Building Zoids in a World of Titans

Swallowed by the flood they'd unleashed, the Colossus was gone now. The basin greeted them with the same steam and silence they'd left behind. The landslide remained: a twenty-meter wall of shattered rock and ancient timber choking the river's outlet, holding back a lake that had no business existing. Alex read it the way he read any half-built structure, load distribution, pressure points, the places where the whole thing wanted to fail first.

He brought the Liger Zero to a halt at the debris field's edge. His left hind actuator whined with every step, a sound he felt in his own knee. The Lanstag limped up beside him, white armor scored black along its rear quarter.

Ziya's voice crackled over the comm, dry as the dust settling around them.

"Three Zoids. One dam."

"Didn't plan to move it by hand." Alex flexed his fingers on the controls. "We move the right pieces. The rest follows."

He didn't mention the fatigue sitting behind his eyes, or the way his hands still trembled from the Colossus's final seizure. None of them had slept.

The Lanstag circled the blockage once, twice. Ziya's sensors painted the pile in thermal layers, stress fractures glowing faint against the cooler stone. She stopped at a junction where three massive boulders locked together like a keystone arch.

"There." Her voice came steady over the comm. "Those three. Pull the center one and the others lose purchase. The whole face should slide clean."

"Should."

"Will. The physics holds. Mostly."

Alex exhaled. "Then that's the plan. Rhian, you're on overwatch. Ziya, lance the keystone. I'll catch what shifts."

The Lanstag's Thruster Lance extended. Rhian's Arosaurer climbed a nearby ridge, its silhouette sharp against the steam.

SHWIIING-CHCK.

The lance drove home. Rock groaned, and dust plumed.

Then water found the cracks.

Not a trickle. Jets, high-pressure streams hammering through the new gaps, cutting stone the way a machine cuts stock. Alex ran the numbers again in his head and didn't like where they landed: the lake behind the dam had risen higher than he'd calculated. Pressure was battering the fracture lines wider by the second.

"Pressure's spiking." Ziya's voice tightened. "The blockage isn't draining fast enough. It's going to blow on its own."

"Then we speed it up."

Alex didn't wait for agreement. He drove the Liger forward, damaged leg screaming, and slammed a Strike Laser Claw into the secondary keystone.

The pile shifted.

A slab the size of a hab unit tilted. Rhian's Arosaurer stood directly downslope.

"Rhian. Move."

She didn't hesitate. The Arosaurer's boosters flared, throwing the machine sideways as the slab crashed where its cockpit had been a heartbeat earlier. Rock dust engulfed the ridge. Silence stretched, and Alex's grip tightened on the controls with every second that passed.

"Rhian. Report."

A long breath came back over the comm. "I'm okay. Shaking, but okay."

Alex's hands locked on the controls, the grip plating creaking under his fingers. Not her. Not again.

"Ziya. Finish it."

The Lanstag didn't wait for a second invitation. Its lance found the last keystone, thrusters roaring, and the mountain let go.

Water exploded through the breach, brown and white and violent, the river reclaiming its channel in a single thunderous surge. Like chaff, the remaining debris washed away. The lake dropped three meters in the time it took to breathe.

The Liger Zero's core rumbled beneath him.

"RROOO-GRRAOOO!"

Rhian's voice came thin but real. "It's flowing. It's actually flowing."

Ziya's Lanstag vented steam, heat shimmering off its armor. "And we're still in one piece. Mostly."

The river raced toward Millcross, toward the mills and the wells and the fields that had waited too long. His shoulders dropped from the tension he'd carried for days, slow and deliberate as a bolt turning home.

"Yeah," he said. "We are."

The three Zoids stood in the settling spray, steam rising off their heated armor, while the river did what rivers do. It kept moving.

The Colossus's carcass waited exactly where they'd left it, half-submerged where the flood had first dropped it, its plates already stripped raw by three Wardens' worth of harvesting work. Alex studied what remained. Enough bulk that dragging it home would take more than good intentions.

Ziya's Lanstag positioned itself alongside the carcass, its Thruster Lance retracted, cargo winches extending from its undercarriage instead. "Chain anchors first. Four points, minimum, or the weight shifts on the first grade change."

Rhian's Arosaurer hauled the first heavy chain across the carcass's ribcage, looping it through gaps in the plating Alex had marked earlier. "This thing still weighs more than the mill it was going to flatten."

"That's the point." Alex guided the Liger Zero into position behind the makeshift sled, hydraulic lines running from the Iron Mule's rear coupling. "Millcross needs to see it. Not hear about it. See it."

The Iron Mule's engine idled low, patient, while the three of them worked the carcass onto the sleds one section at a time: the shattered skull plate first, then the ribcage, then what remained of the limbs. Metal groaned against metal. The coupling locks engaged with a heavy, final clunk, one after another, until the whole ruined bulk of the thing sat lashed down and ready to move.

Ziya ran a final check on the tension lines. "Secure. It'll hold through the passes, assuming nothing decides to argue with physics again today."

"Nothing's arguing," Alex said. "Let's head back to Millcross."

Three days later, the drive back was still grinding on. The Terra-Colossus's carcass, or what they'd managed to salvage of it, rode strapped across two heavy sleds behind the Iron Mule. The Liger Zero limped along on its damaged leg. Damage still marked the Lanstag's shields, scars from the final exchange. Rhian piloted the Arosaurer beside them, her autocannons silent but trained on the treeline.

On the second night, she climbed into the Mule's cab instead of her bunk. The engine's rumble filled the space between them.

"Alex."

He didn't look up from the diagnostic display. "Rhian."

"You were wrong about Millcross. You said we couldn't help. It was suicide, you said."

The display cycled through damage reports. "It would have been, if we'd fought it head-on without a plan."

"But we did help. We found a way." She pulled her knees up onto the seat. "You act like caring about people is a design flaw, like it's something you have to engineer around."

"It gets people killed."

"So does not caring. You just don't see the casualties." Her eyes stayed on his face. "Admit that this mattered, that they mattered."

The diagnostic finished. He set the tablet down.

"It mattered. They mattered. You were right to push."

"Good." She slid off the seat. "That's all I needed to hear."

She didn't say she forgave him. He didn't say he understood. The distance between those two things stayed exactly where it was, measured out in the space between bunks that night.

Millcross didn't cheer when they crested the ridge. Not at first. No banners. No speeches. The watermills stood still, their wheels frozen in the dry riverbed.

Then someone saw what rode behind the Iron Mule.

The shout started at the wall and rolled through the square before it turned into any words at all. People surged toward the gate, first in twos and threes, then a crowd too large to count, straining for a look at the shattered plates and broken ribs lashed to the sleds. A boy climbed onto his father's shoulders just to see over the wall. Someone was laughing, the kind that came out sounding more like a sob. The Colossus was dead, and it was real, chained down and dragged home instead of the other way around.

Then people stopped.

A woman at the well pressed her palms against the Arosaurer's warm flank, tears cutting tracks through the dust on her cheeks. An old man touched the Lanstag's shield and whispered something that might have been a prayer. Children pressed close to the Liger Zero's paws, unafraid.

"Thank you."

The words came from everywhere. A guard at the gate. The baker, wiping flour from his apron. Hesta Sutter, nodding once from her stall, sharp and final.

Alex kept his hands on the controls. Rhian waved, small and exhausted. Ziya's jaw stayed tight beside him, the way it always did when a debt was still open in her head.

The Council waited at the town hall steps. Elder Thorn leaned on her cane, while Keeper Mara stood with arms crossed. Master Rowan hung back a step, his hands still trembling.

Elder Thorn spoke first, her voice carrying across the square without needing to be raised.

"You gave us back our river. You gave us back our future. Millcross owes you a debt no ledger can balance."

Keeper Mara stepped forward. "We honor what you've done. All three of you."

Master Rowan bowed his head. "Thank you for saving our small town."

The crowd murmured. No one moved to leave.

Elder Thorn's eyes found Alex's. "If you'll stay. There's… something we need to discuss. Privately."

The council chamber smelled of pine resin and old stone. The same tea service and flatbread sat on the table. Elder Thorn didn't touch either.

She sat opposite Alex, her weathered hands folded on the table. Keeper Mara stood at the window with her back rigid, while Master Rowan leaned against the wall, eyes on the floor.

"Millcross is broke."

No preamble.

"The grain tax to the Confederacy came due last month. The mills haven't turned in six weeks. We have three months of reserves, maybe four if we ration hard. The fuel depot's empty. The Warden network won't advance us credit on a B-rank territorial dispute."

She met his gaze straight on.

"We owe you for the Colossus and the river, for the Tuskers and the Mire-Devourer. We owe you more than this settlement has ever been worth. And I have to say it out loud, to your face, because that's what leadership means. Even when it shames me."

Alex didn't move. The System chimed silently at the edge of his vision, a damage alert for the Liger's leg actuator. He ignored it.

"I knew, before the fight. Ziya ran the numbers."

Thorn's fingers pressed harder against her cane. "Then you know why I'm telling you anyway. Because knowing and hearing it are different things, and because we made a bargain, and we can't pay it."

Keeper Mara turned from the window. "We have land and water rights, the Oldfoot foundations. The Confederacy would take them all the moment we defaulted. We'd lose our autonomy, our homes."

Master Rowan spoke to the floor. "We don't want charity. Tell us what settles it."

No one spoke for a long moment. Alex touched the blue stone at his throat. The diagnostic alert pulsed again, patient and mechanical, and he set it aside, the way he always did with any problem that wasn't the one in front of him.

He looked at Thorn, then at Mara and Rowan.

"What do you have that matters? Not sols. Not land. Anything valuable."

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.

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