At least one corridor looked like a good escape route to the jackal, and he darted for it. No sooner than he got within twenty feet of it did it become a rather uninviting-looking path, however; gratuitous, violently-tumbling piles of debris all but obliterated the steel door, crushing it inward, and irreparably jamming and clogging the potential exit. He braked hard, lost his footing, and ended up skidding on his hind quarters and back for a few uncomfortable feet across the slick concrete floor before picking himself up again.

Harvesters were already taking up positions at other ground-level exits, blockading them with their bodies. Options were slim. Midian began looking above.

"Up there!" he shouted over the ruckus, pointing overhead. A few ladders ran high up nearby support structures, leading to what looked like maintenance access in the ceiling.

"Might be a way out, but forget it with—"

He was cut off by the pressing need to lunge back into a run to avoid getting turned into paste by another hunk of disembodied robot being fired at him. His point was made clear enough, though. Try climbing a ladder with that thing still shooting.

With its two largest sensors—its eyes—covered in paint, the machine roared and spun, slowly revolving on its torso to try and gain some peripheral vision on its attackers. Its crown of heavy steel turrets revolving aimlessly as it fired, the machine peppered the walls, the floors, the ceiling, everything with a hail of randomly launched slugs of metal, in an effort to hit a target it could no longer properly get a bearing on.

Whichever harvester bot managed to reach the hedgehog first only succeeded with creating a close relationship with a spiked fist. Geoff, arm throbbing and urgency flaring as he found himself being left behind by his companions, had managed to push back onto his feet after a brief moment of spinning confusion. Damn had that hurt.

Shuffling off as he tried to regain his bearings, he began to outrun the other robots whose attention was directed towards his quilled form. Of course, they weren't the main threat, the tsunami of bent metal and various robotic limbs and other such body parts still falling from the heavens around him. Now it was simply a mad dash to regain the lost ground from his little mishap. Jerking and weaving, even rolling at times to avoid the projectiles, the hedgehog made progress towards the ladders. He barely sacrificed a glance towards Tabitha's bold multicolored paint attack as he leaped onto the ladder, scrambling up.

Arms flailed and feet slipped at times out of the panic of escaping the flying metal all about the room, but he was making progress..

Coop collided with the bottom of the ladder with a rickety crash. He groaned. The shape of a gun housing had been stamped into the muscle behind his shoulder. The broken impression was slowly filling in, with the grim consistency of molasses.

Directly behind the hedgehog, he grabbed a few rungs up with his good arm and pulled himself up in a big arc. He grabbed gingerly onto the ladder with his injured arm, and then reached up with a huge reach with his good arm, again, and hauled himself up.

Groan, rinse, repeat.

Midian flung himself through the air at the same ladder as Ace, in much the same manner, trying to clear as much of it as he could before he started climbing.

*Clank!*

He started scaling rapidly. Rather than grasping at the rungs with his hands, they clung to the sides of the ladder, sliding briskly up in quick alternation, one then the other, while his feet kicked off of only every third rung. In short, the lanky jackal was consuming the ladder, and was right below Ace in a matter of seconds.

And then there was a crash.

The ladder had been severed just narrowly under him, blasted by a hunk of debris. The shake caused him to stop a second, clinging so as to not fall as the ladder flexed. He continued upward.

Another crash. The support the ladder was affixed to was hit. The huge robot, though unable to aim accurately, must have been homing in on the one target it had been able to successfully hit, making slight adjustments. Midian climbed faster.

A third crash—this one very nearly either took out either Ace's feet or Midian's head. The ladder was torn like a piece of paper between the two, and Midian slid down a good five rungs as a result of the quake of impact and the falling debris raining on his head. He clung to a rung by a single hand, limbs flailing outward as his severed segment of the ladder leaned out from the pillar. He gritted his teeth and regained his grip, but it didn't change the fact that he now had a huge gap between himself and the rest of the ladder above.

An ear-busting bass pounding resounded through the huge chamber as the first of Seven's explosive charges detonated in a ball of flame some distance away, showering bits of glass and metal all the way to the party. A few seconds later, another followed.

At the top of the ladder was a hatch, and through the hatch was a wide, low-ceilinged corridor which all the other service hatches opened into, and in this corridor, directly opposite each hatch the group’s members had emerged from, were several sets of rickety, punched-metal stairs—labeled “ROOF ACCESS” in large red letters—that each went up to a door. The doors had portholes in them, and beyond the glass was the blue sky. It was from one of these doors that Coop finally barged, squinting and grumbling and muttering incomprehensible epithets under his breath.

It was difficult to know what he expected to see. Perhaps he expected to see a row of robots, bristling with weapons and ready to unleash catastrophic disablement. Perhaps he expected to see a gentle, ethereal pony, gleaming the colour of fresh cornflowers in the sun. Whatever it was, he did not see it, and he stopped short with a suspicious look on his face.

He did see a massive fireball drifting up into the air in the distance. It was distant, but not distant enough to be comfortable; and it rose up slowly from the middle of the factory, curling as convection funnelled it into a thick, orange-red mushroom shape. The first explosive had gone off.

He stuck his head back down the stairway and looked into the hall for the rest of the group to emerge from their respective hatches.

“Where is everyone,” he yelled, “you have to get out here RIGHT NOW if you want to make it off this dump of a building without being blown into pieces."

Midian had climbed as high as he could again, but the next segment of ladder was well out of his reach. He looked around almost frantically for some other way. When Ace went and dangled himself off the end and offered a hand, though, it seemed like there was a chance.

Expressionless beyond blank survival-determination, he gripped what little remained of his ladder, bent his knees, and sprang. It was hard to jump from a position like that, especially straight vertically, and... he fell short just inches. He missed Ace's hand.

But he caught Ace's boot.

Wasting no time, he used his flimsy grip on the shoe to swing himself up and grasp Ace's hand, and from there, he pulled just a little higher to grasp the side of the ladder itself, still holding onto his rescuer's hand just in case his own climbing had cost him any footing or grip. As soon as Ace was able to get the ladder in both hands again, Midian went racing up it again, ready to get the heck out of there. No time to say "thanks" just yet.

Short of any other unforeseen catastrophes, they'd be hoofing it up the stairs to join their comrades on the roof soon enough.

The explosions increased in intensity and frequency as the bombs detonated progressively closer to the party. Those standing atop the roof would begin to see the "horizon" of its structure simply... falling away. As if deflating, the very structure fell, crumbling and collapsing in a continuous wave toward their position. In seconds, unless they acted, the concrete floor they stood on would fall out from under them and they'd become but rather squishy and organic parts of the rubble. Worse yet for anyone who may have been left inside.