A Cold Heart

Initiation 4 - Traitor.

The car door opens and a man steps outside with black glasses and a grey long coat. A machine comes in flying and drops down next to him. crash. A number shines on its chest. T74. The man starts walking towards the mining facility with a briefcase in his hand while the machine follows behind. Water drips from the ceiling and his boots clank over the floor. He enters the workstation and begins tuning his prosthetic arm. Screwdrivers and pliers clank around the table. whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. "Ah. This will do."

He installs a weapon in his arm. Ion Cannon Mk 2. His arm begins to change, parts moving into place. The weapon is ready. He aims at a goat grazing in the field from his window. An eye visor appears over his eye. Range 4 miles. Altitude 63 m. He loads a charge and fires. The projectile hits the goat and it disintegrates instantly. "What a beauty!" His arm changes back and he begins heading towards the mining shed. He gets into the lift with an iris scan and gets in, moving to the upper levels. He feels a presence behind him.

A night crawler, a different one, with four arms attacks him from behind. The man dodges it and punches it few times. The lift stops and the creature goes flying out of the lift gates finally plummeting on the ground. The man's arm changes into the weapon, and he loads the chamber with an ion battery. The creature uses its newly obtained sonic scream on him. The man is unfazed. Half of his face is a machine. "Let's get rid of this annoyance, shall we?" The man grabs its throat and pulls out its esophagus. crush. Blood splashes onto his suit and he gets upset. "Ughhh, someone needs to clean these night crawlers up". He fires a charge of his ion cannon at its face. boom.

He drops it and keeps heading inside. The night crawler begins to regenerate. Slowly growing in size too. It begins growing scales like armor on its body. Tough Armor. The night crawler completely ignored the machine and tried attacking the man. The machine pulls it back by its legs and kicks it against the wall, tearing off its limb. The wall breaks through and the creature lies on the floor, trying to retreat. T74 charges its power beam and fired it out of its chest. It vaporizes the creature's lower half. The power beam blasts a hole through the floors of the facility. The creature tried to regrow the lost parts but T74 grabs its head and rips it out of the body with its spine and crushes it. "That was easy."

These machines are called 'Lancers'. Agile and strong, they are equipped with a Mach 13 speed accelerator, shoulder mounted railgun, incinerator, a combat rifle, missile launchers and the Power Beam. They were built by the Syndicate and have Plasma cores instead of a normal core like Sentries. Each type of core has a specific upgrade set built into them which enhances the power of the machine. The plasma core was the first to be developed.

Once the core goes ultra, the machines physical capabilities are enhanced greatly and at the end of the time-out, they self-destruct. The sentries were built centuries ago to replace military forces. Soon they were used to fight off Night Crawlers, an alien species of life which crash landed on the planet surface. The sentries were stronger but some of them were corrupted by the Night Crawlers. They started killing people. Their creators, all dead. Some of the sentries survived. Now, the Syndicate built these newer machines, all of them made from Durium, a metal forged by melting it with the heat of the nearest star G.A.I.A, the strongest metal. The Lancers could never go rogue. They were made that way.

The man exits the facility on the other side and walks into a mining shed and puts down his briefcase on the table. A display hovers on his arm while he dials a frequency,

Unknown 1: Mr. Nightingale, when will you be arriving?
Jake: We are almost there. Upload a 3D schematic of the mining facility. We'll find you and deliver the package.
Unknown 1: Ah, yes. It is done. I shall await your arrival.

The man sits down on a chair in front of the desk and opens his briefcase. He pulls out some documents and analyzes them carefully. "Hmmm, I must finish project #377.. I require a suitable test subject. I think I have an idea <laughs menacingly>. Be ready, T74, I have a job for you." "Copy. Awaiting instructions. "