Emily uses Harriet’s new railgun to destroy their next target from afar, Overdriving the weapon and overwhelming the enemy’s electromagnetic barrier in an instant; the crisscrossed signals filling the city’s air finally clear enough to confirm the exact locations of the other four.

  She sends off a message to Pod and, within minutes, the distant crackle of explosions begins. It lasts until a few moments after she tears a hole in the side of another mother-spider, burning out the rails in her ride’s gun in the process but downing her target without touching its reactor, when the thunderous roar of another thermonuclear reaction echoes out over the city.

  “Target down,” Pod says through her earpiece, his tone laced with joy as he shouts a little, his ear protection not having protected him completely from the repercussions of his attack. “Moving forward to bring the second into range.”

  “Good work,” Emily replies, peeling back the reinforced plastic panels flanking the railgun to strip the damaged pieces as Harriet scuttles towards their next target. “We’re onto our final target too. Send me your coordinates when you begin your next barrage and remain in place when it's finished: we’ll find you.”

  “Understood.”

  A wave of machina pushes out the fastenings holding the two half-melted rails in place, and with a forceful tug, Emily tears them away and discards them. She forms her mana into metal and creates two temporary replacements, screwing them into place as her communicator pings and Pod begins a new wave of artillery fire.

  Harriet stomps on a small child spider as it tries to take position on the roof beside them, and Emily hears the distant hiss of fuel igniting. Tens of rockets shoot up above the roofs near their distant target, angling towards them. Emily doesn’t bat an eye, flooding the railgun beside her with machina and letting off a single shot before hopping back off the spider’s back and recalling Harriet.

  A golden streak of lightning jumps from the metal spider to her left arm, and she plummets off the side of the skyscraper towards the ground far below. Emily activates her metal connection and pulls in material from around her as she falls, wrapping herself in a dense shell that’s propelled into the pavement by the force of the spider on top of the building shattering in a ball of fire.

  She pulls in more and more material whilst they’re embedded in the ground, using mass alone to protect them and waiting out the destruction of her two targets. When she finally parts her protective bubble, the only thing that remains of the building and the spider that was perched upon it is an indistinct, smouldering mass of melted metal and glass surrounded by destruction spanning several streets.

  Emily dismisses her elemental connection and casts a simple flight spell, wrapping herself in charge and taking to the skies to confirm the death of the mother-spider that fired at them. Its head and control computer are in pieces, so, after a single glance, she turns towards her family’s position and takes off.

  However, before she can reach them, the city begins to shake.

  “Target down.” Pod’s voice comes through her communicator. “All child bots have self-disabled, but they aren’t crumbling.”

  “Noted,” Emily responds. “Any sign of the source of this quaking?”

  “None.”

  “Okay, move to the centre of the street and be aware of any structural damage around you. I’ll be there in a moment.”

  She pushes more mana to her flight spell and shoots forward, letting her gaze roam the cityscape in search of their next opponent. In the far distance, near where she found the first mother-spider, she notices the street layout shifting, with skyscrapers clumping together and slowly parting to create a large empty space.

  Without looking away from the changing geography, Emily comes to a halt above her party, reaching out with her mana and pulling them up to join her in the sky.

  “I think I’ve found our next target,” she says with a mixture of awe and excitement bleeding into her tone as a grin pulls at her lips.

  “Whe-” Pod starts, cutting off as he follows her gaze and his eyes widen in disbelief.

  The streets between them and the movement Emily first spotted are slowly widening, the shift getting closer and closer as a clear path is opened. The ground at the point of inception splits, and a new building rises from underground to fill the empty space. It’s formed from dark grey, reinforced metal without a single window, and shaped like a triangular pyramid, with one of the sharp corners pointed directly towards them. It reaches up past the flanking skyscrapers, its peak towering at least four hundred metres above street level when it comes to a halt, and Emily spots tens of sealed openings spanning its flat faces.

  “Damn,” Pod mutters once the city’s quaking stops. “Do we need to destroy it, or get inside?”

  “I have no idea,” Emily responds, her grin only growing as her machina burns in her chest, spurring the emotions on. “Only one way to find out.”

  She twists the mana enveloping them, exchanging the blue glow of lightning for a purple tint as she locks onto the pyramid’s point. Space bends, and in a burst of energy, they shatter, reforming directly above the towering structure. Emily feels fluctuating magnetic fields pressing against them the moment they arrive, trying to force them back, but a pulse of lightning-charged mana and machina pushes back the foreign influence, holding it at bay and allowing her to lower the last few metres to make contact with the structure.

  The moment her machina flows into the building, it lurches into motion, the sealed openings she observed from a distance unsealing as one. The top third of the building splits away from the rest, floating up and cutting off Emily’s access to the structure’s core as another powerful magnetic field activates. Her fleeting scan of the full structure has drawn a clear image in her mind, though, and Emily immediately recasts her teleportation spell, distorting space with a sense of urgency as raw plasma erupts from the large separation, curling up around the floating pyramid and shooting towards them.

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  Her passengers barely have time to process what’s happening as they find themselves back where they started, staring at the distant structure still mid-reaction. The thick film of lightning scaling it laps at the empty space they just left, burning the air as a flood of rockets launch from the holes dotted across the lower structure’s surface, shooting up to search for a target and finding nothing. The rockets quickly adjust, angling away from the heavily-armed building and drawing trails of smoke towards their new position.

  “Definitely destroy,” Emily says, a chill running down her spine as she glances down and sees scorch marks tracing the sides of her highly lightning-resistant boots. “There’s no open space inside for us to enter, just a shit-tonne of weaponry and a reactor more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “Can you recreate it?” She sees Ivor sign out of the corner of her eye as she returns her gaze to the mechanical monolith.

  “I don’t even know what half the materials it’s made from are: I’ll definitely try though.”

  Pod draws his heavy machine gun from his bag and shoulders it as Emily holds her right arm out, channelling mana through the tattoos writhing beneath her skin. The patterns freeze in place for a fraction of a second, and her fingertips pulse purple as she draws them down, parting a crack in space anchored to her internal dimension. It appears as a clear window with blurred edges formed from ever-changing spatial runes, giving them all a look into a wide chamber, just over a hundred metres from wall to wall, filled with inactive metal soldiers, an array of artillery batteries, and several large, ominous rockets airbrushed in bright, unmissable colours.

  Pod opens fire, releasing a spray of lead that accurately targets the incoming rockets, detonating them all before they can get close and filling the air with fire and shrapnel.

  Emily sends a spark of machina into her Dimensional Factory, priming two rockets and beginning their launch sequences, shifting the portal within the dimension to position it above them.

  The mechanism floating above the armed pyramid doesn’t stop burning with plasma and, before Emily can launch her warheads, it begins to rotate, spinning around a central axis as it tilts, pointing its tip directly at them.

  Mensacus hisses out a guttural, wordless command, and the wendigos waiting beside him leap forward to form a wall of flesh. However, Emily’s instincts still scream a warning as palpable pulses of energy are released from the pyramid’s gaping top, coalescing around the spinning hunk of metal. In an instant, she drains her mana reserves to near empty and holds out her free left hand, releasing a flood of spatial mana and wrapping their group within it, forming a barrier of distorted space.

  The pyramid roars like thunder as its attack is unleashed, and a torrent of charge rushes towards them, crossing the city in the blink of an eye. One moment, the air around them is clear, and the next, it’s alight with a blinding sea of lightning.

  Emily narrows her eyes while everyone else shields theirs as the attack flows around them harmlessly, breaking before them and reforming behind as if they were never there, sapping mana from the spatial barrier but not breaching it. She quickly converts most of her remaining machina to mana, leaving a core to maintain their defence as she tries to form a small portal spell, locking on to the coordinates she used earlier above the armed building. The spell twists and folds in on itself before stabilising, burning a chunk of her mana but revealing a newly activated layer of protection around her target.

  “Tsk,” she clicks her tongue under her breath, too quiet for anyone else to hear over the crackling plasma still raging only metres away. “I can’t tell if it's spatial protection or disruption…”

  She tries again, this time moving her target coordinates up by a hundred metres, and manages to open a portal without resistance.

  “Protection it is. These two won’t be enough.”

  The last of her mana wraps her left arm, quickly forming into a glowing purple blade as the thrusters of the rockets in her Dimensional Factory activate in sync, and they shoot up into the open exit above, crossing over into the second portal in a flash and letting Emily sever the external connection with her Factory. She follows the rockets through the portal as one accelerates faster than the other, quickly approaching the pyramid below. Her arm snaps out, and she activates Spatial Blade. She feels a little resistance as the spell tears through an invisible dome of layered energy covering the target, and a fraction of a second later, her primed warhead slips through, impacting the still-spinning weapon and erupting with charge.

  A pulse of electromagnetic force envelopes the building, and the lightning flowing from the base fizzles out.

  The second rocket lands a moment later, but Emily’s already stepping back through her portal and shutting it before the warhead detonates.

  The distant pyramid erupts with light and heat that reaches them from half the city away as a shockwave sweeps through the streets, shattering windows and toppling already damaged buildings. A cloud of smoke and debris bursts from the wreckage, billowing out into a distinct mushroom-like form and blotting out the suns.

  The spatial barrier that would have protected them from the aftermath of her attack disperses as Emily’s mana hits rock bottom, but Mensacus wraps his arms around the group, holding them all up and moving his wendigos to the front to act as a barrier of flesh, using their reinforced skin to protect from shards of metal and glass riding the oppressive wave of force as it hits them.

  “Shit, which warhead was that?” Pod questions, reaching up to check his hearing protection once the pressure finally subsides.

  “N-01,” Emily replies, ignoring her exhaustion and confirming it was their highest load nuclear model, as her gaze scans the flattened half of the city surrounding a new crater lined with molten slag. “Though it definitely set off the reactor beneath the target: the predicted destruction from N-01 was nowhere near this widespread.”

  “Please say we’re never setting one of those off on Ulea,” Ivor signs distractedly, staring at the crater larger than any single city he’s ever seen.

  “An entire continent would have to piss her off for that,” Pod says, his eyes widening in realisation at his own words as he scrambles to pull a radiation counter from his bag. “Shit.”

  “Yeah, we need to leave, or you’ll start feeling the effects of that quite quickly,” Emily says, not even glancing at the values displayed on the screaming counter.

  As if hearing her urgency, the dungeon begins to change almost immediately. The air wavers a few metres ahead of them, and space twists in on itself before expanding into a familiar, glowing blue doorway. The radiation counter falls silent, and the ground far below liquifies before rushing up towards the entrance, drawing in the surrounding buildings and breaking the illusion of a realised space as a pure white void is left in their place. The metal flows into a single point and condenses into a floating drop of liquid metal that radiates enough mana to send shivers down Emily’s spine and joy to her heart.

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  [Low Grade Metal Essence]

  [Rank:] C

  [Description:] A rare magical resource representing the concept of pure metal.

  _____

  “Perfect,” she grins, reaching out and pulling the essence into her Factory before nodding at her son to take them through the waiting door.

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