Suppressing a curse, I swung again, to the same result. Small spiders jumped up, deflected the blow, then the big one swallowed their Logic, stopped in place, and spewed out a fresh new wave of tiny, eight-blade-legged horrors. It would have seemed comical even, if it hadn’t been for the two facts that the small ones had started to attack me and I had to either dodge their attacks or block them with my vambraces, and that I had an ominous feeling about what would happen when that walking maw reached either me or Zephyro, who was standing beside me, waiting for me to mark the monster.

Then again, I had a way of stopping it, didn’t I?

I gritted my teeth, swinging Pharus over and over with its chain extended to its full length. Each hit was absorbed, each hit produced more spiders, each hit locked The Skittering Mind in place…

Each hit left me wide open for a mass of spiders to swarm over me, stabbing me with countless tiny legs, driving gashes through my clothes and drawing blood from exposed skin.

{CPU Load: ▲ 82%}

{Core Temp: ▲ 71° C}

[>>compiling… 16%]

I screamed in pain and frustration. Again and again, I swung. A burning sensation spread all over my body, paper-cut-thin wounds crisscrossing each other like a delta of flaming rivers, flowing up north to set the sea on fire.

{CPU Load: ▲ 89%}

{Core Temp: ▲ 75° C}

[DPM integrity]

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱ 91% ▼

The skittering wave crested, crawled over my face. I closed my mouth and eyes like diving five fathoms deep, as their tattoo-machine legs dove into my skin over and over. I kept swinging wildly, free hand reaching for my face, swatting away insect after insect. Cold blades left trails of hot blood on my lips, cheeks, brow.

{CPU Load: ▲ 93%}

{Core Temp: ▲ 77° C}

[DPM integrity]

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱ 76% ▼

Then a swing connected, unimpeded.

[>>PROCESSES BY USER T3h_skitt3ring_m2nd ARE NOW HIGHLIGHTED]

The hammering of the notification got swallowed by agony so pointed and frequent that it bled together into a dull, omnipresent ache.

I only knew that my work was done, darkness, and pain.

{CPU Load: ▲ 95%}

{Core Temp: ▲ 79° C}

[DPM integrity]

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ 60% ▼

And then it faded, like all pain does, eventually. Needles still stabbed me, but it was sporadic now, unorganized. I opened my eyes and immediately closed them again as my salty blood burned my tear ducts. I wanted to rub my face, but something held my arm pinned to my side. The floor, I realized. I groaned, but something small and painful skittered into my mouth, shocking me with adrenaline. Riding that burst of energy, I spat out the spider in my mouth, and rolled to my knees, rubbing the blood from my face with my sleeve, then forced my eyes open.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Fire, monsters, and the moon greeted me. Zephyro was close by, sword embedded deep within the server-spider, both hands on the handle, eyes closed. Above him, a bright star had flared into existence, shooting beams of glorious light all around us at stroboscopic speeds. Many did not connect, just left tiny craters in his parade grounds, but those that did completely annihilated the spiders, no matter the size.

They were swarming him now, falling from me like oily water, but as they approached and surged up his shin, his eyes opened, burning with blue light. It was so bright as to almost be pure white, and it left afterimages in my vision as it flooded the plaza.

When I could see again, all but the largest, original spiders lay dead around him in a dizzying cloud of cyan. The surviving arachnids chittered something in their disc-scraping language, but instead of fighting over the Logic like their counterparts from earlier, they immediately fell back to form a circle around one of their own. Its jagged carapace opened like a black metal flower, revealing a teal-and-red glow around maddening machinery.

The cyan clouds stirred, shifting into a slow vortex with the Ferals at their center.

Pharus’ censer crashed into the evolving beast, sinking deep into its core. A high-pitched noise filled the world as time slowed, then it erupted, an explosion of sickly teal that covered all the spiders around it. As I pulled back on my weapon, ending an attack I did not remember starting, the Ferals inside the cloud collapsed one after the other, like they were suffocating. Then they released their Logic.

I was panting as I stumbled over to the vizier, waving for him to stop and conserve his energy. Finally, I managed to take a deep breath, assimilating the leftover Logic.

{INCOMING LOGIC - 298 LB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 473 LB}

{CONSUMED LOGIC - 73 LB}

{AVAILABLE LOGIC - 400 LB}

{CPU Load: ▼ 55%}

{Core Temp: ▼ 74° C}

[DPM integrity]

▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰ 100%

[>>compiling… 20%]

When the blue glow washed over me, healing my wounds, the Vizier finally noticed me. The star he had been summoning vanished, illuminating his quiet smile and calm brown eyes for one more second before it was completely gone.

Then he collapsed, hands still on his sword. He glitched once, twice, then the entire world shifted out of perspective, leaving reality both an endlessly dark void and an intricately crafted oasis for a split second. I noticed the Ferals, Scorpion and Snake and Spiders, were entirely unaffected by the glitch, but then the world snapped back and Zephyro stood next to me, glowing cyan underneath a red moon. Only a thin sickle remained white.

“You alright?” I asked, and he whirled on me, despair-fueled hatred raging in his deep brown eyes.

“Am I alright?! My people are dying, Sultana! Monsters ravage my city, bandits pillage my home, and their war-slaves seek to put a collar around my mother’s neck. The giver of my life, whom I have sworn to almighty Allah to protect with my very first thought! My Sultana, shackled! The blasphemy of it!

“No, I am not alright. Yet a hundred thousand times worse, nothing will ever be alright again for so many of mine. Ask me not if I am alright, Sultana! Ask Emil, Raoul, and the Alkashaf siblings. Ask Mudira and Minhat-Albina! No Angel of Death will take them, for their souls have been torn from their flesh, consumed and defiled!”

By now he was panting, and I struggled not to drown in his bottomless anguish.

“Comfort not me,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Lament my people.”

Then he glitched, violently like I had never seen it before, dead and alive and bones and rose-cheeked and young and old, until he settled back into his original form. He stood atop the colossal Feral, again. No anachronistic combat vest anymore, I noticed. I wondered if he had become weaker, and hated myself for the thought.

“I’m sorry, I-“

“No, Sultana, it is I who must offer you a thousand apologies once more. This…” he gestured as if to say this is all too much, but instead, he said: “This is not the time. Let us dispatch the beasts and retire to the palace. Our time is short.” And with that, he pulled his sword out of the giant spider, flicked it to clean it of dark, oily blood, and jumped down to land next to me.

[>>compiling… 25%]

There was more I could have said, more I could have asked, but I left words unspoken and instead chose to keep us going. I yanked Pharus’ handle to pull its head back to me, and after attaching it to the shaft, wrapped its chain loosely around my forearm.

“Take the fight to them?”

Zephyro paused, looking over the void-engulfed inferno that had once been his city. Then he nodded. “That, as ever, is wise, Sultana.”

On the opposite side of the plaza, close to the ruined arch, the Ferals were fighting each other. The spiders were an endless tide of twitching black, sparking teal and glowing red. One of the server spiders—a Mind, I guessed— had made it all the way to the snake and latched onto it like an eight-legged tick. The abomination was clearly in pain, thrashing and trying to coil its tail around itself to retaliate with its many mouths. It seemed as though by growing so big, it had become cumbersome. It leveled a house with an undulation of its screaming tail, but the attack was slow and telegraphed, and the spiders had easily escaped before the mass of scrap metal connected.

The scorpion, on the other hand, was faring far better. It was engaged in a grappling match with the other spider-mind, and its chainsaw claw was burying itself deep within the server to the screech of metal tearing metal. The spider’s maw was open wide and glowing an ominous red, but the ball of plasma had started to flicker, approaching critical failure.

[>>compiling… 35%]