Sgt. Golem: Royal Mech Hussar - Books 2 & 3

When the attack began, Hannah had scrambled up and used her shield against the first Russian attacker. The blowback from the impact collapsed her shield threw her to the ground. She dove for cover.

Her mech was stowed under a tarp on the east side of the clearing, opposite from Angelica's. Hannah ran for it. She roused the machine through her link. It stood, brushing off the tarp and straightening to its full height.

A Russian mech loomed in front of Hannah, its cannon pointed towards her robot. Desperately, she threw a shield, trying to cast it between the two war machines. The angle was so awkward, it came out as a wave of force instead of a static shield. The impact knocked the Russian's gun aside just as the cannon roared.

The Russian cannon’s muzzle blast dazzled Hannah's eyes. She lunged her mech forward, grabbing at the Russian's cannon, and was horrified to feel her mech dropping its own cannon. In the sudden confusion, she had fixated on the enemy's gun and forgotten her own. Her mech grappled with the other and wrenched its cannon away. The weapon went flying into the trees.

Hannah danced back, trying to keep out from under from the flailing limbs of the entangled robots. She lined up a force wave and sent it at the other mech's rider. She tried to keep it small and focused to not disturb her own machine. In the frantic scuffle, the Russian moved just as she released her istota. It did little more than buffet mech and rider. The Russian mech shoved her charger away and lifted its left arm, which had a machinegun mounted on it.

The Russian mech swung the gun in Hannah’s direction. She dropped to one knee and brought up both hands in a tight shield, just big enough for her body, focusing all her skill on creating an impenetrable wall.

The machine gun roared. Bullets kicked up dirt all around her. Rounds dropped to earth directly in front of her, and more skittered off her shield into the trees on either side.

Hannah couldn’t afford to spend much attention on her link. The order she gave was vague, more like a wish than a command, but her charger responded. As the Russian pilot continued to pour machine gun fire into Hannah's shield, her mech charged. It slammed straight into the Russian machine, and they both went down in a heap. The Russian mech's lights flashed about wildly as it fell illuminating tree branches overhead and the chest of Hannah's machine falling atop it.

The rider, though taken by surprise, leapt away into the darkness. Hannah saw where she went as she vanished into the night.

Swiftly, Hannah released her shield, redirecting her magic into a weak wall of force spread thin across a wide area where she thought the Russian would land. The wave of force shoved against rain-covered pines. Water and pine needles sprayed in a cloud. In the distance, Hannah heard a short scream then a thud and she knew her strike had connected.

Her mech clambered to its feet. The Russian mech waved its limbs in an uncoordinated fashion, like a beetle on its back. Its spotlight illuminated her own mech, so Hannah had a clear view to leapt for her charger's shoulder. She had never been as good as Angelica or some of the others at precision istota-enhanced acrobatics, but she managed this jump well enough, landing on the rain-slicked shoulder and grabbing for handholds to steady herself.

She stood there, breathing rapidly, clinging to her mech's head with both hands. The Russian machine twitched again and fell still. Hannah fumbled for the panel on the side of her mech's head. She flipped all the switches at once, and lights sprang out in all directions. It took her a moment to spot the crumpled shape at the foot of a tree 40 yards away. The Russian pilot was dead or unconscious. Either way she was out of the fight.

There was still gunfire through the trees, up slope in the direction where their camp had been. Hannah turned to head back.

In that instant three Russian mechs came out of the trees in front of her, cannons raised. One of them had its headlights on, and the other two were dark shapes to its left and right. Even as they appeared, Veronica charged out of the forest from Hannah's right, rushing past her in a spray of blown water droplets

Hannah threw her mech to the side as the Russians opened fire. Bullets and shells whizzed all around her.

Hannah's leap carried her mech into a steeper slope with loose rocks. The rocks slid under its heavy metal feet, and it fell to its hands and knees. Trees exploded around her as shells flew by in every direction. All her lights cut out. She tried to summon a shield and angle it towards the Russians, but the movement of her mech made the magic swing wildly around. The shield crashed into one tree and then another, and she lost her grip on the spell. She cursed herself again for losing her weapon.

She was clinging for dear life now, one hand on a head-mounted handhold and the other on the mech's shoulder, which also had strategically placed loops of steel. They practiced for things like this, drilling on a framework that simulated the shoulder of a mech. The whole contraption could spin and tilt in various directions to approximate how the mech would move if it fell on its back or lunged to the side. The riders would practice various techniques to lash themselves magically to the armor, or hold onto hand grips, or even release all hold and leap away, whatever the maneuvers of their mech called for.

While she wasn’t as good as the others at leaping through the air, Hannah had always been proud at how well she did casting magic while riding on the simulator.

Now she put that training to use. As her mech scrambled up, she summoned her shield again, this time keeping it tight and angling it over her head like the pitch of a roof. She shaped the istota with her mind to be narrow and shifted it as they moved to avoid trees. Branches brushed against it, but didn't disrupt the spell any more than bullets did.

She urged her mech forward, not a wild charge but a steady, careful stride over loose ground. It steadied itself with the left hand on the tree trunk and then started up the slope. The volley of firing had died away, and she couldn't see what had happened to Veronica. Shadows and bobbing lights flashed through the trees. A cannon roared off to her left, and then another one answered in front of her, but she couldn't tell who was shooting or who might have been hit.

Her mech was steady on its feet now, and so she lifted her hand off the hand grip and reached for the headlight panel. She had to be able to see.

She flipped a switch, flooding the area in front of her with light, then just as quickly flipped it off again.

The afterimage of pine branches glowed in her vision.

She shifted her mech two paces left and toggled the switch again. Here, the branches were thinner. She caught a glimpse ahead of mechs moving in the trees. It looked like a Russian. When the light came on, it started to turn in her direction.

As soon as she flipped it off, she shifted three more steps to the left.

A cannon roared. The ball of fire from its muzzle blinded her temporarily. Hannah darted forward three steps past a tree whose shadow she had seen in the muzzle flash, and then two to the left again.

This was ridiculous. Only insane people fought a war in the dark.

Hannah flashed her light again. This time, instead of dodging, she formed the shield in front of her. The Russian was there, its gun pointed off to her right where she had been moments before. It started to shift its aim as Hannah charged forward.

She didn't swerve. The cannon roared, and the heavy caliber shell ricocheted off of her shield. She still had it sloped like the angle of a roof, and the shell slid up it, over her head, and tore its way through tree branches, off into the night.

Hannah spun her shield as she charged, shifting the top of her shield from above her head and dropping it to her left.

The next shot from the Russian's cannon hit her shield at point-blank range, this time ricocheting off to the left along the slope of her shield. It weakened, but she had been ready for that shot and poured on the istota to bring it back to full strength. The shield, angled as it was, slammed into the Russian mech from the side as Hannah charged forward. The wall of force hit the Russian on its left side and threw it in the opposite direction. Its arm hit a tree trunk and its cannon went flipping away.

The mech staggered and then regained its footing, turning to face Hannah as she pulled her charger up short.

The Russian machine crouched, raising its hands. It was about to leap for her.

Hannah remembered something Veronica had said about a wave of force just being a different application of shield magic. Though she preferred the shield over the blast, she excelled at both.

Now she brought her hands tight together, focusing her istota with her mind, shrinking the area of its effect smaller and smaller.

Its strength compacted as it compressed to the size of little more than a human fist.

The air in front of Hannah shimmered as the density of usually invisible magic increased to an incredible level. Hannah released her force wave directly at the Russian pilot.

At the last moment, the enemy rider saw what Hannah was doing, and tried to raise her own shield, but it was far too late.

The magic expanded slightly as she pushed it away. When it hit the Russian pilot, it was somewhere around the size of a human head. It caught her right in the torso with the force of a locomotive. She was blasted from the shoulder of her robot.

She didn't even have time to cry out as her shattered body was thrown across the mountainside. Somewhere in the dark, the body hit a tree or a boulder with a wet crunch.

Suddenly, Veronica's robot was there, with the girl herself grinning at Hannah through the bobbing mech lights. "Hey, nice shot. I think I got two of them."

"Yeah," Hannah gasped. The impact of what she had just done hit her, and her istota reserves were nearly spent. She sagged against the head of her mech. "I think I did too."

That was when the Golems appeared.