The Daily Grind - Chapter 160 (Patreon)

I'm gonna do that thing again where I say I might need to take next week off for mental health reasons, and then maybe ignore that and make a new chapter anyway.

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“When one of us says, “Look, there’s nothing out there,” what we are really saying is, “I cannot see.”  - Terry Tempest Williams, Red : Passion and Patience in the Desert -

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“Too many turns.”  Alanna growled as she took another corner at high speed, clipping a lamp post with the car and crumbling a chunk out of the side of the pylon.  As it turned out, small towns didn’t have a lot of long straightaways you could accelerate down, and it was even worse when the city was under attack.

Not from the Last Line Of Defense, either.  All around them, the wreckage of every car that had been in motion littered the sides of the streets.  Asphalt grew from the roads and climbed the buildings like black vines, sometimes jerking suddenly to stab toward motion with wicked thorns.  It tried that repeatedly against their cars, but Anesh was using his last charges of manipulate asphalt to shield them, and El just didn’t fucking care, letting her car take hits in places that would have demolished a normal vehicle, but for her just healed over in seconds.  The main cost was in momentum, but the assault stopped once whatever was in control realized it couldn’t hurt them.

El knew where they were going, and she led them toward one of the main roads that crossed the city.  Aside from the wreckage around them, there was no sign of other people, alive or dead.  Nothing attacked them but the road itself.  They just moved as fast as possible, keeping James’ velocity topped off as he slowly shaped the mass of asphalt he’d ripped up from a wobbly ball into a real weapon.

The place looked like a war zone.  One a week after the fighting had happened.  Nothing was even on fire, which put Alanna even more on edge as she kept her eyes peeled, drawing on the other part of Anesh’s ability that James wasn’t using to keep herself alert.  Anesh just sat in the back seat, sluggish and bleary, waiting for them to need him more than his buffs.

They were still doing about fifty, an irresponsible speed in streets like this, when the other car nearly blindsided them.  It was as they blew through a red light at a weirdly angled intersection.  El blinked as they plowed through, ignoring the traffic light on the street devoid of people anyway, and the next thing she knew, there was a scratched up white SUV alongside her car, almost bumping into her driver’s side door.

“Shit!”  She heard herself yelling, and could practically feel Alanna echoing the word as the trailing vehicle behind her wavered in the street.  The other car wasn’t trying to flag them down, it was intentionally matching speed, which meant they’d *known where their cars were going to be*, which didn’t point to anything good.  El’s worries were confirmed basically right away, as the windows on the other car rolled down, and a pair of wary men propped themselves up and levels guns at her, yelling something she couldn’t hear over the engine.  “Is the entire fucking city in this fucking shit cult?!  Cam!”  El yelled, jerking her head at the people who were now shooting, leaving pockmarks on her rear window as they failed to understand how guns worked while driving.  “Get em!”  Then, a second later, she added another command.  “Siri!”  She yelled at her phone.  “Play Offspring’s Bad Habit!”  If she was going to die, she was going out to a decent soundtrack.

“Are we sparing these ones too?”  Camille asked as she somehow seamlessly slid between the front seats to the cramped bench in the back of the car, *while wearing plate mail*, the thick slabs of metal not even brushing the seats, much less catching on anything.

El didn’t answer.  She saw and heard as Alanna slammed the corner of her bumper into the other car, trying to execute a pit maneuver, but the enemy vehicle was still holding steady, and Alanna couldn’t slow down to try it again or James would run out of velocity.

Velocity.  El gave a terrified, wild grin to herself.  She had some of that too, and one thing specifically for being chased by hostile high speed assholes.  “An Engine Hums Eternal”. She muttered, and that invisible, thrumming power seeped out of her chest, and into the frame of the very nature of the car around her.

Then they were going a hundred miles an hour, their speed doubled in a heartbeat, leaving the pursuit behind in a flash.  If she’d done it by pressing down the gas pedal, El would be dead as soon as the road took a moderately sharp curve in two seconds; but she’d done it with magic, and it didn’t just amp up her speed, but also gave her car the handling to manage it.

“Tell them to get clear.”  Camille ordered El, voice perfectly audible without the other girl having to raise her voice at all.  El called through the radio as fast as possible, and watched in her rear view as Alanna whipped her car over to the side of the road.  She considered saying something about using turn signals, but didn’t have the nerve right now, and didn’t trust her voice not to break.

People were *shooting at her*.

*Again*

Then Camille punched out the rear window that wasn’t supposed to roll down - or be hit so hard it popped out of its frame, El grumbled silently - leaned her arm out, and flung her piece of rebar like a throwing axe, the metal bar’s spinning perfectly centered.

Alanna jerked the wheel again, pulling their car in a gut wrenching maneuver, as the thick piece of metal scythed through the SUV and punching about a half foot out the back door, bringing with it a spray of blood that left a thin trail down their side windows.  The driver died instantly, at least one gunman had been hit as well, and the force of the impact combined with the sudden lack of control had the car veering to the right and down the embankment next to the road, slamming into a wet ditch with a screeching crash.  Alanna had gotten them out of the way in time, but she wasn’t sure if she’d slowed too much.  A quick check showed James still with his eyes closed in focus as he kept their big gun going, and Anesh in the back seat looking like he wanted to throw up.

“El!”  Alanna yelled into the radio.  “We need a straightaway!”

“Road six is just ahead!”  El’s voice came back sounding a little queasy herself.  “You guys go right, get some speed, then u-turn.  I’ll scout.  Over.”

“Now she bloody says it.”  Anesh looked like he was fighting nausea with grim humor, slowly enunciating his words to avoid tripping over his own tongue.

“Got it.”  Alanna said, holding the radio in clenched fingers with the hand still steadying the wheel.  “Scream if you need help.”

The two cars stuck together just long enough for El to guide them to the turn, then peeled away from each other.  Alanna pushed the pedal down, getting them up to a speed that could maintain James’ mana supply, while still letting her weave around the irregular overturned or burning vehicles still on the road.  El was mostly right; this one was just a straight line, cutting through the town.  It had some hills and light curves, but even though she wasn’t a car wizard, Alanna knew how to drive normally, and this was well within her abilities.

She didn’t know exactly how far she should go.  But every second was giving James more time to work.  And yet, also more time for whatever was going on to get even worse.

The road out here, as they passed through one of those undeveloped spaces between chunks of houses and businesses, was still doing whatever it was doing closer to the city center.  Maybe a little slower, but all the same, the black asphalt was spreading from the road out into the dirt and grass around it with a vile determination; the stone flowing like veins to climb trees and power poles, smothering plant life and generating more and more asphalt.  It was obviously making more.  There was no other explanation for where it all *came from*.  There was just too much.

Alanna was just getting to the good part of her self-doubt on when to turn the car around when the radio crackled to life again.  This time, the voice that came through was steady and calm; Camille had over for this one.

“Eleanor asks you return to assist us.”  She said simply, in that scratchy, yet composed, voice of hers.  “We have located the guardian.”

Alanna was frowning as she pulled the car through a U-turn, constantly hoping James kept control of the increasingly dangerous spear he was building outside their car.  She still didn’t remember a lot, and she wasn’t sure if this was the kind of thing that he was *good at*.  Not in the way that she knew that Rufus was a good listener or Anesh was really good in bed.  So she just had to trust that no matter what, James would pull through for them.

Which felt so familiar, it burned in her chest.

“That doesn’t sound good.”   Anesh finally spoke from the back seat, reacting to Camille’s message.

“Sure doesn’t.”  Alanna agreed.  “Ready?”

“Always.”  Anesh had closed his eyes again, taking deep breaths and steadying his nerves.  “This is what we do.”  He took his time to say the words, the car moving them ten blocks by the time he finished.  “What’s one more monster?”

Alanna found the comment oddly soothing, and didn’t even notice the smile making it to her lips as she gave it some more gas and pushed them back toward their goal, speed keeping their wizard supplied with power even as the wheels rumbled over debris and odd bumps in the road.

Then they crested one of those gentle hills, and Alanna lost any sense of composure she had.  Her eyes went wide as in the distance, her enhanced sight picked up the frame of El’s car.  And also the thing chasing it.

It was a tanker truck.  One of those big fuel tankers, a doubled up trailer of massive silver cylindrical tanks.  The kind that were perfectly safe, but everyone was always nervous driving around anyway.

This one was not perfectly safe.

It didn’t have wheels.  Or if it did, Alanna couldn’t see them.  Instead, it writhed itself forward, arches of its body rising and slamming into the ground as it pulled its bulk forward.  It didn’t have two tanks, it had *eight*, all of them too flexible, too vaguely organic, to be a normal Earth-made cargo trailer.  Jagged geometric scales of metal plating shone along its coils, catching the light of surviving street lamps and the overhead moon like they were amplifying the beams and not just reflecting them.  Streamers of metal and rubber sprouted off it like coral growths, making what was already a massive, dangerous creation look even more ominous and unapproachable.  Where there should have been a trucker’s cab, there was instead a streamlined visage.  Ten headlights in a ring around the outside blinking in sequence like rippling eyes, a snout with smokestack nostrils and exposed engine pistons along the forehead.

It was fast.  Alanna could tell that just by the fact that she could hear El’s engine from here, and El was only barely keeping ahead of the dragon.  She’d decided, basically immediately, to think of it as a dragon.

“Jaaaaaames!”  Alanna didn’t take her foot off the gas, rushing forward to meet their end.  But she did have a *little* bit of trepidation.  Especially as the massive armored serpent paused to belch a gout of yellow-orange flame onto the road, only missing El’s car by virtue of the girl accelerating so fast her car blurred in motion.

Alanna caught sight of James sitting forward, shifting in his seat, one hand still held out the window over the spear.  A spear in earnest now.  She had no idea if it would be enough, and they really, really didn’t have any other weapon options aside from ramming it with a car and praying.

Trust.  She chose to trust.  She kept her foot down, and closed to engagement range with the guardian.  Trust in James.  Trust in everyone, including herself.  Trust in that stupid chunk of road

It was, by this point, no longer simply a convenient carrying package for material he could manipulate without interference.  Instead, it was a true weapon, forged out of necessity and pressure.  Every inch of the thing, James could *feel* through his road magic, like it was his own fingers shaping it.  The asphalt had been compressed on the outside, a hard, intensely sharp shell that was designed to shatter on impact, but only after cutting through the first thing it hit.  Shortly behind that was more compacted matter, in a splitting wedge.  Contours and angles shaped into exactly what was needed to drive the weapon farther into the target.

And then, the interior.  James knew in the back of his head that if he were to try to examine this without the mystical enhancement he had right now, it would hurt his brain to try to comprehend.  Hell, even examining with it active might not be possible; the spell was a one way street of creation, and nothing else.  It was a nest, a spiraling mass of coils and springs.  Built out of the worst possible material to do this with, James still had utter confidence it would work.  Once the lance was embedded inside the target, once it had been hit with the correct amount of force, those stone springs and latches would trip, and propel one hundred and eight micro edged blades outward.

They would accomplish relatively little. You could only store so much force in stone, and the blades wouldn’t keep their edge for more than a half inch of cutting into something like steel.  But that didn’t matter, because they weren’t fighting a modern military tank, where the exterior armor could soak a dozen hits from something like this.  They were up against dungeon constructs, which, for all their weirdness, *had internal organs*.

James opened his eyes.

The eastern dragon reared back, thick cylindrical body arching coils, but carefully not overlapping itself too hard.  It’s face, the facade of a trucker’s cab looking more like a mask it wore than its actual features, split apart as it opened a metallic maw.  Six jagged mandibles extending outward to welcome the oncoming vehicle.

James clenched his hands, feeling the velocity running out.  He expended another charge of Manipulate Asphalt, keeping his mental grip on his lance just long enough to make use of it.  Their car flashed past El’s, no one even having time to glimpse the faces of the other vehicle’s residents.

The tanker dragon’s maw began to glow, a baleful red-orange fire deep in its throat.  Burning liquid dripped from the corners of its jaws in fiery streamers.

The lance of unclaimed roadway James had been hauling this whole way, slowly developing, sharpening, and modifying with the combined ability of three different synergistic magics, shot so fast that everyone lost track of it.

“Get out of my way.”  He whispered.

The shot punched into the dragon’s middle coil, just as James’ velocity gave out.  Slumping back into his seat with a sigh, he relinquished control of the asphalt and returned Anesh’s speed at the same moment.  His hand on the controls wasn’t needed anymore; the damage was done.

The missile carved a hole through the sheets of metal skin, punching through with a noise like a screaming machine.  A split second later, the internal mechanisms ‘detonated’.  No one would ever know, but only about a third of it worked; James was smart, had some engineering skills, and had literal magic guiding him, but he wasn’t *that* good.  Still, it was more than enough to propel those heavy shards of stone shrapnel into the internals of the creature.

There wasn’t even time for everyone to blink before the consequences of that strike made themselves known.  Multiple different internal organs ruptured in the dragon, all of them carrying volatile substances.  And the pseudo-organic sac of high octane gasoline spilled open, suddenly exposed to the source of fire the guardian was holding in its throat.

The whole thing exploded in a deadly flash of white and orange, black smoke billowing out of the breach in great gouts.  The shockwave hit so hard it shoved their cars backward and an inch off the ground; El’s windows shattered like special effects glass while her own retreating bumper skewed wildly to the side.  The windscreen of the vehicle James was in cratered inward as a flat, jagged piece of what used to be dragonskin slammed into the middle of it, bowing the whole piece of reinforced material inward.

Then their tires caught on the road again.  The engines screamed protest, the cars wobbled perilously, but the drivers kept it steady, and the group blew past the burning corpse, El pulling a dramatic U-turn over the center island of the road as her mystic fuel source slowly knitted the glass and tires of her car back together.

The air around the blast site slapped into them like a physical thing.  Smoke and ash, heat and *something else*.  It stung eyes and skin like acid.  But it didn’t stop them as they covered the last handful of blocks to where they needed to be.

All that was left now was the barricades, the rest of the forces arrayed against them, and one probably pretty annoyed cult leader.

James’ didn’t really know if they had an answer to that.  But at the very least, they had to give it a try.

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“I’ve got em.”  Chevoy spoke, and a rustling excited energy sprung into being within Pendragon’s carrier pods.

They were a half mile up, soaring over deserted streets and a creeping darkness that was slowly but surely killing streetlights below them.  Pendragon’s newly reinforced aluminum frame keeping them in a steady glide, only mildly enhanced by a collection of dungeontech that she’d been gradually incorporating into herself.

There were six people that Dave/Pendragon were carrying.  Nate had claimed a seat early, and was their backup for if things got dangerous.  Deb and Frequency-Of-Sunlight were there for any medical aid needed.  Knife-In-Fangs had tagged along in case things got *really* dangerous, and the first batch of people weren’t enough.  Chevoy and Nikhail were here mostly because they were available on incredibly short notice, and they were both proficient drone riggers.

Right now, they had twenty camera eyes spread out around the area, the signal amplifier built into Pendragon’s frame letting them keep up fine control with their skulljacks.

They had assembled, geared up, and teleported in two batches to an empty field roughly sixty miles away about four hours ago.  It was still a little unsettling to Nate to watch Pendragon flatten her belly to the ground and peel back her flanks like they were car doors, but the insides of the artificial dragon that were designed for carrying people were clean, dry, and devoid of any kind of weird biological matter.  So in they got.

Pendragon was not large, and despite being a magically augmented aircraft, she also didn’t have the ability to carry infinite weight.  So with the exception of Nate - who insisted - the team was selected from who was available to be fairly light, and they kept their equipment from being too heavy as well.  What was more frustrating was that the little pods they were in, held along Pendragon’s sides, had about as much room as a seat in coach.  Nate was pretty sure he had an indentation in his flesh in the pattern of the rifle he was wedged against.

What she lacked in size or comfort, though, Pendragon made up for by being airborne, and *fast*.  They’d taken a bit to get up, but once at cruising altitude, the dragon could move when she wanted to.  Not as fast as something with actual jet or even prop engines, but for a creature that was mostly organic, being able to clear fifty miles in under two hours was insane.  And she was still keeping moving after that sprint, too.

The instant they’d entered the city, everyone had known something had gone wrong, too.  It wasn’t just that it felt like a dungeon.  There was a kind of invisible pressure, a dire warning to steer clear, emanating from a line in the sand that they’d crossed coming in.  All of them on board immediently knew that they were trapped in here, whatever that meant.

So they set about aerial recon, looking for any sign of James or Anesh.  Pendragon/Dave took them in lazy circles over major areas while the techies deployed drones and the rest of them used what intel gathering dungeontech they had.  And while Nate tried to take a nap.

What they had found was signs of a fight.  Or a war.  Wrecked cars, crumbling buildings, a few small fires that were smothered out within minutes. No people, though.  Not even bodies.  The city looked like a scene out of a movie that couldn’t afford extras.

Normally, ‘just follow the trail of destruction’ would be an *excellent* way to find James.  But it didn’t really apply here.  The entire city was like this; it wasn’t confined to any one area.

Every now and then they’d see cars moving from overhead, but by the time they got eyes on them, they were already totaled and emptied out.  And as indeflagable as Pendragon was, the dragon did need to land eventually.

So when Chevoy spoke, it was to both relief, and a kind of pre-action electric thrill.  It was *time*. Time to take a deep breath, and dive into the problem.

“Where are they?”  Dave/Pendragon’s voice echoed through the interior.  “How do you know it’s them?”

“Your two o’clock.”  Chevoy replied.  “See the big road that’s half lit, with the big plume of smoke coming up?”  She paused for a second.  “Two cars just drove out of a fireball from something.  So unless the town has turned into 90’s Hollywood…”

“Oh yeah, that’s them.”  Deb’s voice was assured as she leaned back into Pendragon’s form.  She’d gotten a lot better at just rolling with stuff like this in the last year.

The frame of the dragon shifted under them, inertia pulling the passengers around their seats.  “Spotted.”  The blended voice came through again.  “Time to target, two minutes.  Beginning descent in thirty.”

“Weapons check!”  Nate called out to everyone.  “Braids in!  Remember these are the new model!  Pendragon will serve as our connection point, so Dave, back in the air as soon as we’re out, but don’t go far!  Riggers, drop the drones! We’ll retrieve ‘em later!”  A series of sounds and shifting motions answered him.  Nate reached back to the back of his head and clicked the wifi adaptor into his skulljack, awkwardly pinging the connection and beginning to set up incoming video and audio.  Humans and camracondas calling back with ready checks as they got in position. “Remember!  We’re probably going into save *James*!  So just because something looks weird, don’t shoot first!”  Nate reminded them.

The laughs that came back twisted into yelps as Dave/Pendragon got in position overhead, and began dropping toward the ground.

_____

There were two streets left between them and the garage they were aiming for, assuming El’s mother had remembered the address properly.  Which, if she wasn’t exactly on spot, she was at least fairly close.  In the right region of angry life forms and hostile roadway.

The road had tried to spike their car twice more since plowing through the guardian.  Quick reflexes by Anesh caught the first one, and the second actually got up through the footwell of the back seat before he noticed it and broke off that attack.  In that split second, it had caused irreparable damage to the vehicle. But that didn’t matter, they were almost there.

Alanna gunned it, getting every last erg of power out of the engine now sputtering angrily from the damage to the machinery.  She didn’t dare try to pull maneuvers right now, instead just slamming through the front bumper of a crashed car that was laid across the road, and ramming aside an overturned motorcycle that still had its engine running.  Behind them, El’s car followed in the wake of clear road, the shattered windows already half-mended.

Then they reached the last street separating them from their destination, and Alanna rolled the car to a stop.

There were no streetlights on here, the surrounding businesses were dark, but the garage in question had a warm orange glow pouring out of its upper windows.  It illuminated the street around it, and in that light, the road ahead of them took on a different feeling.

It was a small side street, the kind that went through a city center and connected small patches of businesses for convenience, but no one ever really drove on unless they were going somewhere in particular, or really enjoyed a 20mph speed limit.  Old dirt and trees that were planted a decade ago and then forgotten lined the sides of it.

And unlike every other road around here, it was almost perfectly clear.  No wrecked vehicles or scattered personal effects, no angry asphalt creeping out of line.

Instead, all it had were dozens of small plate-sized objects, pale white bordering on dull yellow, sitting in stacks all across the road’s length as it wrapped around the mechanic’s hideout.  Alanna had mentally connected them to land mines, and so, brought the car to a halt before running through them.  Behind them, El slid her car into a similar stop, hopping out with Camille following in that impossibly elegant armored way.  Alanna was already out too, Anesh following, before she realized that James might not be up for this at the moment.

But James was also on his feet.  He had his recently acquired pistol in hand, a stubby little revolver he’d taken off one of the cult assailants earlier.  Alanna also had another stolen gun, which she held proficiently, but without the confidence James seemed to have.  “Oh, that’s suspicious.”  He said glibly, raising his eyebrows at the field ahead of them.

“They’re gears.”  El said suddenly, voice too loud in the quiet night air.  And it *was* quiet all of a sudden.  No engine noise, no distant crashes or screams.  Just them.  And a soft organic humming coming from the building ahead.  “The piles of things.  They’re gears.”

“Not metal though.”  James commented, metallurgy skill kicking in.  “They look… off color?”

Anesh sighed.  “Okay, they’re obviously traps.  Form up, move slowly, let’s…”

He didn’t get a chance to finish that sentence before the first pile started moving.  The gears rattled first, then began to rise into the air.  There were five in the stack, and they quickly took up a formation of one central one, with two smaller gears to the left and right, and two other smaller ones below.

Then the asphalt below the formation began to flow.  Streamers of dark stone pooling up, forming into claw shapes that linked themselves up to the movements of the gears.  The outline, the *suggestion* of a humanoid form.

The instant the asphalt started to cover the central gear, Anesh shot it.  Realizing that whatever weak point it might have was going to be covered shortly, he slung his P90 forward and pulled the trigger from his hip, spraying bullets into the still-assembling form.  His aim was a little wide, and he shredded one of the side gears first, causing a partially formed claw to drop back to the street and be reabsorbed, before he walked his fire across the central assembly and the entire thing collapsed.

“Hit the piles!”  James yelled, as the other forty stacks of gears within eyesight started to tremble and shift.

He didn’t hesitate, snapping off all the bullets in his revolver into a group that was just starting to rise up, killing the core and leaving the rest of the bone gears to drop to the pavement and shatter. As his allies opened up on everything in sight, James reloaded with shaking hands, popping the chamber, dumping the spent casings, and pushing bullets into the cylinders in the first manual reload he’d done in months.  He got one shot off, before the first of the automatons finished forming and rushed him.

James frantically ducked a claw, before a kick took him in the chest and he realized that these things *didn’t need legs*.  They were hovering street puppets!  Why would they need legs?

Alanna came to his rescue, punching the one on him from behind so hard it snapped the central gear in two and the whole thing collapsed before it could claw through his coat.  But there were more and more of them closing in, and the rapid bursts that Anesh was laying down on the unshielded ones weren’t enough.

“We will be overwhelmed shortly!”  Camille shouted, letting claws rake over her armor while she dispatched two of the creations.  She was breathing heavily, but it felt hard to believe that *she* was in danger of being overwhelmed.

James should have trusted her though.  Because a second later, more of the creations, these ones fully formed, rounded the corner.  Then another pack, from the other direction.  Then, stomping after the smaller, humanoid ones, came a creation that balanced on three spikes and held three hovering claws around its core, each the size of a small car.

“Shit!”  James yelled, distracting Anesh who took a scything claw across his armored chest as he turned to look.  The hard shell he was wearing took most of the damage, but it severed the strap of his rifle, and the impact caught his arm, jerking him sideways and sending his gun spiraling across the road.  James caught his other arm and stabilized him, but the group was getting pushed closer together by the advancing mass of targets.

The creations were relentless.  They didn’t move like dungeon life, they moved like fucking terminators.  No hesitation or predator tactics, no concern for their allies, just advancing and swinging those rough claws at high speeds.

James awkwardly yanked his sword from his belt and caught a strike, months of practice with JP and Anesh turning the parry into a riposte that cracked the small exposed arm gear and dropped the melting claw to the ground.  His hands stung from the force of the impact, but the blade held against it.  The air was quieter again, Alanna and El out of ammo all of a sudden, the cracks and booms of their pistol and shotgun having faded away.  Camille continued to punish anything that dared try to hurt her, but she wasn’t in position to cover the rest of them.

“We have to break through!”  James yelled, giving ground with the rest of them, trying to keep from having to fight a new automaton every five seconds.  He set his shield bracer to ‘road’, caught two hits intended for Alanna’s skull, stabbed and missed at an exposed gear.  Tried to keep his breathing even.  “We can’t keep fighting here!”

El turned her head to glance back at her car, and then nodded.  “I’ll get-!“  Whatever she was planning died with a scream as one of the creations slammed a claw into her flank, and another one stomping down onto her calf as she fell.  Camille shouted something and slammed a plated kick through the core of that one creature, but three more stepped up to the plate to cover them.

The big one hadn’t even engaged them, just ominously interposing itself between their group and the garage.

“Anesh!  Back!”  James tried to yell, but found his voice hoarse and dry.  He lashed out with a spike of intent, manipulate asphalt catching a strike midway to Anesh’s head and starting to pull the claw apart, before he lost control of the claimed material.  Anesh tilted his head sideways, a flash of anger showing on his face as he flared his own blue absorbed power, only he played it smarter than James did.  Select, careful pressure to the asphalt around the core, and the central gear snapped, sending the remains of the creature dropping.  “Cam!  Can you punch us through?”  He yelled.

But Camille was too busy to answer.  The creatures had begun focusing on her, twenty of them stepping forward in military march precision to separate her and back her up against a wall on the other side of the block.  She was cutting them down, but it was obvious now that she did *not* have an unlimited amount of strength.  She looked like she was getting tired faster than the rest of them.

It was, James realized, pretty damn optimistic of them to think they could make this work.  A foolish assault against a prepared, entrenched enemy.

“We have to get out of here.”  He muttered.  They’d been backed up to the hood of their ruined pilfered car, he and Alanna were fighting side by side.  It was, he almost laughed, kind of exactly what he’d wanted.  Just, maybe, without the impending death.  One of the automatons lunged, and James caught the middle of its claw with the blade of his sword.  Before it could pressure him with the force of the blow, he panickedly triggered the perfect strike on his earring, the blade suddenly finding exactly the right position and force, shearing through the claw and bisecting the gear controlling it.  “We’re not gonna make it.”  His breathing was getting rough, real terror starting to set in.

There were still twenty or thirty of the things left.  And the big one.  El was still alive, and they’d covered her as she’d gotten back behind them, but they were going to keep taking damage, and there wasn’t, James thought, much they could do to turn this around.  But they had to, because this was *it*.  They either pulled something out of their ass, or the town got destroyed tomorrow.  He just didn’t have much left to pull.

Which made it the perfect moment when Pendragon landed.

The dragon smashed down into the middle of the pack of creatures that were shoving them back, and instantly, the dynamic of the fight shifted.  It wasn’t the most tactically sound place to land, *unless* the tactic that you were going for was buying breathing room for a team of idiots that had gotten in over their heads.  Then, her wings thrown wide, the big girl’s flanks opened up, and members of the Order spilled out, landing in unison on the road and engaging the creatures.

Nate had told them not to fire just because something didn’t look human.  And they didn’t, but they’d seen enough of the skirmish on the way down.  Nate shifted from target to target with the training of a practiced soldier, putting out three on target shots to each of them before realizing that the ‘head’ wasn’t where these things needed to be hit.  The unit silently sent mental updates to each other, aim shifted, and the area around Pendragon started to clear.  Deb turned as soon as the fight did, and rushed El with a medical bag already half open.  The two camracondas made use of their abilities to stop incoming strikes, opening up finishing blows.  Knife-In-Fangs also had a modified set of camraconda arms, almost inflexible but capable of acting as a weapons platform for one of their favored rifles, and was picking off his own stationary targets, one of their gun bracelets worn as a necklace under his armor.

The fight turned.  The odds tipped.

Then Pendragon braced herself and leapt back into the air, clearing the road and leaving an expanding crescent of space around the team as they chewed through the bone and stone creatures.

“James!”  Ethan yelled, underhand lobbing a bundle of cables to him.  James caught them with his free hand, shaking loose one of the braids and dropping the other two down to Anesh.  Both of them plugged one in, and James was going to offer one to Alanna, but then, the larger creature started to move.

They’d been upgraded in terms of threat, clearly.

*Incoming*.  Nate sent over the relay.  *More of them moving from the left.  Ethan, Chevoy, take that side.  Fall back from the big guy*.

*We need to get through to the interior.* James fired off the message with a thought.  *These things are moving like robots.* He didn’t need to add that the target would be the assumed controller.

*Big one’s in the way* Chevoy sent.  *Ideas?*

James paused as he felt Anesh draw his own blade at his side.  Then he felt more, as Anesh made a mental nudge toward him, the signal strong enough they could really connect, stronger than it should have been.  He opened himself up, let his mind be vulnerable to this other person.  And then, they were the same person.  Afraid, but with a combined plan.  *Give us a corridor*.  James and Anesh sent.

Anesh’s body was exhausted, but as soon as he and James were unified, Endurance kicked in and gave it exactly what was needed to keep moving.  Just a little more determination to push through, to make it to the end.  James’ suddenly felt his pool of Velocity refill, felt his body’s vision sharpen, and also felt a tooth he hadn’t realized had been knocked out of his mouth in the fight start to painfully regrow.

In front of them, Nate and Ethan overlapped their fields of fire, letting the flanks advance as they tried to gun down anything that was directly between them and the giant walker that was stomping their way, leaving molten divots in the road as it did so.  James/Anesh could see notifications coming in from everyone over the link of concern, that the giant creature was about two ponderous steps away from murder range, but they didn’t back off.

James and Anesh’s bodies stabilized each other in a physical gesture for good luck, even as their minds plotted out their course of action, and started moving.  The two of them broke into a sprint, rushing past Nate on either side, taking full advantage of James’ shell upgrades applying to both bodies.  The towering automaton rotated its center, one of its three claws descending on them at high speed.  But the two of them flexed their collective blue power, one organic mind manipulating the asphalt just long enough to freeze it in place, the other one peeling back layers around the leg’s gear like petals of a flower.

Then they ducked underneath, triggered the Status Quo earring’s power of a flawless strike twice, and let their blades meet the armored bone gear overhead from opposite sides.  The cuts passed effortlessly through the material, and behind them, the two ton chunk of rock slammed into the ground with a liquid ripple as it began to melt.

They swept forward, legs and arms burning, lungs on fire, but moving with a unified momentum, and repeated the process to one of the legs.  The creatures might, James/Anesh realized, have needed legs more than expected after all, as the larger tripod started to topple wildly as it lost one of its support pillars.  The arm claws flailing, shredding a nearby tree and smashing a roadside mailbox into a pancake, but not hitting anyone as it collapsed.

Then they were at one of the garage’s big metal shutters, past the horde, to their goal.

*Go!* Nate sent.  *We’ll cover!*

They ran along the side of the building to the back door, a metal security door with flaking paint and a rusting handle.  Anesh’s body pulled their one surviving thermite grenade out of his coat, and wedged it between the handle and the wall, before carefully pulling the pin and stepping back just a bit as the orange sparks started to eat through the metal.

There was an arcane hiss as whatever trap was supposed to kill whoever tried to open the door burned.  And then, the thermite tumbled to the ground along with the molten hunk of metal that used to be a handle.

James/Anesh kicked the door open, and moved in, blades up.

The inside of the garage caught both of them off guard.  Through their combined minds, they compared and contrasted how they saw the place. Anesh saw a great machine, lines of mathematical engineering drawn out in reality through interlocking gears and engine components.  The entire thing, he reasoned instantly, was a *tool*, designed to be used for something.

James saw an altar, a religious site.  The orange glow coming from the light sources around the expansive area were shaded and placed so that they *felt* like candlelight, while being nothing more than color tinted shop lamps.  The machinery that had been dissected and reassembled to cover the walls and ceiling, to create a dome that felt like being under the hood of a monstrous vehicle, wasn’t so much meant to *do* something as *feel* a certain way.

Both of them were probably right, and their combined view shared that thought.

On the far side of the bay, wearing oil stained overalls and carefully adjusting something with a carefully held screwdriver, was a man.  He was balding, looked a little bit over fifty, and was shaking his head in mild annoyance, seemingly impervious to the gunfire still sounding outside.

At James/Anesh’s entry, he finished what he was working on and turned, revealing that what he’d been working on was a frame in the shape of a human.  It was sunk into the wires and pipes and pistons that coated the walls, and it was almost certainly meant for him.  It was his height, and while James/Anesh couldn’t see his exact dimensions, it just felt like there wasn’t anyone else it could be for.

On the opposite side of the mechanic’s bay, just to their left, was a similar indentation.  This one sized for someone much smaller, who James/Anesh were pretty sure they’d already met.

“Made it past my army, eh?”  The Mechanic spoke first.  “With *swords*?  Now ain’t that fuckin’ insulting!  I shoulda made em better!  But, eh, it was a rush job, you know.”  He flapped a hand, dismissing the topic with a spiteful look.  “So, what do you want?”  The old man demanded of them.

“For you to stop.”  James/Anesh let their bodies speak in unison.  “You need to unanchor the dungeon, or-“

“Ah, that fuckin’ thing?”  The Mechanic’s voice was a rude, loud, and angry one.  He made a sound like he was dragging something out of his throat, then spat to the side.  “Knew that whole club was a mistake.  Bunch’a parasites.  Idiots couldn’t even catch a single kid.  What’s the point?”  He looked James up and down.  “You’d probably make a good one, huh?  Ya seem big on the whole hero angle.”

“It’s the sword, right?  It makes the look.”  James/Anesh said.  Well, mostly James, Anesh’s mind was busy doing the mental equivalent of a facepalm as his partner’s words flowed through them.  “But seriously.”  They both said.  “Shut down your little army.  There’s still time to end this peacefully.”

“Nah there fucking ain’t!”  The mechanic yelled, spittle forming on the corner of his mouth as he flung his screwdriver to the side in a sudden outburst.  “It’s never been fuckin peaceful!  Don’t you get it?!  Everyone just wants to take from me!  Take my work, take my magic, take my god!  Well I’m sick of it!  I’m sick of being stolen from!”  The Mechanic leaned back and crossed his arms, and James/Anesh caught sight of a nametag on his chest.  ‘Bob’, it read.

“To be clear,” The two boys spoke, “we have no interest in taking away your magic.  This is all very impressive, and if you’re willing to share, that’s fine, but you are getting people killed, and-“

The Mechanic paced over to a workbench in the middle of the room. “Ah, fuck em.” He cut the two off.  “Not like it matters, anyway.”

“Excuse me?”  James/Anesh were both shocked, though in different ways, at the words.

“You heard me!  Fuck em!”  The Mechanic stuck a cigar between his lips and carefully lit the end with an old lighter.  “You already know, I bet!  Fuckin cutting your way in here with *swords*.  You’re strong!  Got the right blood, don’t ya!  You already know; everyone else is just gonna try to take that away from you.  Always asking you to do favors, until you’re worn down and weak like them!  Well, I’m not having it!  If people die?  So what!  People die all the time!  I’ve survived everything life’s thrown at me!  I deserve a little reward!”  He gazed reverently at the human-shaped crèches he’d built.  “I’m gonna be a *god*.” He muttered.  “She told me so.  I know it’ll work, too.  Just need the right materials.”

James/Anesh conferred within their combined mind briefly.  He was obviously trying to make them mad, trying to control the flow of conversation.  It wasn’t working.  They clearly had the drop on him, and he was stalling, so there was something here that he needed them to not notice or do anything about.  One of their bodies kept talking while the other one started scanning the room.

“Okay, putting aside how fucking psycopathic that sounds,” James/Anesh spoke calmly, trying not to set this guy off any more than he already was, “Surviving everything so far is just the default state of being alive.  Everyone alive has survived their whole life, that’s what… that’s what being alive is?  I’m not sure why you think you should be rewarded for that.  Rewards are for accomplishing something.  Maybe you could, I dunno, build something that helps people? Be a hero, instead of someone trying to kill a whole city?  People tend to like heroes more than murderers.”

The Mechanic just laughed at them.  “Fucking heroes.”  He spat again.  “You think you’re so special?  Cause you got ‘morals’ or some shit?!  Hah!  Making me laugh!”  Outside, the gunfire continued in waves of sound.  “You’re just letting everyone take advantage of you!  Couple’a obedient little bitches, eh?”

Ah, it was simple.  The one place the Mechanic was never looking, and that they *couldn’t* look.  There was a single spot on the ceiling.  James’ body drew his revolver, still loaded from the start of the fight, and emptied all but the last rounds into whatever gently humming machine was up there.

Oil fountained down like black blood, small waterfalls of it pooling on the floor as the Mechanic screamed in fury at them.  All of a sudden, all the vigor seemed to go out of the man.  No longer was he a mildly balding mid fifties guy, but someone much older.  Wrinkled skin and liver spots, sunken eyes, bony hands and gnarled knuckles, he looked like he’d lived a hard life for the last ninety years.

The shooting outside stopped.  “No!”  The Mechanic tried to scream, but his voice tore halfway through.  “No, you’ll let it escape!  I have to, have to…” he scrambled on his bench for tools, staring up at the beating engine-heart that hung suspended from the ceiling, the no longer hidden centerpiece of the whole room.

Around them, the world *eased*.  The electric salt feeling of being in a dungeon faded, pulling back.  But it didn’t disappear entirely.  “Let it go.”  James/Anesh said.  “Please.  You’re going to get yourself killed if you don’t let it go.  You can’t keep anchoring the Horizon here.”

“You!”  The Mechanic spun on them, eyes literally glowing with fury.  “You did this!  Outsiders, coming in, ruining everything just like always!  You’re trying to steal from me, take all my power away, just like everyone else!”  His hand scattered objects off the workbench as he stumbled, searching for something.  “I won’t let you!  I won’t!”  His voice was little more than a wheeze as he knocked a bucket of screws to the floor and lifted a sawn off shotgun off his bench in a trembling hand.

He got halfway to lifting it toward Anesh’s body when James broke the connection between them, and shot the Mechanic in the head.

The body dropped lifelessly to the floor, whatever defenses he might have thought he had already gone, or never there in the first place.  James let his arms drop to his side as the dungeon feeling abated instantly, the sensation of high speed traffic carrying the last remnants of the dungeon’s forced claim on the outside world back to where it came from.  The revolver clattered to the floor as his exhausted fingers let it drop, and he shook his head, partially to try to keep his tired eyes open, and partially in frustration.

“Just an angry old man.  All this, because one guy was pissed at the world.”  He muttered.

Anesh set a cautious hand on his shoulder.  “You okay?”  He asked.  “You kicked me out there.”

“Didn’t want you to… you know.”  James waved at the cooling corpse, blood pooling beneath it.  “Cause it sucks.”

“Self defense.  Defense in general, really.”  Anesh told him.  “I’m not gonna say you ‘had to do it’ or anything trite like that, but he wasn’t going to let it go any other way.  And we both knew it.”

“Yeah…” James sighed.  “Okay.  I’m okay.  I’ll be…” he took a shuddering breath.  “I’ll be fine eventually.”  He admitted quietly.

Anesh hugged him, as Nate and Deb burst through the door behind them, guns up, ready for anything.  “Clear!” They each shouted in time as they swept the room, before Nate approached James.  “Alright.  Now what?”  He asked, uncertainty creeping in for the first time since he’d landed.  “We still can’t leave, unless you know something I don’t, so what’s our next move?  More of… this?”  He waved a free hand at the religious composition of machinery around them, his other hand keeping his gun steady.

“Oh shit, I need to talk to Camille.”  James said quietly, another tremor of fear going through his hands.  “Nate.  Can you…” he made an ambiguous hand gesture, and the other man just looked at him until he elaborated.  “Get everyone ready?”

“Ah.”  Nate said.  He blinked, and James saw Anesh and Deb react as the ping went out through their link.  “Done.”

James stumbled outside through the rear door, the big metal shutters of the garage sealed shut from the inside with the various arcane constructions the Mechanic had been working on.  There were piles of shattered bone gears and bullet casings littering the road, but the surface was smooth.  All the pieces of the creations having melted back in seamlessly.

El was laid out over on the sidewalk a block away, being watched over by Alanna.  The other Order knights, human and camraconda, were watching a rough perimeter for any more problems.  And Camille… Camille was leaned against the rough brick wall of a bank, next to an ATM that hadn’t made it through the fight intact.

Her armor looked like it had seen better days, but was still intact, just beaten up.  Dented, scratched, but not broken.  A lot like her, too.  There was a cut on her forehead, blood matting her short blonde hair into an ugly scab, and bruises across her face, but she was still awake and alive.

“Hey.”  James said, sinking down opposite her, leaning up against a telephone pole.

“Greetings.” She nodded once at him.  “You did as you said.”

“Yeah, had some help.”  He told her.  “Got lucky.”

“Oh?”  She raised an eyebrow.  “Your people acted on their own initiative to find and assist you.  They were equipped and prepared for this situation.  This is not luck.”  Camille’s eyes slid sideways to where Nate was taking up a sentry position near them, lit cigarette in his mouth.  “This is loyalty.”

“Maybe.”  James conceded.  “Could be both.”

“Could be, indeed.”  She almost, *almost*, smiled.

“We’re probably alive because you helped.”  James told her, switching subjects.  “We owe you, a lot.  I saw you take a hit for Alanna back there.  I don’t… I just owe you one.”  He cleared his throat.  “Thanks for being with us.”

“You were correct, after all.”  She told him, voice still unwavering, detached.  “And so, we are victorious.”

“We are.”  James looked over at the injured, exhausted woman.  She seemed so *tired*, beyond even himself. “Come with us.”  He said, suddenly.  “Again.  But… more.  Join us.  I haven’t met your father figure, but I’ve encountered others like him.  It can’t be a good life.  And I saw you.  I saw how much you want to be the hero.  We can give you that.  And an actual home.”

Camille opened her mouth, then closed it again.  She looked at James like she was seeing him for the first time.  “I…” She paused.

“You don’t need to decide now.”  James told her.  “But we’re going to try to leave soon.  Assuming your dad drops the barrier.”

“He will already be gone.”  Camille shook her head sadly.  “Nothing left to defend against.  It is his way.”

That truth was confirmed shortly, as Deb teleported out with an injured El in tow.  James sat with Camille, both of them lightly dozing, but also watching the scene around them, as members of the Order began flowing in and out via telepad.

They coordinated with Nate, who had gotten a bigger picture view from Anesh.  Searching the area, and widening their net to begin scouring the city for survivors and holdouts.  There were parts of Townton where the arbitrary ‘claim’ the dungeon was forced into hadn’t taken hold, where property was never sold and there wasn’t a foot in the door.  Some of those had survived the night, others had been overrun by more of the bone and road automatons, or other creations of the Mechanic.  And they were his creations; the knights found several sites in hidden garages through the city where hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies had been taken.  The dead processed into fused and carved bone, used to power the road warriors.

They found how he’d done it, too.  Extensive notes, which were useless now without the anchor that bound the nearby dungeon.  Those, along with large quantities of the Mechanic’s tools, were ferried out to a secluded location that Research would use to pour over them and try to find anything of constructive value.

All they left was the garage itself.

“What will you do with the machine?”  Camille asked, startling James out of his nap.  It was several hours later, the two of them having been left to their own devices after being declared medically stable, with the sun just beginning to lighten the sky.  “The one he planned to use to make himself a god?”

“Oh.  Burn it down.”  James said.  “Or something like that.  No point to keeping it, since we don’t… you know… use humans as raw materials.”  He shrugged idly.  “You can’t have it, by the way.  I don’t care if your dad could beat me up.  No one should have something like that.”  He turned his head, frowning at the building behind him still glowing with that inviting orange light.

“Yes.”  Camille said.

“Yes… you want it?”  James tensed up.

The armored girl shook her head.  “No, yes I will join you.”  She said.  “I would like to, I think.”

“Okay.”  James sighed.  Relaxed.  Nearby, Nate noticed and calmly released his vigilant grip on his rifle.  “I’m gonna nap.  We’ll get out of here with the exit crew, yeah?”

“I, too, would like to sleep.”  She said.

The two of them drifted off, leaning against uncomfortable structures.

Six hours later, between aerial sweeps from Pendragon, and several long range red orbs Momo teleported in, the Order had verified that there were no further survivors in the city.

Everyone they had found, they’d teleported out, handed off to Recovery to begin the long process of managing temporary housing, contacting family, and putting destroyed lives back together.  There was, nowhere, any news about Townton vanishing from the map.  A smaller town in Canada had been consumed by a forest fire, and that had gotten more press.  Just another side effect of the dungeon’s antimeme at work.

Jeanne and Ava had been found safe, along with El’s mom Marjorie.  They were all back at the Lair, getting special treatment beyond being put up in a hotel temporarily.  No one knew exactly what to do with the cultists who’d lived through the event.  So they treated them like every other victim, but kept tabs on their number, to sort out later.

There had been, at rough estimate, three to five thousand people in the city when James and Anesh had arrived.  A large number of those had fled before the Last Line Of Defense cordoned off the city, *something* letting them know they had to get out of town.  Personally, James thought the dungeon had done it, though he didn’t know how.

Of the remaining population, however large it was, they found three hundred and fifty one survivors.

The butcher’s bill was steep on this one.  Though at least those people hadn’t lost their record in the memory of their families and friends.

The town was completely empty now, except for a curious population of opossums and raccoons.  The last sophont life being three members of the Order who were acting as security, James and Anesh who insisted on being there until the end,, and Camille.

Someone wrote the address of their home on the telepad.  Anesh clapped a hand on James’ shoulder, linking arms with Nate.

James offered a hand to Camille, who took it.  He raised an eyebrow at the feeling of a piece of paper pressing into his palm, and opened his mouth to say something, but then the page was torn and they teleported away.

Five people arrived in the Lair’s teleport landing platform, James’ hand extended to empty air, Camille nowhere in sight.

He looked down at the scrap of paper in his hand.  “You’ve passed the test.” It read.

“Well *fuck*.”  James muttered with a sigh.

_____

“Report.”  The Last Line Of Defense did not look up from the sheaf of papers it was flipping through, sitting cross legged against a bullet-riddled boulder forty kilometers outside Kabul.

Camille tilted her head in deference to her senior sister who was watching the road, waited to be acknowledged, then knelt and spoke.  “They are untrained, inexperienced, foolish, reckless, and naive.”  She said in her uninterested tone.  And then, with the slightest hint of a smile, added, “And as you said.  They did the right thing.”

“Their type almost always do.”  The Last Line Of Defense nodded idly.  “But it is important to check.”

“They offered me a home.”  Camille said, spontaneously.  The information had not been asked for, she did not know why she offered it.

The Last Line Of Defense didn’t even look up.  “They do that, as well.”  It said.  “It is, I believe, part of how they get as far as they do.  Oh, do shield your ears, daughter.”  It said suddenly.

Overhead, a heavily armed US military drone expended a part of its payload.  Three guided cluster munitions slammed into the empty ground nearby, turning a portion of the local hills into a thunderous inferno in an instant.

Far away, commanders and technicians would see a successful strike on a ‘terrorist training camp’.  Here and now, the Last Line Of Defense saw the death of a particularly aggressive dungeon.

“This part of the world is so much easier to work in.”  It sighed in contentment as the job was completed to satisfaction.  Rising to its feet, it folded the pages it carried and set them alight with a thought, more burning debris adding that already nearby.  “Our next incursion feels to be in London.  Join me there in one week’s time.”  Then it paused, and with careful concern in its eyes, reached out and smoothed a hand along Camille’s damaged armor.  Scarred and dented metal healed instantly under its gentle hand, only the girl’s bloodstains left behind to make it.  “Much better.  And congratulations, daughter, on your successful operation.”

Then it was gone, leaving the two girls in the rocks.

Camille raised a bare hand to feel the refreshed armor, wincing as doing so pulled at the mass of bruises that was her shoulder.  She felt like sighing, suddenly, for some reason.  But she held it in.  Her sister was here, watching her as much as the road.  “London, then.”  She said aloud.

“London, then.”  Her sister echoed in an identical voice.  “I shall see you there.”