One hour earlier…
“Merc! Something’s wrong—Little White has to be in trouble.” Bit’s voice cracked with urgency over the common channel. “We need to get to her, now.”
Merc was about to answer when a faint tearing sound drifted through the cavern—engines. He turned and saw several blurred shadows rising from below.
Before he could make out what they were, the closest one burst into a bloom of green light.
In night-vision mode, the flash was blinding.
Merc’s optics whited out for a heartbeat. Instinct took over anyway—he rolled hard, dove for cover, and let his stealth systems spool up.
“Merc?” Bit tried again. No answer. Worry sharpened his tone. “Merc?”
A moment later, the common channel filled with noise.
Boom—crack!
Rock shattered somewhere, followed by a long rush of wind.
“Merc! What happened?!”
Bit hovered in the air, frozen for a few seconds, until Merc’s reply finally came through—broken, delayed.
“Aircraft… attacking me…”
“Aircraft?!” Bit’s thoughts scrambled. “What aircraft? Don’t tell me Plando has trash down here too.”
“Don’t know. Model unknown…” Merc’s voice cut out under another burst of sound—whip-whip—then a dull impact. From the audio alone, Bit could tell Merc was taking heavy fire.
“Hold them. I’m coming.”
Bit snapped into motion, angling toward Merc’s last position.
“Don’t.” Merc forced the word out. “Go to Little White. I can handle this.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I’m not fighting them head-on. I’ll shake them, then rendezvous with you.”
Bit hesitated only a second. Merc was an Infiltrator frame—stealth was what he did. He wasn’t built for a straight brawl, but vanishing was his specialty.
“Fine,” Bit said. “Don’t die.”
Merc didn’t answer. The line went noisy.
Bit turned and accelerated toward the area where Little White had gone silent. After twenty minutes, he found the river.
Following the water, he soon spotted the bear corpse—and the shattered pieces of Little White’s communicator nearby. The carcass had already shrunk, half-consumed by the surrounding “grass,” which had turned a vivid, wet red.
The fatal wound at the bear’s throat was unmistakable. Twin blades.
Bit finally let himself breathe.
Okay. She’s alive.
But where is she?
He circled above the scene, scanning. No sign of her. He wanted to search, but he had no direction—so he did the only thing he could think of.
He lit a hovering light and stayed put, hoping she’d see it and come to him.
Little White didn’t.
Merc did.
Before Merc even arrived, a message snapped onto Bit’s HUD.
Bit, kill the light. Now.
“What? Why?”
Something’s coming your way.
Merc shared his overhead feed. Seven dark shapes—spider-like—were sprinting across the stone toward the glow of Bit’s hovering light.
They were only a few hundred meters out.
“What the hell are those?!” Bit killed the light instantly.
“Who knows. Another unit type I’ve never seen. Looks like the light pulled them in. Hide—right now.” Merc paused, then added, “And that means the ‘obstacle lights’ I ran into weren’t obstacle lights. They were surveillance.”
“This underground world is ridiculous,” Bit muttered. “Where is all this coming from?”
“I’d love to know.”
The sudden darkness didn’t slow the spiders. Half a minute later, they reached the bear corpse. They paused, scanned, then fanned out and began searching the area methodically.
Bit crouched behind a boulder on a nearby rise. Merc landed beside him without a sound, both of them watching.
Up close, the machines looked like smaller versions of Bloodthirsters—compact mechanical crawlers built for speed and climbing. Each carried only a single-barrel machine gun. No laser turret. No rockets. But the small frame made them faster than anything that size had a right to be.
One of them drifted toward Bit’s hiding spot.
“Do we hit it?” Bit whispered. “Doesn’t look that tough.”
“Not yet,” Merc said. “I saw a wireless module. It’s linked to… some kind of control hub. If we engage, we announce ourselves.”
“Fair.”
They backed away slowly until the crawler turned and moved on.
Ten minutes passed. Finding nothing, the spider pack seemed to give up. As one, they turned and headed back the way they’d come.
“Follow,” Merc murmured.
They trailed the machines at a distance, staying in shadow, trying to see where they were going.
They didn’t make it far before everything—Bit, Merc, and the crawling machines—froze at the same time.
A sound rolled through the cavern.
A low, drawn-out bellow, like a foghorn.
And from the center of the underground world, red-orange light began to rise.
A cylindrical tower slowly emerged from the darkness—so distant it looked like a slender pillar of light spearing up into the ceiling.
The glow crawled upward from its base, shifting constantly between red-orange and blue-purple, painting the uneven stone ground in strange, flickering colors. The rhythm of the flashes almost looked like… a signal.
Bit and Merc pressed into the deepest shadow they could find.
The spider machines, meanwhile, went rigid—like their power had been cut.
“What is that?” Bit breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Merc shook his head.
After more than ten seconds, the bellow stopped. The light kept climbing higher, illuminating more of the cavern.
Then the spider machines jerked back to life.
They pivoted sharply to the right and surged forward in a wave, moving several times faster than before.
“Do we go check the tower,” Bit whispered, “or keep following them?”
“Tower,” Merc said immediately—then looked again and realized the spiders had already vanished into the dark. He hesitated, thinking fast.
“No,” he decided. “We follow the spiders.”
…
Meanwhile…
Little White watched the strange light spreading through the woods and felt the same pull she always did when something didn’t make sense: she wanted to see what it was.
But she didn’t want to stand exposed under that eerie glow.
Before she could decide, several dark shapes burst into the forest from the direction of the light. Running now would only get her spotted.
She picked the nearest thick tree, climbed fast, and snapped her twin blades together into a longbow. Hidden in the canopy, she drew a breath and waited.
The first few machines skittered beneath her—mechanical spiders, the same kind she’d just destroyed.
And they weren’t searching randomly.
They were chasing Bululu and Uguwa.
Little White didn’t have time to think. She loosed an arrow.
Boom!
The lead crawler blew apart and rolled, one of its legs left behind like a severed limb. The second machine hesitated for a fraction of a second—long enough for Little White to thread another arrow into the gap between its turret and chassis.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
From the tree, she dropped three in quick succession.
But her position was blown the moment she fired. A storm of bullets shredded the branches, cutting her hiding place apart. Little White sprang to another tree before the canopy was fully chewed away—and in the brief gaps between bursts of fire, she shot two more spiders to pieces.
The longer she fought, the more crawlers poured in. Their fire followed her like a shadow. Opportunities to draw the bow got rarer by the second.
Wood splintered. Leaves exploded into the air. The already sparse trees toppled one by one.
Little White didn’t panic.
She moved.
She kept hopping, sliding, and climbing through the forest, pulling the spiders after her.
Without realizing it, they clustered.
She waited for the right moment—then fired one more arrow.
Boom!
A blast of dirt, dead leaves, firelight, and jagged metal legs erupted into the air.
Little White snapped the bow back into twin blades and plunged into the middle of them.
She didn’t waste time striking their bodies. She went for the thin legs—slash after slash, blue arcs flashing as her blades cut in fast, precise sweeps. She was quick, and she made herself faster. The spiders kept trying to swing their guns toward her, but they couldn’t turn fast enough.
Where she passed, severed legs littered the ground. Machines toppled and writhed, off-balance.
Some took her throwing knives instead—gallium hidden in the blades, eating through metal in seconds. Those units corroded, froze, and died.
And yet…
There were more.
Little White felt it in her gut first. The wave wasn’t thinning. If anything, it was growing.
Worse, the reinforcements weren’t all spiders.
Mixed among them were humanoid silhouettes—familiar shapes made wrong by age.
Destroyers.
At first she didn’t recognize them, because these were obsolete frames—antiques from the human era. But when the tall, ancient robots raised laser emitters and glowing blades, a flash of disorientation went through her.
And the danger didn’t end there.
Shadows swept over the treetops—small aircraft, like scaled-down fighter drones, about the size of a winged robot. They weren’t powerful-looking, but their fire said otherwise. They circled and dropped laser beams that snapped after her like hunting lines.
The enemy came like a tide.
Little White started to feel it—real strain. She fought on, stubborn and furious, but the pressure kept building.
Is this the Blood Dawn? she thought wildly. Am I really going to die down here?
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Five sharp rifle cracks in a row.
With each shot, a spider crawler or a Destroyer snapped backward—headshot, clean and precise.
Little White’s confidence surged back so fast it felt like someone flipped a switch.
That sound was unmistakable.
Merc’s sniper rifle. The one he’d rebuilt with his own hands.
Sure enough, a moment later several of the small aircraft spiraled down in smoke, each one cut by a smooth, impossibly clean slice.
Then Bit dropped from the sky, swinging a 2D Blade like it weighed nothing.
“Little White—are you okay?” he demanded the instant he landed.
“I’m fine,” she said, breathless with relief. “How did you know I was here?”
“Followed the spiders. I saw this place lighting up from a mile away and figured you were the one throwing the party.”
They spoke as they fought, cutting down the last few machines still close enough to be a threat.
With Bit and Merc at her side, the pressure vanished.
All three of them turned, ready to carve through the rest—when—
The bellow sounded again.
Like a command issued to every unit at once, the machines immediately stopped attacking and began withdrawing toward the tower.
Merc dropped the tail end of the retreating wave with calm headshots, then warned Bit over private comms not to chase. It smelled like a trap.
He stepped out of stealth, revealing his frame, and walked up beside them.
The moment the immediate danger passed, Bit threw his hands up.
“Did I just see Destroyers?”
“Yeah,” Little White said. “First-generation models.”
Bit’s face—if a robot could have a face—looked scandalized. “So Phantom Forge owns this place too?”
Little White didn’t answer.
Merc crouched by the smoking wreck of a mini aircraft, studying it. “I got hit by these things in the air earlier. Do you recognize them?”
“I do,” Little White said, nodding. “Bono-S2 drones. Their firepower was so weak that Plando retired them before Phantom Forge even came online.”
“Aircraft older than Phantom Forge…?” Merc’s voice was tight. He glanced around at the battlefield. “Then how is any of this here? And those spiders?”
“The spiders,” Little White admitted, “I’ve never seen before.”
Merc looked up. “So what now?”
Little White’s eyes went distant for a second—then she jerked as if remembering something, and took off running.
“Hey—Little White!” Merc called. “Where are you going?”
Bit and Merc exchanged a look and sprinted after her.
At the edge of the woods, Little White skidded to a stop.
Bululu lay there.
His body had been blown in half from the chest down. His insides were spilled out. He was long dead.
Less than ten meters away, Uguwa lay in a pool of blood. One leg was gone. His chest rose—barely.
Bit stared, horrified. “Oh hell. Is that a monkey or a human?”
Merc crouched, eyes narrowing. “That one’s still alive.”
Little White dropped to her knees and hauled Uguwa into her arms, propping him against her. “Uguwa. Uguwa, wake up.”
A long moment passed.
Then Uguwa’s eyelids fluttered open.
When he saw her, a faint spark returned to his eyes.
“You’re not… an angel,” he whispered, voice thin as dust. “I… knew it.”
“Where’s your tribe?” Little White demanded. “I’ll carry you back. We’ll find a doctor.”
Uguwa didn’t seem to hear. His gaze fixed on her like he was staring at a vision.
“You’re… the Goddess of Light, aren’t you?” He laughed weakly, then coughed. “You… finally came back…”
Little White froze. “I—no, I’m not—”
“I remember,” Uguwa rasped, and a mouthful of blood spilled from his lips.
“What? What do you remember?”
“Edean…”
Little White went still. “Edean?”
“Edean…” Uguwa fought for breath, every syllable costing him. “It’s… Glimmer City’s… old name…”
Those words seemed to drain the last of him.
“Where is Glimmer City?” Little White demanded, voice rising.
Uguwa lifted a shaking hand and pointed toward the light.
“Save… us…”
His arm fell.
Uguwa went limp in her grasp and didn’t move again.
Bit, Merc, and Little White turned to follow the direction of his finger.
There it was—the strange tower in the distance, light already far up its length, flickering and shifting.
The shifting patches of color slid across the stone like a living thing… and then, for a heartbeat, seemed to focus on them.
Like an eye.
Watching.