The Reclaimers pressed onward, clearing the Grand Plaza with weapons raised and nerves frayed. They gave the roiling black rad-mist a wide berth, its hungry tendrils reaching like living smoke. In the northeastern quadrant they found a section of ceiling that had collapsed, leaving a precarious metal staircase, catwalk, and railing hanging over the void like a broken spine. One by one they climbed, L’Uomo Prime and Steve Austin taking point. Steve rose on silent wings to scout ahead, while L’Uomo and the massive Butterball leapt upward with mechanical grace.
The third floor opened into the Office Warrens — a decaying maze of collapsed cubicles and winding corridors where stale air hung thick with dust motes that danced in slanted shafts of sickly light. The hot metal floor burned through boot soles. Sheik, Plissken, and Butterball were forced to gulp down the Badgers’ pungent “burrow brew” to dull the pain, while D’Can’Tr wrapped his silicone limbs in strips of scavenged leather. The entire level felt like a tomb that had forgotten it was dead.
L’Uomo’s detector legs flickered constantly with warnings — radiation pockets, infrared signatures moving behind walls and above ceiling tiles. The deeper they pushed, the more the feeling grew that they were being watched.
A grenade bounced out of a vent with malicious cheer.
The explosion threw them into cover as shrill, chittering laughter echoed from every direction — from inside the walls, above the ceiling panels, behind piles of debris. They were in a gauntlet.
Rather than fight an invisible enemy in hostile territory, the Reclaimers chose to parley. They met the Blue Hoardin — a cunning clan of rat-like humanoids who claimed this sector. After surrendering a few trinkets, power cells, and hand axes, safe passage was granted. The Blue Hoardin warned them that the floor was divided among four rival clans — Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green — all locked in endless, bloody war. Reaching the upper levels would mean crossing Red territory, and the Blues made it clear the Reds were unreasonable at best.
Steve Austin, with a predator’s grin, proposed a solution: pit the clans against each other. The Blues would hide in ambush while the Reclaimers lured the Reds into a decisive strike. The rat-people’s eyes gleamed with delight at the scheme.
The plan worked with brutal efficiency. Sweet words and calculated flattery convinced the Red Hoardin that the outsiders could help them crush their rivals. When the Red warband marched out to attack what they believed was a vulnerable Blue camp, the Blues fell upon them like a tide. Grenades bloomed and small-arms fire rattled through the warrens as the rat-war ignited in full.
While the Hoardin tore each other apart, the Reclaimers slipped away through back corridors and found a ramp leading to the fourth floor.
The middle-management sector was smaller, the building visibly tapering as it rose. Faint rad-hum vibrated through their bones. Flickering emergency lights cast bloody shadows across warped desks and neat rows of cubicles that now looked like dunes of ruin. The carpet was a sickly green, thick with age and mold. The air smelled of burnt plastic and old coffee.
As they approached the central elevator lobby — a brutalist-art deco atrium of cold grandeur — a security robot rounded the corner.
“Identification, please.”
Weapons snapped up. But L’Uomo Prime stepped forward, his voice calm and authoritative, citing long-forgotten green-level clearance codes from his memory banks. To everyone’s astonishment, the robot accepted the command and stood down. A second robot followed moments later and was similarly recruited. The Reclaimers suddenly found themselves flanked by two powerful Arc bots armed with devastating Arc-Lightning Battle Systems.
Their relief was short-lived.
From the far side of the vestibule came the heavy tread of more machines — these ones clearly corrupted, their movements jerky and hostile, as though they had waited decades for someone to finally eject from the boardroom. They opened fire without hesitation.
The battle erupted in a storm of lightning and violence.
Blue-white arcs of electricity tore across the lobby. One bolt struck the rear guard, chaining between Sheik, D’Can’Tr, Turkey Plissken, and Henry with devastating force. Sheik’s stun pistol fizzled uselessly. Lasers barely scratched the enemy armor. The controlled Arc bots answered with their own lightning, but the corrupted machines were relentless. L’Uomo’s vibro-axe struck true, only for his weapon to suddenly power down mid-swing. Steve Austin’s shots with the captured AR-50 kept missing, the unfamiliar rifle fighting him at every trigger pull.
The fight became a desperate, grinding melee. Butterball roared as he poured rifle fire into the enemy. Henry’s M1 Garand barked again and again. D’Can’Tr and Plissken added what they could. Sheik, bleeding and scorched, switched to his vibro-beak and charged. The corrupted Arc bots answered with merciless lightning, nearly killing Sheik outright and forcing both him and Steve to fall back, bodies twitching from electrical trauma.
For a moment it seemed the machines would overwhelm them.
Then Henry’s Garand found its mark, blowing one bot apart in a shower of sparks. Turkey Plissken scored a direct hit. Sheik, bloodied but unbowed, drove his vibro-beak into another with a savage cry. Butterball’s rifle delivered the killing shot on the last corrupted machine.
Silence fell across the elevator lobby, broken only by the crackle of dying electronics and the ragged breathing of the survivors.
They had won — barely.
But as they regrouped among the smoking wreckage, checking burns and gathering what little remained of their strength, the Black Monolith seemed to press down on them heavier than before. They had survived another floor.
The question none of them voiced hung in the scorched air:
How many more floors remained… and what waited at the very top?
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