I woke up in the dead of night with a sense of urgent wrongness. I rolled over to face the room and saw a black shape looming over me, massive, with only one tiny red pinprick of light emitted from the very center of the darkness.

Moving more on instinct than thought, I swung my arms, and lightning blades up in front of me. One of the blades sheared through my hammock and sent me spilling out sideways, which turned out to save my life as a huge blade attached to the black shape’s arm crunched down and pulverized the hammock where I’d been sitting.

I rolled to my feet but was still trapped. The thing was massive, hunched over and easily three or four times as broad as I was, and barely able to fit inside the room. With it’s huge reach, and the cramped confines and sheer amount of junk in the room, there was no way I could move freely or get past it.

Still, there was something I could do.

I bounded towards it, and clapped twice.

Light flooded the room and the thing recoiled, briefly blinded. I took the brief moment to get a good look at my nighttime assassin.

It was…a huge robot. Bigger even than AEGIS’ bigger variants of DOG, but definitely with some of their DNA in its mix. It moved on four legs, but instead of being spidery, they had treads on the end of each, and instead of a small central body it had a huge torso, with two powerful arms, one ending in a hand, and the other in a lethal-looking set of blades. It had no head, instead having an array of sensors in the center of its chest.

If it was one of AEGIS’ machines, and it worked the same way as DOG, the little red light next to the camera seemed to indicate that she was driving.

“AEGIS? You in there?” I asked. The machine stayed in a ready pose and did not move. “I would kind of like to know the meaning of this.” I stole a glance behind me and noticed that the AEGIS box was gone, almost confirming my suspicions.

“I don’t like this game!” I shouted at it. “Let me out, please!”

It didn’t reply, but it did attack again. Sweeping its huge arm sideways, it devastated a huge arc in front of it. I jumped back against the wall to barely evade the swing, and sliced at it with my lightning swords as it passed, to absolutely no effect. The resistive shielding on these guys was even better than that on the big DOGs, and maybe she’d learned from the one I killed and made it impossible to melt as well.

It had me pinned in the corner when it swung again. Knowing I couldn’t avoid it, I went in, instead, rushing at the swinging arm and diving under it at the elbow. The arm tried to change course to intercept me, but it was too big and heavy, and just scraped a huge gouge in the concrete floor inches behind me. I was on its side now, and it quickly was rotating in place using the treads on its feet to spin. I put some shelves between me and it and tried to make for the door.

Fucking AEGIS had finally closed the damn door. Rusty piece of shit that it was, I didn’t think I could get it open with this murderbot trying to cut me in the process. I would have to deal with it first.

But how was I supposed to fight something this strong in such a small space, when it was presumably designed by somebody who knew exactly how to kill me?

I took another quick look around. The Exosuit was gone, as were the boxes of guns and explosives. AEGIS had taken everything which could have given me a fighting chance.

Well, fuck her.

Before the thing could finish turning on me, I charged it. No use waiting for it to bring its sword to bear again. As one, four blades of lightning pierced right through its center. I could…feel them, if that was the right term. They were held together by my will, so in a way they were an extension of myself. As they went into the machine’s torso, I felt them subtly twisting and bending, shunted by a lattice specifically put in place to divert electricity, avoiding wires quadruple-insulated. Doing what lightning liked to do, follow the path of least resistance.

To my annoyance. AEGIS had the whole thing built with lightning-immunity in mind, its guts were wrapped in layer after layer of faraday cages and lightning rods, all designed to shunt electricity away from vital areas and out of the machine.

I couldn’t even burn the thing. The parts of it that electricity were allowed to flow through had enormous heat tolerances, and though they glowed red and white from the entire seconds that I pumped lightning into them, they did not soften or shift.

In essence, I was fucked.

Before it even finished turning, it cleaved at me again. I jumped back, out of reach, but it quickly rolled forward, taking up the space and now beginning to threaten pinning me against this wall instead. I was reminded of how nimble for its size DOG was. This one was so much bigger, but still just as fast, even moving on treads instead of legs. I had to think of something and quick.

Next swipe, I followed the swing, grabbing the blade-arm and pinning myself to it. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it couldn’t cut me in half if I was rooted to the blade. It gave me a couple of experimental swings to dislodge me, when suddenly I found myself grabbed by the shoulder by the robot’s other arm and forcibly ripped off. Now helpless in its grasp, it reared back and slammed me into the ceiling.

Stars popped in front of my eyes as the ceiling crashed into me again. My arms and legs dangled helplessly from the machine’s huge metal arm.

I threw out lightning everywhere I could, having nothing else I could do. My swords swung like crazy, slicing right through it with no effect, like it was a ghost. I saturated the air with energy and could smell nothing but ozone, but the machine cared not at all. Finally, after cracking my head on the ceiling one more time, I heaved a huge lightning bulb at it, flinching as the expanding wave of electricity washed over me.

I had never actually tested if I was immune to lightning or not. The fact that I could use it to shave of my hairs definitely indicated that my body was in no way naturally resilient. And more…I’d never been shocked during my Ramanathan window. So as the arcing web of lightning consumed me, I realized this might just be the end.

It…wasn’t. It didn’t hurt the robot either. I realized that I was subconsciously using my powers to divert the energy off of me. If the lightning hit me and passed through my body, I may very well be dead, but some part of my brain could control lightning, had an intuitive grasp of how to make my powers go. It was what I tapped into when I made swords swing or crafted a bulb in my hands, and it was the part of me that was actively making whatever lightning which arced into me go right around me instead of through me, tracing my skin but never touching me.

It straight up just broke the laws of physics, but hell, so did everything else about Exhumans, so I wasn’t going to complain.

As my powers protected me, I realized I’d done the same thing consciously that morning, shaving. Carefully manipulating the flow of energy to shave in the river, not allowing the lightning to do as physics intended, but rather follow my flow, my rules, my command. Resistance and conductivity be damned, I was an Exhuman who controlled electricity.

And this robot was about to be massively fucked.

I grabbed the arm holding me across the chest with both hands and pumped electricity into it. At first, the current just flowed into the dampeners in the resistive armor, but I forced it, willed it to go further, to penetrate the defenses and strike at the vulnerable parts beneath.

Painfully slowly, the current straightened out, not following the curvature of the arm, but passing straight through it. It burned wires and blew fuses, seared internal servos and pneumatic pumps, and with a cloud of smoke and some small explosions, the arm released me and fell useless at the robot’s side.

AEGIS must have been driving because the robot seemed to react with shock, taking half a step/roll back, and guarding its body with the extended blade. I swear I saw one of the chest-embedded camera’s aperture widen in surprise.

I didn’t give her time to recover. I darted in, faking to one side and then rolling off towards the disabled arm. The treads rolled at me, trying to crush or pin my legs, but I swept to the side and planted myself at the bottom of its torso, hanging off of it underneath its dead arm. From each hand, I began the process of pumping electricity into the central systems.

There was a lot of empty space in the machine. Robots were at the same time so much simpler and more complicated than humans. A lot of the space was there for protection, I realized, an air gap or insulation layer to divert electric flow. Still, lots of the thing’s insides were not empty, and that’s where I forced the energy to flow.

In her defense, AEGIS’ machine fought to the end. It flailed and thrashed, spinning every possible way and even throwing me off twice, but without the short-range arm in play, it had no chance of defeating me without keeping me at range and skewering me, and that was a game I refused to play. I stayed close, strafing around it and keeping it constantly having to rotate to face me, pumping electricity into it constantly, and as I did, it gradually became more and more unresponsive as systems shut down, parts became inoperable, treads refused to move.

Until finally it was dead. The light was still on and the cameras still adjusted to point at me like a set of beady eyes, but it could no longer move or fight.

It felt like a hollow victory.

“WHY, AEGIS!?” I screamed at the immobile unit. “WHY KILL ME? I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

In response, the red light went out. She was elsewhere now.

I had an idea where that might be. I took a few minutes to sit and rest, letting my head stop spinning and getting the stars out of my eyes. I wished I had Saga to help me put my brain back on faster. I cut a length of synthetic weave and wrapped it around my head a few times to keep the blood out of my face and hopefully inside my body and took a final inventory before heading out.

She’d taken pretty much everything of value, the spiteful bitch. Even Karu’s nutrient paste, despite the fact she couldn’t even eat. I guess she wanted me to fight hungry. The mass-fab was unsurprisingly completely shut down, and many other bits and pieces of what I had assumed were just junk were missing as well. I fumed and headed to the door.

Now at no risk of spontaneous bisection, I was able to slowly open the crappy rusty door, swearing as it slowly grated on its hinges, seemingly going nowhere. Then, with a boom, it flew open at once, sending me falling outside into the night.

There, waiting for me were 3 of the large DOG units, each holding a long spear, easily ten feet long and with a blade as broad as my head. As I stumbled out, the scorpion-tail necks of all three trailed me in unison.

As I charged the one with the glowing red light on, I finally remembered what AEGIS had said after making DOG. She wanted to make another series, with an externally-mounted camera. DOG-Enhanced.

I decided I definitely preferred the original to the DOG-Es.

They were harder to deal with than the big guy, though at least I could wear them down with ranged bulbs, which, being light-speed, were impossible for them to dodge. But other than that, they were so fast and hopping all over the place it was equally impossible for me to get a hand on them and force some power through their vitals.

Every time I finally made one stumble or got a good hit in, the other two pressured me harder instantly, keeping me from capitalizing on my advantage until the wounded DOG-E could get back up. Unengaged units circled behind me, and tried to impale me from behind, and more than once, I dodged only barely in time, getting a slash on my body as a consolation prize for the machine.

It was exhausting, but it was also obvious these three weren’t meant for the fight. They worked well together and were fast, but they weren’t that aggressive, only the one with the red light really led any attacks, and the other two followed. I was forced to play a game of keep the red-light DOG-E disabled, while AEGIS was playing switch between the three as fast and annoyingly as possible.

We were both wearing each other down, but I wasn’t getting much slower with every attack and they were. A stray blow on me meant a gash or bruise, which could make me favor a leg or hurt, but a stray blow on them meant ruptured electronics, unresponsive legs, or melted frame and limited range of motion.

AEGIS did her best managing the DOG-Es even as they were more scrap than robot by the end, but she never really stood a chance with these. As I terminated the second one, the third one lit up with the red light…and a yellow holo.

“You’ll never win, Athan,” AEGIS said, sneering at me through her computer.

“AEGIS! Why are you doing this!”

“I…that’s not important.”

“Not important? How is that not important?” I looked around feeling like the world had gone insane. “What could possibly be more important?”

“It doesn’t matter…you’ll soon be dead. All you need to know is that I’m at the western bunker. Come and be destroyed.”

“I’m coming there all right, and when I do–and I kick your stupid robot army’s ass–you had better have a great explanation for all of this.”

“I don’t need to explain myself to you,” she said, and cut the holo. The DOG-E leapt at me and I rolled under it and fired a series of three bulbs into its underside. It crash landed and rolled once before stopping dead.

“AEGIS you ungrateful bitch,” I growled. “What the fuck are you thinking?”

She told me where she was. That could only mean one thing. She wanted me to come, meaning…

“Well this is obviously a trap.”

I sat and caught my breath for a few minutes again, pausing only to blow a couple cam-drones out of the sky. They were utterly unshielded and popped like popcorn when hit. It was pretty satisfying.

It was my death she was obviously after. The assassination attempt, the ambush, the trap…she had no reason to talk to me right up until it looked like I was going to win, which meant she didn’t want anything from me except for me to take the bait, and presumably die.

Well take the bait I would. I got up and made sure no more cam-drones were in the area by saturating the air with a wave of electricity before heading south instead of north-west. I had a brief detour I had to make before I confronted AEGIS in her lair.