Kayana watched the giant war machine unfold itself from the forest floor. Despite being covered in thick layers of moss, algae, and ferns like a second skin, she could still make out its rough shape. For whatever reason, fate, threat, or amusement, its creators had fashioned it to resemble the great chanoth beasts; predatory, bipedal reptiles that had hunted her people at the dawn of history.

A tiny part of her brain wondered if every humanoid culture had stories of such beasts. The rest was overcome with a base terror that weighted her limbs with deep-rooted, ancestral fear. Her stomach clenched as her body tensed. The flame she’d been using to clear the woods flickered and died as her v’tana snuffed out. There would be no fighting the beast. The only choices were to flee or be eaten.

On either side of its torso, just above the hips, were twin sets of pods like the one Ax had fallen into. Weapon bays of some type, she imagined, though they were long since emptied in whatever war had driven the thing’s creation.

Not that it needed the weapons to be dangerous. Even if it didn’t attack them directly, the weight of it stepping on them or knocking over a tree in passing would be enough to cripple or kill either of them. She tried to sneak backwards, and a twig snapped under her heel.

The thing’s giant head snapped around and focused on her. Blue-white light flared in the space where its eyes should be just before it opened its gargantuan mouth and a metallic roar thundered from somewhere in the middle of its chest.

Shit. Kayana didn’t need any more of an invitation. “Run!”

Ax turned on his heels and sprinted into the heavier woods. As the broad-snouted head swiveled to track him, Kayana snapped the spark-glove Ax had given her. The first effort didn’t ignite, and she took a deep breath, forced herself to calm down and sense her inner flame.

On the second spark, her v’tana caught the flame, and she shaped it into a tight ball. She could feel the flame, different from the magnesium of the flare, push against her constraint. Her lessons had been so long ago. What had her teacher said? Turn the fire in on itself, tighten it until it can’t help but break free.

She twisted her hands together, compressing the ball. Each press made her control more tenuous. When she worried she might not be able to contain it further, she hurled it at the massive robot. The sphere exploded when it struck the robot’s chest, but before the smoke had cleared, she could see that all it had done was burn away some of the plant life. The gleaming metal armor underneath didn’t look like it had been waiting centuries to fight.

The robot roared a second time, whirling toward her, and Kayana ran in a different direction from Ax.

Panic and speed prevented her from raising a new flame to clear the underbrush. Without it, she was assaulted by the combination of lashing branches, tangling vines, and ankle-snagging roots. At every step, something else slashed at her exo-suit and tried to maim her. The war robot had no such hindrance—its massive size allowed it to slam through smaller trees, shattering them into flinders.

“Ax! Cut toward me!” She turned to run toward him, trying to match his speed so that they crossed almost in front of the robot.

It worked. The war machine kept moving in one direction, while its head and torso turned to follow Ax. It tangled up in its own feet, slamming into a tree too thick to atomize and bringing the robot to a sudden stop.

She didn’t look back. Instead she again crossed paths with Ax, hoping to confuse the robot once it had righted itself.

“Get to the big trees!” Ax sounded as out of breath as she felt. He pointed toward a copse on the far side of a small rise. “They look too big for it to knock over. And if we can limit its mobility, we might have a chance.”

As ideas went in the heat of the moment, she’d heard worse. She turned to head in the direction Ax had indicated and risked a glance behind them to check on the war machine. The automaton had already regained its feet, tearing a huge gouge in the soil in the process. The alien light of its eyes scanned the woods for a second before spotting them, and once again the chase was on.

They were almost to the copse when the hill in front of it raised itself up on ten scything, segmented legs. Sickly green light seeped out from between the joints, washing the plants nearby with unhealthy pallor. Nine legs, she corrected. One of the thing’s enormous claws had been torn off in some previous battle. The same light that leaked between its joints poured out of the wound as though it were fresh.

Shitshitshit. She glanced to confirm that Ax had also seen the new threat.

“Well, that’s just great,” he muttered. “I was just thinking, ‘You know what would be really nice? Another war machine, that’s what.’” Ahead of them, the crablike machine raised its remaining claw above its head and snapped it in angry agitation.

There were no two ways around it. This had just become genuinely bad. If only Al’kheri had a maxim for giant alien war machines. She’d have to improvise. “Go under it!”

“Are you mad?” Ax looked at her as though she had suddenly grown an additional head. Despite his protest, she noticed he had changed direction to match her recommendation.

“I sure hope not.” Her throat burned from how fast she was breathing, and her legs ached from fighting against the underbrush. She forced herself to push even harder, picking up speed as she raced toward the new robot. She just hoped that the different design ethics indicated that the two machines were on opposed sides of the conflict.

And Al’kheri did have a maxim for that. The twelfth. Let your enemies exhaust themselves against each other.

She charged beneath the metal crustacean, threading between its legs as the claw carved a furrow in the soil behind her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ax thread in as well. Before she could call out to him, the reptilian mecha slammed into the crab and tangled up with it. No further agitation between the two giants was needed. Each lashed out at the other in a destructive display of gouged terrain, showering sparks, and the scream of metal on metal.

Ax waited for her a few meters away, out of range of the destruction. “I didn’t expect that to work,” he said between breaths.

Neither had she, frankly, but she wasn’t about to let him know that. “There is a maxim for everything.” After confirming the two robots hadn’t decided to begin some kind of unholy team-up, she led Ax away from the conflict and in the direction of the gemstone. Hopefully. The last thing she wanted Ax to do was check and draw the war machines’ attention with another ping from the tracker.

With luck, the rest of the challenge would go easier, but somehow, she doubted it.