Whoosh! Swish! Zing! Crack! Bang!
Brass and iron carpet the corridor. Broken automatons heap into jagged drifts, their instrument-shaped bodies split open, keys and strings and bell-mouths strewn across the flagstones like the picked-over ribs of some mechanical herd.
Aurélie Nakano Takeko walks through the carnage without wasting a step. Anathema is a black streak in her hands—every swing measured, every cut placed exactly where she intends. A violin-shaped automaton lunges at her. She pivots, lets it overshoot, and takes its scroll-head off at the neck in a single stroke. The body folds. She has already turned away before it hits the floor.
Limejuice spins his staff, a hissing ribbon of blue current trailing from its tip, and slams it down on a horn-shaped automaton. The brass bell crumples inward. Sparks spit from the seams. The machine drops.
Building Snake's twin blades hiss through the air. He cuts, parries, redirects, his feet never crossing, his strikes never pausing. A harp-shaped automaton rears back and swings its string-arm. Building Snake slips beneath it, rises at its back, and drives both blades through its soundboard. It shudders, wires twanging, and topples.
Yasopp holds a position off to one side, his rifle barking in a steady rhythm. Every round lands in a joint, a seam, a cracked casing. He works the bolt without looking at it, his eyes fixed on the advancing horde.
"Forty-five!" he calls as a cello-bodied machine crashes onto its face.
Limejuice curses. "Forty-eight!"
Aurélie doesn't bother to raise her voice. "Fifty-two."
Building Snake drops a drum-shaped automaton and shouts, "Fifty-six!"
The heaps climb higher. The automatons keep pouring in. And then—
Silence.
The final automaton crashes down, its brass limbs rattling across the stone. Nothing else moves.
Building Snake drags a forearm across his damp brow and cuts a sideways glance at Yasopp. "Looks like someone is going to have to swipe the Chief's sake."
Yasopp scoffs. "We will see about that."
He shoulders his rifle. A straggler—half its keys missing, one leg dragging—scrapes toward them across the floor. He fires. It bursts apart in a spray of springs.
"Forty-six," Yasopp says.
Building Snake's head whips around. "Wait. What?"
Yasopp lifts one shoulder. "Forty-six."
"That's not—you can't just—" Building Snake sputters. "You can't count every round fired as a kill!"
The corner of Yasopp's mouth curls. "I count what I hit."
"You missed at least three!"
"Did I?"
"Yes!"
Yasopp shrugs. "Prove it."
Building Snake flings up his hands. "This is—this is—" He turns to Aurélie. "Tell him!"
Aurélie sheathes Anathema; the guard meets the scabbard's mouth with a soft, decisive click. She regards Building Snake with steel-gray eyes that give away nothing. "I like my sake with ice."
Building Snake gapes. "That's not—"
Limejuice cuts in. "Hold on. Hold on." He waves his staff at the heaps of wreckage. "I'm going to count."
Yasopp snaps, "What are you doing?"
Limejuice says, "I'm making sure the numbers are right."
Yasopp spreads his arms. "You can't tell just by counting! There are piles everywhere! Some of them are in pieces! Some of them are half-buried!"
Limejuice ignores him and aims a finger at the nearest heap. "One. Two. Three—"
"That one's not dead," Yasopp says. "It's just twitching."
"It's close enough."
"It's not—"
Aurélie watches them argue, her face perfectly composed. Building Snake joins the count, louder with every number. Yasopp objects to each one.
Their squabbling ricochets down the corridor.
---
Charlie clears his throat—a prim, pointed little noise that carries over the argument.
He rises, swatting grit from his khaki shorts and nudging his pith helmet level. He glances at Bianca. She stands with her arms folded, watching the schoolyard squabble and slowly shaking her head.
Charlie sets off. "I assume it is safe for us to proceed."
Bianca sighs, flicking a wrist. "Like sure. Like why not."
The pair pick their way through the wreckage—drifts of gears, split casings, coils of twisted wire. Bianca boots a stray piston out of her path. It skitters across the floor and pings off the wall.
As they pass Aurélie, Limejuice, Building Snake, and Yasopp, Bianca says, "So like we are like going to like go now."
Aurélie inclines her head. "I shall accompany you."
Building Snake nods. "As will I."
They fall into step behind Bianca and Charlie.
Yasopp looks up and sees them going. "Hey! Don't leave me behind!"
He jogs after them, calling back over his shoulder to Limejuice. "You coming?"
Limejuice shakes his head. "Nah. I'm going to count my kills."
Yasopp waves him off. "Suit yourself."
He is the last to round the corner into the room with the Poneglyph.
The chamber is enormous. Water seeps down walls of dark stone. At its center squats a colossal monolith that no blade or blast has ever marked, its faces crowded with ancient script that glows faintly, brightening and dimming in a slow, steady pulse.
Yasopp whistles. "So. One of these things."
Charlie plants himself before the Poneglyph, fingers tight around his satchel strap, and nods. "Yes."
Building Snake folds his arms and rocks back on his heels. "Shame we don't know what it says."
Charlie pushes his glasses up his nose. "On the contrary."
He begins to read.
"Hear the lament of the Great Kingdom: We could not slay the Great Discord, for sound is the breath of life and cannot be put to death by steel. Therefore, we forged the Vitriol-Pyrobloin Core. We bound the demon of the false dawn to the Seven Planetary Spheres, anchoring its acoustic soul within the Living Crystal of the Sea.
KNOW THIS, SEEKERS OF THE DAWN: The beast feeds upon the dream. It cannot die while the Sea remembers. To break the crystal is to sever its leash; it will no longer return to stone, but walk the waking earth forever.
IF IT BE FREED: Only the Sovereign of the Threshold—the one who bears the Salt of the Underworld and rings the Nine Bells of the Void—can open the Gate. Drive the beast beyond the River of Forgetfulness. Oblivion shall swallow what the living sea cannot drown.
WARNING: The fracture of the Anchor requires the Voice of the World's Worst Warship. When the stone shatters, the Red Line shall weep."
Charlie falls silent.
Yasopp stares. "Well damn. So you can read these things."
Charlie nods, visibly pleased with himself.
Bianca asks, "So like that's cool and all, but like what does it mean and stuff?"
Charlie cups his chin and starts to pace. A steady drone of muttering follows him back and forth across the chamber.
Bianca groans. "This could like take a while."
---
Back in the corridor, Limejuice stands alone amid the scrap, jabbing a finger at one heap and muttering to himself.
"One. Two. Three. No, wait, that one's just a leg. One. Two—no, that's a head. Does a head count? I'm going to say a head counts. One. Two. Three—"
He stops. One of the broken components twitches.
Limejuice blinks. He tilts his head.
A second piece twitches. Then a third. A clank behind him spins him around.
Scattered parts rise off the floor. They drift upward, wobbling, then start finding one another. Gears mesh with gears. Plates weld to plates. Severed limbs snap back into their sockets in bursts of sparks and screeching metal.
Limejuice tightens his grip on his staff. "Ah. Guys."
The words bounce down the empty corridor. Nobody answers.
The parts fly faster now, latching onto any working component within reach. What takes shape is lopsided and wrong—automatons stitched together the way a toddler might draw a dog, limbs sprouting wherever they happened to land.
Something heaves itself out of the rubble. It stands on three legs, two of them bent backward. A trumpet serves as its head; violin necks jut out where arms should be. It lets out a cracked, strangled blare, like a bugle played through a mouthful of gravel, and starts crawling toward him.
Limejuice takes a step back. "Um. Guys."
A second creature assembles. This one has no head at all—only a stacked trunk of drums and cymbals that crashes toward him on a dozen tiny wheels.
Limejuice raises his voice. "Um. GUYS."
He sprints to the end of the corridor, skids around the corner, and bellows, "GUYS!"
Every head in the chamber jerks up.
Limejuice jabs a thumb back the way he came. "We have a problem."
Yasopp grins. "What? Did you finally realize you're the loser?"
Limejuice shakes his head—
A shriek rolls out of the corridor behind him. Metal grinds on metal. Hundreds of mismatched parts slam together in a deafening, arrhythmic clatter.
Bianca winces. "Like that doesn't like sound good."
Limejuice snaps, "That's what I've been trying to tell you!"
Aurélie, Building Snake, and Yasopp trade glances.
Limejuice wheels around. They follow him out.
They spill into the corridor.
Four enormous centipede-shaped automatons, cobbled together from the wreckage, come skittering toward them.
---
Each centipede is a long, jointed train of mismatched segments—brass drums, violin bodies, trumpet bells—held together by a force none of them can see. Pistons, keys, and snapped strings churn beneath them in place of legs. Their heads are wrecked instruments: a dented tuba, a split lute, a flute bent nearly double.
They scream in four discordant keys at once.
Aurélie draws Anathema. A crimson glow throbs along the black blade. She moves first, silver hair streaming behind her. Her opening slash shears off a centipede's front legs. It pitches forward and hits the floor. Then the severed legs crawl back and lock into place, and the creature rises.
"Regeneration," she murmurs. She cocks her head. "Interesting."
Limejuice levels his staff. "How do we kill something that puts itself back together?"
Building Snake charges, blades flashing, and cleaves a centipede in two—but the halves drag themselves back together and fuse with a screech of grinding metal.
"Cut it into pieces small enough that it can't reassemble!"
Yasopp fires. The round punches through a centipede's head and blows it apart. The body never slows; a new head knits itself together from its own scattered shards.
"That's not working!"
Aurélie watches. Her gaze follows the centipedes—how they rebuild, how they reach into the surrounding heaps for spare parts, how they—
"The piles," she says. "They are drawing from the piles. We need to separate them."
Building Snake nods. "Right!"
He plows into the debris, blades clearing a lane, kicking heaps apart and sending components skidding across the corridor. Limejuice joins him, his staff spitting current as he pounds the scrap into fragments too small to use.
Yasopp keeps up a steady fire, pinning the centipedes back while Aurélie moves.
She picks her target: the largest centipede. It barrels toward her, two broken trumpet bells clacking together like mandibles.
She leaps.
Four translucent locust wings unfurl from her back with a dry rattle. As she climbs, her shadow peels off the floor—not trailing her, but swelling. It bursts into a seething swarm of black locusts. They engulf the centipede, gnawing through its joints and devouring the organic tissue that binds its parts together.
The centipede thrashes and wails. It tries to pull itself back together, but the swarm has eaten the binding away.
Aurélie lands behind it. Anathema is already completing its arc.
"ANATHEMA KENJUTSU: SILENT HARVEST."
ZASHIIIN!!
The centipede comes apart—not in two, but in dozens of pieces that rain onto the stone and stay there.
The remaining three go down in quick succession. Limejuice's current fries their joints. Building Snake's blades pry their segments apart. Yasopp's bullets shatter their heads.
Quiet settles over the corridor.
Limejuice leans on his staff, chest heaving. He surveys the heaps—smaller now, scattered wide—then turns to Yasopp. "This only counts as one kill."
Yasopp glares. "What? No. That's four. There were four centipedes."
"They were already dead. They reassembled. That's not a new kill."
"That's—that's not how this works!"
Building Snake chimes in. "Actually, he has a point."
Yasopp throws his hands up. "This is ridiculous!"
Aurélie slides Anathema back into its scabbard without a flicker of expression. "I am still in the lead."