The beam of his power produced light, and he saw racks of men and women unconscious in the pool of fluid, situated beneath a deceptive looking facade. Waiting to be born.

He produced his beam, and cut a hole in the wall of the tank. The shift of pressure dumped him out onto the floor to the side. The fall was hard, and made harder by the fluids that poured down on top of him.

He could hear shouting.

An entire army closed in around him.

He couldn’t fight an army.

But he could think like a mercenary. It came down to value, what a given job was worth.

Fourth maxim, he thought. He looked for and found a likely target, a set of chemical tanks kept out of plain view by the foot of one of the larger pools of water, cyborg clone banks in disguise.

He blasted the chemical tanks. They erupted into violent fire and noise. Foreign voices shouted their alarm.

He blasted others, then kept blasting.

And then he ran, leaving them to deal with the distraction.

Those things are worth more to you than I am, he thought. Fourth maxim, sometimes you gotta set it all on fire and walk away.

⊙

He stopped.

His winning strategy was just to stop. He could feel the tendrils of Axehead reaching for him, feeling out for danger, and finding only quiet confidence.

He was attacked, brutally at first, every heavy weapon the attackers had. He curled around his device, made from the pieces of a hundred members of this Machine Army that roamed around him and pried at his flesh, protecting the technology while sacrificing pieces of himself.

At first.

Putting one foot in front of the other, he walked.

Through the portal. Toward his partners. He’d picked effective ones. They were reliable. They watched his back.

He’d verified. He trusted.

They would be at the center of the connections, as soon as they found a way past the bigger cluster at the heart of the city. They would have to bring the dancing girl, the old man, and the gaseous lady in, too. Anything else and they would be buried beneath the mass of the others.

He ceased walking, taking in his surroundings. The darkness no longer gripped him.

He’d set his fire, he’d walked away.

He was no longer in Bet, and with everything in ruins, the capes now scrambled and failed to keep the Machine Army in check. It was free to access the city, the first robots finding their way in.

Five slipped past him while he picked the biggest one to crush and tear apart for materials for his weapon.

⊙ ⊙ ⊙ ⊙ ⊙

She stood utterly alone and completely still. For all intents and purposes, she was the only one of her kind.