The battle lasted until the sun went down, and by then, Ashen had lost count of how many enemies had fallen.
It didn't matter. For every Penitent his father scrapped, the warriors would later see small crab-like things scuttle out from the ruins to drag the wreckage back inside.
When a destroyed Censer had toppled near the outer edge of the city in the morning, Ashen saw it again near midday, standing. Its ribs were mismatched and its lens chain was new, but it was the same one.
Instead of destroying the enemy, it looked like they were just giving it spare parts.
As dusk fell, Adam finally raised his sword overhead and swept it in a wide arc.
"Fall back!"
The warriors retreated in good order, the frontline covering the backline, the spellcasters covering the frontline, until they were well beyond the ridge where it had all started. Even then, they didn't stop. They kept going for what felt like an hour, carrying their wounded on their backs, until Adam finally called a halt in a shallow valley far from the ruins.
There, Lucan, the eldest of the brothers who had come along, pulled a small orb of dark crystal from his pack and set it on the ground.
He pressed his palm onto it and fed it mana. The orb hummed, then unfolded outward into a dome of faint shimmering haze that swallowed the entire camp. From the inside, Ashen could still see the sky. But the moment he stepped near the edge and looked out, the world beyond seemed oddly distant, as though he were looking at it through deep water.
"A concealment orb," Lucan explained, seeing his expression. "This far from their detection range, it should be enough for them to lose track of us until morning."
"Should be?"
Lucan just shrugged.
◉
That night, there were no fires. They ate cold rations by the faint blue glow of the dome, and the wounded groaned quietly while the healers worked on them.
Ashen sat with his knees pulled to his chest. His thoughts kept drifting to the skulls in the Penitents' chests, and the hole in the stone where his own spell had come back for him.
Orin dropped down beside him, followed by Bram, a broad-shouldered brother whose hands were always stained a dull orange, no matter how often he washed them.
"Your first real fight," Bram said. "How do you feel?"
"Like I wasn't in it." Ashen smirked, "I just kept flailing around in the back and haven't really contributed much."
Bram laughed, low and rough. "Look at the bright side, little brother. That means you'll live to be in the next one."
Ashen was quiet for a while. Then he asked the question that had been gnawing at him since the morning.
"What are they? The mechanical force. Narkals at least are beasts… sort of. But those things... where do they even come from?"
Orin and Bram exchanged a look.
"You know about the Outer Gods already," Orin said.
"Yes." Every member of the tribe was educated with the bare minimum information on them. That was another question Ashen kept asking himself.
Why not extend that education to the other monstrosities they were now facing…? It felt like Adam was deliberately keeping them in the dark for most of what was transpiring in the expedition, and he did not know why.
"Right. Each of them has a… philosophy, you could say. Something they believe so completely that it bends the world around it." Orin picked up a pebble and turned it over between his fingers. "The one behind the mechanical force is called the Unborn Heir."
Ashen frowned. "That doesn't make sense. An heir is someone born into a family to inherit what their parents leave behind. How can something be unborn and still be an heir?"
"That's exactly the point," Bram said. "Its whole belief is that birth is the problem."
Orin continued. "The Unborn Heir hates intelligence in living things. Anything with flesh and blood that dares to think. To it, a mind inside a body that rots is an insult. We learn things, and then we forget them. We grow old, we die, and everything we knew dies with us. Every generation has to relearn what the last one already knew. It sees that as… theft. As waste. Knowledge being squandered on vessels that can't hold it."
"And metal can," Ashen said slowly.
"Metal doesn't forget… metal doesn't die of old age… metal doesn't need to be born." Orin tossed the pebble aside. "So the Unborn Heir claims that the mechanical force is the only true inheritor of knowledge. That everything living things ever learned was only ever borrowed, held in trust until something worthy came along to take it back."
Ashen thought of the Copyists clicking in the high windows, recording every spell.
"Take it back, huh…" he repeated.
"Yep, from us. That's how they see the whole world. I doubt they even see us as their enemies. To them, we're probably a library that's been left out in the rain. They're just… collecting the books?"
Ashen felt a chill crawl up his spine. "What about those ruins… did people build them? Before?"
"Nobody knows for sure," Orin said. "But most likely, it was a base for the mechanical force before something else erased them. They are known to always crawl back to their old bases after all."
A long silence fell over the three of them.
Then a shadow fell over them, and Ashen looked up to find his father standing there, his great sword shrunk down to the size of a dagger and hanging from his belt.
"Father," Ashen said. "Can I ask something?"
Adam sat down heavily. "Go on."
"Our destination isn't the ruins. It's past them. So why don't we just… go around? Leave them alone? If they're this dangerous, fighting them seems like…" He trailed off, not wanting to say a waste of lives.
Adam didn't get angry. He just shook his head slowly.
"You saw the little ones dragging the wreckage back inside today?"
"Yes."
"That city is full of metal. Thousands of years' worth of it. To them, it's not a ruin but a womb." Adam's eyes were fixed on the shimmering edge of the dome, toward where the ruins were.
"Somewhere in the middle of it is something that takes that metal and turns it into more of them. Every day we leave them alone, there are more. And it isn't a steady growth. More of them means more hands to strip metal, which means more of them faster. If we walk around them now, by the time we come back from our expedition, this whole region will be teeming with them"
"Oh… shit."
Ashen's temple throbbed as he imagined the scale of what they'd have to deal with if that ever came to pass.
"And more importantly than that," Adam continued, his voice dropping, "home isn't far from here. If this region falls to them, the next thing they'll turn their eyes toward is our place."
He didn't need to say the rest. Ashen thought of his mothers, his sisters, and the little ones who would run to the gate every time the warriors came back.
"We kill them here," Adam said. "Regardless of what it costs."
◉◉◉
Ashen didn't sleep much that night.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the skulls in the Penitents' chests, so he stopped trying and simply watched the camp instead. That was how he noticed that, while most of the warriors had collapsed wherever they sat, a handful of his older brothers hadn't rested at all.
They were gathered around Bram at the far edge of the dome, speaking in low voices. Bram sat cross-legged in the middle of them with his orange-stained hands resting on his knees, his eyes closed and his brow damp with sweat, as though he were carrying something heavy.
Every so often, Lucan or Orin would lean in and murmur something, and Bram would nod without opening his eyes.
He was building a spell. Ashen could tell that much from the slow, careful pulse of mana coming off him. He had been at it for hours.
That was when Ashen realized that it was not solely to heal the injured and rest their bodies that they had retreated.
The men had a plan, and they were in the middle of implementing it.
When dawn came and the brothers finally explained it to him, the plan was simple enough that even Ashen, half-dead from exhaustion, could follow it.
Bram would build a new spell. And that spell would be imbued with his own concept: Rust.
'That's logical… rust is the ultimate counter to metal. But we only have a single shot. By the second time, it probably won't work on those guys anymore.'
He said as much out loud, and Lucan only smiled at him in a way Ashen didn't quite like.
"You're right," Lucan said. "And they know it, too. Why do you think we spent all of yesterday throwing every spell we had at them?"
Ashen opened his mouth, then closed it.
He thought back to the first day. At the time, he'd been too busy ducking to notice, but now that he looked back on it, something was off. His brothers in the backline had never stopped casting, not even once. Fire, ice, lightning, stone, wind. Spells that had no real hope of killing anything had been thrown at the ruins one after another, as though they had mana to waste.
And every one of those spells had been copied.
"You let them…" Ashen said slowly.
"Hmm… more like we taught them," Lucan corrected. "In the morning, the Copyists needed to see a spell three times before they could throw it back. By noon, it was twice. By evening, a single glance was enough. There were too many spells coming at them, too fast, and they couldn't afford to fall behind on the battlefield. So they stopped thinking about it."
"Stopped thinking? Ah." Ashen tilted his head before it dawned on him. Lucan's following explanation turned his conjecture into truth.
"They stopped judging." Lucan tapped the side of his head. "At first, they'd study a spell before they used it. Take it apart. Make sure it was worth stealing. But by the end of the day, they were just grabbing anything that looked like it worked and throwing it right back at us. As long as it looked effective, they took it. They don't care what a spell is supposed to do to the one casting it. They only check what it does to the target."
Ashen frowned. He felt like he was missing something important, but before he could ask, Adam stood up and drew his sword.
"Enough talk. We move."