Symphony of Steel
“Let's fall back for now. Quickly, please.”
Taylor and Shiva didn't ask why. It was trust in Alan, and a vague sense of unease they couldn't quite name.
The misgiving became reality. Slightly smaller than the spoon worms they'd dealt with earlier, four-meter-long monstrosities came pouring out of the sewers like strands of noodles.
“Goddammit!”
The profanity in Taylor's voice grew heavier as he glanced back. Splashing on a little yellow fluid wouldn't melt you on the spot, but neither was he eager to shower in acid.
Alan led the party forward. With his spiders deployed on all sides, even a city he'd never seen before lay open before him like the palm of his hand.
By the time they reached the construction site, monsters other than the spoon worms had joined the fray. The creatures crept closer, hiding their bodies behind buildings and wrecked vehicles.
Shiva uppercut a bear-like monstrosity into the air, and Taylor finished it off with his shotgun.
“Better idea — why don't we draw their aggro and open things up for the others?”
“A fine thought, Brother.”
“There's an even better way.”
“Which is?”
Taylor, busy carving through monsters, asked without so much as glancing at him.
KOOM!
The answer came back as a heavy thud. A massive steel rebar flew in from somewhere and skewered a spoon worm clean through, while a slab of prefabricated concrete flattened a cluster of the creatures into paste.
The construction site's screen fencing tore open, and enormous figures strode through. Construction Golems — human-shaped machines built in man's image. They were capable of nothing but simple labor, but the sheer power they put out was staggering.
In each golem's cockpit sat one of Alan's spiders, wired into the machine with cables drawn from its abdomen, all of them orchestrated by Alan himself.
“You sure about this?”
"...Yes."
His reactions had slowed from multitasking, but it hardly mattered. The members of a vast orchestra, following their tiny conductor, began to grind the monsters underfoot.
The booming of ponderous footsteps and the wet, squelching shrieks of dying monsters wove together into a single symphony.
Chimera (2) — End
Chimera (3)
Alan was piloting five golem brothers. Counting his own body, he had six bodies, six fields of vision, and nearly twenty-four limbs to juggle.
His skull was in glorious turmoil because of it — and Alan welcomed even that with delight.
“So this is what it feels like to be Asura? The mental workout is extraordinary.”
“That's your whole review? I can barely manage one body as it is.”
“It's more manageable than you'd think.”
“Easy for you to say.”
At some point, the sluggishness in his speech from divided attention had faded back to normal. A brain that had never been like other people's, and the Taylor Cultivation Method had strapped wings to it.
A tentacle attack came flying at Golem Unit 1. The unit planted its hands and rolled out of the way, abandoning its position. The more numerous and complex the enemy's attacks became, the more his brain ached from the strain.
Professor Oros did say the brain should be trained like a muscle...
Once he'd found his rhythm, his thoughts began chaining one into the next as they always did. Alan rapped his helmet, sharpening his focus.
Golems were built with labor in mind, so their movements were awkward at best — but their destructive power alone was first-rate. And whatever clumsiness one unit showed, the other golems under Alan's control covered for it.
Unit 1, having completed its roll, planted both hands on the ground and sank into a crouch. Exactly like a sprinter in the blocks. Which was precisely what Alan intended to do.
Arms heaved the upper body up, legs drove against the earth. The speed was modest, but when a golem weighing dozens of tons moved that violently, nothing dared stand in its path.
Small monsters that blocked the way were trampled; anything bigger got a shoulder-check. Behind Unit 1 stretched a long, sticky red carpet.
But the enemy was many, and momentum never lasts forever. As Unit 1 slowed, the monsters began creeping in. Then a broken utility pole came into view through the unit's half-lowered gaze — or more precisely, through Alan's sight.
One more roll to crush the small fry underfoot, then a hand reached for the pole. A long weapon now in its grip, all that remained was to swing it.
KWAJIK!
The necks of the bull-like monsters charging horns-first were pulped. Their forelegs buckled hard, and they tangled together and tumbled across the rough ground.
Unaccustomed exercise made the joint assemblies scream. Lubricant oozed in thick ropes from the stressed connections.
The moment Unit 1 showed weakness, the monsters lunged for its exposed back — and that was when Unit 2 appeared. It blocked attacks with steel plating torn from somewhere, and at times swung the same plates to send enemies flying.
From the shattered pavement, spoon worms poked their heads out and smacked their orifices. The prelude to acid spray. They meant to melt the isolated Units 1 and 2 down.
Isolated? Hardly.
They'd heard something enormous moving, but the battlefield itself was so chaotic that the worms' judgment came slow. By the time they shut their half-opened maws and glanced sideways, the dump truck was already upon them.
“You disgusting vermin!”
Taylor shoved the enemy aside with some heavy machinery he'd commandeered from somewhere. The risk of rollover, injury from collision — he'd long since thrown all such concerns out of his head.
The truck, bowling its way through pins, soon faced its own crisis. A monster wedged between the wheels made the vehicle's narrow waist lurch and wobble.
Trying to drive the wedge deeper, a gorilla-like monster slammed in from the side. Its grotesquely swollen arms were no ornament, and they showed off terrifying strength.
But Taylor had more than enough means of escape. He blasted the driver's door off with his elbow and leapt outside.
A spoon worm targeted Taylor mid-air. Before it could spit its acid, Shiva lowered him a lifeline — no, threw it down.
“Got it!”
The instant Taylor snatched the line, Shiva hauled it hard. Taylor's body traced a diagonal through the air, and a vile liquid filled the spot where he'd been standing.
With the enemy's attack rendered void, it was Alan's turn. Even a battlefield drowning in chaos had its own rules, if you looked closely. You hit me, so I hit you back. Granted, only between peers of comparable weight class.
Unit 3, Shouldering a massive pack, stepped forward. Cables running from the pack connected to something held in its hands. The cables shuddered, and blue flame roared up from its grip.
The flame was the working of a mana cutter. It was never meant to be this size or length, but safety limiters had no place in the current situation.
Unit 3 swung its overclocked cutter with startling grace. Coming from a labor golem it looked absurd — though anyone who knew Sion might have felt a strange kinship watching it.
Each wide sweep of Unit 3's blade painted the surroundings red with monster fluids.
Units 4 and 5 held the line against the monsters flocking toward the commotion. They hurled rebar like javelins, and with every throw, another monster was pinned into something resembling an insect specimen.
Having cleared the swarm, Alan's party exited the construction site. A crimson-painted golem followed at their heels.
Alan, walking down the street, stopped dead. A bank was sitting right there in his field of view.
If the disturbance had been man-made, the place would have been looted long ago — but monsters had no interest in gold and treasure.
“Let's go in.”
"Alan..."
“Magic stones will be useful.”
“Ah, so that's what this is about? Here I thought you were planning a transfer of ownership.”
“Brother Taylor, there is a saying. To the eyes of a demon, only demons appear; to the eyes of a saint, only saints.”
“Oh, come off it.”
Even as Taylor's face twisted, Shiva pretended not to notice and pressed on.
“It means one projects one's own patterns of behavior onto others.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it. Enough.”
Alan was already inside the bank, and he looked oddly cheerful about it. And Shiva, keeping watch outside, spotted a signal flare rising in the far distance.
*
The sun sank lower and lower. Red liquid dripped steadily from Danny's mace as well. Every time he destroyed a hatchery, he had looked inside carefully — and there had been citizens within.
The citizens who hadn't escaped were all piled up as corpses. There was no need to agonize over the choice.
That clever Brother said they were hatcheries, but...
To Danny's eyes, they looked like reassembly plants. The monsters swarming him now had once been people. More precisely — their bodies only.
Making chimeras out of human beings.
He gripped the mace's handle so hard it threatened to snap. Each hatchery he destroyed stoked his fury at the Electo Cartel — and at whoever stood behind it.
As Danny ground his rage down, a signal flare caught his eye. With communications jammed, this was how people were reaching each other.
“Father, it seems a group of survivors has been found.”
“Let us go, then.”
Danny quickened his pace, the clergy and vigilantes following in his wake. After crushing a few more packs of monsters, a plain rectangular school building came into view.
The grounds and interior had fallen long ago, but resisting citizens still held the rooftop.
The men kicked chimeras off the walls as they swarmed upward, while the women beat the creatures back with mop handles and whatever else came to hand.
The citizens had no intention of dying quietly, and the priests of the Mother Church had no intention of letting them become monster feed.
The moment Danny's foot touched the schoolyard, he opened his mouth.
“OGRES!!!”
The roar dragged every monster's attention toward him. Charging beasts, the growing light of his mace. And Danny brought the mace down.
KWAJIK!
Even monsters the mace never touched were crushed flat. The weapon itself was barely longer than a meter, yet its reach was inexplicably several times that.
Danny snuffed out the monsters' lives in a single stroke — freeing whatever souls might be bound inside those flesh, sending them home to the Mother's embrace.
The chimeras were not at fault. The debt belonged to someone else entirely.
Electo. What in the world are you after?
He swung the mace in mechanical rhythm, chewing over the question that had no answer. Before he knew it, the monsters were gone and only citizens waving from the rooftop remained. The priests climbed up swiftly and saw to the wounded.
Danny was hopeless at healing. As he kept watch over the surroundings, a nun came up beside him.
“Eighty survivors. Twenty-five of them cannot walk on their own.”
“Heal them only enough to walk by themselves.”
“Understood.”
In their present situation, a priest's hands busy carrying the wounded meant hands that couldn't fight — a far greater danger. Even those who couldn't fight needed at least to be able to run.
For a long while they devoted themselves to treatment and preparation. Danny, scraping gore off his mace, sprang to his feet.
Blast it all...
He didn't let a sound escape his lips. If he wavered, even those following behind him would be shaken.
But the effort bore no fruit. Everyone looking in the same direction as Danny let out groans of despair.
“Ah...”
“What in God's name is...”
With the sky already darkening, a heavy shade of dread settled over every face.
It couldn't be helped. Enemies were pouring in — enough to make the force that had besieged the school earlier look like a joke. There was no hope of even guessing at their numbers.
Some crawled out of ruined buildings. Some slithered from the sewers, planting slick, sticky feet on the pavement. Winged things wheeled slowly through the air above.
There weren't this many yesterday.
A horde this size, hitting them all at once? With civilians in their care, no less?
Danny understood. It was a trap. The citizens hadn't held out bravely — they'd been bait, laid out by someone in advance. But as a priest, as a man, he had no choice but to bite.
The dark-red tide surged in without end, and the sun sank fully below the horizon. The city, its functions dead, was swallowed whole by darkness.
In the blackness, only the monsters' shrieks carried clearly. Limited vision fed amplified imagination, and imagination fed the fear.
“This is hell!”
One of the citizens screamed it. Danny agreed to a certain degree. It was every bit as hellish as that.
Not that surrender had ever crossed his mind. The enemy had surely left the civilians alive to divide his strength — but to Danny, that constraint only set his heart ablaze.
“Let us go!”
““The Mother watches over us!””
Danny shouted first, and the clergy steeled their resolve. The white light they poured out gathered into a whole and pushed back the darkness around them. Even the trembling citizens recovered some measure of courage within that glow.
If the priests were torches, the monsters were moths flinging themselves at the flame. They wouldn't die easily — but that was certainly how it looked.
The instant the monsters began scaling the school building — the moment the priests' tension crested —
a new lamp appeared. More precisely, a passenger car with its lights blazing appeared behind the monster legion, and Danny could see the whole tableau clearly from the rooftop.
The small, distant sedan never slowed. It simply charged — and then came the explo—