The Gang of Legend

by Robert J. Crane

  Cables ejected from the automaton’s core. They shot out, gripping the walls around the smashed window—and then it reeled them in, the motion propelling it, and me, through the gap—

  “HELP!” I screamed—

  Heidi’s blade swung as I sailed past. Bub lumbered forward, his own blade ready—but I was too far gone. The air blew past my face like I’d been thrust headlong into a gale—

  The hawk leered, waiting for me, wings outstretched and the automatons that made it up beginning to peel apart, preparing to welcome me—

  I did the only thing I could, with my hands trapped by my waist. I grappled for Decidian’s Spear, in its glamored umbrella form. Clutching it tight, I prayed that it wasn’t angled such that extending it would spear me through anything too vital and I gave it a short jerk. Just enough to shake off its glamor.

  The spear extended in the blink of an eye—and the bladed tip ripped through the automaton’s obduridium hull, burying itself into a pair of humming motors that were, very suddenly, no longer humming.

  Killed instantly, the automaton’s legs immediately relaxed around me.

  But we were still surging through the air, fired like a stone from a catapult.

  Grappling with my free hand for the line launcher on my belt, I had a fraction of an instant to ensure it was pointed at the ground. I fired—the arrow arced clear, silver rope streaming behind and below me—and then, just as the automatons riding the hawk fired their own cables to grab for me—it hit something solid, and my stomach jolted as I was pulled backward on the wire and surged for the ground.

  The world rolled in a nauseating blur—

  Then I hit earth—hard. I hadn’t managed to land on my feet, or even my knees: I crashed into earth shoulder first, at the very least slightly cushioned by a bush with leaves the red-orange color of an autumn sunset. Lucky for me, because it probably kept me from breaking anything. Not so lucky for the bush, because when I rose unsteadily to my feet, what had once probably been a very lovely plant was now a squashed and broken mess.

  “Where did you come from?” gasped a university student, with stupid plastic-framed glasses (the thick hipster sort), a sweater vest on with skinny jeans that made him look emaciated more than skinny, and patchy stubble. He and a bespectacled girl with a crocheted beret were pointing camera phones at the hawk-like amalgam, lurching through a stand of trees planted to cordon the green into sections.

  “Why have you got a spear?” the girl asked. She gasped. “Is that like an extracurricular thing? Can we spar here?”

  “I’d get out of here if I were you,” I said. “That thing is—not friendly.”

  “Something came off of it and smashed through the university building,” said the hipster boy.

  “Yeah, I know.” I gripped Decidian’s Spear and pushed past them. “Seriously, get out of here. And delete the video from your phones, please.”

  “Delete it?” the girl said. “No way! People will never believe this! I have to film it!” She gasped again. “This could go viral!”

  “You’re going to fight it?” said the hipster. “With that spear?”

  I snorted a laugh. “This isn’t going to make a dent.”

  Unfortunately, these students were not the only ones out on the green. There were others, clustered together with camera phones trained on the hawk. As slow as the damned thing was, they’d have a whole lot of video to share to social media—way more than the few grainy, shaky views that had been taken in Tokyo, the last time this massive thing came lumbering through.

  On the plus side, as slow as it was, no one was likely to get stamped on by the thing.

  Automatons were peeling off though, detaching in droves. Clambering down the hawk’s roiling surface in all their many sizes and shapes, they leapt down the last dozen feet to earth and landed hard, their weight driving impressions into the green—which was just fantastic; yet more evidence that this was really happening, rather than some elaborate film club’s project.

  The smaller automatons surged across the green. They came damned close to a couple of clusters of students, who banked on the hawk’s slow gait holding out and had gone up close to get some nearer video footage. They leapt out of the way of the surging army, confidence dissolved. The automatons, though, had no mind for them; they hurried past, or in the case of one unfortunate screaming straggler, around them, headed straight for me.

  “MIRA BRAAAAAND,” the hawk rumbled again, the call cutting off with digital garble.

  “What’s it saying?” asked the girl, iPhone waving around wildly between the hawk and the smaller automatons closing the distance toward me.

  “It said ‘MERICA’,” said the hipster. “I’m sure of it.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re idiots, the pair of you. Seriously, get clear of here.” Striding away, I readied Decidian’s Spear, all too aware that the last time I’d gone toe to toe with these things, the spear had been a pretty poor weapon of choice.

  “Oh! She’s going to fight it!” the girl squealed. “Let’s go over here, Kaden! The angle will be so much better!”

  “My Insta followers are going to go nuts when I upload this,” said Kaden.

  “I AM GOING TO GO NUTS IF YOU DON’T TURN YOUR PHONES OFF AND GET OUT OF HERE,” I bellowed, swinging the spear to meet the first of the automatons.

  “Ooh, look at that, Kaden! This is going to get us so many new followers! Hey, fighter girl! Can you angle around toward us a bit more?”

  “GO AWAY!” I roared, jamming Decidian’s Spear into the joint of one of the automatons with a hooked grabber, which was covered in a layer of dirt and grass it had dragged up as it pulled itself along. The automaton reeled backward, grabber thrashing to free itself—I simply drove the spear in deeper, penetrating for the mechanical equivalent of its heart, the motors that spun inside its core.

  They caught. A metallic shredding noise screeched as the motors ripped all their teeth off on the spear’s tip—

  The automaton collapsed. I yanked the spear out, and thrust out for the next, swinging a single long arm at me with a pronged tip.

  “Mira!”

  I glanced back momentarily, just long enough to see Heidi and Bub rushing between Kaden and his squealy bereted girlfriend, followed by a sweaty-faced Carson, clutching his manbag ever so tight.

  “A sword!” the girl gasped. “Are you going to fight too?”

  At the same moment, Kaden asked Bub, “Are you from the cosplay club?”

  Heidi surged in with Feruiduin’s Cutlass. Swinging to cleave the automatons’ swirling arms off, she danced in her familiar graceful way, a ballet dancer of death. The cutlass’s onyx blade glinted in the sunlight, its sharp edge perfectly polished, capable of slicing through all but the most solid of materials.

  Bub’s approach was much more brutish. With little apparent finesse, he swung his red-black sword high and then low. Bulky and wide as it was, rather than cutting through the automatons it simply crushed them, like oversized beetles broken under a boot. The automatons bleated little cries, their alarms cut short before they could sound for backup as Bub’s blade continued its earthward path.

  “I can’t believe you, Mira,” Carson moaned. “I was going to go to college! How am I ever going to pass my interview now?”

  “No offense,” I grunted, slicing through the writhing arm of a trilling automaton—another leapt forward to merge with it, then was flattened by Bub—“but your college interview is the least of my worries right now.”

  “Of course it is,” sighed Carson.

  “Heidi,” I said, “do you have any big ideas?”

  “That depends,” she said, slicing through another automaton as the hawk lumbered ever nearer. “Carson, do you happen to have any weapons in that manbag of yours? An AK-47, something like that?”

  “What?” he spluttered. “Of course not!”

  “Oh. Well, this is a very disappointing first visit to America.” To me: “Sorry, Mira. I am all out of ideas. I’d say le
t’s banish it to a void, but … well, that didn’t exactly turn out so well last time.”

  “We could smash it apart until all its pieces are dead,” said Bub. “I would very much enjoy that, the Miss Mira.”

  Heidi seethed. “YOU DO NOT ADD A ‘THE’—”

  “We can’t fight it here on Earth,” I grunted. “It’s too big. And damn near half the university is filming this right now. The only reason the Tokyo attack hasn’t blown up bigger in the news is because it’s Japan, home to weird, freaky, kind of pointless robots.”

  “Well you have to do something!” Carson cried. “I want to go to college here! I want to study literature! How am I supposed to do that if this thing destroys the campus?”

  “Literature?” Heidi echoed, slicing another automaton’s arm in half. “See, this is exactly why you should come back to us! You like reading, Mira has a library full of books. I’m sure she has a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in there somewhere.” Another swing; another metal arm detached. “And she won’t even charge you sixty thousand dollars to read it! Win-win!”

  “That book is so deep,” said Kaden, camera phone unsteadily following the automaton.

  “I can afford tuition, thanks,” Carson countered. “Lost treasure of Ostiagard, remember?”

  “Aha!” Heidi said. “See? You’re far too good for this university, Carson. How many other students do you think solved thousand-year-old mysteries all by themselves?” Through gritted teeth as another automaton came at her, and she dispatched it by burying Feruiduin’s Cutlass through its body, she added, “Half these guys probably can’t even figure out how to dress themselves for the real world.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the girl squealed.

  “You are wearing a crochet beret,” said Heidi.

  “I made it myself!”

  “You look like a coffee shop hipster.”

  “Well, maybe I am a coffee shop hipster!”

  “Ugh.”

  “CARSON,” I cut through. While this pointless little back-and-forth was going on, Carson’s mention of Ostiagard, and its lost treasure, had sparked something in me—the memory of finding it—and then my thoughts had shunted sideways.

  We needed to get the hawk out of this world, sooner rather than later. That meant cutting a big gateway for it—which we could do, if I climbed up the damned robot again, putting even more of myself on show for the world through all the shaky phone videos going on right now.

  We could do that a lot easier, though, if …

  “Do you still have your ring?” I said, peeling out of the fight and grabbing Carson by the shoulders.

  He looked bewildered at me.

  “The ring, Carson! The one you stole from Borrick, in the Chalice Gloria’s chamber! You’ve still got it, don’t you?”

  “Uh … yeah—”

  “Get it, please,” I said.

  His eyes widened, knowing what I was about to say before I said it, one of the rare handful of times I ever had:

  “I need you to open a gate, right now—and to get this thing out of here.”

  4

  I saw, then, a little part of the Carson I knew was still in there—a Carson who was still excited by a world beyond the one he had been, ten minutes or so ago, attempting to thrust himself back into. A spark of excitement lit in his eyes—I was telling him to use his ring, giving him permission after having confiscated it for so long, banished him from using it—this was one of the rare moments he waited for!

  And then the hawk bellowed, “MIRA BRAAAAAAND,” again before its voice descended into a garbled squeal of noise, and he jolted back into the moment.

  “Right,” he said. Pushing his glasses up his nose with one hand, he delved into his manbag with the other, rooted around—still chock full of stuff, I saw, although the papers and books in it now were more likely to be university documents and curriculum content rather than Seeker tomes—and then he produced it, the ring he’d stolen from Borrick when Heidi and I had gone to rescue him, fending off the Order of Apdau and an army of orcs and fighting to claim the Chalice Gloria as our own all in one chaotic jumble.

  Sliding it onto his finger, he said, “Under the Gundam thing?”

  “Sorry,” said Heidi, “the what?”

  “The big robot,” I said.

  “It’s an anime,” Kaden interjected.

  “Evangelion?” said Carson.

  “Ooh, have you seen Build Fighters: Battlogue?” asked the hipster. “It just started last month—”

  “I’m watching the fansub to help me learn Japanese!” piped up the squealy girl.

  “How is it?” Carson asked, intrigue piqued—

  “FOCUS!” Heidi yelled. With ever more automatons peeling off the larger hawk, we were growing quickly nearer to being outnumbered on ground level—not to mention the hawk itself, which through its lumbering lurch had closed the distance down between us to little more than fifty meters.

  “MIRA BRAAAAAND.”

  A pair of long-armed automatons shot themselves at Heidi. She ducked the first, carving Feruiduin’s Cutlass through the air to slice one of its arms off. The other glanced her though, hitting low across the knee—

  She grimaced, buckling—the cutlass swung around as the arm encircled her—

  “CUT THE DAMNED GATE, CARSON!”

  The automaton’s arm sliced off with a beautiful shick, and fell into a coiled heap around her feet.

  “R-right!” Carson said. Touching a finger to the ring, he swiped a shaky line underneath the hawk—

  A hellgate very much like the one I remembered opened on the green. Cleaving the earth apart as though a very long chasm had suddenly split open, it exploded into a wide maw, edges spasmodic and shuddering. The world below was mountainous, with a peach sky smeared with pink, low-hanging clouds. The peaks lifted out of them, tall and thin, like they’d been drawn in with the stroke of a pencil, their bases far, far below.

  The hawk tipped over. A garbled noise erupted from it, and alarms began to blare, as it fell into the juddering portal underfoot. Automatons began to peel off, unmelding themselves in an instant and scuttling away from its suddenly diminishing body as it canted forward. A line of cables fired out from its wings, shooting for the edge of the green to grip hold—

  The gateway shuddered and widened farther, uneven and jagged, so the cables shot through—

  They must’ve connected with something on the other side, something just out of sight, because all at once the hawk was tilting faster than ever, following the cables down, down—

  “After it!” I said, smashing Decidian’s Spear through the carapace of a boxy little drone buzzing over my head like a mechanized wasp—and then, swiftly, in my best attempt at a very limited form of damage control, I whipped my spear out and around, knocking the phone from squealy-girl’s hands and shattering its screen.

  “My iPhone!” she wailed.

  “Sorry!” I called, sprinting for the edge of Carson’s trembling gateway. “I hope you have insurance! Also, your beret is stupid!”

  She called something back, but I didn’t hear what. The gateway gave another violent spasm. A new cleft opened underneath me, so one moment I was hurtling toward the open maw in the university green; the next I was yelling as I turned over and over, into an atmosphere that was suddenly much thinner than my own, and much more pink—

  And then I was jerked around as though I hung on a string.

  “Miss Mira,” said Bub. “I have you.”

  He pulled me back in—he’d snagged me by the line launcher just before I went careening off the edge of the mountain—and set me back upon the peak we’d come out on.

  “Thanks,” I said shakily. “Where’s the robot?”

  Bub pointed over the edge. “Fell over the side.”

  The maw had opened on the ground, so looking down through it was like looking into a mirror that erroneously displayed another world. The sky above—below—was a serene, coastal blue. At the edge of the vibrating p
ortal, Heidi looked in. Carson stood nervously beside her, hanging onto his manbag.

  “Come through,” I called.

  Heidi turned to Carson. She said—something—to encourage him, I supposed. I couldn’t hear though; sound apparently didn’t travel through the gateway. Carson looked nervously at her. She stuck out a hand—he considered it, torn—and then he took it and followed her through, coming out upside-down—

  Bub grabbed the both of them before they followed in the footsteps I’d almost taken and fell over the mountainside.

  “Hello again, Carson,” said Bub. “And Miss Luo.”

  “Put me down,” Heidi ordered sharply. “Your callouses hurt.”

  Bub dropped her. She should’ve landed heavily, but instead dropped like a cat. Straightening, she whipped around Feruiduin’s Cutlass, took a backward glance at the portal behind us—

  Kaden and the squealy beret girl were staring through it in horror—

  The gateway collapsed, as though sucked in by gravity, and vanished.

  Dust settled gently where the peak had been levelled off. Presumably there had once been a scattering of loose rocks here. Now, I could only assume they occupied the damaged green behind the University of Akron, because they certainly weren’t here: except for the very edges where the gateway hadn’t reached, the peak was quite featureless.

  “Where’d the hawk go?” Heidi asked.

  “Down there,” said Bub, pointing.

  “Oh. Well, excellent.” She stowed the cutlass. “Problem solved.”

  “Problem solved?” Carson breathed. “Problem solved? What about me? I was supposed to have an interview for college today! I was supposed to be getting my life back in order! I was supposed to be—”