The mutated robot pulsed with power, its metallic skin twisted into purple flesh. Its metallic surface was broken open in pieces, revealing the missing parts of its body. Its arm elongated into the blade of a sword. It was raised high and then slammed down toward Sam's furry bear head.

Sam didn’t flinch, but Rick did—slightly. It was still disconcerting seeing sharpened blades bouncing off the bear’s fur. He tossed out another Healing Cloud, but she barely needed it. A flurry of arrows and darts ripped into the front of the creature, and Gambit’s sword hacked off an arm. A moment later, it fell into the dirt.

“These are too easy,” Sam said as she shifted back into human form. Her white armor was blinding in the morning sun.

“We might need harder groups,” Rick said, scratching the back of his head, slightly embarrassed. The fight had gotten so much easier with a real tank keeping the attention off the rest of the party.

“Why don’t we move further into the camp?” Gambit pointed down into the bowl-shaped valley nearby.

They were fighting robots to the north of Mesa City. There, the robots were twisted and warped by the power of an artifact that sat in the center of a large crater around the base of a house-sized boulder of purple stone. The stone glowed faintly, only visible where the edges were in shadow from its bulk.

A shanty town had grown up around the base of it. It was populated by a collection of Rorks that were in various stages of transformation. Rick would not have been able to tell whether they were Rorks turning into robots or robots gaining flesh to turn into Rorks. But the quests they had picked up in the farming village made it clear.

They were supposed to look for missing farmers. They had also been tasked with investigating debris that had apparently disappeared in this area. Based on that, Rick was pretty sure the crystals were somehow mutating normal Rorks into robots.

He wondered if this was how the robots around the city had been made. Had they once been Rorks?

Rick’s thoughts were interrupted as he glanced down into the valley. There were a lot of them down there. How many would they be pulling at once?

The single robots they had been fighting so far had barely dented Sam’s health. But still—

“Sure, let’s go!” Sam said responding to the suggesting to move deeper into the camp. She immediately turned and headed off down the hill. Rick opened his mouth to protest that he was the group leader, but the rest had already turned and followed her.

The encampment itself was just a collection of people going about their daily lives—except they happened to be robots.

At the edge of town, they came upon two of the robotic Rorks. These were less transformed and looked almost like Rork wearing patchy, random chunks of green plate mail. They were stacking cylinders and crates in a pile.

Sam and Gambit charged in as soon as they reached the range of their abilities. They blasted across the ground, kicking up twin trails of dust, and slammed into the pair of Martian cyborgs. Claws and swords flashed.

Sam’s target only took a minor chunk of health, while Gambit’s suffered a quarter of its hit points gone in an instant. The robots lashed back, and Gambit’s health dropped by a similar margin.

The white bear snarled and lashed out at Gambit’s target, hitting it twice before it turned its attention to her. Meanwhile, the other enemy was pounding her hairy backside.

Rick was still rushing down the hill, trying to get into healing range. Their charges had carried them well clear of his reach, and he was struggling to catch up. Gambit’s health was down to half when Rick’s healing mist finally reached him.

When Gambit’s health bar finally lit up, indicating he was in range, Rick’s healing mist brought him back up. Their health pools were large enough now that Rick was really starting to need a large single-target ability to round out his rotation.

Sam was now tanking two targets, and her own health was suffering. But healing mist started creeping her health in the right direction. Rick followed up with *Protect* on her to let the Healing Cloud catch up.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The two targets were pushed back slightly by the translucent bubble as it popped. The bear threw what appeared to be a dirty look in his direction.

“Can you make that thing not push them away from me? It’s hard to keep aggro if I can barely reach them.”

Rick opened his mouth to give her an angrier retort but then stopped. That did make sense. He needed to check his ability tree to see if more points would make it do that. The knockback effect was nice on smaller targets, but perhaps what he needed was a different mitigation ability.

Distracted by considering the options, he didn’t respond to her. The comment rankled him, but he was trying hard not to pick a fight. By the end of their relationship, fights had come too easily. Even the smallest disagreement had spiraled out of control. And now, those habits were hard to break.

He found himself reflexively disagreeing with everything she said and frequently had to bite his tongue.

Sam smacked the two robots a couple more times, but she kept looking over her shoulder at Rick as if expecting him to say something. Then she suddenly turned and flashed away in a blur.

Rick jerked in surprise and rushed after her. She tore straight into the center of another pack of three robots. The two she had been fighting turned and jogged after her. Her original targets were still above half health.

Mia and Daniel started switching targets, pelting the others with arrows and darts.

“Focus fire on the low ones!” Rick yelled.

Sam’s health was starting to suffer, and he had barely gotten back into Healing Cloud range. He spammed it on her over and over, but her health was still creeping downward as the incoming damage overwhelmed the rate at which she could heal.

Daniel shifted his aim, but Mia didn’t immediately.

“Mia, shoot Daniel’s target!”

Even as Rick said it, Daniel shifted targets again.

“Damn it,” Rick thought. “I need a way to mark targets. I’ll have to ask Slate if that’s something I can put ability points into.”

He resolved to search through the ability trees himself later. For now, he focused on keeping Sam alive.

One of the mutants at the back of the pack stopped short before reaching Sam's melee range. Its hand started to glow, and a casting bar appeared. It was turned away from the warriors and seemed to be pointing its spell toward Rick or Daniel, who was standing near him.

The casting bar was getting full, so Rick launched a Force Wave at the robot. Just as he cast, Sam turned and lunged for the mutant. Her paw came up short as the mutant was knocked back several yards, and her claws just missed it.

"Don't do that!" she snapped.

She lunged a few steps forward and hit the casting mutant just as it started another spell. But doing so caused one of the others to turn and go after Nia. The others went after Daniel, who immediately started backing away.

"Don't move! Look out!" Gambit shouted just as another pack of mutants came at them from behind.

Daniel had stepped too far back and gotten aggro on another group.

He started to run, but several blows hit him at once, and his health plummeted.

Then Sam was there, charging into the pack with blurring speed and flashing claws.

After that, the fight descended into madness.

The first pack, who Sam had left damaged but not dead, kept staying outside.

They kept trying to stop and cast just outside her melee range.

This made it difficult for her to get them all into one place.

This meant that as she moved to get aggro from one the others would be hitting her from behind. She took a lot more damage when she was hit from behind.

"Gambit, focus the casters!" Rick shouted. "Nia, Daniel, go after that one."

Rick had to jump forward and point vigorously to get their attention. He swore not to go out on any more quests until he had grilled Slate about target marking. In games he played back home, there was usually a mechanic that allowed a raid leader to put icons over targets' heads. But he hadn't figured out how to use one of those, if there was one built in. And if there wasn't, perhaps there was some other way to do it with a wand or something. Perhaps if he could get his hands on a flashy spell with a big debuff, it would be easy for others to spot his target. Either way, he needed something like that to exist because Rick desperately needed a way to mark targets.

The farthest caster dropped from Gambit's onslaught and a moment later, the other one that the ranged DPS was shooting died as well.

"Now everybody on the one that Sam's hitting!"

"But she keeps changing targets!" Nia called, her voice filled with frustration.

"I have to!" Sam growled, "because you keep aggroing them!"

Rick ground his teeth in frustration as he threw another protection on Daniel, and hit Sam with yet another Healing Cloud.

"Then only attack something she hits twice in a row, and don't change targets until it's dead."

After that, the fight devolved into a stony silence punctuated by grunts and cries as the NPCs backed up and the mobs were killed one by one.

After the fight was over, and Nia was reloading her blowgun she threw a dirty look at Sam.The bear growled and went back to licking its wounds—literally—even though Rick's final Healing Cloud had just filled her health bar completely.

Gambit finished looting the bodies. “We have seven of ten shards. Can we just finish up here and worry about the debriefing when we're turning in?"

The only reply was a grunt from the bear and stony silence from everyone else.

Sam and Nia had maintained their standoff while they turned in the quest to the mad scientist. As they walked back to camp, Rick headed off the brewing thunderstorm.

"Before we debate what went wrong, I want to say that as soon as I can mark targets, most of the problems we had today will go away. So let's just drop it until I figure out how to do that."

Sam mumbled something that would have sounded more appropriate had she still been in her bear form, and Nia just glared and ignored them both.