A blaring cry echoed through all of Wroetin and the other cities of Otharia, its harrowing sound bringing forth agitation from the assembled masses. From inside the House of Manys, Blake watched the various crowds’ reactions through the projections with satisfaction. He’d always loved the sound of those World War Two-era air raid sirens—they carried an alarming urgency that other klaxons just couldn’t quite nail—and so he’d done his best to mimic the memorable timbre. With a thought, he cut the circuit and the wails cut off, bringing the attention of the crowd before him, and those watching via Many all across the country, back to him.

“The system is simple,” he explained. “There will be warning sirens placed on city walls at each of the four cardinal directions. The sound will indicate what direction the threat is coming from. When you hear the siren, leave the city by running away from the sound. That’s all there is to it. If all the sirens go off at once, that means that the threat is already inside the city. In that case, leave the city by the closest exit.”

He paused for a moment to make sure everybody had heard and digested the instructions.

“It is likely that you will never hear this sound again in your lifetime. Still, the fact remains that this world is a dangerous place. It is prudent to be ready even for the least likely situations. If you hear the sirens, do not hesitate. Leave immediately for your own safety.”

Once again he paused to let his message sink in. Looking out at the people of Otharia, he took note of the faces of the onlookers. In their eyes he saw the same fear he’d seen back at the beginning of his conquest, simply more muted and concealed than before. Yes, he’d beaten them into submission, but that was all. They did not follow him or cheer him for the great accomplishments he’d already achieved; the fact that he’d provided great improvements to their lives, such as creating the first winter without major food shortages since anybody could remember or drastically improving the sanitation in the major cities, still did not override that fear.

Well, Blake didn’t really care. Soon enough, nobody would be able to deny the truth. He’d said it before: he would hold their head in the water until they had no choice but to drink. If this amount of advancements wasn’t enough, then he’d just have to force more into their lives, starting with this one.

“Last, but certainly not least,” he continued, “many of you have surely noticed the strange paths being built across the nation. These are train tracks, and they will change the way people move about Otharia forever. Once again, the system is simple: a train runs at regular intervals between all the cities in the nation. Simply wait at a station and when the train stops, get inside. Now you will be able to travel from city to city in just a few hours, instead of days!”

His ears caught a smattering of surprised murmurs and he smiled beneath his mask.

“For those in Wroetin, there will be a celebration two days from now to mark the first journey of this triumphant new mode of transportation. I look forward to seeing you there. That is all. You are dismissed.”

With a wave, Blake signaled for the transmission to be cut off and walked out, his loud tromping through the halls now accompanied by the clacks of a skitter’s feet as it dutifully followed behind him. This skitter looked much different than the standard one, more resembling a large cube with legs than it did its brethren. Blake didn’t much care, though. Function was the primary goal with this unfortunate necessity.

Several minutes later, Blake’s journey came to an end in a large, long chamber down in the bowels of his fortress. Filled with a large supply of cantacrenyx and tucrenyx, assorted half-finished skitters lining the walls, and what could only be described as a bootleg firing range taking up the far half of the room. It was here that Blake spent most of his time these days.

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!

As if on cue, an alarm—different than the one from the speech but almost equally as unwelcome to Blake’s ears—screamed out from the skitter shadowing his every move.

“Fuck, already?!” Blake groused with a click of his tongue. “At least she waited until the speech was finished.”

The robotic cube quickly opened up, the simple geometric shape unfolding to reveal a tri-screened battle command station. Immediately the screens powered on and lit up, revealing an overhead view of the Crirada on the middle screen and several readouts listing skitters and an array of readouts on the others.

Sitting down, he zoomed in on the figure highlighted in red on one side of the screen, his eye twitching in recognition. There she stood, several minutes away from the city walls, swarms of Ubrans behind her: that damnable woman. Of course, Blake knew what he’d see as soon as that alarm had gone off; the battlestation skitter only made that particularly grating sound whenever she appeared. He’d spent several real-time hours in Hyper Mode working on algorithms to spot targeted people by their face, body proportions, and outfit just to make sure that this woman wouldn’t be able to catch him off guard ever again.

Just the sight of her made him subconsciously grit his teeth. How many times had he killed her now, forty? Fifty? No, it had to be at least sixty times at this point. Blake didn’t get it. How did she keep coming back from the dead? It shouldn’t have been possible!

It was almost funny, really. In a world where people could throw fire and shape stone and do all manner of crazy, magical things, his nemesis somehow turned out to be just a woman with a big sword and a stubborn refusal to stay dead. Not that she couldn’t do some crazy things herself. A plethora of destroyed robots could attest quite well to just how much she was capable of.

The two were locked in a seemingly endless cycle. Blake had no doubt that he could absolutely crush the black-haired woman, were he to just throw his entire army at her all at once. Unfortunately, while nice to imagine, such an option wasn’t a realistic possibility.

It seemed obvious, especially after today, that his control over the country still depended largely upon the presence of his skitters throughout the nation. Were he to pull his robots from the cities and the fields and send them on their way north, how long would his rule last? A few days?

Perhaps just as importantly, there existed another threat to Otharia’s safety, one that he also couldn’t ignore. Just beyond the Eterian border stood a ramshackle city of desperate refugees fleeing the invasion. By his estimates, based on the overhead pictures he’d taken, there were several hundred thousand people squatting on his border, waiting for an opportunity to get inside.

As much as he felt for the poor people running from the violence, there was no way that he could allow what amounted to a de facto invasion force into Otharia just like that. He didn’t have enough food to feed them all and the Otharians themselves would never be able to handle the sudden shock. The people of the nation been indoctrinated for so long with the idea that all outsiders were evil that there was no way they’d be willing to welcome a sudden flood of them. After all, one merely had to look at the way they’d reacted just to him.

The end result was that, for the moment at least, he was stuck with whatever he could send via zeppelin, one trip at a time. To make matters worse, he also needed to include ammunition for his robots and even some food to keep the still breathing defenders from just keeling over when hit by a light breeze. It was a delicate balancing act, one which he was still getting used to.

Somehow, he and the woman had settled into a strange equilibrium where neither of them seemed capable of making any progress against one another. Blake would make improvements and modifications to his skitters, while she would fight back through improving her skills and equipment and by working together with the rest of the Ubran invading force. In all of his life, Blake had never seen somebody improve so much in so little time. The woman seemed to get stronger and faster and harder to hit every day.

Before the Ubrans arrived, Blake began as he always did by divvying up his units. He typically assigned around eighty percent of his troops to focus on the woman while letting the other twenty percent assist the Eterians defending the walls. As much as he wanted to focus entirely on stopping his nemesis, there was no point if the city fell while he had his back turned.

With several clicks of his mouse, Blake selected the eighty percent group and marked the woman as their target. This way was obviously not as efficient as using his powers, but he liked it better. It brought a sense of nostalgia, reminding him of those late nights back in high school when he’d stay up too late playing whatever the hottest real-time strategy game was at the time.

Blake’s unit composition varied from day to day as older units were destroyed and replaced with new varieties in Blake’s constant quest to perfect his machines and finally achieve true victory. For this skirmish, Blake’s eighty percent consisted of three different types of units: five gatling skitters, two heavy battle skitters, and three sniper skitters.

Gatling skitters were a concept he’d originally designed all the way back before his initial conquest. These variants, greatly improved and refined compared to their predecessors, had become a mainstay of his forces in the past few days after a highly successful trial. Focusing entirely on raw output, they lacked any real up close defensive measures, the crystals and parts required to operate such defenses sacrificed to make room both for more ammo and the cantacrenyx crystals needed to power so many shots without slowing down. Of course, it didn’t matter that you had poor defense against up close enemies if nobody could get anywhere near you without being turned into swiss cheese.

In essence, Blake had decided that if the woman could heal a bullet wound, then let her heal a hundred instead. She couldn’t dodge them all, right? So far, the answer had turned out to be that no, she could not dodge them all, but she could still avoid far more than he’d hoped. He would need to increase the turning speed and compensate in the targeting algorithm next time he updated the design, but they were more than good enough for now. Even a few hits could sometimes open her up for a potential snipe, or perhaps a stream of rounds through the skull would be good enough to do the job on their own.

Heavy battle skitters, meanwhile, were a brand new, never-battle-tested addition to his forces. The oversized skitters specialized in defense, horsepower, and close-range fighting using their combination of incredibly thick armor and an abundance of reinforced melee implements. They still had guns, but that wasn’t their real focus. Their job was to tank the woman’s assault for as long as possible, blocking her movements and slowing her down for easier sniping and. If possible, they were to use their chainsaws, nets, claws, and any other implements in their arsenal to either capture the woman alive or, when that likely proved impossible, to survive until the end of the battle and secure her corpse before the Ubrans could retrieve it.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of his duels with his adversary was the fact that even though he “won” every battle, they never felt like a victory because he always failed to stop her from coming back. That woman always seemed to be able to take out enough of his units that when she finally fell he wouldn’t be able to stop the Ubrans from absconding with her remains. That didn’t stop him from trying, of course, but strangely enough, the Ubran troops seemed willing to sacrifice a few hundred of their lives each time if it meant retrieving their supersoldier. Every time, Blake would be tempted to send his remaining units after them, but he always held back. His skitters were strong, after all, but they weren’t invincible. They could fall if enough Scyrians swarmed them at once, especially once they’d run out of bullets. The heavy battle skitter was designed to change that balance. With them in his forces, hopefully he’d be able to fend off the Ubrans and secure true victory once and for all.

Last, but most definitely not least, were the stars of the show: the sniper skitters. Slow firing, slow moving relative to other models, and limited in function, his snipers had nevertheless been the units to deliver victory in the vast majority of the previous battles. Unlike the other skitters, which used a constant stream of energy to fire their weapons at a much closer range, the sniper skitters needed to build up power in a crystalline capacitor of sorts and discharge all the accumulated energy into a single supersonic shot. The result was a gun that only fired about once every minute but struck with such speed, power, and accuracy that they’d become his greatest weapons against the woman.

After the first few encounters, it had become clear that the only way to take the woman down for more than a few seconds was to completely destroy her head, a task that seemed to get harder all the time. A barrage of normal shots could manage it, and his recent experiments with shotgun rounds seemed promising, but for now, his best chance of accomplishing the deed remained a well-placed massive sniper shell traveling well beyond the speed of sound. It didn’t hurt that, being perched far away on top of Crirada’s great wall, they weren’t being destroyed every battle either.

Blake’s game plan was rather simple. The non-sniper skitters essentially did combat with the woman as best they could, using their various capabilities to harass her and hopefully take her down on their own. Should that fail, as it usually did, they would at least occupy her enough that she would eventually leave herself open to a long-rang shot through the skull. It was the best he could manage with the delay in his video feed, where everything he saw was several seconds behind reality. Unfortunately, there seemed to be hard limits to what he could do with his ethereal communication technology.

Speaking of which, Blake watched the feed as the woman entered range. Immediately, Blake’s three sniper bots opened fire from the top of the wall. As if to show their usefulness, one of the three sniper skitters managed to strike home even at the edge of their range, blowing off the woman’s right leg from the thigh down. Still, in this case it only served to show the challenge that Blake faced. One leg suddenly missing, the woman tumbled to the ground but, like always, she seemed almost unfazed by the grievous bodily harm inflicted upon her. Using her free arm, she quickly threw herself back up off the ground and restored her leg before she even landed.

With that, the battle truly began. The woman rushed forward, swerving back and forth like a hyperactive mosquito as she closed the distance with astounding speed. The rest of the Ubrans charged after her. Meanwhile, Blake’s units emerged from the west gate’s tunnel, fanning out into battle formation.

The woman barreled towards the heavy skitters, using the terrain—an uneven plain filled with large craters caused by self-destructing skitters—to keep her exposure to the minimum. Blake always found it significant that the woman ran towards his forces instead of trying to go around them. Perhaps, he surmised, she considered his robots to be as great a threat to the people in the Ubran camp behind her as he considered her. Regardless of her thoughts, this was the way he liked it. It was easier if he didn’t have to chase her down.

Blake began taking notes in his head as the woman came into contact with the heavy combat skitter, looking for weaknesses to improve. It swiped at her with three of its six chainsaws, each from a different direction, and she countered by spinning out of the way and using the force to lash out with her giant black sword. The weapon cleaved cleanly through the arm holding one of the chainsaws, drawing a frustrated mutter out of the former engineer. That blade fascinated him. It was obscenely sharp and never seemed to dull, and could somehow withstand even full-power sniper shots. If only he could get his hands on it to study...

The woman was not yet finished. She continued her spin, whirling around to strike the closest leg. The oversized blade cut well into the armored appendage but came to a halt about two-thirds of the way through. With a whoop of delight, Blake began pumping his fist in the air. In all the interactions between his units and the woman, the biggest weakness his skitters had was her ability to sever their legs, leaving them largely helpless. He’d tried buffing the armor several times before, but nothing had worked until now.

With what looked like a snarl, the woman ripped her blade out from the leg and pulled it back for a second swipe, but the skitter acted quickly and fired its reinforced tucrenyx net at her. The move seemed to catch her off guard, as she barely ever reacted before the metal mesh wrapped around her, pinning her legs and arms to her sides and dropping her to the ground. Blake whooped some more. This was going so much better than he’d even hoped!

Seemingly eager to contribute, the closest gatling skitter managed to maneuver around the obstacle the heavy battle skitter represented and spun up its dual guns. A moment later, just as the woman was ripping herself free, two streams of bullets ripped into her, turning her body into swiss cheese. However, Blake didn’t whoop this time. He’d seen this often enough already to know how it ended. In fact, he grit his teeth as he watched his heavy battle skitter’s chainsaws swipe out, all remaining five this time, only for three of them to swing right through the hail of bullets. The impacts tore the relatively delicate saws into scrap metal.

Note One: improve skitter coordination.

Suddenly the heavy combat skitter lurched to the side as the woman, leaking blood from a myriad of holes, broke out of the net and struck the damaged leg a second time in the same spot, finishing the job. As quick as could be, she swung again, lopping off the skitter’s two remaining chainsaws before diving behind one of its remaining good legs to avoid the gatling barrage. All the while, red smoke continually coalesced around her, filling in her wounds with incredible quickness.

WHAM! A sniper shot plowed into her shoulder and blew off her arm that held her sword as a second just missed her head and slammed into the nearby dirt. The impact nearly sent her reeling, but she held on to the leg with an iron grip using her other arm. Forced to choose between the snipers and the gatling, she chose the gatling and moved to the other side of the leg.

What followed was a sort of scene that Blake had become depressingly familiar with, the sort that made him want to tear his hair out. As the heavy battle skitter struggled to free itself from the woman’s grip, she reformed her destroyed arm and shoulder, finishing just as the gatling skitter finished repositioning itself. The high-volume guns whirling at full speed, the robot resumed emptying its entire contents into its opponent, but the woman didn’t budge. She latched on to the leg with both arms and began to pull, her body literally shaking as round after round plunged into her flesh. But no matter how many bullets slammed into her, the mist seemed to rebuild her just as fast and he would not fall. Slowly, painfully, the leg began to rip. Blake cringed as he watched. There was no sound in his video feed, but his mind filled in the missing screech of stressed metal for him all the same.

Soon enough, not even the massive, three-foot-wide and twelve-foot-long appendage could hold out. The skitter fell to the side as the woman tore the leg free. Immediately, she turned and threw it at the gatling skitter with a mighty heave. The skitter dodged to the side, but the projectile bought the woman just enough time to grab her sword from the ground nearby and rocket towards the offending robot. By this time, other gatling skitters had managed to find a clear line to her and began to fire, adding their rounds to the storm of bullets already heading her way, but none of them hit home. The superhuman Feeler juked about like crazy, avoiding not just all of their projectiles but also another sniper shot as she dashed towards her next target.

Blake sighed as he watched the woman slice through both of the gatling skitter’s gun emplacements. The legs were the next to go, rendering the formerly deadly machine now little more than a lump of worthless metal. With several clicks of his mouse, he set both of the legless robots to begin charging for self-destruction.

Note Two: consider dialing back gatling skitter’s complete focus on guns, ammunition, and firepower in favor of improving close range defense a bit more.

The other heavy battle skitter bore down upon her by this point, its gun firing and its close-range weaponry lashing out. Unlike the first time, this time the woman took the weapons head-on, slicing through a saw as it cut deep into her midsection, ripping out a claw with her bare hand, even thrusting her sword out to catch the net before it could reach her. She moved with inhuman speed as she tore through the large array of implements. Just a moment later the skitter was largely neutered. Blake ground his teeth in anger.

Note Three: while the skitter’s body armor seemed capable of standing against her, at least for a much longer duration than his other designs, the actual weapons, though reinforced, still aren’t strong enough to make a difference if she was ready for them. Improve arm and weapon durability or consider scrapping idea and going in another direction. Perhaps harpoons? Or bolases?

Then, Blake’s jaw dropped as the woman sliced through one of the heavy battle skitter’s legs. Not only had she done it with a single swing this time, she’d done it with only one hand! Had she just not been trying the first time? And why had she only used one hand this time? Was she mocking him? Rubbing it in? That damnable woman! He would enjoy killing her one day.

Swiftly, the last of the heavy battle skitters fell to the ground, limbless. With a growl of aggravation, he triggered its self-destruct sequence as well, only to watch as the woman rammed her free hand into the robot’s torso and lift it off the ground! What followed made him want to facepalm at his own stupidity. Holding the skitter in front of her, the woman used its body as a shield! The other gatling skitters’ bullets bounced harmlessly off the thick body armor, allowing the woman to quickly advance of each of them and take them out one by one. Meanwhile, the sniper skitters had been programmed to avoid shooting through the bodies of their teammates and couldn’t get a clean bead on her exact location, so, for the most part, they held their fire!

Note Four: Scrap heavy battle skitter concept. Provides too much utility to the enemy.

It was then that something finally went his way. The woman had long gotten used to the general timing for how long it took for his robots to explode, and as if to prove it she tossed away the remains of the heavy battle skitter just before it erupted. Her timing proved to be correct, but what she hadn’t accounted for was that the heavy variant required larger crystals, which meant a more powerful, larger kaboom... and she was still unwittingly in range.

With great force, the heavy battle skitter erupted, sending incredible amounts of tucrenyx shrapnel throughout the entire area around it. A large amount of said shrapnel buried itself deep inside the woman’s body, sending her stumbling back in pain and surprise. Caught off guard, she was momentarily open, and Blake’s prized sniper skitters were ready. Three rounds were fired, and three of them struck home. The woman’s head seemed to almost evaporate from the high-speed impacts.

This was it, Blake realized. The heavy battle skitter had gone off before the woman had been able to finish off all his units. He still had one fully functional gatling skitter! While not equipped for close-range self-defense, the unit did possess a set of two small claws for grabbing objects. All he had to do was grab the woman and her sword now, and maybe he could end all this!

Seeing their hero fall, the Ubrans charged forward to valiantly retrieve her remains. While they continued to assault the walls elsewhere, the Ubran troops generally gave the woman and his units a wide berth. After all, they’d just get in her way and probably die. But now that she’d fallen, a large group of them charged forward, racing for the spot where she lay.

Blake wasn’t about to let that happen. With a click and a drag, he set the group as the skitter’s new targets, and the robot’s upper body rotated towards them. Bullets began to fly while his skitter closed the gap between it and the fallen woman. Blake nearly cackled with glee as he saw the Ubrans begin to fall. He’d finally won!

A volley of rocks and other projectiles hit the skitter from the front, causing it to stumble slightly. What was this? A second group was coming in from the other side! With great dread, Blake realized another of his follies. In an attempt to maintain balance and stability, he’d mounted the pair of gatling cannons on opposite sides of a swiveling upper body. While they could both modify their angle slightly, they were largely locked into place facing the same direction because they’d only really been designed to both fire at the same target. This hadn’t been a problem until now, but suddenly he was in a position where his unit could only fire at one of the two groups at a time!

Blake was now faced with a choice. Risk his last remaining gatling skitter, a highly valuable unit, on the chance that he could perhaps put an end to this once and for all, or retreat and save his forces? Quickly he calculated the variables.

“Shit!” His skitter wouldn’t likely be able to escape with the woman in time, even if it managed to pick her and the sword up cleanly on its first attempt. There looked to be at least a thousand soldiers converging on that point, easily enough to take down his robot with sheer numbers alone. He had a ten percent chance at success at best. He ordered the skitter to retreat.

BANG! The battlestation rocked as Blake slammed his arm down upon it in fury. So close! So fucking close!

Note Five: Fuck the Ubrans. And fuck that woman. That damnable woman. Fuck her with a rake.

With a sigh, he set about repairing the battlestation and working on new skitters. The battle would be over soon and he had many new modifications to consider.

*     *     *

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!

Blake jerked awake with a start as his battlestation blared out its alarm through the darkness, his mind swimming in a sea of half-asleep discombobulation. He groaned as he felt his back spasm from the sudden awkward movement. With a thought, the lights slowly brightened as he formed the exoskeleton around his lower body and pushed himself into a sitting position on the bed’s edge. To his right, a clock blinked “2:41 AM”. Blake blinked right back, rubbing his eyes in exhausted disbelief.

Seriously? That fucking woman was attacking again after already striking that morning? He’d just gotten to bed a few hours ago!

Luckily for Blake, his latest shipment of skitters had arrived at Crirada earlier that night, including something rather unusual this time, so he didn’t need to worry about fending that woman off with just a gatling skitter, three sniper skitters, and his weaker old skitter models. However, the Flying Toaster had embarked on its delivery mission a little before the morning skirmish, so, unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to tailor the next shipment to fill the holes left by the last one. He’d have to make do with three heavy battle skitters, two gatling skitters, and two prototypes of his new surprise. Not an amazing loadout, to be sure, but something he could still work with.

The fight began much like it had the time before. The woman rushed towards his units, this time specifically targeting his heavy battle skitters as he expected. However, Blake was ready for such tactics this time. He held one of his heavies back and sent the other two forward, each with a prototype trailing right behind, waiting for the woman to choose a target and act. She did, closing in on the one on the right and engaging with its assortment of chainsaws and other implements. As she did so, the prototype quickly scampered around its oversized bodyguard and charged at her.

The woman turned and saw a boxy skitter heading towards her. The robot was small relative to its cousins, perhaps a bit taller and wider than a large man but no more than that. Given the small, stubby legs attached to the bottom of an upright rectangular body, one would be led to wonder how it didn’t tip over. But Blake didn’t care about any of that right now—it was a prototype after all. What he cared about was what happened next.

The woman slashed her giant blade towards the prototype in a horizontal arc, and at the same time, the robot opened the panels on its body and emptied everything it had towards her. But this unit didn’t have bullets inside it. It had crushers. Unlike the large original versions, these smaller ones were just big enough to wrap around a face or an arm, but they were crushers nonetheless.

The woman reeled back as the dozens of the powerful traps clamped onto various parts of her body. Blake smiled a predatory grin. He’d figured it out! Sure, she could take out large things like his skitters with her massive sword, but what about swarms of smaller things? Those couldn’t be sliced in two so easily.

Flailing about, the woman reached up and ripped off one crusher that had managed to grab a hold of her head and wrap around her face almost like a facehugger from the Alien movies. The trap came off, blood staining its thin but strong appendages, just as all three sniper bots fired and Blake’s jaw dropped to the floor. Two shots were slightly off. One drove into her left shoulder, while the other plowed through her upper torso and through her heart. Yet what caused Blake’s disbelief was the third shot.

Quickly, he rewound the footage and played the bit in slow motion. The bullet had been on target, heading straight for her skull, but suddenly her head had literally rotated ninety degrees so that her ear touched her shoulder. No, it had rotated more than ninety degrees to avoid that bullet. Zooming in, he could see where the vertebrae were bent so hard that they formed a literal perpendicular edge. She’d twisted her head so violently to avoid the shot that she’d literally broken her own neck! What in the world was this crazy-

All thought in Blake’s mind came to a screeching halt as a fierce spike of agony suddenly shot up his spine and dropped him to the floor. No! Of all the times for an attack, why did one have to come now?!

Gritting his teeth through the unbearable torment, Blake pulled himself up to his knees and leaned his upper body against the battlestation as best he could. The world swam around him and he could barely make out the screens in front of him through the haze of pain. Still, the fight had to go on!

As he refocused on the images, he saw the woman powering through the concentrated fire of three gatling skitters, tanking the brunt of two of them with her regenerative abilities while blocking the third’s stream with the broad side of her blade. As quickly as his shaking hands could manage, he sent the second prototype and heavy battle skitter pair her way while activating a special setting on one of his snipers.

The engagement between the woman and the pair began with the same flow as the one before. The woman went to town on the heavy battle skitter’s weapons while the prototype crusher skitter maneuvered its way over to her. That was when events took a different fork in the road. This time, the woman was ready for the prototype and its contents. However, she wasn’t ready for the sniper bullet that came ripping through the heavy’s armor when she least expected it.

After the last skirmish, Blake had added a new setting to his sniper skitters’ behavior routines. When activated, it told the robot to shoot the target whenever possible, even if the shot was blocked by an allied unit. If she were ever to use a skitter as a shield again, any sniper with that setting activated would fire at her regardless... just like now.

Every nerve ending in Blake’s body felt like it was on fire, but he could not let himself look away. The bullet’s force had largely dissipated as it went through the thick metal shell of the heavy battle skitter, but enough momentum still remained to ram into the woman’s thigh and embed itself deep into her muscle. Caught unprepared by the sudden hit, the woman lost her balance and stumbled. Then the crushers fell upon her.

This time, to Blake’s great relief, the combination was enough to disorient her fully. The heavy battle skitter quickly moved out of the way, and the other two snipers did what they were designed to do. The woman fell, headless once again.

The moment he saw the woman fall, the resolve keeping him off the floor vanished and he collapsed in an awkward heap of flesh and metal. The fortress trembled as he laid there shaking, panting, sweating, and crying.

As the pain raced through his very being, the small part of him that was still lucid noted that this was the perfect time for him to seize the woman. For perhaps the first time in many days, he’d managed to take the woman down without losing most of his units. He’d easily be able to fend off the charging Ubrans right now if he could only get up again.

Yet, to his immeasurable bitterness, he no longer had it in him to seize this opportunity. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t move, he could barely even breathe. That damnable woman would escape once more, and this time there was only his own weakness to blame.

It took over a Scyrian hour before Blake had recovered enough to even sit up. This attack had been easily one of the worst he’d ever experienced, no doubt exacerbated by his own actions during it. He didn’t know if this latest attack had been caused by the shock of watching the woman basically kill herself to avoid the sniper’s bullet, or the lack of sleep, or just the general wear his body had been sustaining every day since his entry into the conflict. All he knew was that one day that damnable woman might win their rivalry through attrition just by being the last of the two still standing.

He needed to end it. He knew, deep inside, that this wasn’t something he could keep doing forever. But still, he could not bring himself to throw his other troops onto the battlefield. The cost would just be too great for everything he’d been working towards this whole time. Unless...

There were a few areas that he could borrow some skitters from, right? Quickly he walked over to his standard terminal and brought up a map of Otharia. With a click, he activated an overlay showing population densities, or at least the best estimates that Leo could provide him. With a second click, he brought up another overlay showing his skitter deployments. Yes, there were a few places where he could skim off a robot or two. It would take a few days, but if he really pushed the zeppelin to its absolute limits, he’d be able to increase the size of his force in Crirada by another perhaps twenty skitters—nothing mind-blowing, especially since these were older models, but certainly a force more capable of swarming that damnable woman and still having enough left over to capture her and end this farce once and for all.

Actually... there was once more source of skitters he could throw in, while he was at it. After he’d finished the construction of the sewers in Wroetin, Blake had assigned several skitters to patrol the tunnels and keep any unauthorized people out. So far, they hadn’t been needed; not a single person had tried to enter the sewers on their own. And who could blame them? There was nothing down there but human waste. With a click, he assigned those skitters to the new force as well.

*     *     *

Blake scrolled through page after page of data, periodically rubbing his head to ease the stress migraine threatening to break out inside his skull. No matter how he formatted it or how he presented it, the data made no sense. Well, to be honest with himself, it was very likely that some of that data meant a whole lot to somebody, but that somebody was not him.

Blake’s forte was mechanics, electronics, and programming. It was not chemistry, it was not biochemistry, and it was most definitely not theoretical physics. When creating the special drones designed to collect data from the “blighted area” up in that godforsaken city, he hadn’t known just what sort of data to collect, so he’d simply decided to collect every type of data he could and hope to figure it out later.

The end result was a massive block of unintelligible numbers that he had absolutely no idea how to interpret. That didn’t stop him from trying his best anyhow. Whenever he had a spare moment, he’d open up the latest numbers and look them all over, hoping that this would be the day when he’d begin to understand what any of it meant on a deeper level.

Something was definitely happening, that was for sure. Certain metrics featured exponential decay, while others fell almost linearly, while still others seemed to fluctuate randomly between two extremes. Overall, it seemed like something was slowly fading away, almost like radioactive decay, but what was it and would it help point him a way home? He’d thought so before, but now he felt doubtful about the entire concept.

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!

With a sigh, Blake closed the data and turned around to find his battlestation skitter fully powered up and ready to go. First the previous morning, then last night, and now the following evening? That was three times in two days. Had something happened on the Ubran side? They attacked fairly constantly, but never this often in so short a time.

Blake’s eyes focused in on the red dot signifying the woman. Something wasn’t right. Usually, when the alarm went off, she’d be a lot closer to the city walls, but this time she seemed to have stopped advancing well beyond even sniper range.

Confused, he zoomed in the video feed to the more up-close view he liked to use when watching the battles play out, the one where he could see enough detail to make out her limbs and even her face. Instead of moving forward, the woman was bending backward and twisting her torso around almost an entire half a rotation. What was this, some sort of pre-battle stretching routine that he’d just never caught before?

As if to answer his unspoken question, the woman uncoiled with unfathomable torque, her body straightening out and her arm whipping about so fast that he barely even caught the blur. She released something as she did, something that grew larger in his view so quickly that he didn’t even have time to become alarmed before it was too late. The flitter’s anti-collision routine kicked in, but it didn’t make a bit of difference; Blake hadn’t written that behavior to compensate for something traveling so fast, and as if to make sure it hit, the object split into smaller pieces like a shotgun shell as it neared the drone. The rocks, or metal balls, or whatever they were collided with the side of the flitter’s frame and sent everything spinning madly. Blake just watched, appalled, as the overhead view he’d been watching whirled about, the ground getting closer and closer with each revolution until-

“Oh fuck. Oh fucking fuck.”

As the drone struck the dirt, Blake was also struck with a realization: he was in deep shit. One of the biggest weaknesses of the data relay system he’d set up, where data moved along a chain of flitter drones connecting the battlefield to his server and back, was that there was only enough bandwidth to provide semi-real-time data from one single drone. Given that limitation, he’d never bothered to put more than a single flitter hovering over the city at any one time. Besides, they were so small and hard to spot, and even if somebody did spy one, what could they even do from such a distance? Blake was constantly juggling what felt like thousands of demanding tasks every day, and so setting up redundant backups that would never be needed was all the way near the bottom of his giant list of priorities.

And now here he was, blind to a battle about to begin, with nothing standing between that woman and his total defeat but the backup routines in his robots. Whirling back to his normal terminal, he brought up his flitter control program and quickly pulled one near the start of the chain to become the newest member of the chain. Then he ordered all the others in the chain to move up one spot and switched his view to that of the chain’s new end.

Hands trembling with anxiety, Blake watched the terrain scroll by as the flitter made its way towards Crirada. The distance between each link in the chain was about fifty miles, so it took several minutes for the massive walls of the city to once more grace his screen. What he finally saw, once the skitter had finally come to rest over the west gate, was nearly a worst-case scenario.

While his older models, generally left alone on autopilot during battle anyway, were doing just fine helping the Eterians hold back the Ubrans assailing the wall, almost the entirety of his anti-that-woman force had been wiped out. The crusher and gatling skitters laid on the ground in pieces. As for the snipers... well, when he located the woman again, it was as she was pulling her sword from the remains of the second sniper bot.

With a curse, Blake reestablished control and ordered the one surviving sniper skitter to hightail it away from the woman as fast as it could. As the robot turned and ran north along the wall, Blake clicked several buttons he had never needed to click until now and hoped for the best.

The woman, perhaps sensing that her chance to be rid of the hated snipers was at hand, turned about to face the fleeing robot and gave chase. While faster than most humans could ever dream of running, a sniper skitter, with its long gun barrel and unwieldy proportions, was perhaps the slowest variety of skitter in existence. That woman, on the other hand, was faster than all of them. The gap closed quickly. Blake eyed the screen with desperate intensity, hoping, no, begging for his final trump card to come in to play in time. Just before the woman made it to her target, Blake saw a light on his screen go green and Blake’s last resort, the hypersonic railgun he’d installed atop the citadel in the center of the city, fired once with every last bit of power it had.

To say that the woman’s top half exploded was to do a disservice to the moment. Any of his sniper skitters could explode part of her with a supersonic bullet. This was no supersonic bullet; this was a massive missile of metal more than a foot wide hurtling at Mach seven right through the woman’s skull and annihilating everything in its way, including not just the woman but also the stone wall behind her, faster than anyone could process. Not even she could react to this. It was like Blake had flipped a switch and altered reality. One moment the woman was just feet away from her prey, and the next moment she was gone, the concussive blast caused by the giant ingot’s passage blowing her sword and her lower body through the newly created hole and off the wall. Only the stunned looks on the nearby Eterians’ faces and the rocking of the skitter as it steadied itself after the blast wave hit was proof that anything had been there at all.

Blake slumped down to the floor with relief. He’d won. Barely, but he’d staved that damnable woman off for another day. Unfortunately, he’d burned his last trump card to do so. The gun he’d installed atop the top of the citadel was, sadly, a single-use item. Though Tucrenyx was incredibly strong for a metal, similar to titanium but lighter, not even it could withstand the force such a firing imparted on it—at least, not with Blake’s current skills. The barrel would buckle and the crystallized circuits would crack under the strain. If he were there in person to repair it, perhaps it would be a different story, but such was not the case. As if to make it even plainer that the cannon would not be firing anymore, the stone of the tower upon which it stood gave way and the whole of it plummeted to the ground.

That weapon had been set up long ago, way back in the beginning when he’d had a small window before the woman became a greater threat and before the Ubrans stepped up their attacks. He wished he’d installed it on the west gate instead, where it would have been able to fire directly into the Ubran camp, but past Blake had had a different perspective on how this war would shake out. Unfortunately, it didn’t look like he’d get a chance to install a new one anytime soon. Unless the Ubrans took a sudden unexpected break, the Flying Toaster would be too busy replenishing his forces to waste a whole trip on a single-shot weapon.

A moment later, the relief faded away, leaving only simmering frustration and anger. How?! His flitters were up so high, and they were so small! How had she been able to see it? That woman! That... damnable woman! He hated her so much! Now he was going to have to stay up all night to replace his units, and he needed to write better collision avoidance routines, and... UGH! He was going to kill that woman permanently if it was the last thing he did!

*     *     *

“Welcome, people of Wroetin, to a day of triumph!” declared an exhausted Blake to the crowd assembled around him at the newly completed Wroetin Train Station. Once again, he gave silent thanks to the fact that his Lord Ferros persona wore a mask at all times. It wouldn’t do for the people of the city to be able to see just how tired he looked and felt.

Standing before the crowd, along with him, were his Chief of Staff Leo Feldmanis and, cowering a bit behind Leo’s body, Samanta. With the station platform at his back, a semicircle of skitters formed a buffer between them and the masses just a few feet away. As always these days, the boxy battlestation skitter was present as well, but since he was giving a speech he’d sent it off to the side where it wouldn’t distract anybody from listening to him.

“Today is the first day of operation for our glorious new train system!” he called out with pride. “Observe!”

Flipping a circuit, Blake started up the train system and turned to the east. Several moments later, a series of three linked train cars rolled into view. As they approached the station, they smoothly slowed down until coming to a stop perfectly aligned with the station platform. Murmurs spread through the crowd as the doors on the train cars opened as one, followed by gasps—be they of shock, amazement, fear, or a smattering of all three, Blake wasn’t sure—when a girl’s rang out loudly for all to hear.

“Thak kdak ak... Wroetin,” the voice stated clearly. “Novd kdak: Keqont. Prouko kduvk droul ad dho drakavk kaalk.”

Blake heard a shaky, disturbed “A-ah?” come from Samanta behind him. Blake wasn’t surprised, it was her own voice speaking after all. Recordings of speech didn’t work the same way here that actual spoken word did. After realizing that his own voice couldn’t be understood by the Otharians when played through speakers, he’d recorded her saying all these phrases a while back. In this case, what she’d said was “This stop is... Wroetin. Next stop: Keqont. Please stand clear of the closing doors.” The reasons why Blake’s voice didn’t work but Sam’s did were profound and revealing, but now was not the time to ponder them. Now was the time for celebration.

“That’s right! Now you can travel from here to Keqont, Eflok, Nont, and Breah simply and easily. Trains run every hour. Simply wait for the proper train to arrive, board it, and you are-”

The sound of a scream behind him interrupted his speech and set off alarm bells in his head. Almost instinctively, Blake whirled around, a portion of the forearm on his artificial left arm popping open to reveal a gun barrel. The coils in the barrel powered up, ready to fling metallic death at whoever was so stupid as to try to attack him on today of all days. His mind mentally fingered the trigger circuit and the arm took aim at... a kid.

Two kids actually, a girl chasing a boy in a game of tag or something. Just as he whirled, ready to fire, the boy being chased, looking back towards the chaser instead watching where he was going, ran right into Samanta’s side and knocked them both to the ground. The girl seemed to finally realize what she was doing and froze, her eyes becoming wide with fear as she gazed up at his glowering mask with its glowing eyes. That same terrified look could be found on the boy’s face as well as he stared up at him from the ground, his body noticeably trembling.

The entire crowd had fallen into a fearful silence as they watched. For a moment, nobody moved. Then Blake reverted his arm to its normal shape and waved the children back in the direction they’d come from.

“Go on, scram. And watch where you’re going next time.”

The kids didn’t have to be told twice. They sprinted back the way they’d come and disappeared into the crowd as Leo helped Sam back up onto her feet.

The surrounding people seemed to collectively exhale and a wave of roaring anger filled Blake. Those fuckers! They’d thought he was going to fucking kill children! Was that all they saw when they looked at him? He’d made a conscious effort to never kill kids, but did that matter to them? No, of course not. They saw only what they wanted to see.

Blake clenched and then relaxed his hands, pushing that anger down for the moment. Now was not the time for unproductive outbursts. Besides, other factors colored the situation. It had been his fault that the children had been able to get into his inner semicircle in the first place. In an effort to help endear his skitters to the public, he’d made sure to program them to be gentle with kids and treat them differently than adults. Right now, he’d ordered the robots around him to keep all potential threats from getting within a certain radius of him and the others, but children were not considered a threat by their programming. It was an obvious oversight in this specific case where he could only blame himself.

More importantly, however, was the simple fact that he couldn’t get mad at the Otharians for thinking he was going to shoot a kid when he’d actually nearly done exactly that. After staying up all night working to replace his forces in Crirada, as well as days of unending stress, his reactions and thought processes had slowed. When he’d heard the sound behind him, he’d reacted without thinking and if he’d been any slower in realizing the truth of the situation, a tragedy would have unfolded in front of everybody.

These facts didn’t make the anger go away, it just gave him reasons to bury it deep within himself, and so he did. Re-centering his thoughts, he took a deep breath and continued as if nothing had happened.

“As I was saying, simply board the train car headed in the direction you wish to go and you will be whisked away to your destination in just a few hours! The trains run all day and all night, so you can come and go as you please! And best of all, th-”

WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOP!

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

All that pent up rage suddenly burst forth in the form of a howl, causing the crowd to take a collective step back. Blake barely noticed, as he wasn’t even really paying attention to them anymore; instead, he was fuming as he marched towards the quickly unfolding battlestation standing by the station.

“Leo, you take over,” he growled as he strode past his assistant and grabbed the mouse in his armored hand. He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. Most of all, he wanted to strangle something with his bare hands.

That woman!

That... DAMNABLE WOMAN!