Chris jumped back as colorful clouds billowed in front of him.

Dodging another bolt flying his way, he ducked behind a nearby pile of rubble. Nearby he heard the spider golem grinding and hissing toward him. Curls of bright smoke wafted around the corner, tugged into tendrils of airborne poison by a light breeze.

He bolted to another pile of rubble. He felt a rush of wind whoosh past as an alchemical bolt shattered itself against some nearby wreckage of what must be other spider golems. This time, however, no gas came from the broken receptacle, even if the same sound of glass shattering came from inside.

It must be out of poison, either that, or the poison was being diverted to do its area gas attack. There wasn’t much of an opportunity to approach it right now, but Chris still peeked upward to see what was going on.

The spider golem had veered away slightly, scaling the side of one of the rubble piles. Its chest lid had swung open and with its two forelegs it pulled a nearby tree into its mouth. Did it need more biomass to create its poisons and bolts?

Its ballista wasn’t even facing in the proper direction right now.

Chris put a hand into his backpack and drew out one of the jars he’d prepared earlier. Inside was a wobbling mass of green jelly with a core at its center. A Slime.

He’d been intending on using it to replenish his arm if he ran out of material, but this would do just as well. He set his hammer down and retrieved another.

Holding a jar loosely in each hand, he jogged toward the spider golem. Its head and ballista swiveled toward him as he approached. The creature was still shrouded in poisonous fog, but less and less was seeping through the cracks in its skin as it gnawed on the tree.

It must have regenerated sufficiently to create another bolt, though. A new barrage hammered into the ground around his feet and Chris was forced to dodge to the side, picking his way over several chunks of shattered stone.

As he neared the edge of the poison cloud, he lobbed the first jar.

The glass shattered against the chest, but failed to make it inside. The Slime, freed from the jar, stuck to the wooden side and for a moment Chris hoped that it would crawl upward. It didn’t.

The Slime, shards of the broken jar glinting inside its gooey green form like glass shards, slid down, then dropped into the surrounding rubble. Damn.

Chris dodged as another bolt shot past him. However, this time gas whistled out of it. One last try. The spider golem must have begun replenishing its poison supply.

The jar almost went too high this time, but it hit the lid of the spider golem’s chest. The jar shattered and the Slime inside hung between sliding off the back, or into the opened receptacle of the chest. And it just sat there, happily minding its own business.

Well, crap.

Chris jumped to one side as another alchemical bolt whizzed toward him. The golem’s head tracked his movements and the motion sent the Slime slipping into the receptacle. Hopefully the Slime would find something useful inside that it could eat.

He ran back to get his hammer as more bolts slammed into the ground, hot on his heels.

The spider golem went back to crunching on the tree—although how its mouth was able to exert that much force, Chris did not know. Hopefully the Slime he’d thrown in would survive the journey into the depths of the construct.

The crunching sounds stopped and he heard the golem begin its grinding walk toward him. He got ready. By now the golem would have stopped emitting its gas. Indeed, there was no characteristic hiss of the poison’s release when he heard his enemy scuttling toward him on stone legs.

Then the spider golem’s steps paused. Chris looked around, but saw nothing. Why had it stopped?

[Danger Sense] activated too late as the rubble around him suddenly collapsed and scattered as the golem brushed it away with its forelegs.

Large rocks knocked Chris from his crouch to the ground. He rolled, just in time as a bolt impaled the ground where his head had been. Too close!

Some of the gas caught his skin, instantly causing it to break out in red, bubbling welts upon contact, but Chris managed to push himself up and then charge the spider golem.

Two swings with [Sunder] were enough to collapse one foreleg. The spider golem hissed again, and Chris took a step back. However, nothing came out except a thin trickle of Slime stained with an ugly swirl of colors.

If he had to guess, adding a Slime to the alchemical processor within the spider golem had probably resulted in making bathbombs instead of deadly poison.

He dodged aside as yet another bolt flew past him, but, unlike the previous ones, this too dribbled Slime from inside it. That wasn’t to say there wasn’t a small puff of the gas, but it was on the same scale as a goldfish fart.

The golem began to creak and groan as Chris systematically took out each of its legs, until, eventually, the construct collapsed. Its ballista continued to spin, pitching and yawing to find a way to shoot him. He dodged each time.

Chris began clambering up the back of the golem, dodging the bolt whenever they fired. He jumped on top of the ballista, which suddenly stilled, and wedged his shield into part of the mechanism. The weapon ground and screamed around the shield as it tried to remove the obstruction, to no avail.

Chris left the shield lodged inside, then went to knock out the golem’s last remaining legs.

The spider golem slumped to the ground, struggling weakly. It tried to release another spurt of gas, but its internals were so gunked with Slime that little more than a weak slimy sputter and steaming of poison exited the golem’s shell.

The ballista continue to whine away above, trying to remove the jammed shield. Chris gave it a quick glance to ensure all was well, then ignored it. He moved around to the front of the spider golem and stared at the chest. The dark rivets set in the banded iron—eight of them—stared at him with a mix of hatred and plaintiveness. Its lid-like mouth wide, exposing a gullet ringed with sharp, pulverizing blades, and blackness beyond.

He smacked at the chest until it was nothing but splinters, but the spider golem didn’t stop moving, and the blades within continued to whirr intermittently. Chris brought his hammer on the blade, the black metal—Nuctite—crumpling the metal that made up the blades like aluminum cans.

No longer able to move, the broken macerators jolted and jarred in place, vibrating violently until, one by one, they failed and fell still.

No longer masked by a blur of blades, Chris could see a golden panel sitting just behind the wrecked golem’s teeth. He gave it a light tap with his hammer. Nothing bad happened.

The golden panel was ever so slightly recessed, and anything that wanted to normally get access at it would have to get past the teeth first. Odds were good that it was either the thing responsible for controlling the golem, or its ‘brain’.

He reached inside, feeling a notch between the panel and the wall of the recess. He slipped an armored finger behind and tugged. The panel dropped down, dangling from fine silver wires. Chris gave the panel a tug.

Taking the panel in hand, he saw the wires were loosely attached to the back of it. With a sharp tug, they came free.

The spider golem’s gears ground to a halt and the whine of the ballista turret ceased above. With a pneumatic hiss, the spider golem’s tightly packed stones loosened, showing gaps between, and even light from up above.

On either side, he heard the spider golem’s eight abused legs collapse and crumble as the construct lost the force coordinating it.