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~~((The National Chocolate Pudding Day Special -- page 3 of 10))~~
The monsters were clambering through the orbiting cubes like monkeys trying to tumble over an obstacle course. Some had shrunken down to a smaller form and lost their wings, perhaps in an effort to better slip through the openings.

Hector wasn't trying to smash them with the cubes, though. Just the opposite, in fact. Any time one of them made contact with a cube, he made the iron morph around their body and absorb them. The cubes were already occupied by other monsters, and Hector didn't minding doubling up the occupancy. He had to make some of the cubes larger than the others, but they could be split up and equalized later. And for now, it wasn't that much more trouble to keep track of in his head, he felt.

The fleet of orbiting metal around him was quickly growing. And these cubes weren't exactly small, either. Sure, he'd practiced this technique quite a lot, recently, but even still, Hector didn't know how many of these he would be able to maintain before things would begin to crumble.

In his training, he'd been able to keep upwards of four hundred little iron satellites before losing track of them, but those cubes had been no bigger than mice. These ones were the size of ponies, or even full-sized horses some of them. He had to be approaching that limit soon, right?

And of course, there was still Chort to worry about. The Beast of Lorent clearly did not appreciate the iron chains that kept materializing and latching onto it. Chort's body was shifting again, its limbs becoming slimmer and bonier, perhaps in an attempt to help it wriggle free without having to break all that iron.

Then it did something Hector hadn't seen it do before. A huge, gangly hand with long claws appeared from its portly body--seemingly out of its back--and slashed the air.

And the air shuddered visibly.