This monster was more muscle than machine. Like the dragon engines of the first sphere, its flesh was living metal. Unlike them, the thousand-legged giant millipede was too ferocious a predator to have free run of the first sphere. Its fang-studded mouth reared into the air.
Kristina ducked beneath the striking head. The titanium toes of her engine cracked into the back of the great beast. A quick spell made those toes razor sharp. Feet slid between folding plates of metal. With similarly honed fingers, Kristina crouched and grabbed handholds. She heaved, ripping open the back of the monster. Sparks spewed from ruptured wires. Pneumatic muscles groaned as she yanked again. Steel cables separated beneath the millipede's plates. Cords lashed.
Kristina was dauntless. She plunged her hands deeper. Titanic fingers grasped adjacent ribs along the millipede's torso. Spells heightened the tensile strength of her own gears. She pulled. With a pop and an acrid gray cloud of smoke, the nerve center of the beast separated. Severed halves of the monster flopped in biomechanical agony. Kristina continued her grim work until she had completely ripped it in two.
The joints of her suit steamed with exertion. Kristina rose triumphantly in the breach of the worm.
Commodore Guff arrived, his titan engine striking a dignified pose. Through a haze of smoke, he peered out of the pilot capsule and stared appreciatively at Kristina's handiwork.
By Belinus! You've got a way with bugs. We'd had critters like that back when I was a kid, and we ripped 'em in half too, but just to watch 'em grow a new mouth on both ends-
Kristina was too slow-they all were too slow. Both new mouths lunged for her engine. It seemed Yawgmoth had known the signature defense of living millipedes. The first mouth bit straight through Kristina's pilot bulb. Glass shattered and metal sheered. The bulb crushed like an egg. The second fastened onto the torso of her engine. In dynamic opposition, the two mouths ripped the head away from the body.
Had she 'walked? Had she 'walked? came Taysir's anxious thoughts.
With an animal shriek, Szat hurled himself between the two halves of the beast. He had learned from Kristina's mistake. You couldn't tear this beast apart. You had to kill it from the inside out.
Swallowing, one mouth lunged for Szat. He caught its jaws and roared, pouring fire down the metal throat. While the flame went from red-hot to white-hot, Szat also sent a cloud of corruption down the beast's gullet. Millipede teeth wept like candles. Metallic flesh melted from metallic bones. Neural networks turned to sparking goo. Szat's attack killed the brain of the thing. It went limp, settling like a long, deflated balloon.
Hurling the dead creature down, Szat whirled to attack the other millipede at his back.
He breathed fire. He poured out corruption.
But it wasn't the other half of the millipede that he slew. It was already dead, smoldering in blackness beneath the angry figure of Kristina. She had planeswalked away from her titan engine just as it was dismantled. Reappearing aback the second beast, she marshaled her full arsenal of planeswalking spells. The monster lay in dead runnels beneath her, but every last spell was gone from the woman. Battling the caustic air all around her, she had no time to 'walk again.
Szat's firestorm dismantled her. Skin, skull, and brain- brain was the thing, whether with a millipede or a planeswalker. If she couldn't think, she couldn't step away from danger, couldn't reassemble a new body. She was gone. Obliterated. An eternity over in an instant.
Szat stood gaping while another beast attacked. This was no Phyrexian but a more deadly mechanism-Taysir, onetime love of Kristina. He fell like a mountain on his fellow titan, hurling him to the scrap heap and landing on top.
You careless bastard! You damned vicious monster!
Taysir was proving himself little better, furiously battering the titan engine of his foe. It was his mistake. Szat was not helpless like Kristina.
Flipping over, Szat hurled Taysir's titan off him. She killed herself. She got in my way.
Both titans were knocked back by a sudden presence between them-Urza Planeswalker in the largest, most powerful engine of all. Hold, both of you. Have you forgotten our mission?
Taysir's suit flashed in rage. Have you forgotten Kristina?
Szat sneered. Urza always forgets the dead.
You're implicated in this, Urza. You're the one who insisted on bringing this… this… murdering monster. Maybe you needed somebody else who would love this place, Taysir roared.
Urza stared from his pilot bulb with bald incomprehension. What are you talking about?
Oh, don't kid yourself, Urza. You love Phyrexia like a man loves a woman. You love her lines. You love her machines. You love the perfection of design through constant war. You don't want to blow up this place. You want to take it as your own!
Enough! Urza shouted. Enough! This was an accident. It shows how vulnerable we all are without our titan suits. Keep them on. In the meantime, I will prove to you what little love I have for this world. On! On to the stone-chargers.
The three had been so immersed in their argument that they hadn't realized the other five had fought on toward the munitions factory. Bo Levar and Commodore Guff led the charge.
Have you seen this one? Bo Levar asked as new defenders rose in a swarm about him. The mechanisms had the configuration of tadpoles, though instead of tails they had single lashing wings. Their main body consisted of gnashing teeth. Bo Levar easily grabbed the wing of the first creature and swung it in an arc before him. The titan engine's glove glowed with a blue radiance that proliferated out across the body of the defender. It seemed to draw the other defenders magnetically inward. They con-verged around the first beast. The chattering jaws chewed each other to shreds of metal. Twenty in one blow.
I'll be jiggered, said Commodore Guff in genuine amazement. Combining martial sciences with magical ones…
The wave of the future, Bo Levar said. You watch. Once this business is done, this kind of stuff will be huge.
Let me have a go, the commodore replied. He grappled a huge, spidery construct that rose in his path. Various colors of magic flashed from the titan and raced along the rodlike legs of the beast. The first spell managed to produce an odd odor, the second to cover the spider in rampant ivy, and the third to send it floating away toward the smoggy ceiling of the sphere. Ah, perfect, little happy to write about that one.
As Bo Levar and Commodore Guff blazed the trail forward, the other titans loped afterward, Urza last of all.
Taysir had sounded so like Barrin. The mage master had once joked that the only difference between Urza and Yawgmoth was a four-thousand-year head start. Such comments were not helpful, and Barrin had been full of them.
Taysir and Szat had been wrong. Urza didn't forget the dead. Every day since he'd killed his brother Mishra-it was a mercy killing, yes-Urza remembered him. He remembered Xantcha and Ratepe, who had been Mishra for him and had helped him reclaim his mind. He remembered the students and scholars of the first Tolaria and of New Tolaria. Most of all, though, he remembered Barrin. That was a loss Urza would never recover from. Barrin, Xantcha, Mishra-they had all become a single beloved other lost for all time. Urza remembered all too well.
His dark reverie was broken by a bright vision. He and his team had reached the ammunitions factory. Before them, row on glorious, gleaming row, stretched thousands of stone-charger shells.