The second day began the same way the first had ended.
The warriors crested the ridge, and the ruins lit up with white light. Beams bent through mirrors and came screaming down at them from impossible angles. Penitents poured out of the streets to meet the front line, and the backline began hurling spells, as many as they could and as fast as they could, never stopping, keeping the Copyists clicking in their windows.
Only this time, Bram wasn't fighting.
He stood on the ridge behind the backline, surrounded by six warriors whose only job was to shield him. His eyes were closed. His hands were raised in front of him, cupped together as though he were holding water.
And he was building.
Bram's lips were moving. At first, Ashen thought he was praying. Then the words reached him, and he realized it was a chant.
"Water seeps. Breath settles. Iron forgets its shape."
The mana around him coiled.
"A red tide climbs the anvil, a red bloom swallows the blade."
The air above his cupped hands turned the colour of dried blood.
"Hollow belly. Endless table. The mouth that is never full."
That hunger rolled off him, and Ashen's stomach clenched just from hearing the words, feeling as if he had starved for weeks.
"Let the first bite be the hand that feeds."
Bram opened his eyes.
"Gluttony's Rust — Red Famine."
A concept, imbued into a spell, to grant it its power and push its effects beyond what the other three components could reach alone.
Bram's concept rose from him starting with odor. It was a bottomless, aching want. The feeling of a mouth that could never be filled, no matter how much was fed into it.
'Gluttony…'
Ashen stared at his brother's back.
'So that's where Rust comes from. It isn't exactly decay… more like appetite. A Rust that doesn't destroy metal… but eats it.'
Bram opened his eyes, and he threw.
The wave of mana rose above the battlefield as a ball of red no bigger than a man's head. Then it began to swell. It grew and grew, spreading over the sky until it hung above the entire ruined city like a storm cloud the colour of dried blood. For a moment, everything paused. Even the beams stopped as the machines' countless lenses turned upward.
Then the cloud came down.
It fell across the ruins like rain, and wherever it landed, the metal began to rot.
Censers sagged as the red crept up their long thin ribs. Mirror-bearers' dark glass clouded over. The Penitents on the front line slowed, their joints grinding as rust bloomed across their chains and frames, flakes of red dust peeling away with every step.
The warriors roared.
And yet…
Ashen watched, and his heart slowly sank.
It wasn't enough.
The machines were rusting, but they weren't completely destroyed.
The Penitents simply tore away the parts that had rotted through and kept walking; their frames became thinner and uglier but still moving.
The little crab-like harvesters were already scuttling out from the ruins, stripping metal off the dead to patch the living. A Censer whose lens chain had snapped simply lowered itself onto all fours and began firing from the lens on its other arm.
The beams resumed. The pressure on the front line came back as strong as before, and maybe stronger.
'One shot,' Ashen thought, his grip tightening on his spear. 'That was our one shot.'
Behind him, he heard Bram gasp.
Ashen turned and saw his brother on his knees. Blood was running freely from his nose, and his eyes were so bloodshot that the whites had nearly gone red.
He looked hollowed out, as though something had been eating him from the inside while he cast.
But his hands were rising again.
"Bram, you can't—"
"Shut up," Bram hissed through his teeth. "Shield me."
"Water seeps. Breath settles. Iron forgets its shape."
He squeezed out what remained of his mana. Ashen could feel it being wrung out of him, every last drop scraped from the bottom of the well and forced into the same shape again.
It was the same spell with the same appetite. The cloud that formed this time was smaller and shakier, its edges thinning as Bram's mana gave out, but it still grew large enough to cover the heart of the ruins.
"Gluttony's Rust — Red Famine!!!"
Bram threw it with a scream and collapsed face-first into the dirt.
And by the time his spell had left his hands, the mechanical force was already answering.
Everyone saw it happen. In the windows, every Copyist snapped toward Bram the moment the second cloud began to form. Not thrice or twice…. They had seen it once, and that was enough, exactly as his brothers had taught them.
Then a voice came out of the ruins.
It was hundreds of them, all speaking in perfect unison, and every single one was human. Men, women, the young and the old.
Ashen realized with horror that they were recorded, voices drawn out of the skulls in the Penitents' chests and played back as a single chorus.
"RETURN WHAT WAS BORROWED."
Every Censer lifted its lens. Penitents raised their hands. A web of mana spread across the city, linking every machine to every other, and down every strand of that web travelled the same spell. Bram's spell.
They took the knowledge, the shape, and even… the same appetite as it is.
…Only bigger.
Above the ruins, a red cloud began to form that was twice the size of anything Bram had thrown, aimed at the ridge this time. Targeting every weapon and piece of armor on the battlefield.
If that came down on them, they would be left fighting with their bare hands. Everyone realized at once.
The cloud swelled as the humans held their breath…
And then… the machines began to rust. And it was countless times faster than when Bram's spell hit them.
It went past their surfaces this time. Penitents near the front line jerked to a stop with their hands still raised, and then red dust began pouring out from between their ribs and the inside of their hollow chests, as though something within it was being eaten away.
The joints seized, the arms locked in place, then they simply folded in on themselves, crumbling from the inside out, and the skull in its chest rolled away across the dirt.
All across the ruins, the machines who had raised their hands to cast stopped moving.
Censers sagged and toppled as their insides rotted out. Mirror-bearers crumbled where they perched. And because the spell had travelled along that web of mana, so did the hunger, leaping from machine to machine and tower to tower, faster than any of them could cut the connection, faster than they could even calculate why it was happening.
The great red cloud above the ruins thinned, frayed, and scattered before it could fall. Its casters were no longer there to hold it.
The chorus of stolen voices broke apart into a stuttering noise. "RETURN— RETURN WHAT— WHAT WAS— BORR—"
Bram's second, smaller cloud came down on top of the chaos, finishing what was left.
Ashen stood frozen with his spear in his hand, and slowly, it all fell into place.
'Ha.' An absurd chuckle echoed out, 'The rust was never the point.'
He remembered how Bram had looked after the first spell. Bleeding and hollowed out, drained far more than a single spell should have drained anyone.
…As though something had been feeding on him the entire time he held it.
'Gluttony doesn't only eat the target. It eats the one who holds it, too. The real effect of that spell was most probably always inward. It devours the caster from within. The rust on the outside was nothing but a side effect.'
For Bram, there had been no metal inside him to devour, so the spell had gnawed on what it could find instead: his mana. That was why he had collapsed after only two casts. A man of flesh could survive it, barely, if he was willing to bleed for it.
But a machine was metal all the way through.
'And they don't seem to acknowledge intent or concepts. Anything that can't be measured doesn't seem to exist to them. So when they looked at that spell, they only saw what it did on the outside. Metal rusting. Their own forces rotting.
'From their point of view… it was a perfect weapon against anything made of metal, like our weapons and armor.'
That was why the first spell had been thrown at all. It had to visibly work. Not only that… It had to look so good that they would want it.
And yesterday, his brothers had spent an entire day training them to grab any spell that looked effective and throw it back as fast as possible, without stopping to judge it or stopping to take it apart, which they would have done on the first day of their battle, when they had all the time in the world to be careful.
'Bram's second spell was bait. The moment they saw it again, they took it and turned it on us without thinking twice.'
'And every single one of them fed themselves to it.'
Ashen let out a breath that came out half a laugh. Beside him, Orin was kneeling over Bram's collapsed form, checking his breathing, and he caught Ashen's expression.
"Figured it out?" Orin asked.
"You could've told me."
"You'd have looked at Bram differently when he threw the first one," Orin said. "And they were watching… everything."