The Chronicles of Inthandonia: The Wizard Wars. Pursuit I was free but certainly not clear. The Skrellian rotor-bots were singularly fixed upon my destruction. They pursued me with that single focus as implacably as only machines can. The wise man always seeks the highest path and so I plunged headlong upwards through the forested mountains seeking the advantage of altitude. My physical enhancements allowed me to climb almost effortlessly, the weight of my body firmly supported by the flowing metallic endo/exoskeleton that overlay my flesh. The networked quantum nano-computers that flowed within my bloodstream tirelessly calculated probabilities and nudged them to fall in my favour. It was almost as if a path was opened for me amongst the dense forest as I went. I was literally running full tilt up the steep mountainside through the clinging undergrowth yet I felt no more wearied than a man strolling along a sunlight courtyard. Above the trees came a constant high-pitched roar from the rotors supporting the large mechanoids as they clawed at the thin mountain air. As my progress was managed by a bank of automatic subroutines in my neural net my mind was free to consider the nature of my pursuers. Built to the same common eight-legged arthropod blueprint as other Skrellian robots these were heavy lifting and construction bots hastily re-tasked to a hunter-killer role for which they were not really suited. My exoskeleton contained a plethora of integral sensor options and at first it was an easy matter to break into the robotic coms networks and hack my way into their primary operating systems. The robots were built to the same design sensibilities that drove my exoskeleton and basic codes and encryptions were already familiar to my nano-net. At first I was able to simply confuse the robot brains into attacking each other. Over a dozen of the lumbering things crashed together in flames around me on the mountainside before emergency data upgrades locked me out. There were still plenty of them hovering screaming above the tree tops but once I was excluded from taking them over I resorted to simply creating ghost images of myself at varying other locations and concealing my own presence from their sensors. Many an innocent tree was blasted to pieces with cutting lasers and demolition charges directed at a false reading of my presence and so I was able to continue my escape. On the snow-laden slopes above the tree line I watched the mechs drone through the chilly air. The sound from their rotors shook snow from the higher slopes and sent it avalanching downwards in frigid torrents. Once I reached the ridgeline I created several more false decoy images of myself to distract the bots and then, unobserved I slipped away and down into the next valley.