I dropped into the helicopter and punched a cyborg in the face, yanking him out and flinging him from the door. Two rats came at my feet, but I was fast as lightning. Nothing would have stopped me.
I picked them up and smashed them together, then flung them behind me and out the door too.
The chopper was being piloted by another cyborg, but I left him alone for the moment. There was only one man in here I wanted to see.
The Technomancer was a big, heavyset man. He had a long, dangling moustache and heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes. He was strapped into his control chair, with wired running from his head to the machinery on the back of the chair.
“You absolute fucking abomination!” I roared at him. “You’ll die now, and your army will die with you!”
The chopped reeled suddenly as the cyborg at the controls turned and tried to see what was going on.
“Into the mansion!” screeched the Technomancer, in a surprisingly high, reedy voice. “Land us on the mansion!”
The chopper turned and began to make a beeline for the mansion’s roof. The man himself swiftly detached himself from his chair and made his way toward me.
“I’m ready for you, Dungeon Keeper,” he snarled. “The Dungeon Core will be mine, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “How about this?”
I reached over and grabbed the wiring that was coming out of the chopper driver’s neck. I wrenched upward, and the cyborg spasmed twice then died. The chopper began to careen toward the mansion’s roof.
“No!” howled the Technomancer, making a leap for the controls. “My control system! All my work!”
The chair. That was his control system. He had set it up in the chopper so that he could control what was happening on the ground.
“You fucking idiot!” I laughed. “That’s your control system?”
“The result of ten years of work!” he cried defiantly.
“How’s this for ten years of work?” I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and hauled him away from the chopper’s controls. The helicopter was heading straight for the roof of the mansion now, on a collision course. When it hit the roof, it would explode and take the control system with it.
He fought for his life, grappling for my face and trying to get his hands around my throat, but I held him fast. When he tried to bite my face, I kicked him in the nuts and he went down gagging. At the last moment, I grabbed him and threw him out of the chopper and onto the roof, leaping out after him.
The chopper crashed into the roof and exploded into a ball of flame.
From below, I heard a howling of despair from the cyborgs, but the attack did not immediately stop as I had expected it would.
“Fool!” spat the Technomancer as he got to his feet. “You think I would risk everything in so delicate a machine as a helicopter? I am the Technomancer! I am the key! My army stands or falls by me! You will have to kill me to defeat my army!”
“That can be arranged!” I promised him. Below me in the mansion, the defenders had been pressed back into the core chamber. Enemies flooded in, dropping into the lava and pushing my friends back up onto the bridge.
Time to finish this.
The Technomancer had a knife in his hand, and he slashed at me with it,but I leaped backward, then danced in, swift as lightning with Todd’s speed boosts in me. I pummeled his face with my fists, punching so fast that my fists became a blur.
He staggered backward, tripped, and nearly fell from the edge of the roof, but I caught him. “No,” I said. “I’ve got a better plan for you.”
I raised a hand and summoned a Frostbreath Cougar.
“Nooo!” he howled, holding up his hands to cover his face as the big cat stalked toward him.
It breathed, raised its head, and then disgorged a sweeping vortex of Frostbreath right in his face. His scream was muffled as his lungs filled with ice, then he fell forward. When he hit the tiles, his frozen head smashed to pieces on the hard bluestone.
The headless corpse rolled down the sloping roof and disappeared off the edge.
The Technomancer was dead.
Chapter 22
It worked better than I could have hoped. The instant the Technomancer’s frozen head hit the tiles and smashed into a million pieces, his whole host began to die. He was the host, in the same way that I became the dungeons when I activated Sentient Dungeon. The difference was that I was tapping into the ancient and noble power of the dungeons, whereas he had created the control field through a combination of magically enhanced neural networks and meta-chip modifications implanted into the bodies of the poor, hapless victims he’d captured from the gutters of the inner city.
They all died, the dreadnoughts, the rats, and the humanoids. Only the flamethrower team kept fighting, because they were not actually cyborgs. It turned out that they were living people, committed to the Technomancer as acolytes. They died all the same, devoured when a team of Frostbreath Cougars attacked them in the grounds as they tried to flee.
As the dust settled over the chaos of the battlefield, Kyrine appeared beside me. She was looking more like herself again, in a blue dress and bare feet, and with her face returned to that of a beautiful woman rather than an angry God.
She put her arms around me. “You did it, you saved me!”
“We
