A deep droning sound from above and to starboard alerted me to the attack, giving me just enough time to dive forward. Hot air and shrapnel flew over my back mere seconds after I hit the deck, following a sound that was almost identical to an arquebus shot, but louder. I got carefully back to my feet and turned to examine the damage. The explosion tore a hole in the Swift’s forecastle deck, just half a meter to the port of the ship’s wheel, revealing the galley just below.

“I really wish we knew where these things come from,” I grumbled.

“Well, we’re probably headed the right way to find out,” Marjory answered. “They’re attacking a lot more often now than they did this morning.”

My gunner was, for a change, standing next to me on the Swift’s bow instead of in her customary station at the stern mounted steam cannon. Our current enemies were too fast to hit with the heavier version of the weapon, and she’d been protecting me with her original, backpack cannon instead.

To varying degrees of success. Between the dwarf and my Archers, my protectors had been taking out about half of the attackers before they could kamikaze on us, and the droning sound accompanying their flight had been helping me to avoid being hit by the rest.

The Swift was not so fortunate, however, and I’d long since lost count of the number of hits my ship had suffered. Fortunately for all of us, the attacks were still far enough apart from each other that the Shape could restore herself between them.

The two of us and my Shapes were the only ones on deck at the moment. Mable and Doreen had both retreated into the hold when it became apparent that the only thing they were contributing on deck was to provide more targets for the flying bombs.

We were three weeks out of the flying island, and fairly deep into the wilds. Over the past week or so, the fertile grasslands near the kingdom border had given way to dark grey, nearly black rocks and the relatively flat terrain was slowly transitioning into hills, which had been getting steadily higher since we entered the area. According to Marjory, who’d passed this way before on the way to the kingdom, these hills weren’t part of the mountain range the dwarves called home, and we still had at least three more weeks of sailing to reach her people.

Sailing had been remarkably smooth until a day ago, when the first of our new tormentors smashed into my Sailor. The Shape, which had been piloting the Swift at the time, had been blown apart and dissipated instantly, and the rest of us had instantly braced for further attacks.

Attacks which utterly failed to manifest for the following two hours. We’d just about managed to relax, with the reformed Sailor back at the wheel, when my Longbowman spotted a black, fist-sized beetle flying towards us. A single arrow had been enough to set off the thing’s explosion, far enough away from the Swift to be completely harmless, but the second insect’s appearance had been enough to let us know that the first wasn’t an isolated incident.

Since those first two attacks, the insects, which I’d named ‘Blast Beetle’ (overruling Marjory, who’d suggested ‘Blasted Bugs’), had been attacking us in an increasing frequency.

“These things make absolutely no sense,” I complained, getting back to the wheel to keep the Swift on course. “I mean, they blow themselves up attacking us. Even if they succeed at hitting one of us instead of the Shapes, they’re still dead afterwards.”

“Maybe they’re like Bees?” Marjory shrugged. “Bees kill themselves when they attack you, but they do it to defend the hive.”

“Beetles aren’t really hive insects though. They tend to be solitary, don’t they?”

“Sure, but you never know what Warping will do to a creature. You can’t expect a giant bug to be the same as a regular one.”

“Those giant ants we fought were just like regular ants,” I shook my head in exasperation. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”

“You’re just upset that they’re blowing themselves up so you can’t get any vim from them.”

“That’s… Yeah, that’s at least part of it,” I admitted. “But I still think they don’t make any sense.”

Marjory, who’d been scanning the skies around us in search of more bugs, moved suddenly to raise her cannon and fired a quick shot at something behind me.

“Blast it!” Marjory swore over the distant sound of another exploding beetle

“The Archers were faster than you again?” I asked the grumbling dwarf.

“It’s not a fair contest!” she protested. “There are four of them!”

“I’d tell them to stand down and let you have fun skeet shooting, but I’d really prefer it if less of those things reach the Swift. Especially now that they’re coming faster than the Ship can reform.”

Despite her grumbling, Marjory had a better record at shooting down the Blast Beetles than any of my Shapes, and I estimated that about a third of the explosive bugs had fallen to her shots.

***

The pattern repeated itself for the next couple of hours, with the beetles striking closer and closer together, until they were coming about five minutes apart from each other. The Swift was starting to look battered from the bugs we couldn’t intercept, and I’d lost a couple of the Deckhands to direct hits before things finally took a turn for the better.

“Got you!” I cried as my Longbowman took down another beetle, further away from the Ship than we’d ever managed before.

“How’d you do that?” Marjory wondered. “I couldn’t even see that one yet!”

“My Hawk saw it leave a cave not far from here, and kept watch until it was in range.”

“Cheater.”

“Guilty as charged,” I admitted. “But now that we know where they’re coming from…”

“We’re going to charge in and kill the beetle queen?” Marjory finished for me.

“Assuming there is one, yes.”

It took an extra half an hour to reach the cave, but with the Hawks keeping watch and the entrance, we could shoot the beetles long before they could reach us, and by the time we landed in front of it, the Swift was looking almost as good as new.

“Do you have to go in there?” Mable asked in obvious distaste.

With the cave mouth in sight and all of my Archers ready to shoot anything that tried to come out, we felt safe enough to get everyone back on deck and discuss our plans.

“This is what I do for a living,” I answered.

“But you aren’t out here on your own looking for artifacts,” Doreen argued. “We’re on a mission to get the dwarves to help us against the people who destroyed Gerald’s Rest and Warped us.”

“We are. But even if the dwarves agree to help us, we still need more power. We’re up against a Shaper who’s much stronger than I am, and I’ll need to rank up my Shapes before we can face them. And this looks like the best source of vim we’ve come across since we left the island.”

“Might even have another elemental stone, like the queen ant had,” Marjory added.

“Fine. Just… Be careful in there, OK?” Mable asked, hugging herself and looking miserable.

I went over and took the former serving girl in my arms, hugging her shaking form until I felt her start to calm down.

“I’ll be as careful as possible,” I promised.

Doreen opted to go into the cave with us, which left Mable alone on the Swift. There wasn’t really a need to leave any Shapes for her protection, since we were bottling up the beetles’ exit, and it looked like the bugs have kept anything larger than a rabbit from living near their home, but I still decided to leave two Deckhands with her, so that in case of the rest of us dying, she’d have enough of a skeleton crew to stumble back to the kingdom without us. A precaution that, unfortunately, did nothing to calm her down.

The two Deckhands we took with us, as the most expendable of my Shapes, went in first, followed by the Marine and Sailor. After the melee Shapes were my Archers and Longbowman, with Marjory, Doreen and I at the rear.

The cave mouth was made of the same black rock we’d grown used to, and while the cave didn’t look man made, it was also unlike any natural cave I’d ever seen. Rugged edges and cracks, only barely smoothed by the passage of time, ran every which way without any pattern that I could ascribe to the work of water, beasts or people. Fallen stones littered the floor, dooming any attempt at stealth to instant failure.

“This place was blasted open,” Marjory said. The dwarf had been inspecting the walls even more closely than I was, and had apparently seen more in their shape that I could make out. “But I don’t see any remains of the bombs used to do it.”

“Would you expect to?” questioned the dwarf. “Whatever did this must have been years, if not decades ago.”

“Sure. But the debris is still on the ground. The larger rocks have been removed, but nobody’d cleaned the cave up. I’d at least expect to see some metallic remain from the bomb casings.”

“It could have been the beetles that did it,” Doreen suggested. “We haven’t seen any remains from those things when they blow up, right?”

“We haven’t,” I agreed, “but that makes even less sense than the attacks on us. I can maybe see a hive insect sacrificing itself to protect the hive, but blowing itself apart to dig a cave? Even Warped creatures would just go look for somewhere else to lair.”

“Well, we won’t find any answers standing around here.”

“True enough,” I agreed, and sent the Deckhands to lead the way further into the cave.

We’d gone maybe twenty meters into the cave when the first sign of resistance showed up. We were still close enough to the cave’s mouth that we had enough light to see by, but the small black beetles were a lot harder to notice than they were with the sky as a backdrop. By the time I head the now familiar drone of the bugs’ wings, it was already practically on top of my Deckhands, and had blown itself up on the foremost pair of Shapes.

The Deckhands were, of course, a far softer target than the Swift. And the confines of the cave amplified the blast enough that the beetle took out both Shapes at once, leaving with half of our melee force down.

As soon as we heard the blast, we braced for a follow up attack. I had the Marine back up a little so that the next beetle wouldn’t be able to take it out along with the Sailor, which I’d sent a little bit forward. Long seconds went by, but after further attacks continued to fail to manifest, we started to move back forward.

The cave tunneled down directly into the hill, completely unchanged. We moved forward slowly, taking extreme care not to miss any hidden hole from which a beetle could attack the three of us directly. They hadn’t shown any inclination to anything other than blow themselves up at the first available target, but it still wasn’t worth taking the chance that they’d change tactics.

The next beetle attacked five minutes after its predecessor. The same brief drone, and the explosion had taken out my Sailor.

I called a brief halt after the attack, and ordered one of my Archers to take point.

“What are you doing?” Marjory asked once we were back in motion.

“We can’t stop the beetles from taking out the foremost Shape,” I explained. “But they’re only attacking once every five minutes or so. If I let them take out a tier I Shape, it’ll reform in half an hour. But if it takes out the tier IIs, they’ll take closer to an hour to reform.

“With five tier I Shapes, we’ll still need to sacrifice a tier II every half hour cycle, but the beetles won’t be able to hurt any of us, and we’ll have at least one of the tier IIs with us at any time. I’ll probably keep the Marine alive, since the ranged Shapes aren’t very useful in here.”

“And you’re just assuming they’ll keep to a single attack every five minutes?”

“Yeah. These things don’t act like any animal I’ve ever heard of, and I don’t think they’re actually Warped. They attack regularly enough that they almost have to be Shapes, and whoever is behind them is just sending one out as soon as it reforms. It would also explain why they don’t give out any vim when they die, and why there’s nothing left over when they explode.”

“That sounds like a remarkably stupid Shaper though, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody ever said Shapers have to be smart. I mean, you can say the same thing about walking into a cave full of exploding beetles, right?”

That last comment got a chuckle from my companions, and we started back into the cave. The pattern held true for two more attacks, and I was down to the Marine, the Longbowman and one Archer. The first two Deckhands were still fifteen minutes from reforming, and I’d been planning to sacrifice the Longbowman after the final Archer, which would give them time enough to reform before another beetle appeared.

The next beetle, however, wasn’t alone.

It flew in and attacked the Archer just like the previous ones, but as soon as my Shape dissipated, there was a soft pufft! sound from further in front of us, and the Marine, which was next in line, was sprayed by a swarm of sharp needles. We’d moved the torch from the first Shape in our formation to the second, so it would stay up after the beetle attacks, and the light reached far enough to let us see a large beetle, about half a meter tall, two meters long and a meter wide. It had a large horn on its head, similar to a three horned rhinoceros beetle, and the same glossy black armor as the smaller Blast Beetles.

The huge insect’s forward set of wings was open, but instead of the expected set of flight wings under it, it had a large muzzle on each side, which must have been the sources of the needle attack. As we watched, the beetle folded its wings and charged at us.

We’d been caught unprepared by the new enemy, but all three of us were enough on edge that by the time it started attacking, we were ready for it.

The Longbowman fired first, its arrow glancing against the beetle’s armor harmlessly. My own crossbow wasn’t any better, and I’d left the arquebus, for which I was nearly out of ammunition anyway, on the Swift. Marjory’s cannon had a bigger impact than the arrows, crunching the bug’s armor and slowing it down enough that the Marine could grab onto the horn and stop its charge.

This left us in something of an impasse. Doreen’s claws scored shallow scratches in the bug’s chitinous armor, and at point blank range our arrows stuck into it rather than bounce off, but we still couldn’t do much damage to the beetle. The bug, too, was unable to hurt us while restrained by the Marine. We could slowly wear it down, especially with the dwarven steam cannon, but I feared that the next Blast Beetle would arrive before we could do enough damage.

What I didn’t count on, however, was the bugs’ strange behavior. A normal animal, when held by the horns, would try to struggle. Maybe back away, or try to kick. Instead, the beetle raised its wings, probably in preparation for another needle spray.

It probably would have worked if the beetle was facing just the Marine, since the Marine was as caught by the beetle as the beetle was caught by it. And while it survived the first swarm of needles, it was still not in great shape, and another swarm at such close range would certainly be enough to finish it off.

But with the rest of us surrounding it, exposing the beetle’s soft interior was definitely not a good idea. Arrows which could barely scratch the hard armor were more than enough to pierce the flesh underneath, and Marjory’s cannon smashed one of the needle muzzles as soon as it started to rise.

It was Doreen, however, who did the most damage. She’d spent almost every waking hour since being Warped on getting used to her new body, and as soon as the beetle exposed its soft interior, the dragon girl jumped on it, claws bare.

The beetle must have realized its error almost as soon as it made it, but it was still far too late. By the time it’d started to close its wings back up, it had already taken far too much damage. The giant insect started to fall apart, and within seconds there was no sign of it ever existing.

Doreen, who’d been standing on the bug and attacking it, fell down to the ground.

“What in the Shattering was that?”

“Definitely a Shape,” I said, offering her a hand to help her up. She grasped my offered hand and pulled herself up, rubbing her tail, which must have taken the brunt of her weight when she fell.

“I really hope whatever we find in here is worth it,” she grumbled.

We were ready for the second bug, which we’ve named Needle Beetle. We had to sacrifice the Longbowman to the Blast Beetle’s attack, but the ranged Shapes have proven less than useful in this cave, and I didn’t think the loss would have to big an impact on us. And after that fight, the 2 Deckhands we’d lost first had reformed.

The third Needle Beetle came without its accompanying blasted bug, and with the Deckhands holding it off, the Marine was free to attack. That Beetle didn’t even survive long enough to try and expose its needle shooters for another attack.

“This seems to be getting easier as we go along,” Doreen commented once the enemy Shape had dissipated.

“Actually,” I answered, “it’s somewhat concerning. If our enemy is keeping the Blast Beetles close now, we’re likely to be facing a group of them later on.”

“Not much we can do about it though,” Marjory shrugged. “It’s not like we’re going to back out now.”

The next Beetle only appeared a quarter of an hour later, and was again alone.

“I can’t possibly believe that a Shaper would be that stupid,” Marjory said after the short fight. “This thing is sending its Shapes at us as soon as they reform, without any thought to tactics. It’s the kind of behavior I’d expect from a machine, not from something that can actually think.”

“I was thinking something similar,” I agreed. “Some sort of intact Old-world vim based machine would certainly explain it. But I’ve never heard of one that still works after all this time.”

“I just hope we don’t have to destroy it to get it to stop. An intact Old-world machine would be worth a fortune.”

“Is this really the time to think about fortunes?” Doreen asked the dwarf. “We’ve got a war to fight, against an enemy we don’t even know yet.”

“Wars are expensive affairs,” the gunner replied. “Even with my peoples’ support, we’ll need the gold for equipment and supplies.”

We’d kept walking as we talked, but all three of us fell silent when the cave itself changed around us. The rough-hewn walls, which still looked like they were formed by small explosions, ended abruptly. A door made of whitesteel had been blown open at some point, and now lay bent out of shape on the ground, fragments of worked stone that had once been a wall scattered around it. The room beyond was hidden in pitch darkness, but I could tell from the echoes of our steps that it was far bigger than the tunnel we’d been walking in.

I sent the Deckhands in first, bearing torches, figuring that in the larger room the Archers might be more useful than they’d been in the tunnel. As soon as they’d crossed the threshold, we could all hear the now familiar pufft! of the beetles’ needles, though this one sounded louder than before. I’d been ready for an attack, however, and each of the Deckhands broke in a different direction as soon as they entered the room.

They still caught the edges of the needle spray, but it appeared that the needles were sprayed from further away than we were used for, and the Deckhands were still functional enough to keep running inside.

With the help of the torchlight, we could finally see into the room. It must have been a hundred meters on each side, but it was impossible to say what function it once served, since almost everything in the room had been blown to smithereens by the Blast Beetles. Piles of rotten wood chips might have been cabinets once, and shreds of cloth could have come from once beautiful tapestries.

The only thing left whole in the room, however, was a monstrosity made of chitin standing next to one of the walls.

It was three meters tall, and made of the same organically black armor as the beetles we’d been fighting for the past days. Large doors in what looked like a meter-wide insectile torso were closing on what must have been a larger version of the Needle Beetle’s needle thrower, and a second pair of doors was opening at the same time.

I had just enough time to notice six bladed appendages that looked like they belonged on a praying mantis before I had to leap behind the remains of the wall to avoid the another needle barrage.

“Spread out!” Marjory shouted as soon as the needles stopped plinking against the walls. “And stay away from those blades!”

We all rushed into the room before another needle spray could be readied, and spread as far apart as the large room could allow. Which was more than enough to ensure that only one of us would be targeted by each needle spray.

We learned very quickly that getting within melee range of the monstrosity was a suicidal endeavor. The Deckhands didn't even last a second against it, and I didn’t think that the Marine would fare much better. Unfortunately, our ranged attackers weren’t doing much better. Arrows and crossbow bolts just bounced of its armor, without leaving so much as a scratch. Marjory’s cannon was doing somewhat better, but it still wasn’t doing much more than cosmetic damage.

“We’ll need to wait until it opens up to spray needles, and shoot inside its armor,” I shouted, reloading my crossbow as fast as I could.

We didn’t have long to wait. The bug was alternating between its top and bottom needle shooters, with very little down time between each attack. The needles were always aimed at whoever was closest to the bug, which meant that Doreen, with her armored scales, quickly became our decoy. The room was large enough that she could remain at the extreme outer range of the needles, and while her yelps told us very clearly that being hit by the needles wasn’t at all fun, she immediately assured us that she wasn’t actually wounded.

This freed the rest of us to wait for the bug’s armor to open and shoot it where it wasn’t protected. I could see my bolts hit and penetrate its flesh, but I couldn’t tell how much, if any, damage we were doing. Still, it was now a battle of attrition, and seemed to be going in our favor.

Which, of course, was when things changed.

A set of smaller doors we hadn’t noticed before opened on the monstrous insect’s abdomen, and before we realized what was happening, a Blast Beetle was flying straight for Doreen, whose wings were raised in front of her head to protect her eyes from the needle sprays. Fortunately for the dragon girl, I had enough time to send the Marine to tackle her out of the way, and the Beetle exploded in contact with my Shape instead, causing it to dissipate from the massive damage.

The loss of the Marine didn’t really affect our tactics, but we were down to just the three of us, the Archers and the Longbowman. More Blast Beetles would quickly whittle the Shapes down, and we’d have to retreat if we were left without them to take the attacks.

More Blast Beetles, however, did not appear to be coming. Doreen, shaken from the close call, was sprayed by another needle attack, and she quickly shook off her jitters and we settled back down to the routine of waiting for the needle attacks to strike back at the bug.

I had a hunch, however, about when another Blast Beetle would appear, and when that point approached, I had the Longbowman stop its attacks and prepare. My intuition proved correct, and almost precisely five minutes after the previous Beetle, the smaller set of doors opened again.

This time I was ready. As soon as the doors were open, I had the Longbowman shoot inside it. The Blast Beetle’s explosion, coming from within the giant bug’s armor, absolutely devastated it. The monstrosity broke apart, and we barely had time to flinch at the armor fragments shooting towards us before the whole thing dissipated.

I could feel the rush of vim as what had to be an Echo belonging to a long dead Old-world Shaper was destroyed after what had to be centuries of fulfilling the last order it was given, which must have been to defend the area against all attackers.

And as soon as it completely dissipated, the thing it was defending was revealed. The familiar shape of a Pattern was hanging on the wall where the giant insect had stood, fortunately undamaged by the explosion that destroyed its protector.