Though it was my intention to rush forward, gallantly into duty, I am certain you will apprehend the obstinance of kin that preferred I might not die, and how I might be delayed by it. But Ashli and I spent that time efficiently, supplying ourselves even as we comforted our relations that we possessed the discernment to retreat if necessary.

I pushed up with one arm to raise the hatch, and thrust the chopping edge of my ax ahead of me into the gap. The kitchen was dark, and the house was empty. I discovered noise though, which had been deadened previously from below. A faint, but numerous scratching was coming from the exterior walls; and in more than one direction. There was additional sound in the undercurrent of this louder part, but I could not yet secern their various source or nature.

“Clear,” I whispered.

“10 – 4, roger, charlie, foxtrot, cowabunga, wilco, seventy-two, hike,” Ashli huffed. “Just go.”

She gave me a shove from behind, and we stepped up into the kitchen together. For caution’s sake, we stayed crouched down to stay below the level of the windows, and carefully laid the shutter back down between us.

Taking the lead, I crawled towards the lower hall, “I’ll need my things,” I muttered.

I had to grip my pack tighter as it slipped along the shoulder-strap, and its contents rattled. The tortoise shell which I’d lashed to my belt clunked against my knee and threatened the nearby cabinetry with louder announcements until I gripped it still. Heavy leather gloves made my fingers clumsy, and the handle of my hatchet bumped against the floor unless I lifted it higher.

“Like, more?” Ashli scoffed, then she reconsidered. “Whatever, I’m getting my amulets then.”

The urgent scrabbling of sharp edges on wood grew clearer as we came into sight of the mudroom and entry. There was a flicker of a shadow through the door’s glazing, and a hideous squeal of metal on glass as a scored line was drawn across it.

“Oh, I don’t like that,” Ashli bleated. She rushed us into our room and clambered up into her space, while I unearthed my book from below. Indistinct shadows played on the other side of our window curtain, which we left alone so as not to invite them through that way. As I hadn’t a better way to carry my blessing, I stuffed it down my tucked shirt such that it rested over my belly, only adjusting my shoulder strap to pin it better. From there, Ashli preceded me back into the hall, and she grabbed my collar roughly to stuff one of her amulets into my breast-pocket.

“By the Grace of the Earth and the Seasons, or whatever, let no curse or malefaction… I guess, fuck up your day,” Ashli chanted. “Let the unnatural be undone, and the krominetric –”

“Chromoelectric.”

“The chromo-electric interaction be decoupled: [Sharp-Field Dispersal Tensor].”

We nodded, and slunk to either side of the front door. The manic sliver-carving of wood grew wilder, and beyond it I caught the first signs of shouting men and hooves beating. “Do you have to say the name of the rosary for it to work?” I whispered.

“I mean, I don’t know,” Ashli rasped. “Why? Did it sound stupid? I thought it was dope.”

I hesitated.

“Does it sound dumb?” She insisted in mounting horror.

The doorknob gleamed above me as I reached for the latch and deadbolt, “Shush. They’re like to hear us. See if you can tell what they are.” I jabbed one finger towards the glass, and tried to make as little sound as possible.

“A dozen god damns, I thought I was being cool,” she cursed, bobbing up for a darting instant to look out the front door. Then she froze and did it again. “Bugs? Shit. A lot of bugs?” She flinched and blinked painfully, rubbing at her face and striking droplets of condensing dew off her eyelashes. “Ack, what the flying fuck, they’re blue something awful.”

“Stay behind me.”

“What, no. Come on, I wanna live. Can’t we go out the back?” She objected in panic.

As I swung the door back and open, I took one long stride backwards into a solid stance. Windless chill sublimated past me into the house, and there was a tumbling metallic clatter as the enemy was rolled into our domicile by my rescission of threshold. Its central column of dull white metal was spackled nacreous with runes; toppled sideways it was roughly three fingers thick, and long as my forearm. Sprouting from the peak of that that core, its three triple-segmented legs unfolded like the legs of a cricket, or the ribs of a mechanical umbrella.

Those limbs clawed at the air as the creature righted itself, and strangely I could see that the joints between segments did not exist. Instead, they hovered together firmly with invisible force.

As the alternative (I suspected) would be to submit to dissection, I instead secured a double-handed grip and swung the hatchet underhand, such to catch its low body before it could upright. I struck the central joint of a leg heavily into the soft metal; it was flung off on the follow-through and past its fellows, rattling into the night.

The Argument roiled. 6, it insisted.

Regretfully, there were yet a dozen of that fellow’s likeness behind it, and as their attention turned to me they began to vibrate with harmonized malice.

“Shit, shit,” Ashli pawed over herself until she found the claw hammer hooked through her belt loop, and the skinning knife sheathed on the other side. She drew both out and pressed away from me and to the left. “’Least gimme space with that thing,” she complained of my ax. “Back up a little.”

There was no sense in squandering an available and defensible emplacement, and moreover I saw the wisdom in avoiding such adjacency that I might homicide my kin through error, so I fell back with her to hold them at the choke of the mudroom.

“Knives work on gòshëm?” Ashli doubted. I suppose she anticipated the negative, as she simply flung her blade at the nearest tripodal, shin-nipping threat-no-bot. The handle wobbled as the point sunk into a leg and stuck fast (to otherwise no visible effect).

I exercised a particular maneuver which Nick Baker hand called the ol’ [bait and bisect]: which is a footwork of controlled, retreating stride paired with a smooth and plunging overhead chop. It’s purpose in the vocabulary of wilderness self-defense was to dissuade a wiser varmint, or inanimate a fool one; since the next [variant gòshëm: lesser tin locust] was all too eager to crawl over its kinfolk and be rent a cleft in its bodily middle, I am not inclined to have ascribed a particular intelligence to them.

8, demanded the ‘vader point of view.

From there I took control of my corner, and leveraged it to some minimum of cover. From what I could see, I counted perhaps one less a dozen gòshëm left ambulatory in, out, and about our our entryway. Since the mechanicry of three legs is ungainly a conformation enough as it is, the first-struck of them was left afloor flailing, but immobile. The second I’d cloven had suffered a deep, lipped score into its metal. Its runes shimmered indecisively and it slumped drunkenly until it was leant against the coat-rack and curled; unhappy as a spider’d ‘been shown the newspaper.

The tin locusts hobbled towards us – with difficulty where they navigated about the obstruction of their fellow. Their gait was lurching and unbalanced, and they would fall back on the use of their central column as a clumsy fourth leg to correct their totter. Pressed on her side of our struggle, Ashli pinged at a leg with her hammer, twice evading jabs from the spike of its nine-inch tarsus1. Finally, she put a bend into its point, and gòshëm twisted off its course as its leg slipped crooked under it.

“This. Thing. Sucks. How’m’I – Ahh! S’posed. To fight –” my cousin yawped with each swing. “Hold these shits off, I need something bigger, goddammit.”

I pushed aside an invasive integer as I nicked a reaching arm, “Ashli, wait!” I could not secure that hall alone so easy.

“Fuck off, you got an ax! Lemme grab an iron, or a chair or something!”

“Don’t use a chair! They’ll kill us.”

“Ow, shit, ow. Fuckin’ fingers. Then gimme something then.”

I swept my implement to either side, knocking askew either of two forward legs, then braced and kicked their core rod. Knocked back and jerking from the force-attraction of its articulations, the tin locust tangled up briefly with two of the others. “Chopper,” I barked, tossing my weapon over to her lateral and longways.

“Shit, yea. Vengeance for my nail polish,” bellowed Ashli as she caught and hefted the hatchet one handed. With the opposite, she whipped her hammer out and hurled it spinning out the door where it thunked into the far line of our adversary.

Meanwhile I, momentarily unarmed, threw my bag to the ground. Squatted behind it and quick as you like, I plucked out the most provident of my basement acquisitions: the humerus2 of a mountain lion, gone mutant. Fourteen inches long and heavily knobbed on one end, the fresh, weightless smell of green still clung to it.

And so as it settled into my grip, and as it is the nature of a tool to be defined by the context of its use, I applied the bone towards violence; therefor it was changed from carcass to club.