Mira didn’t move for a long time after she said it.

The other ten didn’t move either.

Somewhere down on the plain, a construct started walking, then another, and then a third. The wind didn’t carry up here. The valley was very quiet around them. Nine minutes for one construct, and there were maybe a thousand down there.

Everyone reached the same conclusion.

Three hundred meters behind them lay the body of the support who hadn’t reacted in time, where the first construct had gone through her arm. Her name never came up, but everyone knew the body was there.

Another supporter said it without raising her voice. "We can’t kill our way through that."

There wasn’t an argument.

...

Raze spoke first.

"Then we stop fighting everything."

He pointed at the horizon. Mira followed the line of his finger. A fortress sat against the far edge of the valley, dim through the dust. The dungeon’s center.

"We go straight there. We don’t engage in anything we don’t have to."

Mira thought about it. Elden was already thinking about it.

The supporter who had spoken before spoke again.

"Half of us die before we get halfway."

Silence.

Raze glanced back toward where the support hunter had died, and then he looked away. He didn’t argue, but a month ago, he would have.

He nodded once instead. "Yeah," he said.

That was it.

A hand went up at the back of the group. It was a short woman with a Titan Forge sigil on her shoulder. Mira recognized her immediately. The Metal Builder from the entry tests.

"This might be stupid," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

"Why don’t we hide inside them?"

Mira frowned. "Inside the constructs?"

"They’re hollow. I checked when Elden cut the channels. There’s room. The pieces stay together if I reconnect them correctly. Enough for a person to stand inside and walk."

Elden’s head turned toward the scout’s body fifty meters back. "Can you make the pieces move with you?"

"Probably. Not well. Not fast. Enough to walk."

Raze said, "Show us."

...

Raze tried it first.

He didn’t ask. He walked over to the scout’s remains and stood there until Ava caught up. She turned a few pieces over and pointed at the chest cavity. "In there."

Raze stepped in.

She worked fast. She didn’t put the construct back together. She put it back together enough. The chest closed most of the way. The legs reconnected at the joints. The arms hung where they had to hang.

"Try a step."

The bronze leg moved with Raze inside it. Stiff. Slow. It moved.

"Another."

He took another, and then four more. Then he walked across the ridge in the body of the thing that had nearly killed them an hour ago.

He took six more steps across the ridge, and the three constructs on the plain that were close enough to have seen him all turned their smooth, featureless heads toward him at the same moment. Raze walked, and they watched, and after ten seconds, they returned to going wherever they had been going before he arrived in their field of attention, apparently satisfied with what they had seen.

He came out of the bronze slowly, the way you handle something fragile that you are not yet finished using, and looked at the eleven people watching him from the ridge.

"Yeah," he said. "We can do this."

"Told you it wasn’t stupid." Ava said as she puffed her chest out and lifted her chin.

Mira laughed. "You were right."

...

Sora was leaning forward with her face an inch from her monitor.

"No."

Her chat was running faster than it ever had.

"No way."

She looked at her camera. "They’re going to walk through the whole thing dressed as the dungeon."

In the Coordination Building, Mayor Ko smiled for the first time in three days. He didn’t say anything to the analysts around him. He wrote something in his notebook and went back to watching.

In Kai’s apartment, Leo turned to his sister.

"That’s cheating."

Mina said, "I think that’s called being smart."

At the Hollow Sky staging area, Kai and Lily watched the same feed. Behind them, Sera grinned. "Not a bad idea."

"I never would have thought of that," Kai said with his lips twitching.

"That’s because you’re normal," Sera said with a smile, making Kai chuckle.

"It’s a good idea. The question is, will it last?" Lily nodded.

...

It took the Metal Builder an hour to get all eleven of them into hollow constructs. The first construct collapsed after three steps.

The second lost an arm.

The third finally stayed together.

Although some looked better than others.

Raze’s was the most intact. Mira’s left arm did not fit cleanly into the construct she ended up in, and she could feel the brace digging into the bronze. Elden’s was small, and he had to walk hunched. The Metal Builder went in last because the construct she had been working from was the one she had figured out.

They walked down off the ridge.

The plain swallowed them.

Up close, the valley felt endless. Siege engines the size of office buildings lay sideways in the dust. Old weapons stuck up out of the ground at strange angles. The constructs walking nearest to them had paths they kept, slow circles or wide arcs. None of those paths intersected the team’s.

Mira walked her bronze body through the field and looked at the others as she passed.

A lot of them were damaged.

Long cuts running across torsos. Holes punched out of plates by something with claws. One of the construct corpses Mira walked past had been opened down the middle by something the size of a building. Whatever had done that was far beyond anything standing in this valley.

Mira kept the thought to herself.

...

The outer walls had been built for an army, but there was no army there now. The gates stood open. The team, in their disguised bronze bodies, walked through into a wide stone courtyard that ran up to a raised platform.

The thing on the platform was not a centaur.

It sat in the middle of the platform without moving. It looked human at first, but then the longer Mira stared, the less human it became. It was longer in every direction than a person should be, with a face smoothed flat the same way the constructs’ heads were smoothed.

Mira read the system label over its head.

[Bronze Throne Keeper.]

[Level 49.]

She felt the others see it at the same moment. It was the first level any of them had read inside Titan Grave.

Around the platform, two dozen constructs stood in a wide ring.

Raze said, very quietly, "It doesn’t fight."

He said it because the Keeper had not moved when they came in. Had not looked up. Had not shifted weight. The constructs around it had, all of them at once, their bronze plate faces turning to track the team.

The Keeper sat there as if the outcome had already been decided.

"Kill it," Mira said. "They all stop."

Elden nodded. "Yeah."

...

She and Elden put the plan together while they crossed the last hundred meters.

Mira had been watching the constructs since the ridge. They reacted to the threat. Anything loud pulled them. Multiple loud things at once split them.

Elden had been watching the Keeper. It did not move. If they cleared a path to it, the path stayed clear.

They needed to be loud and clear. They needed someone fast enough to reach the Keeper before the loud, and the clear closed back up.

Raze said, "I’ll go."

Of course, he would.

They stepped out of their constructs at the edge of the courtyard, and the ring reacted immediately. Two dozen bronze heads all turned toward them at once, and the casters opened before anything else could happen.

They all unleashed fire and lightning and ice into the courtyard air all at once, not to kill anything but to be loud enough and bright enough that the constructs had somewhere else to look,

Most of the ring moved toward the noise while another hunter brought a wall up around the casters. And they kept going behind it, throwing everything they had into the air and holding the constructs’ attention for as long as the wall could last. The constructs hit the wall, and the wall held for the time it had been built to hold.

That was enough.

Another hunter layered additional armor over Raze in a single pass. And he drew the Tyrant Edge, which glowed with a crimson light. Mira planted her feet and released everything stored in the Ironheart Harness at once. The attack swept through multiple constructs and drew their attention to her.

Raze left the ground moving faster than anything his size should. He flew over the platform railing with room to spare while Elden’s Sevenfold Arc Lens split one bolt into seven, and each one found a construct still standing near the throne and cracked them at the joints and locked them in place.

Just as Raze landed on the platform.

The Keeper did not move.

Raze swung.

The first cut hit something invisible and the shield only became visible when it shattered. The Keeper trembled before shattering into pieces, all of its bronze parts scattering to the side.

Everything stopped.

The constructs around the barrier wall stopped. The ones turning toward Raze stopped. The constructs out in the valley stopped too. Mira couldn’t see the valley from here. But the constant vibration under her feet had vanished.

The dust kept falling, and nothing else moved.

[Titan Grave Cleared.]

[Mythal City: First Mythical Clear.]

[Level Increase 52 to 54]

Nobody cheered first. Then someone did, and then the rest began joining in. Across the city, every emergency broadcast switched at the same time.

Raze stood on the platform.

He flexed his right hand, but it didn’t close. He tried again. The fingers got most of the way and stopped. There was a tremor down the inside of his forearm that had not been there before the third cut. He held the sword in his left hand because his right hand could not hold it.

Elden and Mira saw it too, but neither said anything. Raze put his hand down at his side and flexed it again, low, where the others would not see.

The tremor was still there.

The cheering drowned it out.