DIIIIIING!!

The large pillar cut through the crowd of undead and slammed into the TAWP, lifting it into the air and flipping it several times. At easily three times the TAWP’s size and swinging a pillar of fused stone and iron as thick as one of the TAWP’s legs, the zombified Beast Lord was becoming a real thorn in Alpha’s side.

The blows weren’t enough to actually damage Alpha, but each one carried enough force and sheer momentum to send the several hundred-ton war machine tumbling. Even attempting to lock down his legs with anchors wasn’t working. The ground was too soft, and too many bodies surrounded them.

To make matters worse, his primary weapons were useless. An opening shot with the [B55-Vijaya] had blown several meter-wide chunks out of the creature, but they had quickly filled in with stone and metal. His energy weapons had fared slightly better, taking longer for the creature to ‘heal,’ but the drain on his core wasn’t becoming a problem. His smaller caliber rounds were even worse.

The smaller metal slugs did little to no damage to the massive creature and were even absorbed and used to heal other wounds. It was eating his bullets!

The only weapon he had that seemed to be even somewhat effective was his prototype [Crystal Rail]. The crystal rail rounds didn’t have the same penetration as his more modern, standard rounds, but their explosive nature carved baseball-sized chunks of stone and metal from the creature’s hide wherever they struck.

Better yet, these wounds seemed harder to heal than even the blasts from his energy turrets. Maybe the lingering energy from the blast disrupted whatever method the creature used to heal. He didn’t know.

Whatever the case, Alpha was annoyed that such an otherwise minor opponent had managed to hard counter him so well. Would the same thing have happened if he’d not gone for the overkill the first time he’d killed the oversized murderbird?

Or was this a deliberate modification specifically to counter him? That toothy bastard Tuguslar had made it seem he and his people had been watching Alpha for a while now. Alpha wasn’t sure which was more concerning; that there might be more natural creatures out there that could shut down anything he threw at them… or that they could be so easily made.

If nothing else, it was a lesson in not overspecializing. Bring a gun for every occasion, as they (Alpha) say! That would have to be one of the first things he did once he established a base… instead of just dreaming about it.

As for the pain in his side…

Alpha had a little surprise cooking in the oven for him.

All he needed to do was wait for… Ah! There they were!

A swirling cloud of dust and wind approached from behind. Suspended in the air were several dozen pulsing, black crystals. As the swirling dust cloud approached, Alpha disengaged with the giant stone bird and opened a hatch in the TAWP.

The dust cloud blew past Alpha, and the black crystals streamed into the opening. The dust cloud then doubled back and coalesced into a figure standing on top of the TAWP. No. 7 fell to their knees, panting. Their mask slid upward in several sections, relieving only their mouth as they coughed up a thick, black sludge onto Alpha’s back.

Ewww….

No. 7’s body pulsed with blue light, and a strange black fog pushed itself away from them, dissipating into the air. The human stood on shaky legs and spoke to Alpha.

“I don’t know what you’re planning, but you better hope this works. I’m not doing that again. Those… things aren’t normal -cores-.”

Alpha laughed and dodged several earth spikes that shot out of the ground under him while pulping a dozen smaller undead as they tried to bite and tear at the TAWP’s legs. His internal factory got to work on the black crystals as he answered.

“I have no idea! No better time to find out than the present, though! It’ll take about 15 minutes to process everything. Quicker if you can buy me some time to focus.”

No. 7 stared at the surrounding undead sea and the large Beast Lord slowly approaching them. They sighed and spoke.

“Anything to end this slog. Give me a warning before you do whatever it is you’re going to do, though. I have a strong feeling I don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

They then lept into the air, once more dissolving into a swirling gust of wind and dust. The swirling wind soon turned into a roaring vortex as it circled around Alpha’s position, pushing the larger undead creatures back while cutting the smaller ones into ribbons.

Only the massive stone figure of the Beast Lord was making any progress, though the high winds hampered it. In the eyes of the storm, Alpha sat down and focused his attention on what he needed to do.

His work on arrays had steadily progressed over the last few days. One benefit of being an AI is the ability to split your focus across multiple projects at once, at least if you have the hardware.

After completing the storage arrays, Alpha had compressed and combined them into a “battery” capable of storing the energy from the heart crystals, or -cores- as No. 7 had called them. Well, he called it a battery, but in practice, it was little more than dozens of storage arrays stacked and connected to form a 0.5m-x-0.5-x-0.5m cube. In a way, it reminded Alpha of pictures of old-timey heat sinks like those used before quantum heat dumps became mainstream.

The resulting battery was far more space efficient than storing the crystals and let Alpha turn all the crystals into ammunition with little to no waste.

The second battery that had just finished printing was only roughly half the size, but using what he’d learned from the prototype, it was just as, if not more, efficient. He’d originally intended to use it to drain the larger crystal in the black box, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Over the next few minutes, Alpha steadily drained the energy of the collected black crystals into the Vr.2 battery. There was no time to check how the black energy differed from those found in the ‘normal’ cores, but there seemed to be enough overlap that the arrays worked as intended, even if the battery began leaking an ominous black fog.

While he did that, Alpha’s internal factory was working overtime to carve and chip the drained crystals, quickly cutting the dozens of knuckle sizes crystals into thousands of splintered shards. Thankfully, once drained of the energy, the black crystals behaved just as a typical core would, making the process simple enough.

Soon, all the parts came together for his newest toy. Here’s hoping it worked like the simulations said it should.

Just in time, too, as the ground rumbled and a giant stone figure erupted underneath Alpha. It seemed whatever little remained of the Beast Lord’s thinking mind and grown tired of trying to force its way through the wall of wind. So it went under it instead.

The Beast Lord reared up to its full 50-meter height and fell on Alpha, trying to use its massive size and weight to crush the TAWP.

Several pillars sprang from the TAWP’s back, slamming into the small mountain of stone and metal. It was enough to keep Alpha from being pressed into the ground, but the massive weight was nearly too much even for the TAWP, and its joints creaked under the pressure, even as they were driven deeper into the soft earth.

Soon, Alpha was totally enveloped.

— — — — — —

The swirling hurricane surrounding them sputtered and died as No. 7 rematerialized in the air. The masked figure hovered in place, staring at the unmoving hill, wondering if Alpha’s ploy had failed. If it had, No. 7 would have to retreat and leave their new “friend” to his fate. They might be working together, for now, but that didn’t — .

The middle section of the Beast Lord suddenly rose, then bulged outward before exploding in a torrent of metal shrapnel. Through the wind summoned to block the debris, No. 7 saw a small object rocket into the sky.

No. 7 tracked the object as it rose higher and higher, slowing down as it neared its peak.

At the top of its arc, No. 7 finally identified the object. It was a large metal… cube?

No. 7 only had a brief moment to study the object, wondering what it could be before it violently erupted into a massive black fireball. As the fireball expanded, hundreds of smaller, shining objects were ejected in all directions.

After a second more, these too exploded, lighting up the sky in dark light and further spreading out even smaller sparkling objects, covering tens of squared kilometers in all directions. Like glittering snow, the sparkling objects slowly fell back to the earth.

No. 7 couldn’t tell what the objects were at this distance, but they burned in their [Spirit Sight] with rotting spirit energy. They almost looked like overloaded —

Behind their mask, No. 7’s eyes suddenly went wide. At the same time, Alpha called out from the rapidly sealing hole in the Beast Lord’s stone “body.”

“This is the part where you want to run!”

No. 7 didn’t need to be told twice.

They become one with the wind and rushed away from the area as fast as their depleted energy could take them. Even then, they barely make it out of the area as the first sparkling object contacted the writhing horde below.

From the sky, No. 7 watched as the first object hit one of the large golems, then erupted into a massive black fireball several meters across.

Then another. And another, then a dozen more. Soon, the prairies turned into a black hellscape, as thousands of black fireballs filled every inch for tens of kilometers in all directions from where they’d left Alpha and the Beast Lord.

After what felt like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a few breaths, the last sparkling objects fell, and the prairies went silent. What had once been a seemingly endless sea of undead had been reduced to a charred wasteland of black ash and sputtering dark flames.

That single move had obliterated 80% of the horde easily, with only stragglers on the edges having survived.

No. 7 hovered in the air, utterly unable to process what they’d just witnessed. After a long moment, No.7 snapped back to reality and flew deeper into the wasteland. A moment later, they hovered over a small hill. If they hadn’t known this melted, warped lump had been the Beast Lord only moments before, they would have thought it a slag-dumping site of the world’s worst blacksmith. They couldn’t even feel any spirit energy circulating through the stone anymore.

No. 7 stared at the hill and questioned if they should try digging Alpha out. Or if the madman had perished in his own attack.

Their question was answered for them the next moment, when the small hill suddenly rumbled. No. 7 put up their guard. But instead of the Beast Lord rising from the ashes, the hill crumbled away, relieving a solid blue dome composed of interlocking hexagons.

The dome shimmered once, then melted away. Alpha stood from the center of the doom, the creature’s insect-like legs stretching out to push his large metal body into the air.

Alpha turned and looked up at No. 7 hovering in the air.

The two locked gazed for a silent moment before Alpha threw his stubby arms into the air and yelled,

“WOO HOO! LETS DO IT AGAIN!”

No. 7 stared down at the insane creature before pointing at them and yelling back.

“Are you insane?! What the hell was that?! I thought you had a plan! Not that you were going to blow yourself up!”

Alpha just looked up and shrugged before responding.

“Rule #20; If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win.”

No. 7 gawked, speechless. While they tried and failed to form any kind of response to that ludicrous statement, the ground beside Alpha stirred.

A figure dragged itself out of the rubble. The much smaller, much more fleshy form of the Beast Lord. The creature, or what remained of it, was barely recognizable. What little flesh hadn’t been replaced with arrayed metal was burned black and rotting in places. Its lower half was missing entirely, and it slowly crawled toward Alpha on its stomach with a single, warped flipper.

Despite falling apart with each inch it moved, the creature’s empty, black eyeholes never strayed from Alpha. It groaned and snapped a twisted beak at him as if its entire existence was powered by nothing more than pure malice and hatred.

For all No. 7 knew about the undead, that might have very well been the case.

BANG!

Before the Beast Lord could crawl more than a few feet, however, a single thundercrack cut through the silence of the wasteland. The Beast Lord’s head exploded like a rotten melon, producing a small flash of black light.

The Beast Lord’s flipper stretched out one last time, desperately reaching out to Alpha before collapsing to the ground. A few seconds later, what remained of the Beast Lord’s body collapsed in on itself, even the arrayed metal disintegrating away into fine dust.

Alpha and No. 7 stared at the remains as a gentle wind whisked them away.

After a moment of silence, Alpha spoke in a cheerful voice.

“Well! That was fun! Let’s get on our way. The path is clear now.”

The creature then turned and strolled off into the distance.

No. 7 turned and looked toward the distant temple and saw that, indeed, the way was clear. What few undead remained between them and their destination still wandered the prairies, with a few making their way toward them, but their numbers were so pitiful compared to before. They would be no obstacle at all.

Still, No. 7 hesitated.

Should they continue on?

After seeing something like… that, they weren’t so sure anymore.

While they had a reputation to uphold, a job was just a job.

After long contemplation, No. 7 sighed and flew off toward Alpha.

They’d already made it this far. Might as well see things to the end.