The roof of the casting hall ripped away with the screech of twisted iron.
Gilded blades, each thick as an ancient cedar, plunged out of split purple clouds. They did not fall; they impaled the earth like dropping executioners, crushing my newly laid copper assembly lines into glittering scrap. Air turned sweet and thick with ozone, that vile incense scent the heavens always used to disguise an impending slaughter.
[Warning: Romantic Climax triggered. 'The Swan Maiden's Pyre' has commenced. Yield to your grief. Embrace your destined protector.]
"Shut up," I snapped, shoving an alloy hex-wrench between my teeth while I secured the star-iron casing on the weapon's core.
Outside, the mountain shook. The second tier of the refining foundry took a direct hit from a sword-shaped pillar of auric light, blowing apart thirty days of brickwork into powdery shrapnel. Morou Qiong was on his feet instantly, his black robes shredding into tatters as his demonic skin hardened to basalt. He looked at me with an expression so nauseatingly tender it made my molars ache.
"Let it end here, Qilan," the demon barked, his voice vibrating with theatrical despair. He reached out to seize the glowing core from the clamp. "You gave me a furnace when they offered me an executioner's block. I will sink into the magma. My body can endure the fire long enough to trigger the firing mechanism. Live... and remember who bore the brand for you."
Before his claws could touch the metal, a flash of white frost sliced the air between us.
Jian Wuchen stepped into the breach, his chest heaving, hair wild from the blast pressure. His sword hovered an inch from Morou Qiong's throat. "Step back, beast. The karma of this mountain is tied to the orthodox paths. I severed my master's scroll for her. I abandoned my sect's pedigree to drag timber across her yard. The drop into the magma belongs to me. Qilan... let my end wipe away every tear you never shed."
"Are both of your brains made of wet dung?" Shen Zhixing lunged between them, waving a burning scroll of ledgers like a weapon. Ink speckled his pale face, his scholar's robes singed down to the cotton wadding. "Neither of you understands the calibration! The thermal drop requires an accountant's precision! I stole the alliance's maps. I betrayed seven generations of ancestors for this woman! Qilan, grant me the honor. Let me be the single entry in your debt book you cannot erase!"
They stood there. Three grown men, surrounded by falling celestial ordinance, glaring at each other with tears and profound, theatrical resolution, entirely ready to waste three perfectly functional sets of hands for the sake of an emotional funeral.
My vision went red.
"You absolute, miserable wastes of labor!" I roared.
I grabbed an eighty-pound iron pipe wrench from the bench and swung it sideways. The flat edge caught Jian Wuchen squarely in the ribs, sending him skidding across the polished slate. Before Morou Qiong could process the strike, I drove my steel-toed boot into the hollow of his knee, forcing the Demonic Sovereign down into the rubble. I hurled a wooden ledger box straight into Shen Zhixing's stomach; the impact folded him like an unboiled noodle.
"I spent six months installing those hydraulic presses!" I pointed my wrench at the shattered ceiling where celestial swords continued to obliterate the foundry terraces. "Three hundred talismans per minute! Gone! Because you three useless parasites want to die in a poetic heap of ashes instead of carrying scrap metal!"
"Qilan—" Jian Wuchen gasped from the floor, coughing up blood, his pale eyes brimming with horrified reverence.
"Shut your mouth! If any of you dies today, I'm digging up your corpses and using your marrow for flux!"
I turned to the corner rack. Hanging from chains was the project I had kept quiet: a four-hundred-pound exoskeleton forged from dense lead-plate and lined with frost-serpent scales, fitted with pneumatic piston joints salvaged from the bellows. It was clumsy, hideous, and built for extreme-depth geothermal extraction.
I stepped into the iron greaves. The latches slammed home with brutal thuds—thighs, waist, chest. I hoisted the star-iron core into the chest harness, clamping the green-etched sphere against my breastplate. The solvent hummed, vibrating through the cold lead.
"Zhixing!" I barked through the slit of the heavy iron helmet.
Shen Zhixing pushed himself up, trembling, clutching his bruised gut. "Master..."
"Get on the perimeter winches. Realign the cooling mirrors toward the primary vent. If the exhaust pressure drops below eight hundred units, I will flay you."
"Understood," he wheezed, suddenly scrambling toward the gear-house on all fours, completely stripped of his martyr complex.
"You two," I pointed two lead-clad gauntlets at Morou Qiong and Jian Wuchen. "Stand at the breach. Catch the plunging blades. If a single orthodox spike hits the magma conduit while I'm below, I will personally feed your darlings to the slag crusher."
Morou Qiong wiped crimson from his lips. The terrifying ruler of the northern wastes actually grinned—a wild, hungry, broken thing. "Magnificent monster," he muttered, leaping directly through the smashed ceiling into the golden downpour.
Jian Wuchen rose without another word, drawing his frost blade with mechanical precision, his sorrow hardened into cold iron. He vaulted after the demon, their qi colliding with the falling swords in a thunder of blue frost and black flame.
I did not watch them.
I kicked open the basalt hatchway leading straight down into the gut of the volcano. Heat rushed up, scorching the grease on my joints. I jumped.
The fall was a roaring wall of red. Magma churned eighty feet below, glowing like an exposed furnace heart. Just above the liquid rock, bolted into the black roots of the volcanic chamber, sat the firing chassis of the Heaven-Piercing siege gun: a colossal alloy barrel three paces wide, anchored by adamantine chains that groaned against the volcano's pulse.
My boots struck the basalt platform beside the breech. The heat was instantaneous. Even through the lead plates and serpent scales, the metal of my suit began to bake against my skin. Blisters formed instantly along my forearms.
I did not flinch. I worked.
I unlatched the core from my breastplate and shoved it into the loading chamber. The star-iron fit into the forged teeth with a heavy *clack*. The solvent boiled over, hissing, dissolving the last traces of celestial dampening wards painted into the mountain's roots.
The barrel hummed, vibrating so low it rattled my teeth in their sockets.
[Anomaly detected. User Sheng Qilan is rejecting the Martyr Protocol. Divine punishment intensifying. Accept the hero's embrace to survive.]
The pink, shimmering prompt materialized right in front of my faceplate, blinding me.
"You want to guide my fate?" I reached out with a lead gauntlet. I did not touch air; I grabbed the gilded script hovering in my spiritual sea, physically dragging the shimmering characters into the physical realm using the soul-grip array etched into my palms. The script wriggled, an oily, divine parasite.
I jammed the glowing text straight into the cannon's primary ignition port.
[Warning! Unauthorized integration! Divine target locked! Cease—cease—]
The barrel's sights whipped upward, locked to the script's origin point. Through the open mouth of the caldera and the shattered clouds above, the weapon pointed directly at the colossal, radiant eye that blinked in the high firmament.
The volcanic floor dropped four inches as the compression chambers engaged. Pure magma was sucked into the under-tubes, transformed by the green solvent into an azure beam of concentrated, spiteful energy. The air cracked.
Then, the honeyed voice broke entirely into a frantic, jagged shriek inside my skull.
[Failsafe Activated: Sovereign Tether. The script's existence is woven into the host's pulse. Destroy the eye, and your heart stops forever.]