For one second Seras was frozen with the sudden recollection of nearly being eaten alive by these things. Teeth shredding her inside, her vision twisting, and her useless pounding on its flanks.

“MOVE!”

Seras snapped out of it and dived down to the ground. It was just low enough to avoid the maw of the largest Star Glider. The golems had not been that quick. One snapped up the flame spitting golem, and another rammed into the rolling golem. The other two golems had assessed the Star Gliders as a threat and went on with the attack. The arbalest golem unloaded three rapid shots, while the blade golem took and step back and slashed into the flank of one of the Star Gliders.

Seras pushed off the ground but stayed low by maintaining a low crouch. She surveyed the chaos and made a simple decision. Get the fuck out of here.

She quickly found Athena and began to dart over her direction.

“What the fuck is going on?” Athena hissed.

“I think the Star gliders use dimensional substrate to communicate, just like me and the Builder Golems. I couldn’t get much, but I made out ‘nest breakers’ in their messaging,” Seras hissed back.

“Then the golems drew them? That explains a lot actually, if these things use the same sort of magic to talk then they might have attracted one or the other and fought. That’s why the outpost was a mess.”

Seras scratched her head, “this one actually might be my fault. I was more or less screaming into the sub-realm.” It was embarrassing really; her old crew always gave her crap for being too loud.

“Why?”

Seras pointed back, to where two golems now stood on top of one Star glider that was weakly moaning. “Those things aren’t robots, they’re people. Cut up and twisted into these things. They’re the people we were supposed to save.”

Seras remembered the villagers of Westend and imagined them cut up and pieced back together like these ‘Builder Golems’. What were they even supposed to be building in this astral space?

“Yes, and?”

Seras was stunned by the bland frankness in Athena’s voice. “You knew?”

“Not for long, but when I checked out the saw golem I saw that it had a human brain in it, cut into three pieces and ran through with metal spikes.” A crack appeared in Athena’s façade revealing how disturbed she really was by it. She shook herself, “my question is why did you get mad?”

Seras opened and closed her mouth. She didn’t know why she was mad, something about seeing innocent people taken from their homes and used like that just pissed her off. Pallimustus wasn’t like Ruin, on Ruin you were born into a system where you were expected to be used and discarded. Here it was different, and to see people who could have had a chance at happiness used like that hurt her on a primal level. The question was why had this never affected her before?

Athena must have seen the turmoil from Seras’ face, she laid a hand on her shoulder and gave her a firm squeeze. “We’ll circle back to this later, right now we need to figure out what’s next?”

Seras glanced back and saw that three Star Gliders were now dead, but so was the rolling golem. Seras looked up to the sky and saw two wounded Star gliders fleeing the battle, but instead of flying into the asteroid field they flew through a constellation of stars and vanished entirely. With a start she realized that the constellation must have been the exit to this Astral space.

It was outside of her teleport range, and there was nothing solid to land on, but that didn’t really matter. Seras glanced down at the dead Star gliders, destroyed golems, and got a wicked idea.

“I’ve got a plan. Follow me and stay close,” she whispered as a grin broke out across her face.

She nodded and stood with Seras.

Seras watched the fight between the Star gliders and Builder Golems, the Star Gliders out numbered the Golems but were on the same rank of power. On paper the Star Gliders should be dominating, but just like when they attacked Seras in the shaft they had a limited capacity to fight their mechanical natures. They could gnaw on the golems, bludgeon them with their massive bodies, but then the Golems would just get back up again.

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What Seras needed was more mana to power her teleport, which meant she needed to kill either a golem or Star glider. Her preference was to go for the golems, despite their higher durability.

That’s when she saw her chance, two heavily wounded Star Gliders ganging up on the Arbalest Golem. They pulled off its non-weapon hand, and it was leaking blood and oil from the wound. Seras lurched forwards and broke into a dead sprint. Her every step thumped the ground hard in order to push herself forward faster.

She raised her rifle and fired twice, one shot hit the Golems head, and the other was aimed at the mechanism of its arm. The cord snapped with a thunderous crack, the end of the broken cord whipped around and gouged a deep wound into a nearby Star glider.

The Golem turned its head and focused on Seras, it may have just been her, but she thought she could almost see horror and shock in its dead red eyes.

The Star gliders saw that the Golem was fully disarmed and charged it in their blood frenzy. They fell upon it with open maws and wild abandon. Seras charged towards them and leapt high into the air, she flipped from the force of her jump and dropped a single silver hand sized object.

The grenade fell into the center of the fracas and exploded with a thunderous BANG! Three auras faded away from the battlefield as two Star gliders and a single golem died from Seras’ last grenade.

She landed on the other side of the three corpses and raised a single hand and began to chant, “break, and fuel my rise!”

Blue ethereal ribbons of mana rose from the corpses and added their power to her meager stores. A slew of Quintessence, spirit coins, and other miscellaneous things found its way into her pocket space. She had no time to look over the loot, and dismissed the popup screens to the side of her vision for later.

An enraged roar filled the space as the largest of the Star-gliders saw what she had done. It was the largest one she had seen so far, and its aura marked it as only a sliver away from silver.

It charged her, and Seras charged it. The maw of the damn thing filled her vision, it opened its jaw and prepared to rip her to shreds with its long terrible teeth. Seras towards it harder.

In the last possible moment when it seemed like the two would collide Seras lurched back and slid just below the thing’s belly. While the Star gliders could fly around with total impunity, they had to keep off the ground by at least half a meter or else they’d risk scraping their undersides. That was the gap Seras had ran for, the shortest path between where she had landed, and where Athena had taken cover.

She slid at least three meters before her momentum ran out, but it was enough to get past the gargantuan Star glider and allowed Athena to run up to her. She pulled Seras up with a grunt, Seras glanced up towards the exit and saw exactly what she was hoping for, another injured Star-glider pulling back into the labyrinth.

She pointed at it, griped Athena tight around the waist and teleported to her maximum range. Her mana nearly bottomed out again, and Seras’ vision began to swim and glitch, the edges going dark.

No, the condition, not now, she needed, she needed to grab…on…

Her vision went black, despite her attempts to fight it.

…

…

…

And then it came back in flash. Seras jerked around; she saw grey glittery rock passing by her fast, and could feel the air rushing past her. She looked up and saw a strong tanned hand clamped around her bicep like a vise grip. She looked up the arm and saw Athena, with one arm she held Seras back from damnation, and the other held onto the injured Star-gliders’ fin, all while wearing a pained expression.

From the way her arm was it looked like Seras’ weight might have dislocated her shoulder, and it was a true feat of determination that the woman was still holding on despite that.

The Star-glider jerked, and bucked in the air as it flew up, trying to throw them off. But now that Seras was awake she wasn’t letting that happen. She summoned up a knife and jabbed it deep into the beast’s flank. It howled in pain and jerked more urgently, but her knife was in too deep. Seras pulled herself up and gripped the same fin Athena was holding onto.

The woman sighed as Seras let go of her arm, she opened her mouth to say something, but the damn beast went into a barrel roll. Seras felt her already queasy stomach hit a critical stage and was thankful she hadn’t eaten anything other than spirit coins lately.

Seras tried to gauge the space around them but could only make out a small amount of this new space. All she could confirm was that this wasn’t the first shaft they had fought in, as this space was an enormous bubble of distorted gravity and rotating Stibnite clusters. The space was so vast Seras felt like it could have housed five jumbo jet from her world, wing tip to wing tip. The largest kind of passenger airplanes with a capacity of twelve-hundred passengers all crammed on top of each other.

She did catch sight of something promising though, a huge opening in the cavern, like a giant hand poked their finger straight through the stone.

She used her free hand to slap Athena’s good shoulder, she pointed outwards and mimed letting go, Athena nodded, looking fairly green herself. Seras held up a hand and tried to judge the best time to let go of the spinning Star-glider. She counted down for three with her fingers, and let go when she reached zero.

The spinning of the Star-glider flung them off with incredible speeds, and they both flew towards that huge gap. The gravity distortions threw them this way and that, but both ended up hitting the walls more or less where Seras had planned. The strange gravity of the chamber stuck both of them to the walls and gave them a straight shot at the tunnel she had seen.

They heard several enraged alarmed cries from the Star-gliders as they fell into the tunnel, which to them from their current orientation was like jumping into a bottomless pit. As they landed Seras realized why the Star-gliders had retreated to this cavern in the labyrinth, and why they had sounded so alarmed. All around them she saw broken Bulder Golems, and smashed eggs.

The eggs were more like giant round boulders and were it not for them being smashed open she wouldn’t have guessed at the contents. A final piece of the puzzle clicked into place just a smaller Star glider stormed into the tunnel.

Seras and Athena ran for it, both of them charging for a tiny gap in the back of this tunnel as the Star-glider tried to snap them up with its long jaw. Seras felt the remaining cloth of her burnt shirt snag and tear away, her smart skin prickled unnaturally at how close she came to getting her head snapped off.

They lunged for the gap and dove through, it was a space only big enough for a person to squeeze, so long and she was thin enough and ready for her skin to be shredded by rough stone. Athena was grunting ahead of Seras as she pulled herself forward. Seras, once again topless and crawling through a tight stone tunnel. She tried to turn skin sensitivity down like before, but despite sliding the slider all the way to zero she only felt her skin go somewhat numb, not anywhere close to what it should have been.

The Star-glider tore at the gap with its mouth and tried to batter its way through but the stone was too tough.

They slid through rock for five minutes; at about the two-minute mark Seras was beginning to fear that this chasm was a dead-end. But Athena claimed she could see a light and Seras chose to believe in her.

When they finally pushed out of the thin crevasse it was into the familiar lush environment of the verdant tunnels they had first traveled through.

They both fell to their knees, running their hands through the soft moss carpeting. They glanced to one another and laughed.

There was nothing funny about going through all that trouble just to seemingly wind up back where they had started. Except that it was. To their overtaxed and stressed-out minds this was the just about the funniest thing they had ever encountered.