No Victory Without Sacrifice

It worked. To their surprise, Aldan’s strategy was working.

The City Crusher barely had room to maneuver in the cavern, but it was enough to turn in tight circles, which it constantly tried to do as the seven young mages harried it from every angle. Almost nowhere was out of reach of one of its six enormous arms; they had to remain constantly in motion.

Aldan and Ophia pressed their attack against the arm joint—within minutes, the whole arm was noticeably slower, but did not yet seem on the verge of breaking.

She hurled spears of ice into the mechanism one after another, while he kept up a light beam at his maximum intensity whenever he wasn’t running to evade the Crusher’s counter-attacks. Aldan was an unusually strong light mage, able to keep up a beam at a strength sufficient to scorch metal and stone; this technique of light magic hadn’t been known during the age of the Machine Men, so their armor didn’t have modern protective enchantments or prismwards. It was simply huge, thick, and durable.

They kept firing spell after spell, then turning to run while Morenna and Uthien swept in to divert its attention.

Ophia kept up the attack about two casts too long, as the City Crusher ponderously turned toward her—turning to flee, she tried to zigzag, not quickly enough to evade the gigantic pincer arm which descended toward her.

Rakkan swept her into his arms without slowing, the cavern shaking as the arm hit the ground behind them. Pumping his strengthening magic into his legs, he carried them in a wide arc around the Crusher’s treads even as it tried to turn to follow them.

Uthien landed directly atop its central body, hammering his three tungsten spheres in a rapid rhythm onto a single spot as if he could bore through the armor. The City Crusher halted its pursuit, instead raising multiple arms to sweep the prince away. He swooped away well before they hit.

In his wake, Morenna kept teleporting from one upraised arm to the next, hacking and stabbing Blackwing into the exposed arm joints and adding to the Crusher’s apparent confusion.

Rakkan brought them three quarters of the way around the City Crusher before skidding to a halt and setting Ophia down in a position from which she could again attack the target joint, which Aldan was already torching with another intense energy beam.

“You know the worst part?” she said breathlessly. “It was our brilliant idea to come all the way down here looking for something nasty to fight. We can’t even blame Father anymore.”

“Phia, the man sent us down a hole to get picked off chasing phantoms,” Rakkan replied. “We never have to stop blaming him.”

Ophia hesitated, then grinned and conjured another ice spear. “Thank you, Rakkan, I needed to hear that.”

“Got your back, sis!”

Ice and concentrated light raged against the gears; that joint was noticeably smoking now. Even as they watched, the arm under attack twitched, dropping lower. The pincer at its end began snapping erratically, then spun in a constant circle on its axis before falling still, a wisp of smoke emerging from it.

“It’s working!” Espa shouted.

“Don’t let up!” Aldan called. “We have this!”

Then something changed.

The great treads went still as the City Crusher ceased trying to chase any of them. Morenna continued flashing from one point to the next, applying her enchanted steel blade to any spot that looked slightly vulnerable, while Uthien swooped back and forth, pounding on the armor with unyielding tungsten. Suddenly, the Crusher seemed to be ignoring them.

Instead, with a huge grinding noise, its main body began rotating in place until the target joint was out of Ophia and Alden’s range.

Of course, they started circling around in pursuit, but suddenly the Crusher slammed down one metal arm, blocking their path. Then it swept that arm toward them, while driving its huge drill into the floor behind them to cut off their retreat.

Vanerra and Rakkan grabbed their siblings and bolted directly away from the Crusher rather than trying to circle it as they had been. It was a close thing; the sheer force of wind displaced by the huge pincer’s passage on her heels made Vanerra stumble a step, but she regained her footing, hauling her older brother well out of range.

Espa dashed up to join them as they regrouped, turning to look back at the monstrous clockwork. It had no face, but from its current position where it continued to sit still, ignoring Uthien’s and Morenna’s attacks, it almost seemed to be staring at them.

“Um,” Espa said nervously, “how smart are these things, exactly?”

“They can’t think,” Aldan said, frowning, “they just follow pre-scripted instructions. But…hm. I guess it stands to reason that the bigger they are, the more room there is for…uh, scripts. It’s probably capable of more complex behavior than the beetle tanks…”

“I’m suddenly concerned that we did not, in fact, outsmart it,” said Rakkan, and then the City Crusher began rolling right at them.

Fast.

They split, dashing to the sides in both directions. Previously this had seemed to momentarily confuse it; this time it simply kept going forward, sweeping out with both arms low to the ground as it charged right toward the cavern’s wall.

The life mages swept up their siblings, jumping and dodging, but this herding motion was simply too wide for them to fully evade. Vanerra and Aldan managed to duck under one arm, then jump over the limply hanging one they’d damaged while the third swept down at the wrong angle.

Rakkan and Ophia, though, were facing three fully functional arms, including the one with the drill. Rakkan diverted toward the Crusher itself, barely slipping inside the gap below its “shoulders.”

Already, as if missing its first grabs had been an expected outcome, the City Crusher was changing tactics, spreading all five functional arms wide and low to the ground and starting to rotate fully in a sweep that would encompass most of the chamber and provide much harder gaps to slip through.

Then, suddenly, Morenna was there.

It had been ignoring her and Uthien, but now she materialized right atop the housing of the damaged shoulder joint, and stabbed Blackwing directly into the gears. With a roar of effort, the Black Princess braced her feet and wrenched the sword like a lever.

Sparks flew, followed by a gout of acrid black smoke—and then loose chunks of hot metal.

The Crusher halted its maneuver in what looked like panic, instead swinging all of its remaining arms except the drill at that spot.

“Morenna!” Ophia shrieked.

Their view of the impact was blocked by the torrent of smoke and some black fluid that spurted across the floor, but the sound of it was colossal, the screech of rending metal echoing painfully off the walls.

Then, that metal arm fully detached, landing limp on the floor with an even more titanic clatter.

Their cheers were cut short as Morenna came skidding out of the smoke on her side, bouncing painfully across the floor toward them.

A second later her sword followed.

Blackwing’s delicate feathered arms and basket hilt had been mashed flat, its blade twisted and bent into a useless curl of metal.