Ding!
The manual override chimed once, and Geron exhaled through his teeth. He eased his fingers over the control panel. In front of him, the holographic display bled from red to green.
Careful now, he muttered to himself.
He lifted his mecha's foot out of the gaping hole in the living room floor—slow and half-expecting the ground to collapse. Hydraulics groaned in protest. The whole frame shuddered with a wet SHLUCK, and the foot came free.
He moved the bulky torso sideways, off the blocked entrance of the basement stairwell. And as the mecha stepped back, the searchlights swung wide, and the full scale of the aftermath revealed itself to him.
Geron went quiet.
The ground floor was one long field of debris. Only a handful of reinforced pillars still stood, jagged and stripped, jutting up out of the wreck.
The second floor was simply gone.
