In its prime, the housing block was open to the air, built on the edge of the endless nautilus shell of construction that became Teleth Thadeyn. However, it seemed the city denizens never anticipated the explosive rate of growth.
The housing block was huge, larger than any town or settlement the Student had ever seen. She remembered the first time she had ever seen the walls of Isin. The din of the great augurs as the gates parted. Back then it seemed impossible that something of such size and weight could even move, but now these endless blocks of concrete and steel dwarfed the factory-citadels of New Babylon. She could fit all of Isin, foundry and all, into the space this singular housing block occupied.
It seemed the city had a similar idea. In stark contrast to the featureless concrete was row after row of towering matte black carbonsteel pillars.
The supports for the level above, the floor of which formed the great roof, split into colossal tessellating hexagonal sections. To the Student they appeared as the legs of some titanic creature, stamping through a child’s toy, a city made of building blocks. Occasionally, some of them would hum to life with a tremendous noise, a mechanical rumbling and whirring that one could have mistaken for the distant roll and crash of a summer storm. These pillars were what provided light to the enclosed space, their capitals wreathed with massive floodlights that would shudder and falter as the noise came.
“Freight elevators” said the Teacher, as if no elaboration was necessary.
The walls that marked the borders of the housing block were made from the same stuff. Evidently a later addition. A guillotine of modern materials, quarantining this place from the rest of the megacity. The housing block strained against those walls. When the light was good, the Student could see legions of laborer husks in the distance, building endless rows of empty concrete structures. Pillars of inaccessible, impossible rooms struggling to expand past a border that could not be breached. Raised highways and boulevards connecting nonsense to nonsense.
Navigating here was difficult. It wasnt maze-like, it was worse. At least mazes made sense. More than once the party had followed a road, only for it to terminate in a sheer wall, or simply the open air. Once a road even proved to be a completely closed loop, leading them right back to where they started. Even more confusingly, it appeared that other travelers had been in the same situation, they would find cairns hanging from a stray piece of rebar, only for the path to lead directly to an impassable wall of rubble. Concerning.
More concerning was the bodies.
the Students experience as a trapper, a synthetimancer, and time working as a pit mechanic made her an expert in biomechanichal injuries, simply by the sheer number and variety she had witnessed. When she was working with the pit crew she would joke to the knights, “If its any comfort, no matter how mangled you get I can at least figure out exactly what killed you.” She didn’t have the precision or the bedside manner to be a doctor, but she liked to think she would have made a damn fine detective.
She was disappointed, as it was incredibly obvious what killed these husks. They had been cut in half with a massive axe. She paused for a moment. Cut wasn’t the right word. They were smashed in half. The road here was covered in broad, deep, cuts. Whatever killed these things was strong enough to damage the concrete when it struck.
She stood from where she was kneeling and turned to relay the information to her companions, when the nearest pillar groaned to life, drowning the words in the rumble of some colossal hidden machinery. She rolled her eyes at the inconvenience, and gesticulated at the Teacher and the Sorcerer, exaggeratedly pantomiming herself swinging an axe, as one would do to split wood.
The floodlights flickered. A lot of things happened at once.
There was a comet of scarlet flame. It collided with something above and behind the student, she struggled not to scream as she felt a shower of molten slag hit her shoulders and neck. The ground shook and cracked. The Student was blinded for a moment, and nearly lost her balance. She was shocked into motion, the hydraulics in her legs propelling her into a twisting leap forward, out of the way of whatever her teacher had just struck.
It was massive. Nearly 30 feet tall. Humanoid in the sense that it had two arms and two legs and a head, but the resemblances stopped there. It was top-heavy, its upper body bristled with uneven lumps of muscle bulging from under its natural armor, as if its skin was a dead, graying sack stuffed so tightly with wads of stolen, rotting, muscle tissue that it was near to bursting. When it moved, the muscles seemed incapable of doing so in harmony, and would only flex in syncopated bursts that caused the entire creature to twitch and shiver as if it was caught in the throes of mad laughter. Over its skin were plates of a dull grey-white material that appeared to be bone, or chitin, or metal, or some unnatural hybrid of all three. Its legs appeared much more machine-like. They bent backwards, the armor on what looked to be its shins forming a double-helix of thick, shock absorbing springs reminiscent of aircraft landing gear that terminated in broad, metallic hooves, stained black with blood and dust. These seemed to compliment the pair of folded, six-blade rotors jutting from its back that seemed to twitch and writhe with the creature itself. One hand still gripped its weapon, where it was embedded in the concrete, just inches from where the Student was standing. The other frantically clawed at its face,
trying desperately to keep the molten metal from sealing its own mouth and eyes shut. It was screaming in pain, but the sound was lost under the overwhelming noise of the freight elevator.
But as the metal began to cool, it bonded with the metal of the things hand, fusing the two together. The Student never got a look at its face. It was a featureless lump. Its jaw was fused open, long drops of metal forming a sort of grill. The only thing it managed to save, between the gap in its fingers, was its right eye. It was huge, deathly milk-white, with a broken sclera, and covered in hundreds of smaller malformed eye-like growths that twitched with the same palsy-like tremors. It reminded the Student of how soap bubbles could form on the edge of other, larger soap bubbles. Every last pupil was fixed on the Teacher with a look of pure, unspeakable hatred.
The freight elevator passed.
The Student already had the momentum, she was preparing to run. The Teacher was doing nothing of the sort. As the thing began to slough its enormous form towards the Teacher, hate burning in its eyes, her hands were already ablaze with scarlet flame. The thing roared in fury as it began to gain speed, lifting its weapon for another strike. The Student looked away to shield her eyes from the flash of light. But as she did, she heard her teacher scream at the thing. And when she did, her voice matched the rage of the thing, but there was something else in it, that same deep, unplaceable emotion.
“Traitor!“
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