We were finishing the best meal we'd had in weeks. The pickled herring was salty, the stolen bread was soft, and the coffee was hot. Rax was leaning back against the Centurion’s massive foot, picking his teeth with a splinter of wood. He looked... younger. The constant, grinding tension that usually lined his face had softened slightly.
"I could get used to this," Rax muttered, closing his mechanical eye. "No guards. No sirens. Just the river."
Amelia was sitting on the knee armor above him, dangling her legs. She was holding one of the spare mana crystals up to the sun. "It's not just a battery," she whispered, twisting the gem so it refracted blue light onto the muddy ground. "It sings. Can you hear it? It sounds like wind trapped in glass."
I looked up from my diagnostic tablet. "It's resonance, Amelia. Don't get poetic on me. It's just physics."
She smiled down at me. It was a genuine smile, one that reached her eyes. "You call it physics, Julian. I call it..."
She stopped mid-sentence. Her smile vanished instantly. She dropped the crystal into her lap and grabbed the safety railing. Her head snapped toward the east, toward the dense wall of ten-foot-tall reeds.
"Amelia?" I stood up, my hand going to my wrench.
"Something broke the resonance," she said, her voice tight. "Something... sharp. Moving fast."
"Guards?" Rax was already on his feet, pistol drawn.
"No," Amelia shook her head. "No heartbeats. Just metal. And cold magic. Three of them."
The reeds didn't rustle in the wind. They parted. Thirty meters away, the grass was being sliced apart by something low to the ground. Three distinct wakes in the sea of grass. Closing in.
"Mount up!" I roared, scrambling up the ladder.
We threw ourselves into the cockpit. The half-eaten lunch was abandoned in the mud. I slammed the hatch shut just as the first shadow burst from the treeline.
It wasn't a Centurion. It wasn't clumsy. It was sleek. Silver. Four-legged. A Fenrir-Class Hunter-Killer. It looked like a mechanical wolf the size of a car, built from polished chrome and razor blades. Its eyes were burning red sensors, and its back was bristling with anti-magic disruption pylons.
"Empire Spec-Ops," Rax cursed, sliding into the gunner seat. "Those things are mage-killers. They're fast enough to dodge fireballs."
"Let's see if they can dodge a train," I muttered.
I hit the ignition. VROOOOM. The crystal-infused V8 didn't hesitate. The cockpit hummed with that new, deep, turbine-like power.
The three mechanical wolves didn't pause to roar. They coordinated instantly. Two flanked us left and right. The center one lunged straight for our cockpit, its titanium claws extended to shred the glass.
In the old Centurion, I would have had to brace for impact. I would have been too slow to move fifty tons of steel. But I wasn't driving the old Centurion.
I shoved the control stick hard to the left and stomped the left pedal. The Type-4 Transmission engaged instantly. No clunk. No lag. The gears bit. The hydraulic fluid surged.
The fifty-ton mech didn't just step; it dashed. We sidestepped with the grace of a boxer. The leaping wolf missed the cockpit by inches. It sailed past us, its claws swiping empty air, and crashed into the mud where we had been standing a second ago.
"Too slow," I grinned, feeling the adrenaline flood my system.
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"Flankers!" Rax yelled.
The wolf on the right was charging our knee joint, aiming to hamstring us. I didn't turn the whole chassis. I just reversed the torque on the right leg. The Centurion pivoted on its hip, spinning the upper torso faster than a machine this size should ever move.
"Rax, you have a stable platform!" I shouted. "Take the shot!"
The ride was incredibly smooth. The fluid coupling absorbed the violence of the turn. Rax wasn't being thrown around the cockpit anymore. He lined up The Riveter. "Goodnight, puppy."
THUNK!
The pneumatic cannon fired. Because the platform was stable, the aim was true. The heavy railway spike caught the flanking wolf mid-stride. It punched through the silver armor plating of its shoulder and shattered its central gyroscope. The machine tumbled, sparking and thrashing in the mud, unable to stand.
"One down!" Amelia cheered, her hands hovering over the mana-distributor, ready to boost power if needed.
The third wolf hesitated. It calculated the odds. Then it turned to run.
"Oh no you don't," I pushed the throttle to maximum. The Centurion surged forward. We weren't lumbering; we were sprinting. We closed the distance in three strides. I didn't bother shooting it. I raised the massive right foot of the mech. And brought it down.
CRUNCH. Metal screamed as the hunter became the roadkill.
"Clear," I breathed, scanning the radar.
"Not clear," Amelia whispered. Her face went pale. "Above us."
I looked up through the skylight. Standing on top of the ruined viaduct arch, looking down at us like a god judging an insect, was a figure in charcoal-grey robes. The Academy Enforcer.
He held a staff made of twisted black iron. He didn't look impressed by our victory. He looked bored.
"Impressive toy, thief," his voice was magically amplified, booming over the swamp. "But weight is still weight."
He pointed his staff at us. The air around the Centurion turned a heavy, suffocating purple. Spell: Gravity Bind.
Instantly, the world became heavy. My arms were pinned to the armrests. The mech groaned. The rivets screamed as fifty tons suddenly felt like five hundred tons. We began to sink into the mud. The knees buckled. The warning lights on the dashboard turned red. STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY CRITICAL.
"He's crushing us!" Rax choked, struggling to breathe under the magical pressure. "The frame... can't take it!"
I fought to lift my hand to the throttle. It felt like lifting a mountain. The Enforcer was smiling. He was going to crush us into a cube of scrap metal without even coming down from his perch.
This was it. This was where the old machine would have died. But we had an ace.
"Amelia!" I gasped. "The crystals! Overload the core!"
"It might blow the engine!" she cried, tears of pain in her eyes.
"Do it! Or we're flat!"
Amelia screamed and shoved both hands onto the distributor. She poured everything she had into the sapphire crystals. The engine bay lit up with blinding blue light. The crystals resonated. They didn't just output power; they screamed.
The V8 engine revved past its redline. The whine became a roar. The Type-4 transmission locked into "Low Gear - High Torque."
I grabbed the levers with both hands. "GET. UP."
The hydraulics hissed violently. Slowly. Agonizingly. The Centurion stopped sinking. The Enforcer’s smile faltered.
With a sound of tearing metal and churning mud, the machine stood up. We pushed back against the gravity. We pushed back against the magic. It was pure, raw mechanical torque fighting against arcane law. And torque was winning.
SNAP. The purple gravity field shattered like glass. The pressure vanished.
The Enforcer stumbled back on the viaduct, his staff cracking from the feedback. For the first time, I saw fear under his hood. He hadn't calculated for this. He thought we were a tractor. He didn't know we were a reactor on legs.
I didn't give him time to recover. I engaged the jump jets—the small thrusters we used for the river drop. It wasn't enough to fly, but it was enough to jump.
The Centurion leaped up the side of the embankment, landing on the viaduct with a massive thud, ten meters from the Enforcer. I loomed over him. A fifty-ton giant blocking out the sun. I opened the external speaker.
"You missed," I said. My voice was cold, amplified by the machine.
The Enforcer scrambled back, dropping his bone compass. He cast a hasty teleportation spell, vanishing in a swirl of grey smoke just as The Riveter clicked into position.
"Coward," Rax spat, wiping sweat from his face.
I powered down the combat systems. The engine idled smoothly, cooling down from the overload. I climbed out of the cockpit and walked over to where the Enforcer had stood. I picked up the bone compass he had dropped. The needle was spinning wildly, reacting to the crystals in our engine.
"He'll bring more," Amelia said, leaning out of the hatch. She looked shaken, but her eyes were fierce. "Next time, it won't be one. It will be a squad."
I looked at the compass. Then I looked at the horizon, toward the distant spires of the Inner City where the Academy stood.
"Let them come," I said, crushing the bone compass in my mechanical glove. "We aren't hiding in the swamp anymore."
I looked back at my crew. "Rax, plot a course. Not away from them." I pointed toward the smoke rising from the industrial district. "We're going to the source. If Vane wants a war, let's show him what the industrial revolution looks like."