Emily sits cross-legged on the mother-spider’s head as it scuttles over the massive city’s rooftops, far from the ground below, where a small crowd of spiders follows their path. She maintains a constant stream of machina into the large machine, helping Harriet maintain the control that the dungeon won’t stop trying to retake.

  A small spark of her energy leaps from her skin and activates the in-ear communicator curled out and around her left ear, connecting to the common channel her apprentices share. The moment it connects, she hears a series of clicks and whistles followed by mumbled responses from Pod, undercut by the constant, droning rattle of metal on metal.

  “Wellness check,” Emily states calmly, cutting through the noise muddying the channel.

  “No major wounds, a few minor,” Pod responds without missing a beat. “Mensacus’ wendigos are damned effective at body blocking these robots, but they’ve started using fire, and it caught us off guard for a moment. Nothing a minor healing potion can’t fix.”

  “Good. Any noticeable behavioural changes other than weapon variety increasing?”

  “Approximately ninety-three seconds ago, a few of the bots attacking us froze for two seconds, but they continued their assault straight after.”

  “Makes sense,” Emily says, increasing the flow of machina to the mother-spider’s transceiver and Overdriving it. “Any change now?”

  “Nothing. Did you find the controller?”

  “Sort of. I found one of eight mother-spiders spawning new swarm members and took control with Harriet’s help. That’s when you noticed the first drop in aggression, but we’re only able to control the child bots within a few hundred metres. We’re on route to another big one now, but I doubt we’ll be able to take control since this one’s still resisting us heavily.”

  “Do you have coordinates so we can deal with one?” Mensacus questions, joining the conversation with a tone of impatience.

  “Not yet. Harriet’s identified seven other matching command signals, but their exact locations are unknown; only their relative direction from our current position. This city seems almost endless, so it’s not worth searching blindly. I’ll let you know the moment we have a more accurate read, but you’re best not getting too close: these things are protected by an electromagnetic barrier, have a nuclear core, and are loaded with enough explosive material to level half of Chroni.”

  Ivor whistles an impressed tone.

  “A prolonged ranged bombardment with some EMP charges mixed in then?” Pod asks, a hint of excitement bleeding into his voice.

  “That would be ideal. We’re approaching our next target now: I’ll update you soon.”

  “Roger that.”

  Emily switches her communicator into emergency contact only, silencing the background hum of battle, and rises to her feet as her ride crawls over another rooftop, coming face-to-face with an open clearing at the junction of four roads, wide enough to comfortably house the massive mother-spider crouched in the centre, surrounded by hundreds of her children clinging to the floors and walls.

  Thousands of glowing red eyes turn to face her and, while the much smaller swarm of robots surrounding her moves to attack, the others open fire. Unlike the first mother’s brood, the spiders facing her down are almost exclusively loaded with ranged weapons, and a hail of bullets tears through the building she’s perched on. The glass shatters, and the metal supports dent and fold under tens of impacts each second.

  Emily leaps into the open air as the building starts to collapse, carrying Harriet’s shell in an uncontrolled tumble towards the waiting host. She makes a quick decision and begins converting her mana to ice, water, and wind as she follows her familiar down, weaving together a complex magic circle that sprouts from her fingertips and wraps her right arm, chilling her to the bone.

  A small grin tugs at Emily’s lips as Harriet slams into the ground with a resounding boom, tilting her shell to use the rear abdomen to absorb the impact and crush three of the other mother-spider’s legs as the rubble falling with her flattens half the robotic swarm. A large chunk of Emily’s mana gathers in her arm, and the moment her feet slam into the ground, her knees bending to absorb the intense impact that craters the pavement around her, she snaps her fingers, releasing Flashfreeze.

  The small disturbance in the air around her fingers is amplified as the spell pulses, and the burst of water vapour near-instantly builds into a raging storm of frigid wind that sweeps out across the intersection. The vapour clings to every surface the wind passes, freezing over on contact and icing up the surviving spider’s joints. The clearing stills as Emily rises from her impact crater, calmly walking towards her target and flexing her fingers to regain feeling in her numbed extremities.

  She doesn’t spare a second glance for a single one of the child spiders as she passes them, knowing from her own experience how hard it is to de-ice metal joints. The faint sound of ice cracking emanates from the opposing mother-spider’s legs after only a few seconds, but Emily places a palm to its abdomen long before it can finish freeing its limbs.

  She pushes machina into the frozen monster, calling back a fraction of Harriet’s consciousness from the other, targeting its transceiver directly. Unfortunately, she’s quickly proved correct as the spider’s onboard computers fend her off, following its inbuilt programming without need of external instruction.

  “What a shame,” Emily mutters to herself, calling on her lightning connection and flooding the robot’s systems with a sudden surge of power, frying its control components and causing its power core to sputter out.

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  The light behind the mother-spider’s eyes dims, and Emily lets go, turning back to Harriet’s damaged shell while releasing wild tongues of charge that ripple out, dancing across the ice-covered intersection and slipping into the rest of the frozen robots, shredding their control chips and disabling them completely.

  “Damage report,” she asks as she approaches her familiar.

  “No lossss of major systemsss required for movement or detection,” Harriet responds through the spider’s crackling speakers. “Production capabilitiesss destroyed, and rear legsss disabled.”

  Emily nods and switches from lightning to metal as she climbs back onto Harriet’s cephalothorax. She lets mana and machina fill the machine before severing the damaged abdomen and cutting the two shattered legs leaking hydraulic fluid off at the base. She moves a fraction of the lost material to patch the holes, and pulls the spider from the crater, formed by its landing, with a strong mental tug, dispersing the ice holding it in place and pushing it onwards to restart its march.

  The mother-spider skitters away from the intersection, its gait stumbling and disjointed as Harriet adjusts to the missing limbs. It takes a minute for them to gain the confidence to scale a nearby wall, but once they’re off the ground, they don’t hesitate to resume their leaping progress from street to street.

  “How’s tracing the other mothers going? Did removing one help narrow the others’ locations down at all?” Emily questions as she sits down and pulls out the Whisper, aiming towards a few distant spiders crawling across the city’s roofs and opening fire.

  “A little, but the air isss still cluttered with messsagesss.”

  “Okay, give me your message logs then. We should have enough data now for me to triangulate a rough position so we can get the others moving.”

  Golden sparks leap from the spider beneath her in lieu of a verbal response, twining with her machina and flowing into her mind, filling it with a complex string of data. Emily immediately begins unravelling the mass of information, diverting most of her processing power and leaving only a few threads to pilot her body. Harriet doesn’t stop the flow of data, transmitting the messages she’s picking up in real time as she heads towards the closest source.

  Emily compares the most recent direction markers to the oldest, using the difference to narrow down the locations of the furthest sources.

  “Wellness check,” she says, reactivating her communicator after they’ve crossed over ten kilometres of rooftops, reducing the distance to their next target by nearly half.

  “Your youngest is missing a tail, but other than that, we’re still good,” Pod responds swiftly.

  “She’s spent already? Ivor, give her an earth crystal to chew on, and Mensacus, tell her to rest up for a bit. I doubt this is the only battle we’ll have in this dungeon, and her mana’s wasted here: I think the big ones are the only targets that matter.”

  “Understood,” Mensacus says in sync with two affirmative clicks from Ivor.

  “I’m sending over a range of coordinates for you now,” Emily explains, pulling her communicator tablet from her belt to input a more complex message. “I’m yet to work out the exact position of your target, though, so be careful and use your scanner to search for the densest cluster of signals when you get close. Notify me before you engage.”

  “Received,” Pod says after a moment, before Emily switches her communicator back to emergency contact only.

  As she and Harriet approach their next target, Emily hears a low, rumbling hiss ahead long before she sees any signs of a mother-spider and its greater horde. There are a few child spiders crawling around the street below as they leap from one building to the next, but nothing near the quantity present near the other two production robots.

  She converts her machina to a waveform and projects it from her body into the alleys below, letting it bounce off the densely packed buildings and return a rough image of the enemies occupying them. The vague outline of a large cylindrical object, mounted to the thorax of a mother-spider a few kilometres away, pointed directly at her, sends chills down her spine as the source of the electric hiss washing over them becomes clear.

  “Move!” Emily barks, already knowing it’s too late, as her legs fill with mana and machina and she kicks off in the same instant the hiss turns to the roar of the sound barrier shattering.

  The harsh ring of shattering glass and tearing metal hits Emily as a large projectile tears through Harriet’s temporary shell, blowing their head to smithereens and destabilising the compact nuclear generator at its core. Emily doesn’t waste any time in activating her metal and lightning connections in tandem, weaving together a Faraday Cage filled with nearly a quarter of her total reserves that Harriet leaps to from the spider’s corpse, further reinforcing it.

  The dead spider’s power core erupts in heat and radiation, vaporising the centre of the construct and shattering its outer casing as several kilotons of force slam into Emily’s back, sending her rocketing out over the city as several blocks are flattened in an instant. Her magical barrier protects her from the brunt of the explosion, but the enchanted fabric of her armour is still singed, and several shards of superheated shrapnel moving faster than her eyes can see tear through her protections, carving deep grooves into her sides as they’re deflected away from her vitals.

  She doesn’t flinch as the deep cuts penetrate her subdermal and tear away the flesh beneath. She pours mana into the liquid metal without a thought and lets it stem the bleeding. Two massive wings of metal and charge sprout from her shoulder blades, and she angles them to turn herself back towards her target before beating them to come to a stop high in the sky above. A second wingbeat and she’s falling faster than a descending bolt from the blue. In the blink of an eye, she appears above the mother-spider as it’s charging a second shot. Emily uses her momentum to drive her boot through its insulated outer armour before splaying her wings and flapping them to prevent herself from going too deep. She releases Harriet from her sole with a torrent of machina.

  The spider freezes as they begin taking control, but the small army surrounding it don’t lose their orders, as happened when they captured the first mother, instead turning the barrels of their guns towards Emily and opening fire without hesitation. One wing coils protectively around her while the other slices through the air, shooting out fine metal feathers wreathed in lightning that tear through the child spiders without resistance before following the arc of the limb they spawned from as it sweeps in a wide circle, decimating the horde.

  It only takes a few minutes for the street to fall silent and the mother-spider to fall under their control, and Emily reactivates her communicator as they set off towards the next target.

  “I’m rescinding my prior orders,” she states calmly. “Do not approach the target, and await more accurate coordinates to begin a ranged bombardment. They’re each loaded with different weapon setups, and that can include a railgun capable of penetrating several buildings.”

  “We should have brought Elisime,” Pod mutters with a mixture of awe and concern.

  “There’s no guarantee we’ll have enough space for her when the dungeon changes, and she doesn’t fit in my Factory yet. There’s still no sign of New Denntimo’s attack force, so I’m certain this isn’t the only space it occupies.”

  “Understood. Pausing our advance now.”

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