Sounds hit me first. Not in a simple way, but in a much more visceral kind of horrible warning; physical sounds that batter at my body like a flurry of blows brought on by possibility itself. Each one brings with it the creak of metal, the brain-rattling hum of something being uncovered that should never be, and the crash of spells faltering uselessly against these monsters.

I reach up and scratch the side of my head. Call's voice gibbers in my ear in a constant verbal stream of nervous agitation that barely connects to each other, and that stream flows out of my helmet directly into Lament's covered ears. To Lament's credit, he barely reacts, but that reaction is one of slightly confused pity. At least that's what I assume it is; it's hard to gauge emotions when the face bearing them is completely covered.

"It's bad, Call, really bad," Lament murmurs. "If I'm going to stop these things, I need you to stay close to me or leave. Make your choice right now."

Leaving sounds damn good right now.

Call has another idea. "I'll stay! I have to stay."

Lament nods as I stifle a grimace for no reason. He walks forward slowly, arms carefully held apart like he's holding back a wild animal at both sides. I glance around performatively to confirm what my awareness has already told me; things are bad.

But I haven't even seen the half of it. Screams rip into the open air as speakers are batted to the side like flies by a mech that's somehow exposing a very human-like skeleton below its plated head. Ribs show through gouges in its chest, containing within a beating reactor core within them that's in the process of twisting to be shaped like a heart. Radiation peels off the misshapen thing like simple steam. Everyone here knows the difference.

It barely matters. Whether or not anyone knows what the radiation can do means so little when an arm the size of a semi-truck crashes into a person-sized suit of armor and pins them to the ground, radiation screaming to fill the space in a merciless haze. The screams grow louder. More desperate. More frantic.

"They're so… weak," I mutter to myself. "Almost all of them. Where are the Preservation's elite soldiers? This could destroy the entire damn city."

Lament tilts his head to the side and looks back. "Call? Did you say something?"

I clench my teeth; damn idiot must've turned on my voice projection somehow. Now I need to come up with an excuse, because the explanation he's trying to stutter through sounds so guilty that our cover won't survive another five seconds of it.

"No, this isn't Call–this is the woman he brought back earlier today. What's happening? He said he was coming right back, but some kind of… intercom, or radio, or whatever, just turned on," I say with verbal motions that don't match my inaction inside of Call's suit. "Did he say you're at the hangar? We were just there an hour ago and everything was normal."

"Intercom? Call…" Lament sighs and shakes his head. "No, this panic isn't natural. But we'll have to talk about you giving new refugees direct lines to a speaker later. Miss, do you see anything that you could turn off in the room? You're not supposed to be hearing this."

I hum like I'm surveying the room I'm supposed to be in. "No… I can't see anything. Sorry."

Lament sighs again, this time a little louder. "Then I suppose you'll have to be a part of my talk with Call right after this. Try to close your ears and ignore the screams, please; this is not going to be pretty. Even though I pray it won't spread, I know it will."

I murmur in confirmation and move in tandem with Lament. His magic swirls around him in a destructive haze, controlled easily and precisely to obliterate everything it needs to and spare everything it doesn't. The entire hangar creaks as the crack of a shattering chain sprays shards of metal through the air, scattering a small cloud of speakers who were just buzzing around the mech's head and pelting it with ineffective spells.

"We have to contain the reactor core, then sever it from the mech. Once we do that, it should either die out naturally or be so weakened that everyone else can fight it," Pearl explains with a gesture at the misshapen radioactive heart. "Hopefully Lament already knows this. If he doesn't, you're going to have a dang hard time explaining that to him."

Yeah, I'm aware. But Pearl's right in more ways than one; Lament does seem capable. If he hasn't figured out how to stop the radiation without detonating the reactor, then I'll eat Call's helmet. My awareness twitches, warning me of an attack before it can even get close.

I look up and tap Lament on the shoulder with one hand while pointing at the giant fist about to crush us with the other. He snaps his neck to me, then follows my finger up to the falling guillotine just twenty feet or so from obliterating us. A quiet prayer wisps out of his helmet as he shoves himself in front of me, spreads his hands wide, and projects his aura of annihilation outwards.

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The mech's knuckles sizzle at the touch of Lament's magic. Metal peels away in a very skin-like fashion to reveal bones underneath twisted through with tubing and wires in place of cartilage and muscle. That, too, snaps and gives in a few breath-stilling heartbeats, scouring the mech's fingers down to reveal enough bone that it looks like what I imagine someone punching a belt sander would result in.

Except oil and magical fluid in place of blood.

"HAH!" Lament grunts. He shoves his magic outwards, body shaking under the pressure as if he was actually holding the fist back. The mech creaks and reels back, flexing the fingers on its damaged hand in a dextrous way that would've been impossible a few minutes ago.

I roll my shoulder, ready to move again. But the magical field around me doesn't shift. And neither does Lament. His breaths come strong and hard, expanding and contracting his chest so heavily that his armor looks like it's about to shatter. Shit, did the guy overexert himself just from blocking one single punch? Did I expect too much from him?

The mech rears back and readies another blow. I grimace and discreetly summon a coin into my palm as I grab Lament with my free hand to pull him out of the way. He doesn't resist my dragging him across the hangar at all, his bubble working perfectly to clear out the radiation as the mech rains creaking punches down on a catwalk that's somehow still standing fairly strong. But even it's starting to buckle under the weight.

"C'mon, c'mon!" a speaker from a safe area calls out to me. "It can't hit us here!"

'Here' is on the other side of the hangar. Right between more mechs that the apocalypse could taint at any second. I look back at the mech, fully expecting to see its skeletal face locked on us with as much hatred as a machine can muster. But there's nothing. All the punches are aimed at people closer to it than we are.

I let out a huff and shove Lament at the group of cowering speakers. The Preservation's 'elite', all cowering in fear of a single one of their robots going rogue. If I was in charge, I would've had dozens of drills and protocols in place for this exact moment. Shit, I've seen Ursula go out to do weekly maintenance checks on all the garages she keeps stocked.

…Wait, maintenance. There was someone in here that was doing maintenance. That woman… Lizzie, I think it was. What the hell happened to her? She was going in here with a toolbox in hand. There's no way she finished whatever she was here to do before things went to shit.

"Call, I…" I start to say, but the speakers all turn to look at me. Call still hasn't turned off my goddamn voice. "Um, Call, what's going on? Do I need to call the authorities?"

The speaker in front of me laughs bitterly. "We are the authorities, whoever you are. Call? Did you leave your link on again?"

"I-yes! I'm here! Definitely not freaking out! Haha!" Call lets out a pinched laugh, then stops. "Yes, yes, um, right! I definitely wasn't supposed to leave that on. Haha! My bad! Fixing that right now."

Two clicks sound off in quick succession. I cough to see if Call actually did shut off my voice this time, and from the lack of a reaction it gets, seems like we're in the clear. At least for the much smaller of two problems. I turn to the mech, which is still blessedly held down by chains and a harness keeping its legs together, but it's only a matter of minutes until they break. And a pure question mark of time until it realizes that it has real weapons to try to kill us with.

"Why isn't it using any weapons?" One of the cowering speakers asks before I can field the question pointlessly to Call. "I-I've seen these things fight seriously before. It should have a lazer, or missiles, or-or-or a lot of other kill-us things!"

I snort dismissively and finally let go of Lament's shoulder. "It's doing a damn fine job of picking you off with just its fists. Is the Preservation really not going to send someone actually powerful to deal with this shit? Just get whoever blew the other mech out of the sky to take two minutes to save the rest of the damn city, not just opulence-ville floating up there."

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!" Call frantically says. "Lament should be stronger than this! But that mech's hit must've scrambled brain matter and made sure we're getting a lot of nothing here instead of someone competent at destroying things! Please, Shelby, help us kill it! There won't be a city left to save if you don't!"

I take a long breath through my nose and stare down at Lament. He's still frozen in place, even if that place is now horizontal on the catwalk as the mech's attacks shake it increasingly worse. Part of me recognizes that something must've happened beyond just a single hit. But I can't imagine what the hell that could be.

"Do his powers have damn blowback on them or something?"

Pearl shakes her head. Call speaks before she can. "No! the spell should've broken way before anything else! Something else is really wrong here. But I don't know what it could be! Our sabotage wasn't supposed to happen like this! Too many people could get hurt, and Lizzie knows that, so she'd never–"

Call keeps prattling on even after my disbelief tunes him out. Sabotage. There's no other plausible explanation. Which should mean Lizzie is still somewhere around here. I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and feel for someone that isn't inside of a suit of armor. Mechs everywhere filter into my awareness, each one perfectly maintained with no flaws whatsoever. The apocalypse-touched mech's magic insists at them like flames licking at the edges of a dry field…

But none of it takes hold. None even scrapes the paint. I blink in surprise and mentally rub my eyes; out of the entire hangar, only the one mech is struggling to break free. All the others–even the ones right next to it–aren't in any danger by any stretch of the imagination. Almost like this one alone was sabotaged. Except… that completely discounts the one that exploded over the city.

A mass of magic that squirms like millions of worms inside a rotting carcass surges into my awareness. Not from the mechs, though; from above. I crane my neck skywards, and inside of all that overwhelming magic is a single word.

Speak.

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