item hiding in a tunnel.

The clicking noise turned into a strident cry and the machine started chasing her.

Marianne turned around and put some space between her and the exit. She knew that she would never get out of the corridor before the machine caught up to her location, but she couldn’t afford to have her back against the wall.

Lord Bethor wanted a fight.

He would get it.

Marianne adopted a fighting stance even as she struggled against the pain in her chest and cheeks. Blood dripped on her lips as she reinforced her fists with a layer of bones. She wasn’t as good with her hands as with her rapier, but she had to use the tools available.

Wait… Marianne thought as she ‘looked’ at her right arm with her enhanced senses, examining the bone beneath the flesh. I have a sword.

Marianne clenched her teeth and struggled against the sheer pain in her arm, as she drew upon the Blood and her body’s last reserves to grow a new bone. The sharp end of a blade erupted from her forearm, centimeter by centimeter. Blood and bone bullets caused much pain, but nothing like this.

“Fuck,” she whispered, tears raining down her cheeks and mixing with her blood. “Fuck…”

By the time she managed to get a bone rapier out of her right arm, the machine had already entered the corridor. Marianne grabbed her weapon, its hilt closer to a fingerbone than anything she had ever wielded, and prepared herself to fight for her life as blood poured out of her wounds.

The machine caught up to her in seconds while running on all fours.

It moved as fast as Shelley, but unlike the unskilled wererat it struck with lethal precision. The machine didn’t shriek a threat or offer a warning. It simply rose on its two back legs and aimed for its target’s chest with its claws.

The motion took less than a second, but to Marianne, it seemed to last forever. She heard the sound of the servos, sensed the vibrations in the air, and smelled the oil. Her mind gathered all these sensations into a perfect picture.

Marianne dodged by sidestepping to the left and struck back with her rapier.

Her bone blade was as strong as steel and her aim true, but the weapon bounced off the creature’s armored chest. However, at the moment of contact, Marianne enhanced her sense of touch to analyze the vibrations. Her mind visualized the results and mapped out the internal workings of the creature. She saw the weaknesses in the joints and how the biomechanical organs all fit together.

It has a brain and spine, weak points, Marianne thought as the machine raised both of its arms and tried to find a hole in her defense. I have to strike the joints in the neck and sever it.

To allow the creature to turn its head, the builders made the neck flexible, fragile. One strike at the weakest point would do the deed.

Like a true duelist, Marianne waited for the machine to attack and leave itself open to retaliation. Its left hand twisted to attack from below, but as it moved the noblewoman noticed that the joints didn’t move as they should.

A feint!

The true attack came from the right and aimed for her head. Metal needles lunged for Marianne’s carotid with enough force to behead her. The machine had reached the same conclusion as she did and identified the neck as a weak spot.

Wagering everything in this one strike, Marianne let the monster’s weapons approach as close as possible before dodging. The needles grazed her skin and hair without drawing blood, like a razor brushing against an invisible beard. Carried by its momentum, the machine moved a step forward just as Marianne’s rapier lunged for its throat.

The blade struck true.

Guided by her complete awareness of the space around her, Marianne hit the machine in the weakest part of its gaunt neck. Her rapier hit the spine between the joints and went through it. The noblewoman let out a roar of sheer anger as she used the blade like a lever, wagering all her strength and weight in the motion. She felt the needle already inside her chest tear through her muscles and draw blood, but she powered through.

Her sword cracked along its blade, but the machine’s neck broke first.

The head went flying like a bottle cap and bounced off the walls, while the decapitated body lost its balance. Marianne took a step back as it collapsed on the ground before her feet, her broken blade showered in oil and spinal fluid.

For a moment, the noblewoman could only breathe loudly, her body as tense as a cable. She almost expected the beast to rise back to its feet and strike her by surprise once again.

It stayed down.

And Marianne laughed.

All the stress accumulated in the last hour left her body, replaced with joyful ecstasy. A rush of endorphins traveled through her body, filling her with pleasure and the satisfaction of a perfect victory. She basked in her senses, and even the blood dripping from her chest, cheek and arm felt as pleasurable as a warm water shower.

“Do you understand, Marianne Reynard?” Lord Bethor’s voice asked with a hint of satisfaction. “The lesson I meant to teach you?”

Marianne breathed heavily, before calming down enough to answer. “I was so distracted looking for an exit… that I failed to study my foe closely.”

If she had focused on fighting back instead of trying to escape the creature, she would have noticed the structural weakness earlier.

“Yes. The beast defeated you in your first encounter because it focused entirely on one task at a time. Its mind was unclouded by judgment or distractions. It decided the goal it would pursue, and when it did, it dedicated all its strength towards achieving it.”

Though she couldn’t see, Marianne turned her blind eyes to the beheaded machine. The head was alive, desperately trying to move to get at her. In spite of the damage it suffered, it still wanted to kill her. “You want me… to become that?”

“Of course not. Tools cannot learn and improve. In our ability to innovate and think, we humans are superior to animals, mindless golems, and auto-machines. I do not ask that you relinquish your intellect or self-awareness. Only that you focus them on what truly matters. A blade cannot cut left and right at once. You must direct all your energies in one direction if you hope to prevail.”

Marianne chuckled, though she didn’t even understand why herself. I don’t even have enough strength left for a healing spell, she thought. “I broke your record.”

“You did,” Lord Bethor conceded. “You have passed this first round of training and your sight shall be returned to you. You may see small changes in your visual acuity.”

Slowly, a veil was lifted off Marianne’s eyes. She saw the lights above her head, the iron walls, the white metal carcass at her feet, and the black oil dripping from its wounds. It’s like that pool, she thought as she remembered Verney Castle. It’s wrong…

It was wrong.

Something was wrong.

She saw the ripples in the oil and the blond hair on the machine’s claws. She saw the veins in the creature’s biomechanical red eyes and the slight traces of rust around them. She saw the slight weaknesses in the ceiling, the tiny cracks in the steel.

“What…” Marianne looked at her bloodied hands and the tiny microscopic hairs growing out of them. She noticed the countless lines on her skin, every single tiny scar. Her mind started counting them all, her eyes unable to look away. “What is this?”

“You were fed a mix of the Elixir of True Sight and other alchemical components through your eyes,” Lord Bethor explained. “It will heighten your visual acuity and reflexes to near-perfection.”

Marianne saw the microscopic black spots in her blood, and the tiny eyes looking back at her inside them. It’s inside us, Bertrand’s words echoed in her head as the wound in her chest ached. She saw the colors of the eyes as droplets of blood fell on the floor, spreading the infection further.

“It’s… it’s too much…” Marianne closed her eyes, but what little light filtered through her eyelids still caused her pain as her mind processed all the colors making up the visual spectrum. She put her hands over them in an attempt to cast her gaze in complete darkness. “It’s too much!”

She was seeing everything in perfect detail, all at once.

“Too many things…” Even her eyelids had eyes looking back at her. “I can’t… I can’t think…”

“Your struggle will not be to learn how to use your sight but to process the information,” Lord Bethor said without any warmth. “Valdemar will take care of your wounds as you rest and figure it out. I will give you some time, and then we shall resume training.”

Marianne let out a scream as her eyes itched so much that she struggled against the urge to tear them out.

By the time the door opened, her nails had sunk into her skin.