The skies were heavy with clouds when the clockwork legion caught sight of the charging hordes of monsters Matthias had dispatched to counter them. The clouds hung low and swollen, their bellies bruised purple by gathering thunder. Rain misted the battlefield in a cold veil, turning churned earth into sucking mud beneath metal feet and clawed talons alike.

  The clockwork golems did not panic despite being so greatly outnumbered. They were designed for a job—a duty. Fear had never been included in their construction. Even if they fell, innumerable other golems just like them waited in silent vaults to take their place. Their brass lenses adjusted. Internal furnaces roared hotter. Targeting sigils aligned with mechanical precision.

  The golems formed a firing line to prepare for the monstrous hordes to close in. They arranged themselves in two ranks. The first rank knelt in unison, metal knees sinking slightly into the sodden ground, while the second locked their legs and took aim above them. Panels slid open along their arms, revealing crystalline arrays that hummed with building light.

  Their focus on the foe before them was so absolute that they never saw the beast descending from the clouds, nor heard the beat of its wings over the hiss of rain and the distant rumble of thunder.

  From their flank descended a wyvern—a massive draconic creature with two legs, enormous wings, a barbed tail, and golden eyes that flickered with enough intelligence to relish the chaos it wrought. Its coloration was split: the scales facing upward were a deep forest green, beaded with rain, while those on its underside were white, almost luminous against the storm-dark sky.

  The wyvern folded its wings at the last possible moment and slammed into the flank of the firing line with vindictive glee. Metal shrieked. The ground quaked. It slid to a stop, smashing through the ranks and crushing golems beneath its two?ton bulk. Gears ruptured. Steam vented in violent bursts. Upon halting, it swung its tail in a full three?hundred?and?sixty?degree arc, the barbed tip carving through torsos and severing limbs in a glittering spray of broken brass.

  The constructs turned to address this new threat with mechanical obedience, torsos rotating on grinding pivots. Targeting crystals recalibrated. But as they did, a manticore descended to repeat the performance. It struck like a falling star—wings snapping wide at the last instant, leonine bulk crashing down amidst them. Enhanced talons and corded sinew collided with metal and clockwork to disastrous effect. Its scorpion tail lashed, punching through chest cavities to rupture power cores in showers of blue-white sparks.

  By the time the golems had recovered from this second surprise and loosed their first volleys, the rest of the myriad monsters had reached them. Lances of coherent light speared through charging bodies, burning holes clean through fur and chitin, but momentum carried the creatures onward even as they died. A tide of talon and claw fell upon the clockwork legion. The rout was so swift and thorough that it did not even slow the charge in any noticeable way. For every beast that fell smoking to the mud, two more vaulted over its corpse.

  Thunder boomed overhead as the manticore and wyvern took flight once more, their silhouettes vanishing briefly into the storm before wheeling ahead of the advancing horde like shepherds guiding a slaughter.

  As Matthias, the world spirit, and Nefertut held their distant discussion, the beast tide reached the Clockwork Dungeon.

  The dungeon entrance had been transformed into a fortress of geometry and steel. Rank upon rank of golems stood in disciplined formation along ascending tiers carved into the stone. Defensive pylons thrummed with stored energy. The air smelled of ozone and oil.

  Instead of charging directly in, the beasts slowed and took up positions just out of range of the golems’ laser arrays. Growls rolled like distant surf. Massive forms rose from within the horde—creatures broad as siege towers. With ponderous strength they dredged up boulders from the saturated earth, claws sinking deep, muscles bunching beneath matted fur. With roars that shook rain from the air, they hurled the stones forward.

  Rain and stone slammed into the defenders. The first impacts shattered outer ranks, scattering metal limbs across the steps. Defensive pylons flared and died under repeated blows. From above, the wyvern released a particularly large rock from its taloned feet. It plummeted end over end before smashing into the center of the formation, collapsing an entire tier in an avalanche of stone and shattered constructs.

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  Only when the formation was broken and in desperate need of regrouping did the roiling tide surge forward. They swept over the disoriented defenders with relentless ferocity. Claws pried apart armored shells. Fangs found the seams between plates. The entryway became a grinding press of bodies and broken machinery.

  The manticore descended first into the dungeon proper, landing amidst the echoing corridors with a snarl. With talon, fang, and tail, it reaped a harvest as it pushed deeper and deeper inside. Traps triggered in cascading sequence—blades scything from walls, floors dropping away into gear-filled pits, jets of alchemical flame roaring down narrow passages. The beasts died in droves, but the pressure of numbers forced the advance onward.

  With every slain enemy, Matthias was fed a steady stream of mana—a distant, steady warmth at the edge of his awareness—though he was too occupied with other matters to devote more than the faintest notice to it.

  As the beast tide tore into the dungeon with a vengeance, no one noticed the slimes detaching from beneath several of the larger creatures. They were acid slimes, translucent masses clinging like living shadows. Spreading out, they used their peculiar senses—vibrations, heat gradients, the faint hum of arcane currents—to select precise locations before settling in place. Then they began dissolving the ground beneath them. Stone hissed and liquefied. Metal reinforcement softened and sagged. Slowly, patiently, they burrowed downward while the tide of talon and claw held the dungeon’s full attention.

  This is not to say the fight was one?sided. The Clockwork Dungeon was riddled with layered defenses. Clockwork sentinels emerged from hidden alcoves to reinforce faltering lines. Rotating corridors attempted to disorient invaders. Crushing pistons descended from ceilings in rhythmic devastation. Yet there always seemed to be another body ready to take the place of the fallen. Every time one of the bladed spiders died, its corpse convulsed and split, boiling over with dozens of palm-sized offspring that consumed their dead parent in a frenzy before skittering back into the fray.

  Deeper and deeper the beasts pushed, leaving a wake of ruined mechanisms and warped corridors behind them. Where claw and talon could not prevail, sheer bulk forced passage. Where bulk failed, acid reduced obstacles to slurry.

  Among the slimes was one like Cedric, named Sarge, who took its role with grave seriousness. Unlike the others, Sarge maintained a steady cohesion of thought, issuing subtle pulses that guided the burrowing network. It tracked vibrations above, mapping the chaos of battle in faint tremors through stone. They reached the core chamber first, rising silently through a thinning floor.

  What they found did not please them.

  The chamber was vast and cathedral-like, ribbed with arching supports of brass and bone. At its center, a ritual circle burned with intricate sigils etched into the floor. The dungeon’s fairy hovered above the core with a look of horror frozen on its delicate features. Gossamer wings hung limp. The fairy was already dead, its body dissolving into motes of light that drifted in slow spirals into a pulsing mass of flesh and clockwork where the dungeon core should have been.

  The mass throbbed wetly. Veins of copper threaded through swollen muscle. Half-formed gears rotated within translucent tissue. It was neither wholly construct nor wholly living thing, but an abominable fusion attempting to become something new.

  Without hesitation or mercy, the slimes hurled themselves at it. One surged upward and engulfed the fairy’s dissolving remains, prematurely severing the ritual’s final channel. The sigils guttered and flickered. The rest fell upon the grotesque mass of flesh and gears. Acid met alloy. Tissue blackened and sloughed away. An unholy grinding, squelching scream reverberated through the chamber as the slimes went to work.

  Troops meant to hold off the invasion were diverted toward the core room in mounting panic, their footfalls hammering down corridors. This only made it easier for the beast tide to surge forward and gain momentum, flooding deeper into the dungeon’s heart.

  Golems funneled into the chamber, forming a desperate perimeter. They could not fire their lasers without risking catastrophic damage to what remained of their core. Instead, they waded forward to seize the slimes with iron hands. The decision proved disastrous. Limbs dissolved at the elbow. Fingers sloughed into dripping ruin. The chamber filled with the stench of corroded metal.

  Then the first manticore reached the chamber, bloodied and scored with burns but far from defeated. With a roar that shook dust from the vaulted ceiling, it hurled itself at the remaining defenders, scattering them like toys. Next came a bladed spider, leaping onto the abominable mass and driving serrated limbs deep into exposed machinery, tearing out gears in shrieking handfuls.

  The mass quivered violently, its half-formed consciousness unraveling under simultaneous assault. Flesh collapsed inward. Gears spun wildly before snapping free. The assembled beasts fell upon it in a final frenzy, reducing it to twitching fragments and inert scrap.

  Sarge burrowed deepest and was the first to reach the dungeon core crystal embedded within the writhing remains. It was misshapen and lumpy, as though it had grown irregularly—veins of cloudy impurity marring its once-pristine facets. The observation was noted and stored within Sarge’s awareness.

  Then the slime expanded, enveloping the crystal completely. Acid seeped into every fracture. The light within the core flickered, sputtered, and finally went dark as it was broken down into its constituent atoms.

  Above, throughout the dungeon, the remaining constructs froze mid-motion. Gears slowed. Lights dimmed. The great machine that had been the Clockwork Dungeon fell silent, its heartbeat extinguished beneath storm and claw.