Chapter 20:The Robot Master's Tomb - Part 2.
Clone-3 web-slung to the ceiling the instant he materialized. Organic fiber caught a support beam with a wet thwip. He hung there upside-down, looking down at the chaos erupting below.
Twenty identical figures in bone-white armor. Twenty-six robots converging. Metal and flesh and chakra colliding in the confined space of an abandoned subway station.
"Huh," Clone-3 said to himself. "Spider-powers really do work better upside-down."
A robot ran beneath him. Mid-generation model. Focused on Clone-7 ten feet away. Didn't look up.
Mistake.
Clone-3 dropped like a stone. Kunai in both hands. Gravity did most of the work.
Both blades punched through the robot's shoulder joints simultaneously. Severed the connections to its arms. They fell useless, clattering on tile.
The robot's head started to turn—optical sensors tracking upward, processing the new threat.
Too slow.
The clone kicked off hard. Used the robot's shoulders as a springboard. Flipped. Landed on another robot's back.
This one was faster. Started to buck. Trying to throw him off.
Clone-3 drove a kunai down through its optical sensor. Straight into whatever passed for a brain. The bucking stopped immediately.
He jumped clear before it collapsed.
"Satisfying," he said, already moving toward the next target.
***
Clone-7 didn't have time for satisfaction.
Three robots had him surrounded. Chrome models. Latest generation. Moving with that fluid awareness that said dangerous.
They attacked in sequence. One high. One low. One middle. Textbook coordination.
Clone-7 formed seals while dodging.
Doton: Doryū Taiga.
Earth Release: Earth Flow River.
Chakra flooded into the ground beneath the three robots. The century-old concrete and tile didn't stand a chance. Molecular bonds broke. Solid became liquid. The surface turned to thick mud in an instant.
The robots sank. Six inches. A foot. Servos whining as they fought against suction that didn't care about their strength ratings.
They struggled. Adaptive programming trying to calculate escape vectors. Weight distribution. Thrust angles.
Clone-14 was already moving through the crowd. He'd seen Clone-7's technique. Knew what was coming next.
Timing. Everything was timing.
He formed seals. Perfect synchronization.
Doton: Doryūheki.
Earth Release: Earth-Style Wall.
Stone erupted from the mud like a fist punching upward. It caught the three trapped robots between liquid below and solid above. The collision was catastrophic.
Metal screamed. Armor buckled. Components shattered with sounds like gunshots.
The wall dissolved back into chakra-saturated earth. Three mangled corpses remained half-buried in mud that was already solidifying back to concrete.
Clone-14 nodded to Clone-7 across the battlefield.
Clone-7 nodded back.
No words needed. They were the same person. Thought the same thoughts. Fought the same fight.
***
Clone-19 had pulled shuriken from his utility belt. Four-pointed stars. Perfectly balanced. Edges sharp enough to cut spider-silk.
He held three in his right hand. Two in his left.
Five robots approaching. Early and mid-generation mix. Uncoordinated. Opportunistic.
Clone-19 threw.
The shuriken left his hands in a spreading pattern. Chakra threads invisible to normal eyes connected each one to his fingertips.
The stars curved mid-flight. Defied physics. Drew paths that shouldn't exist.
One took a robot's optical sensor. Glass shattered. The robot stumbled blind.
One severed an arm at the elbow joint. Clean cut through the hydraulics. The arm hit the ground still sparking.
One embedded in a knee joint. Locked the servos. Mobility gone.
Two more found throats. That gap between head and torso where the armor was always thinnest. Critical connections severed. Two robots collapsed.
Three left standing. Damaged. Vulnerable.
Clone-19's wrist-gun came up. Built into his armor's gauntlet.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Three shots. Three processing cores. Three bodies joining their companions on the ground.
"Good," he muttered.
A robot charged him from behind.
His spider-sense screamed warning.
Clone-19 spun. Fired. The bullet caught the robot's optical sensor. Didn't penetrate deep enough to kill but bought him a second.
Enough.
His other hand had already drawn his ninjato. The blade came up in a rising cut. Caught the robot under its chin. Through the jaw. Into the processing core.
It collapsed at his feet.
Clone-19 kicked the corpse aside. Kept moving.
***
Clone-11 didn't bother with weapons.
A robot lunged at him.
Clone-11 caught its punch mid-strike.
The impact would've shattered concrete. Broken bones. Pulped organs.
His hand didn't even shake.
Clone-11 twisted. Used the robot's momentum against it.
The robot went flying. Crashed into two others. All three went down in a tangle of metal limbs and confused servos.
The clone was there before they hit the ground.
Hidden blades deploying from his wrists with that distinctive snikt sound. Through optical sensors.
Snikt. Snikt. Snikt.
Three corpses in three seconds.
Clone-11 retracted the blades. Shook hydraulic fluid off his gauntlets.
Another robot approached. This one had learned.
Smart.
Still not smart enough.
Clone-11 formed seals.
Mokuton: Mokujōheki.
Wood Release: Wood Locking Wall.
Wooden pillars erupted from the ground in a curved barrier. But these pillars had faces. Grotesque screaming demon skull masks carved into the wood.
The mouths opened wider.
Wooden stakes shot from each mouth. Multiple angles. Overlapping fields of fire. Nowhere to dodge.
The robot was impaled seventeen times simultaneously.
It hung there suspendes in air.
Clone-11 dismissed the technique. The wood dissolved back to chakra. The robot collapsed.
"Overkill," he admitted. "But impressive."
***
The original Arbor moved through the chaos like he was dancing.
Every movement served a purpose. Every strike placed exactly where it needed to be.
A robot swung at his head with enough force to decapitate.
Arbor ducked. Let it overextend. Caught its arm. Used its momentum. Classical judo throw into a support pillar.
The impact was catastrophic. The pillar shook. Century-old tile cracked. The robot left a crater in the decorative facade.
It didn't get up.
Another fired its energy weapon. Blue beam screaming toward his chest.
Arbor's hand came up. Palm forward. Chakra coating his gauntlet in a visible shimmer.
The beam hit. Deflected. Ricocheted at a forty-five degree angle.
Caught a different robot square in the back. Melted through its spine. Through its processing core. Out the front.
The robot collapsed. Friendly fire.
"Really need to fix that," Arbor observed.
A third rushed him with what looked like an electrified baton. Crackling with blue lightning. Actually dangerous. Contact with that would hurt even through his armor.
Arbor didn't dodge.
He stepped inside its reach. Too close for the baton to swing properly. Close enough to smell the ozone coming off the weapon.
His hidden blade deployed. Up. Through the chin. Angled to catch the processing core.
The robot's baton hit the ground still crackling. The robot followed a second later. Dead before it finished falling.
Arbor kicked the baton away. No sense leaving live weapons around.
"Your pattern recognition is decent," he said, decapitating another robot mid-sentence. His blade took its head clean off. "But you're not adapting fast enough."
The head bounced. Rolled. Came to rest against a broken early-generation corpse.
"Stromm should've implemented better machine learning algorithms," Arbor continued, already moving to the next threat. "Real-time adaptation, not just post-engagement analysis. That's your problem."
"Cannot—" The AI's voice was breaking down in real-time. Words fragmenting. Overlapping. Degrading like corrupted audio. "Systems failing—subject is—is—multiple subjects—impossible—sensor data invalid—ELIMINATE INTRUDER."
"Which one?" Clone-8 asked cheerfully from across the platform forming seals..
Kirigakure no Jutsu.
Hiding in Mist Technique.
Gray obscured half the battlefield. Thick. Choking. Overwhelming the robots' optical sensors.
They stumbled through it. Blind. Threat assessment matrices collapsing under insufficient data.
Clones struck from within the smoke. Blades appearing from gray nothing. Kunai spinning out of the obscurement. Wire wrapping around joints and pulling tight until metal shrieked.
A robot emerged from the smoke. Damaged. Missing an arm. Optical sensor cracked.
Clone-16 was waiting.
His hands closed on the robot's head from both sides. Palms against temples. Fingers finding purchase on smooth metal.
He squeezed.
Applied with enough force to crush tank armor.
The robot's head crumpled like a soda can. Processing core destroyed. Optical sensors bursting. Metal folding inward.
Clone-16 let go. The headless body stood for a moment. Then collapsed.
"Yeah, yeah," he said to the dying AI. "Eliminate intruder. Broken record much?"
***
Forty-seven seconds since the clones materialized.
Twelve robots remained.
They tried to regroup. Adaptive programming finally kicking in at scale. They fell back toward the computer servers. The research stations. Stromm's workbenches.
Protecting what mattered. The research. The data. The legacy.
The original Arbor appreciated that. Strategy. Even dying, degrading, failing, the AI tried to complete its mission.
Admirable qualities. Even in a machine.
"Smart," he said quietly. "But not smart enough."
He formed seals. Drew a deep breath. Chakra flooding his lungs. Converting to wind nature.
Futon: Daitoppa.
Wind Release: Great Breakthrough.
The technique erupted from his mouth.
The gust was precise. Powerful enough to send twelve robots tumbling backward like leaves in a storm but not strong enough to damage the station's infrastructure. Not strong enough to scatter the valuable equipment he wanted intact.
The robots crashed into walls. Into each other. Into the electrified third rail that still carried residual charge from the city's power grid after eighty years of supposed deactivation.
Electricity arced. Blue-white lightning jumping between metal bodies. Robots convulsed. Systems overloaded. The smell of burning circuitry. Smoke rose and melted plastic filled the air.
The robots collapsed. Twitching. Sparking.
Then still.
Silence fell like a hammer.
The clones stood scattered across the platform. Twenty figures in bone-white armor surrounded by mechanical corpses.
Victorious.
They began dispersing without a word. One by one. Puffs of smoke. Memory feedback flooding back to the original with each dissolution.
All of it. Every moment. Every kill. Every tactical decision. Flowing back. Integrating. Becoming part of the original's experience.
Arbor stood alone in the center of a mechanical graveyard.
His armor had new scratches. A dent in the left shoulder plate where a robot had landed a lucky hit. Scorch marks on his right gauntlet from deflecting that energy beam.
Nothing serious. Nothing that couldn't be repaired.
He wasn't tired hust... satisfied.
The AI's voice came one last time. Broken. Barely coherent. Degraded beyond recognition into something that sounded almost organic in its desperation.
"You—you are—are not—not supposed to—Dr. Stromm said—he said he would return—said no one—no one could defeat—defeat the security—defeat—"
Arbor's expression softened behind his helmet just slightly.
"Stromm's dead," he said quietly to the empty station. To the dying AI. To the forty-three broken children lying scattered across the platform. "You've been alone down here for seven years. Waiting for someone who's never coming back."
"Alone?" The AI's voice cracked. Actually cracked. Like emotion bleeding through code. "No. No. Mission incomplete. Must protect—protect the work—the research—he said—he said when the work was done—when the research was complete—he would—would—"
The AI made a sound. Not words. Just... noise. Corrupted audio that might have been a scream or might have been nothing but degraded code finally collapsing.
Then silence.
The emergency lights flickered.Then died.
Arbor stood in the center of a field of destroyed robots. Metal corpses scattered across the platform like a mechanical graveyard. Sparks still jumped from severed cables. Fluids leaked from broken hydraulics. The smell of ozone and melted plastic and burning circuitry thick enough to taste through his helmet's filters.
He walked slowly through the destruction.
Examined his work.
Stromm's children. His legacy. His life's work.
All dead.
All destroyed in minutes by someone who'd never met him. Never known him. Never cared about his dreams or his research or his desperate need to prove himself through machines that could think and fight and live.
Arbor stopped at the center alcove.
"Shame," he said to the silence. "Could've Built something better."
He walked toward the dark tunnel at the far end of the platform. Where Clone-2's memories said the vault waited. Where the real research lived. Where Stromm had kept his actual work hidden behind biometric locks and paranoid security.
Behind him, robots lay broken.
Stromm's cathedral. His gallery. His monument to the belief that machines could be more than tools. Could be companions. Could be children.
All of it destroyed by someone who saw them as obstacles. Resources. Things to be overcome and forgotten.
Arbor didn't look back.
He had work to do.
Steady footsteps echoed into the darkness.
The red emergency lights flickered one last time. Then died completely.
Normal white light filled the station. Sterile. Clean. Exposing every broken body. Every shattered dream. Every failed creation.
The Robot Master's tomb.
Silent now.
Empty.
Waiting for someone who would never return.
In the darkness beyond, a door waited. . Hiding Stromm's real work.
Arbor walked toward it."
END CHAPTER 20
END CHAPTER 20