Industrious: Engineering Marvels - Chapter 28

“It still following us?” Logan grunted, reloading his rifle and pistol.

The truck jumped with an impact like an earthquake.

“I think it's still following us!” Bucky yelled back, leaning out the passenger's side and shooting a handful of bullets at the giant robot.

A mechanical whine filled the air.

“It's shooting again!” I warned unnecessarily as Steve swerved out of the way and off the road.

Immediately afterwards, a beam of coruscating energy slashed through where our transport van had been just a moment before. The truck rocked wildly, both with the uneven field we were plowing through and the nearby impact of the energy cannon mounted in the robot's chest.

“Fuck! You're gonna' blow an axle, Rogers!” Victor shouted.

“It's the axle or our lives!” Steve replied, shifting the stick and swerving us back onto the road before kicking up a cloud of dirt as he poured on the speed.

Meanwhile, I took a few slow breaths and took a crouch at the back of the transport, one knee pressing against the wooden boards that made up the floor of the cargo area. My bow was in my hands and an arrow was strung, one of the explosive ones. I was trying to ration them, but also knew how important it was to incapacitate that goddamn cannon.

“C'mon... c'mon...” I muttered, the words completely lost to the awful din surrounding us.

The robot was a lumbering giant in the night, not helped by the fact that – although it hadn't been enough to incapacitate it fully – the mass of explosive tags I'd set in it's leg had basically blown the entire thing off below the knee, leaving only a sparking mass of wiring and raw machinery.

As a result, the machine was engaging in a kind of loping crawl that shook the Earth with each grasping impact as it used its arms to pull itself forward in a desperate bid to catch up with us. While I very much doubted my ability to put the thing down here and now given how much damage my best attempt had done when I'd been able to plant it inside the damn thing... well, if I could damage one of its arms, that would slow it down substantially.

Also? It might stop it from firing that fucking chest cannon.

I took another slow breath, forcing myself to absorb the shocks of the road instead of fight them. I needed to be as steady as I possibly could.

Then the giant robot reared back to make another lunging step-

“There!” I breathed out, releasing the energy on the bow.

-thunk-

“BOOM!”

“Great shot, Ray!” Nina shouted at me over the noise of the fight.

“It do anything?!” Logan roared, bringing his rifle up as the smoke began clearing.

The moon wasn't quite full in the sky above us, but it was more than halfway there and I couldn't make out any serious cloud cover, either. So, while the visual conditions weren't ideal, basically everyone in the transport was some sort of superhuman on top of actually having some sort of light to see by.

Then the great metallic beast burst through the smoke cloud created by my exploding arrow and came crashing down on the road behind us-

-and his left arm buckled.

His chest crashed into the muddy road with a resounding splat.

“Take that, you sunnovabitch!” Victor howled, flipping the downed machine off.

“It's still getting back up,” I cautioned them, even as Steve slowed a bit. The machine was crippled slightly more, the area I'd shot sparking and shooting fluid, but not completely broken.

“As long as it can't shoot that fucking cannon at us again, I'll take it,” Logan sighed, snapping up his rifle and plinking a shot or two off its head.

“Don't waste ammo!” Steve shouted back.

“Just making sure it knows we haven't forgotten about it!” Logan chuckled harshly, earning a playful shove from his brother.

“Keep it pissed off, but watch your ammo count,” Bucky backed Steve up. “We're still in hostile territory, even if we've got a fucking giant robot chasing us. We aren't getting caught with our pants down if-”

“German patrol!” Steve shouted.

Now, if this were a sitcom, Bucky would have laughed and nodded at Steve, agreeing that a 'German patrol' was a definite possibility. After all, we were far behind enemy lines, making a hellish amount of noise, and the occasional cannon blasts from the thing in the giant's chest were basically ultra-bright flares that had gone up a half-dozen times. Steve screaming out something about a German patrol essentially on cue was a heck of a comedy bit.

But none of us were stupid enough to believe that our Boy Scout of a leader would actually pull something like that.

Maybe Dougan? Nah, that's not fair... Dino might, though. He loves his bad jokes.

Instead of any of that, though, there was a round of cursing as we all turned away from the struggling robot still chasing after us, and saw a roadblock of German trucks setting itself up, screaming at us to stop.

“Hold on to something! I'm pushing through!” Steve shouted.

Gunshots rang out, adding even more noise to the chaos, accompanying the sound of broken glass as the windshield was shot out.

“Shoot the fuckers!” Bucky added on, which was an entirely reasonable order.

After all, a group of professional soldiers were much less likely to actually get good shots on you if you were shooting back at them.

Being – by far – the worst shot of the group, I just hunkered down and kept one eye on the robot. As deadly as Germans with guns were, someone needed to pay attention to the other deadly menace bearing down on us.

But that didn't mean I couldn't help out at least a little.

“Flare!” I warned as I selected one of the arrows in question.

“Do it!” Steve shouted back.

I leaned out the back of the transport, wrapped my legs onto the drop-down ramp and momentarily turned my spine into a pretzel as I twisted to one side and pulled the bow taught. Thankfully, it was an easy enough shot that didn't require much distance or accuracy. My arrow flew through the intervening space, sparking as it went, before piercing the hood of a German jeep and bursting into an eye-scorching miniature star.

Their screams of alarm and pain as retinas were seared rang out like music to my ears.

Then I relaxed my back and I was hanging off the back of the transport staring as the goddamn giant robot took another flying leap at us.

“It's gaining again!” I shouted.

“Get back in the fucking car, dumbass!” Logan cried out, reaching down and clenching his fist in my uniform's shirt. With a superhuman heave, I was pulled up from where I'd been hanging and nearly thrown back into the rear of the transport.

Then the vehicle bounced.

And bounced again.

A few more stray shots rang out.

Then we were through and I could see the light of the smoldering flare behind us. Oh, and also the robot was smashing through the German blockade they'd set up.

“Call out, anyone injured!?” Bucky shouted, cursing as he fished for more bullets.

“Nothing that won't heal,” Victor replied, spitting blood out the back of the transport. Even if his words were louder than normal, they weren't quite at the level of shouting. Now that we'd passed the Germans and put some more distance between us and the bot, my ears were almost ringing with the sudden comparative quiet.

“Same,” Logan replied, one hand held to his side red with blood.

“Uh... I'm good?” Nina asked, her head popping up from cover like a curious animal.

“Same,” I stated, giving myself a rudimentary check.

“Steve?” Bucky asked, turning to his friend.

“Just a bit of shrapnel, barely made it past the costume, shield caught most of it,” Steve shook his head. “I'll be fine. You?”

“A bit of glass,” our 2IC replied, the sound of tinkling shards almost lost against the various noises in the distance and the wind now blowing freely through the driver's cabin and back out onto the road behind us. “Nothing much else.”

“You know, I'd like just one mission that wasn't fucked from the get-go,” Logan groused, pulling out a cigar and snipping the tip off with a flash of a bone-white blade before lighting up. I guessed it was a mark of just how much he trusted our little section of the squad that he didn't even try to hide the motion.

Our eyes met, and I shrugged, taking the opportunity to pop open my canteen.

“How far are we from this ridge, anyway?” Victor asked, popping open a pack of cigarettes.

“Ten miles,” Nina stated, holding up a map, before turning to me. “How'd you know about this, anyway?”

“I'm a history buff,” I replied with a sigh, casting one eye towards the robot as it tried to catch up. Granted, it was making progress. Even as crippled as it was, though, it was faster than a transport from the forties could go on muddy roads in a war-torn countryside at night. But the destruction of the German blockade had bought us time, at least. “My hobby is basically knowing all of the weird facts that I can cram in my head and, with my ninja skills, I tend to find out about a lot of stuff no one else knows.”

“That's amazing!” Nina's eyes widened, her glowing irises large in the dim night.

“Pull the other one, it's got bells on it,” Victor growled, spitting another wad of blood out over the back of the vehicle.

“Vic,” Logan cautioned, looking over at me.

The blond man rolled his eyes. “Look, his entire story is a crock of shit and the entire squad knows it. I don't know what the fuck is actually up with him, but I'm going to call him out if he lies to my face.”

I clicked my tongue as Steve swerved slightly, probably to avoid a bad pothole.

“That's a national secret, Creed,” the Captain called out. “Bucky and I know what's going on with Ray, he's on the level.”

“Toldya,” Logan grunted as he stared out the back, the robot gaining on us, but no longer able to easily and quickly position his chest-cannon. “Rogers and Barnes wouldn't put up with some kind of mole or spook.”

Victor snorted derisively. “Well sorr~reee for callin' shit as I see it.”

Nina, whose head had been twisting constantly between us, finally settled on me again. “Is that true, Ray? Everything's a lie?”

I winced slightly, mostly for effect, but sighed and shook my head. “A lot of the specifics are the same, even if the names got swapped around. Like, the rich girl I had a thing with back home? Her name was Satsuki. Her parents were actually pretty okay with me hanging around because I was a prodigy, but... well, some stuff happened – ninja magic bullshit – and I can't get back home.”

“Can't?” Nina asked, frowning. “Because it's in Japan or something?”

I grimaced, looked to Bucky – we traded shrugs – and shook my head again. “Nah, think... Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz type deal. My home was a place called Konohagakure – the Village Hidden in the Leaves – but I got into a fight with an evil spirit and got kicked out of that world and into another one.”

Pausing, I gave a wry grin. “Basically, this whole world isn't my 'Kansas,' to quote Dorothy.”

“You know I have to tell the General about this when we get back, right?” Steve asked tiredly. “I can't just disobey orders from the President, Ray.”

“Holy shit... you're serious,” Victor stated, blinking at me.

I grinned.

It wasn't as though Steve, Bucky, and I hadn't planned this out – with Peggy, admittedly. My fake backstory was paper thin, literally in most places. There were a hundred holes that were only plausible because of the general chaos of the war and the constant loss or classification of paperwork by a dozen different departments.

Even General Phillips was in on it, or at least he'd been notified about the possibility of needing a cover story for the cover story.

Konoha made a wild enough tale that no one would ask about the truth underneath the truth. It explained away a lot of my weirdness and gave me a believable cover for many of my unique skills and powers. The actual knowledge about various things... well, most of that would be eclipsed by the revelation that I was from another world. And the stuff that I legitimately had no way of knowing about? Well, I was a ninja. We were deceptive by our very nature. I was allowed to have secrets, almost obligated to do so in fact, and I'd tell that to their faces knowing they'd look for a more mundane explanation given how weird my life already was. No one would look past that for further weirdness.

No one would look underneath the underneath.

Heh.

“I'll be damned,” Logan muttered, then snorted and cursed. “Shit, I had money on you being some kind of spy from Japan who'd flipped on them. I lost the pot.”

“You guys have been gambling on Ray's identity!?” Steve shouted, sounding morally outraged and other boy scout emotions.

I snorted, “Yeah, Bucky's been keeping me tied into things. Some of their ideas have been pretty funny.”

Victor threw his nearly-dead cig away in disgust, pulling out a new one. “Fuck, I'm out too. I thought you were some weird experiment cooked up by that Stark guy. Maybe a robot.”

I outright laughed at that, Nina giggling along with me.

Vic's guess had been one of the more creative that wasn't just absolutely insane.

“So, wait... how do you know about these mines on this ridge if you're not even from out world?” Nina asked, frowning.

I just chuckled, still grinning. “I wasn't lying about liking history, I did even back in my world. When I got here, I picked up a bunch of books on your first world war and rifled through a lot of old reports I swiped from military storage.”

I stopped, cocked my head, and shrugged. “Well, that and it's generally considered common sense for most shinobi to know where large stockpiles of explosives are at any given time. Never know when you'll need something wiped off the face of the planet.”

“Now that?” Vic asserted, pointing to me with his lit cigarette. “That? I can believe.”

Then the earth shook violently and we all jerked towards the back of the truck.

“For fuck's sake-” Logan spat, shouldering his rifle.

“Are we there yet?” I asked, turning back to the front.

“We're actually pretty close!” Steve shouted in reply. “Give Ray the map, I need closer directions!”

I took the folded up stack of papers from Nina and narrowed my gaze as I forced my eyes to adjust to read the small words and trace the terrain lines. Combined with my half-remembered knowledge of the area from Google Earth...

“Okay, there should be a path coming up on your right!” I shouted. “Take it!”

“There!” Bucky cried.

“I see it!” Steve affirmed as the earth shook behind us once again. “Hold on, this looks like it's barely a goat path!”

He swerved and we started climbing a steep incline.

“So how do we set these explosives off, anyway?” Nina asked loudly, looking around our group.

“We bundle all of the explosives we've got left, throw it at the thing, and drive like hell once they're dropped,” Bucky replied sharply.

“And if that doesn't work?” Logan asked, frowning as he began pulling together grenades and explosives we hadn't used on the Hydra base. “What then? This shit is supposed to be thirty years old, isn't it? How do we know it's still good, anyway?”

“Besides it being the only idea we've got short of leading it to the Channel and seeing if it swims?” I asked rhetorically. “There was an article in a paper I saw about how the French are still digging up explosives from the war and they go off all the time when they get plowed up when tilling fields. We don't need all of the explosives to still be good, just enough.”

“And given that there's tons of the stuff buried under this hill? Odds are pretty good,” Steve stated.

Besides, if the first plan didn't work, I had a backup. Although I'd used up every tag I had to blow off the damn things lower leg, I hadn't pulled off the ones that were currently charging on my body.

My true last ace in the hole.

I hoped I didn't need them, honestly. It was going to be a complete pain in the ass building up a new stockpile, but if it was a choice between that and dying, I'd burn my last tags on a bolt of lighting.

As we crested the hill and the explosives were strung together with mechanical timers set, we rolled the device out onto the top of the ridge, the transport stopping briefly for us to unload.

“It's coming!” Nina cried, looking down the incline.

“Almost done!” I shouted back, Bucky planting the last timer.

“Go! Gogogogo!” He cried, and we leaped into the back of the truck.

“Drive!” I shouted, the vehicle already peeling out dirt as the entire hill started to shake from the clumsy climb of the crippled robot.

We got halfway down before the world went white and the transport left the ground in a blast of noise and light.

Either I hit something or something hit me, because my world went black.

The next thing I knew, I was laying on the open ground, staring at the sky.

“-ay! Ray! Hold on!” Steve shouted desperately. “Can you hear me!?”

I blinked, pain coursing through my waking mind as I looked down at my torso, only to find one of the two mutant brother's rifles sticking out of it.

I groaned and let my head loll back.

“Ray, don't you dare fucking die on me!” Steve shouted, my ears still ringing so much that I could barely hear him.

“I'm not fucking dying!” I barked out tired, actively twisting muscles and tissue to bind the wound. “Ugh... gotta... cut the nerves... ah!”

Instantly, I felt the pain fade to a shadow of itself. Then I sighed. “Fuck... it hit a kidney, that's going to be a pain to fix. Ugh... we kill the thing, at least?”

Steve, still breathing harshly, swallowed as he seemed to take in that I wasn't immediately on the verge of death. “Take a look for yourself.”

I blinked and slowly turned my head to where a gaping maw of earth was torn open some distance away from where our totaled transport now lay on its side. Large chunks of the giant robot now lay strewn about, embedded in the soft earth around us.

“Halle-fucking-lujah,” I sighed, “How's everyone else?”

“You got the worst of it,” Bucky groaned, limping towards us with Nina's help. “Vic and Logan are... putting themselves back together. They say they'll be up in a few minutes, at least.”

“We'll have to improvise a stretcher,” Steve started and I cut him off.

“No, I've got another pair of tags on me. Let me get them and I'll close the wound at least. If it's not actively bleeding, I can manage a walk back,” I sighed. “Just get ready to pull the goddamn gun out of me, okay?”

Steve looked like he was going to fight me for a moment, then sighed as his shoulders slumped. “If you're sure. Hard-headed idiot.”

“Oh and Steve?” I asked as he moved around to grip the stock of the weapon.

“Yeah?”

“I want at least a month's leave after this shitshow,” I told the man firmly. “I am sick and tired of being undergunned for this mad science bullshit.”

“You and me both, Ray,” Steve sighed. “You and me both.”

~~~

Yeah, as I said, things got a little hectic leading up to Halloween, so this is a bit late.

I should have the polls out in an hour or two after this post. Kind of surprised I managed to put things together as quickly as I did.

Anyway! Here's the end of this arc for Engineering Marvels. There's likely going to be a short timeskip of a few months after this, possibly with a 'downtime chapter' to bridge things and fill in some gaps.

Hope everyone enjoys and had a Happy Halloween!