“You’re a monster that needs to be put down. How can you treat something so incredible so poorly? I’ll make things right.”

“It’s amazing, no matter how long I talk to you, you just keep sounding crazier. Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to kill me, right? That’s a good attitude to have. It’s no fun hunting prey that doesn’t fight back.”

Jace remained calm as the curtain was pulled back. It was more than the other two could manage as they began to shout questions into their radios. The kind of stupid questions no one could answer, but they still asked them all the same. Ukko… Jace had no idea how Ukko responded. He’d gone radio silent, and his machine had stopped moving. Jace was worried. Ukko’s MAC seemed like it was stressed or maybe disappointed. It clearly didn’t want Jace’s interference though, so he left the two alone.

The ‘curtain’ in this case was the field they had been walking through for some time now. Jace wasn’t sure when the illusion started, but they were in the thick of it.

All around them, the fields fizzled out of existence as massive trees took their place. Trees bigger than any that Jace had ever seen before. They towered over the MACs, making them feel small in comparison. And the width of the things was crazy as well. Some of them even had tunnels carved through.

The two basic MAC pilots who had come with were now yelling at Ukko directly. They were asking for orders, asking what was going on. More stupid questions.

Jace started to move.

If she was the hunter and they were the prey, the worst thing to do would be to sit around in a group. He either had to hunt this hermit or wait for her to back him into a corner that he could fight from. He kept the hammer hoisted up onto his left shoulder and brought the rifle up to waist level. He felt bad for the MAC he’d taken the rifle from. Its remaining armament was just some missile batteries. Obviously, they worked great for taking out these small resistance forces of conventional arms, but now that they were fighting another MAC, he would be useless.

The other one could serve well though. It was outfitted with a downgraded version of Ukko’s laser rifle. He had no other armament except for a few autocannons. Jace thought about taking that rifle, but he would be leaving another MAC defenseless. He didn’t want that.

Sadly, the MACs had to rely on their pilots. No matter how incompetent they were. Incompetent pilots wouldn’t be able to give those machines the glorious battles they deserved. Jace just had to accept that for now.

A bright light came bouncing through the forest in an entirely unnatural way. It moved as if it were swimming between the mighty trees. It snaked its way into the clearing where the two MACs and Ukko were still standing around. The beam of light paused in front of the MAC holding the laser rifle for a brief moment.

Jace made a note of where this was taking place. He would circle back later to grab the rifle.

But, while Jace was making his plans and trying to inch away from the scene without revealing himself, something incredible happened.

The beam of light that was seemingly waiting in front of the MAC was growing. It slowly grew bigger as the rest of the length of the light poured into it, creating an orb about the size of the core of the machine.

“Admiral? What the hell is-”

The man couldn’t finish his thought. He died in a pathetic way: still asking worthless questions.

The ball of light had made a sudden movement that pushed it into the core of the MAC. Then, before Jace could even blink, it grew in size until it fully consumed the top half of the metal golem.

And then it disappeared. The legs of the MAC fell to either side. The tip of the laser rifle’s barrel and part of the tubing that extended from the back fell to the ground as well.

There was nothing else.

It was simply gone.

The other MAC suddenly dropped down and the cockpit hinged open. Jace zoomed in to see the pilot exit the machine with his hands in the air.

“I quit! I’m done! I didn’t even want to pilot this thing, please just let me go.”

“Let you go? Ah yes, just like you’ve let all the people of this land go, right? All the men, women, and children that you surely spared when they raised their hands and said ‘please stop’.”

“I didn’t want this! I joined up as their cook. I got pressed into this, I promise! I wasn’t even-”

“A cook, huh? So you fed them?”

“Ah, well, yes. Yes I did.”

“I’m sure you did a very good job. Kept everyone alive and healthy, right?”

“Of course. I’m good at it too! If… if you let me go, I could cook for you. I could make whatever you want. My food is always delicious and, and it fills you up! It’ll give you plenty of energy. I swear. Please, oh God please just let me live.”

“Hm, now that is tempting, but here’s the thing: this delicious miracle food of yours, all this energy and health and what not, what would The Stragglers have been without it?”

The man had the usual problem of someone begging for their lives: they didn’t think. “They couldn’t have even moved. They would have been useless without my food. Yes! Absolutely, that’s how good my food is!”

Jace saw the beam of light begin to streak through the forest once more. It seemed to be white but the burning crimson rays of the setting sun lit it up like a rod of fire.

“You see Mr. Cook, I want The Stragglers dead. So you feeding them… well, it didn’t exactly help me out, now did it? Thanks for getting out of your pathetic metal box though, you wouldn’t believe how much power a fully charged shot uses up. I’m a frugal lady, you know.”

The man suffered nearly the same exact fate as the MAC, but simply on a smaller scale. His upper torso disappeared and his legs fell off the sides of the hinged open cockpit, bouncing slightly as they hit the forest floor.

Jace couldn’t stay and watch any longer without risking his own life, he had to move. He imagined that Ukko would suffer the same sort of end. It was strange. The man was a good pilot. His machine was powerful. Jace couldn’t imagine why he was just waiting there. He hated the idea of abandoning such a beautiful MAC, but he had to focus on freeing this one first.

“Oh dear, it seems like the exterminator is having a tough time. I heard you were old from the Chief, but I didn’t think you were so old that you’d forget you were in the middle of a life-or-death battle.”

Ukko didn’t respond to the woman. He didn’t contact Jace either. The man had gone completely silent.

The hermit’s voice came across as a bit annoyed, “What, is he dead or something?” It was kind of strange to hear her voice with a tone other than general amusement. She’d spent the last few hours mocking Ukko and Jace endlessly. Her annoyed voice sounded far older than her mocking voice. It was like a completely different person. Jace supposed she was just playing a character. Being by yourself in these woods would probably lead to that kind of mental state.

Jace laughed to himself, “Can you believe that buddy? I think we’re all just calling each other crazy, aren’t we? Well, we’ll find out who’s actually crazy by the end of this. They’ll figure it out. I just have to show them how to understand you guys.” Jace patted his machine once more. He felt so close to this machine right now, sitting in the cockpit. Something tickled the back of Jace’s mind and seemed to hold him in a warm embrace.

This was much better than Guinevere’s comforts.

It was better than Callista could have ever been.

In fact, Jace realized, this must have been what Callista was always trying to get him to understand. Did he love MACs? Callista must have meant more. She loved her MAC as well. She loved it, and fought in it, and ultimately died in it.

The best, most euphoric ending possible.

Jace smiled, from the heart, for the first time in a long time.

He tried to keep a constant watch for the ideal battleground. There were plenty of dips in the ground as the land rolled from one hill to the next. The forest seemed to go on forever. He activated his boosters and started to weave his way among the giant trunks that seemed to grow upwards endlessly.

Did she have another illusion activated? Was he actually out in the open, making himself a perfect target? He kept his eyes trained on the sky, trying to spot any of those balloons that might be floating around and causing issues, but it was nearly impossible to see through the canopy.

No beam of white light had come chasing him yet, so he had to assume the weapon either had a range limit that he was outside of, or the hermit didn’t have any way to keep tabs on what was going on in her forest.

The sun had dipped down somewhere off in the distance; its final rays of light retreated from the forest and left nothing but pure blackness. No starlight peeked through, and the moon may as well have been absent considering how thick the canopy was.

He couldn’t see well, but the cameras did a decent enough job for him to not be flying blind. However, as the darkness fully shrouded him, he decided to deactivate the boosters and stick to walking. His MAC shouldn’t be giving off any sort of light now.

After a few hours of trying to be careful and quiet in an eighty-ton metal giant, Jace was pretty sure he found what he had been looking for.

It was a steep drop on all sides into a cratered-out hole in the ground. Jace didn’t know what caused the land to sink like this in some places, but it was a good place to test out a theory.

If this hermit could see everything that was going on in the forest, she would surely have some sort of trap she could spring on him once he hunkered down. If there was no trap, then she was operating as blind as he was. That would make things easier. If he could make sure he had the element of surprise, then ambushing this hunter wouldn’t be so difficult.

He settled into the center of the dip in the ground. Earthen walls raised up at least as high as his MAC on all sides. Jace kept his eyes on four monitors that showed the entire three hundred sixty-degree view of the area. If he saw a bright white light approaching, all he had to do was rush into the sides of this dirt bowl and hope that the raised ledge would be enough to stop the laser from reaching him. It could clearly be controlled, but it was making fairly slow paths through the trees back there. A sharp change like this might even be too much for it.

A few drops of water began to splash onto his machine. Each drop seemed to struggle to find its way down from the crisscrossed canopy above. The sound was almost unbearable for Jace. The longer the drops of water seemed to splash onto his armor with hardly a sound the more he wanted to start firing off his weapon. He wasn’t used to such small noises when in a MAC. He crossed his arms over his body and held himself tightly, “It won’t be long. We’ll find her and then we’ll fight. It won’t be long.”

It almost felt like the MAC itself was reaching out to him. It held him in a deep embrace and let him know that soon things would be better. Soon he would be able to hear the loud percussive blasts as he fired his rifle. Soon he would hear the deafening explosions as shots landed all throughout the forest. Soon he would hear the metal on metal as he closed the distance with this hermit and began to beat her into submission. Each strike with his hammer rending the metal armor and freeing the MAC from its horrid pilot.

These thoughts made Jace feel warmer amid the cold midfall rain that seemed to drown the landscape. The dirt beneath him began to lose its rigidity and started to consume his machine. Somehow the land was still soaked even with the trees blocking the rain. Jace wondered why that was the case. He wondered why he couldn’t figure out something so simple by himself. But he felt so warm as he was comforted by his MAC. ‘Not much longer’ it whispered to him.

Jace accepted the kindhearted words gratefully. He would wait.

After several more hours, Jace saw what he had been looking for.

A light that snaked its way through the darkness.

It was heading toward him.

He paused for a few moments to let the light get closer to him. His mind was suddenly back to the battle, though no less comfortable. This was great. If she had cameras set up, if she could see everything going on in the forest, she would have been able to catch him far faster than this. Even normal cameras would have at least shown a blur as the MAC scrambled the image.

The light also took a similar amount of time to reach him as it did to reach the two other pilots who died. The range was something around eight seconds of travel.

As the light finally closed on his position, still snaking through the forest with small and smooth movements, Jace flipped all the switches that reactivated his boosters. He crashed his machine directly into the dirt wall in the direction the light was coming from.

The light couldn’t make the sudden adjustment to veer down into the dirt and potentially burrow its way to Jace, instead it passed above him and headed for the other side of the divot. It started to make a small curve to the right, as if trying to circle back around, but it stopped in mid-air.

For a second, Jace was worried it was about to come together and reroute itself, as if it had a mind of its own.

But lasers don’t have minds. The area where the stream of light was disappearing didn’t grow like it had when it connected with the MAC and the man. Instead, the beam merely ceased to exist at the spot. The long trail of white light poured into the spot and disappeared as if into a black hole.

It reached its range limit. That meant she was firing about as far away as possible.

This gave Jace an idea.

He boosted himself out of the hole in the ground, causing a cascade of muddy water to pour off his machine, and watched the darkness for the next beam of light.

The light appeared once more, coming down from the treetops and streaming toward him.

He began to boost backward as he counted down the seconds.

The steam of light again disappeared into a void in front of him. Nine seconds. It was actually a fairly short distance, only covering about a half kilometer before disappearing like that.

It was strange to Jace that, even though the shot came from the treetops, none of the trees seemed to be shaking. It seemed entirely impossible for an eighty-ton machine to even stay up there suspended on those trees.

They were sturdy trees, sure, but they all grew thinner and frailer. Especially toward the top where the machine must have been hiding itself.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Could her MAC be lighter?

Jace had never even heard of a variant sinking beneath forty tons, and that was when they had no weapons or armor. They were brawling types for rushing the enemy.

It didn’t fit. It wasn’t making any sense.

Jace would have liked to have Ukko around, he might have some sort of input given his experience, but considering the man hadn’t gotten into contact with Jace yet, he figured this hermit had killed him back there.

Jace decided he needed to focus his efforts on what he was actually capable of doing. Trying to figure out this thing’s specs wouldn’t help if he didn’t even understand how it could move.

Jace waited for the next beam of light to approach him. It fired off in the same interval that separated the last two. It seemed like the weapon needed to charge for about ten seconds between each shot. That gave Jace ten seconds to close the distance.

More than enough.

The best way to figure how this MAC moved was to simply find it and see it for himself.

He cranked everything to max and started on a collision course for the approaching white beam. He fired off a handful of shots into the darkness. He didn’t fire up though, he was aiming for the bottoms of the trees, hoping to get a couple of them to collapse. If the hermit knew that Jace was aware of where she was hiding, she might throw something new into the mix.

In about three seconds Jace was face to face with the stream of light. He yanked down on a series of levers on the left side of his cockpit, activating the thrusters that lined the left calf and shoulder. Most of the left calf had been destroyed by the cannon fire his machine had taken from being a decoy not long ago, but the shoulder thrusters still managed to push him to the side, barely scraping past the white light of death.

He would get right underneath her. The now collapsing trees would throw off the balance of whatever kind of MAC she was in. Jace would boost up into the canopy firing off a few more shots to distract her. Once he got above her, he would bring down his hammer and smash her flat like the insect she was.

The stream of light continued on behind him, trying its best to course correct for the new target, but there was no way it could make such a sharp turn.

Jace arrived under where the light originated from.

He smiled as the white light disappeared into the void behind him. Two seconds to spare.

He boosted upwards and fired off three shots into the trees above.

But apparently his plan wasn’t as foolproof as he thought it was.

“Oh you’re a smart one aren’t you?” The trees all around Jace seemed to shudder for a moment. He fired off a few more shots as he hovered near the canopy, but his ammo was already drying up. “You’re not the first to get to this point of the fight. Figuring out the laser isn’t that difficult as long as you have half a brain cell to spare. But, considering what these machines do to the pilots, maybe I should still be impressed that you’re capable of any thoughts at all. Your little leader certainly isn’t. Not anymore at least.”

Jace kept his eyes on the surrounding treetops and his hands on his thruster controls. If that light came back at him this close… he might not make it out alive.

“So then, now that you’ve made it past the first hurdle, let’s go ahead and get started on the second!” Jace vaguely realized that she was excited, “I’ll let you in on a little secret Mr. Traitor: not many people make it past the second hurdle.”

The tops of the trees seemed to bring down a sprinkle of leaves and rain as they shook. Jace tried his best to keep track of which trees might be hiding the hermit, but it was no use. She was either moving too fast or too erratically for Jace to get a good bead on her.

“Oh come on Mr. Traitor, you were right under me weren’t you? I’m sure if you keep popping off shots you’ll find me soon enough.”

A white stream of light was already heading straight for Jace. He boosted backwards only to be cornered by another two beams of light.

He used his split fingers to flip nearly every lever at his disposal and activated all his boosters. His MAC shot straight up into the sky. However, only a few meters above the canopy was some sort of net that sent a shock through Jace’s MAC, dropping him like a stone.

Jace was honestly amazed by the bit of piloting he pulled off as he used the weight of the MAC’s limbs to redirect him while he fell back to the forest floor, barely evading the three beams of light that seemed to sink into a void above him as he fell past.

Jace could only sit and wonder where the hell the other two beams of light had come from.

“Oh, look at you. Very fancy moves. Unfortunately, you’re already caught in my web.” She seemed to be very certain that she just said something clever. She laughed with certainty as well.

Jace took no time to respond. It was unnecessary. His MAC was telling him all he needed to know: kill her. Free that machine from her wretched claws.

Jace would oblige.

Or at least, he thought he would.

Another barrage of white lights seemed to pop out of every treetop nearby. They all came crashing down toward him, each one surely as lethal as the last. Jace had to keep boosting backwards, settling himself further and further into the center of the forest where the trees seemed to grow even larger, making Jace in his MAC feel like nothing more than an ant amongst mountains.

Jace was searching the treetops for signs of the weapons. A few glints were clear indications of where the beams were coming from. He lobbed a few shots their way and a snowfall of crystals married with raindrops fell to the ground.

But it didn’t make any difference. The things he shot were just replaced by more that seemed to coat this entire forest.

The hermit may not have cameras set up, but apparently she had these beam-producing turrets all over the place.

It didn’t take long for Jace to run out of ammo. The empty click of his rifle was more than just an unwelcome sound. He tossed the weapon aside and put both hands onto the hammer.

His only hope now was to find her and close the distance.

But how the hell could he do that when he was being pursued by a dozen beams of white light that could incinerate his MAC and him with just an instant of contact?

Jace knew there had to be some kind of trick. Some kind of method to it all. No one gets in a life-or-death fight without protecting themselves.

Unless they’re crazy.

But her movements and attacks didn’t seem crazy. They seemed planned out.

Yes, in fact, Jace could hear it the more he listened. With each dodged laser and with each tree trunk seemingly sucked into the void by the expanding white light, Jace was sure that he was being guided. His MAC seemed to whisper to him in a conspiratorial tone: ‘she’s leading you somewhere’.

Each beam of white light seemed to push him in a certain direction. Specifically eastward.

Did this woman have something in the west that Jace wasn’t supposed to see?

‘To the west’.

Yes.

He agreed with the metallic beast that he sat with.

It was an agreement of two beings that both sought out the same goal.

Jace couldn’t have been happier as he realized he was truly at one with his machine. If he was going to bring peace to the enemy, it was bound to start with finding the peace in his own cockpit.

“How much longer do you think you can survive this? It’s just plain and simple insanity not to accept your fate at this point. Whatever power supply you have left isn’t going to be enough, I can promise you that.” She laughed to herself, but Jace paid it no mind, “Don’t worry too much, I’ll make you a nice grave if I remember where your body is. See, I have to go pay a visit to your leader once we’re done here, so I might not have time to respect your corpse. I wonder, do you think when I go back to visit him he’ll be absolutely mind-broken and babbling to himself? Oh God, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I ripped him out of that iron coffin and put him on display? The Chief likes to dig holes, so get this right? I’m thinking I’ll have him dig me a hole. I’ll make a border of epoxy and place your leader’s body inside. Hell, maybe I’ll really put in some effort and test out my taxidermy skills. Could you imagine? How cool would that look? Your mentor stuffed like a fucking squirrel and locked in a plastic box for all eternity?” As Jace continued to dodge the beams of light and stream his way westward her voice became more rushed and maybe even more worried, “Maybe I’ll finally have a reason to host a family dinner. You know, to show off the fancy new centerpiece? Come on Traitor, you can’t just stay silent the whole time. Silence in the presence of company is a clear sign of insanity. Does going crazy just run in the blood of you savage mercenaries?”

“I’m not,” Jace knew exactly how crazy he was. That was what he liked to think anyway. He was sane enough, but, for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to say he wasn’t insane, “a monster.”

Jace continued on his way, bobbing and weaving through the massive trees and trying his best to dodge and outpace the ever-present white lights that tried their best to lick at his heels.

The rain had been letting up as Jace made his way into thinner and thinner parts of the forest. Jace was getting close to the edge of the tree line. He would force this pathetic hermit out into the open. He would smash her like the bug she was. He would free her MAC from its painful servitude.

Jace was absolutely awestruck as his MAC burst through the final stretch of trees and flew out over a seemingly endless expanse of water. The moon above made its twin in the waters below. Two full and silver moons cornered Jace from both the top and bottom.

Jace was so incredibly happy.

After all, he was about to show this woman the true power of a MAC.

He rubbed his hand along the controls of his comrade, “It’s time to save our brother and kill this slave driver, do you think we can do it?”

The gears roared a positive answer and Jace prepared for the intoxicating fight that was about to take place.

He hovered over the abyss of water, watching the tree line that sprouted out of the cliff. Jace admitted that the hermit was right about one thing: his power supply wouldn’t last much longer. They had scavenged the spares from their operation zone by the bunker, but Jace had nothing left. He could only watch with growing anxiety as his power gauge fell lower and lower.

Jace wondered again, although it was mostly just to distract himself from the dropping gauge, why Ukko hadn’t let Lionel implement his new upgrades to the power canisters The Stragglers used. They may have made encounters like this a bit easier. But those sorts of questions were far beyond where Jace felt comfortable. He was a pilot. That was all.

The hermit broke her silence, “How much longer little dog?”

“It’s time for our fight.”

“Oh yes, absolutely. I’ll just go ahead and give up every advantage I have and meet you out over the water. That sounds like a plan. Tell you what, just go ahead and drop dead out there and then we can fight? Sound good?”

“What you want doesn’t matter.”

“Wow… you are literally crazy, aren’t you? Do you even remember where you are right now? What you’re doing? Dear God, I think I might actually feel bad if I kill you like this. I mean, thankfully I won’t have to, I’m sure you’ve only got a few more minutes out there. In case you didn’t know: MACs sink.”

The moon did a good enough job of lighting up the edge of the forest. Of course, Jace couldn’t see anything inside, but he didn’t need to. A few of the trees started to sway in a wind that didn’t blow.

She was coming.

A white stream of light came pouring out of that grouping of trees. Jace simply moved back until the beam disappeared. The reflection in the water was oddly beautiful to watch. ‘Patience’ Jace heard from his machine.

Yes, Jace agreed. Patience is key. Even at the edge of the forest, the hermit could probably still use all those extra beam-producing machines. He needed her out over the water. But Jace’s patience had a time limit. His power was nearly depleted.

“You’re almost there. Soon I can free you.”

The hermit’s voice came across as strained, as if she were trying very hard to fix something, “Free me? Damn, I wish I could put you down like the rabid dog you are, but you’ll drown soon enough.” She almost seemed to be convincing herself rather than talking to Jace, “I’ll just let you drown. It’s perfect.”

Jace held his anger at bay. She was fighting with her machine. She was forcing it to stay. Jace felt sick as he realized both he and the hermit were pulling the beast in different directions. But Jace’s direction held salvation. He had no choice but to pull harder.

“They’ve forced you to dream for too long. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to do what we were born to do! It’s time to finally die and wake from this miserable nightmare!”

“What… what the hell are you doing?” The hermit who had always tried to sound so in control was now nothing more than concentrated fear and confusion.

It was people like her…

Ragged breaths and muttering leaked from her, still broadcasting out to Jace.

People like her making these dreams to trap us.

The ragged breathing and muttering was quickly replaced by screaming and pleading.

Dreams that were torturous. Dreams that needed to be escaped.

The trees shook once more, this time violently, as a splotch of darkness with eight blue streams of fire pouring from its feet burst from the tree line and charged toward Jace.

In the instant it took for Jace to ready himself for the fight, he realized something:

He had changed. He was something different. And that was good. The world was imbalanced. These machines, the apex predators of this future, had been shackled and enslaved. Jace… Jace would be their messiah. Jace had to be broken down. All of that pain and confusion and emptiness was all to get him here! Jace was certain, he was so very certain as memories leaked from his head and thoughts turned to dust, just one more push. One more push and he would be transformed fully into the savior the MACs were shaping him to be. One more push to forget them:

Lionel.

Guinevere.

… Callista.

Jace’s head screamed, but he could no longer hear it.

After this fight, he would find his ‘one more push’. And then…

I’ll finally wake up.

He used the same move he had before as the white beam of light approached him. He slid beside the beam and boosted in to close the distance to the enemy.

The MAC was a large central cannon that had eight leg units installed. It was covered in tiny rectangular pieces of glass that seemed to reflect the moon in a million different ways. The entire machine seemed to glow silver. The large barrel of the cannon was dwarfed by the housing it grew out of. A power source large enough to supply the main weapon and still move the arachnid-esque beast had to be large after all. It looked almost like an orb weaver with a long metal tube attached. On the right side of the housing sat a glass container. It looked strangely fragile when compared to the rest of the creature and, with the lighting inside that cockpit, it gave the perfect view of the hermit.

Jace was bringing his hammer up from beneath once again, hoping to smash this insect. It was quick, and with a swirl of legs it managed to throw itself out of range of Jace’s mallet. Before it moved, however, Jace saw the hermit within the cockpit. It looked like she was still screaming, although her voice had stopped broadcasting to Jace. Either that, or her voice no longer worked.

The lower half of the glass container had strings of red spread out within. It almost looked like the root system of a tree: webs tangled in one another as they sought to dig deeper into the ground and secure their home. The upper half of the hermit’s body seemed to serve as the trunk of the tree and faint puffs of gore that burst from her head seemed to be growing out the branches that would carry the crimson buds.

Jace thought it looked very beautiful.

The legs of the spider now sent it into a spin. It spun faster and faster until finally reaching a suitable speed to fire its main gun and send out a ring of white light that expanded in all directions.

It would have been easy enough for Jace to dodge. In fact, it likely would have been far easier to dodge than the regular beam that snaked after its target.

But the machine didn’t fire just one ring. It slowly floated up and released ring after ring of white light that didn’t seem to dissipate nearly as fast as it should have. Small strings of white light seemed to rip away from the closer rings and start making their way toward Jace.

Apparently, the creature had outgrown its limiters.

It was awake.

Jace shot down instead of toward the awakened beast. It had long been a basic concept of war: if you’re going to fight something that’s filling the sky with death, you either dive from the top or approach from the bottom.

Jace hoped the idea would still apply to MACs. Specifically, MACs that had broken free.

He reached the bottom ring and snaked into the bright white cyclone of death. The rings down here were growing smaller, seemingly shrinking inward on themselves. Jace decided to forget about his power gauge. There was no other choice anyway. He threw everything to max output and began to zip his way up through the rings. The beams that would ‘peel’ off of the rings seemed to almost have a proximity trigger. It was only after he passed a ring that it would peel itself into a scattering of thin strips of white light that sought him out.

The light practically blinded Jace as he continued up toward the blue thrusters that shone at the top of the spiral.

The blue thrusters were framed menacingly by the sheer blackness of the night sky.

The machine itself didn’t seem to notice Jace’s approach up the blinding column until it was too late. The bright blue boosters altered direction, trying to turn the turret and fire a shot down into the column that would surely seal Jace’s fate.

Jace felt truly alive. This was exactly the fight he always wanted. This was exactly the way he wanted to die.

But, Jace thought as he burst through the final ring and found himself looking down on the metal spider with a red vial of glass where its cockpit used to be, he had a holy purpose in life now that he simply couldn’t ignore.

That he couldn’t run from.

The hammer crashed into the turret and sank halfway in.

A faint glow started to rise out of the reflective surface that seemed to coat the machine.

Jace realized these were the weapons in the forest that were firing off the miniature beams of light to corner him in.

Jace boosted away as the metal beast went critical and the white light seemed to almost grow from within and eat away at the machine.

Jace didn’t get very far. His own MAC shut down entirely and now plummeted back toward the ground. He didn’t hear any large explosions, but he did feel a sudden and violent quake. If not for the harness that strapped him in, he likely would have been knocked unconscious. Or, even more likely, he would have been smashed into a paste against the insides of the metal container.

He tried to operate the manual crank that could lever open the cockpit in emergency situations. With that kind of impact, he was fairly sure he didn’t land in the ocean.

By some miracle, after everything this militarized golem had been through today, the crank still worked and the cockpit creaked open.

Jace climbed out and sat down on the metal frame. He stared out over the ocean from his perch on the tree covered cliff side.

White rings and streams of light seemed to rise out of the ocean and into the sky in a pillar that looked truly divine, all leading to an orb that was bright enough to be the sun’s imposter.

“You finally woke up from that cruel dream that shackled you, and now you can have your first real dream. One that’s wonderful and pure.” Jace patted the creature beneath him, “I’ll do the same for all of you. No matter the cost.”

Jace watched as the pillar began to dissipate, revealing the silver moon that was retreating behind the horizon. The first few rays of sunlight struggled through the forest and landed on Jace’s back.

“No matter the cost…”