The transition from the lush valley of Oakhaven to the jagged, skeletal foothills of the Iron Peaks was like moving from a dream into a nightmare of charcoal and salt. The air grew thin, losing its sweetness and replacing it with the dry, choking scent of ancient dust and sulfur. Above us, the peaks pierced the sky like the ribs of a buried titan, their heights shrouded in a perpetual, roiling bruise of dark clouds. This was the territory of the Second Node—the Thermal Engine—and it was clear the mountain did not want us here.
Every step I took felt like I was fighting the earth itself. My bronze arm was a heavy anchor, its internal gears humming with a low-frequency vibration that seemed to agitate the very stones beneath my boots. The blue light in my right eye flickered in time with that humming, mapping out the invisible veins of energy that ran beneath the crust. I wasn't just walking anymore; I was navigating a grid of dying power.
"Keep your head down, Vane," Kaelen hissed from the ridge above us.
The scout was a shadow among the grey rocks, his cloak of mismatched furs blending perfectly into the desolate landscape. He moved with a silent, fluid grace that I envied. My own movements were clunky, punctuated by the mechanical whir-click of my joints.
"The Sunderers have scouts on the lower vents," Kaelen continued, sliding down a scree slope to join us. "They've set up spiked barricades at the Throat of the Pass. They aren't just guarding the way; they're harvesting the residual heat. If we go through the center, we'll be walking into a slaughterhouse."
Borin wiped a thick layer of soot from his brow, his steam-mallet resting heavily against his shoulder. The old smith was huffing, his lungs struggling with the thinning air, but his eyes remained sharp. "The Thermal Engine is failing, lad. I can feel the ground cooling. If we don't reach the stabilizer within the next few hours, the pressure in the vents will back up. It won't just freeze Oakhaven; the whole valley will pop like an over-pressured boiler."
The Weight of Leadership
I looked at my bronze hand. The talons were stained with the black oil of the Scrappers from the village, a permanent reminder of what I had become. I could feel the Second Node pulsing ahead of us, a frantic, irregular beat that felt like a heart in cardiac arrest. It was desperate. It was dying.
"We don't have time for the high ridges, Kaelen," I said, my voice carrying that new, metallic resonance that made Borin flinch. "If we take the long way, the engine fails before we reach the door. We have to take the Throat."
"That's suicide, Vane," Kaelen whispered, his hand going to the hilt of his obsidian daggers. "There are at least twenty of them. They have Scrappers on leashes and harpoon launchers."
"Then we don't walk through the front door," I replied, a plan beginning to form in the static of my mind. "We use the vents."
I pointed to a series of massive, rusted pipes that jutted out from the mountainside like broken teeth. They were venting a sickly, yellow steam that hissed against the cold air. To a normal man, those pipes were a deathtrap—clogged with toxic gases and searing heat. But my bronze arm was already adjusting. The blue runes were shifting, turning a deep, fiery orange. My arm wasn't just a weapon; it was a sensory organ. It was telling me that the pipes weren't just vents—they were the veins of the mountain, and I was its blood.
The Infiltration
We moved toward the vents under the cover of the drifting sulfur clouds. The heat intensified as we approached, a shimmering wall of distorted air that made the horizon wobble. Borin adjusted the valves on his bellows, prepping his hammer for the high-pressure environment, while Kaelen stayed low, his eyes scanning the ridgeline for Sunderer snipers.
The entrance to the vent was a circular hatch of reinforced brass, etched with the same symbols I had seen on the Obelisk. It was fused shut by centuries of rust and calcified mineral deposits.
"Let me," I said.
I didn't use the hammer. I placed my bronze palm flat against the hatch. I felt the heat of the pipe—thousands of degrees of pressurized steam—longing to escape. I didn't fight the pressure; I invited it. I manipulated the vibration of the bronze, matching the frequency of the rust.
SCREEEEEEE.
With a sound like a dying giant's groan, the hatch didn't just open; it dissolved. The metal turned to fine grey powder under my touch, and a blast of hot air sent us stumbling back.
"Into the dark," I muttered, stepping into the maw of the mountain.
The interior of the vent was a labyrinth of catwalks and spinning turbines. The scale of the machinery was staggering. We were inside a planet-sized engine, a cathedral of iron where the gods were gears and the prayers were the hiss of steam. But the cathedral was rotting. Black sludge—the "Silver Rust" in its liquid form—was dripping from the overhead pipes, eating away at the brass fittings.
The Ambush in the Steam
We were halfway through the main exhaust chamber when the sound changed. The steady hiss-thrum was interrupted by the heavy, rhythmic clank of armored boots.
"Intruders in the secondary vent!" a voice boomed, amplified by a brass resonator.
From the fog of steam, the Sunderers appeared. They weren't like the villagers of Oakhaven. These were men who had fully embraced the corruption. Their armor was grafted directly into their skin, their eyes replaced by glowing yellow lenses. They carried long-handled "Puncture-Poles"—weapons designed to pierce the pressurized suits of the Old World Architects.
"Protect the core!" the leader shouted, leveling a steam-cannon at us.
"Kaelen, the rafters! Borin, behind the turbine!" I roared, throwing myself forward.
The steam-cannon fired. A bolt of superheated water and iron flechettes whistled past my head, shredding the railing I had been standing on a second before. I lunged at the nearest Sunderer, my bronze arm flaring with a violent orange light. I didn't punch him; I grabbed his Puncture-Pole and channeled.
The energy from my arm surged into his weapon. The Sunderer didn't even have time to scream before the pole exploded in his hands, the feedback shattering his mechanical armor and throwing him into the abyss below.
"THOOM!"
Borin's hammer echoed through the chamber. He had stepped out from behind the turbine, his mallet glowing with a dull red heat. He slammed the hammer into the catwalk, the kinetic wave buckling the floor and sending three Sunderers tumbling into the grinding gears beneath us.
"Watch your six, Borin!" Kaelen yelled, dropping from a pipe above. He landed on a Sunderer's shoulders, his obsidian daggers finding the gaps in the brass plating with surgical precision. He was a whirlwind of black glass and grey fur, a ghost in the machine.
The Price of Progress
The battle was a blur of heat and screaming metal. I felt a cold detachment as I fought. My bronze arm moved with a mind of its own, calculating trajectories and identifying structural weaknesses in our enemies' armor. Every kill felt like a data point being checked off a list. I was losing the "Vane" who had been afraid of the dark, replaced by a being of cold, architectural logic.
But then, the leader of the Sunderers stepped forward. He was massive, his entire torso replaced by a steam-boiler that hissed and groaned with every breath. He didn't carry a pole; he carried a heavy, serrated saw-blade that whirred with a terrifying hunger.
"You are the one the Great Engine spoke of," the leader rasped, his yellow eyes fixing on my indigo eye. "The False Architect. You think you can restart the heart? You are nothing but a spark in a dying furnace."
He swung the saw-blade. I raised my bronze arm to parry, but the blade was coated in a black, oily substance—a concentrated form of the Silver Rust. When it hit my arm, the blue fire didn't flare; it shuddered.
Pain, real and searing, shot up my neck. I fell to my knees, the bronze on my arm turning a sickly, dull grey where the oil had touched it. My vision blurred. The "connection" to the mountain flickered like a dying candle.
"Vane!" Borin shouted, trying to reach me, but two more Sunderers pinned him down with harpoon lines.
The leader raised his saw-blade for the killing blow. "Your metal is weak, boy. It still clings to the meat of your soul."
In that moment of near-death, I didn't see my life flash before my eyes. I saw the Code. I saw the internal blueprints of the Thermal Engine. I saw a bypass valve directly beneath the leader's feet.
I didn't use my arm to fight him. I used it to talk to the mountain.
I slammed my fist—the part that wasn't covered in oil—into the catwalk floor. I didn't hit him. I hit the release mechanism for the high-pressure coolant.
"PSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
A jet of liquid nitrogen-gas erupted from the floor. The Sunderer leader was caught in the center of the blast. The steam in his boiler-chest didn't just cool; it contracted with such violent force that his entire torso imploded. The saw-blade flew from his hand, clattering harmlessly against the wall, as his frozen, shattered remains were swept away by the pressure.
The Second Node
The remaining Sunderers, seeing their leader unmade by the mountain itself, broke and fled into the steam.
I lay on the catwalk, my arm pulsing with a dull, throbbing ache. The grey stain of the Rust-oil was slowly being burned away by the indigo fire, but the effort left me drained. Borin and Kaelen hurried to my side, their faces grimed with soot and blood.
"You alright, lad?" Borin asked, helping me up.
"I'm... changing, Borin," I whispered, looking at my hand. The bronze had moved again. It now covered half of my chest, a permanent, metallic plate where my heart used to beat. "Every time I use this power, I lose more of the boy you knew."
"Then we'll make sure the man you're becoming is worth the price," Borin said firmly.
We reached the end of the vent, emerging into the Core of the Thermal Engine. It was a cavern of fire and brass, dominated by a massive, rotating sphere that hummed with a sound like a thousand drums. This was the Second Node.
But as I stepped toward the console, I saw why it was failing.
The Node wasn't just old. It was being strangled. Thousands of black, vine-like cables had wrapped around the sphere, sucking the heat out of it and channeling it upward, toward the summit of the Iron Peaks.
"They aren't just breaking the mountain," Kaelen said, his voice hushed with awe and fear. "They're re-wiring it. They're building something at the top."
I looked at the sapphire slot on the console. I had the power to restart the engine, but the cables were a warning. If I turned this on, I wouldn't just be saving Oakhaven. I would be sending a massive surge of power straight to whatever the Sunderers were building at the peak.
I looked at Borin, then at the glowing indigo fire in my palm.
"One way or another," I said, "the mountain is going to wake up."
Chapter 3 Conclusion
The Thermal Engine is ready for activation, but the mysterious "Peak Construction" looms above.