Kael pulled himself out of a heap of rusted chestplates, the metal screeching like a dying bird.
Every inch of him hurt. His ribs—already cracked before the jump—felt like they were grinding against his lungs with each breath. He spat, and the saliva came up red against the dull grey of the ancient steel.
"Elric?" His voice was a croak, swallowed instantly by the vastness of the place.
Silence answered him. Just the wind, howling through the gaps in the mountain of scrap they had landed on. It wasn't a normal wind; it carried no scent of moisture or earth. It smelled of ozone and old blood.
Kael forced himself to stand. His obsidian arm pulsated with a dull, aching rhythm, reacting to the energy in the air. He looked around, and for the first time, he truly understood the scale of their mistake.
They hadn't landed on ground. They were standing on a dune of discarded war gear that stretched to the horizon. Millions of swords, shields, helmets, and broken pikes formed a jagged, metallic ocean. And above them, the sky was a churning ceiling of heavy, violet clouds that blocked out any view of the Spire.
The light didn't come from a sun. It bled from the horizon, a sickly, dirty gold glow that made shadows stretch comfortably long and sharp.
"Elric!" Kael shouted, louder this time.
A shifting of metal to his left. A hand—gloved in fine, torn leather—burst from a pile of chainmail.
Kael scrambled over, sliding on shifting breastplates, and grabbed the hand. He heaved, dragging the older scholar out of the debris.
Elric gasped, flailing, his eyes wide and unseeing for a terrifying second before they snapped to Kael. "We're dead," he wheezed. "Tell me we're dead."
"We hurt too much to be dead," Kael grunted, checking Elric for major wounds. Bruises, cuts, a likely twisted ankle, but nothing fatal. "Can you walk?"
"Walk where?" Elric gestured frantically at the landscape. "Look at this place, Kael! It's an infinite junkyard! This is where the world throws its garbage."
"Not garbage," Kael said, bending down to pick up a helmet near his feet. It was cracked, the visor missing, but the crest was unmistakable. A stylized hawk. "This is House Vane. They died out two hundred years ago." He kicked a shield. "And that one... that's the crest of the Iron legion from the First Expansion."
He looked at the horizon. "This isn't a dump. It's a grave."
skitter
The sound was faint, metal clicking against metal. Not the settling of the pile. Something purposeful.
Kael dropped the helmet. His hand went to the hilt of his iron sword. "Quiet."
Elric froze. "What?"
"Movement."
They stood back-to-back, balancing on the treacherous footing. The golden light played tricks on their eyes, making the rust seem to ripple.
Then, thirty feet away, a pile of armor exploded outward.
The thing that emerged was a nightmare of repurposing. It looked like a crab the size of a carriage, but its shell wasn't chitin. It was a patchwork of shields welded together by some organic grey paste. Its legs were sheaves of spears fused into articulated limbs. And its face...
Its face was a cluster of human skulls, fused together, looking in all directions.
"Scavenger," Kael whispered.
The construct let out a sound like grinding gears and chattered its spear-legs. It had spotted them.
"It's armored," Elric hissed, stepping back. "Fully armored."
"It's made of armor," Kael corrected. "There's a difference."
The creature charged. It moved terrifyingly fast for something so heavy, digging its legs into the scrap to propel itself forward.
"Move!" Kael shoved Elric down the slope of the dune and threw himself in the opposite direction.
The creature crashed into the spot where they had been standing, sending a spray of metal shrapnel into the air. Kael rolled, coming up on one knee, his sword already moving.
He struck at one of the spear-legs as the creature turned. His iron blade sparked against the shield-shell, leaving only a shallow gouge.
Hard, Kael thought. Too hard.
The creature lashed out with a pincer made of two jagged greatswords. Kael parried, but the force of the blow slid him backward, his boots scraping for purchase on the loose debris.
"Kael! The joints!" Elric screamed from below. "Look at the joints! The grey paste!"
The creature lunged again. Kael didn't try to block this time. He ducked under the sweeping limb, risking being crushed, and thrust his sword upward into the connection point where the leg met the body.
The blade sank into the grey flesh.
The creature shrieked—a sound of tearing metal and human screams. It thrashed, flinging Kael away. He landed hard on a pile of gauntlets, breath leaving him in a rush.
The construct was leaking a glowing blue fluid. It turned its skull-face toward Kael, the empty sockets seeming to burn with hate. It raised both forelimbs for a killing strike.
Suddenly, a beam of pure white energy lanced through the gloom.
It struck the creature in the center of its mass, punching clean through the shield-shell. The construct convulsed, then collapsed into a heap of loose scrap, the binding magic gone.
Kael scrambled up, chest heaving, looking for the source of the shot.
On the ridge of a nearby dune of debris stood a figure. Tall, draped in a cloak the color of dust.
They held a long rifle—not a primitive black-powder tube, but something sleek and silver, pulsating with the same white light.
The figure lowered the weapon.
"You speak the Old Tongue," the stranger called out. Their voice was distorted, metallic.
Kael gripped his sword, stepping in front of Elric. "Who asks?"
The stranger slid down the dune, moving with an unnatural grace, like they weighed nothing. They stopped ten paces away.
"Someone who hasn't seen fresh meat fall from the Sky in a cycle," the stranger said. They reached up and pulled back their hood.
A face of pale porcelain, cracked and repaired with gold lacquer, looked back at him. Eyes that were essentially camera lenses zoomed in and out with a soft whir.
"Welcome to the Rust Plains, flesh-things," the machine-man said. "Try not to get recycled."