A great wolf stood in the empty hallway, peering through the slice of doorway that wasn’t really wide enough for it to get through. It could squeeze through, but that might leave it vulnerable. Better to just open them up a bit more. And in this form, Velik’s physical surged more than high enough for him to do that. He rammed a shoulder into the right-side panel, forcing it into the wall another foot and giving him plenty of space.

  The instant the golem thought he was distracted, it struck. Surprisingly, its choice of attack was the tail Velik thought he’d already sabotaged. The golem had apparently repaired itself somehow, which actually made things easier. Now there was no question about having to remove or destroy the power source.

  Velik slipped under the tail strike and rushed the machine. In his wolf form, he could only retain access to a single piece of gear at a time. Unfortunately, his latest acquisition demanded that privilege. Velik wasn’t sure why, but he guessed it had something to do with his traveler’s bracelet having the [Spatial Storage] enchantment on it and then not meshing properly with whatever little pocket dimension the rest of his physical possessions got stowed away into when he assumed his wolf form.

  That meant the loss of all the stat buffs he got from his gear, not to mention close to two dozen enchantments. Even with all of that, it was still worth it just for the raw boost to all physical [True Form] gave him. Velik tore down the hallway so fast that he practically teleported in front of the golem, and he hit it so hard that it rocked back onto two feet for a moment.

  Not waiting to see what it would do, he started tearing at the armor plating with his nails. Unlike what his spear was capable of, he left great rents in the metal, and before the golem could react, he’d already ripped one panel free. It hung by a strip of twisted metal, swinging loose as the golem thrashed wildly.

  It brought its front two legs up, the limbs spinning at the elbow joint to allow the claws to grab hold of him. At the same time, its tail whipped forward, aiming to skewer him from the top. Velik leaped free, easily threading his way between the golem’s chest and its grasping claw. On his way by, he bit down hard on the offending limb and ripped one of the claw’s toes clean off.

  Lightning sparked out of the open cavity, but Velik ignored it. He was already past the damage anyway, and it did nothing more than leave smoking black scorch marks on the floor. I wonder how well you’d move if I took off a few of these legs, Velik thought to himself as he eyed up the hip join on the machine’s rear limb.

  He was every bit as agile in his wolf form as he was in his more familiar human shape, though that had taken a lot of practice to gain the needed familiarity with such a radically different body structure. Velik darted forward, sure-footed and easily avoiding the kicks or flashing blades the golem tried to hit him with, then leaped up to rake at the leg. As far as he could tell, the golems didn’t feel pain, but it definitely had some way to register damage, because it went berserk the instant it realized what he was doing.

  The next thing Velik knew, he was bouncing off the wall and rolling to a stop on the floor below. Get up! The golem wasn’t interested in a fair fight, and it wouldn’t wait for him to recover. He didn’t need to see the descending blade to know it was coming. He scrambled to all four feet, lunging desperately to get clear, but white-hot pain flashed down his leg as the tip of one of the golem’s wrist blades carved through flesh.

  It was, ironically, the same limb he’d been trying to disable on his enemy. Maybe it has a sense of irony. Velik darted out of the way of another attack, leaving golden blood splatters behind as he moved. The golem seemed to anticipate his angle of approach, forcing him to dodge around several arm blades as he approached, but now that he knew how fast it could move when it was really trying, he was more than capable of avoiding its attacks.

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  He ripped into the hip joint, severing several braided cables that he assumed were important, and was then rebuffed by another discharge of lightning. His wolf form had powerful regeneration, however, and the lightning wasn’t strong enough to fully disable him. If it couldn’t put him down, it wasn’t good enough to take him out of the fight.

  Velik repeated his attack on the other leg, disabling it as well. Then he went after the tail. Now that the golem had lost most of its agility, it was all too easy to rip into it. Over the next two minutes, Velik tore it apart until there was nothing left but the chest and head.

  He paced around it, wary of any tricks it might have left. It had yet to open what he was thinking of as the mouth, but he didn’t suspect much in the way of offense there now, not unless its neck could stretch out and flex like its tail. Given the thickness of the armor plating there, Velik doubted it. All he needed to do now was finish ripping open the chest plate, find whatever was keeping the golem active, and tear it out.

  The moment he made his move, the golem’s jaw dropped open to reveal some sort of metal pipe. Flames roared down it, but too slowly to catch Velik. He raced forward, under them, and slammed into the golem’s chest. It was a moment’s work to finish tearing apart its armor, revealing a bewildering mess of what looked like steel ropes, gears, and cylinders.

  How the hell did anyone ever figure out how to make a magic machine work with all of this? he wondered, unable to make any sense of what he was seeing. One thing he’d learned from fighting the smaller golems, however, was that the power source was always in the center of a sort of harness of ropes going out in every direction.

  He quickly dug through the tangle, ripping it apart where he needed to, until he found a great ball almost as big as he was. Velik ripped it free and let it roll out onto the floor. The instant it came loose, the whole machine sagged sideways to lean against the wall.

  Velik freed himself from the ropes, though he’d gotten himself so hopelessly entangled in them that it was actually easier to revert back to his human shape and extract himself that way. The moment he did, his Life Giver’s Ring kicked in. It was one of his three legendaries, its enchantment so powerful that the ring only held one: [Full Regeneration]. According to the system, it could even regrow severed limbs if given enough time and mana.

  His leg was already mostly healed, but the electrical burns had carried over. Those would close up over the next few minutes, he knew. By the time he went into the next fight, he’d be back at full strength.

  At least, that was his plan. He’d barely even circled around the inert golem’s body when a faint breeze brushed past his cheek. ‘Velik. Lord Jensen wants you to return to the base,’ Tempest’s voice whispered to him.

  Scowling, Velik glanced back behind him. “Damn wind mages,” he muttered. He could ignore the order. Jensen wasn’t really his boss, after all, and if it had been important, Tempest would have said so. What had likely happened was Jensen’s [Treasure Hunter] had let him know about the huge influx of valuable materials that had suddenly appeared when the golem had shut down. The skill didn’t work on living creatures, but golems didn’t seem to count, and deactivating them only made them stand out even more clearly.

  He could be patient. There was plenty left to explore and they’d only been inside the ruin for an hour or so. Whatever was beyond the golem would still be there when he came back. Still grumbling to himself, he turned around and started running back through the dusty old hallways.

  * * *

  A small machine, modeled to look something like a spider, crawled out of the wreckage of the bridge guardian. It was only a few inches across, even including the legs, but that was all that was needed. It had the guardian’s logs recorded, and a singular job of returning them to its master.

  The spider machine wasn’t alive. It didn’t think. But it had a set of instructions to follow, and its master had been clever about making them. So before it crawled off, it approached the wet, golden blood on the floor.

  Scraping up a sample with its mouth, the spider machine stored the blood safely inside its housing. Then, its work complete, it turned and skittered off toward the bridge. The greater machinery had long since failed, but that didn’t matter to the spider. It had its own route home, and it could already tell the mechanisms were still operational by the signal they were emitting.

  Soon enough, the spider was settled onto its little palm-sized platform, connected to the controls, and with a blip of mana, it had vanished from its home sky bridge. An instant later, it appeared on a platform that could have been a twin to the one it had just left, and it started the next leg of its journey.