The building’s interior was in as much disrepair as its exterior, though the structure held together remarkably well for such a large, empty, spacious ruin. As Axton drove Franken through the broken sliding plexiglass doors, which were smashed out of the way by Franken’s form, the pilot took a few moments to look around and try and plot out a few potential places he would strike from if he were ever forced to defend from here.

He noted a few places nearby where a defending party could reasonably hide from most War Suit sensors, and he trained his Player HUD on those areas to see if his hunch was correct. For once, his gut instinct seemed to be wrong, but he was still unwilling to take any chances regardless.

Rather than waste ammo on shooting at things that might not be there, Axton had Franken yeet a small, fallen, rod-like metal pylon at the potential hiding spot. The metal pole smashed through the already decayed faux marble and tore a massive hole from one side to the next.

However, Axton’s gut had, it seemed, been proven to not always be correct. Though a chunk had been torn away, one large enough to see a good three or more feet around what used to be a corner, there was neither hide nor hair of any threat beyond falling dust that was revealed.

Axton exhaled deeply and limbered up inside the cockpit. Maybe he was a bit too nervous for his own good. Then again, he had essentially been on his toes for around 6 in-game hours straight in a very high-stress environment, so who could fault him for being on edge?

“Well, they must be deeper in…”

As Axton mumbled those words, the sound of a large crash came from deeper in the building.

“Seems a broken clock is right at least twice a day, eh?”

Partially throwing caution to the wind and partially praying that his gut wouldn’t be proven wrong twice in such a short period of time, Axton drove his giant humanoid killer robot farther in, stopping before exiting a wide hallway. The hallway ended right in front of where he stopped, opening up into a massive interior plaza that likely was once covered by a colossal domed skylight.

That skylight had seemingly long since been destroyed either by the hands of time or by more physical ones, and now all that remained there were scattered pieces of metal and ruined furniture that had obviously seen better days. Remarkably, though, a series of water fountains were still operational, though they, along with nearly everything else here, had been mostly overtaken by nature.

Axton paused before deciding to risk it all. He backed up his War Suit before rushing forward, putting his humanoid death robot into a tumbling roll that shook both Franken and the War Suit’s pilot as Franken somersaulted through the air and over the ground. As he had suspected, the enemy was indeed deeper inside, and they had indeed set up some firing angles fast enough to be able to try and pepper him and his mech with gunfire.

If he had driven in normally, even at top speed, Franken would have been hit a few times. But, by going balls-to-the-walls insane and somersaulting his mech through the opening and into cover, Franken managed to avoid taking more than a pair of glancing shots that ended up being non-penetrations that caused nothing more than a bit of damage to the paint job.

As Franken reached cover, the fire rate increased, and Axton had to learn on the fly how to inch a War Suit like his along the ground on its mechanical fanny to avoid taking hits to his mech’s head. Eventually, though, he did manage to reposition Franken at the right edge of the worn reinforced concrete wall that had acted as cover up to this point, and as he directed Franken to stand up and bolt through the mess of fallen materials and overgrowth the fire from the enemies blasted through the part of the wall where Franken had first hidden.

As soon as Franken had begun to move out in the open, the guns began to retarget from where it and its pilot was to where they were now, and this forced Axton to duck and dodge and weave his War Suit as bullets and occasionally rockets fell all around him. Thankfully, game logic still applied, and while fast as fuck, the oversized bullets were much, much slower than real ones would have been.

Rather than being sonic or supersonic in terms of speed, he could actually dodge these shells if he put his mind to it and there were openings. The problem was that he also had to deal with the overgrown flora and the ruined structure’s fallen debris, which added more difficulty to his task.

However, as long as Franken did not suffer any major damage, Axton could rather easily repair his machine without risking much of his own virtual life and limb in the process. As such, the name of this game was to dodge, duck, weave, and try desperately to avoid taking a penetrating hit.

…

Franken sped around a fountain, grabbing a metal table with its left hand as it rounded the fountain on the machine’s right. As it neared to edge of the line where his War Suit’s ‘toe-line’ began and the fountain’s rim ended, Axton had Franken spin around, using the metal table as a gyroscopic weight for a full rotation before having Franken release its grip on what it was holding.

The table soared through the air as the gunfire sounded off. They had aimed towards where Franken should have been had Axton continued on normally, but due to Franken turning into a mechanical ‘discus’ thrower, their rounds only hit the ground in front of Axton’s mech.

The table, for its part, continue to soar through the sky before landing amongst the unsportsmanlike support that the cheaters had called down, tumbling a bit as it landed and smacking a Light War Suit straight on. Rather than moving forward normally, Axton pushed Franken into reverse and had his machine move backward until it was under an elevated walkway.

Then, after he now had a roof over him and his machine’s heads, Axton put his piloted death robot back into normal, forward movement and sped forward again. Now the enemy had to reposition to get a better angle of attack, but they would not be able to do so quickly enough.

Axton and Franken ducked down another hallway and out of sight and sensor range, and the intruders in the Battle Royale were given time to catch their breath. Maybe he had simply chosen to run away?

If that last line was their actual belief, then they were sorely mistaken, and Axton had something that they lacked: a map of the area. And, wouldn’t you know it, the path he had just taken had a way that would lead right back to his foes and would allow him to hit them from the one direction they would likely not expect.