Chapter 73 - The Taste of Iron

The thirteen-hundred-square-foot warehouse at Sítio Três Meninas had been fully sealed the previous afternoon.

The structural concrete block walls were coated in thick mortar, the front steel roll-up door was padlocked from within with twin brass deadbolts, and four rooftop solar panels already fed the recessed wiring that kept the four-hundred-liter chest freezer humming in the kitchen corner.

Water from the creek flowed clean through PVC conduits to the five-thousand-liter cistern hoisted on a hardwood tower at the rear of the lot, guaranteeing full line pressure to the kitchen and washroom taps.

Dante finished checking the satellite dish bolted to the roof ridge.

Stepping down from the aluminum ladder, he wiped cement dust from his palms onto his jeans and halted dead center on the polished concrete slab of the main hall, directly over the anchor point of Planar Transit.

Maria stood beside the reclaimed-timber dining table, cinching the leather straps of her iron greaves.

She wore dark heavy work trousers and a sleeveless top, the corded musculature of her back taut beneath skin tanned by the Acre sun. She rolled her shoulders in tight circles, her joints popping with a raw restlessness she had held back since their lunch by the river.

"Three days eating wood-grilled fish and hauling cement bags," she said, her voice laced with that eager gravel of someone whose body demanded violent kinetic work. "My hands are too soft, Dante. I need to feel the recoil of this new blade biting through real bone."

Nicole leaned against the kitchen sink counter, wearing her black-scaled coat with the cowl already drawn forward over her pointed ears and rounded horn buds.

The huntress had dressed the guide rails of her mechanical crossbow with fine terrestrial machine oil, loading her thigh quivers with the silver-tipped steel bolts left over from the aqueduct descent.

"The Third Ring permit dispatcher had two heavy contracts open for the mire when we stopped by on Friday," Nicole said in a quiet, focused tone. "A nest of tar basilisks and a colony of armored centipedes in the south culvert. Seven thousand scrip in total bounties."

"Seven thousand scrip and at least three thousand combat experience," Dante added, settling his heat-resistant leather vest over his chest. "We have one hundred and forty-seven days remaining on the interface timer. The barbecue vacation is over. Now we grind these levels to thirty."

He held out his open right hand in the center of the concrete floor.

Nicole gripped his forearm with a firm hold of gloved fingers, and Maria locked her heavy palm over his left shoulder.

Dante pulled up the fourth tab of his mind.

Planar Transit: Jump to Primary Capital Anchor.

The snap of the dimensional vacuum swallowed the three of them in the center of the Amazonian warehouse.

The transit lasted precisely two seconds.

The bright sunlight of Earth, the scent of damp foliage, and the drone of cicadas vanished in a single pulse.

All three touched down on the dark basalt flagstones of the ground-floor workshop in townhouse forty-two of the Boilermakers' Village.

The crushing Mana density of the First Great Continent descended over Dante's lungs with that familiar weight of molten lead, but the copper dispersal grooves carved into the soles of his boots discharged the surge directly into the flagstones with a dry electric pop that barely quivered his stance.

The air reeked of coal soot, old rust, and scorched engine oil.

Nicole exhaled slowly through her mouth, staring at the dense stone walls of the workshop.

"Two seconds," the huntress murmured, shaking her head. "We crossed an entire cosmos in two seconds."

"Etheric geometry has no highway traffic, Nicole," Dante replied with habitual calm, walking to the workbench to verify the chalk containment circuits he had traced along the door sill.

The three tiers of [Runic Containment Barrier] sat undisturbed.

No one had attempted to force the bronze latch of the double doors, and the street padlock remained untouched.

Maria wasted no time inspecting the walls.

Striding straight to the cast-iron rack in the corner of the shop, she gripped the extended hilt of her new Black Boiler Steel Greatsword with both hands, clearing the weapon from its vulcanized canvas scabbard with a clean, deep hiss of steel that rang against the thirteen-foot ceiling.

The six-and-a-half-foot, forty-eight-pound slab of forged iron dropped level with her knees with unyielding balance.

The dark steel struck in Korgan's forge bore a blue sheen beneath the light filtering through the door gap, its central fuller grooves primed to drink the concussive force of her skills.

She locked the scabbard into the reinforced mount of her brigandine cuirass with an audible snap of the buckle, drawing in the Capital's dense air with savage satisfaction.

"Now we talk," she said, her deep voice setting the workshop air vibrating. "Let's grab those bounties before another party steals our prey."

......

The Third Ring Permit Bureau operated at full tilt at nine in the morning.

The intake clerk with the clockwork brass eye occupied wicket two, stamping work orders with his customary mechanical indifference.

When the man adjusted his brass lens and took in Maria's six-foot-three frame carrying the massive black boiler steel blade across her back, flanked by Dante and Nicole, his ink stamp froze in mid-air.

"Figured you took the freight back to the frontier with your twelve thousand scrip from the serpent," the clerk rasped.

"We had private affairs to settle," Dante set the party's brass registration token on the iron counter. "We want permits one-twelve and one-fifteen. Extermination of basilisks in Sludge Gorge and suppression of armored centipedes in the south culvert."

The demon clicked his mechanical eye through two focal settings, cross-referencing the contract numbers in the intake register.

"The gorge basilisks sit at Level 27," the clerk warned, drawing two black-bordered parchment folios from his drawer. "Thirty-eight hundred scrip for the basilisk nest, thirty-two hundred for the centipedes. Seven thousand total. Bring the three pressurized venom bladders and the ferrite cores from the carcasses before end of day."

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Dante paid the hundred-scrip issuance fee in two Central Bank notes, collected the stamped permits, and stowed the folios inside his vest.

"We will be back before the night shift."

They left the military depot, boarded the southern line of the elevated tram, and cleared the South Sluice of the sixty-foot wall in under twenty minutes.

Passing the garrison turnstile went smoothly.

The Legion sentries merely verified their outbound badges, waving them through into the dark mire of the Tar and Ferrite Marsh.

The terrain beyond the wall was waterlogged from acidic morning showers.

Black sludge covered the gravel ankle-deep, and pools of mineral oil burped small gas plumes between the fossilized iron trunks.

Nicole took point the moment they entered the Boiling Sludge Gorge, a narrow ravine bounded by sixty-foot walls of ferrite rock that channeled scalding wastewater from the city's boilers.

The huntress dropped low against an outcrop of dark stone, raising a clenched left fist.

"There," Nicole whispered, pointing the tip of her dagger toward a muddy hollow a hundred feet out.

Three Tar Basilisks lay sprawled across a shelf of warm slag.

They were colossal six-legged reptiles, sixteen feet long apiece, their frames plated in overlapping scales of black ferrite fused with oxidized lead. Their wedge-shaped heads featured iron beak-like jaws, and the venom bladders at the base of their throats pulsed a vivid orange through thick hide.

[Entity: Tar Basilisk (Tier 2 Elite).]

[Level: 27.]

[Health Points: 490/490.]

[Warning: High-Temperature Pressurized Venom Discharge.]

"Three targets at Level 27," Dante analyzed from the rear, drawing Mana into the brass focus ring on his right hand. "Nicole blinds the left one with a silver bolt. I drag the alpha close with [Forced Transposition], and Maria severs its head drive."

"I'm going straight through the middle, Dante!" Maria had already cleared her forty-eight-pound greatsword, her brown eyes blazing with a hunger for battle she refused to bottle up any longer. "I want to see what this new steel does to actual ferrite plate!"

The Sentinel tore through the black mud before Dante could countermand the move.

Her two hundred pounds parted the sludge in twin plumes of dark water, her iron boots striking the gravel in heavy strides that shook the canyon floor.

All three basilisks reared their skulls simultaneously, their orange throats ballooning like mechanical bellows to spit scalding bile.

From high on the rock shelf, Nicole's answer whipped out like a wire snare.

THWIP.

A bolt of pure silver cleaved the acidic haze, piercing the left basilisk's eye and detonating the orb in a wisp of gray smoke that sent the beast thrashing in agony, vomiting its acid wide into the stone face.

The lead basilisk, its skull plated in heavy naval steel, gaped its iron beak to blast a torrent of boiling venom directly into Maria's chest.

Maria made no move to evade.

[Active Skill: [Liquid Lead Stance] activated.]

[Passive Skill: [Reactive Impact Carapace] primed.]

The stream of acid slammed into Maria's brigandine cuirass with the violent sizzle of a chemical reaction.

Green steam rolled off the iron plates, but the stance's thirty-five percent resistance blunted the sear to a passing numbness that failed to check her stride by a single millimeter.

At the same time, twenty percent of the liquid impact's kinetic force was siphoned into the muscle fibers of her thirty-two Constitution.

Maria let out a guttural roar, drove both boots ankle-deep into the muck, and brought the new Black Boiler Steel Greatsword down two-handed with full rotational torque from her hips.

Her [Devastating Cleaver] skill channeled the forty-eight pounds of tempered steel into a flawless arc.

The dark metal crashed into the armored neck of the alpha basilisk.

KABANG-CRASH.

The impact rang out like an industrial stamping press pulverizing a boiler plate.

Korgan's steel didn't merely cut flesh. Its crushing mass backed by thirty-three Strength shattered the mineral ferrite plates as though they were brittle clay tiles. The black blade sheared eighteen inches into the monster's torso, cleaving the spine and bursting the venom reservoir in an explosion of dark blood and mineral grease that sprayed fifteen feet across the mud.

The beast's four-thousand-pound head collapsed into the sludge, motionless.

[-380 HP to target.]

[Target Eliminated: Alpha Tar Basilisk (Level 27).]

"NOW THAT IS A SWORD!" Maria roared into the steam, her face streaked with black oil, baring her teeth in a savage grin as she wrenched the clean blade free without a single rolled notch in its cutting edge.

The third basilisk lunged at her right flank, all six claws tearing through the gravel.

Dante didn't wait for its paws to touch down.

[Skill Activated: [Forced Transposition - Tier 1].]

[Mana Cost: 65 MP.]

The ether fold snapped shut across space in eight-tenths of a second.

The sixteen-foot basilisk vanished from the mud and reappeared suspended two feet in the air, exactly three feet off the path of Maria's raised blade.

Maria didn't even need to shift her footing.

Riding the recovery momentum of her heavy weapon, she swept into a horizontal cleave of maximum concussive force that caught the disoriented creature dead center across its abdomen.

The black steel severed the beast into two chunks of meat and lead that crashed into opposite banks of the culvert with the dull thud of dead matter.

[-340 HP to target.]

[Target Eliminated: Tar Basilisk (Level 27).]

Nicole vaulted down from the rock shelf in a fluid leap, executing the blinded basilisk with two surgical dagger thrusts driven straight into the soft temples of its skull.

The engagement had lasted under sixty seconds.

The dark waters of the Boiling Sludge Gorge settled, bubbling only from the heat of the three carcasses venting thin ribbons of gray steam toward the purple sky.

The interface flared with immediate golden rewards.

[Sector Engagement Concluded!]

[Experience Received: +1,150 shared EXP.]

[Dante Miller: Level 21 (1150/2600 EXP).]

[Maria: Level 22 (1150/3600 EXP).]

[Nicole: Level 22 (1150/3600 EXP).]

Maria rested the greatsword over her broad shoulder, wiping the flat with a tuft of dry wiregrass, her brown eyes blazing with raw vitality beneath the acidic drizzle beginning to fall.

"This blade is worth every copper of the forty-five hundred scrip we paid Korgan, Dante," she said, drawing a deep breath, feeling her arm muscles warm and hungry for more. "The steel bites smooth, zero vibration in the wrists."

Nicole drew her boning knife, dropping beside the alpha carcass to begin harvesting the intact venom bladder.

"It cuts faster than the Citadel's executioner block," Nicole noted, sealing the first gland into an airtight crock with a brief smirk. "With that iron and Dante's spatial warping, we'll clear the centipede colony before midday."

Dante slid the stamped contract for permit one-twelve into his vest, adjusting the brass focus ring on his right hand.

He looked down the black sludge track winding toward the southern sector of the mire.

Their rest on Earth had done its work. Their bodies were fortified on clean food, their extraction route to the Acre forests sat locked a mere two seconds from mortal peril, and their hunting tempo in this iron empire was back on track at the point of steel and spell.

"Harvest the glands quickly, Nicole," Dante said, his voice cold and driven, running a level-grinding line. "We have thirty-two hundred scrip waiting in the south culvert before we head back to the house for lunch."

Maria barked a loud laugh, brought the flat of her forty-eight-pound blade against a ferrite boulder with a clean ring, and took the lead through the black mud, ready to carve their path to Level 50 on bare steel.