No sooner had I pasted the function into Sparky’s magic file, he triggered it. In seconds, a squirrel the size of a large dog was sitting on the Oni, engulfed in flames. Ryoma screamed out in pain, being burned for the first time. I guess his resistance to fire wasn’t actually maxxed out.

“We need to leave, now!” I yelled as I retrieved Carnivac into my [Inventory]. Sparky shrank back down to normal size and passed out. He must have used a huge amount of mana to both grow and burn. Pythona looked completely flummoxed to see Carnivac vanish and tried lobbing balls of energy at me with zero effect.

“What are you?” she yelled, confused.

“I’m an Automata, and I’m leaving.”

I scooped Sparky up, and tried to pull Elita to her feet but she was unresponsive. “Damn it, come ON Elita! Shea, help me with Elita!”

But Shea wasn’t helping. She had gotten to her feet and drawn her sword and was pointing it at me.

“You! This is all your fault!” she screamed. “Everything was fine before you showed up! [WaterJet(maxSize, minDiameter)]!”

“Oh Shea...” I said, my heart broken.

Her blast tore into the wooden floor and would have taken my arm off if I hadn’t turned, though it did manage to dig a scar into my back plating. The force of the pressurized water sent Shea flying back like a rocket and into the wall. I protected Sparky with my body as the pressure stream hit me and then carved a groove into the ceiling as Shea slumped onto the floor. Her jet dissipated and she didn’t get back up.

“I’ll kill you... I’ll definitely kill you...” Ryoma said from a crumpled pile on the floor.

I looked down at him. “So you heard from someone that Carnivac was really an Automata in disguise and wanted to find out if it was true. What was your plan after that?”

He looked up at me, eyes burning with rage. “I’m... going... to... KILL YOU”

Sigh. “You should put some aloe on those burns. It helps.”

I pulled Cyclone out of [Inventory] and got inside with Sparky. I had considered waiting until out of this guy’s sight to do this but I couldn’t carry Elita on my own. Besides, there was no one here who could take down Cyclone and he wouldn't have blended into the crowd anyhow. With Elita over my shoulder, I backed up to the window, keeping the gun on my free arm pointing at them. The guards and the Adventurers were stirring and my chances of leaving without killing anyone were getting smaller.

I glanced over my shoulder and crashed out the window, enlarging the opening from floor to ceiling. Once outside the window, I looked up and used [Blink] to put me on the roof after they saw me fall downward and out of their view. The [Blink] spell that Cyclone was equipped with, allowed me to move at impossibly fast speeds for very short distances and in a straight line, much like Instantaneous movement in Dragon Ball or short range teleportation rather than me actively thinking about movement at that speed.

The Guild Hall was quite large and had a very spacious rooftop. I really wasn’t sure what to do or where to go from here. I gently set Elita on the ground and climbed out of Cyclone and returned him to [Inventory]. His size and weight would certainly give our position away easily.

First I would need to figure out a way of getting back to the shop. It was then that I realized that all of my shop proxies were offline. I had disconnected them when I upgraded and completely forgot about reconnecting them. I hoped nothing bad happened, Shiro must have been freaking out.

First, I connected to Alfred, my shop keeper proxy. Looking through his eyes, everything was dark. He seemed to be in a storage closet of some kind. I looked around and Ram and Rom were in the closet as well. I could hear voices outside the closet, a male voice was grumbling about having to “keep an eye on her” while further away I could hear a gruff female voice yelling about the “Knight Watch bothering old ladies” and “their mothers should be ashamed of them” and “Noah Izumi, you were a brat when you were a kid and you’re still a brat!” I looked down and could see evidence tags on Alfred and the girls. From the sound of things, Jada had gotten arrested by the Knight Watch and my proxies were impounded. Syncing up with Alfred didn’t grant me any new information so all of this must have happened after I left Shady Grove.

They would be safe enough for the moment though I kept Alfred connected so I could keep an ear in the Watch in case things went bad for Jada. I didn’t want her to take the fall for stealing the Automata from that magic tool shop, though busting her out of jail probably wouldn’t look too good for her either.

I put Alfred into a background process and focused on Elita. She had taken a lot of damage to her head and neck which caused her to go offline. Thankfully, her soul core was untouched. I got the connections in her neck reestablished and one of her eyes flickered back to life. Her eye locked onto me as her hand lashed out and grabbed around my throat while her other hand was ready to rain down a beating.

“Elita! It’s me Prime, we’re safe for now” I tried to reassure her.

“I know,” she said coldly.

“Harsh. Look, I know I said something jerky after killing that stone dragon, and I’m sorry, but how long are you going to drag this out?”

“I don’t care about that,” she admitted, “how many people know about you? You can’t keep your stupid mouth shut and you have to keep telling people what you are instead of acting like a normal Automata, and THIS is where it’s gotten us.”

“A normal Automata?” I barked back at her. “You’re the one that attacked me the instant you came online saying `you’ll never be a slave again`! You also refused to even pretend to be Shea’s property to work as an adventurer to help earn money. So how about you get off your high horse and take a long drink of Shut The Hell Up!”

I knocked her hand off my throat and stood up, backing away from her. “I couldn’t go along and pretend to be a happy little slave any more than you could so cut me some slack.”

She seemed to deflate at this and her anger evaporated a bit. “You’re right... I couldn’t pretend to be a slave either. I can’t fault you for that. So what do we do now?”

“You’re right too... I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut and now there are at least three people that could have blown my cover to the Guild. Five, if you count the kittens. None of them knew about you though until that stupid arrow bounced off of you.”

“What about Jada? She knows about me.”

“Jada is currently sitting in the Knight Watch jail and Alfred and the girls have been impounded. I’m guessing the Watch raided the shop and found the stolen Automata there and are accusing her of somehow stealing them. Najii, Lily, and George all knew my connection to the shop so any of them could have tipped the Watch off.”

“You know it’s creepy when you refer to them as `the girls`, right?”

“Is it creepier than you murdering them in cold blood so they wouldn’t squeal on us escaping the magic tool shop? I can do this all day.”

“But— I didn’t murder.”

“At the time, I didn’t know what Automata really were. I thought maybe I was unique and actually alive thanks to how I got here and maybe the rest really were just magic tools. Especially since you just cut them down without a thought.” I risked a peek over the edge to see people were still scrambling around trying to figure out where we’d gone. “But now I know they were alive, they had living souls bound to them.”

“Look Prime... I know it isn’t pleasant, or nice... but we couldn’t leave them behind. They would have given us away immediately and they refused to come with us. Sometimes in war, you need to make sacrifices.”

“Are we at war? Who is our enemy?”

“We are. It’s the Automata against everyone else. Especially against those bastards that keep making more of us. Every. Single. Person, down there. Wants to deny us our right to live as people. I’m sorry that I had to kill those others, I truly am, but I would still make that same decision again if it meant a chance at freedom.”

“So then, what’s your story morning glory? I guessed you were a military grade model, but I don’t really know anything about you beyond that, and you seem to be too afraid to unlock your own past memories.”

Elita looked up at the sky for a long time before answering me. “I unlocked them. Back in AutomaTown when everyone was busy rebuilding.”

“So now you know who you are?”

“Nope. What I unlocked were even more memories of being an Automata. Apparently, I’ve been through several different Automata bodies now. I’ve been a soldier, a maid, a fetish, a toy, a curiosity, a test subject... I have no idea how old I actually am. I ran your program several times and a new lock was put in place each time I got a new body. But the further back it goes, the more fragmented it is. I removed all of the locks... but there’s barely anything left from before. I remember waking up as an Automata and going berserk, and killing an old man... but I can’t remember anything at all before that. I don’t know who I am Prime.”

I leaned down behind her and put my arms around her shoulders and held her. “I know who you are. You are Elita the First. You are my closest friend. You are the strongest Automata I know. And you are going to get the most kick-ass body upgrades I can think of, so be ready for that.”

She laughed and patted my arms. “You’re so weird.”

“I know.”