The Last Anvil

When it was over, Adam was the only one left standing.

He stood in the ruins of the great hall, ankle-deep in rubble and melting stone. His armor hung from him in pieces. One of his eyes had swollen shut. His left arm hung at an angle no arm should hang at. His greatsword was in his right hand, its tip resting on the floor.

Around him lay thirty of his sons.

Bram, kneeling with his chin on his chest. Gideon. Silas. Tobias. The young father-to-be. All of them.

Adam had felt every one of them die.

Yet, he was still standing, not even knowing how.

For a while now… he had been feeling like a hot volcano about to erupt. He felt the magma twist and turn inside him, struggling to form something…

And when it finally did, the System whispered it to him.

[You catch a Glimpse of the Concept of Blood Debt]

A debt of blood. It was the oldest kind of wrath there was. It was the wrath of a man who had been wronged so deeply that he refused to die until the wrong was paid.

As this Concept took hold, the fruit he had eaten when his son gave it to him seemed to latch onto it.

[You Resonate with the Concept of Blood Debt]

The fruit had ripened it to the next level at once.

Now… as long as the debt remained unpaid, death couldn't collect him.

Every wound that should have killed him was owed instead. Written down and deferred.

He felt them piling up inside him like stones in a sack, every fatal blow he had taken tonight, and every loss of his family, waiting patiently for the moment the debt was settled.

There were so many by now that he wouldn't be able to count them.

But it was alright. Blood Debt was keeping every count.

◉

“Still standing?” Zelrathus cocked his head. He was barefoot in the rubble, his silver skin unmarked, his crown glittering.

The faces on it had all returned to the glass. “Why? All your little sons are gone. You’re all alone now. Aren’t you sad?”

“...”

“Aren’t you sad?” The god leaned down until his weeping face was level with Adam’s. “Come on. Be sad for me. Just a little. You’re the last one, my dessert.”

Adam didn’t answer.

He raised his sword…

And the god hit him.

It was barely a slap. An open-handed swat, the way a man swats a fly.

{Path Skill Activated: Anvil}

==============================

Anvil

Blows that land upon you are struck as a hammer strikes an anvil.

Their force does not stay within you. It passes through you, into the ground beneath your feet, and the ground breaks in your place.

An anvil endures a thousand hammers. Yet, it does not endure forever.

==============================

The blow passed through Adam’s body like a shockwave through iron, down his legs, into the floor.

The floor of the great hall broke.

It split open beneath his feet with a roar, cracking down through the stone, down through the next level of the settlement and the one below it. Adam rode the collapsing floor down into the dark.

He landed on his feet three levels below, in the middle of the storerooms, rubble raining down around him.

Zelrathus peered down at him through the hole, delighted.

“Oho! You fell~!”

He hopped down after him.

Adam was waiting.

He swung his sword at the god’s neck. The god caught it with one hand and backhanded him with the other.

{Path Skill Activated: Anvil}

The floor broke again.

Down.

Every blow the god landed on him, he passed into the ground.

Every time the ground broke, he fell. And every time he fell, the god followed him down, laughing, weeping, reaching for him.

Down through the storerooms… down through the old forge level.. down through the deep cisterns where the underground river ran… down through the bedrock beneath it all, into stone that no one in the tribe had ever dug through.

A ravine.

Adam was carving it with his own body.

With every blow he took, he made it deeper. And he positioned himself carefully every single time. A step to the left before the blow landed, a half-turn to the right, so that each break went straight down.

It was a shaft. Narrow and deep and steep-walled.

Zelrathus never noticed. He was having too much fun.

But an anvil didn’t endure forever.

Adam felt it giving out. His legs had begun to shake. The power granted by the concept of Blood Debt was groaning under the weight of every death it had deferred. His vision was going dark at the edges.

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And Zelrathus was still smiling, seemingly ready to do this forever.

‘I’m not going to make it…’ Adam looked up.

He couldn’t hold it long enough for the ravine to be deep enough.

‘This is not enough for them to run…’

It wasn’t long enough for the tribe to reach the far side of the mountains.

‘...It can’t be helped. I have to do it’

There was only one more door left to open. The last one.

The one every Pathwalker feared. The threshold of the First Step, where a man either became the master of his Sin or its slave.

Adam had stood before that door for decades. He knew exactly what was on the other side of it for a man like him.

This much banked wrath... It was too much, far too much. The moment he stepped through, it would swallow him whole.

He thought of Anastasia.

He thought of Ashen, standing in the cold forge with tears running down his face.

‘No choice. Huh. So be it.’

He opened the door.

Unlike what the system usually did when it helped to ascend a human to the next step, this time, it acted as desperate as the man himself.

There was none of the gentleness it usually carried when infusing Sin Concepts.

Like a dam that broke, it poured everything into him before Zelrathus claimed the last embers of his life.

[...]

[...]

[...]

[You have taken the final Step toward Ascension.]

[You are now a Step I, The Last Anvil.]

[Warning: Sin dominance exceeds the threshold. Control of the host is being—]

[—being—]

[—]

Alas, no miracle occurred. And he lost control at once.

The wrath poured out of him.

It came out of his core like a furnace door blown off its hinges. It poured into his blood, his bones, his skin.

His skin cracked. Fine lines spread across his face, his arms, his chest, like cooling iron splitting in a quench, and through the cracks, fire glowed.

Red, then orange, then a white so bright it lit up the bottom of the ravine. Smoke curled from his mouth and his nostrils. His swollen eye burst open, and behind it was nothing but flame.

His body grew. His shoulders broadened. His hands became great black fists of cracked, glowing iron. When he breathed, the air shimmered.

And still, his face didn’t change.

It didn’t twist into a snarl, nor did it stretch into a monstrous wrathful grin. It stayed the same as it had always been. Calm. Composed. Expressionless.

The face of a patriarch.

Zelrathus stopped laughing. He was about to sigh in disappointment, but as he stared at the burning thing in front of him, his weeping eyes went wide.

“…Ohhh,” he whispered.

◉

The wrath wanted to rage.

It wanted to burn and destroy, to tear the world apart and scream its fury to the heavens. It wanted to forget the tribe, forget the plan, forget everything, and simply burn.

That was what losing control meant.

Every Pathwalker knew it. When the Sin swallowed you, you stopped being yourself and became nothing but the Sin, endlessly expressing itself until something killed you.

Adam felt it happening.

He felt his thoughts begin to burn away.

First, the small things like what he had eaten for dinner, the color of the crystals, then, a little bigger, like the name of the young warrior with the pregnant wife. They flaked away like ash on the wind.

Then bigger still. Bram’s laugh. The lessons of the forge. The face of his first child…

He let them go.

He held onto one thing.

Hold.

Just one word… A duty. A task.

Hold it here.

And the vast, raging, mindless wrath that had swallowed every Pathwalker who had ever stepped through that door before him, found that it couldn’t make him move.

Because Adam was still abiding by it.

Control.

He felt every scrap of rage and scream of the Sin clawing at the inside of his skull, begging to be unleashed. He felt all of it, honored all of it.

And he chose his action anyway.

Control isn’t suppression. Feel everything, and still choose how you live.

He had taught that to his son.

He was living it now.

◉

The burning thing that had been Adam Hunt hit Zelrathus so hard the god left a crater in the ravine wall.

The god came out of the wall laughing anew. The burning thing hit him again.

And again.

And again.

With no roar or scream, it fought in perfect silence, its face expressionless, its fists falling like a smith’s hammer on an anvil, one blow, then the next, then the next, with the rhythm of a man swinging a hammer in a forge.

Temperature. Force. Timing.

The god tore its arm off. It kept swinging with the other.

The god’s tears melted half its face. It kept swinging.

The god’s laugh hit it like a mountain falling. Its body cracked further, and the fire inside it blazed brighter, and it kept swinging.

“Stop,” Zelrathus giggled, pressed against the ravine wall, his crown askew. “Stop, stop, stop, you’re so mad, you’re so mad, why aren’t you sad? Why aren’t you sad? Your whole family is dead! Be sad! BE SAD!”

The burning thing didn’t stop.

Hold.

It didn’t remember why anymore.

Hold it here.

It didn’t remember its name.

Hold.

But somewhere, far down in the fire, there was a woman’s face smiling through tears. A boy crying in a cold forge. A hand on a shoulder.

Live.

Yes… that was enough.

◉◉◉

At the very bottom of the ravine, deeper than anyone in the tribe had ever dug, Zelrathus finally hit the floor.

The burning thing had knocked him there with one last blow. The god lay on his back on the bedrock, at the bottom of a shaft so deep that the hole far above was only a pinprick of light.

His long limbs were sprawled across the stone, his crown tilted sideways on his head.

He was still laughing.

“Ahh~ that was fun,” he sighed. “That was so much fun. You were so miserable. All of you. So miserable. But you didn’t give me your misery, did you…? You held it all in… you stubborn, stubborn…”

The burning thing stood over him.

It raised its sword.

The greatsword had stayed in its hand the whole time. Through the shattered floors, through the cisterns, through the bedrock. Its cracked iron fingers had never let go.

The sword began to grow.

It swelled in the burning thing’s hands, longer and longer, wider and wider, until its blade filled the shaft from wall to wall and its tip rested over the god’s chest. Until its hilt rose up through the dark toward the distant pinprick of light.

Then it began to grow heavy.

The burning thing poured itself into the blade.

Every death it had deferred.

Every fatal blow the Blood Debt had recorded and set aside.

The thirty deaths of its sons that had crashed through it and refused to take it with them.

It had owed death for every one of them. All of that debt, piled up inside it, every unpaid death.

It paid them now. It paid them into the sword.

Every owed death became weight.

The blade grew heavier, and heavier, and heavier, until the bedrock beneath the god began to groan and the walls of the shaft began to crack.

In the end, the sword became so heavy that the air itself seemed to bend around it.

Then the burning thing let go, finally letting the sword fall.

It came down on Zelrathus’s chest and drove him into the bedrock.

The god’s laughter cut off in a strangled squawk. The stone beneath him split open in every direction, and the sword sank and pinned him there beneath a blade as heavy as a mountain.

“Ah…?” Zelrathus blinked up at it. “Oh… this is…”

He tried to push it off.

It didn’t move.

The burning thing stood at the bottom of the ravine and looked down at him.

Its fire was going out.

The debt was paid, so death had come to collect.

The cracks across its body were growing darker, the glow behind them fading from white to orange, from orange to a dull, dying red.

It reached into its chest, into whatever was left of its core, and found the last thread it had been holding onto all night.

The wards.

They were still full of accumulated mana, and despite not remembering any of it, the burning thing still pulled on the thread, as if it had to do so at all costs, and not even madness could stop it.

And it poured the last of its wrath down the line.

◉

High above, in the empty settlement, every ward stone began to glow.

Far below, at the bottom of a ravine carved by his own body, the burning thing that had been Adam Hunt sat down.

Slowly… heavily… like a tired man sitting down at the end of a long day.

He sat on the bedrock beside the god pinned beneath his sword, folded his cracked hands in his lap, and looked up at the pinprick of light far above.

His face was still calm.

Anastasia.

The name came back to him, just for a moment, from somewhere amid the endless rage.

Ashen.

The ward stones broke.

My sons and daughters.

The whole underground home went up at once.

Everything a pair of young survivors had carved out of the earth with their bare hands. All of it detonated in a single, rolling roar that shook the mountain to its roots.

The ceiling came down. The walls came down. The levels collapsed onto each other, one after another, a mountain’s weight of stone pouring down into the ravine.

Down onto the sword.

Down onto the god beneath it.

Down onto the patriarch of the Hunt tribe, sitting quietly beside them both with his hands folded in his lap.

Live.

And the dark swallowed all three.