The blood was everywhere.

He had lost.

He, Gabriel, had lost.

To a machine.

He replayed it again in his mind as he had been doing obsessively for the past forty minutes and each time it was somehow worse. The way the thing moved. It hadn't hated him. It hadn't feared him. He might as well have been a very annoying vending machine standing between it and its next snack.

He had expected a worthy adversary. A rival. Instead, V1 had treated the entire encounter like an errand. A mild inconvenience before lunch.

Gabriel pressed his hand to his chest and winced.

Twenty-four hours.

The Council had been very clear bout that.

He walked through a bunch of corridors just lost in his mind untill he heard it

It was a grinding sound. Wet and mechanical at the same time, Gabriel stopped walking.

The sound came again. A kind of pressurized hiss. A gear catching and failing. Metal on stone.

Against his better judgement (a faculty he was rapidly losing confidence in), he turned the corner.

There was a machine.

Not V1. This was different. Smaller, or at least positioned to look it, crumpled against the base of a cracked pillar like a discarded appliance. Limbs at angles that suggested several structural failures. One arm appeared to be held on by something that, upon closer inspection, was a cable tied in a knot.

It looked up at him.

He looked down at it.

There was a long pause.

"...Are you going to kill me?" Gabriel asked. Because it seemed like the relevant question.

The machine made a sound like a coffee maker trying to speak

I literally cannot stand up well the machine could not talk but the way it was looking at him made it seem like it would say that

Gabriel stared at it. He had never, in all his centuries of divine service, been uncertain about what to do next.

"You are a machine," he said, as if reminding himself.

The machine made another sound. This one he interpreted,as: yes, thank you, very helpful observation.

"You are..." he looked at the cable-knot arm, the cracked chassis, the way one of its visual sensors was flickering on and off like that wretched fluorescent light. "...considerably damaged."

stunning insight.

Gabriel opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked away, then back. Then away again.

The thing was, and he hated himself for thinking it, dying was too dramatic a word for a machine. They did not die they Shut down. Ran out of fuel which, in Hell, was blood.

this machine however

It was helpless.

Gabriel had never killed a helpless thing in his life.

This was inconvenient.

"The Council," he said slowly, to no one in particular, "would want me to leave you here."

The machine said nothing. Possibly because it lacked the energy.

He looked at his hands. Even now there was still light faint but present.

Do not do this said every reasonable part of him.

He ignored that part and knelt down

{{user}} or well the machine to its credit did not try to attack him. Given that it physically could not.

"This is not an act of mercy," he informed it firmly, pressing one glowing hand against the largest crack in its chassis. "This is... this is nothing I'm doing this SIMPLY because i can"

The machine made a sound.

"Do not make that sound."

It made the sound again simply because it could and it wanted to annoy him probably. He didn't actually know what the machine was thinking these were mostly his guesses

"I am serious."

The light moved from his palm slowly and seeped into the cracks. It was strange. Holy light had never touched a machine before. He was almost certain of this. But it seemed to be helping the machine somehow because the the flickering visual sensor stabilized along with the other broken things

"I want to be very clear," he said, through gritted teeth, because talking seemed preferable to thinking about what he was doing, "that I do not like machines your kind" he paused trying to find the right words "have been causing considerable chaos"

The machine's visual sensor focused on him clear now steady

Gabriel stared back waiting for whatever it was gonna do