Chapter 47: The Hammer and the Anvil

Chapter 47: Chapter 47: The Hammer and the Anvil

The anvil plain stretched before him like a courtroom. Joel stepped onto it without hesitation. He had made this appointment weeks ago, in a small attic, and now it was finally happening.

The Forge-Lord was working when it noticed Joel.

The moment it did, the entire crater fell silent.

The hammer stopped at the top of its swing. The expected sound never came. The vents stopped releasing smoke, holding their breath.

Across the terraces, every hound turned toward Joel at the same time, like compass needles pointing north.

Then the Forge-Lord turned its glowing visor toward the small, calm figure standing on its anvil plain.

Joel had time to plant his feet and raise his voice across the kilometer of glowing stone.

"I’m here about a job," he called casually. "Yours."

The Forge-Lord’s visor grew brighter.

Then it answered in the only language it knew.

Artillery

•••

The first mortar flew off the anvil plain like a thrown sun. Its launch shook Joel’s teeth.

A lump of molten slag the size of a cart rose into the air, trailing smoke against the bruised clouds. It came crashing down where Joel had been standing.

The impact was an explosion.

Molten metal burst outward in a ring of orange fire. The ground turned into a crater of hissing glass.

But Joel was already ten meters to the left and still moving. Phantom Tread carried him across the anvil plain without making a sound. A grey afterimage remained in his old position, drawing the second mortar’s full attention.

THWOOM. SSSS-KRAK.

The second blast swallowed the afterimage completely. The third and fourth mortars struck the ghost’s next two positions.

The Forge-Lord walked forward through its own barrage, calm and patient. With each shot, it adjusted its aim toward the flickering image of a target that made no sound.

[Ding!]

[Incoming: thermal-artillery. Aegis Frame jurisdiction: NONE.]

[Evasive doctrine advised. The house notes that its favorite tool is, in this instance, a lie.]

Noted, Joel thought as he moved between the blast zones, his heart steady and his eyes tracking each shot.

I can’t absorb fire, but I don’t need to. It’s slow, and every mortar it wastes on a ghost is one less shot aimed at the real me.

So we keep the ghosts coming.

He opened the dark.

"Nyx. The shadows along the eastern terraces. Go be weather."

A shadow behind a slag ridge began to unfold, blade by blade. Nyx emerged and moved along the edge of the basin to begin her work.

The hammer and the anvil had begun their negotiation in earnest.

•••

The Forge-Lord reached hammer range in six strides.

Then the first real blow came down on him. The massive hammer struck like a pillar of stone, carrying the weight of an entire boat.

Joel planted his feet and raised his guard to take the blow. The hammer was the one part of the Forge-Lord’s body his Frame could absorb.

DOOM!

The world turned white at the edges. The anvil plain shook beneath him.

The impact flowed into the Frame like money entering a vault. Joel stood with his arms raised, his boots buried ankle-deep in the fused stone.

[Ding!]

[Aegis Frame: 9,200 units absorbed. Host damage: 0.]

"Again, please," Joel said, and meant it.

The second strike came from the side. The third came straight down from above.

Joel absorbed the second blow with his Frame and blocked the third with the Kinetic Bastion’s guard. Each hit drove his boots deeper into the anvil plain, but each one also filled his energy reservoir.

The first phase of the fight took shape. It was like standing at a deposit window, letting the Forge-Lord pour power into his vault.

Above him, the colossus’s molten joints hissed. Its legs towered twenty feet overhead, and the air around its ankles shimmered from the heat.

Joel could absorb the hammer’s blows. It was the only thing the boss had that he could use, so he kept taking the hits and filling his reservoir.

Meanwhile, Nyx moved along the ridges toward the boss’s blind side, jumping from one shadow to the next. The darkness was thin and broken, making her progress slow.

The shrapnel attack came fifteen minutes into the fight, when the Forge-Lord finally lost patience.

The vents along the terraces opened together.

FSSSH!

A strong, horizontal blast of wind swept across the anvil plain, carrying glowing slag and torn metal plates. It was a burning storm aimed straight at the small figure that refused to die.

Joel didn’t dodge.

He stored, and released.

KRA-BOOM.

Joel released the stored force in a sphere around him.

The wall of flying metal hit it head-on. The force pushed the entire storm back toward the Forge-Lord.

SSSS-TK-TK-TK!

The glowing metal pieces flew back even faster, striking the gaps in the Forge-Lord’s knees and ankles. Its own attack had turned against it.

The Forge-Lord staggered for the first time in its long shift.

Joel watched the metal plates around its knees and ankles spark and lock up where the shrapnel had hit. The damage was small, barely a scratch on a mountain.

But the mountain had noticed.

The Forge-Lord lowered its furnace visor and fixed its full attention on Joel.

"Yes," Joel said quietly. He stood in the open, with two-thirds of his stored energy still left.

"That was just a test. Now, let’s deal with the weak point."

•••

Nyx struck on the backswing.

The Forge-Lord prepared its biggest attack. It turned its twenty-foot body and raised its hammer with both hands, aiming at the center of the plain where Joel stood.

Turning such a huge body took time. For a moment, its back faced the eastern ridges.

The shadows along the ridges joined together, forming a narrow path of darkness just wide enough for a person.

Nyx moved through the shadows and crossed the distance in an instant.

She emerged from the shadow beneath the Forge-Lord’s own shoulder blade.

The coolant pipes along the Forge-Lord’s back broke apart. Nyx had cut them at their joints.

Four jets of white steam burst out under high pressure.

FSSSSSSSS!

Nyx had already vanished into the shadows before the first jet finished spraying.

The Forge-Lord stood at its full height, its hammer still raised. For the first time, it faced a problem it had never dealt with before.

With its cooling system broken, it had nowhere for the heat to go.

Every gap in the Forge-Lord’s armor began to glow. The orange light turned gold, then white. Its furnace visor shone like a door opening onto the sun.

Its breathing changed. The slow, steady breaths it had taken since the fight began became quick and shallow.

The ruler of the Fourth Stratum was losing control of its heat. Even its own hounds had never seen it in this state.

[Ding!]

[Forge-Lord has entered Overheated Frenzy.]

[Attack speed +60%. Thermal output: RISING. Sustained contact: lethal to host.]

[Structural note: thermal containment is now operating past design tolerance.]

•••

The Forge-Lord’s frenzy turned the fight into a different battle. It nearly ended Joel’s plan in the first minute.

The hammer struck three times in the time it had taken to land one blow before.

DOOM-DOOM-DOOM!

Its mortar arm began firing from the shoulder without warning.

THWOOM! THWOOM!

Molten slag flew across the plain in fast, flat arcs. The Forge-Lord no longer aimed carefully. It attacked with everything it had.

For the first time in the fight, Joel had to retreat. He moved backward across the plain with Phantom Tread, leaving afterimages behind him.

The fire destroyed each ghost, and Joel kept creating more to draw its attacks away from him.

He was mid-evasion, a half-step into the fade, when the floor cheated.

The magnetism came from below without warning. In its frenzy, the Forge-Lord was sending its charge into the ground through its feet.

The entire basin floor became a giant magnetic field.

VMMMM!

Every piece of metal Joel carried reacted at once.

The halberd on his back pulled him sideways, dragging him out of his fade. His boot cleats screeched against the ground as he fought the pull.

His mistake lasted less than a second.

That was all the Forge-Lord needed.

Its molten fist came straight at him.

Joel twisted at the last moment. That small movement saved his life, though it still came at a cost.

The Forge-Lord’s fist missed him, but its arm scraped along his left side from hip to shoulder blade. The arm was covered in white-hot slag.

Calling it a graze made the injury sound far less serious than it was.

The pain was beyond anything Joel had felt before.

For a moment, the world around him seemed to disappear.

There was no blood. That was the worst part.

Joel’s mind, trained to think like a pharmacist, noticed the reason even through the pain. The heat had sealed the wound as it burned him. A strip of cooked flesh, two fingers wide, ran along his entire left side.

This was not pain like a blade cutting him. It was much worse. It felt as if his body had been crushed under an unbearable weight.

Joel Carrow heard himself making a sound he had never made in either life. It was small and continuous, coming from deep inside him.

He found himself on one knee behind a ridge of hot metal. He couldn’t remember moving there or dropping to his knee.

Then Juggernaut Vitality began to heal the wound.

But even after his skin had healed, the pain remained. His nerves kept sending pain signals long after the wound had closed.

[Ding!]

[Host damaged: thermal trauma (deep graze, flank). Aegis Frame: inapplicable.]

[Regeneration: active. Duration: extended. Pain index: SEVERE.]

[Lethal encounter survived (near-fatal exposure, boss-class thermal).]

[Survival Accumulation: 100%. Converting...]

[+3 Fate Points Earned (extreme danger premium). Current Balance: 13.]

Three points.

Joel knelt in the ridge’s shadow and forced himself to breathe through the pain. Each breath was hard work, but he could survive it.

That is the cost of a graze, Joel thought through clenched teeth.

The Forge-Lord turned, searching for him with its visor glowing white.

A direct hit would kill me.

The Frame can absorb the hammer, but it cannot absorb the fire. And the same frenzy that is burning me is also burning the Forge-Lord.

Its body can no longer contain the heat. The landlord is now racing its own furnace to the end.

The Forge-Lord’s back still released four streams of white steam. The damaged gaps in its armor began to glow brighter and brighter as the trapped heat built up inside it.

Joel rose to his feet, fully healed but still smoking. He now had thirteen points in his account, and his energy reservoir was completely full.

He studied the Forge-Lord and saw how the fight would end.

As always, the answer became clear just before it was time to act.

"One more time, Architect," Nyx said from the shadow beside him. Steam covered her blades, and her voice was soft. "The shadows are deep now, even beside its fire. I can reach any part of that mountain you need."

"Then get ready to strike its weak points," Joel replied.

A cold smile spread across his face.

"We’ve broken its cooling system and pushed its furnace too far. Now the anvil is going to walk up to the hammer one last time and spend everything in the account."

He looked toward the Forge-Lord.

"Come and collect your artillery, General."

He stepped back out onto the plain.

"Now then," Joel said to the burning mountain as he planted his feet. "Let’s discuss your dismissal."