Broken Lands

The lack of more monsters gave Sophia the chance to examine the one she’d just attempted to pin to the wall. She’d speared it through what would be its back if it were alive. She clearly should had struck it a bit more gently; she’d collapsed the outer shell until it crumpled around her knife, partially trapping it. She might have had trouble if she’d had to deal with more of them.

It was a mistake her teachers would have scolded her for and made her practice, but it was one she couldn’t be all that surprised about. It was often better to use too much force than not enough, though too much could be bad as well if it trapped your knife. She forced her knife out of the thing’s back before she did anything more.

It resembled nothing so much as a mechanical beetle almost the size of a soccer ball. The outer surface was smooth, but Sophia’s strike had penetrated into its interior and revealed that it ran on clockwork rather than anything she was more familiar with. That explained both why the outer surface was so weak, it probably couldn’t handle much weight, and why a single hit from either of them disabled them; they were easy to break if their gears were hit.

A closer examination showed all the ways it wasn’t a beetle. It had too many legs, for one thing; Sophia thought a spider or even a centipede might have been used as inspiration there, and the legs seemed more like a fly’s legs than like a beetles. That might explain how it was able to stick itself to a wall. The face was also very wrong, distorted and bulbous in the wrong places, with nothing that looked like real eyes. Directly behind the face was a series of mostly black flaps that glowed an almost iridescent blue when the magelight caught them just right.

Sophia lifted one of the flaps and found a socket that held a miniscule blue gem-cut crystal. It looked just like one of the small ones you might find on the side of a fancy ring, but she didn’t know enough about them to know what that meant. What she did know was that the socket seemed to be connected to all of the flaps covering the beetle’s thorax. That probably meant something, but she wasn’t sure what. She had some ideas about monsters, but mechanical beetles weren’t her specialty. “Are these monsters or did someone make them?”

“Is that important?” Dav sounded startled. “Could there be a secret way through here if I figure out where they came from?”

He almost seemed to be talking to himself. Sophia cocked her head to the side as she considered saying something, but this wasn’t the time. He seemed to be holding it together for now, but he hadn’t said anything about the fight in the dungeon, the trip through the Origin, or even the fact that he’d suddenly become able to see in the dark, other than noting it. She needed to know if he was going to keep it together, but poking at it might bring it to the surface. It had to wait until she knew they were safe enough for him to be useless for a bit.

“It could be.” Sophia limited herself to answering the surface question. “If it’s a monster generated by whatever the Shard of Kestii is, then we’re probably just going to have to deal with more of them and things like them. If it’s a monster, they have to be coming from somewhere and I don’t think golems breed.”

Sophia bit her lip and continued. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with applying the knowledge of her own world to this one, but she didn’t have anything else to go on. “If it’s manufactured, it could be anything from specialty work to something easy and fast. Back home, the tsarualk have a few Von Neumann devices, though we haven’t managed to make any yet. Something like that … well, who knows?”

Sophia took a deep breath. Dav might not be the only person who needed to not think of home right now. She’d deal with it when she had time. “Why don’t we move on? The sooner we either get to the Shard or get out of here, the better.”

“Aren’t we going to loot the monsters first?” Dav pointed at the gem. “That stone looks like it might be valuable, if you don’t want to carry the whole beetle.”

Sophia opened her mouth to refute his claim, since that wasn’t in the plan, then realized that none of this was planned. She was used to delving well-known, explored dungeons with a plan for what to bring out, but she needed to treat this like a first delve into an unknown dungeon. She’d only done that once; it wasn’t an opportunity many people had unless they specialized in it and sought it out. She had no idea what, if anything, was worth taking off the beetle. She didn’t even know if it would dissipate into mana the way many dungeon monsters did or not.

She converted her objection into a sigh. “You’re right. I have some room in my pack; do you have any room in yours? We can take both of the machines for now and cut the jewels out if we need to toss them later.”

He did; in fact, the glimpse Sophia got inside Dav’s pack showed that it was nearly empty. The fact that she could see that unfortunately meant that his pack wasn’t a spatial storage; he only had what would fit. Her pack wasn’t all that large, but it would definitely hold several times the amount Dev’s would.

The tunnel led them deeper into the ground, curving as it went. Sophia saw several places that had clearly once been either cross-passages or simply cracks in the tunnel’s walls; they’d all been filled with stone or concrete.

A few minutes after they left the spot where they killed the beetles, Sophia started hearing water moving in the distance. It sounded like a stream, but sounds could be deceiving in dungeons. They could simply be atmospheric or they could be vastly magnified or reduced by distance; it was impossible to know until you got there. This wasn’t a dungeon, but Sophia had to assume that it could be the same. There was water somewhere ahead, but she didn’t know how much or where.

The mechanical beetles were easy to spot by the blue luminescence of their thorax now that Dav and Sophia knew what to look for. Three more perched on the walls they walked past, but none of them reacted fast enough to avoid Dav’s sword. In fact, Sophia wasn’t certain any of them had even noticed Dav before he struck.

The sound of water grew louder over the next few minutes until they reached another large cavern. This time, Sophia’s light revealed a sheen that reflected off the floor of the cavern; whether it had once been improved and drained or not, the floor was now covered in water. It didn’t look very deep.

Before Sophia could determine the depth of the water, Dav shouted “Incoming!” He stepped forward into the water and raised his sword.

Sophia turned her light up to see what he’d noticed and gasped in surprise. How did a mechanical flying grasshopper manage to move silently? Real grasshoppers made noise!

Three more grasshoppers followed the first. The thought flashed through her mind that this was going to be a lot harder than she liked; she didn’t have her Skills, which meant that she only had her knife. She knew how to use her knife, but it definitely wasn’t the weapon she’d have preferred to use on giant flying mechanical bugs anymore than she’d have used it on true giant wasps. Throwing fire or wind seemed like a much better option, but it was one she didn’t have.

It was a good thing that they didn’t seem to have any sort of distance attack, either.

As the first one closed on them, Sophia lunged forward and plunged her knife at the brass grasshopper’s head. Her knife skittered off some sort of projected shell around the grasshopper, almost like a personal shield Skill, but far weaker than any Sophia had ever seen. She left a scratch behind but didn’t manage to throw the grasshopper off course in its dive towards Dav.

At the last moment, the grasshopper’s wings whirred into motion, finally making noise, as it avoided an actual collision. Its legs were aimed at Dav’s eyes, but Dav twisted away before it could hit and the grasshopper barely managed to connect, leaving three lines of blood in his scalp.

Dav grabbed the hilt of his sword in his left hand as well as his right and swung it almost like a baseball bat. Sophia had just enough light to tell that while the strike was large and slow, it wasn’t poorly aimed or unskilled; the blade hit the grasshopper squarely between the thorax and the abdomen and sent it into the wall, sliced more than halfway through. He might be a better swordsman than she’d given him credit for.

Sophia noticed that something seemed to slow Dav’s sword a little as he hit the oversized metallic bug, but it wasn’t significant. Either she’d significantly drained the shield or it couldn’t hold up to the massive blow Dav gave it.

A gear sprang out of the broken grasshopper’s innards as Dav tore his sword free from its guts.

Dav’s strike gave the next two grasshoppers time to close the distance. Sophia was able to step past him and guard his back, but she could only really stop one of the two grasshoppers. They made the decision for her when one went high, near the tunnel’s ceiling, and the other went low; she couldn’t reach the ceiling with her dagger, at least not with any reliable force.

“It’s up high, Dav!”Sophia shouted as she attempted to draw the other grasshopper’s attention with her knife. She might not be able to penetrate the shield, but she could at least give Dav only one target to worry about.

The low grasshopper moved slowly as Sophia moved between it and Dav. Its slow approach hid a reaction speed Sophia didn’t expect; it shied to one side as she struck out at it, and while her knife sank a little ways into the shield and slowed, it slip just barely past the grasshopper without touching it.

The mechanical bug’s return blow was a headbutt directly into Sophia’s chest. It knocked the air out of her lungs but her armor protected her from anything worse.

Dav leapt up at the grasshopper near the ceiling. His attack was awkward and the grasshopper nearly made it miss as it bent itself almost in half in an attempt to strike Dav. It was hit by the flat of Dav’s blade instead of the edge due to its twist and flung away, delayed but essentially undamaged.

Sophia sliced at the bug in front of her as quickly as she could manage. The last grasshopper was almost there and she didn’t want the fight to turn into a three on two; they were already having enough trouble handling one grasshopper each. This time, her slice went through the shield easily and cut into the grasshopper’s head, disabling one of the eyes. At least, she hoped it was an eye and not essentially decorative the way it had been on the beetles.

One thing the strike did tell her that hitting the shield wasn’t useless; it seemed to have limited power, at least in the short run. If she couldn’t get through it in a single hit, she just had to keep hitting. As ablative shields went, it seemed weak, but the bugs themselves didn’t seem very strong.