The advantage was that it wasn’t very mobile. Instead of four arms pointed down and the point they met up, it was the other way around. Four lengths of arm, ‘shoulder’ to elbow, all resting on the ground as a cross, each with a massive mechanical forearm and hand rising up from the terminus or draping out from the end. In the center, protected by those hands, I could see the ‘bowl’ of stasis-frozen body parts. We needed those.

I saw Swansong look over her shoulder and gave her a tight shake of the head. Because the terrain was muddy and she was missing a foot, and because the mech had hostages at the same time she had a chaotic and reckless power.

It could drag itself, and it looked to be trying, but it was just an obstacle, with a lot of reach and, should it move in just the right way, the possibility of slamming into Brandish.

I threw myself at one elbow, pushing the entire mass just a few feet across slick, muddy ground, still wet from Byron’s power. The hand came down, and I flew back and away, spinning once in the air to try and ensure I wasn’t flying into anything lethal.

The spin made my head swim, and between the sick feeling in my upper chest, the tension in my facial features, the dizziness that swept over my every sense, and the fact that the arms and legs I was relying on were entirely power-derived, I felt like I was just a head, neck, and some shoulder.

I hit it again, to try to wedge it into the corridor that Brandish and Capricorn had been guarding, and nudge it further from Brandish.

The thing was trying to stand, and I did what I could to keep it from getting there. Moose leaped onto it, knocking an arm flat to the ground, while making the rest of it buck up.

I hit it again, harder, to knock it flat again. Metal bent and broke.

“Heads up!” Rain barked.

There were arms nested in one of the primary ones. I’d seen how they did it, a more slender arm fitting into hollows in the forearm, palm, and fingers. As they pulled free, I saw the glint and crackle of the invisible cables. The hollow spaces in the underside of each arm and hand were covered up by shutters.

“Moose, Harbinger, get back!” I called out the order.

The whips came crashing down. Five deep slices into earth as the left hand swept down. Five more when the right hand swiped horizontally, raking a nearby wall that had been raised up from the ground as part of the ‘maze’.