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A green creature spilled into the gap I’d made, filling the entire hole with its bulk. Another mass of green loomed on my dashboard screen, captured by the rearview camera. A third darted on the side, just outside the windows. We were surrounded.
If the three of them teamed up, they would pull us into the water. We had to make a stand.
I slammed on the brakes.
Alessandro jumped out of the car. Magic burst around him, and the M4 materialized in his hands out of thin air. I punched the release on the console and grabbed Linus’ sword.
The green creature behind us stared through the glass. It resembled a wire framework stuffed to the brim with water plants, vines, and algae, but instead of a wire, its outer skeleton consisted of fused metal and bone, bound together by magic. Seven feet tall, it stood on four massive limbs tipped with twin metal claws. Its back arched, like the spine of an angry cat. Its conical head ended in a massive beak and its eyes, two pools of glowing white, burned into me.
A construct.
I let my magic spiral to it, like the shoots of a grapevine growing toward the sun. A faint glimmer of intelligence brushed against my mind, an echo of sentience, too distant to influence. They were remote-controlled, extensions of someone’s powerful will.
“Grenade!” Alessandro barked.
I hit the floor.
The grenade launcher popped, like a tennis ball being fired from a machine. The grenade sank into the beast that followed us through the hole we’d made and detonated.
The blast tore the creature apart. For a moment, metal and bone shards hung in the air among the plant trash, the smoke from the grenade contained in a perfect sphere of magic, and I glimpsed a metal gyroscope with a glowing plant bud inside it. It was like watching an explosion on TV with no sound. My mind knew there should have been a kaboom, followed by a blast wave, but there was none.
The magic collapsed in on itself, yanking parts of the creature back together. It re-formed and righted itself, smaller, clunkier, but still mobile. A chunk on the left side of it didn’t make it, and as it teetered, the vines and plants grew at a dizzying speed to fill the gap. It belched and a cloud of black smoke erupted from it.
It regenerated. Constructs were inorganic. They didn’t regenerate. They were a collection of parts infused with magic. Eventually constructs ran out of that initial infusion and collapsed.
This was a hybrid between a construct and a living creature, alive in a whole different way with magic so powerful it swallowed the grenade blast like it was nothing. Regeneration like that would require a power source more potent than any infusion. This was beyond the capabilities of any animator Prime on record.
We were so screwed.
Alessandro bared his teeth.
Shooting this creature with conventional ammo was useless; however, if we could take out the power source, it should fall apart. The glowing bud was the key, but there was no way to tell where it was within their bodies.
The beast on the opposite side of the dealership rammed the glass. The windows shattered. The construct landed on the floor and scrambled toward us, slipping on broken glass.
I sank a burst of my magic into Linus’ sword and charged the second construct.
Behind me the grenade launcher popped. The walls quaked. The staccato of the M4 spitting bullets ripped into the air. Alessandro, blowing the construct apart with a grenade to expose the gyroscope and trying to shoot at its glowing flower before the bio-construct re-formed.
The construct lunged at me, trying to bury me under its bulk. I spun to the side. The creature shot past me, slid, turning, and swiped at me with its claws. I danced out of the way and sliced at its leg.
The blade bounced off.
The beast twisted its paw and hooked me with its claws. Sharp points of pain stabbed my side and thigh. The construct tossed me into the air like a cat playing with its toy.
I hit the floor with my shoulder, rolled, and scrambled to my feet. My side burned. The beast bore down on me, and in a terrified burst of adrenaline I saw everything around me with crystal clarity: the beast charging, Alessandro on my left firing the grenade launcher, the counter behind me, and the offices on my right and left, and I knew I had nowhere to go.
I sank more magic into the sword. It kicked in my hand, as if I had struck something hard with it. Hair-thin glowing lines spread through the blade. Work! Work, damn you.
The beast reared, blocking everything else. My magic tugged on me, and I slashed in a wide arc, following its lead. There was no resistance. The head and the right shoulder of the beast slid aside and fell over. The rest of the body swayed, fighting to stay upright.
Thank you, Linus.
Plants wriggled from the severed stump and latched on to the other chunk of the body. The two halves snapped together. Fine. Now that the sword worked, I had a shot at the flower. I couldn’t sense it, but it was in there. The drain of the sword pulled all of my magic in one direction. There was none to spare. I had to cut blind.
The third creature crashed through the glass. Its glowing eyes sighted me. It surged forward.
I couldn’t take them both.
Alessandro thrust himself between the third construct and me. The grenade launcher was gone. A bright red banner popped into his hands, white words clear on red vinyl—“Christmas Sale”—and Alessandro snapped it open like an unfurling flag.
The second construct lunged at me. I swung my sword and its front limbs crashed to the floor. It grew new ones and I sliced them off before they fully formed.
The third beast turned its head toward the flash of red. Alessandro waved the banner as if it were a matador’s cape and moved to the left, spinning the construct away from me. It chased him, swiping at him with its enormous paws.
It could tear him apart and I would watch him die because of me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had to cut faster.
Alessandro dodged the bone claws with a fencer’s grace, slipped between them, and rushed the beast. The banner fluttered to the ground. Before it landed, two swords flashed into Alessandro’s hands. His magic whipped around him, a serpent of orange sparks. The Artisan ripped into the construct.
I turned myself into a bladed whirlwind. Plants and metal sprayed as I hacked chunks off the construct. The pieces crawled and wiggled, sliding back to the creature, but I kept slicing. My arm burned as if magic flowing from it turned into molten lead on its way through muscle and bone.
Something crashed to the left and a cubicle flew through the air like it was cardboard.
Faster. I had to cut faster.
The construct collapsed in front of me. A foot-wide ring with a bud in the center hung in front of me, suspended in midair by pure magic. Before it could remake itself, I jumped into the mass of vegetation and sliced at the spinning metal rings. The gyroscope fell to the ground at my feet.
The green heap exploded up, swallowing me—the construct, trying to re-form. I must’ve missed the flower.
Magic folded in on me, chunks of the creature flying and slamming into me, as the beast tried to regenerate with me inside it. Plants and magic blinded me. I stomped, trying to find the flower by feel.
Pressure ground my chest. It hurt to breathe. I stomped again and again. Where the hell was it?
A hunk of metal smashed against my head, and the world’s biggest bell rang between my ears. My vision swam. I stomped in frantic frenzy. Something crunched under my foot. The pressure vanished. Pieces of the beast rained down around me.
I turned and saw Alessandro standing by the SUV, my tactical machete in his right hand and a metal ring with a severed plant stem hanging from it in his left. Nothing else moved.
We won. We took on an impossible fight and we won.
He dropped the ring and grinned at me, and I grinned back.
A body crashed through the skylight and landed between us. Nine feet tall, humanoid, with four arms and two sturdy legs, it was made of the same material as the beasts, but instead of the blunt head with glowing eyes, its face was a rotting human head. The skin had peeled off its cheekbones, frozen in time by the magic. Its lips were gone, and its teeth flashed a grotesque smirk. Two human eyes, charged with blue magic, glared at us.
I didn’t have enough magic to swing the sword.
A second sword, a narrow black blade, appeared in Alessandro’s left hand.
My magic brushed against a rudimentary intelligence. It felt muddled, undone, as if parts of it had rotted away, but it was there.
The creature turned toward Alessandro. Metal blades slid from the vegetation of its four arms.
It had a mind. Not much of one, but it was there.
“Feed it magic!” I hurled my blade over the beast.
Alessandro jumped, catching Linus’ sword in midair.
The magic of Primes manifested in different ways. For me, it was wings. Beautiful glowing wings, each long translucent feather dark green at the base lightening to a brilliant grass green, then turquoise, until the color burst into triumphant gold at the edge.
I opened my wings and sang out a long high note. Magic tore out of me. I only had enough for one blast, and I sank everything I had into it.
My magic seared the giant’s crippled mind.
The creature stopped in midstep.
I raised my hand and sang out, my voice an ethereal call suffused with power. “Come to me.”
The giant turned, took a step toward me, and dropped to its knees.
The world went black and fuzzy at the edges. Alessandro appeared above the creature, falling, Linus’ sword held over his head. The blade sliced through the air and bit into the giant’s head, splitting it in two. He bisected it all the way to the floor. The two halves sagged to opposite sides, and the ring with the bud hovered in midair. Alessandro reversed the cut and slashed across it in a classic diagonal strike. It was a beautiful move, smooth, fast, and precise.
