Chapter 745: Three Days of Survival.
But the job wasn’t done. The storm’s tether had shredded the main support cables. Thousands of tiny, hair-thin fiber-optic wires were frayed, hanging like metallic weeping willow branches. "Look at this mess," she sighed, moving her harness along the line. "It’s like a cat got into a ball of yarn. Why do I do this to myself?" The answer to the question was easy: because she needed to level up and close the rifts in her world.
Those simple repair jobs had to be saved for repairmen like Nine, who were not in a hurry to level up. At the moment, she longed to be like him.
She grabbed the first bundle. Each wire had to be aligned perfectly, or the data flow for the bridge’s suspension defense system would glitch. If she messed up, the people who used the bridge would end up falling into the abyss and becoming food for the creatures below.
She hummed a song, her fingers moving with practiced grace despite the cold. As she worked, a Skulker managed to leap through a gap in the robot defense. It slammed against her shield, its face squashed against the blue energy field, staring at her with those creepy orange eyes.
"Eww! Gross!" Sunshine yelled, not even looking up from her wiring. "Hammer! You are slacking!"
The hammer whizzed by, bonking the creature off the shield with a satisfying thud.
"Thanks!" she called out.
The work was tedious and exhausting. Her fingers became stiff, her muscles burned, and the ribs felt like they had been sat on by an elephant from the earlier blast. Every time she finished a cable, she had to wrap it in a reinforced Beast-Proof sleeve_ a thick, leathery material made from the hides of creatures that were resistant o electricity.
"The irony in this" she chuckled to herself, her voice a bit raspy. "Using the monster skin to protect the wires from the monsters." She moved from one cable to the next, her movements becoming a rhythm. Repair, seal, sleeve. Repair, seal, sleeve.
"System?" she said after a long silence, her voice getting a bit soft. "Could you tell me more about the residents of this world?"
[Yes host, Elitopians are very nice aliens but they like to keep to themselves. They are very short naturally, shorter than the mythical dwarves in some of your fairytales from earth.]
Sunshine gasped. "That is.... a crime against nature. How do they protect themselves from being stomped?"
[They use exo suits of different types to borrow height. So, when you meet them, you cannot tell that they are actually short by nature.]
Sunshine sighed. She had never been more relieved for a species of aliens she had never met. As she worked, the system told her about the way of life of the Elitopian’s. Eventually, the exhaustion became a weight too heavy to carry, and Sunshine succumbed to a deep, pull-less sleep inside her space.
She didn’t want to go home until the job was finished. If she allowed herself to soak in the love of her family and comfort of the base, the task would feel like a punishment.
Day Two on Elitope was even worse. The winds transitioned into a deeper ice storm. Thankfully, she had the shield, but she felt sore and tired despite the six hours of sleep. She took out an energy pill and swallowed it then got back to work.
When she reached the main anchor joint, she groaned. A massive cluster of cables wasn’t just broken_ they were tangled and fused together by the lightning, looking like a giant ball of burnt hair. She took a picture for Ariel.
"Okay, System. I’m going in," she muttered, unhooking her primary harness to crawl into a tiny, dark maintenance conduit. It was a tight squeeze, and once she was inside, she was blind to the world outside.
When she heard the squealing outside after an hour, she knew. The Fanged Skulkers were back, she could hear the robots fighting them off.
"They do not give up, do they?" Sunshine muttered. She grabbed a live wire sparking nearby and jammed it toward the shield. A blue arc of electricity shot out, zapping the air and sending the monsters scurrying back with scorched fur. "Electric fencing, courtesy of Earth engineering! Try elsewhere!"
She spent hours in that cramped tube, sweating and swearing, until the fused wires were finally straight.
By evening, her body felt like it was made of lead yet, there was too much work left, she found a relatively stable ledge. She strapped herself down tight with three different safety lines and pulled a dry ration bar and coconut beans from her pocket.
"I have no energy to chew," she said, taking a bite of the chalky protein.
As she chewed slowly, she watched the round robots buzzing around her in a protective circle, their little red eyes scanning the mist. Whenever a creature got too close, a robot would zip forward with a zap to scare it off.
"You guys are okay," she whispered, tossing a tiny crumb toward a robot.
It beeped at her curiously and ignored the crumb.
Sunshine looked toward the distant platforms. She could see the silhouettes of the masked residents of the area. They wore heavy exoskeletons and hovered perfectly still, watching her work from a distance. They looked eerie, like ghosts in the rain.
"No wonder they paid so much for this," she sighed, leaning her head against the cold metal. "Only a crazy person would take this job. Luckily, I’m at least fifty percent nuts."
She took out the red telephone from the space and called Hades. "How are things going over there," he asked.
Sunshine cleared her throat. "Well, you know, this and that. There are monsters here too, but I have my ruthless robots, a space and hammer."
"That makes me feel a little bit less worried." Hades answered.
Then she talked to the kids too, which only made her miss them the more. When she got off the phone, she worked with more energy, determined to leave as quickly as she could.
Day Three was the grand finale. The last cable cluster was the most dangerous part of the whole bridge. It was a massive bundle of wires hanging loose, swinging back and forth over the abyss like a giant pendulum.
[If that thing hits the bridge while it’s live, the whole span explodes, your work here will have been in vain.] the System warned.
"Point noted," Sunshine yelled over the roar of the wind.
[You will need to get out of the shield.] The System told her something that she had figured out already.
"I see that System" She ordered the robots to release the shield temporarily.
She attached her rappelling line and stepped off the edge. She dropped down, swinging through the air. Every gust of wind threatened to snap her rope and send her screaming into the red mist below.
Suddenly, a swarm of winged creatures attacked, as if they had been waiting for this very moment.