Champion of the Bots ✔️

Chapter 4 ~ RENA

The plane landed with a flip, slicing open a wing and the head. Blood everywhere—on the plastered walls, on the plastic windows, on the precious last items of survivors. Wooden picture frames, antique chairs, jeweled bracelets, wooly jackets scattered on the plain of grass.

Rena didn't waste the time to cry. She surveyed her landscape—water and coconut trees.

"Water!" She began to panic. "I need to get out of here." She stood up and brushed the sand off her jeans. "Hello?" She cried out, squinting her brown eyes at the blazing sun. "Anyone here?"

No answer save for the crashing waves.

"Sid!" She shouted, walking dizzily like a zebra on roller-skates on the grass. "Paul? Jimmy? Nina?"

Rena ran. And ran and ran. Her sneakers slipped from the slippery sand, but she kept moving. She needed to get away from the water, from the island. She needed to find her family.

"Hello?" She kept calling out. "Help!"

As she rounded the island, she saw a shining glare. "Bubbles!" She cried out. She sprinted, her thighs squeaking in agony. "Bubbles!" She whooped again, hope rising in her chest.

As she cleared the coconut trees, she saw her family. "Everyone! I'm here!"

"Rena!"

She stopped. So did the young man.

He grinned at her again, then continued dragging a figure through the rocky sand.

Rena continued running. "Let Sid go, you monster!"

"Don't." A tall, sturdy man appeared behind her shoulder and gripped the edge of her shirt.

"Paul," she cried out. "Let me go."

Paul, the right hand man of Sid, looked up at me, his grey eyebrows a straight line above his eyes. "No."

Stamping my foot, Rena cried out, "How many people has Sid saved?"

He went silent for a moment.

"He has saved all of us; yet here we are, doing nothing! Let me go."

The grip on her sleeve loosened, and Rena raced. She jumped and sprinted and pounced. She flew and kicked the enemy in the face, literally.

She fell, her feet cramped. The monster simply stretched his neck and walked slowly to his victim. Rena felt fear clog her throat. The moment was too familiar, too similar to her past. It's a Bot, she realized.

Every night she worried about meeting another Bot, another metal monster since the night Sid found her. Every night she dreamed of those cold-blood eyes, those metallic fingers that raked through bodies.

The Bot hissed, cold green eyes calculating her, until she saw a sudden flicker of hesitancy through the binary code in its eyeballs.

A h-human emotion? Shaking the distraction, she punched the Bot in its metal chest, ignoring the searing pain in her knuckles.

"Run, Sid!" She cried out, swinging another punch at the side of its pretty face.

The man tumbled out of reach and stood behind his hero. "Not without you, Rena!" But it was too late—the Bot simply stretched his elbow and smacked Sid in the face.

Rena's hero—everyone's savior—toppled to the ground, blood smearing the bright green grass.

"Rena! Run!" Nina screamed from behind. Rena's legs tensed to spring, but they felt stiff as ice.

"Human," the automation confirmed. It bent and picked her up by her thin shoulders. Fur boots dangling down, it raised her up to its eyes; and Rena could see the neverending jumble of the binary code on the lenses of its eyes.

The Bot wrapped its hand around her neck, its stormy grey eyes flashed with a hint of red in the iris, calculating the quickest way to annihilate her. But a flicker of sadness tinted its eyes. But how could a Bot have feelings?

"Let me... take you... Eden!" The cyborg's pale lips trembled, wrestling with himself to speak. His whole figure shook as he slowly lowered Rena onto the grass—

Click.

"Don't shoot!"

The mechanical boy tensed, digging his nails into Rena's shoulders. His grey eyes flickered with a hint of agony.

"Don't shoot!" Rena repeated, her eyes never leaving her enemy's.

The half-automaton-half-boy's features softened. She saw the familiar hint of human in it, or him. Its fingers heated to a boiling point, searing her shoulders through her thin blouse. "Save... me..." It whimpered out, its eyes boring into Rena before it slumped onto the ground.

Rena fell on the tips of her kneecap, her eyes watching the android crumple into a lifeless figure. Raising her eyes to her family who stood a few meters away with large guns in their scarred hands and a scowl on their lips, she spoke softly, "We have to save him."

The wind whooshed her words away, but it could not hush the roar that erupted.

"Are you serious? Did you hit your head?"

"Let's rip its wires out!"

"I want to see if it has a brain!"

Rena looked at the man standing few feet away from her. "What do you think?" She asked.

Loosening the gun in his arm, Paul sighed. "Sid first. Bot later."

"Sid!" Rena whimpered out, clawing her shaken legs to the cripple man next to her. Gently turning his body around, Rena saw the damage—torn lip, red-wrung neck, bruised cheeks, swollen right eye, and more that she couldn't see beneath the blood.

Her ear against his broad chest, Rena listened. For anything. A gasp. A flitter of a heartbeat.

"I c-can't hear anything—"

And then, a breath of life.