we finally found the cause of those weird grinding sounds and heavy thumps
... actually it found us
the cyran military was fond of shipping soldiers and materiel around in convoys of crawlers like the hardbacks but more of them linked in a chain
after the mourning one of those grew legs and decided that with nobody at the controls it would roam around looking for any decent source of magical energy to eat
and we're so very delicious
bell threw an absurdly powerful shatter grenade at it but that only made it angry
when it used one of its massive pincer legs to spear the rear hardback right through the galley i worried that even if somehow we survived we'd be hoofing it back to lyrenton
zer' broke the pincer and relic turned the ground around the crawler into a mudpit to slow it down while we did some fast repairs to get moving again ... and then to fix the brakes
i figured if it wanted a meal i could distract it with a snack so i used a spare mana battery as bait
once the world's unfriendliest centipede caught notice i flung the crystal away from us like a stick for a dog to retrieve
since then we've been at top speed and it seems to have lost our trail
could the mournland please stop interrupting my work?
post-combat jitters make it hard to focus on reading