Fallout: Fury Blood

Chapter 43: Dead Steel

He ran.

From the Brotherhood. From the truth. From himself.

Know your enemy. My enemy is me.

Synth. Machine. Abomination.

No. Impossible.

So why am I running?

Numb. Nothing.

He ran.

Danse ran in no specific direction, he just ran. Every step he took echoed through the passage of his life, a cruel reminiscence of an illusive lie. Every step he took was an excrescence of life, an insult to everything he ever stood for, an insult to the Brotherhood. Every step he took was a curse.

He ran.

Through the Glowing Sea, abandoning his power armor on the Edge. He mourned it, but he had to let it go. They would track him.

Through the irradiated swamp, the cold absent from his senses, the discomfort of his wet uniform not registering. Why did it matter that he was cold, tired, hungry and thirsty? None of it was real. He wasn't real.

Through the dead Wastelands, from the demons that scourged it, from the demons within himself. They weren't real.

He ran.

His body operated on pure instinct. Self-preservation. Keep on. For the first time in his life, he ran from his enemy. He always knew his enemy, knew the strengths and weaknesses, knew when to hold and when to fold. But this was no tactical retreat. He didn't know what it was.

He just ran.

Numb. That was all he felt, all he was. Just numb.

Nothing. That was all he felt, all he was. Just nothing.

Just a machine without a purpose.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Nightfall.

Danse ran. The road, the dirt, the grass, the rocks. None of it mattered, it was just his path, and in the way. The stars followed his exodus, chasing him as he tore up the land. His heart thrashed, bruising in his chest. His heart wasn't real. His breath wheezed, stinging in his lungs. Lungs weren't real. His limbs pushed, burning in his muscles. None of it real. But he powered on, crashing through rivers and clearing outcrops of rock with a furious speed.

Remnants of false memories endeavored to seize him in his automaton state, but he tuned them out by pushing harder, faster. His path became laced with laser and blood, slaying the beasts in his way without mercy or feeling, numb, witness through eyes that were not his own. He stopped not for the spoils of war. A machine did not need spoils nor sustenance.

The land was a deadscape and Danse became it, an embodiment of the Wastes in phantom death bringing, lost but for his instincts to survive.

To kill or be killed.

A shadow and snarl of teeth. It was on him like wrath itself, smashing in from his blind side and sending him crashing down under it's weight. Danse tumbled down rocky mounds with the beast fast upon him, his combat armor soaking up most of his impacts. When he rolled to a halt against a tree, his senses righted themselves and he saw it.