Chapter 34: Chapter 34: Into the Crimson Verge (3)
The drums started before the sky did. Metal under ash, steady and smug.
Lucien pinched the dome closed. It sighed flat and was gone. We packed what hadn’t melted. The city on the horizon had stopped pretending to be a mirage.
Varga crouched and drew a quick map in the ash with one knuckle—ridge line, the valley of glass ribs, the black river. "We need eyes," he said. "Here." Tap on a notch along the crater rim.
Elise leaned in, hair stuck to her temple. "I can go—"
"No," Varga said before the word finished. "You flare in this air. They’ll see you from the inner ring."
She caught a tiny flame above her thumb and killed it with a face. "Okay. True."
Lucien’s gaze did the doctor scan—boot, knee, band—then landed on me. "Light kit. Quiet joints. You handle heat better than we do."
Varga didn’t argue. "It’s him."
I looked down at my own knees like they had voting rights. "Counterproposal: send plate mountain. He absorbs swords."
Varga rapped his breastplate; it answered like a locked door. "I’m loud on stone and slower on glass. You aren’t."
Elise tipped her chin at my boots. "You don’t land," she said. "You arrive. Assassin legs right?"
"Assassin-adjacent," I said. "Or they call me the polite trespasser."
Varga swept the ash sketch away with his palm and stood. "Take the ridge. When you hit the ribs, slide under the north spur. Get close enough to see if there’s something like a bridge and whether we can cross it without dying a dumb death. If there’s time, grab a quick look at the inner ring. If there isn’t, you turn around."
"No detours," I said. "I don’t have fun today sorry... It’s expensive this time.
"Abort criteria," he said, ticking them off. "One: three patrols in under a minute. Two: heat dizziness, dry mouth, or black sparks in your vision. Three: you touch metal and it sings back."
"It sings?"
"It will," he said.
Lucien uncapped a vial and brushed my wrist. A thin rune flared cold and sank under the skin. He watched my face while it took. "Locator tether," he said. "If your heart rate flatlines or spikes, I come get you. Try not to make me run."
"Do I get a snack?" I asked.
He dropped two flat capsules into my palm. "Salt and water. Let them dissolve. If your hands shake, stop."
Elise dug out a thumb-sized disc—warm even unlit—and curled my fingers around it, holding them there a beat too long. "If it goes sideways, snap and throw. I can put a wall between you and whatever eats fire for breakfast."
"I thought no flares," I said.
"It’s not a flare," she said. "It’s me cheating. Last resort."
Selene’s voice crackled over comms, thinner than yesterday. "I’m on the array. Ethan, if your pulse hits one-sixty or you lose comms for thirty seconds, you turn around. Rendezvous at the overhang. I’ll have an extraction vector if it gets loud."
"Copy," I said, because arguing with her voice had a survival rate of zero.
Varga held my gaze a beat past comfortable. "We don’t need a hero," he said. "We need you back."
"That my eulogy?"
"That’s me avoiding paperwork."
I rolled my shoulders. Knees: good. Ribs: complaining. Head: clear enough to make bad choices on purpose. The band thumped once like it was amused.
"Back in a bit," I said, and meant it.
Then I ran.
The world here hated fast. The ground clung, the air pushed, the heat put weights on your bones. I ignored all of it.
[Lightning Step — Step 1/3 Active]
[Cooldown to next Step: 2 s]
[Chain Window: 5 s]
[Agility Output: 212% baseline]
=[Kinetic Reaction Time: 0.18 s]
One heartbeat I was with the team; the next I was a streak of bad decisions sprinting over a lava river that clearly hated me. The crust flexed like muscle under my boots, soft and angry, every step glowing before it cooled off like it regretted knowing me.
[Lightning Step — Step 1/3 Active][Cooldown to next Step: 2 s][Chain Window: 5 s][Agility Output: 212 % baseline]
I ran the ridge in three strides, palms skimming black glass, boots finding edges no sane man should trust. The whole slope hummed under me like a living lung. Every jump made gravity look confused, which felt like progress.
Don’t waste the chain. Count.
[Cooldown to next Step: 0.2 s → Ready]
I saved it. Always good to have one miracle left when the floor’s on fire.
Then the world opened up—and tried to kill me with scale.
The crater wasn’t a crater. It was a city sitting in hell’s lap. Broken fortresses lined the rim, their walls bleeding into rivers of magma that split and flowed like arteries made of light. Barges drifted along them—iron platforms with chain-wheels chewing molten rock—hauling ore, bones, and slabs that pulsed from the inside. Bridges spanned the gaps: steel, glass, and one built from the ribcage of something that probably had opinions about gods.
And the orcs.
Not a warband. Not spawns. A damn city.
Thousands of them—ash-gray, armor matched by squad, banners over every block. Circle sigil, knives around an anvil—the same mark burned into warg bone. Foundries hammered to the drumbeat. Sparks rose and fell in rhythm.
[Observation Logged: Organized Civilization Detected.][Entity Classification Updated → A+ Intelligent Species][Behavior Profile: Metallurgy-Dominant • Agriculture Absent]
"Fantastic," I muttered. "They’ve got infrastructure."
I dropped behind a spine of slag and followed the rim. A patrol passed below—twelve orcs, shields sharp enough to cut air, scars that matched like uniforms. The one in the center wore red-black plate that made light bleed. General, no doubt. Helm under one arm, spear longer than my rent history in the other.
His eyes swept the ridge—bright, aware. Not monster. Just intelligent enough to ruin my evening.
Move.
I took the switchback wall, boots and hands finding holds nobody had left for me. A sheet of ash slid loose and hissed down. One pebble clicked. Just one.
Every head turned.
[Lightning Step — Step 2/3 Active][Cooldown to next Step: 2 s][Chain Window: 3 s]
I blinked two ledges up and went flat. My heartbeat tried to drill out of my ribs. Below, boots scraped stone. A helmet’s shadow cut a red curve across the wall. One of them sniffed the air—sniffed—and the ledge I’d left glowed faintly, still remembering me.
The general lifted his spear.
Not guttural. Not guesswork. Clear, human words."Sweep the rim. The Falseborn’s scent is fresh."
My stomach went on strike.
Falseborn. That again.
They split—six into tunnels, six toward the rim. No torches. Their armor glowed from inside, red lines running through plates and into skin. Not worn. Grafted.
The shelf under me cracked with a sound that didn’t care about stealth.
[Lightning Step — Step 3/3 Active][Cooldown to next Step: 2 s][Chain Exhausted — New Chain after 5 s idle]
I blinked sideways into a narrow gap, hugged stone until my pulse quit tunneling, counted to five, and let the chain reset.
[Lightning Step: Chain Reset — Ready]
I slipped through a seam and came out on the city’s shadow side, as high as I could get without the view killing me. Up close didn’t feel like victory. It felt like sneaking into a temple that could smell sin.
The inner ring wasn’t streets—it was machinery pretending to breathe. Lava channels fed a structure that might’ve started as a temple before someone decided divinity should mass-produce weapons. Chains hung from arches big enough to swallow houses. A hammer the size of a transport bus swung from them, striking metal that screamed every time it hit.
Dozens of orcs worked below, synchronized with the outer drums. The sound wasn’t chaos; it was order. Faith measured in sparks.
A catwalk clung to the wall. I took it low and slow. Smaller orcs—kids, maybe—carried plates of cooling steel to racks. Older ones tested each with a single tap. Wrong tone, back into the melt. No shouting. No waste. Just rhythm.
To my right, a mural burned into the wall—rows of orcs kneeling before a human-shaped figure, arms stretched toward a web of light. The same geometry as the forge below. Lines ran down the figure’s wrists, sharp and deliberate. I’d seen those patterns before in dreams I didn’t talk about.
[Culture Artifact Detected][Optional Objective Progress: 1 / ?][Hidden Path — Resonance Pending: +1]
The band on my wrist pulsed twice. Like it was saying, go ahead, stare longer.
I didn’t.A ladder of iron pegs climbed the column beside me. I took it, came out on a parapet just under the roofline, and looked down.
There it was. The bridge.
Not elegant. Not welcoming. A span of fused anvils and chain stretched across the main river straight into the forge’s mouth. Guardians lined it—statues, I thought, until one moved.
Golem. Half flesh, half metal. Mask like a cracked furnace door. Hammer hands. Its chest pulsed on the forge’s rhythm.
"Perfect," I whispered. "The bridge has a bouncer."
A low current rolled through the city. Red veins lit up across stone, armor, and chain. For a second, the whole thing glowed—rivers into forges into golems into walls into ground and back again. A single working circuit.
[Grid Mapping: Incomplete][Power Loop Identified — Efficiency 84 %][Warning: Prolonged Observation Increases Detection Risk]
Copy. Stop staring. Be nothing
I eased back—and froze.
Two shapes stood on the span, armor so black it ate the glow. No eye slits. Spearheads dipped and rose like metronomes. They shouldn’t have been able to see. That wasn’t the point. They were listening.
On a terrace below, a chain-cloaked officer spoke with a robed figure whose staff had no business being bone. The robed one didn’t bow. The chain-cloak did.
Command tree: visible.
On reflex, my brain did something stupid—ran the odds on dropping into a squad and ending their center man before anyone blinked. The system helpfully painted the math.
[Situational Crit Stack Preview]
Base 5.0% + AGI 6.1% + Positional 15% + Height 5% + Twin Resonance 5% + Lightning Step (if used) 20% → Capped 60%
[Projected Multiplier: ×2.48 Fangpiercer / ×2.44 Gloamthorn]
[Result (center target): Lethal • 0.7 s TTK]
I swallowed and edged back from the drop.
"Not today," I mouthed. "Not why I’m here."
Leaving was harder than getting in. Patrol routes had shifted. New triangles of trouble cut the slope. Twice I became wall so completely I could count tool marks in the stone. Once a red flare licked along the path like a tongue and tasted the air where my ankle had been.
The heat found places inside me I didn’t know could sweat.
[Body Temperature: 42.3°C]
[Hydration: Critical]
[Heart Rate: 152 bpm]
"So basically I’m soup with opinions."
[Lightning Step — Step 1/3 Ready]
I took one Step off a breaking slab onto a ridge. Waited out five with my cheek on glass while ash fell in curtains. Took the reset and moved again.
[Lightning Step: Chain Reset — Ready]
At the span I’d crossed in, two black-armor sentries had materialized and decided the bridge was their personality. No eyes. Spears ticking time.
Not this way. Fine. Different way.