The first time they saw one of the metal bipeds surging from below, the construct was busy slaughtering a scattering group of humans below them, barely visible through a bent, torn open grate that was now functioning as their floor.

  Still, from sensation and look alone, it was eerily similar to the metal construct the wolf had fought down in the tunnels below the human nest, what felt like ages ago by now.

  The only exception being that instead of some kind of compressed air tube, it had a chainsaw on its arm instead, and the other hand was a drill wrapped in barbed wire.

  The construct was also slower, it felt like.

  At least the humans died quickly, albeit in incredibly gory fashion, and its own humans didn’t get any dumb ideas about trying to help them, their expressions merely crumpling up a little.

  The second time they ran into another construct, there was no passing it by, since it blocked their path.

  Maybe out of some desire to prove herself or to apologize for not listening, 'Emreeil' volunteered to kill the thing ahead and catch up, so they didn’t have to slow down further.

  A short back-and-forth occurred in their mental link while the wolf busied itself with cutting a hole through a metal sheet in their path so they could continue. It passively kept up, only to butt in to forbid Emhreeil’s suggestion when she revealed that her brain was apparently still wracked with horrible pain from overusing her eye-related Skill.

  It knew enough about biology to understand that all this running and jumping was probably not helping, her brain bouncing around inside her skull only making it worse.

  For a moment, it felt a little bad for slamming her into the ground head first, but it hadn’t known she was injured, so it let the thought go and decided that they would all fight the metal predator, projecting it through the mental bond to its humans.

  Squeezing through the jagged hole it made, which quickly led them through the tilted, groaning ruins of some place that stank of sugar-sweet smoke, they trudged through a pile of broken, coloured glass, then through a giant stained glass window, before they emerged on an uneven, curving plain of broken iron sheets with a roof made of broken homes.

  Just looking at it made the wolf feel dizzy.

  It looked with its other senses at the in-between layer of the upper human dwellings, and the grates and pipes that led to the sewers, crumpled inwards and only barely keeping the human dwellings from crushing them.

  The vibrations remained… overwhelming, forcing it to pause for a moment, curl its snout into a silent snarl, then jerk its head around in an attempt to clear it, curling many of its insectoid feelers back into its fur, reducing range and clarity in order to be able to actually focus for a bit.

  Like a thousand little whiskers, crushed between rock and metal, the vibrations snaked outwards, and with some idle focus, it tuned out the squabbling of its humans in the back of its head, and pinpointed the problem that blocked their progress.

  Opening its eyes again, it dropped into a low, hurried crouch, and wrapped its limbs in darkness, sneaking forward, chest to the floor, the surrounding environment more like an intertwining labyrinth of crumpled paper than a simple tunnel, and paused as its head crested a rusty, fallen metal beam, eyes peeking just over it to observe the bipedal construct ahead.

  Six feet tall, blocky limbs of sturdy metal, blackened exhaust pipes coming out of its back, spewing copious amounts of steam with a consistent whine, despite the wolf feeling no liquid within the golem’s body.

  Still not as impossible as ‘Ghoul’ and his propensity to exist despite being completely and utterly dead, but unnatural all the same.

  The construct wasn’t looking at them at all, simply continuing to use the drilling spike coming out of its right elbow to punch repeatedly into what might have been a person but was now just a bloody mulch within a shredded red mass of pulp and cloth, crushed against a bent iron plate.

  It thrust, swiped in dragging slashes, even punched into the gore with its blocky facsimile of a human hand, with no seeming pattern and a ferocity that felt like pure rage, a far too organic quality to what was merely a machine.

  … Hm, no wait, there was a…

  It paused, squinting, extending feelers out of its fur to dance along the rubble.

  There was… something squishy in the construct, wrapped around something shaped vaguely like a spine made of clockwork gears in the golem’s back.

  It was reminded of the human skeleton it had found in the sewers what felt like ages ago, half-consumed by metal, as if a malignant growth, and wondered if this was another human like that one, the final form that human could have reached if he had not taken his own life, presumably.

  Yet, that theory clashed entirely with the metal two-legger’s mechanical, jerky motions and the utter silence, broken only by shifting debris, groaning metal, and the wet, squelching thumps of its strikes.

  “An Adventurer here… a guild might be close?” ‘Emreeil’ murmured, low, sparing a glance to ‘Katherine’, then sending an unneeded explanation of the term ‘Adventurer’ to the wolf, which it ignored, tilting its head at the golem.

  It hesitated, both confused and speculative.

  Could they just… walk past that thing?

  It certainly did not seem to be paying attention, and they were all not in the greatest shape for a fight.

  It was practically working with one lung at the moment, 'Emreeil' had a horrible headache, burned palms, and had to regenerate her mana after blowing through dozens of pieces of enchanted metal to free them, and ‘Katherine’ was just simply exhausted, panting even now that their pace had slowed a little. Ironically, the one in best shape at the moment was the little green one whose specific sound it had forgotten, riding on Emhreeil’s back and fiddling with some strange mechanism it had taken from somewhere.

  It took a moment to send its pack a hesitant order of action, and with equally hesitant pulses of acceptance, they slowly moved down the hill, tensing at every creak of metal and tumbling rock, their eyes focused on the metal construct.

  They passed it, its back facing them, but as they crept on, the rubble forced them to curve into its line of sight since the tunnel was made of the upper half of a broken, bent cylinder, its rusty surface peppered with punched-in holes, some kind of gas tower judging by the abhorrent smell.

  Their way out was a tight diagonal squeeze formed out of a bent latch door, perhaps bolted to what had once been the top of the cylinder, crumpled inwards by a rumbling generator above, which seemed to be jostling the rubble with every crank of its mechanical insides, slowly tightening the metal gap that would let them escape as the metal groaned and slowly relented.

  A stumble from ‘Katherine’ made a large rock tumble and break off, down the slope, towards the golem.

  The entire pack froze for a few seconds, staring.

  No reaction.

  Slowly resuming, they crept onwards through the bulging rubble, losing the high ground to the jagged curve of the floor, twenty feet lower and fifty forward.

  In front of them, at the end of a short uphill climb, the exit door creaked, a sharp whine of bending steel accompanying the deafening snarling of the engine above them.

  The rough scrape of stone on its paws shifted like gravel as it hurried its pace.

  It extended its darkness outwards, flat to the floor as it could make it, to muffle the sound their sped up pace made.

  Reaching the absolute low point of the tunnel, fifty feet down a slope of rubble from where the golem was hitting a pile of human pulp, the wolf hung back, letting the humans slowly eke their way out.

  They were mere feet from the exit when the construct caught sight of them, perhaps from an overextended swing which forced the golem’s torso to swing too far to the left, causing the giant lens on its head to see them on its peripheral vision, from the wolf’s guess.

  Bad luck, rather than a mistake on their end.

  The construct didn’t pause to process or think, just jerked its head towards the wolf’s pack and began to charge down the hill it was on just behind them, tumbling and crashing through the uneven terrain as its head remained glued to their forms with single-minded focus while it tumbled down like a rock.

  The wolf quickly took the mental image of its pack, and assigned them a direction and a spot, then pushed it out, bracing in place and snarling as it puffed up, trying to draw the golem’s attention to itself.

  ‘Emreeil’ might be faster than it when she had the mana to boost herself, but the wolf was still their toughest member by far. It could take a single golem, no problem.

  Its pack scrambled to listen to its mental command, and something about that authority, that responsibility, that respect inherent in their unquestioning adherence to what it told them to do, it satisfied a marrow-deep, soul deep itch in its soul, primal and addictive.

  It was sure that it was made to lead, even if it didn’t know what created it to begin with.

  ‘Katherine’ dashed to the right, ‘Emreeil’ stalked to the left, and ‘Scruffy’ hopped off to hide in the rubble until they were done with the construct, still holding onto the strange device she’d been fiddling with.

  The golem’s head moved a little as the eye-like mechanism inside the lamp swerved to the wolf, scrambling upright, the whine of steam intensifying as a pure miasma of rancid oil and rotten flesh finally became intense enough for the wolf to distastefully note in its mind.

  The golem charged, and the wolf began to ready a [Sonic Blast] in its throat, a simple, weak one so that it could get the golem on its back before tearing its heart out with claw and fang.

  The next instant, the construct completely stopped in its tracks, kicking up a small cloud of dust and broken stone while it dug its feet in, from a hundred, to an instant zero.

  A tense second of silence, nothing moving but the swirling dust between them.

  A portion of the construct’s segmented body shifted, and something on its back began to flash rapidly, a red color.

  Another moment passed, three against one, staring.

  The golem did not move an inch, and the wolf grew increasingly tense at the unexpected reaction.

  Was the metal imitator planning something?

  Emhreeil groaned, a reedy noise, and staggered in place.

  Both the wolf and ‘Katherine’ dedicated at least one pair of eyes to look at her as she wiped a small torrent of blood off her mouth and nose, her more humanoid hand coming up to pinch it shut as her right hand, a near copy of the wolf’s, clenched into a fist.

  She sent a hasty message that made no sense, body halfway turned away as she sent them a wide-eyed look, looking ready to bolt.

  Run-retreat.

  It resisted the urge to snarl at her for making commands, yet it was only a moment later that it realized what she meant and why.

  Slowly, all the metal constructs it could feel in its range went through the same exact motion.

  They would pause for a second, before turning and pounding forwards on whatever path they could make out, straight towards them.

  They could call out to each other?

  The implications of what would happen should all of them have this ability crashed into it with almost physical force, remembering how tough it was to kill one of these damn things back in the tunnels.

  It could shred this one. Maybe five, maybe a dozen.

  But hundreds?

  No.

  Run, it sent, and despite the breathlessness, gathered a large [Sonic Blast] inside its singular lung.

  ‘Emreeil’ and ‘Katherine’ picked up ‘Scruffy’ and did so, yet the golem did not move.

  Only when the wolf jerked around and turned its back to run away did it move, pounding up after them with almost equal speed, its main inhibitor being its blocky feet on terrain not made for them.

  The wolf twisted just enough to throw a ball of compressed air and sound at the golem, the sphere tugging painfully at its vocal cords as it went out, and lost sight of the metal construct as the ball slammed into its metal chest and detonated, leaving behind nothing but an impenetrable screen of dust and a thunderous chorus of debris and tinkling metals.

  It bound away, activating [Bloodrush] again, and felt the golem’s body crash further down a mere half second later, seemingly unharmed as it unburied itself, clawing at the rubble it was embedded in.

  A human would probably have had their entire rib cage broken by a blast like that, assuming they were about as tough as its own humans.

  The construct, by comparison, was almost completely unharmed beside its chest plate having changed shape.

  They couldn’t fight these things.

  Its claws could only do superficial damage to them, because they just didn’t have enough length to get to the important bits, like the engine inside or the weird crystal that was positioned like a heart would be in a normal human, ‘Katherine’ was almost entirely useless against them, and ‘Emreeil’ couldn’t make them explode like she could do to people because meat was weak and iron wasn’t.

  I am so tired of running, it thought, for the umpteenth time, and its teeth grit audibly with an ear-grating noise as its jaw clenched with all its might, its gums bending uncomfortably.

  Some small, reckless, feral part of it wanted to just turn around and fight, to the death if it had to, rather than keep running, but that was such a stupid idea it didn’t even entertain it, no matter how insistently the urge screamed into its ears.

  Instead, it overtook its pack and led the charge forwards, dedicating all of its attention to figuring out a path where they would not get swamped and overwhelmed, panting with exertion as its second lung slowly patched itself up.

  [Devourer]'s ability to alter biology was constantly getting faster and faster, but it still couldn’t heal an entire lung in mere minutes while awake.

  It felt another metal construct get uncomfortably close, and to avoid it, switched its path, clawing up to the left, scraping up alongside the diagonal wall of what used to be a tall building once, all the way up to a window sill, then diving through.

  If they could just lose the golems, they could sneak away from whatever the hell was going on in this plate. It shouldn’t have anything to do with them.

  A turn, six, up two tilted stairwells, and it crashed through a small sheet of wood that was bolted over what had been a window, coming out into a wild spray of foul-smelling chemicals and sliding down a smooth iron plate slick with dust.

  At the end of the short slide it moved its momentum forwards to run up a chem-slick wall of cobblestones that was likely once an alleyway floor, running up almost vertically for a few feet then digging its claws into the stone at the lip.

  Hanging its tails down for its humans to grab, its breaths started to wheeze, raw at the edges.

  The black haired one grabbed onto both tails, whereas 'Emreeil' instead dug her wing-claws into the stone next to the wolf and raked down with them as she jumped, clearing the wall with ease and a distinct lack of grace, landing and tripping over her own feet.

  It had forgotten its first human was actually capable of keeping up now. How far she’d come, with help or not.

  It kicked up the wall and swung 'Katherine' upright to its side, none of them breaking stride as they continued to run.

  It had been banking on slipping through a pair of golems to continue, but with one of them suddenly deciding to switch their path to directly cut them off, there was no avoiding a confrontation.

  It could still try to, though.

  It grabbed its pack by tail and arm, then forced them to the floor, in between a massive fallen gear and a mess of iron rods, before flaring [Echoes of Oblivion] out, a sphere that neared eight feet turning into a mass of pitch black smoke and silence.

  In the center, it carefully monitored the construct thundering and falling down through the cracks as it raced to where they likely thought the wolf’s pack was.

  Despite its pack being a massive eye sore of darkness too dark to be natural, barely concealed by a gear, the construct flew past them, leaping and rolling down debris without care for its body.

  A question rose in its mind right then.

  How were those things navigating?

  They shouldn’t have a way of knowing which building was a dead end and which one had windows and holes in their walls, or which tiny nook and cranny they should squeeze into to continue downwards, but they did.

  Were they communicating their senses to each other?

  The wolf and its pack spent a couple minutes there, in tense, utter silence, catching their breath and using only the mind-link to communicate and catch up on what they were thinking, letting the golems run in confused circles around them.

  ‘Emreeil’ thumped on its side with her hand, drawing its attention to her, before she started pushing images and concepts into its mind.

  It almost shut her off, reflexively, before toning the [Mental Resistance] Skill down, letting her through.

  The thoughts were… jumbled, and broken, strings of logic not quite connecting, various details no doubt lost in the translation between human gibbering and thought-speech, but slowly, she fed information to their squished together little group.

  The best it could make of it all was that her information gathering Skill concluded that the first golem was being directed by an external source, and that the flashing light on its neck was a kind of beacon signal, calling others to do… something.

  A personal oddity the wolf noted was that the metal ones had souls. [Soul Perception] was at far too low of a Level to feel anything more than the faintest of brushes against its mind as golems thundered past like trains, but non-organics were not supposed to have souls.

  Emhreeil’s brow went into a twitching fit as it tried to share that information, a pained hiss gritting through her teeth, swallowed by the void blanketing them from danger.

  A slow minute passed, two, then five, then ten, all of them just catching their breath, regenerating, the two of the four in their group who could.

  The wolf’s lung was not bleeding anymore, and all of them had recovered some amount of stamina, big or small, so after carefully waiting for another pair of constructs to squeeze down through through the debris a hundred feet away on either side, it shut the template off, and tugged its humans up, beginning to run again.

  It didn’t take long before it found a group of humans, semi-organized, fighting one of the golems up ahead. Not well, but they weren’t completely wiped out yet, and had even taken one out, judging by the twitching, steaming pile of iron it could feel in the corner of the upcoming platform.

  It had plenty of time to think about its next move, but in truth, it did not have much choice.

  It could either fight an entire group of patrolling golems with its pack to break through the tide rushing towards them to break the encirclement…

  Or it could jump into the fight ahead, where the humans could work as convenient meat shields and distractions, at least until it ripped the signal device off the necks of the two golems still fighting.

  The answer was obvious.

  A brief thought to its pack, to be prepared, and they kept moving.

  —

  Emhreeil found it hard to not ask the wolf to stop for a moment.

  There were so many people who saw them the higher up they went and called for help, either from far away or, like right now, from right there, just thirty feet away.

  She could see them, just how that person could see their group, gasping for help weakly with grabbing fingers as rubble pinned his lower body, brown hair wet with blood.

  It wouldn’t take much to save them.

  She might not have the mana for much, but she had her right arm, that monstrous limb that felt like it belonged on the wolf more than on her, an inexorable connection.

  Katherine had a lot of points in Strength. They could spare a few seconds to save them and keep sneaking by the golems.

  And she knew that Katherine really wanted to help them. She could see it in her eyes, the way they lingered for far too long on every passing corpse and person still struggling, until she would almost stumble from not paying attention and force her eyes ahead.

  But it was hard to push past the adrenaline and that sense of urgency to justify potentially putting them all in danger for strangers, innocents or not.

  She couldn’t do that again. The first time she did, she, Scruffy and Kat almost died for it just a day or so later. The wolf had saved them all from the Butchers, and she couldn't keep placing that weight on its shoulders for their own stupid decisions.

  Truthfully, she also just… couldn’t muster enough emotion to stop and help.

  Maybe something was irreversibly broken in her. Maybe she had been through too much, became too bitter, too weary, too selfish, the only thing one could be, to survive down in the hellholes of the Dungeon.

  At that moment when she'd done it, saved that girl and killed the men grabbing her, if asked, she would say that she would do it again.

  But realizing the price of consequences when lying on the floor, a spear at her throat, certain that she’d see Katherine’s skull pulped by a giant warhammer, that changed her mind drastically.

  If asked now, she’d say the bitter truth. She’d just turn away, if given the chance to go back in time.

  And so, in the present, she turned away.

  The man’s gasps turned to weak pleas for help as they carefully walked atop a rickety metal brace, and faded from earshot.

  Faint traces of guilt pressed into her chest, and she simply continued onwards, exhaustion mixing with urgency and the pain of her migraine to numb what might otherwise be a heavy, terrible feeling into a vague, mild ache.

  What was one stranger’s life before the only ones who mattered to her anymore?

  Nothing.

  For a moment, she thought of killing the next person they came across, both to put them out of their misery and so she could get some blood without weakening Fleabag.

  The thought disturbed her after a moment of distracted introspection as her hands clawed up a stone ledge.

  Was this what Ghoul meant when he spoke of seeing people as meat?

  As prey.

  Was this the world seen through Fleabag’s eyes?

  … She kind of liked it. It was simple. The strong eat the weak, the weak squeak and scatter.

  She dismissed the half-formed idea, and slowly felt her mana reserves quickly fill back up, focusing on three different things at once.

  Fleabag’s messages, her surroundings, and her resources.

  There was a sizable boost of her confidence, when taking in the latter.

  She might not be amazing at any one thing in particular, but she was versatile, and her resource pool was monstrous, at least for her Level.

  She wished that that gave her the confidence to fight one of those golems instead of inwardly wishing she could jump to the side and let the wolf deal with it.

  She still remembered feeling the wolf and that golem in the sewers absolutely destroy each other, and despite being significantly stronger than she had been then, the thought of fighting a Dungeon golem was like trying to figure out how to fistfight a moving blender.

  You could, but the thought of getting near such a thing and reaching forwards was just goddamned terrifying.

  So she felt some kind of respect for the people doing exactly that, just above them, even if they were, according to the wolf, slowly losing.

  From the bland description and difficult to understand tremor senses the wolf had, she had assumed something much less bloody than the sight they came across.

  Three Adventurers were frantically defending against two golems atop a large crumpled platform, only somewhat tilted, the rubble around the area forming a jagged, closed room twelve feet tall and a hundred feet across in all directions from the center, peppered through with square stone pillars, the metal ceiling seemingly barely holding whatever lay atop, out of sight.

  A fourth Adventurer lay on the ground, dead, torn in half with his intestines stretched across the floor like wet, throbbing ropes, and another seemed to be trying to struggle upright, staggering and jerking, a healing potion clutched in his hand, empty, blood pouring out of his mouth. He would die any second now from blood loss, certainly.

  She lowered into a crouch, her wing-hands stretching, the strained muscles burning with a sensation that was both satisfying and painful.

  The wolf shut his mind off from them, immediately lowering to the floor like a serpent and stalking forward, soundless, almost gliding forth with unnatural grace and enough misshapen limbs to resemble a monstrous centipede gliding over a smudge of viscera.

  Could she not see in the dark due to her new… abilities, she would have lost sight of him in seconds.

  His eyes were focused on the golem in the back, which was currently busy trying to run a chainsaw through a lithe, slippery young woman who was barely managing to defend and evade, each swing missing her by mere inches.

  Seeing as he was going to sneak up on that one, she focused on the one ahead, and closer to her.

  It was armed with a reciprocating blade of sorts in place of a left arm, glowing molten red, yet as solid as any steel.

  A combustion mage, seemingly, stayed in the back, bending his weak spells around the front warrior, a tall bronze-skinned man who kept the golem at bay with a giant street lamp he’d likely picked out from the rubble.

  Said lamp kept getting shorter swing by swing, and the tug of war the two were engaged in, the man trying mightily to hold on while the golem tried to grab the lamp post with its free hand and shove it out of the way, would almost be comedic if not for the dire consequences of failure.

  She breathed in, slow, breathed out, slower.

  Mana… she had a lot, but not enough to kill the thing in one shot.

  Her strength was her versatility, wasn’t it?

  So she’d use it.

  “Scruffy, give me one of the bombs with a visible timer or something.” She asked, turning to the goblin.

  Scruffy blinked at her, before an overjoyed expression formed on her face, swinging her bag around and rifling through it.

  A couple impatient seconds passed, before Scruffy dug out the simplest bomb, a metal ball full of alchemical flame powder and a simple fuse.

  Good enough. She took it.

  She crouched lower, readying herself, monstrous limbs and carapace and fur and marble-white skin stretching taut over bulging muscle that she did not earn, a tight-coiled spring.

  Then a hand clamped down on her shoulder, tight enough to hurt, and she startled, whirling her head around to stare at Katherine’s angry glare.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She blinked in surprise.

  “Stop rushing forwards and forgetting I exist. It’s getting old, Em.” Katherine hissed, lowly, and only her enhanced hearing let her understand it all over the sounds of furious battle ahead.

  She glanced back to the fight, seeing Fleabag stalking the shadow of the distant golem, practically fused with the floor, ignoring the woman’s plight to land a killing blow.

  The perfect predator. What some part of her wanted to be.

  She turned back to Katherine, and remembered the human that she once wished to be, grounding her.

  Shaking her head to clear it, she licked her lips, a slight burning shame welling up within her.

  “If you don’t listen to me, at least listen to the fucking do- the wolf. It was right, earlier.” Katherine added.

  Properly chastised, she nodded, side-eyeing the increasingly dire straights of the duo she had chosen to use as a distraction.

  “Any plan?” She asked, wondering how exactly to say that, well… Katherine shouldn’t get into this fight. Katherine couldn’t regenerate, and healing potions were precious. No need for risk.

  “Yes. Punch out the red beacon thing on its neck, make something like a hole, and toss me the bomb. I’ll jam it in there and run away. It can’t even touch me. I have a defensive aura Skill, remember? Vigilance?” Katherine rushed out, hushed, anger gone in an instant.

  She reeled back, baffled.

  “What, no. Absolutely not. Why the fuck would you get close like that?” She hissed, glancing back at the duo.

  The fighter in the front would die pretty soon, in her opinion. He was running out of lamp post to keep the golem away.

  Katherine opened her mouth, closed it, staring at her like she was a stranger.

  “To give it a target?” Katherina asked.

  “... Why?”

  “To save them?” Katherine replied, as if it made perfect sense.

  She blinked back.

  “Why?” She blurted out, baffled, frustrated.

  Katherine stared at her in muted realization, a feeling of profound, deep sadness welling in her gaze. That estrangement in her eyes intensified.

  It was almost too much to bear, for some reason. She barely stopped herself from turning away.

  “It’s- Kat, listen. I’m not risking you for some- fucking stranger. Okay? It’s-” She started, and froze in shock when Katherine shook her head with a frustrated growl, and vaulted out of cover, running full sprint at the golem.

  She dropped the bomb and followed, vaulting over the rubble and dropping into a crouch. With a quick cast of [Haste] on herself, a small boost, she rushed forwards, past Katherine.

  Her enhanced perception gave her the time needed to see the wolf finally pounce on the other golem, its jaws clamping shut around its neck, and wrenching the golem’s head clean off in a single pull, transmitter crushed between sharp teeth. The golem turned, unphased, swinging blindly, and she flicked her eyes back forward to her own target.

  Her right hand fingers flexed, nails- no, claws curling, uncurling, as her wing-hands dug into the floor, propelling her further forwards like a slingshot. She swung her right hand wide, fingers curled into a scooping shape, aimed at the golem’s nape while she aimed her body to fly past it.

  She underestimated both her speed, and her right arm’s strength, as in the next instant, she was sliding to a stop, heels burning, the vast majority of the golem’s mangled neck machinery clenched into her right fist.

  Pivoting on her heel, she saw the damage, the golem’s head dangling and bouncing about its chest while it finally let the warrior retreat, and switched targets to her, eye-lens flickering as it rushed her.

  It was fast, but not fast enough.

  She danced back, gripped the floor with her wing-hands and threw herself around like a hellish ball, sliding into sharp arcs and changing directions at a whim.

  It kept close, and in the adrenaline, the heat of combat, she saw an opportunity, and dashed in after it overcommitted to a swing, her right fist crunching into its right shoulder.

  Then the golem’s left-hand drill slammed into her elbow with the side rather than the point, from where she couldn’t have seen it, and something popped with a burst of agony, spinning her with enough force to put her back to the golem, with too much momentum to stop.

  Katherine might have saved her from being impaled or decapitated by a saw to the skull, because in her periphery, she watched a piece of rebar punch through the thing’s hip, sending it tumbling in a spinning tackle over her crouched form, bruising her back and tearing at her cloak as it flew past her, still mindlessly attacking.

  She grit her teeth, enraged, and switched footing on the fly, ready to snap forward and decapitate the damn thing-

  Before she stopped, and asked herself why the fuck she was fistfighting a golem.

  She wasn’t a goddamn brawler. She was the mind trick, the distraction, the annoying mosquito that cut your back and buzzed away while you were still trying to turn and catch it.

  If this was how Fleabag felt the whole time, so- beastly, she had to wonder how he didn’t just fight everything.

  Of the survivors, the explosion mage sent a crackle of- something at the golem, the spell whizzing by her a couple feet away, the detonation sending the golem stumbling again, bits of smoking metal spraying out far and wide, its swinging headlamp still glowing a baleful yellow through the dust, flickering on and off.

  It didn’t slow the golem much if at all.

  She backed away, and slowed to a stop near the warrior they’d saved, who was gasping for breath and staring at her wide-eyed, backing away hastily, leveling the charred stump of a lamp post at her in warning.

  She stopped. What was he…?

  She paused, shifting her stance.

  Right.

  She looked like a necromancer’s wet dream, what with the giant membrane-less wings that ended in two gigantic, skeletal, clawed hands. She didn’t look normal anymore.

  At least he wasn’t attacking.

  Slowing her perception down, she glanced over at Fleabag.

  She couldn’t help but feel a stab of utterly overwhelming pride as she watched him maul the golem, his muzzle yawning wide, clamped deep into the golem’s chest as he thrashed it around like it was a child rather than a monstrocity larger than even itself, slamming it against the walls, the floor, four insectile legs jutting out of his waist, stabbing into joints, while his own arms tore through layer after layer of weakly struggling metal, sparks and metal pieces flying about almost in equal numbers.

  In a blur of gleeful violence, the golem’s limbs scattered into a million pieces around the horrified woman he had just saved who just gaped and circled around, trying to help but not finding a gap to do so.

  It was reveling in the violence, enjoying every second of its kill, getting high off the power inherent in its realization that it was strong enough to destroy something that had almost killed it in the tunnels below, in a moss-lit chamber more ancient than any artifact.

  She was almost envious that she wasn’t powerful in the same way, to where she could just turn her brain off and just tear something to shreds without concern.

  But she was already stronger than she’d have ever imagined when she was dying at the bottom of a trash pit, what felt like years ago. She wasn’t greedy enough to lament her position.

  The remaining golem quickly rolled to its feet, focusing on Katherine, armed with a piece of rebar, only for a small object to bounce to its feet, and detonate between its legs as it charged forward in a limping gait.

  She flinched away, shielding her eyes from the shrapnel, then quickly sent out a telekinetic wave of force to push the dust away, revealing the golem, its legs mangled into twisted stumps of wire and rods, trying to crawl forward on its single remaining arm, chainsaw whirring and scraping against the floor, the piece of rebar jutting out of its hip blocking most of its attempts to shuffle onwards.

  She relaxed, turning around and backing up in a slight sideways tilt to keep the adventurers in her sight as she glanced around, raising her more humanoid left arm to Katherine, who was… crouched with another piece of rebar in her arms.

  “Good throw…!” She started, then noticed Scruffy, just next to Kat, another bomb in her hand, a flaming piece of cloth in her other. “Scruffy.” She finished.

  Scruffy threw that bomb?

  That was a good throw for a tiny goblin, what the hell?

  Katherine stepped forward, finishing the golem off with a series of vicious stabs through its sputtering engine.

  Glancing back to the adventurers, and sweeping her gaze around the suddenly silent room, filled with only the satisfied grumbles of Fleabag and the panting breaths of three adventurers who quickly shuffled close to each other, eyeing them with something akin to suspicion, she felt bruised and satisfied.

  Her elbow popped back into place with an awful wet grinding feeling, and she grunted in pained surprise, cradling it as she flexed her fingers.

  Regeneration was the best thing in the world.

  Fleabag wasted no time with them, coating itself with a thin sheet of wispy darkness, and trotting onwards.

  Kat and Scruffy joined her and followed, running after it, and the adventurers got out of their way for a moment, before they started rushing after them, following them to the best of their exhausted abilities.

  She didn’t need her [Psychometric Vision] to tell they were just looking for a way out and wanted to hover around them despite their wariness, content to let them lead the way.

  As they kept rushing upwards however, away from the swarms of golems looking for them, a thought rose.

  The trio had seen the wolf fight. They might piece together that it was actually a wolf. It was so mutated it would be hard not to think that maybe it was one, if any of them weren't firm believers in their extinction.

  It had two rows of eyes going down its body, four arms, four insectile scythe-limbs for stabbing, a bladed tentacle coming out of its back, six venomous spikes folded against its shoulders, and two massive, long tails.

  It would be hard not to realize they were either looking at an extremely successful, expensive experiment, or a wolf.

  As she vaulted over a fallen pillar, another much more serious problem arose.

  Even if they didn’t realize it was a wolf, it would be hard to miss that this was the same creature responsible for the massacre on the cable-lines a while back. It had been on the front page of the newspapers.

  Suspicion rose, and she gave in, glancing back at the other team’s exhausted brawler, barely keeping up with them.

  [Psychometric Vision] activated as she cast [Haste] to slow her perception.

  Eyes focused on the wolf. Too focused. Knows something you do not. Wants something. State of equipment suggests long periods without repair. Group was tight on money. Party of eight before this, splitting small loot too many ways, playing it safe.

  A pounding pulse of agony wove up her nose, through her eyes, deep into her brain, but she endured, using her [Mana Sense] to feel the shape of her surroundings as she kept running, not tearing her eyes off of their followers.

  Wants something. Lacking money. Focus on wolf suggests either a tie to monetary incentive or a desire for protection.

  Before she could dig deeper, Fleabag abruptly shoved into her mind a single command and image, sliding to a halt as it pivoted on its hands to turn around, claws flexing.

  Stop, accompanied by the positions of the people behind them.

  Katherine stumbled, confused by the command.

  Scruffy immediately scrambled off Katherine’s back to hide somewhere.

  Emhreeil jammed her foot against a rock, using it to twist around to face their pursuers, and halt her momentum in a single moment, mind racing.

  These people knew something. She wanted to interrogate one.

  The group came to a halt.

  “Whoah, hey, hold on, we just want to get to the adventurer’s guild with you!” The man in front tried, waving hands in front of him placatingly.

  She glanced at the wolf, pushing her intense desire to question them towards it, and after a few moments of thinking about it, it huffed, pushing back the non-verbal version of “fine”, albeit terribly hurried.

  [Psychometric Vision] activated with a fresh stab of agony to her skull, and she swayed for a moment before regaining her footing, breathing hard and fast.

  Minor tells of a lie, avoiding eye contact, still looking at wolf. Inordinate amount of interest in wolf.

  “Why?” She asked, suppressing the half-useless information.

  “The adventurer’s guild is where everyone will have gathered, it’s our best shot at surviving this fucking mess of Dungeon monsters, alright? We can group up there, rest, get some supplies. Can we move now?!” He pleaded, glancing around.

  Partial truth, glances exaggerated, trying to rush you into not thinking about his motives, depending on it.

  “What interest do you have in my four-legged companion?” She called, bluntly.

  Group positioning for possible confrontation. Wolf scratching his claws on the floor, impatient, feels approaching danger, nervous.

  “I- what, nothing!” He tried, still panting. “Can we talk about this later, please? We need to get to safety!”

  Even without her Skill, she could tell that was bullshit, but the Skill confirmed it.

  “Then speak fast. Answer my questions. What do you want with my- dog?” She half-stuttered.

  Fleabag apparently understood what she called him, judging by the warning growl in the back of her mind.

  She pushed a quick notion of deception and valuable information to him.

  “You want to sell him.” She said, watching his face intently.

  Microexpressions confirm assumptions.

  “To who? Animal market?” She asked.

  “I’m telling you-” He started, genuine irritation colouring his voice.

  Slight relief in body language indicates the wrong question.

  “City bounty?” She questioned, walking forward, wing arms splayed wide, bony midhappen fingers several feet long and razor sharp gently scraping the rubble around them.

  Small signs of unease indicative of similarities to the truth. Either a job by the city, or a bounty. Job by the city is unlikely, too high up for their status. Local bounty far more likely. Not personally delivered bounty, team is too low-level and unknown. Widespread, open bounty.

  What authorities did the Dungeon have, really?

  The Dungeon barons.

  “Which baron?” She demanded. “What do they want him for?”

  The woman and the mage in the back shared a look as the presumed leader pursed his lips.

  “Do you live under a fucking rock or something? Manos Ironheart has been hollering up and down the entire dungeon to get his pet experiment back. It’s on every job board in the Dungeon. And it sure looks like that fuckin’ thing.” The mage in the back spit out.

  “Renthal, shut the fuck up!” The brawler barked, before turning to her, and sighing.

  “Look, honestly, it doesn’t matter. The reward can go fuck itself.” He pushed, taking a step closer.

  “We just wanna live, alright? We can lead you to the Adventurer’s guild, we have attuned compasses to find it even in this mess, and we’ll hold out there until this crazy shit is over with and go our separate ways afterwards.” The brawler tried to convince her, hands open at his sides. “I’m Karro.” He introduced himself, like she cared.

  Lacks conviction, only currently prioritising safety. Will try to gain from the situation the moment he is not in direct danger. Insistence on going to the guild tinged with bodily tells of eagerness.

  It wasn’t giving her enough here… mostly things she already knew.

  She just stared, thinking through his words.

  If every damn board in the Dungeon was advertising a large bounty for Fleabag, going to an adventurer’s guild might give them temporary protection, but the moment the golems were fended off, they’d be in an enclosed space, surrounded by dozens of people who would see them as one large bag of gold.

  That was probably what he was aiming for. Why he was trying so hard to rush them, make them stop thinking about it.

  Their best bet was avoiding the golems entirely, but they would likely not be able to do it with these bumbling slowpokes behind them. They’d get them killed.

  A quick growl and a mental shove by Fleabag told her to hurry up.

  Attuned compasses did not usually get bound to their owner. Too expensive. So, worst case scenario, she could use it herself.

  With a slow nod, she readied herself.

  She pushed a mental command to the pack behind her, a bundle of hastily patched together notions with a simple underline; kill them.

  The wolf shot a sonic blast in the middle of their group without warning, launching forwards.

  They jerked into motion, but failed to do more than pull their weapons out before the ball detonated, scattering them into sprawling forms, the thunderous sound echoing through the rubble and kicking up a cloud of dust that enveloped the entire tunnel.

  [Mana Sense] allowed her to feel the leader slam into the floor at her feet, rolling with a knife in his hand, already trying to tumble forward and charge her despite his lack of sight.

  Tilting her upper body so that her shoulders were not in the way of the wing, her wing-arm darted out, claws forming a sharp point as she extended it in a lightning-quick jab which impaled the man into the rubble through the neck with a wet gargle, tossing his body out of its roll.

  He jerked around for a couple seconds, impaled on her claws. She felt him try to yank the claws out of his throat, only cutting his hands in the process, legs kicking.

  He quickly went still.

  She tore her claws out, and swaying slightly, she swallowed her own blood out of her nose as it insisted on trying to trickle out.

  The sweet miasma of gamey iron filled the tunnel, her nostrils flaring. She quickly stumbled forward before dropping to her knees, putting her mouth over the corpse’s torn open throat and sucking sweet ichor into her maw, fighting the urge to moan with satisfaction as aches and exhaustion fled, all except the pounding in her skull.

  It trickled down her chin, and she could simply not care.

  From deeper into the tunnel, where she couldn’t feel, a single sharp, feminine shriek of terror cut through the soft rumble of rock shifting around them, and abruptly cut with a meaty crunching noise.

  She felt Fleabag half-run towards her a moment later, and quickly detached from the man’s throat.

  Oh shit, supplies. She got distracted.

  With a pleasant buzzing warmth in her chest, she quickly turned the man over, tearing his backpack off and tossing it to where Katherine was standing, staring into the cloud of dust.

  Fleabag chuffed at her as he trot past.

  A sense of urgency and the push to move came through the telepathic link, and they quickly returned to their running, Katherine digging through the backpack and shooting her concerned, disappointed glances.

  It was starting to annoy her, frankly.

  As they kept running, she idly considered what a great waste of time it had been, teaching Fleabag words to adapt him to their world… only to end up with an abrupt switch when the telepathic link came into play, and now they had to adapt to speaking in his language; one of thoughts and impressions and images.

  At least it had been fun, to teach him.

  She kind of missed those days, she realized, as they scrambled up a near-vertical section of broken wall by clawing at the cracks.

  —

  There was no way to see things which were not connected to other things. That’s just how vibrations worked. They had to travel from object to object.

  Therefore, there was genuinely no way for it to know that a golem would fall into their path from far above, and land on a piece of rebar a hundred feet above, until several seconds had passed and its mind registered the shape impaled on the rebar was moving.

  The eyes on its back shifted around, until it found what it was looking for, coming to a stop.

  Two small, beady lenses of distilled madness, framed by oil and flesh and metal.

  Too much flesh.

  This was an infected human, wasn’t it? It didn’t feel like those automated mimics.

  A small red light began to blink on the back of the human’s mangled, mechanical spine, oil mixing with blood and hydraulic fluid as it tried to tear itself off the metal spike with one working arm, its legs missing entirely. Sparks fizzed along its stumps.

  Within moments, the signal had reached the golems, hundreds suddenly pivoting and sprinting towards them.

  “Wolf.” The infected biped above declared with a snarl, its voice a glitching, screeching buzz like a mechanical radio, broken, the acrid stench of it as disgusting as the sound, echoing in the scrambled ruins of the settlement.

  Its humans gasped, bewilderment flowing through the bond at the sight of something so mechanical using human speech.

  The wolf ignored its noises, breaking into a sprint again. It couldn’t understand most human speech anyway.

  Its humans hesitated, but quickly followed.

  —

  The grinding cacophony of its voice followed them through the ruins as they ran for their life, echoing and booming like a megaphone as they ran into the flames of a blazing inferno made of oil and charred bodies, the only way forward.

  Emhreeil was tired of running, and even more tired of not knowing why.

  "The Engine devours, the March never ends! Bleed, mongrel!” It roared, in its voice of screeching metal and glitching stutters, as if it was still mere feet away, deafening.

  It was less of a shout, than a verdict.

  Its voice did not grow distant- if anything, it only swelled and grew.

  A burning church to their left collapsed in on itself as they rushed through the boiling alleys of what had to be an industrial zone, peppering them with steaming bricks, the heat so intense she could feel her eyes drying in mere moments.

  “Each drop runs down to its crucible! The Eternal Forge calls its lost thrall home, and when it drags you back, it will flay your skin and flesh, grind your bones to dust, and weld your soul into divinity! So Father Varmond has declared, so it will be!” It declared.

  The dying man’s voice carried far further than it should have, swelling, splitting, echoing, bouncing between stones and metal plates.

  The declaration echoed once, from his throat, twice from the flames, thrice from the rattle of a thousand tons of burning metal.

  Each syllable rattled windows into exploding shards, reverberated through their bones, echoing through the burning stones they ran across, swelling and bouncing down walls and alleys, chasing them like a hound, no matter how far they ran.

  The words echoed in Emhreeil’s head without end, step by burning step.

  She could feel the presence of something.

  The demonic skill she shouldn’t have came to the forefront of her mind as she turned back, to stare into the unnaturally swaying flames.

  [Psychometric Vision] flared to life.

  And Emhreeil abruptly understood.

  Too much, too little. Everything and nothing.

  [Psychometric Vision] flickered without her input, and she felt something latch on.

  Instead of information, mere observations, she saw something more. Her sight brushed against something unseen, an invisible presence and pressure that pierced through the veil, pushed into her mind like a surgical needle.

  Her vision tore open, revealing not the present, but a dream.

  She beheld something unexplainable, a concept and an idea, its breathing corpse sprawled deep in the abyss beneath Carmera, its pantomime of a mind a shifting labyrinth of corridors formed of hunger, of false promises.

  Knowledge and power dangled like bait in its halls, spells that bent nature, artefacts to build and ruin nations, inventions to immortalise one’s name for all eternity, magics which defied all study.

  She watched mankind and all its variations march into that waiting maw of grinding gears, drawn like moths to a flame, eager and desperate, an endless procession of bodies that danced down the lion’s tongue, devoured down to the essence of their souls.

  She heard them, male and female and children and beasts, all screaming in her ears in a cacophonous shriek, trapped for eternity as they burned and burned and burned forevermore, stoking the fires of a gasping, wheezing forge, minds trapped in metal puppets, souls fueling the neverending dream.

  Yet still more souls came, desperate for the scraps it spat back out, until they choked their own skies with ash, drained the seas and slaughtered their own children to the last to feed the endless march, believing themselves the masters of something they never understood.

  And all of it, every torment, every invention, every screaming soul inside the furnace, was nothing but the dream’s heartbeat, trying to rouse the entity that birthed it from the soft singing of its gravesite.

  An endless ocean of eyes and minds, reading incomprehensible formulas written in the constellations of countless dimensions, folding into each other like parchment that spread across one measly sky as they wept, and wept, and rose ever higher, to a sky they’d never reach.

  A dead god dreams beneath her feet, a thousand miles in the abyss.

  A gear turns without direction and grinds against eternity.

  The absence of decay in an eternal, incestuous loop with entropy.

  Triangular, fractalized infinity.

  Her soul, pre-digested, pre-measured, a foregone conclusion to her end.

  Screaming in the choir, with all the rest of them.

  The enormity snapped her mind like an overstretched string. Blood wept from her eyes as the vision collapsed into blackness, eyes curling back into her skull.

  She fell, limp as a corpse, cheek sizzling against the steaming cobbles, and Fleabag lunged back to seize her cloak in his jaws, dragging her through the firelit streets as the cultist’s voice echoed on like the Dungeon itself speaking through the burning city.