Chapter 23: Chapter 23: Forge or Die (3)
[Heat 3: Begin.]
[Absolute Regeneration: OFF.]
[Constraint: Maintain contact with billet. Dropping = fail.]
[Imbuement Protocols: ARMED.]
Light ate the steel. Cold answered. It felt like it had been squatting in my bones rent-free since breakfast, feet on the table, smoking where it wasn’t allowed.
The Fog Tyrant Core woke in my tongs—fist-sized winter with teeth. Frost crawled out in hairline veins, kissed the Anvilspace bubble, and hissed there like it had all the time in the world and my name on a list.
"Hands on. Hands stay," I told myself. "Call the lines. No heroics."
Cold chewed through the tongs and into my palm, then climbed my forearm—slow, greedy, thorough. The blade sang a thin unhappy note while the trait started threading, sparks skittering down the groove like fire learning cursive and writing my name wrong on purpose.
Up above, all twelve Watchers leaned in. Hoods tilted. Hammers angled. The quiet put on weight and sat on my chest.
First strike landed clean. Second, almost. Third—
—off by a heartbeat.
[Warning: Frost Shock building.]
[Backlash Risk ↑]
"Take a number," I hissed. "Pain line starts behind rent."
I locked to the ghost metronome hanging in the air. One-two-three. One-two-three.
Cold pushed. Forge pressure pushed back. Tide versus tide, signing a treaty on my tendon.
Smelt Sight painted the truth across the channel—ruler-straight until it wasn’t. Tiny wobble mid-spine. Drift: 2.1%.
Resin. Tap-tap. Kissed the line back without collapsing the trait. Don’t blink sideways.
A cleaver-shade rolled out from under the next anvil and chopped for my knuckles. The bubble ate most of it; my bones got the rumor. Grip flickered like a dying bulb.
"Hands on. Hands stay."
Timer: 9:12. The count wrote itself on the back of my teeth.
The mask tilted like a bad teacher. The whole ring started counting with me. Miss a beat, get another hall monitor. Great pedagogy.
I kept time. Sweat ran into my eyes; pennies on my tongue. Left palm burned. The tongs had carved grooves in skin that would’ve been gone by now—regen OFF, so we were doing it the grown-up way: suffer, pass, pay.
Heat Memory ticked down. +9... +7... +5...
I fed the core deeper. The blade’s pitch climbed to alley scream. The trait wanted the edge—of course it did. I bullied it back to the spine with the rounding hammer. Gentle arcs. Soft threats. "Spine only. You want edge, you pay rent."
The mask didn’t move and still moved. Every perfect hit dimmed one Watcher a hair. Every sloppy tap brightened one. Furniture had a grading rubric.
Next beat hurt wrong.
My shoulder twanged like a cracked bow. The billet bounced. I almost lost purchase. Left hand spasmed. Tongs squealed. A clean white strip of pain tore the web below my thumb.
[Constraint Warning: Grip Integrity 42%]
[Fail Threshold: 40%]
The room did that hold-your-breath thing, like it wanted a neat, polite fail it could file.
"Not today." I leaned a hip into the anvil until my spine felt taller.
I retraced the Anvilspace circle with the hammer face. The bubble snapped full with a shiver that bit my molars.
[Anvilspace (B-Rank): Recast.]
[Stability: marginal.]
One Watcher set its hammer point-down. Judgment posture. Love that for me.
"Judge this," I said, mostly to keep my jaw moving.
I synced the room’s beat to my pulse—one-two-three, one-two-three—until it sat behind my teeth. A statue hunkered in my shadow like a stray dog on a stoop, waiting for me to miss a note so it could push the door.
Smelt Sight showed a clean channel and one tiny lie. Drift: 1.9%. Okay—if I didn’t breathe weird. Maybe it would go okay.
I breathed weird anyway. My body loves sabotage.
Cold climbed to my elbow. Then shoulder. The trait flexed; my nerves filed a complaint to my spine with capital letters and exclamation points.
[Warning: Nerve conduction degraded.]
[Backlash Risk ↑↑]
No regen bailout if a tendon popped. The tongs became religion: believe or die.
"Be boring," I told my idiot heart. "Dont be heroic."
Another beat slipped. The shadow birthed a punisher and slid it under the bubble through a seam I hadn’t seen. Its knife kissed the back of my hand—clean nick, bright pain.
Vision flashed white at the edges.
Grip Integrity: 41% → 40% → 41%. Flirting with red like a bad decision.
I cheated.
"Speed me up."
The metronome obliged. The count leaned forward; I went with it—short strokes, tight circles, precision over pretty. The mask tilted a fraction like approval I didn’t ask for.
Perfect note. One Watcher dimmed. Another. The shade jittered against the field like a fly that finally understood windows.
Heat Memory ticked out.
[Perfect Window Ended.]
The billet’s color tried to run—past honey-lightning into CRACK ME country. I powered through with wrist and will, kept it in the pocket, and walked the cold thread another centimeter.
"Good," I breathed—stupid—and almost done this one is for the fans in the comments. Tap. Fix. Back on line. Shut up and swing.
Right arm started to stutter. The hammer felt like a different species—one that hated me. Sweat slid off my jaw, hit the billet, hissed, tried to harmonize.
"Hands on. Hands steady come on Ethan you got this."
The world sharpened. The bubble tightened. Hoods leaned in. Someone else’s forge—older, colder, iron sky—put a hand on my neck and said count right or drown.
Five strikes. Perfect because they had to be. My shoulder screamed. Palm burned. Teeth clenched hard enough to invoice later.
Five Watchers went dim. The ring shifted from courtroom to held breath.
I pushed the trait toward the end of the channel and felt the core try to gulp the last inch in one bite. Greedy. Typical.
"Back," I said. If I could’ve used my teeth, I would’ve.
It listened like a wild thing that noticed I had teeth too.
[Imbuement Progress: 83%]
[Backlash Containment: unstable]
[Quench: ARMED]
Left thumb went numb. Pins-and-needles turned to black static at the edge of vision. Grip Integrity: 41% → 40%. Red blink like a dare.
The ring smiled with silence.
"Don’t," I said—to the Watchers, gravity, my dumb hand. "Don’t let it end like this Ethan."
Another strike. On time. Another. On time. The channel swallowed the last thread of winter and locked like two teeth biting the same piece of meat.
Something called a punisher tried one last time to end me. Slipped a knife under the bubble through a seam that shouldn’t exist and nicked the web between thumb and index.
Bright pain. Blood on my hands and the blade. My fingers slid a millimeter that felt like a mile.
No regen. No heal. Just me and the bad idea I’d chosen on purpose.
I almost dropped the billet.
Grip Integrity: 40%. Red. Loud. Counting down to shame.
"Fine," I said through my teeth. "Fine."
I carved the Anvilspace circle again—hard—and the bubble didn’t just close.
It deepened. Air folded like a page. The room lost some of its outside.
[Skill Evolution: Anvilspace → Forge Dominion]
[Rank: S (Domain) — Instance-Limited]
Effect: Sealed pocket centered on workpiece. — Outside interference nullified. — Brief freeze on billet integrity (≤ 0.5s) for micro-adjustments. — Heat/time ratio adjustable (×0.5–×2.0). Duration: 30s (trial). Cooldown: 600s. Notes: Access keyed to rhythm fidelity + trait cohesion.
"Anvilspace got promoted," I said into the quiet. "Fishbowl → god room. Sure. Normal day."
The shade’s knife blinked out like a bad thought. The Gods behind me paused at the boundary, hands behind there back, like they had only wanted to know if I could reach this switch.
Time leaned slow—just enough to sing the right color if I let it.
I let it.
Froze the billet for half a heartbeat, shifted stance, nudged the tray with my elbow, un-froze into motion. The trait seated with one clean hiss that ran the arm and filed my teeth.
[Imbuement: COMPLETE]
[Quench: READY]
"Please don’t scream," I told the blade, and lowered it into Swampglass spiked with Crystal Fog.
It screamed anyway.
Steel screams. This one screamed cold. The sound crawled up my nerves and chewed my shoulder. I held, shook, lied to my muscles about what "hold" means. Twelve statues listened to how well I pretended to be bigger than a knife.
I stirred once to chase vapor pockets—no surprise cracks today—and the Dominion drank the worst of the tantrum, bleeding it into stone like gossip.
The mask pressed its face to the glass of the world and fogged it with a breath it didn’t have. If it had eyes, I was busy not seeing them.
The scream stepped down its staircase: violent → angry → grudging. The blade settled like a heartbeat finally admitting ownership.
I raised it slow. Steam curled pale. Frost-threads along the spine melted into tidy nothing. It smelled like a battery’s ghost and old snow.
"Hello," I told the knife. "Be real."
Dominion dropped. Noise and pressure rushed back. The mask walked backward into its own shadow without moving. The Watchers lifted their hammers by one polite degree, like I’d answered half a question on a test I hadn’t signed up for.
[Hardening: SUCCESS]
[Temper Recommended: straw → brown → purple (quick cycle)] [Absolute Regeneration: still OFF. Don’t be dumb.]
"Copy," I said, and kissed heat back into the spine—straw at the shoulders, light brown along the belly, dusky purple near the tip. Not textbook. Good enough to keep it from exploding if I sneezed on it wrong.
Smelt Sight flickered one last overlay across my vision. Stress looked quiet. No hidden bubbles waiting to turn my work into confetti. The trait sat clean in the spine, pretending to be civilized. Maybe it actually respected me. Maybe it was just tired of fighting.
I set the blade across the anvil. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The tongs had left a street map in my palm, and blood had dried in the web of my thumb like glue I couldn’t peel off.
A soft chime hit—clean, cold, too polite for what I’d just done.
[Forge Judgment: A-Rank (High)]
[Property Bound: Fogbite]
Effect: Critical strikes inflict chill + pressure stagger. Stacks refresh on subsequent hits (cap: 3).
[Bonus: Rhythm Fidelity — Watchers Silenced 6/12 → Grade Up held.]
I laughed because my body forgot the other options. Ragged and dumb. "Hi, Fogbite. I’m Ethan. Please don’t eat your owner."
The mask inclined its head—approval, or wind with opinions—and turned back into whatever statues are when you stop looking.
The room let go.
Then pain clocked in. Hands, elbows, shoulder, back—every part punched a timecard. The tidy slice in my webbing burned now. My knees switched religions to Sitting Down.
I didn’t. Not yet.
I took the soft brush, wiped the edge clean, slow, like I was afraid to smudge a word I’d finally learned to spell. Breath in. Out. Don’t shake. Don’t drop. Don’t be the idiot who trips at the finish line.
The system breathed with me.
[Heat 3: Complete]
[Instance Objective: Met (≥ A-Rank output)]
[Bonus Objective: Met (Trait Imbued — Fog Tyrant Core)]
[Penalty Avoided: Grip Failure]
[Break: 5:00]
[Absolute Regeneration: RESTORED (reduced efficacy)]
Warmth rolled under my skin like water poured into a cracked cup. Cuts knit. Not all the way. Enough to put bones back inside their lines and give my hands their names again.
I laid the blade on the stone like a sleeping animal and didn’t look away until the shake left. Then I made the mistake of looking up.
Half the Watchers were dim. Half still watched. The dim ones looked less like statues and more like memory. That was probably a later problem with fangs.
"Yeah," I told twelve hoods. "Me too."
A pane slid in—polite as a bill I couldn’t afford.
[Hidden Path Unlocked — Forge Protocols L1–L2]
Smelt Sight (C-Rank, Passive)
— Full in instances; partial bleed-through for field repairs. Anvilspace (B → S, Domain)
— Forge Dominion (Trial) unlocked; further access requires Path growth. Bonded Craft (S-Rank, Passive)
— Small stability bonus when working on bound gear.
[Title Acquired (Hidden): The One Who Held On]
Effect: +1 quality tier when crafting under duress.
[Note: Public signature resonance ↑. External detection likelihood ↑]
"Fantastic," I said, because my mouth doesn’t ask permission. "Make me more OP please this week rent’s due."
I picked up the blade. It breathed quiet in my hand—not a song, a calm. Cold lived in the spine like it had signed a lease and paid first and last.
"Fogbite," I said again, because names help. "We’re going home."
I should’ve left right then. Instead, the Forge had one more opinion.
The white mask statue looked back at me over its shoulder of nothing—no turn, no step, just there. The crack down its face brightened once in a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
A final pane blinked, small as a mean thought:
[System Note]
Anomalous resonance logged. Carrier visibility ↑↑ in proximate sweeps. Forecast: Elevated encounter probability in the next 72h. — Recommendation: Reduce signature. Avoid clustered scanners. — Countermeasure preview: Echo Engraving (locked)
"Of course," I said, because I enjoy pain. "Whatever this is i am doomed"
The hatch remembered it was a door and opened back into under-bridge world: algae green, tram hum, GOD IS BROKE sticker flaking its sermon into air that smelled like wet concrete and old wire.
I stepped through and the city felt one degree closer, like it had leaned in to smell what I’d become.
Outside, the hum of traffic was suddenly a chorus of machines that could learn my outline if I stood too long. I put Fogbite in my inventory,
I think my hand would scar because there was no regeneration active. I hoped it would. Some pains deserve a doorbell.
The hatch sighed shut behind me. Heat and statues became a rumor.
I walked.
Boots scuffed slick concrete. The river wind tried to rinse the forge out of my clothes and failed. Above me, the tram roared past, a steel animal dreaming the same dream on schedule. Someone had peeled the GOD IS BROKE sticker at the corner; it curled up like it was tired of telling the truth.
By the time I hit street level, the band on my wrist had pulsed twice in a way I was starting to read as smug. Warden’s Echo liked builders. Of course it did.
Two blocks later, my phone buzzed.
Hana: Inspector moved to 09:00. Keep it tidy.
I stared at the message until the words lined up right.
Me: Copy. Tidier than your linework, promise.
Three dots. Then nothing. She either smirked or added me to a list. Both could be true.