Micah slid down the rope in a full-body hug. The collector’s gaze bore down on them, frozen.
Ryan went to jump and hesitated. It wanted him, or his raincoat. If he went down to help, he would lure it toward them.
His hand jerked to his armguard and hesitated. He could take it off? He’d broken that promise once before. Why not do it again?
Micah would be angry …
The tactical value?
Lisa’s hand fell on his. “Don’t. You can’t expect not to get hurt, Ryan.”
That was sort of the point. Every second under the perfect protection of the raincoat was suffocating. The allure of a monster like it, that might even be able to hurt him while he wore it …?
But if anything, her gaze was more intense of the two. She would be upset, and he had made this mistake before.
Micah raced toward Anne and Shala with their arms out to welcome him, two people his age who could be proper friends to him, for once. He would be safe in their hands.
“Where do you need us?” Ryan asked.
“Closer to them!” The guild worker waved toward her colleagues on the ground. “If you can stay near the ledge to distract it— Without getting hit by a spit attack, of course.”
“Of course.”
They moved.
The collector jerked back into motion and slammed its limbs into the earth. Two metal arms lifted a giant chunk of the plateau and hurled it ahead. It stared and its mouth shot a cone of light. The chunks froze. It used those to cross, tilting its head oddly down on the way.
When it was halfway on the floating bridge, Navid spoke, “Hold.”
It held.
Ryan kept his eye forward, but he couldn’t help but feel a bit of wonder every time he did that. It was a sword cane but somehow, it was enough to turn Navid from a bit of a bratty rich kid into an actual noble, and his friend into someone who could jump off a cliff.
That was a real magic item, one that elevated and inspired. And he could admit, he was jealous.
They approached the guild workers who were setting traps and looked back. “What now?”
“Not used to acting as bait?”
He huffed. “You’d be surprised.” He still wasn’t sure if he liked it. On the one hand, it could keep his allies safe. On the other, it made him feel impotent.
The collector turned. The rope lady fired a bolt. A multicolored explosion rocked its maw and its golden light failed. There was a brief moment of silence before the titan fell.
Far in the distance, past a crashing wave of bronze flames, three small figures ran.
There was a finality in the scene. Ryan took one last deep breath to settle his lungs and nerves, and stood up straight. He felt as though he could look ahead and see how this would end: dozens of guild workers raining down hell while it lay trapped and wounded this time.
“I guess our job here is done.”
Lisa stared, lips shifting from side to side. It was oddly expressive for her. “And I can’t throw one more [Fireball]?”
The collector scraped against the wall with an unholy sound of cracking stone and wrenching metal and impacted. The thump echoed up the walls.
Ryan grimaced.
When the sound dimmed, Navid gestured, “You might hurt a guild worker. They do not take kindly to that. If there is one thing you should fear the guild for, it’s their bureaucratic might.”
The sounds of barked orders and fighting picked up. Ryan spotted the woman with the warhammer hanging from the cliff, guzzling a potion while others rained fire with arrows, bolt, and ropes.
“Cynthia!” a man called.
She threw the empty glass bottle at it—he frowned at the waste—then released her holster and dropped.
Seemingly before her boot touched the ground, she stepped forward in a blinding rush and drove her hammer up into its face.
Ryan grimaced at the sound of metal rending. It was thrown from side to side in the chasm and reverberated in his ears, but he had to take another step forward to look when that single hit sent the automaton rocking up and back.
It put it most of the way between the stylized blue pitons they’d hammered into the ground, right where they wanted it.
They flashed. Roots of lightning zapped the titan from all sides, rolling across its scales, and fell over it in the form of fizzing blue ropes.
It tried to move up and the roped flashed back into lightning that kept it down.
“[Lightning Prison].” Lisa cocked her head. “Why lightning, though? You would think against a machine …”
“Doesn’t metal attract lightning or something?” Ryan asked.
“I mean because of its enchantments. If those are powered by … Maybe it disorients it?”
Navid laughed. “Look at you two. You’re acting like this is a free arena match which … Huh, I suppose it is. Neat.”
“Are arena matches like this?”
“They can be, the good ones. You should see some of the highlight matches of the King’s Court. Those are good. They’ll stay with you.”
Lisa turned to him. “I thought you were a fan?”
“Well, yeah,” Ryan mumbled. “I read the stories and some accounts in the papers or magazines, but I’ve only ever seen … one?”
Navid sounded bemused. “You’ve only ever been to one arena match?”
“Maybe two, but I’m not sure the second one, uh— It wasn’t the real thing.”
Lisa stared. “You’ve only ever been to two arena matches? You have lived here your entire life, what have you been doing?”
He shrugged. “Training?” She didn’t look away so he added, “I grew up in Westhill.”
“Not an excuse. We’re going to have to fix that someday.”
Ryan hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure.”
That sounded nice, actually.
The collector struggled against its prison. Its bronze scales were seared and flayed. A few were struck clean off or cracked, revealing moving pieces within. Cogs, cylinders, and metal arms worked and glowed with an ethereal bronze light. Its dented jaw wouldn’t move right. A few of its smaller legs were gone. One of the big ones was mangled. And whenever one of its circular shutters opened like a rolling fan for a metal arm to come out, it was struck by lightning.
All the while, the guild workers bombarded it with spells, arrows, bolts, and boulders from a safe distance.
It was done for but somehow, it refused to die. If it could ‘die’. Maybe there was some important piece they had to break before it stopped moving, like a crystal.
He doubted it would explode into a burst of smoke. He wondered what kind of metal it was made of …
He wondered how their attacks passed through the prison. “Does the lightning only work one way?”
“No,” Lisa said. “Well, yes. It can be if you learn the spell that way—or have a Skill to help, I guess. But they’re keyed. Look?”
One of the guild workers held a blue badge, stylized in the same way as the pitons. He barked orders. Here and there, people cupped their hands over their ears to listen more clearly.
“He must have some way of propagating the effect,” Navid said. “If it could naturally do that … I imagine a minion of Morgana isn’t stupid. It won’t blindly try to hunt for the most valuable item in its vicinity. It will go for the most cost-effective one.”
Ryan frowned.
“Maybe he’s team leader,” Lisa said and smiled, “like Kyle.”
“Huh?”
“Maybe the badge and the pitons were their lure. A trap within a trap, like a fruit bowl for flies.”
Ryan gestured away. “Wait, if the collector isn’t supposed to be stupid, then why are we here? If we aren’t helping, we can leave.” They could be earning money, training, finding their own adventure and challenges instead of acting as bait.
Lisa asked, “Don’t you want to watch?”
He hesitated.
“We are helping. It really wants my sword cane, trust me. [Sneak Thieves] would risk becoming [Muggers] to get their hands on this thing.”
“If you say so …”
A metal arm pulled out a stylized tower shield, with a stag face and antlers worked up from the bottom along the sides like a frame.
An explosion flung it out of its hand, and the collector immediately withdrew another, smaller shield—almost a buckler—that absorbed some of the incoming lightning with a blue glow.
Two arms down, it pulled out a bark shield that was almost identical to Ryan’s, except without the multicolored, dried fire potion sheen his had because of Micah’s potion used to regrow it.
In-between the shields, a third arm pulled out a giant, severed golem arm that held a bright orb of ice in its palm.
Inside the glowing orb, a third, severed arm he didn’t recognize hovered, frozen. This one was more petite.
The lightning flared, and Ryan turned with a grimace but rushed back to look as soon as he could. The arm looked familiar.
It was humanoid in shape and size, feathered, green and blue, with a glossy sheen like the vibrant plumage of a healthy hummingbird.
The blood from its stump wound was equally frozen into a spiked ruby wall. Its sharp hand cupped—
He blinked. “Is that another glass ball …?”
Navid stepped over. “Where? What?”
“No.”
It was a soap bubble, frozen mid-cry.
All of a sudden, the ice vanished and the stone arm let go. The metal arm tossed it aside like trash and snatched the bird arm up. Its sharp fingers tightened. The soap bubble popped. A ripple of something went through them.
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“Oh, fuck.”
Ragged voided wailed in the distance—bobcats. A warbling roar followed, and one that sounded reptilian echoed in clicks and bursts.
“What was that?” Lisa asked, sounding more confused than concerned. She glanced back at the wilds behind them where monsters could show up at any second.
“We should move.” Ryan stepped away. If it had called for help, every monster in a hundred meters or so would come stampeding to its aid. They wouldn’t want to be standing at the ledge of a far drop when that happened.
“The Root!” someone cried out, and he looked, squinting to find what he was seeing.
Another guild worker shouted, “Barrage incoming!”
Far in the distance, a blurry smudge moved against the sky on the side of the Root. It twinkled like a star.
Lisa jerked forward, dropping her staff to pull them back as she yelled, “Watch out!”
The response was delayed. On a sunny day, from at least two floors away, lightning struck the chasm in a chained, rapid-fire burst that broke the stone and threw up waves of dirt.
Monsters froze in the bushes, hackles raised, and fled. Boulders fell from the cracked edge of the chasm onto the battle below. People scattered.
Ryan covered his ears and shut his eyes, rushing from the impact zone.
When it was safe to look, he found the opposite ledge shattered and tilled. The guild workers had scattered individually or huddled together under wards. Dust caked their air like smoke.
They yelled things he didn’t hear over the ringing in his ears and staggered out from cover.
The collector was free and fighting.
Miraculously, a few of the guild workers still stood. They fought its arms off as their enemy and teammates picked themselves back up.
The blue pitons lay scattered. The collector froze an entire group of workers huddled under a warding sphere with golden light. Arms popped out with items and jerked back inside, only to pop back out with new ones like it was deliberating which to use.
“What the fuck?” Navid said, a little too loud. He worked his jaw with a grimace. “That isn’t supposed to happen. Where’s the stampede that usually answers?”
“Morgana answered,” Lisa said.
On the Root in the sky, the smudge was gone.
Navid sounded urgent. “Is she coming here?”
“I doubt it? I mean, I don’t know,” Lisa said, “but it’s ignored her minions when they were being attacked right next to it before, while it was setting traps on the eighth floor, so—”
“Let’s hope.”
Its minion’s eyes, reinforced glass orbs behind metal slits, flickered from person to person as it fought off the workers who were still standing.
It turned to the others, glanced up— Its eyes brushed past them without stopping for a heartbeat.
Ryan tapped her shoulder. “It ignored us. We should leave anyway, get the others.” He began to move, with or without them.
He wanted to help, to lift the guild workers off the ground, to fight that automaton, but he couldn’t see any way of doing that. They would only be a liability, a distraction to the workers.
Better to get out of their feet and see if they could help someone on the sidelines, or fight off monsters if those came back after being spooked by the lightning barrage.
Navid frowned at his comment and stepped forward again. “It shouldn’t have ignored us. My sword … Maybe it wants to escape? Recuperate?”
“Maybe it can’t sense us,” Lisa said, following. “There’s a lot of noise down there, and it’s hurt.”
They were talking too much, but the words mattered.
Escape where to …? Recuperate how …? Was it just going to run back to Morgana like a kid to its mom and have her fix it up, having wasted so many items in a lost battle?
Far in the distance, three small figures were not in a cave headed their way. Instead, they watched, the same as them, like a bunch of idiots with their pants down.
Two stepped forward as if they wanted to help. The third held a silver and gold blade.
“Madin. Your sword cane? You split it in half?”
“Huh? It’s … uh, a conjuration affixed to the handle!” he called ahead and rushed to catch up.
“Yeah, but does it know that? It’s still magic, right?” He glanced back at Lisa. It would make that magical noise she mentioned?
A metal arm fired a crossbow. A guild worker managed to deflect the bolt at the last moment but a shockwave sent him reeling. The collector swept in and its arms plucked the pitons out of the stone one by one.
It turned, horse-kicked a man, threw a potion that exploded into a chunk of ice, and threw two pitons like darts at the warhammer fighter.
They flew past her and with no reason to dodge, she charged. A blue chain flashed into existence at the last moment, caught her, and pinned her to the wall.
By the look of surprise on her face, Ryan guessed they were not supposed to do that, at all, but when she pushed against the chain, it flashed as it had before and her body convulsed.
She’d withstood the lightning barrage, but not this? A one-time Skill or item? Was she not keyed to them anymore?
The other pitons disappeared inside its body, stolen.
Someone ran to help and the collector spat a glob of fluid that tore into the stone with hissing smoke, where he had stood a moment before. He dodged.
Instead of finishing the job and killing any of the workers it had just incapacitated, the collector turned.
The warhammer lady had been the last one standing in its way. The chasm floor was completely free in one direction, except for three small idiots fleeing in the distance.
The collector turned its eyes on them and, despite its mangled legs, it ran.
----------------------------------------
Anne thrust an arm out. “Sy! Sword! Now!” He flipped it and handed it over as they skid to a stop.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a strength potion? Or a 'might' potion?” Anne asked as she fiddled with the phantom chain that flickered in and out of his sight.
His answer was clipped as he watched something nearly as big Maria, if not as fast or nearly as silent, barrelling toward them. “Uhm—no.”
If this was what a good arena match was like, Micah never wanted to see one.
“Hah,” she sighed with a tired smile, then held the sword up like a spear. “Guess we’ll have to do this the hard way.”
“What are you—?”
Anne skipped forward with one arm up in a perfect throwing form. Her glove glowed, surrounded by tight phantom rings. She threw.
The rings released into a ripple. The blade of the sword flew like a spear, trailing a phantom chain behind it all the way to the handle she held in her hand.
Like an atlatl, he thought. A spear-thrower. Except, not like that at all. A sword wasn’t meant to be thrown, especially not just its blade, even if it was made of magic, but somehow, she made it work.
The blade trailed two-thirds of the way up the chasm and sunk into the rock … and it didn’t stop.
The glowing chain distorted and slipped inside the wall. He could see where it fell by the golden line it left behind, thicker than the blade itself. It formed an arc in the rock. Anne gave it a tug and it began to rapidly reel in. She didn’t wait for it to finish before she ran.
They were right behind her. Behind them, the collector gained on them and the moment the blade slammed back into its handle, they stopped so Shala could hold it for her. She set a knife against the bundle of chains, strained against the resistance, and cut.
The wall cracked like a thunderclap. The sound was impossibly loud as it echoed from wall to wall, and his jaw fell as he realized what was about to happen—
Or what should have happened. Despite the chain and damage from the lightning, the cut was too thin. A layer of rock sloughed off the wall, but it wasn’t enough to make it collapse.
A warhammer hit the wall with a sound like a boulder, and a fissure spread toward the broken section—it wasn’t fast enough. Not faster than the collector.
A fireball hit the wall above the crack. Finally, the stone fell out like the brow of a ship headed for a titan, and crumbled into a landslide.
It clipped the collector, slid off its scales, and crushed its far right leg, but the creature made it out, tripped, and crumbled to the ground a little over a dozen meters behind them.
Micah looked ahead, chin up, pumping his arms like he was running a hundred-meter dash with a scream stuck in his throat. Too close!
His battered body swore vengeance on him.
“Micah!” Shala cried.
He turned.
Anne lagged behind, heaving like she had just finished a marathon instead. Just from cutting the chain?
The sight surprised him, as if somehow, he had expected her to overtake him at any moment and lead the way.
Micah rushed back and awkwardly steadied her. The cave entrance was right there, a few meters away, but the collector was already getting up. Anne had warned them about its breath attacks. What if there was no cover inside?
“We need to distract it.” He got his water bottle, took a swig, and exhaled through [Dissettle], breathing a fog cloud at its eyes. It sunk around their heads like flour. Would that help?
“Fog— It sees the sword,” Anne said with a grimace.
“Right. Move away from where it saw you. Get to the cave,” Shala said and left, and Anne's weight sagged down on Micah alone, holding him in place.
“Wait!”
“He’ll be fine,” Anne said with far less concern than he expected given the situation. Weren’t they friends? “Trust him.”
It wasn’t like he had much of a choice. They steered left until they reached the cave and he checked but didn’t see any immediate threats inside. Anne had her mace …
“Do you have an emergency healing potion? A stamina potion? Will you be fine if I leave you here?”
He still worried a horde of monsters would appear at any second, summoned by the bubble pop. He hadn't seen any at all, which spooked him.
“Yes, sort of, no.”
“Sort of? No?”
“It’s a twofer, and no, I won’t be fine because you can’t go out there.”
Micah frowned and looked her in the eye. “Why are you concerned about me going out but not Shala?”
He didn’t know if he asked because he was upset or hopeful.
“Because—” she broke off and started over, “In part, because he has the sword and we’ve both trained to use it. You don’t have anything like it, and you haven’t. In part, because I’ve trained with him and know what he’s capable of. No offense.”
Micah considered that and shrugged. “How else will know if you don’t see me doing anything?”
“Huh? No, Micah. That was not a challenge—”
“Too late!”
His body complaining, he ran through the fog.
He came face-to-face with a battle they had watched from afar. The first two of the guild workers had managed to catch up, and they fought their way over to Shala.
The helpful lady with the warhammer looked pissed as she had to dodge her own pitons.
A man with a crossbow stood on the rockslide and tried to cover her.
Shala had run to the far side of the chasm and around. Not just to pull the construct’s attention away, but to draw it back to the guild so it couldn’t easily mug them and escape?
The giant centipede had to turn and when it did, golden light flashed. It caught one of Shala’s arms, and he barely managed to yank it out and kept running.
The collector immediately dropped the effect and continued turning its massive body.
Micah fired glue shots at its exposed gears. It might not do anything, but it kept his hands busy while he moved and considered his options.
It was distracted, so it was easy enough to reach its shoulder. When one of its metal arms pulled out another item, he cast, “[Freeze].”
The arm was barely covered in ice, and it ignored that to slap him. The metal struck his shield like a bat, wrenching his already wounded shoulder again as it knocked him back.
He stifled a shout and jumped up, ready to block, dodge, fight—
It casually tossed a potion over its shoulder. He snatched his slingshot up with barely a moment to react.
“[Aimed Shot]!” His vision condensed to a point. The ball clipped the glass and didn’t crack it, but nudged it off-course. He didn’t see where it landed or if that had helped.
The frosted arm disappeared in its shutter, leaving swirls of wind in the cold air, and returned a second later with a crossbow pointed straight at him—his answer.
Micah dropped like a turtle. The impact was worse than the arm slap. It threw him back and he rolled in a ball over the rubble. When he peeked out from behind his shield—a black bolt stuck inside it—the crossbow was gone. It was back to ignoring him.
He moved.
Was it magic resistant? He had [Lesser Vibrancy] and it was pure, focused. That was supposed to make it stronger than twofer Skills like vigor, but his spell had barely frozen it.
He ran alongside its body huddled behind his shield and with one arm up.
“[Condense Water]. [Dissolve].”
The water flowed into the cracks and missing scales and assaulted the magic and metal within. He had to keep trying. Monster magic was essences. It should work—but the thing gave no indication if it did. The top layer of essences scuffed like scratched polish.
“Stranya! What are you doing?” Shala shouted as he retreated around its front, hiding near the chin of the beast and dragging his blade along to create one long, golden line in its face.
It was in the process of rearing itself up—either to freeze him or crush him; Micah didn’t know.
“Helping!” At least, he wanted to. He couldn’t get too close without an arm trying to smack him and just like the golem earlier, if the collector moved a little too fast, it could crush him by accident.
He needed tools, damnit. All he had were weak spells, childish ammunition, glue, and poison that was useless against a metal golem.
That left him with one option, what he had considered earlier: copy the collector and steal.
It was dangerous to handle unknown items, especially ones whose enchantments had been tampered with by someone—or something, in this case—but what else could he do?
Well, he could throw himself into the inner workings …
“The Guild—” Shala snapped and deflected an arm with the side of his blade, leaving a golden cut in the metal, “—is here—we have to—retreat!”
Two arms ducked inside and came out, one gripping a pike, the second a shrunken, severed head. Silver hair fell over red skin. That skin looked ... alive?
Shala saw it and froze. The golden light from above engulfed him at that moment, freezing him in place.
Micah turned on his heels.
The head unfurled its eyes and spoke with a voice like honey, “A customer! Nice sword. Wanna’ buy an even better one?”