The shockwave of disruption dashed across the field, and even the holos broadcasting overhead fritzed for a moment before cameras out of range picked up the views from new angles.

The charging manrippers locked up and folded over, crashing and tumbling. Four Swords rose in clarion unison, and we charged for ten seconds.

That dispersed everyone the full length of the fighting field. I cleaved into power supplies and operating systems as I went by, since it didn’t slow me down, and drone bodies shrieked in protest and spurted oddly motile nanite-infused black sludge as they exploded open under Chalice’s edge.

Ten seconds, and we were spread through over half the length of the dead manrippers that had charged us. As their systems strove to reboot, and the carnage began.

Everyone killed everything all around them, and the more it twitched, the faster it died, spurting sparks and lubricants. Everyone had experience killing machines in fights by now, knew how to deduce where operating systems and batteries were at, and they plowed in with psychic weapons, power blades, vibroknives, disruptors, lightning hammers... whatever worked to kill the manrippers as fast as possible.

More of the drones came surging over the hill, ignoring the others of their kind twisting on the ground, moving with precision and agility over the twitching mechanites scattered over the ground. More lancers, as well as crab-like scuttlers and rolling crushers were with them. If they happened to grind down some of their own as they came forward, or impale them on razored legs, it certainly didn’t bother them.

“Five! Four! Three! Two! One! Fire Two!”

The human cyborg and the urgob were on the ridgeline, using it for cover from the first EMP, and had advanced as far as they dared. The human’s defensive ring pulsed, and the EMP fired off, sweeping over this new flood of mechanites, and even if the heavier ones were insulated, they still shuddered and stopped for a few key breaths.

The fastest and sharpest gladiators raced up to deal with the big ones that were the biggest threats. Jensa called out kill points on the scuttlers, crushers, and lancers sharply, and weapons plunged in to crush, cut, and make sure these creatures did not fire back up. The rest of the force surged forward to try and kill as many manrippers and lancers as they could before they all got back up.

That left the urgob, and we’d see if enlightened self-interest or a stupid gamble in his own skill would prod him more. The last of the mechanites were rolling forward to attack, the gore and sheen of sanguine fluids on them indicated that they’d already attacked something else and succeeded admirably.

We didn’t have any living creatures with enough mass to contest the scuttlers or crushers in brawn, but there were still those who knew how to fight and lure just enough, and then pull back desperately as the last remnants of the mechanite force rolled, bounded, and skittered over the hill, ready to continue the killing.

The girls and I made sure to kill at least one active mechanite of each kind, just to make sure we could, ripping through movement pulleys, cables, tension bars, and sockets to cripple them, weapon limbs flying off with sharp ringing protests of metal, and then ripping into them as Banefire, Crushing, Sundering, and Lightningphasing blew out their internal systems violently... and explosively, in a couple of cases.

The third EMP went off, and the final rush of the mechanites stalled. The Rune-reptoid ended up closest to the command turtle, and heaved it up over on its side as it lay paralyzed. Before it could reboot, his glowing claws had torn into its command systems and shredded its coms, then he was joined by Keva in tearing apart its decentralized processing before it could de-link, separate, and try to flee.

The cyberized people rebooted as quickly as they could, while the rest of us shredded mechanites, and surrounded those that had managed to recover, tearing off weapon limbs and mobility modes, upending them, and carving them open where needed.

It was a not-bloody mess, but it was also over with remarkable speed.

The cybers and power-armored guys rebooted, and surged into motion again. The trio up high paused for a second before coming down, and...

The blast of purple, pink, and puke-green fire soaring up to the southeast a quarter-mile away wasn’t missed by anyone.

I looked down at the scattered, destroyed machines around us.

“AXIOM EVENT INCOMING!” I bellowed out. “MOVE! MOVE! GET TO THE EDGE OF THE FIELD AND KILL THEM AS THEY TAKE THE MECHANITES! ALL CYBERS STAY OUT OF THE MANIFEST ZONE UNTIL THEY COME!”

Curses in thirty languages arose as all the gladiators hurried back to where the cyber-types had just entered the ruined killzone, and were now hastily turning around and getting the Law out of it.

Everyone knew what a Warp Event looked like. C’mon, we were in a drow city, and the Warp was on everyone’s minds here. Warp Events occurred everywhere, all the time, and you either fought them off, or you died.

But we were sitting in the ruins of a high-tech AI dronemind, which was like perfect resonance for an opposition Axiom Event to occur.

The shattered and carved remains of the mechanites around us began to twitch, and shift, and there was more swearing.

“PREPARE TO KILL THEM AS THEY ASSEMBLE! KEEP MOVING!”

If we just let this whole damn field of mechanites turn into Axiomatics, well, the girls and I would live, but anybody else’s chances were a coin flip at best.

Robotic carcasses suddenly and mysteriously disassembled, fell apart, literally falling to pieces and losing all form around us. That didn’t stop the pieces from twitching and starting to move, converging...

“PICK A POINT AND KILL IT!”

Everybody split up as torrents of metal, plastic, ceramic, glass, crystal, neo-oils, and coolants whirled and spun and began to converge together in some new and strange forms, like Transformers, only powered by energies manifesting in opposition to the Warp.

I didn’t want to know – well, maybe I did – what had spawned the Warp Event. Odds on it was a bunch of Warped who had just completed a massacre, but it could simply have been two forces mostly annihilating one another in a fest of gore, and somebody’s emotions just got too intense and prodded something open. With all the other deaths here concentrating things, it was inevitable, expected, and it added to the fun of the proceedings.

The Axiomatics were as alien as the demons of the Warp in their own way, and while they would attack demons and the Warped before anything else, mortal creatures were imperfect and contaminated creatures, and they could find a dozen reasons to justify slaughtering us. Anything from the fact not everyone was right-handed to the numbers of hairs on our heads not being equal constituted justification for mass slaughter.

Anyone who’d been around high tech near a Warp Event was naturally familiar with Axiom Events, and there was no hesitation in anyone proceeding to carve and crack and cripple while the Axiomatics were still taking form.

One of the urgobs in power armor didn’t get out of the manifest zone in time, and his armor animated around him. Pulling in material from the shattered manrippers around it, it morphed and condensed, extending into the space occupied by the big hairy goblin. Tearing, ripping, and squeezing, green blood sprayed out of it like leaking coolant, bits and pieces of flesh and hide in the way were scattered in all directions like they came out of a blender, and bone became a convenient anchor to wrap in steel. After some cracking and reassembling, it formed a new skeleton, while extruded urgob brains dripped down from its new shiny skull.

That was before the hobgoblin chieftain’s power sword carved it into three pieces with double-handed swings, ripping it apart before it could fully manifest, and a Thunder Hammer blew its torso clean apart.

This was, I noted, a unique opportunity to get Enmity: Law and Bane: Lawful Soulborn on Chalice. Axiom Events never occurred inside the Warp Zone, after all, which was where I’d gotten a tremendous amount of my Slaughter qualifications for Chalice. There were a lot of my girls who did have them, since they had done a lot of fighting near Warp Events which spawned Axiomatics in response, but not me.

Naturally, I indulged. The nature of Slaughter and Magic Weapons meant I could only have three of the four opposed Alignments, and I certainly wasn’t going to pick up Enmity: Good, or Unholy anytime soon.

These things were emotionless, but basically just as bad for mortal life as the Warped, however they tried to justify it. If all they did was kill the Warped, fine and dandy, Let Them Fight. Unfortunately, they were like the nadir of hyperconservative reactionary jerks, and if you didn’t meet their impossible standards, death was the only solution.

So, we slaughtered them as they were manifesting without any reservations at all. Unfortunately, it was a big battlefield, and they were coming in all over it.

“Node at the top!” Jensa pointed out for everyone, not that anyone could do anything about it.

The primary Axiomatic was coming in atop the turtle-shell of the mechanite nodemind, steel crinking and protesting as it adopted new forms, and technology bent and twisted into new paradigms and functions to serve absolute Law.

“Count the limbs, count the limbs...”

Axiomatics had weird forms, numbers based. The lowest order of them were flat, like cards, with slender, robotic arms and legs extending out from them, strange abstract faces on their card-bodies.

The second tier was shaped like d4’s, four-sided pyramids, one limb from each vertex, an eye on each face, except the bottom, which hovered along. Tier Three was cubes, while Four was four-point stars, the first of the true Axiomatics. Five looked like a starfish with legs, six looked like a humanoidish thing with a hexagonal head and spiked tail.

Seven through Nine were the Greater Axiomatics, denoted by their frills arranged in seven through nine-point halo-like polygons, and no connecting necks. They had a number of limbs equal to their ranks. Seven had four arms equally spaced around it, and a tripartite face with an extra eye in the ‘front’; Eights added a tail tipped by a bludgeoning sphere, had heads like diamonds; and the Nines, so rarely seen as to be myths, had heads like crystal spheres, eight lesser spheres like a crown above them, and three tiers of three-fingered arms on their bodies.

Nobody had ever seen a Ten, but since a Nine was equal to a Greater Warp Demon, that would be like getting an Avatar on site, and nobody was going to survive something like that.

Diamond-shaped head formed of imperfect crystals melding and flowing together, steel forming the body out of armor plating, wires and struts meshing in to form a false body animated by Axiomatic energy from the fringes of the Warp...

“Pull back, and point at the Warp flare!” I ordered, retreating and pulling back out of the manifest zone as scores of Axiomatics much larger than human size were forming in the area nobody was present in.

I was confident of beating the shit out of an Eight or even a Nine Axiomatic, and sorely tempted to try my luck... but I had better things to do.