The commander's sneer warped beneath the segmented visor, amplified by his helmet speaker. Tevos kept his weight centered on his heels, schooling his face into flat boredom. Zala drew back into a cat-low stance, her irises narrowing to slit-thin bands. The discharge crackling around her deactivated hilt flared into an azure halo. “You talk too much,” she bit out, her voice low, dangerous. “Just stating facts, Aegis dog.” The officer gestured with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “Clear them out. Priority one is the anomaly. The traitor comes along for the ride.” Four more figures, lean and quick, dropped from above. They fanned out in matched paces, closing an iron arc. Tevos calculated the odds. He had volume, but these were disciplined shock-troopers, their power-cells giving off low-grade magnetic whines that set the hairs on his forearms on end. [Primal Need: To build. To consume. To shelter.] Tevos felt the familiar thrum of his swarm, a thousand eager whispers in his skull. “Shelter, then,” Tevos muttered, tracking the advancing squad. He marked the exposed swivel-couplings in their ceramite suits, the pinned gauntlet hinges, the mesh collars beneath their helms. Structural seams. Always structural seams. “Zala,” he called over the metallic racket of the bazaar, “aim for the seam lines!” She didn’t answer, already lunging. Her longsword ignited with an azure hiss, settling into an even drone. She took the first two raiders front-on in a sequence of clean parries and thrusts. Displaced heat rippled along the path of every swing, tracing faint blue arcs. Tevos cracked his palms together. Hundreds of rust-eaters detached from the chassis of the workbench behind him, spilling onto the grating in an ochre slurry. The soldiers brought up their kinetic bucklers to deflect a frontal ram. But Tevos had other plans. “Hinges, pack! Get inside the hinges!” They obeyed. Breaking short of the force barriers, the horde split and climbed along the boot plates, finding purchase on articulated plating. Mandibles sheared into rivets with caustic fluid. Strained whine rose from servo motors as ceramite pitted and flaked. A raider grunted, his left arm locking rigid at ninety degrees. Zala seized the gap. Her edge took the trapped soldier through his exposed bicep. He hit the deck with a muffled wheeze. “Acceptable, scavenger,” Zala said between teeth, booting another shock-trooper back. “Keep them fouled!” Coordination. Unfamiliar, but functional. Tevos leaned on his mental link, driving the swarm to bore deeper into load-bearing seams. A knee-casing stripped out under the gnawing horde, dumping a second fighter forward; Zala met his temple with the heel of her boot, dropping him cold. The commander barked over his horn: “Crossfire! Drop the insect handler!” Three cobalt plasma slugs arced toward Tevos. He spotted the muzzle flashes instantly, but his flank was open and his main clusters were buried in enemy plate thirty feet away. Not enough seconds remained to pull them back into an iron wall. “Down!” Zala shouted, bound up with a broad-shouldered guard wielding a shock-mace. Tevos threw his shoulder forward into the flagstones. He whistled the scavenged stragglers across the floor, drawing floor plates and discarded bolts into a jagged cluster. A rough barricade of warped alloy and interlocking carapace locked together inches from his forehead. The superheated slugs cracked into the crude bulwark. Concussive pressure slammed through Tevos’s ribcage, singeing his bangs. The barrier groaned as slag dripped from the impacts. A glowing sliver sliced his jawline, leaving a blistered notch. He hauled himself back, spitting copper and sulfur. The ricochet angles had favored him. One blast had drilled the floor tiles behind him; the second had scorched across the mace-wielder's forearm. The fighter bellowed as severed conduits sputtered bright arcs across his grip. Zala registered the gap. Her gaze flicked past Tevos—his tunic smoking, cheeks blackened with soot—and locked onto his posture. Her features relaxed into an unsettled stillness. “Adequate,” she muttered, steadying her balance. The mace fighter lunged with his off-hand, pulling a vibro-dagger. Zala spun through his guard, the tip of her steel taking him clean across the throat. He collapsed without a word, and she was already pivoting toward the survivors. Her edge whipped through two defensive blocks. With each collision, a spray of azure discharge bled into the air from the guild runework. The rust-eaters closest to her boots agitated violently, their mandibles chittering as they turned toward the glowing fallout. [Primal Need: To consume. To grow. To replicate.] The interface text aligned with what he saw. They fed on scrap, but the runes were releasing raw, unrefined current. An idea, wild and audacious, sparked in his mind. “Zala! Your blade! Can it… can it share?” She plunged her sword into an assassin’s chest, then yanked it free, the blade humming. “Share what, you idiot?!” “The discharge on your edge! Tap them with the flat!” Tevos hollered, pointing toward the cluster on the floor. Zala dragged the broad flat of her sword across the cluster crawling over an enemy's shin. Blue static discharged into their carapaces. None retreated. Their exoskeletons sparked, their legs blurred into frantic motion, and the plate below them liquefied into slag twice as fast. [Swarm Amplification: Initiated. Power Source: ‘Aegis-Forged Relic Blade’ detected. Enhanced Rust Consumption Rate: +300%.] Tevos flashed a grin. “It drinks it! Keep stroking them, let's turn these scrap-heaps inside out!” Zala adapted instantly. She shortened her lunges, deflecting strikes and dragging her blade's spine across clusters of the crawling swarm. The bugs flared with brilliant cobalt light, disintegrating hinges, burning through gaskets, and tearing harnesses off the remaining raiders. The hall filled with the shriek of corroding plate. The commander backpedaled toward a rappel cable, but Tevos willed his charged bugs onto the man's shins, fusing his boots directly to the structural iron beneath. “This ends nothing!” the officer snarled, wrenching at his anchored legs. “The Hand will butcher you both!” Zala closed the distance, her hilt vibrating quietly. She set the steel against his collar joint, reached up, and snapped the exterior transmitter off his cowl. “It ends for you.” She swung the weighted pommel into the side of his helmet. The officer folded into the floor debris. The surviving squad member discarded his sidearm and backed against a girder, hands flat against the iron. Around them, the stalls sat abandoned, coated in fine metal ash. The bugs nestled into the melted plating, their abdomens faintly luminescent. Silence settled over the concourse, save for a sputtering capacitor and the click of Zala switching off her hilt. She turned toward Tevos, brushing soot from her cheekbone. “That was... unexpected,” she admitted. Tevos wiped grease from his chin. “Told you the little diggers had utility. And your battery-stick has decent voltage when it’s pointed outward.” Zala’s mouth curved slightly at the corner. She held his stare without the usual contempt, her stance relaxing. A pale blue interface box flickered into Tevos's sightline, bearing text he had never encountered before. [Party Request from Zala. Accept/Decline?]

Symbiosis