Dang Convergence Vol. 1

Chapter Ten Heroic Heroes Vs Cyborg Dang!

Chapter Ten

Heroic Heroes Vs Cyborg Dang!

They shouldn't have been there. He'd had specific instructions to not run off to investigate anything without his doppelganger; but in his defense, he had called this world's version of himself a few times before deciding to set out on his lonesome to investigate the hits his makeshift anomaly tracker had gotten. It was supposed to be a simple enough investigation, straightforward field work. He didn't expect them to turn up.

The makeshift tracker had narrowed down the location of the anomalies to an abandoned high school and that was exactly where he'd headed. It wasn't hard to tell why the school had been shut down when he got there. It had a massive hole in one fence, and a huge chunk of the school's main structure had collapsed. In the school compound, there was a wall on which the names of those who'd died during "The Collapse" had been engraved, along with heartfelt goodbyes.

Knowing that he was at a place where a tragedy had occurred unsettled him greatly and a part of him wanted to turn around and leave. However, he wanted to make the decision that perhaps an anomaly just wasn't worth it. But then he reminded himself of the stakes, of just how much was riding on this. If more sentinels had come through, it would be much better for him to take care of them before they hurt innocent people in this world. After all, from what he'd seen of this world thus far, he didn't think the kind of technology that would be required to tear apart the sentinels even existed.

This world was still in the primitive age of relying solely on nuclear weapons as their big guns. If Bellum did come here, they wouldn't stand a chance. Then again, his own world with all of the technology they had hadn't stood a chance either so perhaps it was unfair of him to judge.

He went straight into the abandoned school and found that it looked worse on the inside than the outside. It smelled horribly damp and musty, with rubble cluttering the ground. Several lockers had been knocked over, their contents spilling out; content the owners abandoned, or worse, couldn't return for. He shook the morbid thought and continued on.

Classroom windows were broken, chairs and desks in disarray. One particular classroom had a door that wouldn't budge–it'd been barricaded on the inside. Other-Dang considered blasting the door off but doing so would have been rather noisy and if any anomalies were present on the property, it would have been unwise for him to alert them of his presence.

He continued through the school, stepping around the mess on the ground and stooping low to avoid the metal rods and wires that jutted and dangled from the wrecked ceilings above. After a while, he reached a long hallway that was flooded; the water tainted a rust-red and reeking rather horribly. This was water that had gone horribly stagnant.

He wondered why no one had ever bothered cleaning this place up and putting it back in one piece. Just how bad were the things that had gone on here for it to have been abandoned so completely?

Other-Dang stared at his tracker again after ten minutes. By then, he'd walked through the entire ground floor of the school and inspected the gymnasium and had found nothing. He decided then to take his search upstairs, planning to work his way slowly to the roof. Investigating the first floor was a lot trickier than with the ground floor because instead of piles of rubble and puddles of wretched water on the ground, the floor was really broken, with gaping holes that would take him right back to the ground floor if he fell through them.

In other places, the floor was cracked, fragile...and he knew it would take very little stress for it to give away entirely. The classrooms here were a lot less in ruin than the ones downstairs, but none of them showed any signs of housing an anomaly. With a sigh, he started in the direction of the stairs that led further up, wondering if he'd somehow made a mistake with his makeshift scanner and had been led here purely by accident.