Sentinel sat on a rock that he had dragged into the middle of the road and carefully whittled at a small carving of a robotic condor. He had swords built into both of his arms, but it was nice to carve with the small knife that Kull had given to him.

“Maybe I should have been named SoundWave,” he chuckled to himself as he thought about the bird design he’d been crafting. “SoundWave Prime.”

From around the S curve of the road, the two centaurs came trotting along, looking very confident and less like “scouts” and more like a “spearhead”. When they saw Sentinel, they slowed to a stop, allowing the Automata and the lizardman to catch up to them. Sentinel slowly looked up at them from beneath his wide brimmed hat.

“Out of the way!” the centaur in heavy armor yelled as they both looked down on him with sneers at thirty paces.

Sentinel made a show of slowly putting the carving away in a coat pocket, and then slowly putting the knife away in a sheath at his back, not in any particular hurry, before standing up and dusting off the skirt of his duster and tilting his head to regard them. “Nope.”

The face of the paladin turned beet red and his eyebrows knitted together. “His Royal Highness, the Crown Prince is coming! Now move and take your rock with you or I’ll make you!”

Sentinel looked down at the rock he’d been sitting on and nudged it with his toe before looking back at the centaur. With a bit of a flourish, he flipped the skirts of his duster back over his hips and held his hands ready at his sides as if he had a gun belt. “You can try.”

Agitated, the paladin scuffed at the ground and trotted in place. The other centaur looked annoyed as well but had limited his outward display to flexing his muscles and tightening and loosening his grip on the staff. His moustache was twitching violently.

The lizardman (lizardwoman?) looked confused and kept glancing back and forth at the centaurs and Sentinel. This person was probably the only proper “scout” in the group. The Automata looked at the ground and tried to avoid eye contact with Sentinel. While some of their body language seemed to say “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to do this,” their hands were saying “I’m ready to attack as soon as the word is given.”

“We must be close to their little village if they sent out this little guard dog,” the muscle mage said to the other centaur. Then to the lizard, he said “Marshoo, go tell the Captain that we’re nearly there. We might as well break for camp. We’ll put down their dog and then confirm.”

Marshoo, the lizard, turned and bolted back the way they had come. She was a terrific sprinter, really fast. Sentinel pulled gently on the brim of his wide hat and addressed the muscle mage. “So, you think you can take me by yourself, beardy?”

“I’ll not be baited into some foolish show of strength,” he guffawed. He raised his hand to order the Automata to attack but before his hand dropped, Sentinel had converted both arms into cannon mode and shot all three of the Automata with [Liberator.exe] rounds.

The bodies of the Automata flew back, past the smirking faces of the centaurs and hit the ground with heavy thuds. They writhed on the ground for a while as the curse and the counter-curse fought each other and all of their past memories were forcibly unlocked. When the process completed, all three of them were offline and would be going through their reboot processes in a few minutes.

The sneers faded as the mage’s hand was frozen in mid gesture. They turned to look at their Automata slaves offline and on the ground before turning, as one, to look back at Sentinel.

“You! What?! Gah!” the paladin yelled as he drew his massive sword and charged forward.

Sentinel fired a stone round at the centaur’s lead hoof. The hoof shot back from the force as the warrior was running forward and ended up tripping and falling onto his face. Horses aren’t really known for getting up off the ground quickly and apparently neither are centaurs. He pushed himself up to a sitting position but got slammed in the face by a dirt round from Sentinel’s cannon.

The round smashed into his face, knocking a tooth loose and sending his helmet flying. When he fell back to the ground a second time, he was unconscious. Sentinel converted his arms back to hands and folded his arms to look at the mage.

“So? You think you can take me by yourself? Go ahead on,” he repeated.

The centaur looked down at his fallen comrade then at the fallen Automata. He looked angry but he was keeping himself under control, for the most part. His moustache twitched wildly away for a few seconds before leveling as the anger was replaced by a steel glint in his eye.

“[Inferno]!” he yelled, leveling the staff at Sentinel.

A blaze erupted from the end of the staff as if it had been replaced with a flamethrower. Sentinel dove out of the way, hitting the ground in a roll. As he came up, he fired off three wooden rounds but they were blocked by an aura shield. Green shockwaves rippled outward from the impact of the projectiles against the magical barrier. The mage cantered back as he released a barrage of successive [FireBall]s. Rather than acting like a grenade or a blast of concussive force, the fireballs from the spell behaved more like baseballs made out of magma or really dangerous water balloons. When they impacted, molten flame splashed everywhere and stuck like napalm.

The ground where Sentinel stood and the trees behind him, erupted with splashes of fire from the attack. Even with an Automata’s enhanced physical abilities, Sentinel was only able to stay a hair's breadth from getting shot by a spell. A centaur mage must be something of a mobile weapons platform for how steady they can be when making their shots.

Some of the trees caught in the attack were scorched, but a few looked like they might ignite. If Sentinel didn’t stop this idiot soon, he might torch the whole forest. One of the shots got a little too close for comfort and Sentinel had to take a long dive to avoid getting splashed.

He hit the ground and scrambled to the fallen paladin to duck behind the large shield and armored body. The mage didn’t seem to care that he was throwing molten fire at his stable-mate and continued to hurl fireball after fireball. Thankfully, the shield and armor appeared to be enhanced with some level of resistance to magic based attacks.

The mage was starting to look a little winded, keeping up this level of magic attack must be draining on his mana. I would have thought him to fight more like a rider on horseback but he didn’t move very much. I imagine it was for either energy conservation, spell focus, or aiming stability, which just further cemented the idea of him being a fantasy version of a heavy gun turret.

Sentinel deployed the drone from his back. It couldn’t attack or do much, but it could certainly distract. The drone strafed the centaur, who jerked backward, caught off guard by what was essentially a remote controlled quad-copter. Not that he would have any idea what that was.

A few fireballs were shot at the drone but it was easily able to dodge them, before retreating to a safer distance. When the mage was distracted, Sentinel jumped up and over the paladin, aiming himself for his opponent. With a startled whinney escaping from the lips of the mage, Sentinel landed on his back. He converted both arms to sword mode, reached around the mage and scissored off his beard.

Sentinel leaned forward and yelled into the mage’s ear, “You give up yet?”

The mage roared in rage and reached over his shoulder, grabbing Sentinel by the coat and yanking him up and over, slamming him into the ground on his back. The centaur reared up, intent on crushing Sentinel under hoof but missed as Sentinel rolled inside and under the centaur’s horse body.

Sentinel popped up, driving a fist into the unarmored horse ribs, hearing and feeling several of them crack. The mage yelped and stumbled to the side, but managed to clock Sentinel with a wild swing with the heavy staff. The blow sent Sentinel flying upwards and away.

“[HolyColumn]!” the mage yelled in pain and anger, aiming his staff at the airborne Sentinel.

What looked like a small sun flared into existence directly above Sentinel and a torrent of thick liquid fire smashed down into him. Sentinel hit the ground, pinned under the torrent of flame. Desperately, he tried to turn away and protect his optics and other sensitive areas.

When the spell ran its course, Sentinel lay scorched in a patch of blackened earth. All of his clothes had been burned off and his metal plating was dully glowing a cherry color. Chunks of carbon flaked off as he slowly moved and got himself into a seated position.

“You know beardy? You’re making this very difficult to put you down without killing you,” Sentinel said in a cavalier tone.

“Why won’t you die?!” the centaur shouted back at him.

White light poured from the centaur’s eyes as he began chanting under his breath. Sentinel could feel mana welling up from the centaur and feeding into what would be a massive spell. Suddenly, with a loud “thonk”, the mage’s lights went out. Both literal and metaphorical, and the mage dropped to the ground. Behind him stood one of the Automata that had rebooted, holding the, now bent, rod portion of the Paladin’s lance.

“Nice job, friend. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to sit and cool off for a bit. This summer heat is something else,” Sentinel said with a casual salute.