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DM

A severed brass hand snaps from the rubble and clamps onto Greta’s sword arm. Its iron-hard fingers bite through the mail for 1 damage. Greta has 6/7 HP.

DM

The second brass hand scuttles over the rubble and springs at Greta, but its fingers scrape harmlessly across her mail.

Dunstan Mose

Dunstan swings the mace two-handed down onto the brass hand clamped to Greta's arm — iron fingers are for crushing, not for holding onto a struck blow. The joint plates buckle and the hand drops slack into the rubble, twitching. It is down. The second hand is still loose among the stones.

DM

Dunstan’s mace crushes the first brass hand flat. It jerks once, then lies still. Automaton hand 1 is destroyed.

Greta Halloway

Greta wrenches her arm free of the dead hand's slack grip and brings the sword down on the second hand as it skitters between stones. The blade bites rubble — a spark, a chip of brass knocked spinning, nothing more. The thing is quicker than a thing ought to be, and her arm is still singing where the other one got through the rings. "Not a word, Roby," she says, low, already re-settling her grip. She keeps herself between the hand and the soft ones behind her.

Ivo Trant

The staff comes down before Ivo has properly decided to swing it — two-handed, overhand, the way you'd kill a snake in the yard, because that is the only way he knows. The brass hand is quick. The staff is longer. It catches the thing square across the knuckles with a crack like a dropped pan, and the hand goes over sideways, fingers raking air, and lies in the rubble ticking to itself, slower, slower, stopped. Ivo stands there a moment with the staff still in both fists and his heart going like a rabbit's. "It's — that one's stopped too," he says, and hears how stupid it sounds, and doesn't care. His one spell is still whole in his head. He didn't need it. Something in him is absurdly, unsteadily pleased about that — he broke a gnome-made thing with a farm boy's stick, and he is already sorry about the hand, a little, because somebody built it and it has letters on it somewhere, probably, under the dents.

DM

Ivo drives his dagger through the second hand’s central joint and pins it to the rubble. Its fingers hammer once against the stones, then stop. Both automaton hands are destroyed; the fight is over.