Everything burnt.

My eyes watered in searing pain, throat and lips swelling at the first breath. Where it touched air, my skin itched and blistered. Wherever I’d come through to, it was incredibly hostile to human life.

I wasted no time activating Gear Shift, basking in immediate relief. In my hurry I’d thought I might have entered another lava world, but no. My treads lay on solid ground.

I’d taken the form of a large metal tank. The armour I was carrying could have put me in competition with a number of spaceships, but I was decidedly planet-bound.

The corrosive air peeled at my casing, but I had time. Though it wasn’t endless. And the longer I spent out in the atmosphere, the worse my condition would be on returning home. The other issue – immediately obvious from where I was sitting – was that this form burnt a great deal of fuel. My stores were large and well-armoured, but in terms of efficiency, their usefulness went up in smoke. Literally.

Whether natural or induced, I’d come through to a war. Visibility was low. Other tanks surrounded me, firing screaming cannons of magic into enveloping red clouds. Airships joined in from above; great oval vessels of steel and power.

This universe clearly made liberal use of both sets of tools; magic bolstered my armour and comprised most of my interface, though not in an especially versatile way. I had separate stores dedicated to arcane reserves.

The ground battalion fired into the sky, where my heat sensors picked up the bulk of the movement. Vertical lightning split the ground in the distance, already broken into ruin and rubble. More bolts followed in dotting arcs that tore holes through the field and strobed flashes of discordant motion through the fluctuating shadows.

There were shapes up ahead, clustered in an open valley – mainly tanks and a handful of crashed airships, but beyond them, titans: looming masses dwarfing anything they faced. There were two, and it was they the tanks were striking against.

But the behemoths ignored the ground, despite many shots finding their mark. Mainly, they were aiming skywards. I watched as a hill of claws and floating strands reached out a colossal limb and called down lightning from above, generating more of the gunning arcs.

The other, in a blur of speed unexpected for its size, uncoiled into a bounding leap, clutching at something small in the sky. Its snake-like body twisted midway, coils shifting direction while its head and neck held position and tail swatted through the sky. It missed, but I made out the lumpy speck it was targeting before it collided, scrabbling its many legs, with a mountain on the other side. Boulders flew. I felt the ground shake all the way from the opposing side.

If Near Miss was making a statement, it couldn’t have been louder. Rational self-preservation said I should be getting the hell out of there and looking for a door. This was well beyond anything I could deal with by anyone’s measure.

But if there was even the slightest chance I could make headway with my core, I had to give it a try.

This was the crux of the problem, after all. Every time I ended up somewhere I didn’t want to be or doing something I didn’t want to do, I made the reasonable choice and stopped. Which made sense when dealing with a Defect. Playing with an Arch changed the rules. They would have been different all along.

Giving up control went against all my instincts, especially in a death zone. I crunched forwards over the shreds of metal and war debris, hoping for a better look at the speck in the sky. At this rate, it would take a long time.

The jumping snake catapulted into the air a second time, again making its odd twist for a precision strike. I froze as its body swung in my direction, flinging itself towards my end of the battlefield in another movement covering incredible ground.

It came down in the middle of the tanks ahead, ripping new cracks in the ground. Several war machines went flying, joined by more as the creature’s legs scrabbled for ground. Its tail came down and lashed incidentally at the field, sweeping half a dozen more off their treads.

The battalion opened maximum fire, with more shots meeting their aim. For the first time, the snake shifted its focus, glancing at the amassed army, then rapidly scuttled away. Patches of gold sap dripped from its fur.

The lightning anemone was still focused on the air. The lightning arcs stopped, replaced by a blanket storm of randomised electrical charge extending across the valley. Bolts of it flowed through me, disrupting my magical systems and weakening my casing further, but it managed to hold.

From the sky, away from the airships, a series of clustered precision energy bolts swarmed towards the enemy. They reshaped mid-flight into glowing rings, catching around the anemone’s reaching strands. Where they hit, the rings wrapped around strands and sliced them to pieces.

I felt the draining field weaken.

Slightly too late. Around me, tanks’ weapons were visibly failing. Those that could still fire continued to aim at the snake, but it leapt out of the way and swatted once more at the sky.

I’d lost track of the flying speck in the chaos, but the snake hadn’t. As a new swarm of bolts was released, the spade of its tail collided with the airborne archer in a resounding shockwave splitting the heavens.

For a moment, the sky flared white. Dust clouds parted, leaving a zone of clear air. It lasted for a second, and the speck became rapidly much larger.

It was coming directly for me. In my current form, I wasn’t nearly fast enough to move out of the way.

Thankfully, it didn’t quite hit. The archer slammed into the ground beside me at an angle, shaking me precariously on my treads while the world returned to its previous colour, leaving a long, shallow trench in the rock.

Then it stood up.

A booming impact and minor avalanche sounded from the far end of the valley as the jumping snake landed, wriggling through its scrabbling phase.

The archer’s feet left the floor to take once more to the sky. They were human, or close to, wearing a battered mechanical suit from which sprouted large metal wings in the shape of bladed feathers.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

They got about a metre high before lightning punched them back down. Staggering, the figure raised an arm and released a swarm of the ringed bolts, which blasted across the field with such velocity the pressure of their passing made me once more unstable.

Across the valley, the scrabbling snake clawed itself to its feet again and looked around. Somehow, through the clouds and chaotic warfare, its gaze locked onto its opponent.

I slammed my power into full speed and high-tailed it out of there, which was far slower than I needed it to be.

There were no doors I could use anywhere nearby; any buildings that had ever existed here long since bombed into oblivion. My best bet was finding another tank with its hatch blown open and staying alive long enough as a human to get there. It was a tough ask.

Once again, the archer tried to leave the ground and was swatted down. Rather than leaping, the giant snake scuttled across the field towards them, terrifyingly fast. Realising they couldn’t evade, the figure braced in place and raised both hands to emit an immense energy beam wider than their body. It hit the snake in the neck and sheared through its belly, slowing it down.

Lightning struck within the path of the beam, conducting its energy into a chain reaction of random crackling spikes in the near proximity. It surged back along the path of the beam. Hit by their own weapon, the archer staggered and fell to their knees. The beam broke.

The snake had also been hit by the conducted energy. It stumbled under its own momentum, but the tail lashed out, narrowly swooping above my turret, and slashed through the space the archer was standing.

I realised there was suddenly something inside my compartment. It looked a lot like the archer. Some kind of targeted teleport, I guessed.

They lay on their back, bleeding and helmet cracked, with alarming bubbling sounds emanating from their neck and upper chest. With shaking fingers, they lifted a hand to their collarbone, and a white light surrounded them.

Outside, the snake’s tail finished its swing, and the behemoth regained its balance. Its head swung towards me without any delay or confusion. At the same time, a powerful lightning bolt hit my roof directly.

I was in big trouble.

“They can still see you in here,” I announced over my garbled speakers. My passenger jumped, glancing up from the floor. White light continued to spill from their fingers. “And,” I continued amid rising levels of stress, “you can’t see them. I don’t have your manoeuvrability. So please leave now so that we don’t both get crushed.”

“An… AI?” the archer rasped. I hadn’t been sure they’d be able to speak.

“Out,” I repeated. “Now. Or die.”

My treads were even slower thanks to the electrical disruption.

The passenger vanished, just in time for the snake to swerve in chase. Lightning arced around in a similar pattern, paying me no further attention. I was a tank among identical hundreds. Nobody cared about me. But it had been close.

I hoped this meant Near Miss didn’t actually want me to die, as much as it currently felt like it.

I hurried slowly in the opposite direction, looking for blown-out vehicles to escape through. I only had to endure the atmosphere for a couple of seconds; hopefully it would be enough.

And then the passenger was back.

“You’re an AI,” he said, rushing to my console. His voice had returned to normal. “But can you use magic?”

Lightning hit me outside and my engines misfired, shuddering me to a fresh halt.

“Every time you come in here,” I replied calmly, which was misleading, “those things start attacking again. Please get out.”

“But can you use magic?”

“Yes!”

He vanished again, reappearing about the same distance away as before. I knew this because of the convenient death trail that followed him wherever he went through the billowing clouds. I started my engines up again, made a bit more progress, and then found myself promptly reoccupied.

“They’re going to figure out I’m not a normal tank –” I began.

“Shut up. If I reroute my magic through you, I can modify your cannon and your defenses.”

“The best defence is not being attacked,” I pointed out. “Also, we have about five seconds before the snake lands.”

He made an exasperated noise and vanished.

“I’m doing it anyway,” he said on his return. The decoy runs were starting to have less effect, with both titans now pre-emptively reacting in my direction. “All you have to do is fire.”

“Compromise: You pick a few more hiding spaces so the snake doesn’t just come here and crush me anyway. Then you can do it. Five seconds.”

“Deal.”

He was gone for longer this time. I used it to search for an exit. As the battle went on, more failed tanks littered the field, but none had their hatches open.

The passenger materialised back practically on top of the console. “Right.” He slammed a hand on the interface controls.

I felt a mysterious force take hold of my mechanisms, bolstering and powering them at a speed I couldn’t keep up with. My physical infrastructure shifted without any input on my behalf. Two side cannons appeared in addition to the main one, and their ammunition shifted to gain homing qualities. Powerful, but blunt.

“Give me better armour piercing,” I ordered, and felt him make the change.

I didn’t need to be told. I aimed and fired.

The blasts took out one of the snake’s front legs, sawn off at the knee. It recoiled, emitting a high-pitched burble. My tank of magic partly depleted.

Five bolts of lightning hit me at once, and kept striking.

“We’re in it now,” I called over the continual thunder, firing again to take out the other foreleg. “Now they know I’m a threat.”

My passenger craned his neck towards the turret, his hand on the console. “What’s happening?”

“Too many legs,” I answered, and kept up the barrage. My tank depleted significantly with each blast, but each connected. The snake screamed, pulling itself at first towards us and then away. Its tail thrashed angrily, too distant to reach. “It’s working, but I don’t have much left.”

“I know. You shouldn’t have asked for piercing.”

I didn’t have time to be angry. “It’s severely wounded,” I said. “Now’s your chance. And the lightning anemone is rapidly wearing through my casing, so I need you to draw its attention away.”

“I just used the bulk of my power on you,” the passenger said in a more accusing tone than I liked. “I don’t have enough left either. You’re my best shot. So finish what you can.”

“Better idea,” I returned frantically, “There’s a tank a few metres to my left, also an AI. Fallen, but with full tanks. You can use whatever you do have to find your way in. Open the hatch and I'll retrieve them.”

“Good thinking,” he said, and vanished. Thirty agonising seconds later, the roof finally popped open.

Near Miss, you need to come through, I thought, re-aimed my turret and fired my final shots at the anemone. They took a few seconds to cross the valley.

The lightning faltered.

I became human. Instantly my skin peeled and blistered, eyes blinded with corrosive acid. Even squinting, all I could see was a mottled blur. In inordinate amounts of pain, I scrambled over a trench of scrap and rubble, working off memory, and up to the side of the broken tank. Several hazards carved slices into my legs, probably deep, and I flung myself at the casing, already completely blind. My fingers, torn and slick with substances I didn’t want to think about, managed to grab the rim, and hands pulled me the rest of the way.

At approximately lightspeed, I catapulted myself into the Interstice and blessed, welcome relief. After taking an important moment to appreciate being alive, I abruptly realised I wasn’t alone.

Around me, making an appalling wailing noise, was another smear.

Again, not supposed to happen, and the last time it had, I’d unleashed a Rein-killer upon the multiverse. But I didn’t want to leave this one to get lost in another random universe, or worse, return to the one where he’d die.

“Alright,” I said, adding my resigned contribution to the wail. “Follow me.”