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“GO!” Purah shouted, launching the precious Sheikah slate into the air. I flinched at her sudden motion, turning to watch in shock as the little Guardian made its escape.
A pained groan brought my attention back to the situation we were in. Purah had taken advantage of the Yiga traitors’ distraction to knee her attacker between the legs and swing at his head. Good idea! I turned to do the same to mine, but he had already recovered from his surprise, his blade flashing to encircle my neck once more. With an undignified squeak, I spoke. “Ah, Purah?”
“What, Robbie?!” She snapped, as the Yiga positioned himself to be behind me, and I could see Purah again. She’d managed to grab a sickle and was facing two more traitors. She turned slightly to include me in her field of view, then sighed at my predicament.
“Surrender or he dies!” The Yiga snapped.
“Yeah, yeah,” Purah grumbled, dropping the sickle with a clang and raising her hands.
“Sorry,” I said as lightly as I could.
The Yiga holding me jabbed his free fist into my back. “Quiet! There’ll be no more talking or fighting back!”
As Purah glared at him, I couldn’t help feeling she was glaring at me, for getting us in this situation. She was right to blame me, of course, for my over-enthusiasm and now my lack of fighting skills. But it wasn’t my fault I was scholar, not a warrior, and who could resist loudly celebrating their achievements after such long hours of thankless work?
I cut my musings short as I realized I really should be paying attention to the current situation, my life perhaps depending on it.
Our research team was being herded out of the room, deeper into the lab. The Yiga guarded Purah and I waited until they had left before shoving us against the wall.
“Where is that Guardian going?” One snapped.
I glanced at Purah. It appeared they were going to question us now. What was our plan? Refuse to say anything? Give them enough to not hurt us? Lie?
“I don’t know,” Purah snapped.
“You!” One of them waved his weapon at me. “What did you find? What did it show you?”
“I-I didn’t have time to see—“
A Yiga stepped forward, swinging his fist into my jaw and sending me crashing to the floor, narrowly missing Purah.
“Hey!” She cried.
“Don’t lie to us! Tell us what you saw!” The Yiga shouted as I shook my head, clearing the sudden dizziness from it, and reaching to touch the point of pain.
“Nothing you don’t already know,” Purah snapped. “Just pictures of the Calamity destroying Hyrule!”
The Yiga grabbed my clothes to drag me to my feet.
“She telling the truth?”
I nodded quickly. “Yes, I swear to you, that’s all we had time to see!”
There was silence for a moment, my frantic heart the only disruption.
“Nothing more to be gained right now. Get them secured somewhere while we await further orders,” A Yiga said, stepping away.
The others nodded, then grabbed us again. Purah wrestled against them angrily, bumping into a table in a quick scuffle as she realized they were going to bind and gag us. But there was nothing we could do, though Purah did her best to wither them all with her glare.
Soon enough, we found ourselves in a closet, wrists bound together back to back, knees bent to fit in the cramped space.
I sighed into the rag tied uncomfortably over my mouth, wondering what to do now. I strained to see behind me as Purah moved, before letting out a muffled shriek as something sharp cut into my hand. What is she doing??
With no way to ask, I had to wait while Purah strained against the ropes at our wrists, tightening and loosening them so that our skin rubbed raw. Finally, the pressure released, and I was amazed to find she had cut the rope. I brought my hands in front of me to examine the stinging cut in my palm, my goggles letting me see the blood in the gloom of the closet. Purah must have gotten hold of a blade somehow to free us. My gag fell away in an instant, and I awkwardly turned to face Purah.
“How did you get a knife—you stabbed me!” I whispered as quietly as possible.
Purah hissed and shoved her hand over my mouth, watching the closet door. I would have rolled my eyes if she could see them.
“We have to escape.” Purah murmured. “Any ideas?”
I set aside the pain throbbing in various locations and tried to think. The Yiga were waiting for further orders so we had some time… we needed a way out of the locked closet… out of the lab that was no doubt swarming— actually, there couldn’t be that many Yiga. There’d been five total, two had gone off with our research team… there were lots of weapons lying around to be studied so we could easily arm ourselves… but so could they… and they could fight much better than I or even Purah could…
“What’s in here with us?” I asked, finally thinking to look up and around.
Nothing much, it turned out. Just papers in boxes.
“Aha!” Purah breathed. “I have an idea. We get one to open the door, take him down and use his mask to sneak out in disguise.”
“Hmm, seems risky,” I muttered. “I don’t think they’d be fooled.”
“I guess you are a little small for a Yiga,” Purah sighed.
“That’s not—you’re smaller than me—“
Pursh’s glare silenced me again. I cleared my throat awkwardly.
“W-well, where are we trying to go? Outside the lab to the Hylian soldiers? Or do we need to have avoided the Yiga well enough to flee for the Castle?”
Purah nodded. “The latter. I can’t imagine the Yiga…” she hesitated. “…I can’t imagine they’d have let the soldiers live.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t thought of that.
A moment passed as we considered the gravity of the situation. This was life and death, wasn’t it?
“So… escape to the stables and grab horses,” Purah stated.
I nodded, then frowned when no plan of how to accomplish that came.
“If only we knew what was going—“
Purah smacked her hand over my mouth again.
“Listen! Footsteps?”
I listened and could indeed hear thudding close to the door…then the handle began to move.
Purah shot to her feet and grabbed a small crate of papers.
“Get out of the way!” She hissed as the door began to open out.
I scrambled to my feet and pushed myself against the wall as a Yiga mask appeared.
“What’s going on in—“
That was all the traitor had time to say before Purah slammed the crate on their head. I gasped as the assassin’s limp body crumpled into the small closet, squeezing myself even further back to avoid a flailing arm.
“Let’s go!” Purah said, at almost a normal volume. “We have to make it out now!”
She was right, who knew how long the Yiga would be out? There was no time for planning anymore.
I stumbled out of the closet, trying to avoid stepping on the Yiga, and looked around frantically, searching for the other traitors. Our closet was not in the main room, from which I could hear voices, so we were out of sight for now.
“Our team?” I asked Purah as she emerged holding the Yiga’s sickle.
She shook her head. “No time.”
She had also retrieved the key to our closet and quickly locked the Yiga inside.
“Quietly, slowly, to the side entrance,” Purah ordered, pointing away from the Yiga voices. I nodded and followed behind her.
I winced at every small creak and rustling sound we made, shoulders twitching as I expected to be found out, yelled at, grabbed or stabbed. My breath got shallower and shallower as I tried to keep it quiet, and my head began to swim. I took a deeper breath, almost a gasp, and Purah turned to glare at me, a finger on her lips. She glared harder as a loud thud echoed down the hallway, followed by a yell.
That had to be the Yiga we’d locked up. They’d probably teleport out, and we’d be caught…
I grabbed Purah’s hand and broke into a run for the door, trying to keep my footfalls as quiet as possible. Purah caught on to the urgency and kept pace, and we were soon pushing open the door.
The sky was still blue, the grass still green, but the Hylian guard—I flinched away from the body next to the door and followed Purah in a dead sprint for the stables. It took an agonizing few moments to reach it, seeing as we had to run around the building a ways, and I expected to be shot from behind at any moment.
“No time for saddles,” Purah snapped as we scrambled to get bridles and two horses. I winced at her volume, but unless the Yiga were in the room, they wouldn’t hear her.
I fumbled the small straps and didn’t manage to fit the bridle properly on the horse before Purah was swinging up onto hers…and a red glow appeared near the door.
“Go go go!” Purah shouted as the telltale rustling of Yiga teleportation sounded.
To my horror, I stumbled and failed to mount, giving the Yiga time to appear in a burst of fluttering paper and light.
“Robbie!!” Purah screamed, struggling to keep her horse steady as her stress mounted.
Hurry, I thought as I managed to pull myself onto the beast’s back. By Hylia, hurry.
“Hey!” The Yiga shouted, as I got settled and kicked my horse’s sides. I looked up in time to see Purah stab the Yiga with a pitchfork—they stumbled back with a scream and vanished in the next instant.
“Let’s go already!” Purah shouted, and we were finally moving.
I had very limited experience with horses, and had never ridden bareback before. Immediately, I worried we wouldn’t make it very far, even without the Yiga chasing us. As we pushed the horses faster, it was increasingly hard to balance as I was thrown up and down, my teeth crashing together as I was repeatedly unprepared for the downward movement. I was slipping back and forth, side to side, abandoning the reins in favour of gripping the horse’s mane and trying to get at least some of my muscles to work for me…
“Pur—ah!” I gasped between bone-crunching thuds. “Help—“
I caught a glimpse of her face as she struggled to turn to me without falling off her own horse. Her grimace, eyebrows raised—she was afraid. I’d never seen Purah truly afraid before. Was it just the horse? Had she seen something? The Yiga?
I tried to look around and immediately slid halfway out of my seat.
“Robbie!”
I gasped half breaths as panic flooded me. I had to get back—I couldn’t fall—
The telltale crackle of Yiga teleportation drew an involuntary whimper from me.
How can we do this? How could we ever escape this nightmare of a situation? I was going to fall—
I forced myself to take a deep breath, then another, then to pull myself back up. I tensed every muscle I could, focusing on one goal—as I struggled, the horse slowed down, and that was the last bit of help I needed to finally get upright.
“Get back here!” Came a shout from behind, and I kicked my horse to go faster in response. Maybe we could outrun the Yiga’s teleportation… but probably not their arrows. And not for long, either, if we wanted the horses to survive.
Keeping my focus ahead, I saw the jagged terrain of the Breach of Demise growing larger.
Maybe we could lose them. The pocked boulders of the Breach would provide dozens of hiding places, if we could get inside without the Yiga seeing…
I turned slowly and carefully to look behind us, and chuckled as I saw the Yiga struggling to keep up with their teleportation. They weren’t shooting at us at all, and I only caught glimpses of them as they appeared only to teleport again, always a ways behind us.
I turned my focus ahead once more and nudged my horse closer to Purah.
“Do you think we can outrun them?” I shouted over the thudding of hooves.
Purah looked behind as I had done, then turned back.
“Maybe! Not if they keep following!”
A few tense moments passed as we checked over our shoulders periodically to see the Yiga still following. Our horses were tiring, flecked with sweat and breathing gustily. I had to keep encouraging mine to keep speed, and I wasn’t sure how much longer it would listen to me.
“We could lose them in the Breach,” I called to Purah as we met with the first jagged rocks and sloping ground.
She turned once last time, and laughed as I had.
“Look! They’ve stopped!”
A lone red figure stood shaking their fist at us.
“Amazing!” I laughed. “We did it!”
Perhaps now my heart could stop trying to beat its way out of my ribs.
“Right, but we have to get to the Castle!”
Purah slowed her horse and I followed suit.
“We have to shut down the tech, or find out how to keep it from being…possessed,” Purah continued at a more reasonable volume.
“Yeah,” I sighed. The brief images I had glimpsed in the Guardian’s memory were extremely troubling. We’d all been depending on the Divine Beasts and the Guardians to fight with us… But the idea of them being rendered useless, and beyond that, turned against us, was terrifying. I’d seen their weapons, the energy they could harness…
“How are we going to stop that?” I asked, trying to get my thoughts working. My heart was still thudding from our daring escape, and now we had to face a far worse threat…
“Well, the control unit in the castle has to be able to do something,” Purah reasoned. “…and if something isn’t working right, what do we usually do?”
“Uhh… Turn it off, then on again?”
Purah rolled her eyes. “Sure, we’ll try that. Come one, you got corrupted data back again, this is just a…larger scale of corruption!”
I shook my head. “Purah, my analyses are…logical. Possessing tech with…with eeeevil magic,” I argued, accompanying the word with dramatic finger wiggles, “is not logical. It’s magic! Possession! Not a normal tech malfunction!”
The lack of a witty retort had me studying Purah, concerned. Her coloured lids were low in a frown.
“We have a little time to figure something out, at least,” she muttered grimly.
“Right,” I said quietly.
We didn’t speak again until the castle was in view, and Purah decided we should get our horses moving faster. But the third time I had to encourage my horse to keep the pace, it decided it was done taking orders and reared.
“No no no—“ I gasped as I felt myself sliding right off, heading for the ground.
I twisted as best I could, hoping to avoid damage to the tech on my back, and a fraction of time later, pain burst from my elbow and shoulder as they contacted the dirt first. I slammed my opposite hand into the ground, hoping to keep my head from smacking it, sending pain up that arm as well. My vision jolted off then on, and my heart along with it as I first assumed I had hit my head, and when no pain came, realized I hadn’t entirely preserved my backpack. My lower half hit the ground like an afterthought, and I lay still for a moment, trying to collect myself.
“Robbie!” Purah’s anxious face moved into my field of view, and I let out a relieved sigh as my vision seemed to be normal.
“Move slowly,” Purah cautioned. “Are you hurt? Badly, I mean?”
I slowly pushed myself up to sitting, and groaned as every part of me throbbed.
“Just what I needed—“
I flexed one hand, then the other, felt my aching shoulder and touched the side of my head that had fortunately escaped contact with the road.
I brought my legs under me and rose slowly, wobbling.
“Hey, you should keep sitting for a minute,” Purah snapped, grabbing my waist from the side to support me.
“Check my—can you check my tech? I—I think it’s okay, I hope it’s o—“
“Yeah, yeah, just sit down again, please,” Purah said.
I did as she commanded and waited as I felt her search over my backpack for damage. I tried to keep my breathing calm, but… this was one of the things I feared most in life. Having the tech supporting my eyesight fail on me. Even worse was having it fail on me in the middle of nowhere. Just one unlucky fall and I would be almost entirely blind—
“It did hit the ground, one corner is a bit messed, but it seems to be in working order.”
Purah calm voice recentered me. “Are you okay?”
I cleared my throat, not trusting my voice. “Y-yeah, just fine. Let’s, uh, keep moving.”
Purah walked to stand in front of me and squinted in suspicion.
“You don’t sound fine. Maybe you should just breathe for a minute, and I’ll see if I can catch the horses again.”
My heart lurched at the idea of mounting that beast again.
“I think I’ll just walk from here,” I laughed awkwardly, rising slowly to my feet. I winced at the pain in my hand, shoulder, and now my neck, as adrenaline started to wear off.
Purah threw up her hands in frustration and started halfheartedly towards our horses, grazing nearby. I followed carefully, thanking the Goddess that the worst hadn’t happened, nothing beyond painful bruises, which I could deal with just fine. The emotional baggage attached to my eyesight was something I tried to ignore, and it didn’t come up very often. It couldn’t, when my job relied so much on sight. No one would ever trust me with delicate matters like the Guardian’s memory if they knew how much I depended on the tech attached to me. I decided to push it away the feelings, as usual, and focus on moving forward. We had far greater tech problems to deal with.
Purah didn’t bother trying to catch a horse, since I didn’t want to attempt riding again. We weren’t far now, thankfully. We were soon at the wall surrounding Castle Town, passing through the small gate under the watchful eyes of the guards. Castle Town itself was emptier than usual, as people had been leaving in anticipation of the Calamity’s return soon. Still, as the sun was lowering in the sky, there were people gathered at popular eating venues. My stomach growled at the smells around us.
“We’re almost there,” Purah stated. “Then we can rest and recover from this mess and plan our next moves.”
I nodded, quite exhausted from said mess.
As we reached the inner ring of houses, the ground shook. Purah and I stumbled, and I fell to the ground, looking around frantically to figure out what was happening. People screamed all around, but just as quickly as it had happened, the ground stilled. The air filled with shocked murmurs, which died away and rose again, panicked, as the late afternoon light darkened. A rumbling from the castle, and strange black and pink particulates filled the air. A cloud of them formed around the castle, growing quickly, with unnatural lightning and thunder following.
I looked at Purah, heart sinking at the fear in her eyes.
“That’s—that’s the Calamity,” she murmured. We both recognized the atmospheric effects and unnatural colours from the little Guardian’s pictures.
“But—it’s not the Princess’s birthday—“ I gasped. “How..?”
“Doesn’t matter!” Purah snapped. “We’re too late!”
There was a shriek on top of the thunder as a shape coalesced in the swirling black and pink clouds. A sound like a roaring fire, and a shower of strange energy balls shot out over the sky.
The four biggest headed in opposite directions. Towards the Divine Beasts.
“We should go,” Purah said, grabbing my arm and starting to run for the nearest gate.
“The Guardians—“ I realized. There were dozens in the Castle.
“We have to warn people!” I exclaimed, pulling her to the nearest house.
“The Calamity has come! Get out of the Town!” I yelled, pounding in the door.
Purah left my side to go to the next building.
We made our way as quickly as we could to the gates, calling to everyone we encountered to flee for their lives.
I glanced back once at the Castle, horrified by the huge lightning storm and the vague shape of the Beast circling inside. Explosions broke out in spots along the walls, and I saw figures running. Was the King—the Princess—Impa, for that matter—
Massive pillars had risen out of the ground surrounding the castle, the usual Sheikah tech designs a corrupted pink and black. As I paused to look closer, my panic only grew. There were Guardians dropping down from the pillars, at least one every second. I knew they could run faster than us. We would soon be overwhelmed.
As we moved, more and more frantic as we were joined by dozens of panicking people, we could hear explosions getting closer and closer. A particularly loud one had someone sob loudly and a child scream. I felt a little like screaming myself, but I saved my breath for running.
There was no time for thoughts or clever plans. There was only the next moment, full of fear, pain and noise. Maybe those things would end eventually, but I couldn’t muster the energy to hope.
On we ran, now ignoring others as we ran for our own lives, past the gates of Castle Town and on into the grasses of Hyrule Field. Fires were spreading smoke into the golden air, heralding the arrival of the Guardians following us.
Thank the Goddess, I eventually that they were not catching up, more focused on destroying the town than chasing down our group.
We slowed our frantic pace as energy wore down, and as we reached the meager shelter of the trees near the Ranch Ruins, we stopped, standing bruised and hollowed, as thudding footsteps of escaping civilians muffled the world around us. Uncharacteristically serious, we looked at each other.
“We’ll do everything we can to help,” Purah said. I could only nod. “Split up. Find a way to…to take back the tech.”
We instinctively looked to Hyrule Castle, where our life’s work was… destroying our people.
“I’ll… go to Akkala Citadel,” I managed, picturing the lab outpost we’d set up there, all the Guardians found nearby…
“Hateno,” Purah said briskly. “The Fort will need me.”
“Right,” I replied, almost smiling again. “You and your brrrilliant brain.”
“Precisely,” Purah retorted, smacking my shoulder lightly. I winced as my bruises twinged. “See if you can manage without me for once. And try not to…”
Purah broke off, going serious again. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, taking a deep breath.
“Right. See you soon,” I echoed.
One last look into her eyes, and we parted.