With his Whistling Blade in his dominant hand, Jace charged back toward the automatons.

  The others had already brought down the automaton missing its head, but they kept the two others busy and intact. Jace experimented with his new wrist as he ran, finding the channels and motors to fuel to turn it and angle it, or just change the direction of his palm. It’d take some getting used to, especially in a fight, but he’d rather practice now than against Rallemnon.

  Since his fortification technique was still active, he could still enhance the blade’s cutting capabilities. First, he targeted the nearest automaton’s leg, but he didn’t turn his wrist far enough fast enough, and the cutting edge sliced in at an awkward angle. It wrenched his arm downward.

  Cursing, he pulled back and tried again, but the automaton whirled around, its entire upper torso shifting, and it struck him in the chest with a long arm. His feet left the ground and he flew backward into the wall behind him with a clang.

  He gasped, but it didn’t hurt that bad, not with all his Vitality now. Nothing internal broken.

  He fell down and landed in a crouch, then hopped up and turned back to face the automaton, then adjusted his hand. He’d have to move the Aes through the hand’s tubes and wires a little faster. More intentionally.

  The automaton had turned back to Ash, having not judged him as a threat. Jace’s lips quirked up into a smile, and he chuckled.

  Going right for the same spot, then. I’ll do it right this time.

  He sprinted forward, and, holding his wrist at the right angle this time, angling the cutting edge on the exact perfect plane as his swipe, he sliced through the automaton’s leg.

  With an almost surprised clank, it toppled to the ground.

  Jace took a few extra seconds to turn the Whistling Blade over, until he held it upside down, then jabbed it into the automaton’s chest, piercing right beside its core. He drove it in twice more until the automaton finally stopped moving, then turned to the other.

  After a few more swipes, cutting through its leg, and practicing moving his wrist into the right positions, he felled the automaton.

  Already starting to get the hang of this, he thought. Though his wrist was stiff, and his cutting angles weren’t perfect, it’d come with more practice—if this was how fast he was getting better already.

  Though…there’d probably be a learning curve.

  He stuffed that thought down and concentrated on the blade, then motioned to Perril. “Some more material for you, ma’am.”

  She gave a light, sarcastic bow, then kicked through the remains of the automatons with her boot, scavenging for more materials and components.

  “How much more do you think she’ll need?” Ash whispered. “You’d think she has enough, and that storage ring has to be getting pretty heavy.”

  Lessa raised her hand, lifting the bangle, then turned it side-to-side. “Don’t really feel much. Like…maybe a little heavier than normal?”

  “Lucky,” Ash muttered. “Perhaps ancient Luminians knew how to quell the mass of their storage ring contents better than we do with our modern rings. But are these arts and crafts going to—”

  Before he could finish, the floor rumbled, and the rubble of the automatons shifted and shook.

  Jace’s eyes widened, and he bent his knees, ready to react. The floor was just shifting, and the hallway walls were turning in the opposite direction, like a fan’s blades racing toward them.

  “Grab what you can and run!” Jace called. He snatched up automaton components that looked vaguely useful, but the movement of the floor was getting faster. It was a giant metal disk, rotating independently from the walls, and now, he was jogging just to keep from getting swept off his feet.

  With armfuls of automaton parts, Jace, Lessa, Kinfild, Ash, and Perril all ran in the opposite direction of the floor just to stay on their feet.

  But the walls began shifting toward them faster too. The hallway intersection suddenly began whirring, and neon orange shield walls erupted on the radial hallway walls.

  “If we do not move, the shields will crush us!” Ash shouted. He reached out behind him and touched the shield with his hand. With an electric-sounding spaak, it blasted his hand away, and he shook it. The tips of his fingers smoked.

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  “Go to the left!” Perril shouted, pointing down the hallway in the direction they’d come from.

  “One of the shield gates opened!” Jace called. It was one of the intersections they’d passed that had previously been blocked off. Then, he began sprinting diagonally. It didn’t feel like he was moving, but slowly, they traversed the hallway until they reached an intersection, where they could slow down, and let the empty hallway behind them shift along.

  After a few minutes of running, the floor slowed down, and so did Jace. He planted his feet, and eventually, the floor and hallways stopped moving altogether. His heart pounded and his head whirled with dizziness. He crouched down, but Lessa flopped down on her back beside him and spread out her arms and legs. With a soft laugh, he did the same.

  “What are you two doing?” Ash demanded. “We—”

  “You didn’t ever get yourself dizzy as a child?” Perril asked him.

  “If I did, I don’t remember it.”

  She rolled her eyes, then gave him a nudge. “They’re just kids. Don’t know how to use their senses to orient themselves yet.”

  Jace craned his neck up and rested his chin on his chest. “Hey. I’m…okay, fine. I guess I am younger than you guys. How…how old are you, Perril?” He cringed internally, only realizing after a few seconds that it probably wasn’t the best idea to ask a woman her age.

  “Forty-seven,” Perril answered without hesitation.

  “And Ash?”

  The man swallowed. “Fifty-one.”

  Jace raised his eyebrows. Though they didn’t look like it, they were old enough to be his parents. Kinfild, however old he was…well, if he hadn’t been accumulating as much Aes as they had, then perhaps it enabled his aging. But still, he was probably considerably older than he looked.

  “What is this thing?” Lessa asked between panting breaths. “It’s…weird.”

  “I think…” Jace held up a finger. “Okay, maybe it’s crazy, but I think this entire level is one giant automaton. It’s the only way to explain what my senses were feeling.”

  “That would make sense,” said Kinfild, tapping his staff on the floor. “It isn’t moving through the earth, at the very least. It has simply adjusted its internal shape, perhaps with the intent of stalling us.”

  “Then why not just destroy us outright?” Jace asked. “Just close the walls in on us and crush us?”

  Kinfild shook his head. “The Luminians needed access to their own tombs, still. There must be a way through this level, and we will find it.”

  Jace took a single step, then stopped again. “If this is an automaton, then…it must have a power source, and a hell of a lot of purification crystals, right?”

  Perril laughed. “You don’t need another one. Especially not a massive one.”

  “What if he wants one?” Lessa interjected. “Sorry. Irrelevant.”

  “I need Aes, though,” said Jace. “If we can find where the automaton is purifying it…we could find a massive supply of Aes for ourselves.”

  “General Rallemnon did seem quite powerful,” Ash provided.

  The four of them turned to him, and collectively made a confused expression.

  Ash spread his arms. “Well, I expect the process of becoming half-kyborg took quite the toll on his level rating and his attributes. But he seems to have recovered all of that and grown rapidly stronger. Perhaps he found another level like this. For example, the ninth level, as a challenge to anyone trying to enter the tenth from above.”

  “We need to find the power source of this automaton, then,” Kinfild said. “And we need to keep moving. We must cover as much ground as we can before the automaton shifts its innards.”

  They set off at a brisk jog, letting Lessa set the pace. For the moment, she was the slowest, but by mortal standards, she absolutely wasn’t slow. They dispatched more automatons sent to delay them, and it almost felt like they were fighting through some robot’s immune system.

  Which they probably were. And they were kinda like parasites, because whenever Perril saw some machinery on the wall that she thought would be useful, she got Ash or Jace to cut it off. (Jace didn’t mind—it just meant more practice controlling his wrist and hand.) Bit by bit, they were taking apart the automaton from the inside.

  About every ten minutes, it shifted, changing its hallways, and more annoyingly, shifting the holes in its floors and changing where the stairwells were.

  Jace tracked the Aes source with his Questforger card by locking onto the idea of a really big purification crystal. And sure enough, the tracking needle pointed downward. Hopefully, it’d be the right sort of crystal and there’d be some sort of harvestable Aes flowing through it.

  After a few hours of running and descending, scrapping automatons, scavenging components from the walls, and opening coffins and gathering technique cards or elixirs (and in one case, a set of plasma-launchers that looked vaguely like a rifle, but were vastly oversized for a human), they arrived at an egg-shaped silver object near the dungeon level’s center.

  A tangle of wires and tubes suspended the devices, and pulleys and gear chains extended from its sides, reaching a few feet across the chamber and joining the three-storey-tall egg with the cylindrical outer walls.

  They were at the very center of the cylindrical level, and the floor barely spun whenever it moved. There were no walls to impede them, only a couple doors whose shields flashed on and off. A column of wires and rune-covered tubes ran up from the floor into the bottom of the egg, feeding it orange enhanced shield Aes, and a tube ran out the top, flooding the automaton’s systems with golden pure Aes.

  “The next crust-lift is close,” Jace said. “After this, it’s only a couple flights down. Then we’ll be in the fifteenth level.”

  “It’s getting late,” Kinfild said. “Late afternoon, at least. We should rest and prepare as best we can. There won’t be another chance, and…we will likely have to face Rallemnon before long.”