The blast doors groaned, splitting the darkness to reveal a wall of blinding grey mist.

  Trenn dropped Skate onto the stone floor. The obsidian sphere hit with a heavy thud. He planted his armored boot on top of it.

  Under the immense load of his new, gold-heavy form, the slime didn't just deform; it surged outward. It flattened into a wide, thick disc of black glass, expanding its surface area until its edges hardened to support the crushing tonnage of the Gem-Croc Kin.

  He kicked off. The golden scales of his tail lashed out, acting as a powerful rudder to propel him forward into the mist.

  His sonar ignited. The Quarry was a cathedral of hard edges and trapped air. A wide corridor of houses carved directly into the mountain, shaping a metropolitan ravine.

  Goat Kin peeked through the slats of their windows, their wide, horizontal pupils reflecting the golden monster and the red machine. Others fearfully clacked their heavy shutters shut as the team tore through their neighborhood.

  The side streets were narrow, winding corridors of carved stone that smelled of coal dust and cold grease.

  "They know," Trenn said. "Someone warned the One-Eye. They’re moving."

  Behind him, the rapid steps of Velo’s Rabbitling squad filled the rafters. They vanished into the vertical maze of gantries and chimneys.

  A sharp whistle echoed from above. Then, the rhythmic sound of flintlock hammers being pulled.

  “Fire!” shouted Velo, his order followed by a loud series of detonations.

  A hundred yards up-range, armor rivets popped—a frantic, metallic staccato.

  Trenn’s sonar pinged a half-dozen statues, already stopped mid-step, before they could reach the main avenue. Their discarded armor littered the path like crimson shells.

  But the Rabbitlings couldn't hold every alley.

  "Phalanx! Twelve o'clock!" Zeen’s voice carried from behind.

  A row of Golems was running past them through the narrow streets. Several burst in front of them. A wall of rock and metal blocked the narrow street, their stone pikes leveled. Trenn didn't slow. He leaned into a hard, carving turn, his tail swinging wide to counterbalance the momentum.

  He raised the White Metal shield.

  A stone pike slammed into the divine plate. The impact sent a shower of sparks into Trenn’s face and a screeching vibration down his arm that made his teeth ache. He used the recoil to pivot, swinging the god-bone club in a tight, vicious arc.

  The runed bone struck the waist-rivet of the lead Golem.

  The rivet sheared with the sound of a champagne cork. The breastplate sagged, the enchantment broke, and the statue seized mid-lunge.

  Trenn leaned hard into the turn, his god-like weight driving the obsidian disc into the stone pavement. The friction created a high-pitched scream of torturous heat that vibrated up his leg.

  The obsidian shell beneath his boot fractured, a spiderweb of glowing purple cracks racing across the surface. The glass was failing under the pressure and speed.

  It’s too much! I need to—

  Locked in the turn, Trenn couldn't lift his weight. Friction warped the stone; a ripple opened on Skate’s surface. Under the crush of mass and heat, the carbon realigned.

  The glossy sheen vanished, consumed by a matte darkness that hardened instantly. Instead, it possessed a rough, sparkling shell that drank the light.

  A Carbonado Slime. A Meteor Slime.

  Skate bit into the road. The black diamond surface carved a deep gouge through the cobbles, throwing up a spray of stone dust. The vibration against Trenn’s boot changed from a fragile rattle to the solid, indestructible hum.

  Mara followed by diving below the two remaining Golems' lances before jumping, claws out. She burst past their waist, slashing at their sides. Her claws dug through the Red Metal, into the stone, and out the otherside, tearing their armors open and immobilizing them.

  "Keep moving!" Mara roared, crouching back into her running stance, her white tail trailing behind her.

  The Crusher rolled to the immobile statues, weight transferring smoothly. Ezy threw a lever, and the machine pushed off into a crooked stance to slide between the building and the blockade.

  Tire chains screamed, biting into the stone to propel them forward before the Crusher dropped back into its low, armored crouch.

  Zeen was lashed to the back of the pilot’s seat with a thick length of rope, his face a sickly shade of grey as the machine lurched over the uneven stone.

  "Left! Left balcony! Third floor!" Zeen’s shout was ragged, his ears pinned back against the wind.

  "Stop leaning! I can't aim if you're leaning!" Ezy shouted back.

  "I'm not leaning, I'm trying to shoot!"

  Ezy tracked the coordinates Zeen provided. Her machine’s right forearm pointed, and its mounted rifle shot a twin staccato that bounced harmlessly off their armor.

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  The Golem lifted its giant barbed spear. Zeen’s lead slugs found the rivets. Armor flew apart, and the stone goat plummeted to the street, carried by its own momentum.

  Inanimate Goat Kin statues were beginning to clog the alleys. Golems were forced to climb over the immobile bodies of their brothers, their stone fingers scraping against the walls as they hunted for a new path.

  Velo jumped to a chimney stack and aimed. The rifle bucked—a perfect shot—but as he pivoted, a second Golem emerged from a high alley, planting its feet to strike.

  "High left!" Trenn barked, his voice barely cutting through the wind.

  Mara reacted. She drew and loosed an arrow. It sliced through the binding of the Golem’s pauldron, causing the rivet to vaporize.

  Velo gave a sharp, appreciative whistle from the rooftops before vanishing over a ridge.

  A dozen Golems had poured from a lower-level foundry, slamming into the column’s tail. They ignored Trenn, focusing their pikes on the machine’s heavy drive-wheels.

  "Defense Pattern!" Ezy shrieked.

  The Crusher anchored its weight. The cockpit spun, a centrifuge of Red Metal. The machine's spiked hands became a blur of kinetic fury, shearing armor from the Golems with the clang of plates on stone.

  Ezy pushed aside still statues, but the Golems exploited their reach. They stabbed through their paralyzed brethren—between, under, over—thrusting stone pikes into the Crusher’s flank.

  Sloped plating caught the tips at oblique angles, forcing lethal thrusts to skid upward in showers of sparks.

  One pike caught a flat seam, hammering the chassis with a deafening, gong-like sound. The outer ablative plate cracked and deformed, absorbing kinetic shock that would have crumpled the Scrapper like foil. Warning lights flickered red on Ezy’s console, vibration rattling the bones of her giant hand, but the inner frame held.

  They continued their assault. A spear cleaved through the Crusher’s tank threads, ripping it off along with one of the wheels.

  Zeen turned the muzzle of his soul-bound musket towards the Golem’s shoulder pauldron.

  "Get off!"

  He pulled the trigger.

  The compromised rivets vaporized. The pauldron sheared off; without the armor anchoring the magic, the Golem’s arm seized. The sudden weight shift, combined with the machine’s violent spin, tore the statue’s grip loose, flinging it into the canyon wall.

  The remaining statues towered over the squat machine to stab down at the Crusher’s exposed canopy. Mara pounced from the shadows, using her claws to climb onto a Golem, freeing it of its armor before jumping to the next.

  She slashed the leather bindings of its greaves. The Red Metal clattered to the cobbles while she pirouetted away from a stone backhand. She had carved a buffer zone of paralyzed statues around the Ezy and Zeen, but the tide of Golems was relentless. Two more stepped over their frozen kin, jabbing their spears and forcing her back to the Crusher.

  "Velo! Clear the lane!" Zeen screamed from the rooftops.

  Velo whistled a sharp, three-note command. On the ridge above, a dozen Rabbitlings broke cover, leveling their rifles at the Golems emerging from the upper foundry. They fired in a ragged volley. Sparks showered from the Red Metal breastplates, but at this steep angle, the lead slugs ricocheted harmlessly off the heavy iron.

  The Golems hefted their jagged spears like javelins and hurled them with mechanical force.

  A spear smashed into the chimney stack Velo was using for cover, obliterating the masonry in a cloud of choking red dust. Another punched through a slate roof where a pair of snipers had been perched a second before, collapsing the structure and dragging the screaming Rabbitlings down into the building's gut.

  Velo coughed, waving dust from his face as stone debris crashed around him. He looked down at Zeen, his face a mask of terror.

  “We can’t hold them!”

  He signaled a frantic chop of his hand. “Retreat!”

  His squad scattered, disappearing behind chimneys to escape the artillery. Below, the tide of Red Metal surged forward.

  Without the snipers suppressing them, the Golems surged in. They clambered over each other to reach the machine, pressing shoulder to shoulder until they formed a solid, dense ring of iron and stone around the Crusher.

  The Gem-Croc’s fury seized Trenn's lungs. His diaphragm tightened into a knot that left no room to breathe.

  Trenn roared, the sound vibrating deeper than human vocal cords allowed, looking back over his shoulder at the chaos.

  "Almitad! Now!" he screamed.

  The necromancer was drifting forty feet above the swarm, a dark silhouette against the Quarry's high gantries. She had held her fire until the targets were packed too tight to move. Her gloved hands lashed forward. Three runescribed ribs shot from their orbit around her.

  They flew in a wide spread, targeting the perimeter of the log-jam.

  The moment the bones struck the paving stones, Binding Runes ignited. Thick spectral chains exploded from them, whipping around adjacent statues, snagging limbs and torsos before violently contracting.

  Three bundles of lashed-together statues suddenly blocked the street.

  "Go!" said Almitad.

  Ezy slammed the drive into high gear, but the Crusher’s severed track lashed out like a broken whip, clattering uselessly against the stone. The remaining drive-wheels spun, smoking and screaming as they failed to bite into the ground.

  "The chain's gone!" Zeen roared, ducking as a stone pike whistled over his head.

  "I know!" Ezy shrieked. She punched a heavy red toggle on her dashboard.

  The Crusher lurched upward, its chassis rising as the wheel-frames locked into bird-like legs. The machine hauled itself over the bundles of chained Golems and burst from the city gates into a barren open field.

  The land was trenched by the rooster’s constant crowing. From here, the opening of the Cave of Echoes looked more like a giant, screaming mouth than a hole in a cliff.

  Behind them, the Golems were climbing over each other to swarm the field. A dozen of them poised to shoot their deadly spears.

  A seismic intake of breath pulled the mist into the cave—a mana-vacuum that thinned the air. Trenn felt the Sound Element gathering. He locked his tail into the stone, braced, and attuned his mana to match.

  He felt the shift. He was siphoning power from the One-Eye’s spell.

  But Dawn crowed.

  "NO!" he screamed, before the first echo hit.

  The sound came from the tip of his tail and shot through his entire body before reaching his vocal cords.

  The two shockwaves collided at the cave's mouth. A ripple of distorted air expanded, shattering the incoming sound-wall.

  The atmosphere became a vibrating solid. Pressure flash-froze water droplets into a shimmering wall of shards suspended between the roars.

  The stone pavement beneath shattered, cracks opening into a cavern below.

  The recoil struck Trenn like a physical blow. He was bucked off Skate, skidding backward to trip in the dust. The world tilted violently. He planted the club to keep from tipping, fighting nausea as tears of blood tracked down his cheeks.

  He pushed himself up on shaking arms, the ringing in his ears fading to a dull hum.

  Mara was next to him, shooting arrows towards the city. The Crusher had gone stationary, its forearm mounted weapons were firing while Zeen unstrapped himself.

  Trenn spat blood and placed Skate back on his head. “It’s going to crow again soon! Move!” The Meteor Slime vibrated against his skull, its rough surface digging into his scalp.

  The Crusher’s engine roared, Ezy already gunning the machine toward the dark maw of the cave.

  Schedule Update: Moving to Tuesdays & Saturdays

  twice a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays at 3:35 PM EST.

  Why the change?

  Real life obligations have increased, and I want to make sure I never compromise the quality of the story to meet a deadline. This schedule allows me to keep the story going strong for the long haul.

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