The robotic spiders are beautiful. Their torsos are formed from smooth cut, delicately folded sheets of dull grey metal welded together at near invisible joints, and their strong, well-articulated legs are tipped with a multitude of attachments. The set-up is identical for all of them, with the front two legs holding jagged blades while the other six are split between magnets and nozzles spurting a viscous, off-white liquid that helps them stick to the glass panes of the buildings they’re traversing.

  Their eyes glow with a mixture of artificial, electrical light and infrared rays, searching for prey. Their numerous limbs are controlled with a complex internal hydraulic system that mimics real arachnids, which Emily gets a clear view of as the blade extending from her left palm cleaves through two limbs hurtling towards her chest.

  “What’s with these things?” Pod yells in frustration as he squeezes the trigger of the heavy machine gun in his arms, releasing a flood of bullets into the encroaching horde. “Can’t you take control of them?”

  “They’re just as resistant to my machina as yours,” Emily fires back calmly, squeezing the trigger of the Spitter in her right hand and sending a bullet through the jaw of the spider before her, right into the control chip at the base of its cephalothorax. “The dungeon has full control of them, and it’s not willing to give it up.”

  The light leaves the spider’s eyes the moment her bullet shatters its control chip, and the construct drops like a puppet with its strings cut before rapidly breaking down into metal filings that scatter with the wind as Emily drops and sweeps a foot out, shattering the legs of another foe before it can strike. The spell forming in the air before her reaches completion as she rises, and two violent serpents with metal skeletons and lightning for skin shoot out with an ominous hiss, tearing through the closest spiders and clearing some space to breathe as they circle Emily’s group protectively.

  Ivor dissolves the uneven wall of earthen spikes he had raised to defend himself, dropping the wendigo using it as a perch from which to swipe at their enemies. He wipes his brow and turns his worried gaze to their leader.

  “I can’t keep this up for long,” he signs disjointedly with one hand, using the other to pull a murky potion from his belt that he downs with a grimace. “There’s no earth here: I’m burning mana too fast.”

  “Stop casting and use your gun,” she replies, glancing over at Silica gnawing the head from a spider while Mensacus stands over her protectively, crushing three metal arachnids in the grip of his bladed right arm. “Mensacus, call your other wendigos back and focus on defence with them.”

  Emily hears a familiar electronic hiss in the distance and feels a slight fluctuation at the edge of her spatial senses. She tilts her head instinctively, the minuscule movement letting a bullet slice past her cheek, glancing off her subdermal before burying itself in the ground. She spins and raises her Spitter towards the source of the gunshot, letting off a short burst of shots that punch through her attacker.

  The spider clinging to the wall near the roof of a skyscraper, nearly three hundred metres down the seemingly endless street, locks up as her attack shreds the batteries and hydraulic controls in its abdomen, slipping from the wall and plummeting towards its brethren swarming below. There are five more identical spiders still stuck to the wall from where the shooter fell, half a size larger than the bladed models rushing Emily’s raging serpents and mounted with crackling railguns protruding from their backs, aimed down at her party.

  Emily fires another burst of shots, making the most of her improved shooting skill to accurately target the small control chips of three of the spiders despite the distance separating them. She forms two spikes of metal at her shoulders in the same moment, wrapping them in charge and sending them rocketing out at the other two shooters. Five hissing gunshots respond before her attacks can land, but a single glance at the angle of their barrels is all it takes for Emily to read their shot trajectory, letting her swipe her machina-charged metal arm in a wide arc, splitting the bullets with its blade and scattering their fragments harmlessly into the ground around her.

  “Pod, switch to long-range and focus on removing any more shooters,” Emily commands as she pulls a waveform scanner from her belt.

  “Roger that,” Pod mutters, his head on a swivel to scan the rooftops while he slides his heavy machine gun into the expanded space of his backpack before replacing it with an older generation of the Whisper.

  Emily’s scanner doesn’t show anything out of the ordinary at first, but as she rapidly flicks between frequencies, she finds one that pings hundreds of responses at once, covering the screen of the small device with red dots. She tosses the handheld device to Ivor.

  “That should help: act as his spotter.”

  He nods, glancing at the screen before clicking his tongue and whistling a high-pitched tone, instantly causing Pod to spin on his heel and fire towards a distant target.

  Emily separates from her followers, kicking off the ground and shooting forward through the buzzing coils of one of her serpentine spell constructs. She narrowly slips through its sharpened ribs, ignoring the grooves carved into the ground beneath her feet and the shattered, dissolving remains of tens of robots making it hard to find clear footing. She tears through the swarm, moving further from the others and scanning each street and alleyway she passes.

  She spots a few unique spiders, carrying different weapons, lurking among the masses, as she dodges web-like sprays of grey goop and arcing bolts of pure plasma used in an attempt to slow her down, but they’re all smaller than a person, and none of them indicate any form of control over their surrounding brethren. After crossing enough ground to span Eimdon twice and still finding no end in sight to the repetitive skyscrapers and the thinning but near-endless horde of mindless robots, Emily’s about to turn back when the street around her begins to shake and something large enters the range of her scanning machina.

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  The thud of heavy impacts and the screech of tearing metal grate against her ears, and she follows the street along a slight curve to come face-to-face with a hulking metal behemoth. It’s modelled after a spider, just like the rest of its brood, but it stands at almost a hundred metres tall, filling the wide street and clipping the nearby buildings with the edges of its thick legs as its tens of man-sized, luminous red orbs gaze down at her. The beast’s cephalothorax is lined with hefty multi-barrelled gatling guns spinning idly, and its swollen abdomen is steadily pumping out a stream of many-legged soldiers.

  The moment Emily sees the spider, the spider sees her. It lets out an ear-splitting shriek that sets off the automated sonic defences of Emily’s earrings, but the sound-based attack is strong enough to rattle her bones anyway and spread cracks across the small gems embedded in her ears.

  ‘Big bot!’ Harriet chirps in the back of her mind with buzzing excitement. ‘Let me try/let me try/let me try!”

  ‘Really? You didn’t seem interested when I asked you to try to take control of these spiders earlier,’ Emily questions her partner’s sudden change of mind, the messages passing between them faster than a flash of light.

  ‘They’re small/boring/mindless.’

  ‘Okay, go ahead.’

  Emily raises her left hand towards the mother-spider as its screech starts to quiet and its guns lock on her position, letting Harriet tear forwards in a golden streak of charge. The sentient lightning bolt slams into the giant spider’s face as Emily floods her legs with charge and dives to the side, narrowly dodging a stream of fist-sized projectiles that punch deep grooves into the thick metal road where she once stood. However, instead of sinking into the matte-black metal panels stretched between the spider’s eyes, Harriet disperses, spreading across the robot’s head and searching for a way in.

  ‘Annoying/insulated/coated?/pathless,’ she sparks with frustration, retreating and flowing down the construct’s front legs to rejoin Emily on the floor. ‘I can’t get in!’

  ‘I’ll make you an opening,’ Emily responds, weaving through the endless spray of bullets raining down on her.

  She pulls the Whisper from her belt, aiming towards the robot’s eyes without looking and squeezing the trigger, sidestepping a spray of webs from several smaller spiders trying to surround her. The bullet shoots up, but its trajectory is twisted before it can reach its goal, and it sails harmlessly into the sky. She tries again, aiming several shots at the robot’s centre of mass, but the dull electrical hum accompanying every one of the massive machine's movements gets louder for a moment, and the bullets stop dead in their tracks before falling to the ground.

  An electromagnetic barrier? Damn.

  Changing tactics, Emily casts Faraday Cage, wrapping herself in a complex blue and silver magic circle as she comes to a halt. A thin mesh of metal sprouts from her skin, covering her in criss-crossed links coated in a layer of charge. She pushes a little more lightning into the spell, and the arcs of plasma leap several inches from her flesh, catching the incoming bullets and dropping them unceremoniously.

  She lets the smaller spiders catch her in their webs, focusing on the metal surrounding her instead as Harriet uses the new connections to strike out at their attackers, violently flooding them with charge and frying their internal systems. Emily’s skin turns metallic, and she reaches out a hand and grabs hold of the street before pulling.

  The ear-splitting screech of tearing metal fills the street, and the mother-spider loses balance as the floor beneath its feet rises by Emily’s will. It scrambles to find a new footing, stabbing its sharpened legs into the walls around it and lifting itself from the ground without pausing its attack for a moment. While Emily twists the hulking mass of metal under her control into a series of jagged, coiled spears as thick as a truck is wide, several panels near the rear of the mother-spider’s cephalothorax part to reveal a dizzying number of open tubes.

  The roaring hiss of burning fuel joins the crunch of metal, and a flood of rockets tears from the tubes, angling towards Emily and quickly gaining speed. She drops into a low crouch before the first explosive payload can reach her, slamming both palms into the ground and letting more of her mana flow into it. A dome of metal shoots up to envelope her as she releases the tension on her prepared spears, which rise up towards their target in a wave of force.

  Rockets burst against her shield, spreading cracks and flash-heating sections fast enough to shatter it, but Emily maintains a steady flow of mana to reinforce it, trusting the still-active Faraday Cage to catch the heat and shrapnel that reach her. She sends Harriet through the ground as she blindly weathers the storm of fire and metal. When the last explosive finally slips through her tattered barrier and bursts inches from her skin, scorching and weakly peppering her external armour plating with shrapnel to no effect, she releases her control and lets the fractured dome crumble.

  As the dust clears, she sees the mother-spider suspended above the ruined street, impaled in over a dozen places. Its outer armour is torn to pieces, but it’s still functional, pouring out more child constructs while twitching uncontrollably and shooting its gatling guns aimlessly.

  ‘Help?’ Harriet asks, her voice coming through their link softly, as quiet as the faint counting chorus still barely audible in the back of Emily’s mind. ‘Resisting/possible/power-hungry.’

  Emily nods in understanding, knowing the wordless message will reach her partner, and releases her metal connection to let her burnt mana start regenerating again. While not as costly as forming the metal herself, the large-scale manipulation of the environment has still drained her reserves a considerable amount.

  She leaps into the air, ignoring the small spiders that restart their attacks the moment she becomes visible, and clings to a nearby metal beam with one of the enchantments woven into her combat boots. She sprints up to the same height as the mother-spider’s head before leaping over and landing on its back, beside the only one of her spears that managed to pierce all the way through. Pressing her hands to the metal, she pours out her machina, flooding the spider’s internals and creating a detailed blueprint in her mind.

  She adds the complex, compact nuclear reactor burning away in the centre of its power core and the fractured magnetic barrier generator to her notes for future study, and focuses her energy on the large control computer Harriet is trying to overwhelm, using a bit of her attention to smother the signal transceiver actively scanning for and relaying instructions. The spider’s twitching stops, and the surrounding child robots cease firing on Emily, just in time for Faraday Cage to run out of mana and fizzle out. Emily remains locked in an unseen battle with the spider’s control programs for several minutes as the street falls silent.

  Finally, the last trace of the dungeon’s control is wiped clean, and Harriet takes her place in its stead, spreading to the rest of the construct and feeling out her new temporary shell. Harriet flexes the mother-spider’s legs one by one, and the watching child spiders copy as she starts sending her own instructions through the large construct’s transceiver.

  “Thanksss,” Harriet hisses, her voice coming out of the large spider’s speakers as an off-pitch crackle. “Can you free me, pleassse?”

  “Sure.” Emily nods, reactivating her metal connection and slowly pushing the large spears from the spider’s body, melting a few of them to patch up the holes she’s created. “Can you read the signals trying to take back control?”

  “Yesss. There are ssseven more mothersss waiting.”

  “Perfect. Lead the way.”

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