Another of the hostages met their end at the tip of the woman''s blade then, and she quickly demolished the armored door leading to the reactor chamber. The instant she entered, I cranked the reactor as hot as it could stand. The limits of the turbines meant it probably wouldn''t generate much more power, but I was all for giving this murderous woman a lethal dose of radiation.


    At the exact same time, my Clockwork Knight managed to take down three of the other murder-hobos using its Proton Pile blaster, filling the corridor directly in front of it with what basically amounted to a highly radioactive steam explosion. This knocked another two off-balance, which the machine capitalized on with its chainsword. This, sadly, didn''t last, as one of the enemy troopers got the bright idea to stick their spear right in the Proton Pile outlet, frying the delicate conjuration runes with a crackle of electricity.


    As the soldiers died, I felt significant surges of mana. By my estimates, each of them was giving me on the order of twenty to thirty mana. For a brief moment I could see how that woman''s evil soul-sucking sword could be so powerful, before firmly shutting down that line of thought. Proton Piles provided me with plenty of Mana, and I rather disliked the idea of feeding off sapient life. I might not be human anymore, but I still refused to cross that particular line; it felt far too much like cannibalism.


    Anyway, after my Clockwork Knight fired its Proton Pile the first time, everything went downhill for that particular machine. The chainsword was deadly if it managed to score a hit, but at the moment that was turning out to be a big ''if'', as the experienced troopers quickly began to knock the construct off-balance and start doing serious damage to it. Then that positively evil woman concluded that no, there wasn''t any loot in the room with my prototype reactor, and shredded what was left of my Clockwork Knight in seconds.


    This advance also brought the enemy troops into the part of the corridor that my circular saws could cover, and cover they did, the blades bursting out of the wall to decapitate several of them. Still, in the end, both that positively evil woman and three of her troops made it to the end of the corridor where they swiftly demolished both my machine gun turret and the Armed Clockwork, before coming face to face with another armored door. I didn''t bother with letting that woman demolish it, instead opening it right as my first floor boss lined up a shot with its cannon.


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    In the end, my machine fell, but now that woman was alone, save for the terrified civilians who I had managed to mostly shuffle through the secret corridor to safety with only a dozen or so casualties. The woman went downstairs now, casually demolishing both the Armed Clockwork and the machine gun turret I had waiting at the start of the second floor before slicing through yet another armored door and entering the corridor where I''d installed my Uranium trap. The wall panel concealing the radiation source fell, and as the control rods retracted the entire corridor lit up with the deadly blue glow of Cerenkov Radiation.


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