{We need to get out of these vents as soon as possible!} I barked, giving Shelly control of one of my drones, leaving me with four and her with two.

Speeding up my thinking to the maximum I began hypothesizing which door would lead to whatever hallway our room was connected to. That one! The vent three spots to the left. Using a split-second to confirm with Shelly, we took off down the path of choice. The drone-ninja was on our tail, it couldn’t fly anymore, but boy, could it run.

Its eyes glowed red and it made a shrill shrieking sound that made me want to tear every microphone in this building to pieces. Shadows shifted as we passed. Things that I had mistaken as just dents and bulges in the vent plating now had two distinct red glowing dots peering from them. Even the damaged drones we spotted on the way here revealed their true nature. One jumped toward us. With a thought, Shelly grabbed it from the air telekinetically and shoved it into a group of other drone-ninjas that were moving to block our path.

“Arrgh, migraine!”

{Yeah, Ummm… I’m sure it sucks, but I think you're going to have to do it again.} I pointed out as several more of the pests pounced at us all at once.

The best I could do was dodge while Shelly did her best to keep them away from us. I weaved and turned and rolled in some pretty impressive maneuvers that I feel like I should be proud of. We both knew we couldn’t afford to lose any more drones. As I said, we didn’t have many and for me as an AI, as well as for Shelly as the semi-twisted experiment that she was, they were our only link to any outside world.

Avoiding one blade to the right of one of my drones, another flew under me, as I dodged another with a barrel roll.

They were everywhere! It was like these things could teleport… could they?! Shelly could lift things with her thoughts. Teleportation wasn’t ruled out. As I was lost in thought A droninja landed on my frontmost drone chopping off one of its propellers, sending a painful error through me, before it could do more shelly snatched it from its perch crushing it with the full force of her powered mind, the metal screeching as it was bent. Using the newly formed steel ball as a projectile she tossed it with as much force as she could muster into the nearest enemy, the creatures hardened body dented almost beyond recognition by the power of the shot.

Superpowers were a wonderful, WONDERFUL thing. Even without a body shelly was a force to be reckoned with. Some part deep inside of me buzzed to life and I wanted desperately to know what she would be like at her full potential.

“LEFT!!”

I was jerked out of my musings once again by Shel’s voice. Slamming on the controls in my mind I took a hard left into the vent she had been indicating, the drone with the missing propeller now just barely keeping up as a wave of droninjas now covered every wall. Just how many were there!?

“We need to go down!” shelly shouted her voice pained from her psychic battle

{huh?}

“I’ve been doing some calculations. Based on the length and directions we’ve traveled, the fluctuation in the temperature as we fly as well as my knowledge of the layout of the building in general and the fact that on our way here we moved in an upward slope, I have a what I think is a decent map of how to get where we need to go. And it starts with going down”

{You did all of that while flying two drones and fighting?}

“with a headache! Like I said, I’m pretty good at multitasking” she chipped puffing out her nonexistent chest slightly like a kid who had been complimented on a drawing. “anyway, just stay with me!”

And with that, she dove into the nearest downward-facing duct.

Despite Shelly’s brilliant plan (although I had no way of knowing if it was actually brilliant) the droninjas weren’t ones to let us off easy-

Droninjas? Droninja? Droninji?

{Shelly, what would the plural of droninja be?}

“Droninja? Is that what you’ve been calling them? Don’t call them that it's stupid.”

Droninjas then, the droninjas weren’t ones to give up easily, they could run as fast as we could fly and with their numbers, the horde was starting to catch up.

A dozen seemed to appear out of the shadows in front of us. Shel was able to halt the pounces of six of them, pulling from the air so they smashed against the ground, splattering mushrooms and being impaled on mini-tree branches. Shelly easily maneuvered around the other six. I wasn’t so lucky, While three of my four drones made it through fine, My fourth one, the one with the broken propeller was just too slow, a droninja landed on it. Its sword-like limbs piercing the hull like ice picks. I tried to shake it off by swerving in the air, but the thing barely seemed to notice. I called out to Shelly, but it was too late this time. Rearing back, the automaton drove its sword through the drone and out the other end,

I lost control and the device spiraled through the duct smashing against multiple walls as the droninja continued to stab at it, before finally hitting the ground nonfunctional. Down to forty-seven.

{they got another one…}

“Okay…okay, it's fine. We’re fine. Take this left.” She yelled swerving that direction. “It s-shouldn’t be far now…”

I don’t know if they understood English or if they had some sort of plan or programing but suddenly the droninja’s tactics changed, they stopped attacking us directly, seeming to disappear back into the shadows.

“That can’t possibly be good…”

{Maybe they just gave up…}

“doubt it. Th- they’re machines, but I don’t think they’re truly sentient l-like you. Programs don’t just give up. Take the next right you see.”

That wasn’t going to happen, because the next right we saw was blocked, completely sealed to us by a wall of blades.

“see…”

With a quick turn behind us, we saw the way that we had come was closed in the same fashion.

{can you move them?} I asked.

“n-no there are too many… and my head already hurts so much…” her voice telling me she would be in tears if it weren’t for her lack of ducts.

I guess the only way we could go now was forward. We flew on until we came to a place with a similar setup to the last fork. This time the wall was in front of us and too our left leaving only the right open to us, then it happened again, this one forcing us upward.

{They’re herding us.}

“Wow, I hadn’t figured that out! It’s not like I’m one hundred times smarter than you or anything.”

{What?}

“sorry, headaches make me bitchy…”

Another left a right and a downward slope brought us to a large open area in the vent system. This one was quite different from the one we had found ourselves in when we ran into the first droninja. It was round and dome-like, strange symbols were painted on the ceiling almost like a language, and something resembling bleachers were placed around at the edges of the ‘room’. The shattered ‘corpses’ of droninjas, crushed, stabbed, and diced into fragments by… something, covered the floor. Our five drones were forced into the center of what I could only call an arena.

‘what’s happening…?” shelly asked.

the droninjas made their horrible screeching noise in a way that almost made me think of cheering. They scrambled onto the bleachers and seemed to be preparing for a show.

thud!

{What was that!?}

Thud!

“Oh, God.”

THUD!!!

With one final thud, it burst into the room.

It wasn’t big, not when compared to a human, but it was bulky and broad. Still, if the droninja were human-sized it would be as tall as a mid-sized house, and that made it much bigger than our tiny drones. Its entire body was sharpened and covered in an armor of whirling blades that seemed to cut even the air as it moved, its arms not ending in one sword but in three, curved like talons. Its face was almost human but its metal skin and red eyes ruined the illusion, its mouth was the wrong way, a vertical slit from its nose to its chin, and unlike the empty eyes of the droninjas, its red glowing orbs sparkled with a mechanical barbaric intelligence.

It looked down at our drones, hovering within its arena, and with that, the Dronsumo roared.