The experience of teleportation was strange and disorienting for Kyle. He felt nauseous-which was impossible. That was one of the first sensations he’d cybernetically removed from his body.

  The strange phantom-nausea went just as quickly as it had come. When he blinked, he was in a similar room, standing on a similar array of pink stone inlaid into a floor of more standard gray stone.

  A few differences stood out to him. There was one less office along the back wall, and the stone of the walls had some glassy black flecks in it.

  The attendants were mostly the same, but this time, the seeming lead was a woman. “Final location?” “Tetrelta. Kyle handed over 8 deacons, and the process repeated.

  And so it went for about a day, before he reached the first… complication.

  The first twenty stations had been mostly similar, but this most recent one was different. A few armed guards standing around the array pulled enchanted blades on him on his arrival.

  He immediately took his helmet off as a sign of peace, and they put down their blades. “Hail there, adventurer. You’ve just been conscripted to fight the Iron Scourge, attacking the Imperial Stronghold of Pirezohn. Resisting the Decree of Immediate Conscription will lead to your branding as a criminal of the highest order. Follow me.”

  Oh shiiii-

  —————————

  The portal array happened to be on a hill in the center of the city, giving Kyle a great view of the mountain ranges and woods surrounding the walls. And the huge army of spiderlike killer magic robots firing spells into the city.

  The city itself was covered in seas of tents and huge formations of legionaries garrisoned the walls.

  A huge battle was actually taking place at that moment. A swarm of car-sized robots had flooded towards the wall, only for flights of combat spells and enchanted arrows to cut them to pieces.

  Any that reached the walls died even more brutally, as a forest of coordinated spears and swords would flick out at insane speeds and slice limbs off the bots.

  Farther off in the distance, four-legged robots lobbed huge explosive spells into the city. Some were allowed to land amongst the damaged buildings, but most were deflected or absorbed by varying magical shields across the city.

  Huge ballistae covered in glowing runes and even what looked like a magical hiwacha rained artillery fire back onto the robots, pulping their black metal bodies and extinguishing the glow of countless red eyes.

  What… what am I even looking at… I think leaving the city was a bad idea. I should have just paid that guild thug off…

  Men in Roman armor covered in enchantments directed him to the walls, clearly judging by his armored visage. Well, I was jonesing for some action, I suppose.

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  The sky was grey and full of smoke from random fires burning across the landscape. It is quite cinematic.

  ————

  Kyle was sent to the main breach in the wall. He decided that if he was going to be forced to fight here, he should do what he could to get it over with quickly.

  Just in time. The next wave of the spider bots was flooding towards the breach. Around him, a shield wall of legionaries formed, and adventurers with bows or staffs loosed projectiles into the hoard to lessen their numbers.

  Kyle pulled out his beautiful dusky purple hammer. He’d named it the Daphne after his lost ship. Spinning it around deftly using the actuators in his gauntlets, he prepared to meet the oncoming horde of robots. He stood taller than some of the robots, and they clearly logged him as a threat.

  As the first bot reached the pile of rubble that he stood on blocking the breach, the hammer flicked out at subsonic speeds and absolutely caved the robots entire exoskeleton in.

  Pulling the hammer back, he made a wide sweep across the line of bots. The main body of several robots totally caved in. The Daphne was clearly overkill.

  The shield wall of legionaries behind him carved up any that slipped past him.

  Thunderous swing after swing, he slaughtered the horde of robotic spiders. He had his nanite swarm collect and analyze countless samples at the same time. Using the nanites outside of the nanofactory’s Reality Sheathe was wasteful at best, but these things needed to be studied.

  Eventually, one of the bots got lucky. Their main weapons, aside from their legs, were two mandibles of wickedly sharp looking metal on their flat faces.

  The lucky spider stabbed his shoulder with one of the mandibles, and to Kyle’s utter shock, the mandible penetrated to almost two thirds of a millimeter.

  That was bad-really bad. Not even high caliber armor penetrating rounds could scratch his armor, due to its molecular-scale design for maximized durability. Every molecule was perfectly placed to maximize strength, so even less than a millimeter of penetration was utterly deadly.

  In that instant, Kyle decided to get serious. Falling back behind the still-fresh shield wall, he clipped his hammer to his hip, and unclipped his railgun from chest. Running up into a battered-looking stone watchtower nearby, he positioned the railgun against a pile of bricks on the ground.

  From the elevated position, he had a beautiful view of the battlefield. Warming up the accelerator coils, he aimed the weapon at the huge formations of artillery spiders in the backline away from the wall.

  With the pull of a trigger, a huge cloud of dust erupted from every surface in the tower. As the matter broke the sound barrier several times over, the plasmatic rod of condensate metals sped across the field.

  With an apocalyptic explosion, the shot absolutely blew past the thin red barrier protecting the artillery from return fire. The entire formation was thrown into disarray, as a huge explosion of dirt and decimated robot parts erupted from the center of the line.

  Even as the few survivors of the formation desperately tried to reform, he loosed a second shot at a group of tankier-looking melee bots.

  Their increased armor and ablative plate stood no chance against his weapon, and their smaller formation was absolutely reduced to smithereens.

  The entire force slowly pulled back, and cheers erupted from the legionnaires and adventurers massed along the walls and breaches.

  Kyle still blew up a few more formations of bots, before jumping down off the four story tower and jogging back to the portal room.