It screeched, and a clutch of skin-whips flailed across its smouldering back, battering against the constructs. The moth did not stop bearing down on Shadrach. A tentacular growth snapped around one of the construct’s necks and tugged it from the slake-moth’s back with awesome ease. It sent the metal body crunching against the wall as brutally as it had the helmet.

There was a terrible sound of rending as the construct burst apart, spreading shattered metal and flaming oil across the floor. It roared a little way from Shadrach, melting metal and cracking the concrete.

The construct by Isaac spat a gobbet of strong acid across the clutch of eggs. Instantly, they began to smoke, to split and hiss and dissolve.

The slake-moth let out an unholy, merciless, terrible scream.

Instantly it turned from Shadrach and tore across the room towards its brood. Its tail lashed violently from side to side, catching Shadrach as he lay moaning, sending him sprawling through his own blood.

Isaac stamped once, savagely, on the liquefying egg-clutch, then stumbled back and out of the slake-moth’s path. His foot slithered with the glabrous mess. He half ran, half crawled towards the wall, clutching his knife in one hand, the precious engine that kept his mindwaves hidden in the other.

The construct still clinging to the slake-moth’s back breathed fire all across its skin once again, and it screeched in pain. The segmented arms flew back and clutched for purchase on the construct’s skin. Without pausing, the moth got a grip under the construct’s arms and tore the thing from its skin.

It hammered it against the floor, shattering its glass lenses and bursting the metal casing of its head, sending valves and wire spewing in its wake. It flung the broken body away from it in a heap of rubbish. The last construct drew back, trying to gain range from which to spray its enormous, maddened enemy.

Before the construct could spit its acid, two massive flanges of serrated bone snaked out faster than a whiplash and shattered it effortlessly into two.

Its top half twitched and tried to drag itself across the floor. The acid it had carried pooled beneath it in the dust in an acrid smoking sump, corroding the dead cactacae around it.

The slake-moth ran its hands through the viscid scum that had been its eggs. It hooted and crooned.

Isaac crept away from the moth, gazing at it in his mirrors, feeling his way along the wall towards Shadrach, who lay moaning, crying out, befuddled with pain.

In the mirrors before his eyes, Isaac saw the slake-moth turn. It hissed, its tongue flickering. It spread its wings, and bore down on Shadrach.

Isaac tried desperately to reach the other man, but he was too slow. The slake-moth stamped past him again, and Isaac turned smoothly once more, always keeping the terrible predator in his mirrors.