Chapter Text
The air is thin with a slight chill, leaving a faint impression of sensation in Techno’s throat with every deep breath he takes. There’s a mild scent to it, the way the smell of pine suffuses a forest, something innate to the quality of the air here but nothing familiar, try as he might to place it.
Light beams down at him from the cloudless sky but there is no warmth in it to dispel the chill. Techno shrugs it off mentally, his clothes more than enough to shelter him from the mild cool.
The ground crunches underfoot, scraggly grass prising its way out of the barren soil in scant increments. Most of what Techno can see looks more like rubble than stones. Metal clinks and rattles faintly in the breeze, and he realises the remnants of a chain-link fence are a few feet behind him. Large holes are torn through the rusted metal and it bends over – from age or forceful hands, he couldn’t say.
He stares at the fence, letting his senses settle. The faint sound of rushing water washes in with the breeze. He steps closer to the fence, gravel crunching, and peers through it.
An expanse drops below him. Twisted paths of earth laden with foliage curl through the space, and beneath them is the charred remains of a building, something large but plain. He can’t see any words or decoration across it. The only thing that breaks up the grey walls are splashes of black, soot by the looks of it, and deep cracks that occasionally give way to large holes. A few deep green vines creep across the cracks but they seem to struggle to thrive.
Techno’s gaze follows the path from the building’s entrance to where he stands above it, eyes lighting on crumbling steps that look to be hewn from the rocky surface that rises from the ground before the building and up to he ledge he looks down from.
He blinks, shaking his head once and hoping to clear the whole image from his vision. It doesn’t work.
As he descends the steps, he lets his mind come to terms with the last several minutes.
He’d been making his way through the hallowood forest not far from his cabin against his better judgement; many folk who entered it didn’t come back out, and in his few expeditions through it he could never quite get his bearings, despite his otherwise excellent sense of direction. Unfortunately, he’d been running low on cash and excitement and made the impulsive decision to stop in at the guild, rifling through the recent requests and through to the back of the pile, where the more-or-less abandoned requests lived. Some of them had been boring, some criminally underpaid – hence why others had skipped over them in favour of better requests.
But there also lay the hurdles, the requests others had tried and failed, or not dared look at twice. Those requests were Techno’s favourite.
His foot slips on the stone step as the rock crumbles beneath his weight. He leaps down the last two steps, landing heavily on the ground and shaking away the fog of thoughts.
It doesn’t matter how he got here – the truth of it is he’s here, though he isn’t sure where here is or how it came to be. It’s certainly not the hallowood forest – that was clear the second he opened his eyes on the ledge above.
Down here, with a stretch of smooth concrete laid into the ground, he can see it drops off on either side of the building, leaving only two directions for him to go aside climbing back up to the ledge: forward, into the remains of the building, or directly away from it, down metal grate stairs tarnished with age. He approaches the stairs, peering down at what lays at the bottom of them.
There are more flat slabs of concrete, like somebody had started making pathways through the wilderness but in fits and spurts, and so long ago that cracks spindle through the once-smooth slabs. Chain-link fences are another big hit, but like the one above they’ve seen better days.
Around it all are patches of vegetation, a spare brambled bush or a couple clumps of spiky grass. He can see carpets of lush vegetation around him but he can’t seem to get to any of it, separated by steep drops from the twisting tubes of earth encircling where he stands.
It stirs a disquiet in him, but Techno feels not unlike he’s encased in a vast root system, like he’s an ant scurrying along an incomprehensibly large tree.
Down here, he can see the source of the water he heard above, waterfalls cascading down the steep walls surrounding him in the distance, through some of the twisty leaf-laden not-roots.
Techno’s eyes trail up one such waterfall, tracking where it starts, and realises with a jolt that he can’t see the top of it.
He never thought to look straight up until now.
There is no sun. The light simply is, as though the entire ceiling emits it evenly, and that ceiling is much closer than the sky has ever been, though how he can tell though the sunless, colourless light, he isn’t sure.
Maybe it’s from his time in the Nether, in those vast underground caverns, but he realises he has the same faint niggle of claustrophobia now, that itch in the back of his mind that he knows is irrational that whispers and whines about the ceiling coming down on him one day.
Techno looks down the stairs, then turns around and approaches the building. Where there are structures, there’s civilisation. Where there’s civilisation, there are answers.
As he comes closer, the shadowed doorway becomes clear. Whatever technology they used here, it’s something beyond what he’s ever seen – there is a huge metal door half open, rising up from below with lit lines of colour running from the doorframe to some sort of device he intuits must open and close the door. This close, he can finally see something on the building’s wall: A2 written in large, faded yellow, with a dotted underline. It’s neat and formal, like it was stenciled on. Stray cords dangle from the small overhang that shadows the half-open door, and he realises the building is not made from concrete as he initially thought but sheets of metal, so tarnished and weathered they don’t even gleam faintly in the mysterious nowhere light.
Faint lights spill out from under the door, flickering occasionally. Well, that’s not ominous at all.
Techno steels himself and steps under the door, half expecting it to come crashing down on him when he does.
The inside of the building is. . . not much, if he’s being honest. It looks a lot dirtier in here, rust eating away at the metal walls and some of the metal grated stairs. Thick black pipes run from floor to ceiling, some nonsensically cutting through the middle of the room.
To the side, huge fans blow hot air at him behind rusty grates, and it carries with it the scent of burning electronics.
Well. Great to know that if the first staircase he takes doesn’t rust apart below him, the whole place might catch fire or, who knows, explode at any given point.
He could turn right back around and keep exploring that odd half-laid path that must have been placed by whoever built this. But he had the thought about turning right back around before he stepped into the hallowood forest too.
That thought nearly does send him right back out of the building, considering where hallowood got him, but ‘backing down’ and ‘Technoblade’ are mutually exclusive concepts, so onward he forges.
There’s a faint hum in here, as faint as the distant waterfalls outside were – though those are silenced now that he’s inside. He can’t see a single window, all light coming from the harsh tubes of light nestled into the ceiling. At least this light has a discernable source. It’s worrying, how quickly his standards for reasonable have fallen in the last twenty minutes.
The hum niggles at his ears, ever so slightly uncomfortable like it’s not quite high enough to be a ring but not low enough to fade into the back of his awareness. He shakes the discomfort away, padding through the otherwise quiet room. He can see a few open doorways with more of that oily black piping, so he picks one at random and ventures on, keeping a hand on the hilt of his sheathed sword.
He makes his way through a few such rooms, none seeming much different from the last in contents yet inexplicably different in their makeup – if they were all meant to house the same things, why just throw these pipes here and that big platform of mechanical components there, but then put their counterparts in the room over in a completely different place?
It screams incompetence, as though their builders just dropped pieces of architecture wherever they could find space, yet the actual solidity of the structures – and the complexity of what he can see in the slashed-open guts of one such hunk of delicate machinery – tell another story. It’s a perplexing contradiction he can’t puzzle the answer to.
Worse, there hasn’t been any indication that any of the rooms deeper in this place have anything more than what he’s already seen, and what he’s already seen doesn’t give him any of the answers he’d expected to uncover here. The faint buzz grates at him now, more irritating as his frustration grows. His ear flicks like he can dispel the sound as he would a persistent fly, with little effect.
He wanders halfheartedly through a couple more rooms, tracking his turns in the mazelike structure when finally something catches his eye. Every room so far has had open doorways, but there across the the wide expanse of rusted metal, finally something different – a slate-grey door with a little square window, its glass mostly gone save a few shards still clinging to the edges of the window.
He huffs in relief, his stride picking up. His ear flicks again. That buzzing. . .
It wasn’t getting more annoying because he was losing patience. It was getting louder. He realises this at the same time as a new noise undercuts the buzz – whirring and scuttling, a tap-tap-tapping like something scurries closer on legs that end in sharp points instead of soft padded feet. An almost mechanical chirp accompanies it.
Techno draws his sword, circling to see where the source of the noise will emerge. It’s too pointed, too specific to be ambient noise from an old crumbling buildling. Techno is familiar with the cadence of beasts, even if these sounds in particular are foreign.
The buzz is so grating he feels it in his teeth now, feels like a skeletal hand has passed through his flesh and bone and taken the base of his brain between two of its fingers, pinching not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to make him wince, shift his head to escape the sensation. Every hair on his body stands on end, almost prickling across his skin, like a storm approaches and lightning is near.
Movement flashes in his peripheral. He whips around as a creature waddles from one of the open doorways. Its body a crescent shape, like the discarded talon of some great beast, though it’s sleek and black, almost shiny under the flickering lights. It isn’t large by any means – probably the size of a pig back home – but still, its form looks too massive for its numerous tiny legs as they ripple beneath it, too many for him to count in his quick glance. Bright blue pinpricks of light are peppered across its front, and as they wink irregularly at him, he realises those might be eyes.
He feels like his bones might rattle out of his skin by now, that grinding buzz overpowering. It has to be connected to this creature somehow.
He grits his aching teeth and widens his stance as the creature seems to see him, pausing for a moment before launching itself at him with another unnatural-sounding chirp.
Techno braces for the attack, ready to sidestep and swing as it closes the distance between them.
The creature flickers. Then it bursts into flame.
Or no – not flame, crackling tendrils of electricity that encircle it, but it doesn’t seem at all bothered, unwavering in its charge.
Techno grips his sword tighter and commits to the swing anyway, stepping aside just before it comes into contact with him and swinging his sword in a clean arc toward it. His sword cleaves the creature in half, and stray arcs of electricity dance up the metal of the sword, biting into his fingers and arms. He grits his teeth, leaping back. The two halves of the creature are still. It's dead. He shakes a hand out, trying to rid it of the lingering painful tingle. The bone-rattling buzz is a little fainter now, that phantom grip on his skull looser – though not quite gone.
Techno steps forward, inspecting the halved creature. It looks like something manmade, like its skin is shiny metal and its now-dark eyes were little candles of pale blue light. Oily liquid oozes from its two halves. He nudges a chunk of it with his sword, turning it over to inspect its insides.
If anything, its innards give less away than its outer shell. There are wires twisting through it, some still sparking and frayed in places. What is clearly metal piping intersects it in places. But around that, soft flesh the colour of coal fills the metal carapace, and the liquid leaking out of it smells so familiar he second-guesses if perhaps he’s bleeding somewhere, but no.
This. . . thing, inexplicably, is something between organic and not, but how that’s possible. . . Techno isn’t yet sure.
His scalp tightens, and that horrible buzzing begins to dig into his bones again. He steps away from the creature’s corpse, waiting to see where its friend will emerge.
As the sensation gets worse, he realises the scuttling sound is. . . louder. More.
Creatures round the corner, and Techno realises in that moment that these are clearly pack animals, whatever else they are. He can see the moment they lock onto him, their stumbling waddles halting as they hone in.
The room lights up as multiple monsters are lit with electricity.
Techno’s burning fingers tighten around his sword, and he launches forward to meet them halfway.