Stormblade 4 C40: Workshop (1)
40 - Workshop (1)
The brass turntable continued to rotate at the center of the massive forgeworks we’d found ourselves in. At least a hundred yards separated us from any of the dozen arching doorways that lined the room’s far outer wall, but as we spun, a single brass bridge extended across the dark pit below. It was wide enough to move a Brass Titan down, but even as it clicked into the turntable’s side and stopped, Bernard hesitated. “Do we go?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” Sarah said.
“On it.” Bernard stepped onto the bridge, then steadied himself and broke into a fast jog. At S-Rank, that fast jog was more of a mad dash; we followed him at full speed.
But we hadn’t even reached the end when the entire machine around us seemed to come alive.
Massive jets of steam roared up from the abyss below, framing the bridge with superheated vapor. The entire span shook and shivered under my feet. I braced myself, dropping into Mistwalk Forms—but instead of falling apart, the bridge swayed back and forth, and a dozen monsters exploded upward from the pit.
Cold Steam Overseers: S-Rank Monster
They were undeniably brass. Everything in this place was brass. But at the same time, these looked tarnished and dark. Massive, thin blades jutted from their shoulders, looking like wings, and their arms and legs sported shorter versions of the weapons—or large-mouthed cannons in their place. The armor glinted in the forgeworks’ firelight for a moment as the dozen monsters hovered overhead, steam suspending them mid-air.
Then, as one, they dove.
“Hive mind!” Sarah yelled. I had no idea what she meant by that.
Bernard reacted instantly, though, his shield sliding between Sarah and Hugo and a descending Overseer. The brass wings gouged into the S-Rank tank’s tower shield almost four inches as the monster spun. Steam whirled around it, then condensed into beads of water that hit my armor like bullets as I lunged toward it.
Then it was chaos.
Arrows rippled out like machine gun fire as Hugo opened fire on the cannon-carrying Overseers. They shot back, bursts of steam that condensed instantly and left massive dents in the brass below the Falcon’s Eye when he dodged them. Wing-blades sliced into brass, and the Portal Tyrant’s hammer crumpled armor. Sunbeams and gouts of flame ripped across the Overseers as Cheddar and the Phoenix Reborn both attacked from above.
And I brought Nimbus Edge up, parrying a wing blade as it sliced for my neck. Storm Dance to behind the monster. Shift stances to Cyclone. Cloudburst on the furthest flying Overseers to stall out any surprises. Stormfire Lance into my opponent’s armored chest. Follow up with Darkness on the bridge.
The Overseer I’d been fighting rolled away, and a second one slammed its wingblades down onto me, cutting off my pursuit. Another of Brendan’s Stormfire Lances. It left a black mark in the brass monster’s armor. As its blade ripped toward me, steam condensed on it—just like Rain-Slicked Blade. I backpedaled and cast a Lightning Chain with Windfall to slow the Overseer. Three steps back, shift stances. Thunderbolt Forms. Two lunges as the monster strained against my snare.
Both hit. One caught something important. Steam poured out onto the bridge, and I took another step back, then used Thunderblade. Nimbus Edge blurred as I went on the offensive. Portal metal rang against brass. A half-dozen strikes hit in half as many seconds.
Then the Windfall broke, and the first Overseer tagged back in with a massive overhead blow. It slammed into Nimbus Edge, shoved the rapier aside, and kept going. The steam-drenched blade cut into my off-hand above my wrist; I screamed, then bit it back as the battle trance washed over me.
Thunderblade was still running. I pressed the attack. Steam leaked from a dozen punctures along the Overseer’s armor, and blood dripped from my arm and a cut across my forehead. I wiped the blood aside as best I could. “That’s it, huh?”
The Overseer didn’t say anything.
I didn’t mind.
Nimbus Edge lashed out. Cutting Storm activated, and all twelve Overseers took a blow to their wing-blade joint. Most didn’t break. The one I was fighting did; the wing-blade hung loosely from a fragment of twisted brass for a moment before I followed up and cut it again. I spat. “Now it’s a fair fight.”
The Overseer tried to roll and trade with its partner, but as it disengaged, I used Lightning Chain and pulled myself with it. Nimbus Edge punched into the monster’s armor, this time slicing deep. Steam erupted from the wound and condensed instantly into a jet of water that sliced fifty yards into the air, then evaporated as it fell into the forgeworks.
Something hummed in the air behind me. I whirled, and Nimbus Edge caught the two wing-blades as they ripped through the air toward my face. The Overseer’s counterpart. I grinned and shifted to Mistwalk stance. “You’re missing a dance partner. That’s okay. The song’s almost over for you.”
The Overseer leaped at me, wing-blades ripping the air, and I used Storm Dance, then Rain-Slicked Blade. The jet of compressed steam-water that erupted from the monster’s body was almost as strong as the first, but I was already spinning and sidestepping even as it fell.
Then I threw myself into the battle; there were still Overseers alive, and that wasn’t acceptable.
◄▼►
The bridge didn’t lead us to a work floor.
We stepped off it onto a massive brass walkway, suspended between strands of interwoven metal and silk high above the metal ground below. The ground wasn’t the only surface that was brass, either. The walls and ceiling shimmered the same bright yellow-gold, with only slight hue shifts and sections of tarnish making them distinguishable. The air smelled like molten metal and sweat.
Far below, a machine was being built. One that dwarfed everything we’d seen except the cave-trapped foremen. It had no nameplate, and it looked half-finished. Hundreds of low-ranked monsters swarmed around it—C and even D-Ranked automatons, each working to lower and attach massive plates onto the hulking machine’s frame.
It’d be humanoid—or maybe gorilla-like was a better comparison. Twenty or twenty-five feet tall. Jaws big enough to fit Jessie between them. Arms made from strands of super-tense brass-silk strands that mimicked muscle, and smaller arms hanging from the thing’s shoulders. They looked almost like the attachments for wing-blades, but not quite.
“Get a good look at what’s going on here,” Sarah said. “If we fail to kill the portal boss, someone has to survive to get all this information out of here. Nathan, that’s probably you, since you can fly back to the portal.”
The Phoenix Reborn nodded slowly. “Got it.”
Despite the hulk’s threatening aura—not just a magical one like mine, but its sheer presence—it was just that. A hulk, and a threat, but not an active danger. Not yet. Its massive shoulders and squat legs didn’t move. Its gigantic back was slumped and bowed. Even its eyes were dull, not the yellow or red so many of this portal’s monsters had glowed with in battle. It was inactive. Weak. Unpowered.
Then the crowd of low-ranked monsters parted, and a figure appeared on the room’s far side.
The Craftsman: S-Rank Monster
He was…
My first thought was that he was human—or that he had been before he’d modified himself. His skull was nothing but welded brass plates. There was no skin on his face, only metal, and one of his eyes glowed yellow like the monsters of the portal. Woven silk tubed hung from the mechanical chair he sat hunched in, connecting to the ceiling high above him, and a single, atrophied arm of flesh was tucked against his chest. His other arm was brass, with dozens of fingers, and that one held something.
The Craftsman’s chair floated forward to the hulk’s chest, where a single unsecured plate hung open. The mechanical arm reached out and placed the thing he held inside, then shut the brass panel behind it.
“We need to attack. Now.”
I turned. Terrel Young had a death grip on his hammer. His eyes were locked on the boss below us. “Now’s our best chance to take the portal’s boss out. We need to—“
The screaming of metal on metal from below interrupted him. My gaze flicked back to the retreating Craftsman, then to the monstrosity he’d just brought to life.
Steam Hulk: S-Rank Monster
It moved. Brass rubbed against brass, a horrific nails-on-chalkboard sound that echoed through the forgeworks, as its neck rotated. Seals broke, and steam leaked from its joints as C and B-Ranked monsters fled from the workshop’s floor. Two gigantic yellow eyes took in the fleeing brass automatons. They panned back and forth across them, then up the walls and to the walkway.
Then they met mine and flickered red, and the screaming of metal on metal changed to a guttural, half-living and half-mechanical battle roar.
“Move!” Sarah yelled.
We broke into a run, feet shaking the catwalk as we sprinted toward the far side, where it dove down a flight of stairs and into the brass wall beyond. The brass walkway exploded as something ripped into it. I looked over my shoulder; it was like a dozen spiders had decided to tear the catwalk to shreds using their silk. Ropes lashed around it, then went taut and strained until either they gave, or the metal bolts holding the pathway to the ceiling did.
I stopped watching and put on the speed, and the six of us hit the stairwell one after the other, crossing the threshold into the next brass-lined room in the span of a second or two. We sprinted down a weaving, zig-zagging stairwell toward the ground floor. Halfway down, the wall shook as something massive slammed into it. A second impact followed, and it buckled.
“Bernard, can you take it?” Sarah asked quietly between floor-shaking blows. “I can keep you healed if it doesn’t kill you in one blow.”
The massive tank nodded. “It’s not a boss, just a monster. I can handle it.”
“Great. We’ll try to kill it fast.”
“Didn’t we just destroy a group of S-Rank monsters?” I asked.
“No, that was one monster. A hive mind. They were all the same being. And this thing—this Hulk—is stronger than anything the portal’s thrown at us so far,” Terrel said. He hefted his hammer, readying it as we hit the ground floor and dropped into a wedge, Bernard at the front and Hugo in the back, arrow to his bow.
Two more earth-shaking impacts rocked the room before the wall finally parted, and the automaton’s gorilla-like face filled the gap.
“Here’s Johnny,” Hugo said from behind me, and a massive arrow snapped off his bowstring. It slammed into the Steam Hulk’s face, just below its glowing red eyes. I expected it to pull back. Instead, it pressed forward, gigantic arms reaching into the gap it had smashed and bending a solid foot of brass to widen the gap. When it hit the first support beam, it slowed and braced itself to pull even harder.
I didn’t waste any more time watching. The Polarity Shift combo flowed as I shifted to Cyclone Forms, and I dropped a column of empowered lightning a dozen feet across onto the monstrosity while it was only halfway through. A whirlwind of flame erupted in front of me as the Phoenix Reborn opened up, too. And even more arrows punched into the Hulk’s brass armor.
But none of them stopped the massive machine, and as the first set of support beams gave way, its shoulders wedged their way into our room, and the fight began in earnest.
◄▼►
“Methinks your council doth protest this agreement too much,” Mind Maiden Enolda said from the folding chair in Jessie’s guild leader’s office.
Jessie sighed and stared at her computer screen. It was so frustrating. She had the deal’s terms on her computer. Both the Governing Council—represented by Councilman Nathan Anders himself—and the Crone had agreed to them. Twenty percent of current Paragon cores, ten percent of future, no preference for core typing or rank. It was a cheap payment for saving Phoenix and opening up trade with the Crone’s Ghostmarket, all in all.
But the Governing Council was trying to maneuver and manipulate, and Jessie had an… incomplete…understanding of why.
That wasn’t true. Jessica Gerald, as J-Dawg, understood exactly what the Governing Council’s pressures were. Her friends, User295 and Yreanne, had helped her infiltrate the GC’s deepest-level communications, and they’d done it without tipping off the various intrusion countermeasures and antivirus systems the Governing Council relied on. She’d been reading Inner Council memos, and she knew everything about the GC’s negotiations with one Robert Traynor and his corporation—and its subsidiary, The Overholz Company.
She even understood. The Traynor-Overholz Cannons were—or would be—game-changing. They were a good investment. They might even be worth handing another ten percent of the GC’s Paragon cores to an unawakened businessman. What she didn’t understand was why he wanted Paragon cores.
“They’re doing what any businessman would—trying to renegotiate once their position changes,” Jessie said quietly. Enolda would hear everything, of course. But the puppet-woman didn’t usually reply, and this time was no different. She slumped in her chair like her strings had just been cut, and Jessie relaxed just a fraction.
She typed a quick command into her computer.
J-Dawg: How’s the next operation going?
Yreanne: I was wrong.
User295: Oh? And what were you wrong about this time, Yreanne?
Yreanne: Shut up.
J-Dawg: I’m juggling a lot of plates here. Focus?
User295: Sorry.
Yreanne: I’m not. Look, you want access to the Guardians’ comms, you’re going to have to give me more to go off. I thought your Inner Council job was rough, but this is ridiculous. Their security is almost obscene. It’s gotta be half their budget.
J-Dawg: I’ll see what I can do. User295? Your side?
User295: I have the Overholz side done. Standard phishing trip. And you wouldn’t believe who the catch is there.
J-Dawg: Who?
User295: Rebecca Overholz.
User295: Even better, I’m pretty sure she knows she’s compromised, and she’s still giving us what we want.
J-Dawg: Really?
User295: It happens sometimes. Rarely. How do you want to play it?
J-Dawg: Let me think about it. Thanks for the help.
Yreanne: You pay us.
Jessie snorted as she shut down the chat window, which wiped itself clean. Then she closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. She wasn’t surprised that Rebecca Overholz was willing to give company secrets to a stranger. That was fine. But what wasn’t fine was that she had no idea what the Guardians were up to. Of all the major guilds in Phoenix, they were the only one that hadn’t sent their S-Ranker to Carlsbad.
And Jessie had to know what was so important that they weren’t getting involved in that operation.