Chapter 21

My mind felt closed, I could hear the drip drops of the IV drips next to my hospital cot. It felt clammy with grime, but It could have just been me. I was blurred awake by motions that disturb my comatose state. White was everywhere, plastering me into the cotton sheets below.

“Mr. Rendfield?”

A hand clutched my naked arm, that had a bandage where the IV needle was pricked. The hand was firm, like a touch disciplined by experience. A light glare blinked over between my two eyes, purging the blur of my vision. After a few more flutters, I blinked out the fog out my eyes.

I had stared at the most beautiful individual I ever met, with a professional indifference of a metal I could not summon. The lady was an amalgamation of wonder woman, but with a blonde overlay. She had glasses to fit her medical practitioner like a tea. Her eyes were focused on with concern and common courtesy.

I looked around at the modern and sanitary room and suddenly felt depressed. I was shocked at first, my mind comprehending where I am, relieved that it was all a dream. A vagary of dreams. But for some reason, I despondent for the real, melancholy at what I had experienced in my fabrication of the mind.

It’s as if the dream I had lived felt more real than the world I had woken up in now. The dragging feeling in my heart had missed the comradery of my friends and parents of my fiction. A hogwash of memories dreamed up by an addled thought of something better. But I was in the real world, and it was nothing but mundane. The life I had experienced was just a fantasy, an afterimage of reality, proposed by the concept of the individual.

Did I really, in my deepest desire, wish to live a life of fairies in mechas whilst on an adventure?

“Mr. Rendfield? Are you able to talk?”

“What happened?”

“It seems by the reports, you were in an accident.”

“Yes, I know, but what happened? Why did I wake up now?”

For some reason, I wanted to go back, I felt like I had something left that needed to be done. I know it sounded silly, going back to a long lucid dream I had just woken out of, but I felt I hadn’t resolved it, it was unfinished. I couldn’t for the life of me know why, but I was incomplete in my truth.

The doctor looked at me then, with a sad and charitable smile. “Oh, fate is unkind to those who summit the storm, hence brave for you again need to wake up, Sink. For your journey has yet not met its end, and what an end it will be... Wake up...Grass Hero.”

~~~

I woke up gagging and coughing out the dirt and dust that slithered into my mouth and throat. My bitter rousing made the white stone dust plastered on my face besprinkle into the air like powdered makeup applied dryly on an obtuse green clown.

“Sink?” A shout from below. It looked like Wink was calling my name from the echoes of the interior of the mecha. So my lucid dream was not a dream, but the dream I just came out of was the dream--if that makes any sense.

The mecha was on its back, and I was still leaning on my back, with the stool keeping me in place. I was tangled in grass catered in stone dust. After a few more coughs, I replied back.

“I”m alive!”

“Oh, grand. Thanks for not telling me the plan beforehand.” Wink remarked, now knowing I’m clearly awake, he can protest his opinion. My fellows in my enterprise, really are an opinionated sort, especially for the grass folk. Honestly, how can drones to the grass be so obtuse in varied employment?

Well, it’s not like I pay them or anything, they are all here because of the good of their hearts. Gullible suckers, fit for free labor. Then wait?

‘Why am I here then?’

I guess...I'm one of those gullible suckers too. Just did the task that was asked of me, from the kindest of my heart and memory of a moral code I had once lived; I had blindly followed the edicts of my compassion.

Sometimes I wish I was less empathetic, narcissistic in personality, fate seems kind to those sorts, who show no remorse but greed for ambition. For heavy is the heart who stomachs the world’s cries.

I was about to reply to Wink’s sarcasm when another deluge of dust began to pour through the visor slits and my opened yap. I gagged and coughed out another spattering of stone dust. You’d think I’d have enough quarry in my system, but the world is generous with its earth to those too small to reject.

Teka shouted from up above. “Sink! Commander! Over here Peb! I see metal.”

Ah yes, Teka, and my faithful sidekick Peb, prompt to my rescue. Or burial. I cringed at the idea of being exhumed, being forced from my rest to tolerate the story of the world. This morbid reflection is not getting anywhere.

“I’m down here!” I shouted up.

And to my horror another deluge of dust entered into my cries, making me gag yet again. ‘How bout, I just don’t speak.’

After a granite amount of time had passed, Peb and Teka opened the visor to my closed mouth. Their relieved faces turned apprehensive after they saw me grimace at them. They assumed I was displeased by their tartness, but I was actually just displeased by my surroundings and the grime that was stuck in my throat.

“What’s the situation up above?”

Peb had looked like he had been crying for a long while now. I felt a trickle of moisten drops slap onto my face from Peb’s reaction of spotting me. It looked like he was crying for me, and now his tear ducts are opened again in relief of finding me.

I gave him a proud and honest to goodness, smile. I did not know, I had influenced Peb’s stony heart so much from the grime and the stone.

“I can’t believe it, you made me break so many stones.” Peb accused me, crying atop the visor. He moaned into tears as he continued his tirade.

“I broke so many good tasty stones, not by teeth but by my hands.” He stared at his hands like he committed murder then glared at me with eyes brimming. “Why Sink? Was it all worth it? The chaos you brought to the order of stone. Beautiful, delectable stone.”

My smile was still there, grudgingly so, for I still need him to unbind more stones for my mecha. “Oh, Peb.” I tried to soothe.

“Don’t Oh Peb! Me! You got a lot of bindings you owe me. I’ve been counting!”

‘Oh, voracious Peb.’

“You made me unbind so many…” Peb looked down at his hands again.

“Don’t mind your stony heart, for the world is made of stone, and you will sample the best of the soil.” I proposed.

After a grueling while, I had simpered and catered to convince the needs of the simple. I managed to cajole Peb into breaking the rest of the stones that had buried Amelia, for we needed a vehicle to travel the world to sample the stones.

When Wink and I got out the mecha, Oona was there to greet us as well. “Where is our pooping disaster?” I asked her.

Oona shrugged, pointing to the hovel I had left them in. “Sera has him asleep. He had a few bruises that he needed attending. Luckily, in our brilliance, we used Peb's invention of the fire stones to warm the baby’s pain away.”

“Ah, yes, a heat pack. Brilliant.” I ignored the words of ‘Peb’s invention’, that was a shared venture. I was the mind, he was the arm, but I digress. Speaking of the baby, what about the human squire. With that question in my mind backed up with a growing panic, I asked Oona. “What about the human squire? Did he find out?”

The idea of waking up to a bunch of grass folks digging up an empty armored golem could prompt an unpredictable reaction.

“Oh, from what I could see, he is still unconscious.”

Oh good, I sighed at her response. “Wait, what do you mean from what you could see? Did you even check up on him?”

“Nope.” She shrugged. “But from what I can see from here, he is probably dead or unconscious.”

I tensed at the idea, I had mixed feelings, the strange squire. But he was a comrade in battle, he did not run when he had the chance to, and fought when I asked. Actually, from first impressions, he seemed to be a fairly solid lad.

“Well once we are done with the excavation, we will check up on him with Amelia.”

“You know, you're really good at pretending.” She confided, actually giving me a compliment.

I gave her a chagrin. “Because...young fae, I am charming.”

Oona’s face went red, “Young fae!”

“What?”

“You’re like sixteen?” She pointed out.

“How do you know? And why does that matter?”

“I’m 18,” Oona remarked. “So don’t ever call me a young fae, I am older than you.”

“Ahem, okay.”

It didn’t seem so from my impression, she was more of a child compared to the people in my grove. Granted I have lived two lifetimes, so technically, in mentality, I am older than her with a personality molded by many years of experience. She on the other hand with what she hinted of her unstable upbringing, she seemed to have not yet wisened to the woes of age.

The arrogance of youth is somewhat aloof and naturally brash, It would have been something I think I might have envied a time ago, but not now. I know better now.

Suddenly, I remembered the reason I had gotten into this situation. “What about the dragon?” I asked Oona.

“Is it dead?”

“Did you get a title?”

I checked my Status page. “Nope.”

“So probably still alive. But I’m pretty sure you weren’t the one to have gotten the Title. Ask Peb?”

“Peb?”

Peb shrugged and said he got nothing from no one as he stewed in the grime of his unbinding. Shrugging at his response, I hypothesized the Dragon is still alive but unconscious.

With that priority in mind, I analyzed the condition of my Knight Mecha. Amelia had plenty of new dents all over the steel plates of her armor and the huge tear in the chest compartment was caved in with stones and dust. After we dug out the stones that had piled within, I activated Amelia with a tune.

The grass greenhouse within the mecha was exposed to quarry dust, catering to the environment with stone particles. After the stress of the tempo settings I had enforced the grass to play, the grass within Amelia delayed following my commands.

I cringed at the staggered movement as if the life of the plants were too tired to flutter to the sound. Teka went up to his plumage to dust and clean up the spot he had made comfortable. Wink had been cultivating the air for mana, so he could share it with the ecosystem within.

Meanwhile, Peb had restocked his stone pile at the pelvis compartment, gleefully chewing and binding new combos I had given him.

Taking another deep sigh, I stirred Amelia gingerly ahead. It was time to check on the squire.

When we reached the prone squire, Oona hovered above him. “He looks dead.”

Afraid she was right, I knelt down with Amelia, then used her gauntlets to flip the body of the squire. The squire gave a grunt of disturbance in his unconsciousness. Hearing this gave me a relieved expression.

Dravon looked like he had acquired a bloody head injury above his temple. He was concussed by the impact into unconsciousness by the stone wall beside him. He seemed to be waking up from the Mecha’s touch.

The squire’s left brow had blood streaks crusting down atop his eyelids, tentatively impeding red in his peripherals. He went to rub the crusty flakes out from his eyelashes as he looked up to me.

“Did we win?” He asked, his voice tentative like his bruise.

“Yes.”

“What about the dragon? Is it dead?’

Pausing for a moment, I didn’t want to frighten the lad into hopelessness. I told him, “The dragon is not dead, but it is buried unconscious.”

“Let me see.” The squire had opened his arms to me, directing me to help lift him up with Amelia.

So I did, after a few rustles, and clinks between steel. I lifted the squire up on his sols, supporting him as we stood. I was hesitant to be this close in proximity with the human, for he could see through the visor’s slits, but judging from the damage that was impeding his vision, I thought it was a reasonable risk to take.

With Amelia, I showed him where the Dragon was currently buried and unconscious in the rubble. “How’d you know it’s not dead?” He inquired again.

“I did not get the Title from the System.,” I answered.

“Oh, right...”

Suddenly, as quick as a viper, a serrated dagger pierced through the right vision slit of Amelia’s visor. I just barely had enough time in my drowsy and dull state to avoid being decapitated as I moved my head to the side. The serrated edge had sliced my right cheek and my right ear, my face too shocked to acknowledge the injury.