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The ground before Locke roiled with the shape of a monster still forming, and shuddered with the aftershocks of a natural disaster.

The meteor had struck mere hundreds of feet from the mine—far enough to miss it, but close enough to collapse it and trap all the miners inside, or worse. He didn’t know if there was anyone left to save so close to the still-smoking crater. He didn’t even know what kind of monster he was about to face.

In this moment, at his level of skill, Locke was certain of one thing and one thing only:

If he did not make a dramatic entrance with his robot’s arms heroically crossed over its chest, then he was wasting the whole robot.

“You ready, Ember?” he asked.

He turned his head—and thus his titan’s head—to the right, where a sleek blue-and-silver mech crouched, the cannon on its right shoulder aimed down for its inevitable sniping. Locke’s red titan gripped a rafter at the top of the Blue Heron’s hangar, steadying itself as their airship floated around the scene. It was probably unnecessary—-titans could self-balance with aplomb—but it looked cool, and over the past several months, he’d grown so used to fighting in this machine that he figured he could safely indulge in a little Rule of Cool.

“Ready when you are,” Ember replied from Titan Long Shot.

“Oh, I’m always ready,” Locke replied—then did exactly what he’d been planning to do.

He let go of the rafter, crossed Titan Chimera’s arms over its broad, shining chest, and then took one step and plummeted down from the Blue Heron’s lowered hangar ramp.

Safe inside the cushioning conductor fluid of his cockpit, he felt invigorated rather than terrified by the sudden punch of gravity lurching through his guts. Oh, it had been terrifying the first time he’d practiced this move, but months upon months of airdrops into monster battles had trained him in what to do. He let himself fall for a bit and then, when he was just close enough to the ground, channeled a burst of magic into the crystalline gravity catalysts implanted in the back of each of his titan’s legs. The catalysts flared with purple light. A similar blast of purple excess magic plumed out of his shoulder louvers and trailed behind him like a sparkling cape. And when he landed, it was with all the composed coolness of a veteran mech pilot who was here for one thing and one thing only:

To kick monster ass like it was just one bullet on today’s badass to-do list.

“Yeah.” Locke smiled privately inside the cockpit.

“What?” came another voice from above—Captain Alyssa, calling from her watch point in the Blue Heron’s control room. “Is the situation down there better than it looks?”

“Nah, it’s as bad as it looks,” Locke replied. “It’s just that I’ve been trying to nail that entrance for months and I finally got it.”

“What tactical advantage does that give you?” Ember asked from Titan Long Shot.

“None. It just looks cool.”

“Not as cool as the—what did you call it? The three-point landing?” chimed Bexley, the Blue Heron’s chief engineer. “Even if it did tax the titan’s joints too much. Still, nine out of ten stars, would smash.”

“Bexley, how would you even smash a landing pose?” Ember spat. Locke could practically hear her rolling her eyes over the radio.

“I’d find a way,” Bexley replied.

“I’m sure you would,” he agreed with a grin.

“I’m still not clear on why those ‘landing poses’ are worth expending effort on,” Ember continued.

At once, every giant robot show Locke had watched back home on Earth flashed through his mind, complete with elaborate transformation sequences and epic theme song fights and especially those moments when the robots made their first great appearances on the field of battle, looking so unbearably kickass that even elaborately-animated missiles seemed to stop in their paths just to admire the sheer power of the mech’s presence.

But he couldn’t explain that to people from a world that had never known television.

“It’s a guy thing,” Locke replied instead. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Oh, like an alpha male ‘Step into the room and command all the attention’ thing?” Ember asked.

Locke was about to object, but then reflected on it and said, “Now that I think about it, that actually makes a lot of sense. You do get it.”

“Men are not incredibly hard to figure out,” Ember stated. “It’s what I like about them. You’re very low-effort.”

“… Thanks, I guess?” Locke replied.

“Hey, men are as low-effort as you make them!” Bexley objected. “I, on the other hand—”

“We know, Bexley,” Ember retorted. “It’s hard to miss the noise.”

“Sorry,” Bexley and Locke replied together, though Bexley’s was in a tone that was decidedly not sorry about all the noise she made when she and Locke were together.

“Not that all this banter isn’t fascinating,” Captain Alyssa interrupted, “but there is a monster on the field.”

“Nothing we can’t handle!” Locke replied. Now he stretched his arms out in preparation for the fight. (His titan stretched with him.) “We know it’s shadow dregs, and I’ve fought plenty of those before. Just gotta figure out the form.”

He finished stretching, then focused on the writhing blob before him.

His first few adventures on the world of Haven had been rocky ones, as he figured out the workings and dangers of his new home and circumstances. But their last big adventure had been pivotal. He’d learned a lot about Haven, its weird magical history, its geopolitics, its cultures, the strengths and limits of its naturally-occurring magic, the sheer complexity of its monsters, and the clever lengths to which he could push his titan—and all that had combined to unlock something inside him.

Six months ago, he’d been Joseph Locke of Grassroots, Kentucky, down on his luck in every possible way.

But thanks to a conveniently-timed acquaintance and some weird magical whatnot, he’d since been reborn as Locke—just Locke—void mage, wielder of all the magical elements, pilot of Titan Chimera, co-owner of the Harper’s Harriers, dangerous-errand-runner-and-occasional-bounty-hunter, and general inamorato of every woman on the Blue Heron.

It was, simply put, fucking awesome!

But even he knew that he’d been coasting until that point, trying to find his footing, and now that he’d found his first foothold, he didn’t intend to let it go.

Monster encounters were regular occurrences here, so his first step had been to brush up on the world’s monstrous fauna. He’d started taking notes on every monster he’d encountered, and filled in the gaps with tips from Ember and a titan mage friend he’d begun to make on another ship.

Orion Havoc (or Rion, as he mercifully preferred to be called) was a distant friend at this point—the Blue Heron and Indigo Gryphon spent so much time in the air that they mostly only spoke by radio, or else when they met at random Arcane Indexes—but he was another part of Locke’s strategy: networking. He knew he was basically powerful and valuable in this setting, but even the greatest people were only as powerful as the allies they kept, and he’d stumbled into some potentially useful ones when they’d returned to the Vasor Arcane Index after rescuing Ember’s mother from a fraught archaeology dig four months ago.

Rion wasn’t even the most useful person he’d met that day, but over the course of their conversations, Locke quickly discovered that, in addition to being a mech pilot, he was also a monster nerd, and had been willing to send some detailed references for Locke to peruse between battles.

Between his own experience and Rion’s monster encyclopedias, Locke had been able to put together a much stronger picture of the kinds of creatures he’d be fighting, and the coalescing monster before him was one of the most prominent.

Shadow dregs were one of the single greatest scourges of the world of Haven. They were not native, but rather fell to the planet in meteors that broke off from the Crystal Moon hanging above in low orbit. No one had been able to explain what they were, except a magic-infused purple-black sludge; all they knew was that, once shadow dregs landed, they sought out things to take over. Living, dead, inanimate—it didn’t matter, and once they took over those things, they would rampage and spread until someone stepped in to obliterate them.

Locke and the Harper’s Harriers made their careers out of being that someone. Meteorfall bounties were always plentiful and urgent, and time being of the essence, they generally paid well enough to be worth the risk. Of all the monsters he’d fought, shadow dregs were the one he was most familiar with.

But they were more complex than they seemed. The type of challenge presented hinged entirely on the person, monster, or type of object they took over, and they had an intelligence that, while limited, could also be incredibly dangerous. Most dregs opted to sink into living beings, to take over their muscles and brains until their eyes burned bloodshot purple-black with eldritch magic. But if the victim was large enough, they’d ignore the musculature entirely to home in on the brain, and with a host on that scale, they could wreak apocalyptic havoc.

There were other varieties, too, but Locke didn’t anticipate those in most instances.

For now, he looked at the wriggling, violet mass before him and cracked his titan’s knuckles, unnecessarily.

“Welp, guess I better light it up before it figures out what it’s doing.”

“I’ll take the leftmost side,” Ember replied. “Keep clear of my shots.”

“Will do!” Locke shouted, and then coiled back as if to initiate a running tackle and clawed his hands together like he was holding a huge, invisible globe.

His back foot landed with an enormous, earth-tearing stomp. The energy catalyst in his left arm glowed blazing orange with charging magic; the same color again spurted out of his shoulder louvers, and slowly, a dot of crackling bright energy began to coalesce between his palms.

This was another move he’d been practicing. When he was still getting used to his energy catalyst, he’d either used it as a flamethrower, ice thrower, or beam weapon. He hadn’t yet figured out how his machine concentrated the very physical concept of ice into a particulate, not-entirely-corporeal beam of light—Haven’s physics were slightly different from Earth’s anyway—but his titan could turn his very will into reality, and so he’d figured other shapes were possible.

Shapes like energy balls. Or spirit bombs. Or—

“Gods, Locke, is the screaming really necessary?” Ember shouted.

“YES,” Locke shouted back, through a scream that sounded like it should span several episodes and suck all the energy from every lifeform across the planet of Haven. “IT’S AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE PROCESS.”

“I have literally never heard of another mage harnessing the power of screams,” Ember replied, unimpressed.

“MAYBE THAT JUST MEANS I’M INNOVATIVE!” Locke roared back. The energy ball throbbed between his palms, growing larger with each syllable until it threatened to envelop his hands. He raised it above his head and let it throb and grow in size until it spanned the width of his shoulders, glowing ferocious orange and crackling with tendrils of white lightning.

“HYAAAH!” he finally bellowed, and flung the burning energy ball with all his might.

“Impressive,” Ember deadpanned, still unimpressed—

The energy ball collided with the writhing churn of shadow dregs. It blasted along the whole of the spread like an incorporeal meteor making planetfall—and left nothing but a hole of singed earth at the center where it had struck.

“Oh, I take that back,” Ember began. “That is legitimately impressi—shit!”

Before Locke could even see what she was shouting about, a blast of searing white shot from Ember’s own titan and stabbed into the left side of what remained of the puddle.

It didn’t take him long to realize what, though.

For as the wood burning scent of magic wafted past his nostrils, so too did the acrid scent of burning shadow dregs—and the sickening scent of charred human flesh.

The shadow dreg puddle writhed more vigorously now, galvanized to action by a direct threat, and as the purplish goo undulated, Locke now saw that it was more than a puddle of mere sludge; there were things inside it. Human-shaped things. And not moving of their own accord.

“Be on guard!” Alyssa reported from above. “Something’s happening near the mine!”

Locke didn’t need her warning. From his vantage, he could see the broken earth shifting, as if something enormous was moving it from underneath—-or an enormous horde of smaller things.

Suddenly, the ground exploded upward.

Locke felt his stomach lurch as more shadow dregs slithered out of the rocky debris, carrying with them more human bodies, so broken that they looked like vaguely humanoid snakes wriggling across the ground. They all joined with the greater puddle in one sickening glide, and that was when the puddle began to take firmer shape.

“Oh, damn, it’s a clump type!” Locke shouted, and began to blast heat attacks at the shape at a furious pace. Ember joined him at once, adding Long Shot’s powerful ranged arsenal to the mix. This kind of attack wouldn’t stop it, but the more they could whittle it down before it finished forming, the better.

Clump-type shadow dregs were one of the most uncommon and least fun types to fight. Rather than controlling their victims like zombies, these took their victims’ bodies and lashed them together with their own nasty sludge, forming a single creature that looked made up of magical purplish tar and corpses.

“Corpse dreg,” Locke specified, intensifying his blasts as the creature grew, as a huge arm splashed out of the shape to claw the ground, then another arm, then a leg, and another leg.

The creature had grown to one story tall by the time its first arm emerged, two by the time its second arm sprouted. A great cloud of acrid smoke rose from the fury of their titans’ attacks, partially obscuring the creature. But even behind that oily screen, Locke could see the creature rising even higher. The silhouette of a weirdly humanoid head formed atop its still-wriggling shoulders, twice as high as his titan.

And then a fierce gust of wind blew the smoke aside, revealing the creature in its full, terrible horror. Much of the shadow dreg sludge had retreated inward, either into their victims’ remains or behind them, yielding a monster that resembled hundreds of grimy, bloodied human bodies broken and cobbled together into the desired tall, stocky shape, connected loosely by thick, sticky strands of dark purple goop.

“Corpse giant,” Locke corrected.