“They look like battle droids,” Morgan said. “Are you sure we’re safe?”

Putting aside the issue of what, precisely, a “droid” was, Arachne pointed at the churned-up line of dirt stretching through the grass at their feet. “There was a fence there. It seemed to define the limits of the factory’s bounds, and as such, the limits of the aggressive range of these metal men.”

“Oooh, predefined limits. Do we have a cardboard box?”

“Morgan,” Arachne said very slowly, “I understand you are charming and witty and quite well-versed in this culture of pop you seem so proud of, but I do not have time to ask for explanations for every sentence out of your mouth. Can you distract them? Are you willing to?”

“Yes,” the man grumbled. Arachne had to suppress a sudden laugh. He got so sensitive when someone trod on his sense of humor.

Laughing before a battle. This world had dulled her edge and corrupted her most shamelessly. Perhaps the Arachne of months ago, Legionnaire and consummate agent, would have accomplished her mission without recourse to outside aide, swift and effective as ever she was. But that Arachne had not known how to laugh. “I need your left arm,” she said.

Morgan shrugged out of his coat, catching it in his right arm as he turned to offer her his left. She placed her right hand on his forearm, her skin positively dark in comparison to his. Warmth rose into her palm, radiated out from the slumbering potence of his relaxed muscles. As simply as opening her eyes, she reached for his strength.

He had a lot. More than she had expected, more than she had sensed in almost anyone else. Oh, Arachne had never questioned his fitness; the run here had cost him not even a deep breath, and she had seen him flip about a half-and-a-half sword for far longer than anyone should be able to, but the strength pulsing through him spoke of endurance and tenacity that strove with the limits of human potential. The runes on her palm, hand, and wrist spat out one tenuous thread of silk each. The three threads curled around his arms, spinning and knotting together in an intricate and near-unbreakable pattern. When she dropped her hand, the sense of his strength came with her, thumping in tune with his heart, once every two seconds or so.

Morgan lifted his arm to flex his muscles. The silk pattern stretched across his biceps but didn’t tear. “Should I be feeling something, here?”

“Not now,” Arachne said. “That binding will connect me to you and let me draw on your strength across intervening distance. I hope I won’t need it, since you’ll be distracting the sentries, but I don’t want to chance it.”

“Fair enough,” he said, shrugging his coat back on. “Anything else?”

The factory stood fat and squat amongst the scenic, well-shaped landscape that comprised its grounds. Once it has been a peaceful location for the manufacture of artificial labor, or so Arachne’s employers had told her. Now the cheerfully artificial terrain belied its new role as a factory of war and death. She took some consolation in recognizing that the factory was pure ugliness, bright steel without aesthetic adornment whatsoever.

Clustered around the massive double doors cut into the front wall, the dozen or so robots she’d snuck past the first time and barely escaped as she fled marched in patterns that seemed random to her nonmechanical brain. Long and slender of limb and body, they strutted like starved tinplated soldiers, heads swiveling independently of their bodies to track all they could see. Though Arachne and Morgan stood in plain sight by the long roadway that led to the doors, they were not yet within the mechanical men’s danger zone. One foot past the ripped-up fence…

“I can pass them,” Arachne said, “but the inside is quite full of them. And alerting one is as good as alerting them all. If I’m to sneak in, can you distract them and draw their attention, so that the ones inside do not notice me?”

“For how long?” Morgan said, studying the robots with a serious expression completely at odds with his usual mien.

“Until I can use the –“ Arachne frowned. Technological names escaped her far too readily for her taste in this land of machines and advances far greater than smelted iron. “There is a box that will control them all at once and stop them from performing their duties. I can use that to halt them.”
“Oh, well, that doesn’t seem like it will take long. Their weapons,” he continued, “what are they like?”

The mechanical men bore narrow wands of some metal she did not recognize. “They fire cylinders or bolts of light,” Arachne said, “of immense heat and great speed. I was able to dodge them for the most part.” The remaining part had been searing pain and blackened, smoking flesh, and that from simply being grazed. She set the memories aside.

“Oh, okay.” One of Morgan’s hands darted over his shoulder to grip the hilt of his sword. The dull-gold blade sang an odd note as he drew it. In the back of her mind, Morgan’s vitality surged and rose; to her mind, sensitive to magic in ways that surpassed or simply bypassed her senses, the sword and Morgan himself began to hum with growing power. He grinned as he spun the sword in a series of swift, sharply-curving cuts around his body, swapping the oversized blade from one hand to the other. “I have to admit, I always wanted to do something like this. Don’t tell Akude.”

“Who—“ But Morgan was already gone before the word escaped her mouth, a streak of black and gold racing for the doorway. In three steps he crossed the threshold defined by the churned-up dirt where the fence had once sat. Swifter than a human could even imagine, the mechanical men swiveled their torsos to fire their weapons in perfect synchrony.

Morgan’s blade leapt into the path of the bolts, shimmering like a heat distortion with the force of his magic, his chi as he called it. White-blue bolts of energy struck the sword and rebounded, discharging their force into the ground or arcing off into the sky. The robots discharged their weapons again; again Morgan intercepted and turned the blasts’ path aside. He did not move faster than a human could, Arachne realized, but reacted almost before – no, indeed, before the robots fired.

Another volley fired, another deflected. Another fired – but this time, some twenty feet away, Morgan leapt. The sword arced in shining circles high into the air as it left his grip, while beneath him the bullets chewed into the ground, melting the pavement into bubbling ooze where their concentrated fire struck. Higher and farther than a human should be able to go – but not using his magic! – Morgan leapt over the front line of robots and landed in their midst.

The warrior’s figure blurred. In an instant, Morgan seemed to be everywhere at once. A solid punch landed in the center of a robot’s torso; a sweep kick slammed into another’s legs; an open-palm strike hammered the artificial jaw of a third; a snap kick cracked the neck of a fourth – The images resolved before Arachne could process them all into one lone solid Morgan, still in his landing crouch amongst all the motionless robots. The illusion of stillness lasted only a heartbeat before the force of that brief, intense moment of violence blew through the mechanical men with explosive fury. The robots shot out and away, uneven accelerations shredding their spindly bodies so that only parts struck the ground in a neat circle some five yards away from him.

As Morgan rose, the doors burst open, two robots lifting their weapons to fire with alarming haste. Arachne lifted her mouth to shout a warning, but too late. Morgan simply opened a hand, turning it palm up at waist height.
The robots fired. Humming through the air as it spun through its descent, Morgan’s sword swept mere inches in front of him, reflecting the bolts in matching angles. As the hilt slapped into Morgan’s palm, the bolts slammed into the robots in white-hot sparing fury. Morgan let the momentum of the sword carry his arm back and around; as he slammed the weapon back into its sheath, the robots collapsed. Morgan stalked through the doors lazily, one fist raised in solemn triumph.

For a moment Arachne stared, mission utterly forgotten, as twin emotions warred within her. Anger, and amusement. This was not a game… but then, to Morgan, what wasn’t? And it had been a little impressive.

Laughing at herself – a thing she’d never have imagined oh so recently, and now felt such pleasure in doing – Arachne drew a minute sliver of her vitality through her runes, dropped into a light-footed crouch, and raced for the factory with crawling, predatory speed.