Chapter 44: The Ferro-Hounds

“The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.” — Richard M. Nixon

—

The trail led north along a dry river of rust. Joel followed at a steady hunting pace as shrapnel tapped against his shoulders.

TK-TK-TK.

It sounded like the slow, endless clock of the Wastes.

The pack had left a trail of evidence: broken metal plates, scorch marks, and fading sparks in the ground. Above the wind, Joel could hear the stratum passing messages along the northern horizon. Howls rolled from one pack to another, each one fainter than the last.

“HRRAOOO! HRRAOOO!”

It was as if the entire iron wasteland was passing his name up the chain, like a clerk sending a complaint to a manager.

Joel pieced the pattern together in his head. The howls followed a clear order, and that order told him the deeper packs would gather somewhere ahead, around whatever served as a meeting point in this stratum.

He intended to get there before his name did.

???

Joel found the scouting pack resting in a field of wreckage. Six hounds lay in the long shadow of a fallen gantry. Their metal plates were cooling, and their jaws moved slowly on their hinges.

Joel stopped sixty meters away and studied the hounds again.

These things were not animals by any definition he knew. Animals grew tired. Animals felt fear. The hounds had magnetic fields, hunger, and nothing else worth noting.

Their weak points were easy to spot: the jaw hinges, the neck joints, and the sensor strip behind their forehead plates.

Their main weapon was their sharp jaws, which could cut through flesh. Joel’s Frame could absorb some of that damage, but not all of it.

‘So, the plan is the same as before,’ he thought as he walked toward them through the falling shrapnel. His hands hung loose at his sides, and his halberd stayed on his back.

The first hound charged from the gantry’s shadow. It leaped at Joel, but its jump curved sideways as its magnetic field pulled against the rust.

Joel saw the change in its path and held out the correct forearm. The hound’s jaws struck and clamped down on it.

SHNKKK.

The hound bit down with tremendous force. Its forty-centimeter metal jaws struck Joel’s Epic hide with the full weight of its charge behind them. The teeth sank as deep as they could, then stopped.

The force of the impact flowed into Joel’s Aegis Frame and disappeared. For one long second, the hound kept chewing on an arm that was no longer food.

[Ding!]

[Aegis Frame: bite force absorbed. Shear component: partial. Laceration logged.]

[Jaw locked. Regeneration active.]

“You bite well,” Joel said calmly, standing inches from its face as its legs struggled for grip in the rust. Its jaw motors roared as they fought to tear through his flesh.

“But you’ve brought a mouth to a contest of strength. And I’m not the one who lets go.”

He grabbed the hound’s lower jaw with his free hand and pulled.

RRRRIP.

The jaw tore free with a loud screech. Metal plates ripped apart, its magnetic field died, and sparks flew everywhere. The hound staggered back, its face reduced to scrap.

Joel finished it with a kick through its skull.

CLANG!

His boot sank deep into the rust and broken metal.

The other five attacked together, and Joel learned the rest of the lesson the hard way.

The second hound slashed Joel’s thigh as it passed.

SHNK!

The wound was hot and sharp, but the hound was already moving away.

The third went for his throat, but Joel caught it in the crook of his elbow. Its jaws ground against his arm as he spun around, carrying the hound with him like a stubborn hat.

He used its weight to slam a fourth hound into the gantry’s support strut.

DOOM!

The impact bent the hound and made Joel question how strong the strut really was.

The fifth hound was smarter. It circled wide, trying to reach his blind side.

Nyx emerged from the shadow beneath the fallen gantry, limited by the broken land around her. She struck once with a single blade.

SHNK!

The clever hound became another dead statistic.

[Ding!]

[Ferro-Hound (Lv. 26) x5 eliminated.]

[Lethal engagement survived (multiple hostiles, environmental interference).]

[Survival Accumulation: 47%.]

[Shadow Vanguard: 1 elimination. Kills credited to host.]

???

He made the discovery during the second fight, by accident, while making a mistake.

Joel tore a metal plate from a dead hound to use as a shield. But before he could raise it, the shrapnel wind ripped it from his hand.

The plate flew through the air, curving and speeding up.

CLANG!

It struck a live hound’s shoulder twenty meters away with enough force to stagger it. Then it stuck there, trembling.

The hound’s own magnetic field had reached across the distance and pulled the iron out of the air.

Joel stood in the middle of a battle and watched the physics with his heart at its resting rate.

Joel stood in the middle of the fight, watching the physics at work while his heart beat calmly.

‘You’re magnets,’ he thought, delighted by the discovery. ‘The strongest magnets in this place. Every loose piece of iron in the wind is ammunition, and it’s all drawn to you.’

A slow smile spread across his face.

‘I don’t need to aim in this stratum. I just need to give the bullets to the magnet.’

The third encounter was not a fight. It was a gift.

The deeper packs had come south to hunt him. Nine hounds spread out in a wide crescent as Joel met them in the open wasteland, carrying an armful of torn metal plates with the biggest grin of his second life.

He threw the first plate overhand. The wind and magnetic fields did the rest, pulling the iron two meters off course until it struck a hound’s sensor strip.

Blinded, the hound kept running and crashed into the support legs of a fallen gantry.

Joel threw the second plate low, catching a sprinting hound across its hindquarters. The moment it struck, the surrounding shrapnel began to gather around the beast.

TK-TK-TK-TK!

More and more metal flew toward it from every direction, until the hound was covered in a thick layer of its own ammunition.

It looked like a snowman made of magnetic scrap.

The system gave its usual dry notification.

[Ding!]

[Ferro-Hound (Lv. 27): encumbrance 340%. Mobility: zero.]

Joel moved through the crescent calmly, like a debt collector making his rounds. He tore plates from the ground and threw them at the hounds. The magnetic fields turned the wasteland against them, forcing them to fight each other.

Only a few hounds managed to reach him, and they came one at a time. That was exactly how he liked it. He had been using the same trick against packs since the gorge in the Barrens.

???

The Packmaster arrived with the final howl. It had watched everything, which made it the most dangerous enemy Joel had faced that day.

The Packmaster was Level 29 and much larger than the other hounds. It was built differently, with thick layers of metal plates around its neck and jaws like industrial cutters.

It didn’t charge at Joel or circle him. It didn’t offer him its forearm to bite. It had learned from the others’ mistakes.

Instead, it walked toward him slowly.

The shrapnel wind bent toward the Packmaster as it approached. Soon, it had gathered the loose iron around it into a spinning wall of sharp metal. The flying blades hissed and ticked, blocking Joel’s vision like a moving blizzard.

Then it attacked from inside the storm.

Its metal-covered shoulder slammed into Joel and knocked him off his feet. He skidded ten meters across the rust.

SHKKK!

The flying shrapnel tore open his back from shoulder to hip.

[Ding!]

[Host damaged: deep laceration (shear-class), back. Kinetic component absorbed. Shear component: logged and closing.]

[Lethal engagement survived (elite hostile, environmental blindness).]

[Survival Accumulation: 100%.]

[Gauge converting…]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 10.]

Joel rose from the skid, blood soaking into his coat, but his mind remained clear.

He studied the Packmaster’s wall of flying metal, searching for the pattern beneath the noise.

The blizzard depended on the Packmaster’s magnetic field. But the field had a limited range. Beyond that range, the wind blew normally, and it came from the north.

Joel sprinted south, escaping the storm into clear air. The Packmaster chased him, its metal legs grinding against the rust.

They crossed an open stretch of wasteland where the wind blew straight and the shrapnel moved in clear streams.

As he ran, Joel filled both fists with torn metal plates.

The first plate struck the Packmaster’s mane and stuck there. The second and third hit its brow plates, carried by the wind.

Joel threw the fourth plate high into the air. It fell through the Packmaster’s magnetic field, and all the loose iron nearby followed it.

The beast’s own magnetism pulled everything toward it at once.

TK-TK-TK-TK!

CLANG!

A hundred kilos of metal crashed into the Packmaster. It staggered under the weight, its sensors stripped away, its movements slowed, and its roar echoing across the wasteland.

The Packmaster bit down on Joel’s offered forearm one last time.

SHNK!

Its jaws locked around his arm and ground against his tough hide, but they couldn’t break through.

Joel planted his feet and grabbed the upper jaw with his right hand and the lower jaw with his left. Then he used all the strength he had gained through Evolution to settle the matter the oldest way he knew.

“Nyxfloor rates, as I understand them,” he said through his teeth, “are very reasonable.”

And he pulled in opposite directions.

RRRIIIP.

[Ding!]

[Ferro-Hound Packmaster (Lv. 29, Elite) eliminated.]

[Massive EXP gained.]

[Level Up! You are now Level 27.]

[Level Up! You are now Level 28.]

[Lethal encounter survived against a statistically superior entity. The Wheel acknowledges your gamble.]

[+1 Fate Point Earned. Current Balance: 11.]

???

At dusk, Joel found a canyon, a deep, dark crack between walls of rust. It was the first place in the stratum where Nyx could move freely.

She emerged from his shadow, blade by blade, and looked at the healed wounds on his forearms with something close to affection.

“You spent the whole day fighting with your bare hands against sharp metal, Architect,” she said. “Twenty-three cuts. I counted them all.”

“Twenty-three,” Joel agreed. He leaned against the rust wall, watching the orange glow of the northern furnace beyond the canyon rim. It was steady and enormous.

“All healed, all paid for. And now I have eleven chips and a much better understanding of metal.”

[========== STATUS PROFILE ========]

Name: Joel

Level: 28

Class: [Aegis Juggernaut] (Epic, Unique) [External: Flesh-Guide (F), Level 1]

Fate Points: 11

[— Core Attributes —]

Strength: 64.0 (+40)

Agility: 43.3 (+15)

Physique: 96.7 (+25)

Mana: 36 / 36

[— Day’s Ledger —]

Eliminations: 22. Fate Points earned: 2.

Lacerations sustained: 23. Lacerations outstanding: 0.

[— Shadow Vanguard —]

? Nyx (Level 22): resident. Opinion of the cutlery: unprintable.

[================================]

Joel flexed his scarred hands in the furnace light. The two Merit Points he had earned that day sat in his account like firewood. Tomorrow, he would spend them.

The spin was for one thing: finding an answer to the kind of attack his Frame could not absorb, the force that did not hit him like a punch.

“The deeper part of the stratum lies beyond that ridge, Architect,” Nyx said, nodding toward the glow. “The darkness there smells of hot metal.”

“Yes,” Joel replied, folding his hands. “Whatever controls the furnaces has been hearing about the trouble I caused today. And I’ve made an appointment without giving them my name. That’s my favorite kind.”

He leaned back against the rust wall.

“Tonight, we rest. Tomorrow, the house buys a bastion.”