Chapter 37: The Rusted Foundry

Chapter 37: Chapter 37: The Rusted Foundry

Tobin spent the afternoon hunting salamanders.

He and Aveline cleared a cheap E-rank gate in a storm drain near the river, a bounty worth barely enough for bus fare, and came back to the Sanctum with a sack of fire-red lizards the length of a man’s arm. By nightfall, the Crooked Kettle smelled like hot peppers and wet rocks, and Tobin was pouring something pale orange and steaming into a dented steel thermos.

"Salamander broth," he announced. "Drink it right before you go in. All of it. No sipping."

"It’s boiling," Elias said.

"It’s supposed to be boiling. Trust the cook."

At 22:55, Elias stood at the Association kiosk outside a fenced lot on the industrial river, where an old smelting plant had burned down years before the gates came. The Rusted Foundry hung above the ruins: a vertical tear in the air glowing a sullen orange, like the door of a kiln left open. Heat rolled off it in waves he could feel from ten meters away.

The kiosk screen read CLAIMED: Pierce, E. He tapped his license to confirm, and it chimed green.

Legal. Logged. Six thousand from the city if he walked back out.

He unscrewed the thermos and drank it all in four long, scalding gulps. It tasted like pepper and smoke and a faint sweetness underneath, and it burned all the way down. A second later, the burning stopped, and a cool weight settled through his whole body, as if he’d swallowed a river stone.

[Beast Cuisine: Salamander Broth (E-rank).]

[Temporary: Heat Resistance (3 hours).]

Then he walked through the gate.

The Rusted Foundry was a cathedral built to fire. Iron walls rose into darkness on every side, black with soot and streaked orange where they glowed from the heat behind them. Catwalks crisscrossed the open air at three levels, rusted grates hanging from chains. And far below, rivers of molten metal ran in channels cut into the floor, bright as liquid sunlight, throwing everything above them into shifting red and gold.

The heat should have flattened him. Instead, he felt it the way you feel a warm afternoon: present, heavy, bearable.

"Aveline. Marcus. Tobin."

Three folds of white-gold light. Ninety mana. Fifty-five left, and a slow trickle after.

Tobin stepped out, looked around at the molten rivers and the glowing walls, and grinned.

"Now this," he said, "is a kitchen."

The first golems came out of the molten river.

They rose up out of the channel like men climbing from a bath, made entirely of glowing slag, their bodies dripping liquid fire that hissed where it struck the iron floor. Each one stood twice Elias’s height. Each had a core burning in the middle of its chest, a knot of white-hot light the Link marked in red.

Four of them. Then six. Then nine.

"Link," Elias said, and the foundry drew itself in thin white lines.

They didn’t need to talk about it anymore. That was the strange part. Two weeks of nights, three bosses, and somewhere along the way, the plan had stopped being a plan and become a rhythm.

Marcus went up. He climbed a chain hand over hand to the highest catwalk, twenty meters above the floor, and settled into a kneel at the rail with the whole foundry spread out beneath him. Aveline went forward. She planted herself at the mouth of the main catwalk, the only bridge across the molten river, and raised her new shield.

Tobin went to the river’s edge, opened his thermos, and waited.

The golems hit Aveline first. The leader swung a fist of molten slag at her head, and she took it on her shield. Fire splashed off the steel in a shower of sparks. Without the salamander broth, it would have melted her arm. With it, she just grunted and shoved back.

"Marcus, the leader. Chest."

Crack. A blue round punched into the glowing core, and the leader’s light went out. It froze mid-swing, cooled from orange to dull black in a heartbeat, and stood there like a statue.

"Tobin!"

"On it, lad!"

Tobin flung the dregs of his thermos across the next two golems. Frost broth. Whatever he’d put in it, the molten slag hissed and steamed and went grey where it touched, and the golems’ outer shells cracked like pottery cooling too fast. Tobin stepped in with both cleavers, and the shells shattered, and their cores spilled out onto the floor, sputtering.

"Cool ’em, then crack ’em!" he bellowed cheerfully. "Just like caramel!"

Elias moved through the middle of it, calling targets. "Two left, coming up the side channel. Aveline, step back one. Marcus, the one on the stairs." When a golem slipped past Aveline’s shield and lunged at him, Quick Step carried him underneath its swing, and he jammed his dagger into the joint of its cooling knee. The knee cracked. The golem toppled into the river with a splash of fire.

It took six minutes. Nine golems, nine dead cores, and not one of them touched anyone but Aveline’s shield.

[Level up: 12 → 13.]

Elias stood on the catwalk breathing hard, his face slick with sweat, and looked around at his family. Marcus was already reloading, though he didn’t need to. Aveline was checking the edge of her shield for warping. Tobin was gathering cooled cores into a sack, humming.

Nobody had said anything for the last three minutes of the fight, he realized. Nobody had needed to.

"That," Marcus said over the Link, "was clean."

From Marcus, that was a medal.

Past the river, the catwalk led into the casting hall.

It was the halfway point on the survey map: a long, low room where molds the size of cars sat in rows under great iron ladles hanging from the ceiling on chains. The furnaces along the far wall were dark, their heavy doors shut. Everything was coated in a thick layer of grey ash that had drifted down from somewhere above and settled, soft and undisturbed, like snow.

Almost undisturbed.

Elias stopped so suddenly that Tobin walked into his back.

"What is it?"

Elias didn’t answer. He crouched and looked at the floor.

Boot prints. Clear and sharp in the ash, crossing the hall from a side door on the left and disappearing behind a row of casting molds on the right. Not his. Not Tobin’s. Marcus’s boots had a distinctive tread, and Aveline’s left the long, flat marks of armored sabatons. These were something else.

He counted.

A narrow print, light, close together: someone small and careful. Two pairs of heavy, wide boots so identical they had to be the same size and brand, pressing deep into the ash, so the men wearing them weighed far more than he did. A set of thin-soled prints that turned out at the toes, a fighter’s stance. A fifth set, ordinary sneakers, worn at the heel, hanging slightly behind the others.

Five sets.

"How old?" Marcus asked over the Link, his voice suddenly flat and quiet.

Elias touched the edge of one print. The ash at the rim was still crisp, not yet softened by the slow drift falling from the ceiling. "Minutes," he said. "Ten, maybe. No more."

Aveline’s hand moved to her sword hilt.

"The kiosk said claimed," Tobin whispered. "Only you. Nobody else is supposed to be in here."

"No," Elias said. "Nobody else is supposed to be."

Then he saw the sixth set, and the back of his neck went cold.

It began in the middle of the floor. No prints leading to it from any door or catwalk. Just a single pair of boots, appearing out of nothing beside the long shadow cast by a hanging ladle, as if a man had stepped up out of the dark itself. They walked six steps toward the casting molds, calm and unhurried.

Then they stopped beside another shadow and simply ended.

"Marcus," Elias said very quietly. "Is anything on the Link?"

A pause. "Nothing. But there’s smoke up near the ladles. I can’t see through it."

Elias stood slowly and looked around the casting hall. At the rows of molds, each one big enough to hide a man. At the hanging ladles and the shadows they threw across the ash. At the dark furnaces, their heavy doors shut.

Six people. In a gate that nobody else had claimed. Waiting.

"We’re not alone," he said.

Along the far wall, the furnace doors began to glow, dull red, then orange, then white. Somewhere deep in the iron, gears groaned. The doors began to grind open, one after another, and inside each one, something molten was stirring.

And from the smoke near the ceiling came a soft, unmistakable sound.

The creak of a crossbow string being drawn.