Edmund tried to shout something but the noise was too loud. Whatever. He turned around again and saw that the water of the central pond was vibrating wildly, and the ripples were creating concentrical standing waves on the surface. Below, hidden by the shadows in the perfectly transparent water, something was moving.

A gross, misshapen and almost liquid hand rose from the surface and gripped the rock at the edge of the pond, denting it. The rock splintered and exploded under the extreme pressure, and even small chunks of the hand came loose and fell on the ground like chunks of powdery metal. They were pitch black, while the hand was made of a flowy but blocky substance that hardened as it fell down in chunks to the ground, where it exploded in a dark powder that immediately disappeared into the rock, as if absorbed by it. A second hand emerged, and the creature pulled itself up from the depths.

It’s made of nanites. The monster is made of nanites. The whole room is made of nanites!

Edmund felt his heart beat in his chest. He scanned the room, looking for a way out, thinking of how he could rely this information to the team, and trying to formulate a plan. Time slowed down, the adrenaline kick making his internal clock tick faster, but also muddying his thoughts and his concentration. He felt himself paralyze but grabbed every ounce of willpower to shake himself free.

“Nanites!” he shouted, just as an enormous head was coming out of the watery film of the pond. The rest of the creature followed suit. Its head was that of a shark, squared up towards the ceiling with the deep-set ruby eyes staring down at him, and its body was a rough cubical shape with four articulated limbs attached to it. There seemed to be a deep light coming from behind its eyes, surrounded by a black body made of small metallic bricks. Nanites, organized in small building blocks made of hundreds of thousands of individual units, they clung together and made up the gigantic thing. Sometimes one of these bits fell, exploded on the ground, and disappeared only to be reabsorbed where the two gigantic hands were gripping the fake stone.

“The whole room is nanites!”

The monstrous construct growled, and the room shook again. Edmund was thrown to his knees, while Lisa jumped to intercept a black fist descending on Toora. The blocky, bulky hand impacted her shield and exploded in a mist of black dust and blocks, which disappeared into the walls while the hand regrew from the monster and a new stream of nanites replenished its stock from below.

Edmund pulled himself up and gathered his Hume energy. Beside him, Toora was gathering her magic on the tip of the staff for an attack. Watch her. She was aiming at the head, right between the two ruby eyes. A beam shot from her staff, but the nanite monster suddenly jerked and jumped on the ceiling. The laser dragged across the ceiling, melting nanites and exposing the bare superheated rock beneath. The nanites fell in smoking red chunks on the ground, where they slowly cooled in small drops of black shiny material.

It’s agile. Praetor, calculate the Hume cost to stop it.

It started to crawl on the ceiling, jumping from place to place to avoid the beam attack. Not so fast, Edmund thought, and with a grunt he put his hands in front of him and locked. Reality shifted, bent, changed. What was moving now suddenly was not anymore, and the nanite construct found itself immobile just for an instant. The laser from Toora’s staff cut through it like butter, making molten nanites fall in superheated clumps.

It cut the face in half, splitting the mockery of a shark in half just above the stumpy neck. The two halves dangled from the ceiling, leaking nanites on the ground. The monster was unmoving.

Edmund was about to cheer.

Instead, he looked in horror as the creature not only started moving again, but also started to repair its head with a new stream of black particles flowing around its body and from the ceiling. The two halves pulled themselves together by an unseen force, and the cut closed itself up. A small stalactite disappeared from next to the creature, shrinking until it was gone.

“It’s repairing itself with the nanites in the walls!”

“I know!” Toora shouted.

The creature jumped, lunging at him. A sudden shift in space made everyone lose their balance for just a moment, but when they regained their bearings, the creature had plunged into the wall behind where Edmund was. He was now standing a few meters to the side, unharmed.

To his eyes, what took but a moment in real life took him minutes to complete. He appeared in what looked like a glass tunnel, with mirrors at its edges and ripples of space and time randomly forming within. He weaved through them, dodging them with his body and mind, trying to make it to the end. It felt like forever.

“I can’t do this for much longer!” he yelled. He lied. He was basically out of Humes. Even this lunge through space-time had been risky, the limitations imposed on it to make it cheaper had also made it stupidly dangerous. Still less dangerous than getting impaled by a nanite monster.

“Me neither! That attack was supposed to be the finisher!” Toora shouted back.

They shuffled again to dodge an oversized hand. This time, however, a smaller protrusion jutted out of the hand just as Edmund thought he had dodged it successfully, sending him flying against a wall. He bounced off the cold fake stone, and his head rung, but he managed to absorb most of the damage. His Humes count, however, was running dangerously close to zero.

He pushed himself back to his feet, shaking his head to clear his swimming vision. It didn’t help.

“Edmund, look!”

He tried to look where Toora was pointing at, but suddenly he felt the sharp noise of metal against metal. His vision was barred by Lisa’s armour, and her shield.

“Thank you,” he pulled away from it, and moved to see what Toora was saying.

“Oh.”

Before his mind could even process it, however, the creature unleashed another flurry of attacks. It was attacking him from the front, and Lisa was moving at impossibly fast speeds to intercept every punch with her shield. The creature was once again standing in the pond, and it was stretching its limbs to punch them rapidly from afar.

Hidden behind the shield, Edmund had no way to help Lisa withstand the barrage. “Toora, it’s attacking only one of us at a time!”

The mage tried to hear what he was saying over the deafening ring of metal.

“Try to run around it!”

“On it!” she shouted back and started to run.

Meanwhile, the hits were becoming faster.

“It’s beginning to change shape to adapt. We need to act before it realizes that we only have one tank. Lisa, give me an opening.”

The towering woman, crouching behind her shield, nodded.

“On three,” she said. “One. Two…”

As three came, she shifted her weight and flexed her muscles. As soon as the next punch hit her defences, she slammed the shield into it, spinning on herself. With her other hand she gripped the hammer tight and plunged its head into the hardened nanites with an impact so strong that the hammer shattered immediately. The monster’s hand exploded too, in a mist of destroyed nanites.

There was a brief opening. Edmund focused his eyes on where Toora had pointed earlier, and saw that the molten clumps of nanites were now solidified obsidian droplets on the ground. They weren’t reabsorbed. Praetor, do they still work?

“Yes, sir. They are simply reset; without instructions.”

He nodded to himself and prepared to lunge. He turned to Lisa. “Buy me time.”

The woman nodded, muttering something to herself. Just as she did, Toora launched an attack.

Edmund cursed. The monster had turned to face the defenceless mage, taunted by the new beam attack. She was about to be crushed by a morphed limb, no longer a huge fist but a flurry of razor-sharp spears coming at her like a rain of death.

However, his worries were unnecessary as he wasn’t yet aware that the mage and the tank could share a mind link in battle. They had used it at the battle of Farcall, and now Lisa had invoked it again in order to coordinate with her boss and buy Edmund as much time as he could.

Just as the monster attacked, Lisa climbed on a stone formation next to it, and jumped in the air. She clutched the shield with both hands, and aimed it at Toora. The beam from the mage’s staff impacted the shield, which glowed silver for a moment, and bounced right back at the nanite monstrosity, hitting it in the back. She rotated the shield slowly, cutting though the creature horizontally. As the laser emerged on the other side, the monster was cut in two halves. The top part tilted and fell, sliding across the red smouldering nanites of the bottom part. Its attack lost momentum, now disconnected from a main body that was split in two.

Lisa’s fall reached its apex, and as the beam subsided, she aimed her shield downwards and shot to one of the halves below like a meteor, falling vertically. The impact sent a shockwave through the whole half of the body, which lost cohesion and dissolved into mist for a moment, before solidifying again.

They looked at the aftermath of their coordinated attack but couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. In fact, there were now two different, smaller and faster enemies roaming around. They had jumped to the ceiling and walls immediately after they recovered from the attack and were now about to jump at the crouching figure of Edmund in the middle of a pool of solidified debris.

“Edmund!” Toora shouted, and both she and Lisa dashed as fast as they could towards the man. They weren’t fast enough.

Both monsters dove into him and exploded in a cloud of smoke and debris from the violent impact. As the dust settled, nothing moved anymore.