Gent-081 -

Elias woke up three days later in a clean bed. The first thing he asked for was the machine.

It walked for two hours, through flooded streets and past the skeletal remains of burned-out transports, humming all the way. Its gyroscopes fought against the mud. Its power cell dipped into the red. But it did not stop. gent-081

Elias, shivering and bleeding into the machine’s chest, pressed his forehead against the cold metal. "They said you were just a tool." Elias woke up three days later in a clean bed

Elias felt the residual warmth from the machine’s core through its chest plate. It smelled of ozone, old oil, and strangely, faintly, of the lilac soap the pediatric ward had once used to clean the play mats. Its gyroscopes fought against the mud

It stepped forward, hydraulic muscles whining softly. The man flinched, expecting cold, unfeeling claws. Instead, Gent-081 knelt—a slow, deliberate motion. Its manipulator arms, capable of tearing steel doors from their frames, extended with absurd delicacy. One set of digits gently cupped Elias’s back. The other slid beneath his knees, avoiding the fractured bone with a precision that a battlefield surgeon would have envied.

Gent-081’s optical lens dimmed. Its power cell flashed a final, dying warning. It would not make it back to its charging station. It had known this for the last hour.

"His tibia," Gent-081 said to the medics. "Spiral fracture. No arterial bleed. Dehydrated. Probable hypothermia."