The moment the scaffolding cracked, Xander knew they’d lost the element of surprise.

  A rusted support beam clanged down from above, bounced off twisted rebar, and skittered across the cavern floor with a racket that sounded like a dinner bell being beaten to death. Twenty feet up and a third of the way around the circular chamber, Zoey, Hask, and the wiry Fort Octave scout named Melnik froze mid-climb on the upper scaffold. Their backs pressed to the beams, barely breathing. It didn’t matter. The machine had heard.

  The warspider’s turret, mounted along its scorched and battered spine, rotated with a low mechanical churn as red optics flared from idle flicker to full burn. Its main cannon, cracked along the casing and leaking heat, began to cycle. The mount twitched, overshot, then corrected with a grinding whine, locking onto the elevation where Zoey’s team clung to shadow.

  Xander saw its track. He saw the glow swell.

  There wasn’t time for a callout. Zoey saw the tank take aim, and shouting out a warning would not change the outcome of what was coming.

  He just ran at the monstrosity.

  Boots struck stone as he pushed past the Fort Octave line, shoulder to shoulder with Kane, Jo a pace behind him, Darvos and his men forming a wedge just off their flanks. The air was thick with heat and hydraulic stink. Behind them, Ford shouted something about formation, but Xander barely registered it as his focus narrowed to the cannon, the aim, and the awful inevitability that someone was about to die unless they gave the spider something better to shoot at.

  The cannon fired with a sound like steel vomiting light.

  It wasn’t a focused beam. Whatever stability the machine once had was long gone. What erupted from the broken housing was a wild, searing torrent of energy, laced with electric arcs and raw kinetic force that tore across the air like chained lightning unspooled. The bolt smashed into the scaffolding in a violent surge, vaporizing Melnik instantly where he hung, one hand still reaching for the next rung. Hask, who had just pivoted to look, took a glancing blow on his left side and was flung backward, armor scorched and limbs slack.

  Zoey lunged, caught him by the wrist.

  The weight nearly yanked her off balance, and for a heartbeat she was dangling with one arm outstretched, fingers clenched around his bracer while the remains of the scaffold groaned beneath her. She didn’t pull him up. Instead, she twisted, used his momentum, and flung him toward a lower platform on her left. He hit hard, rolled, and didn’t move.

  But he looked to be alive.

  The cannon housing spat sparks and sputtered. Internal systems ground against their own broken timing, whirred, and then failed entirely with a low, metallic groan.

  Even with what appeared to be its primary weapon out of the fight, it didn’t matter. The machine had other weapons.

  "Positions!" Ford’s voice rang from behind the formation. "Frontline tanks hold the center. Casters and assault roles stay staggered!"

  Xander flared his left hand as he ran, divine energy pooling in the palm before cascading over his frame like molten light. Radiant armor traced itself across his coat, gilding the worn leather with shimmering lines of protective runes and steel-burned scripture as his Divine Aegis ability settled over him.

  The warspider’s turret twitched one last time and then locked. Whatever targeting logic it had left seemed to reorient as the red lenses on its head spun, refocused, and dropped toward the charging melee line.

  "Jo, left! Darvos, pinch wide!"

  He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Jo had already veered to the side, blade low and crackling as it built up a lightning charge. Darvos signaled his team forward with a quick gesture, shields raised, spears angled. Kane fell into step beside Xander to face the tank front and center.

  The warspider moved.

  It lunged—six working legs punching into the stone with enough force to leave gouges, the forward pincers lifting in tandem and slamming down as if to clear a path by sheer obliteration. Xander juked right, felt the shockwave ripple through the floor. Kane wasn’t fast enough. The pincer caught his shield and smashed him sideways into one of the load-bearing columns, where he crumpled in a heap.

  "Ford! Kane’s down!"

  "I see him!" Ford replied instantly. He was already moving, robes flailing behind him as he dropped beside Kane and pressed a hand to the fallen fighter’s chest. Healing magic flared.

  "He’s breathing," Ford called. "Going to take a minute before he's back in the fight. He got his bell rung pretty hard."

  Darvos shot Ford a look. "We need our tank back on his feet."

  "Then buy me thirty seconds," Fore shot back.

  Jo didn’t break stride. She darted beneath the warspider’s forward arc, sword aimed at a joint just behind one of the still-functional legs. She drove the blade in with a grunt, the metal shrieking as it bit through armor and into hydraulics.

  The machine buckled.

  Pressure hissed, and a slick burst of black fluid sprayed from the joint, coating the floor in a wide, gleaming arc. The leg spasmed, then folded, dragging the whole chassis a half-meter down to one side.

  Darvos took the opening. He signaled, stepped forward with his shield raised, and drove his blade straight into the warspider’s undercarriage. The strike didn’t pierce, but it forced the chassis higher, exposing a vulnerable plate near the turret’s base.

  Xander surged in behind him, spear reversed, holy light flaring along the shaft as he triggered the Blacksmith’s Ring. The magic snapped into place, infusing the weapon with a surge of divine energy that would last the next hour. He hadn’t used the ring before. Like most single-charge per day gear, it had become one of those things he kept on standby, waiting for the perfect moment that never came. But facing down a half-shattered spider tank with flamethrowers and turret-grade hate in its soul? That was probably it.

  He drove the point in low, angling for a gap just above the left pincer. The moment it struck, the head flared with gold light, and a bloom of radiant force exploded inward, shearing away a chunk of the mounting plate.

  The machine screamed.

  It wasn’t sound. Not like a voice. But something in the engine core howled as systems buckled and redirected. One pincer snapped in spasm, slammed into the ground again, and this time didn’t rise.

  Then, the mouth opened.

  The breath wasn’t air. It was chemical fire, an incandescent gout of orange-red plasma that spewed across the cavern in a sweeping arc. It hit the front line like a siege engine. Darvos ducked behind his shield. Two of his men weren’t so lucky. One went down in flames. The other stumbled backward, armor ablaze.

  Xander held firm.

  The divine aegis flared, then fractured, then broke completely as the fire punched through. Heat swallowed him. Flames danced up his coat, igniting the hem and crawling fast up the back. He dropped and rolled, shoulder-first, across the grit-slick stone until the fire was out.

  Jo’s voice called across the blaze. "You good?"

  "I'm going to feel that in the morning," Xander responded.

  Ford was already there, hand raised, light coalescing.

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  The worst of the burns faded. Not gone, but duller now. Bearable.

  Behind Xander, a slick of hydraulic fluid caught fire where the edge of the flamethrower blast had spilled across the stone. The flames surged across the floor in a curling sheet, leapt to the second pool exposed by Jo’s earlier strike, and bloomed into a brief arc of searing light. Instead of climbing the nearby scaffolding, the fire raced up the warspider’s damaged leg, trailing heat and smoke. It vanished in a sudden hiss as some internal suppression system activated and doused the blaze before it could reach the turret housing.

  Jo glanced down at the flickering embers of the blaze, then back toward Xander.

  "Well," she smirked, "we know it’s flammable."

  Xander grunted. "Not caustic, then."

  "Good to know."

  He risked a glance toward the scaffolding. Hask lay slumped where Zoey had flung him, one leg twisted beneath him, motionless. The flames weren’t close enough to pose a threat. Hard to tell from the angle Xander had on him, but it looked like he was done for the rest of the fight.

  They’d deal with him after.

  Assuming there was an after.

  The warspider was still moving. One leg dragged badly, another barely lifted at all, and the pincer on its left side hung open, too twisted to close but still heavy enough to crush anything that got too close. The turret was ruined, no longer tracking, though the housing still sparked fitfully from within. Its cannon was dead, but the cluster of red optics remained active, burning with erratic focus as the machine twisted toward the sound of movement.

  And as the last embers of firelight burned down across the cavern, Xander knew the fight wasn’t over. Damaged or not, it was still a killing machine and engine of destruction.

  The thought barely had time to finish forming before Kane’s pounding armor announced his return into the fray.

  His armor had scorch marks, one shoulder plate was missing entirely, and the edge of his shield was torn like tissue paper, but the fighter looked more pissed off than injured. He broke from the rear column where Ford had finished stabilizing him, muttered something to his brother that sounded like, 'don’t stop healing me unless I stop breathing', then sprinted straight into the spider’s turning arc.

  "Pulling aggro!" Kane bellowed.

  Xander and Jo flanked wide as Kane drove up the left side and smashed his shield into the warspider’s already-buckled foreleg. The impact was more noise than force, a thunderclap of metal on metal, but it did the job. The spider reared half a step, optics twitching toward the new threat, and in that moment of shifting weight, Xander dropped his spear.

  It clattered against stone, sliding toward the edge of a burning pool of hydraulic fluid that had smoldered out. The spear was useless here. Piercing damage might as well be strong language for all the good it was doing.

  He reached for the hammerpick.

  Weighty, ugly, steam-choked, brutal, and still smeared with blood and gore from earlier, the weapon felt more alive than elegant. It was exactly the tool meant for something that didn’t care about finesse. He twisted the grip, and the chamber seals rotated with a mechanical hiss as the hammer’s internal boiler kicked to life.

  The first swing came down across one of the spider’s front legs, not to sever but to dent. Steel met steel with a shriek. Sparks showered his boots. The hammerpick bounced, but the steam chamber read the impact and hissed, a low growl of pressure beginning to build in the head.

  Behind him, Jo’s blade arced upward in a flash of blue-white, catching one of the damaged rear legs as she vaulted over a smoking beam. The strike rang out sharp, and the limb twitched, nearly folding under its own weight. The firelight danced in her wake, painting her silhouette in molten gold and cold lightning.

  "It's running on rage and scrap. And we're still losing!" She shouted.

  Xander set his back foot and drove the hammer down again. "Then we keep hitting it until something important breaks."

  The joint he targeted buckled slightly under the blow.

  Far above them, on the half-collapsed scaffold, Zoey was moving.

  She hadn’t called out since saving Hask. She didn’t want the machine looking in her direction. Instead, she sprinted across the narrow beams without hesitation, boots skimming over rust and ash. Her bow was already drawn, but it wasn’t one of her usual frostburst arrows. It wasn’t the kind that left a visible trail of cold air or whistled through the dark like sleet.

  No, this one shimmered at the head. It looked like it had been carved from solid ice, long and jagged like a glacier fang, and it didn’t emit frost so much as contain it. The cold was compressed, focused, and lethal.

  She reached the far side, nearly behind the tank now, where the broken armor from the exploded turret exposed a patch of raw internals. She drew a slow breath, steadied her aim, and loosed.

  The arrow didn’t hiss. It screamed.

  A sharp, crystalline whistle cut across the battlefield like a blade. The projectile struck the open section of the turret casing dead-on. For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

  Then everything did.

  The impact set off a chain reaction. Sparks erupted from the damaged housing, arcs of lightning sprayed into the surrounding air, and a shockwave of static pressure pulsed out across the cavern. One of the spider’s side-mounted sensors exploded in a flash of red light, but the machine didn’t go down.

  It roared.

  This time it was a true mechanical scream, drawn from shattered engines and grinding actuators. The spider spun wildly on its remaining legs, a full-bodied pivot that sent its claws sweeping across the chamber floor in a brutal, uncoordinated arc.

  Jo saw it coming and ducked into a roll. Darvos threw himself backward, boots dragging sparks as he landed behind a split pillar. One of the Fort Octave soldiers wasn’t fast enough. He caught the edge of a sweeping limb and went airborne, armor twisting mid-flight before he slammed against a stack of crushed ore carts.

  Xander barely managed to plant his hammer and use it like a hook, driving it into the floor as the spider’s legs grazed his shoulder and sent him sliding. He rolled with it, came up with his weight low, and cursed the ringing in his ears.

  The spider turned again. Now, all its optics focused on Zoey.

  She’d just finished nocking another arrow when the lenses shifted. Red lights blinked, adjusted, narrowed. One by one, they locked onto her position like a wall of targeting lasers aligning for execution.

  Xander shouted, but the roar of the machine drowned him out.

  The warspider’s head tilted slightly as the flamethrower apparatus opened.

  A stream of concentrated fire spewed from its underjaw, racing toward the scaffolding with terrifying speed. Zoey barely had time to vault sideways. She threw herself onto a narrow platform just below, twisting mid-leap. Her arrow went wide. Her bow slipped from her grasp.

  It hit the stone with a sharp clatter, spun once through the air, then skidded to a stop near the crumpled body of a Fort Octave soldier.

  Zoey landed hard, skidded across the platform, and slammed into a rusted beam.

  Her bow was down, and the spider was still watching her. She was a sitting duck.

  Xander gritted his teeth and spun the hammerpick in a tight arc. The chamber gauge glowed, three notches lit.

  He brought the hammer down in a crushing arc aimed just above the spider’s rear leg joint, one of the already damaged limbs Jo had compromised earlier. The impact landed with a brutal crunch. A wash of steam burst from the head as all three charges fired at once, slamming raw kinetic force deep into the joint. The limb snapped clean at the base with a sickening grind of sheared bolts and ruptured tubing, then tore free in a spray of hydraulic fluid and trailing cables.

  The warspider jerked violently, nearly tipping sideways from the loss of support. It let out another mechanical shriek, its entire frame shuddering with disrupted balance.

  Darvos darted in from the right with his longsword raised, eyes locked on the exposed a gap in the tank’s lower armor. The spot Xander had opened glinted with internal heat and twitching wiring. Darvos didn’t hesitate. He plunged the blade straight into the breach and twisted. Sparks belched outward as something inside ruptured.

  The optics flared brighter, then the tank turned. Its attention no longer on Zoey.

  Xander watched the shift, saw the warspider realign on its immediate attackers. It had forgotten the sniper behind it.

  The thing may be a destructive killing machine, but it is easily distracted, Xander thought to himself.

  Darvos didn’t stay next to Xander long. He yanked his blade free and rolled under the tank’s chassis, moving fast enough to trigger some kind of duelist skill. His body blurred at the edges, like motion smeared by speed. A half-dozen strikes landed in under three seconds, carving gouges along the spider’s underbelly. The last one sent him skidding clear on the opposite side, just in time for the boss to react.

  The warspider dropped flat.

  The entire mass of its armored body came down like a collapsing structure, slamming into the stone with an impact that cracked the floor and sent tremors rattling up the columns. Darvos had cleared it by inches, still sliding as the thing pancaked the space where he’d just been.

  The collapse brought the optics low, faceplate nearly level with the melee line.

  Jo didn’t hesitate.

  Her blade came down in a tight arc, lightning sparking along its edge. She struck the central eye cluster in a crackling burst, and several of the red sensors winked out in a shower of sparks. The rest blinked, jittered, and then began to flicker erratically.

  Xander heard shouts from one side as Fort Octave soldiers surged forward. Several reached the machine and brought blades down across its shell. One stabbed into the cavity where Darvos had just landed his mark. Another hacked at a bent strut beneath the main housing. It was chaos, but it was pressure. And pressure mattered.

  The spider didn’t stay prone.

  With a shriek of servos and a hiss of hydraulics, it pushed itself upright again, smoke trailing from multiple vents. Its good pincer raised high and swept across the line, snatching a Fort Octave soldier off the ground like he weighed nothing.

  The claw crushed inward with a wet, final crunch.

  Then it dropped the mangled corpse at Darvos’ feet.

  It was unclear whether it's dropping the body there was a deliberate move or just coincidence. Darvos didn’t flinch. He stepped over the body and repositioned, blade ready.

  The spider hunched. Both claws lifted, rising high over its chassis.

  Xander’s eyes snapped upward.

  "Oh, hell."

  The warspider slammed both claws into the cavern floor with full force. Stone shattered beneath the impact. The shockwave hit a breath later, a ripple of concussive energy that sent dust and debris hurtling outward like a sandstorm.

  Overhead, the ceiling groaned.

  A sound like thunder rolled through the quarry as cracks splintered across the cavern’s upper rim. Then came the first boulder. Then the second.

  Then, the entire roof began to fall.

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