The Last Of Us Book 2: The Leaders

Chapter 8

"Fuck, these things are indestructible!", Lauren hisses, getting trapped in a choke hold by one of the many specialized robots.

"Yeah, no kidding!", Perrie shouts back, freezing 5 robots so that Dinah could smash and break them easier in her gigantic form.

Lauren heats her hands, hating that these stupid machines didn't feel any pain from the burns she was giving it, but luckily she was able to melt parts of the metal arms, so she quickly broke the mechanical limbs off once she had the chance. Once free, she brought her leg up and roundhouse kicked the machine's head off, taking a quick breather before turning to fight the next one that was coming straight for her.

"We're never gonna be able to fight them all!", Leigh-Anne adds on while she does her best to dodge all of the attacks that her current robotic opponent was sending her, her power not really helping her at all in this situation.

"We don't have to fight them all, we just have to get to the control panel.", Dinah corrects, shaking off all the robots that were trying to climb up her gigantic stature. She's tried on several occasions to just stomp her way across the training room and to the control panel, but these machines are too high-tech, and they always manage to stop her or give her extreme trouble.

"I'm pretty sure if a giant can't get to it, nobody can!", Leigh-Anne argues.

It seemed pretty simple when the supervisors were explaining this to them earlier. 'You'll be in groups of four, and your objective is simple. Fight through the robots to get to the control panel on the other side of the room. They won't stop coming until you turn it off. Once you take away their power source, the mission is over.' Easy, right? Sadly, they forgot to mention that the robots would be freaking indestructible and highly intelligent.

"We need a plan.", Lauren orders, letting her body erupt into flames so that the metal of the robots around her would soften, and hopefully become easier to destroy.

"No shit we need a plan!" Perrie glares at Leigh-Anne's unnecessary sarcastic comment. "What are you looking at, blondie?"

"I'm looking at a bitch, that's what." Leigh-Anne gasps, and Perrie just smirks pridefully at her comeback.

"You wanna go!?"

"I could take you any time, any place."

"Funny...I don't remember you ever beating me during practice matches in training..."

Perrie literally growls, and Leigh-Anne squares her shoulders at the blonde, showing that she's not ready to back down without a fight. Before they could take a step closer to each other, a fire ball blasted towards them, making them jump apart.

"You idiots need to stop fighting! Especially at a time like this!", Lauren scolds, being so utterly done with the two sworn enemies. "Now get back to fighting the real opponents, not each other."

"Yes mom.", Leigh mutters, Perrie shooting her one last glare before shooting a storm of sharp icicles to a fast approaching group of robots.

Dinah has a feeling that she knows the answer to how to get to the control panel.

'Look up'-Simon

"That can't be it...", she mutters to herself, but then she slowly reasons that it wouldn't hurt to do as the riddle hinted.

She took a small glance up, not noticing anything on the ceiling, but when she started to look back down to focus on the task at hand...she saw something she would've never noticed before.

A small steel staircase in the corner, leading up to a walkway that created an outer edge of the upper half of the room. As she followed it with her eyes, she saw another small staircase that lead straight back down to the control panel.