Machi couldn't believe it, Hiroshi had lost his mind!
"He must be bluffing", Machi thought, trying to find something in that nightmare that made sense.
Without a warning, the exoskeleton pointed its arm at her, and a shower of tiny plasma spheres shot out at supersonic speed.
Instinctively Machi planted the tip of a skate blade on the ice and managed to be propelled to the side, away from the hail of projectiles.
Despite her effort, one of the projectiles grazed her shoulder, tearing her shirt and skin.
Machi brought a hand to her shoulder, blood...
That wasn't a bluff, Hiroshi apparently would rather kill her than be humiliated, Machi had made a serious mistake by underestimating his ego.
"I might die here," Machi thought, looking down at the blood on her hand.
"I have no way out of this arena, I have to find a weakness in that thing," Machi thought as she skated swiftly trying to circle the metallic beast.
A new volley was fired but in front of the path where Machi was going to skate. She managed to use the blade trick to dodge once more, but she was now heading towards it.
Projectiles were being fired sideways, and back of her, but not in the path that led directly to the metallic beast. Machi had fallen into a well-placed trap.
Suddenly the projectiles stopped, Machi turned to one side, but as soon as she did, there was a crash at her feet, one of the reinforced blades of her skates exploded into a thousand pieces.
Losing her foothold, Machi fell to the ground. The trap that had been set for her was quite elaborate, the skates having been the target from the start.
Now she couldn't skate anymore, her only hope was the holographic card in her pocket, she could always ask for a new pair of ice skates, even if they weren't as good as those.
With horror, she saw a tear where before she had a pocket, that attack had been extremely well delineated, and with extreme precision, the machine had destroyed the objects that were keeping her alive.
That wasn't the work of a human being, Hiroshi certainly no longer controlled the machine's movements, for the first time, Machi pondered the hypothesis that a being other than the human Hiroshi was weaving that web to kill her.
Now that she was thinking about it, with all that precision, why it didn't simply hit her in the heart? It seemed that thing didn't want her dead, at least not in a way that wasn't error-free.
Machi had given up trying to fight, she had been defeated, there was only one thing she could do: observe every detail, every surface, every reflection, looking for a vulnerability in that thing's armor.
The huge metal fist opened and closed around Machi's waist, it raised her to the level of its optical sensors. The fist closed around her with a terrible grip, she found it hard to breathe, but she couldn't give up, not yet, her mind urged her on, watch everything, in every moment, review everything you've seen, search, search, search...search and you will find.
For Machi there were many reasons why she wanted to stay alive, for Sora, for her adoptive family, and above all, to continue looking for her real mother and father.
The exoskeleton raised its other fist, and placed the trigger barrel in front of Machi's face, "Farewell...Yama," the robotic voice whispered coldly...
The last word stuck in Machi's mind: Yama.
There was a cocking sound, but instead of a thunder of plasma projectiles, the barrel rumbled.
Surprised, the metallic creature inspected the hilt. There was nothing wrong, so why had it stopped working?
Suddenly,
sparks shot from the bottom of the cylindrical ammunition cannon. A
small, sharp object was wedged into a tiny crack. It was... the blade
from Machi's left skate, the intact one. The crack must have been from the time it had crashed into the Plexiglass wall.
The robotic arm exploded violently, the explosion was so violent that the other arm was separated from the metallic torso, Machi was projected through the shrapnel of the Plexiglas wall of the arena.
Machi's world became pitch black.
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