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It was the biggest slimeball Locke had seen since the last election.

Well, technically not.

He’d seen and fought plenty of slime since his strange and fortuitous arrival on the world of Haven. It seemed to be one of the more common forms of monster on this alternative, magical companion to his home world of Earth. (Or, more specifically Grassroots, Kentucky.)

How he’d come to be here wasn’t a long story, but it was a weird one. He’d recently suffered a car crash that left him paralyzed from the waist down and lost his job in quick (though unrelated) succession. He'd been trudging home in his wheelchair when he met a strange woman on the street—a headhunter, he soon learned, who was looking to hire someone with his qualifications. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck, so he’d signed the contract she’d offered.

Then he’d died.

Then he’d woken up inside the cockpit of the giant robot he was presently piloting. Inside a brand-new body that was the exact opposite of the skinny, paralyzed, wheelchair-bound body he’d left behind. On an airship crewed by three gorgeous women, who wanted that body.

There was more to it than that, of course, but considering where he’d started, his current situation was awesome.

Even if he was presently staring down a giant slime monster.

Most slimes he’d fought before had come in the form of what his crewmates called shadow dregs—a parasitic goo that fell in meteors from the Crystal Moon, which hung full in the sky over their heads even this far into the daytime. Locke hadn’t quite figured out the Crystal Moon yet or why it dropped parasite-laden meteors so frequently that meteorfall bounties were the Harper’s Harriers’ main source of income. But then, his crewmates hadn’t figured that out yet, either, and they were native to Haven. All they knew was that shadow dregs took over beings living and non- and bent them to their will, to destructive ends, and so they had to be obliterated the moment they touched down.

But in some ways, those were better than whatever creature was writhing below the airship.

This goo wasn’t trying to control anything. It was just eating everything in its path.

“Found the source of the distress call,” Captain Alyssa Harper radioed from the control room of the Blue Heron. “Get ready to disembark.”

“Way ahead of you,” a voice Locke recognized as Ember Q’Van radioed from the inside of her titan, Long Shot. “Titan” was the name Havenites gave to their most powerful type of mobile weapon. There was as much magic involved in their running as there was technology, but basically they were two-story-tall robots, and Havenites had fun with their designs. Titan Long Shot was a sleek blue and silver mech with almost athletic-looking lines and a subtle, but decidedly female aspect to the chest and hip areas. It was built for speed, mostly so it could fire the magical cannon positioned over its left shoulder and then reposition itself with ease.

“Same,” Locke replied from inside his own titan, Chimera. Chimera was the opposite of Long Shot in many ways. Where Long Shot was the obvious product of some refinement, Chimera was—as its name implied—a mess of disparate parts they’d had to scrounge from other titans. (The Harriers frequently operated on a shoestring budget, and it wasn’t even a particularly good shoestring.) He’d at least been able to use his matter magic to turn all the pieces the same shade of red—oh yeah, he had magic here, too!—but in general it looked like a weird, gracefully asymmetrical hodgepodge of pieces from different armor suits. Still, it was bulky, manly, built for power and smashing stuff, and that was all he needed it to do.

Locke—and Titan Chimera—crouched for a better view through the square opening in the hangar floor, while Ember—and Titan Long Shot—crouched beside him.

In fact, the two had been in their titans since the captain had first picked up the panicked radio signal and spotted the weird shape on the horizon, and now they peered through the open door to get a better look at what they’d be fighting.

The Blue Heron’s engineer, Bexley, looked down through the opening in the floor, too, as casually as if it didn’t open to a thousand-foot drop.

“Whoo,” she whistled. “That’s the biggest slimeball I’ve seen since the last time Locke and I f—”

“Now’s not the time, Bexley,” Ember groaned, adjusting her cannon.

“What is that thing?” Locke asked. “It’s not acting like shadow dregs.”

“It’s a gluttony phantom,” Alyssa replied. “Concentrations of void essence sometimes cause them to manifest. No one knows why.”

Peering down through his titan’s visual sensors, Locke could easily see why they were called “gluttony phantoms.” Beneath their airship lay an expansive farm, or what used to be one. The resident farmers ran about either shooting ineffectually at the monster or trying to corral livestock away from its flailing, grasping pseudopods, but projectile weapons could only do so much against slime. Locke saw the remains of some poor souls who’d tried to get close enough to torch it—they were currently disintegrating in its gelatinous guts—and there was nothing they could do to save the crops in its path. Wherever it traveled, it left a wide swath of vegetation devoured down to the dirt, and the phantom grew wider as it progressed. Locke could see the point where it had started, too—from this distance, a pinprick in a field of corn-like stalks, perhaps no bigger than a tennis ball. Now, growing ever closer to the cluster of barns, silos, and farmhouses, it was easily the size of a modest building.

Half the size of a titan.

“It grows as it eats,” Locke observed.

“It does,” Alyssa replied. “Fortunately, phantoms only feed on organic matter.”

“Oh! So I can punch it!” Locke said. That was a small relief. He couldn’t punch shadow dregs; Bexley kept his titan well-maintained and sealed, but there was always the risk of the shadow dregs finding a crack and slipping in, and while there were ways to purge them, those same purges would gradually compromise the integrity of the titan’s internal systems. Generally, it was better not to touch them at all.

“Any chance of the phantom reaching me in the cockpit?” Locke asked.

“There’s always a chance,” Alyssa replied. “Gluttony phantoms aren’t nearly as persistent as shadow dregs, though. If they encounter something inedible, they ignore it, so they’re unlikely to make it that far inside your titan.”

“But if it does get inside the cockpit?”

“Make sure it eats something less important than your dick,” Bexley advised.

“I see Bexley has her priorities in order,” Ember groaned from inside her titan.

“I do have my priorities in order!” Bexley snapped back. “Locke’s a void mage! His is an important dick!”

“Can we focus on the task at hand, please?” Alyssa radioed in her most Captainly voice.

“Wait,” Bexley chimed, “by task at hand, do you mean Locke’s dick or the—”

“The gluttony phantom!” Alyssa shouted.

“Fine,” Bexley huffed, and Ember moved to take up a better position behind where the engineer was standing.

“I’ll snipe from here,” she said as Bexley skittered out of the way. “I can keep the pseudopods from grabbing things, but you’ll need to expose its core.”

“Core?” Locke asked.

“I can’t see it from here, but it’ll be a little glowing ball of void condensate somewhere in all that slime. Destroy the core, and the phantom will disintegrate.”

“Gotcha,” Locke replied.

“We’re low enough for you to avoid fall damage. Ready to jump?” Alyssa radioed.

“Ready!” Locke replied, and then flung himself and his titan feet-first through the hangar opening.

Titan Chimera flashed brilliantly red in the morning sun as it plummeted from the airship toward the ground. In this world, titans looked like giant suits of fantastical armor, but they were more than that. Their insides brimmed with magical technologies that even this society didn’t fully understand, but Locke didn’t care much about those details. The details he cared about were the ones that turned titans into ass-kicking war machines, and those were the details he was about to put to use.