By the time the dust settled, Ashen guessed that eight out of every ten machines were out of commission.
Adam didn't waste a heartbeat. His sword swelled to its full colossal size, and he raised it overhead.
"Push!" he roared. "Everything that moves dies! Leave nothing they can rebuild from!"
The warriors poured down into the ruins.
What was left of the mechanical force fought back. The machines that hadn't raised their hands in time, mostly Copyists and stragglers deep in the city, still had teeth.
A pair of Censers that had been too far back to join the casting opened fire from a high tower, and a warrior lost two fingers before Adam leapt up the side of the building and brought the whole tower down on them.
A group of Penitents formed a wall in a narrow street and held it for nearly an hour, reading and predicting every blow, until the backline simply collapsed the buildings on either side of them.
But without the web of mirrors and the thousands of hands bringing endless reinforcements, the remaining machines were just that… remaining.
The warriors swept through every street. And they made sure to crush every one of the little crab-like harvesters they found, even the ones that tried to flee down cracks in the ground.
Ashen stomped on more than a dozen of them himself, one after another, until the ground beneath his boots was littered with little bent legs.
Near the center of the city, they found what Adam had called the womb.
It was enormous, a bloated shape of welded metal plates the size of a cathedral, with hundreds of thin arms hanging limp from its sides. It had rusted from within just like the rest of them. It had been the one distributing the spell to all of its children, after all, and it had held it first and longest.
A whole side of it had caved in, and half-finished machines lay spilled out on the ground around it, already rotting before they had ever taken a single step.
"This is what makes them?" Ashen asked.
Adam was frowning at the corpse of the womb. "This is what builds them," he said. "But it's not what feeds it."
He pointed down.
Beneath the collapsed side of the womb, there was a hole in the ground with a wide shaft that went straight down, creating a narrow metal stairway spiraling along its walls, and from deep within it came a hum.
◉
They went down with lanterns. Adam in front, Ashen at his side, a dozen warriors behind them.
The stairway spiraled down for so long that Ashen lost track of how deep they had gone. The air grew warmer as they went, and heavier. The saturation of mana kept climbing until it reached almost lethal levels.
It pressed on the skin and filled the lungs until every breath felt thick. Even the lanterns began to flicker, despite there being no wind.
When the stairs ended, they stepped out into a vast round chamber.
In its center, suspended in the empty air, hung the heart of the mechanical force.
It was a sphere of metal no larger than a human head, but so saturated with mana that it glowed from within like an ember.
Rings of metal circled it on every axis, nested inside one another and turning at perfect angles. They neither slowed nor sped up, keeping a constant tick.
Each ring drove the next, and the last drove the first again. But what was most unfathomable wasn't the quantity of mana or the shape of the object…
'Nothing's feeding it from outside,' Ashen noticed.
And yet the mana kept coming. It flowed out of the sphere in a steady, endless stream, rising up through the shaft toward where the womb had been.
Everyone stared at it for a long time, until they had no choice but to acknowledge the concept governing the thing.
'A motion that would never stop. A machine that needed nothing, consumed nothing, and still gave back from emptiness.'
"A perpetual machine…"
Adam's hollow voice echoed through the chamber, announcing what every one of them had refused to say out loud.
"It's making mana," Ashen whispered. "From nothing."
"An infinite generator…" Orin breathed behind him. "Ha… hahaha…"
Nobody said anything for a long while. Only Orin's despairing laugh echoed in the background.
The men's reaction came from a simple prediction based on what they already knew.
If an abandoned, ruined base held something as absurd as an infinite mana generator, then what would a real colony possess?
Somewhere they could neither know about nor reach, more of these things could be brewing… and they would be helpless against it.
Despair was only natural once one reached that conclusion.
"..."
"..."
Ashen looked at his father, waiting for him to say something. Maybe come up with a plan, a way to take the thing apart and figure out how it worked. Something this absurd had practically rolled into their laps. The least they could do was make use of it.
…but what he saw instead was a raised sword, aimed squarely at the metal core.
Ashen's face went pale. He lunged and grabbed his father's arms with everything he had.
"Pops!! What the fuck! Are you crazy?!"
Adam looked down at his son, who was hanging off his arms with his whole body weight, and raised an eyebrow. "What's wrong, brat? I'm going to destroy it."
"I know! That's what's wrong!" Ashen dug his heels into the ground. "Why would you break it?! Look at it! It's glowing! Things that glow are always valuable! There have to be a thousand ways to use that much mana, right? Right? Let's just… calm down and think about this for a second…"
He looked about one more sentence away from crying.
Behind him, the brothers had gone quiet in an entirely different way. Somebody snorted. Orin's broken laughter had turned into the real thing, and he had to lean against the wall to keep himself upright. Adam held his son's gaze for a moment, then let out a helpless chuckle and lowered the sword.
'Well… at least the depressing atmosphere's gone,' Ashen thought, slowly letting go of his father's arm. 'But why does it feel like it's gone at my expense?'
He glanced around at the grinning faces. Something told him he was missing something.
"Right… you don't know." Adam stuck the sword into the rusted ground. "The truth is, we can't take a single scrap of metal from here. Let alone this thing."
"Huh?"
"Everything made by the Unborn Heir or its minions is marked," Adam explained patiently. "And among the Outer God's subordinates, there's an entity we call the Harvester."
"I think I can guess what it does from the name alone," Ashen said with a sigh, already seeing where this was going.
"Indeed." Adam nodded. "Whenever one of their bases is destroyed, it eventually comes to collect the remains. No matter where they are, or how far they've been carried."
Ashen wasn't giving up that easily. "Then… what if we just beat it when it comes? Is it really that strong?"
"I don't know," Adam said, shaking his head. "I've never faced it. This is just what I heard from the old Tribe I used to belong to. But I do know that even if we destroy the Harvester, another one will eventually come for its remains."
"..."
"The next one will be stronger. And the one after that, even more so."
Adam's eyes grew intense. "In the end, even if we destroy every piece of the mechanical force that comes our way… the Unborn Heir itself will come knocking at our door."
'Well… that escalated quickly…' Ashen put a hand on his forehead.'
"Do you understand?"
He nodded. There wasn't much else he could do.
"That's why those scraps of metal are even more useless than Narkals," Lucan added from the back, driving the point home. "There's nothing to gain from them. They're only a pain in the ass to kill."
Ashen glared at the core.
It kept spinning, glowing and humming, completely unbothered, as though it knew it was untouchable and was rubbing it in his face.
'Three days of walking. Two days of dodging death rays. I nearly got killed by my own spell…'
'…and we can't even take a single thing home.'
'Fuck… my loot…'
Maybe it was the glaring. Or maybe it was his overwhelming, deeply sincere desire to loot. But somewhere between the heartache and the self-pity, an absurd idea occurred to him.
"Wait, Father. What if we use that?"
"That?"
"Hehe… lemme tell you."
As he laid out his plan, Ashen smirked to himself.
'Everyone knows looting after a battle is mandatory. There's no way I'm leaving here empty-handed.'