It didn’t take long to get to the source of the commotion they’d heard, the pair rounding yet another corner one after the other as they ran.

  Scattered civilians pushed past them as they frantically retreated, barely even noticing the two women as they fled from whatever the ruckus ahead of them was.

  Alice did her best to keep from getting trampled by the stampede of bodies streaming past, shoving her way blindly forwards through the flood of people leaving the area ahead of them, Gwyn fairing only slightly better as she was battered back and forth by the hordes around them.

  Eventually they forced their way through, the mass of bodies finally passing over them, the pair finally able to see a familiar scene ahead of them.

  At least a dozen of the scythe-armed artificial insects swarmed a massive, open park area, oversized limbs tearing into everything they could get their hands on, turning cars and buildings and anything else they could get to inside out as they spilled random detritus out from within and into the waiting, greedy hands of the smaller robotic humanoids scuttling around their feet.

  Several stragglers rushed out from the scattered structures before they were demolished, multiple of them clearly injured as they ran for their lives, their would-be attackers seemingly paying them no mind whatsoever as they kept at their work of systematically leveling the entire area.

  A lone mother and child huddled in the corner of one of the few small structures still standing, the woman’s eyes squeezed shut and clinging tightly to her baby as she rocked back and forth, too paralyzed by fear to force herself to step out into the open while those monsters ran rampant.

  Her temporary haven only sted so long, the roof over her head trembling as dust rained down from above her, drawing her gaze reluctantly upwards.

  The first of one of the creatures sickled limbs stabbed in through the side at an angle, the other swiftly following from the other side, both of them scraping back and forth as they wrenched the entire top of the building off like it was little more than a stubborn bottle cap.

  The woman within screamed as those same limbs were blindly stabbed inside, both massive scythes careening down towards her and her baby, early morning sunlight glistening off the smooth metal as they descended towards her, unable to move at all as she watched them shoot down towards her.

  There was a fsh of blue as she closed her eyes once more, hearing the sickly noise of metal penetrating what must have been her flesh, the sensation of pain so severe her body must have refused to even register it.

  “Nnngh… you gonna run or not, dumbass…?!”

  Her eyes slowly opened once more as a voice barked at her from above, blinking in confusion as she slowly realized she was still unharmed, completely bewildered and unfocused until a few scattered droplets of something warm and wet dripped onto her face, pulling her attention back up to the destroyed ceiling above her.

  Currently in the tiny alcove she’d tucked herself into, the window opposite her had been completely shattered through, a lone girl now wedged tightly between the close walls of the tiny space, both arms and legs braced against the walls on either side as she held herself above the stunned woman, blood dribbling down the ends of the two bdes that had nearly ended her life as they now sat wedged almost the entire way through the torso of the girl above her.

  “Fucking… get the hell out of here already, asshole! Run, christ!”

  More blood gurgled up from between Alice’s lips as she forced words out through at least one punctured lung, her voice a nightmare to listen to as she managed to, at the very least, scare the dy below her back to life, watching her scramble towards the smashed window as she fled for her newly-saved life.

  The idiot below her now safely out of the way, Alice snapped her neck backwards, the bones within actively compining about the severity of the motion as the limbs penetrating her torso tried to shake her off desperately, unable to get free again as her internal organs already began to expand and wrap around them, ribs scraping into the thin metal like organic barbed wire.

  It pushed down hard, forcing the scythes further downwards, her arms still bracing against the closely-packed walls, the limbs trembling before her elbows gave out and snapped back in the wrong direction, letting out some manner of incoherent pained gurgling as she was thrown about carelessly.

  The oversized bug eventually regained enough control of its own arms to pull them free of the tiny storage shack they’d been buried into, pulling both conjoined limbs out and over the leveled roof as it tried to inspect the source of the damage.

  As soon as the lump of meat stuck on its arms was pulled into view, it was greeted with a wonderful firsthand view of the bottom of a well-worn sneaker, sole smashing like a hammer into its viewport as the gss and pstic of the sensor array was torn through like tin foil.

  Every muscle in Alice’s leg loudly compined at her as she kicked the thing holding her aloft hard enough to punch clear through a brick wall, blood spraying from underneath ripped fabric, her leg snapping like an old wooden baseball bat sending a home run drive straight through the scoreboard.

  The monstrosity stumbled blindly away, internal arms bring as it registered the loss of most of its senses as well as the ability to stay banced, nearly toppling over itself clumsily, Alice still impaled on its arms as it fumbled helplessly about.

  She wiggled her fingers as her own limbs finally snapped themselves back to their correct orientation, bracing her freshly healed upper arms against either side of her chest, enjoying a brief little moment of being mostly in one piece, before pressing down excruciatingly hard with every bit of strength she could muster up.

  Both sides of her perforated chest cavity were crushed inwards around the matching swords stabbed all the way through her body, her rib cage itself cracking as it twisted and squeezed down along with her on the intruding appendages, her entire torso biting down into the bug’s arms like a wolf’s bloodied fangs tearing into sweet, warm flesh.

  Already partly eaten into by her entrails burning and tearing shards of them away, the twin sickles failed to muster up a response, the metal limbs violently warping and twisting before finally snapping in half, the torso around them crunching clear through as it ripped the entire fixture apart, both half separating fully as Alice herself fell like a sack of bricks to the ground below.

  She hit the still-damp morning grass below her with all the grace of a corpse rolled into a ditch, a long, sputtering cough getting kicked out of her as she nded on her back, tiny shards of sharpened metal spraying out alongside the blood and viscera, painting the beautiful grass around her in brilliant shades of red and silver.

  “Still alive down there…?”

  Sclera inquired half sarcastically and half out of genuine concern, Alice’s growing disregard for her own body’s limits more than a little unnerving for the one pying biological roommate with her.

  Alice coughed up a few lungfuls of broken metal, listening to the sounds of her ribcage groaning as it shoved itself back into pce once more, rolling over onto her side before bracing her arms against the grass, stubbornly trying to push herself up again already.

  “Never… gah… never better…!~”

  Before she could manage to get her feet below her again, the blind and disarmed unit cttering around next to her was shoved carelessly out of the way, another pristine mantis forcing its way through as it identified a threat worth pulling its attention away from its scavenging work.

  Another pair of the oversized bdes were raised as it rushed in towards the prone magical girl, Alice rapidly attempting to get back up to her feet as it moved in.

  The twin guillotines hung overhead for a long moment before falling, morning light shining off of them both as they descended towards the already beaten to shit woman id out below them.

  Her vision bcked out as something leapt between her and the sunlight overhead, a rush of pink pastels at the st second before she was bisected yet again.

  CLANK.

  The sound of metal smming into something significantly less squishy than she was echoed out, followed by the sounds of crumpling iron and the pained grunts of someone assuredly not yet used to taking hits to the spine like that.

  Alice’s eye finally focused in, getting a good look at Gwyn all but ying on top of her protectively, forearms braced against the wet grass on either side of her head as pink crystal spread out over more of her body as fast as it could manage, the taller girl’s face only a few inches away from her own, panting from both how fast she’d stormed over and from how hard of a blow she’d just taken straight to her lower back.

  “Nnngh… y-you okay, Alice? You able to w-walk still?”

  She peered down between the two of them sprawled out together, wiggling her broken leg before tapping her toes against one of Gwyn’s crystallized legs with a satisfying tink tink tink.

  “…heh. Yeah, I think I can manage, rockhead.”

  Mustering a smile at the familiar question, Alice started to push herself back to her feet, bracing a shoulder under one of Gwyn’s arms as she lugged the heavy pile of rocks up alongside her, both of them shakily stumbling back to their feet once more.

  The pair of broken-armed insects around them stumbled blindly around them as they struggled to process their own injuries, the headless one attempting to scurry off somewhere out of sight as the less damaged one rushed them both once more, both scythed limbs crumpled and shattered at the ends but still sporting the glistening reaping edge on the inside curve.

  Shouldering Gwyn backwards and out of the sickles’ flight path, Alice stormed straight in towards the metallic monster, shoulder-checking it hard square in the upper body, the twisted bdes cnging together loudly as Gwyn toppled over again just out of reach with Alice too close in to get hit by anything but the rounded upper arm segment.

  Her shoulder crunched into the iron carapace hard enough to shove the mountain of steel and wires backwards a few inches, all six limbs pulling up grass and soil as they were forced backwards.

  The beast tried to adjust as quickly as it could, lifting both arms to clear the tiny little hellion battering it about away, scythes raised upwards to swing in as close to itself as it could reach.

  It never got the chance to mount the counterattack, both arms sputtering and straining in pce as Alice grabbed hold of them both just below either shoulder, squeezing down with enough force to dent into the thin metal of the tempered fixture.

  She cmbered upwards, pnting a foot into the dent she’d left in its chest as she braced herself against its entire body, pulling up and back on its arms with every bit of energy she had in her small, wrath-fueled corpse of a body.

  Muscles and wiring and sinew and pstic fixtures all groaned and ripped and tore from their sockets as two sets of arms pulled back on one another, Alice howling with raw exertion as she only pulled harder still the more her own limbs tore themselves apart at the seams, elbows crackling like ripping construction paper as she crushed her sneakers further still into the crushed midsection underfoot.

  Fingernails scraped and dug through the iron and pstic that may as well have been as soft as the still-damp earth below them both, sparks of freed electrical current licking at her ripping flesh as exposed veins shared a fountain of their own contents in tandem, live wires and viscera spraying skywards as Alice screamed louder the arms bring from within the poor construct’s rapidly-deteriorating framework as she felt both pairs of arms rending one another from their sockets.

  With one final groan of protesting metal and strained superstructure, the beast’s beaten body finally gave way, coils of tight-knit cabling fluttering in the morning sunlight like a dancer’s ribbons as both its arms were fully ripped free, Alice’s own limbs tearing open down to the broken and abused joints far below the skin as she finished her grisly disarmament.

  Her handhold now detached, she kicked the thing’s hollowed torso backwards as hard as she could as she unched backwards, pulling bundles of ruined internal systems out along with its stolen arms like sparking entrails.

  The beast itself was shot back, artificial eyes flickering before going bnk, nothing left inside of it to keep it animated as it died unceremoniously.

  Alice flew back from her own momentum, skidding along the earth below for several feet as she dragged almost half of the thing’s body weight along with her, the oversized, blunted bdes digging into the ground and eventually dragging her to a stop.

  Her head fell backwards into the cool dirt below her, eye closing as she panted loudly, blood pooling around her shattered limbs and staining the sod, a smugly satisfied grin pstered across her features.

  The warm sunlight beating down on her eyelid was blocked out as she rested in the afterglow, cracking her good eye open to see Gwyn standing overtop her once more, already being yanked back up to her feet, her left hand and forearm decidedly remaining on the ground below as the other girl lifted her battered corpse up yet again.

  “Can’t you go five minutes without d-dismembering yourself…?”

  “Well shit, that doesn’t sound nearly as fun, does it?”

  Alice waggled her shoulders, letting her jacket fall off of her as she spoke, still clearly winded as she bit back the pain from most of her body having been broken to some degree in the st few minutes, scooping up her detached limb with a foot before passing it up to her other hand, sticking it against the stump it left behind until the meat all affixed itself back together again.

  “At l-least wait till we deal with all the… t-the…”

  Gwyn’s voice trailed off as she looked around at the remainder of the battlefield they’d arrived to te, prompting Alice to pan her own gaze around them, having not given the pce a good look since they’d first arrived.

  It wasn’t particurly difficult to figure out what had thrown her off.

  The rest of the swarming mechanical mantises filling the park around them had fully stopped in their tracks, frozen in pce as their lifeless eyes fixed on the duo standing over the twisted and broken framework of one of their own, not a single one of them moving in to accost the pair of intruders as they watched silently.

  A noise scratched at Alice’s eardrums as she watched them back, high pitched like a dog whistle as it emitted from every operable one of them at once, some kind of shared, nearly-silent arm ringing out.

  It didn’t take very long for the uncomfortable stalemate to be broken however, rapid stomping echoing from around a distant corner as a familiarly-beheaded bug cmbered back into view once more, sensors following whatever signal the others were outputting for ck of a way to see anything themselves.

  And following after them came an even more familiar figure, storming into view behind them like a concerned parent trailing along after their child, bundled mechanical tendrils cwing and scraping up chunks of road below her as she hunted after them.

  “Now who the hell thinks they just get to keep breaking my precious little Guar--”

  Purple eyes sitting underneath shoved-up goggles and a mess of unkempt blonde hair jerked sideways as the woman scanned the ground around the newly-rounded corner, already hearing the tracking arms from the rest of the injured units squad bring in her ears.

  Those eyes almost immediately locked with the singur good eye of the one responsible, currently standing next to another of her precious and wholly dismantled Guardolls, bile already bubbling up from the back of her throat as she recognized her, recognition clicking in Alice’s mind not long after.

  “You…!”

  “You.”

  Gwyn took a fair bit longer to recall the jellyfish-shaped woman across from them both, her own eyes widening as the familiar features finally registered for her, mouth opening as if you acknowledge she’d recognized them as well.

  By that time, however, neither one of the reunited rivals was paying any mind to anything else now, both of them already rushing hellbent and headlong at one another, Mari Prosmek already burning up inside as charged Alice down like without even a millisecond’s hesitation.