Chapter 76 - The Hot Blood

Their return to townhouse forty-two in the Boilermakers' Village came just past midday, forty-eight hundred scrip from the gargoyle contract securely tucked into Dante's leather pouch.

Maria racked her forty-eight-pound black boiler steel greatsword against the workshop wall, unbuckled the leather harness of her brigandine cuirass, and laid the iron piece on the bench with a heavy metallic clack.

She slumped onto the wooden stool, resting her elbows on the oak with breathing settled from the march.

Nicole was barefoot at the rear of the shop, flicking basalt dust from the flight grooves of her mechanical crossbow with a fine-bristle brush.

It was in that quiet moment that Maria's body seized.

Her arms locked rigid against the edge of the oak workbench, her nails gouging two millimeters into the seasoned wood with an involuntary spasm.

Her breath hitched in her throat for three full seconds.

A sudden wave of searing heat detonated in the center of her chest, tearing up her throat and racing down her arms to her fingertips with the fury of a pressurized boiler blowing a primary main.

The skin along her forearms and neck darkened in under five seconds.

It was not the ordinary flush of physical exertion or embarrassment.

The heavy veins across her arms corded into a deep, purplish black, pulsing at a feverish rate that made her wrist joints pop. Sweat slicking her skin boiled off in an audible hiss of thin gray steam, releasing that same suffocating stench of primordial sulfur and glowing iron into the workshop that Dante had caught during their battle against the Black Boiler Colossus.

Dante set the ledger down instantly, rising from his stool in one sharp motion.

"Maria?"

The surge lasted exactly twelve seconds.

As swiftly as it had erupted, the heat retreated down her spine, the blackened veins fading back into her natural tan, the steam misting off her arms dissolving into the draft of the room.

Maria expelled the air from her lungs in a heavy, ragged gasp, her forehead dropping forward onto the oak bench.

She drew breath in shallow, shuddering gulps, her hands trembling faintly against the wood.

"Again..." Maria muttered, raw fury grinding through her clenched teeth. "This shit happened again."

She raised her head slowly, slamming her left fist into the wood with enough force to jump Dante's tool kit an inch off the table.

"No monster in the room," she said, her brown eyes pinning Dante, her pupils dilated from the lingering thermal shock. "No mortal peril, no hammer falling on my ribs, and zero combat adrenaline. I was just sitting here unlacing my boots, and my blood boiled like quench oil all on its own."

Nicole halted her maintenance work at the back of the shop.

The huntress closed the distance in three swift strides, the vertical slits of her four amber eyes narrowing as she caught the sulfur reek trailing off Maria's skin.

"What is that smell?" Nicole asked, stopping beside the stool. "Your breath smells like deep pit-ash."

"I don't know what the smell is, Nicole!" Maria fired back, scrubbing her forearms with rough, frantic friction as if trying to scrape the sensation out of her meat. "I'm a human from Earth! I was delivered in a suburban public hospital and ate rice and beans my whole damn life! Humans don't vent steam through their nostrils and don't have black veins crawling up their arms!"

Dante pulled his stool closer, seating himself directly before her with his usual analytical composure.

"Sit still, Maria," Dante instructed evenly, his measured tone cutting through her agitation. "Nicole, fetch the mercury boiler thermometer from drawer three in the tool rack. And bring the bowl of cold water from the filter."

Nicole complied without a word, sliding open the iron drawer to retrieve a cylindrical brass casing with a thick glass bulb, an instrument used for reading oil heat in locomotive journal boxes.

Dante took the gauge, pressed the metal probe directly into the crook of Maria's elbow, and held it there for thirty seconds.

The silver column of mercury inside the glass bore climbed without pause, blowing past ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, sweeping past a hundred and four, and locking dead on one hundred and sixteen degrees. Forty-seven Celsius.

Dante pulled the instrument back, inspecting the index etched into the brass sleeve.

"Forty-seven degrees Celsius," Dante said in an undertone. "That level of hyperthermia in baseline terrestrial tissue would cause generalized convulsions and systemic cellular failure in under five minutes."

NovelPhoenix is the author's publication site for this chapter, but no permission was given for the copy presented here.

"I don't feel feverish," Maria countered, her chest rising and falling in an even rhythm. "No dizziness, no headache. It just feels like my body kicked open a blast furnace in the middle of my gut that wants to tear through my ribs."

Dante closed his gray eyes, calling up the primary menu to run an immediate structural diagnostic across their party link.

[Party Link: Target Structural Diagnostic.]

[Target: Maria.]

[Primary Class: Unshakable Sentinel (Level 23).]

[Health Points: 160/160.]

[Active Attributes: Strength 33, Constitution 32, Dexterity 26.]

[Primary Bloodline Record: Masked by Undetermined Soul Signature.]

[Warning: Deep-Origin Biomechanical Energy Fluctuation detected in bloodstream.]

Dante opened his eyes.

The bloodline entry remained sealed beneath the same gray redaction bar he had logged months earlier during their drills in the gorge.

"The interface does not register this as a class skill," Dante explained, setting the thermometer onto the oak. "It draws nothing from your pool of forty-five Mana, and it carries no recorded cooldown. It is entirely biological. It resides in your blood."

Nicole stepped closer to the stool, leaning down to inspect the veins across Maria's forearm.

The huntress reached out with an ungloved hand, brushing her fingertips along the girl's tanned skin.

The surface remained slightly elevated above baseline, but Nicole showed no shock at the temperature. She closed all four amber eyes for three seconds, scenting the vapor bleeding from Maria's pores with the practiced focus of someone who knew the horrors of the plain.

"In the southern pits..." Nicole said softly, measuring each word, "...the veteran miners told stories of the primordial flame bloodlines. Entities from the lower rings, the Seventh and Eighth Continents, that draw no ambient Mana to work their arts. They are born with biological fireboxes rooted inside their very bone marrow. Their blood burns like boiling pitch whenever the frame enters a state of extreme stress."

She pulled her fingers from Maria's skin, studying the muscular expanse of the Sentinel's back.

"Those bloodlines are pure native stock of the deep trenches, though. You carry human biology, Maria. You have no horns, no chitin mandibles like mine, and no surgical graft seams across your skull like Miro had."

Maria drew air violently through her nostrils, resting her elbows on her knees.

"Where the hell did it come from, then?" she demanded, frustration weighing down her words. "I was nine years old when that bastard in the white jacket materialized in front of me in an Earth alley. He snapped his fingers and claimed he was granting me a special permit. A tool to keep Dante alive."

She lifted her brown eyes to Dante, her pupils tight with grim realization.

"What if that son of a bitch didn't hand me a standard class, Dante? What if he unlocked something that was already buried in my body the day I was born?"

Dante held her gaze for several long seconds.

His intellect, operating at thirty-four Intelligence and twenty-six Wisdom, began connecting the nodes of a puzzle that refused to resolve cleanly.

The man in the white jacket had surveilled their development for years.

He had issued the quest to protect the Light to Maria. He had unlocked her Sentinel specialization. He had distributed early completion bonuses.

Yet that same entity had exhibited an absolute blind spot regarding the events inside the Black Smelter.

He was ignorant of the fact that Maria had shattered the colossus's drive leg under thirty-four points of temporary Strength with sulfur smoke hissing from her teeth. His report logged only an internal mechanical failure caused by an aether bolt.

"That man is not the master of that power, Maria," Dante said, his voice ringing with the clarity of a theorem proven amidst chaos. "He understands soul matrices, he understands system architecture, and he understands celestial radiance. That was why he laid the [Ash Veil] across my spine to mask my wings from the Legion."

He stepped forward, stopping beside her stool.

"He does not control the primordial flame, though. His report glitched inside the foundry because his interface lacks the sensor calibration to track heat rising from the deep abyss. If that trait were an implant of his own design, he would have possessed exact damage telemetry across his screen."

Maria looked down at her open palms.

"What am I, then?"

"You are Maria," Dante answered plainly, stripped of conceptual rhetoric. "The same girl who hauled me in a rusted wheelbarrow at nine years old and cleaved a Level 27 basilisk in two with a single blow this morning. Whatever is dormant in your blood is reacting to your physical ascension. You reached Level 23, hit thirty-two Constitution, and your skeletal frame is learning to shoulder the load."

Maria exhaled slowly through her mouth, feeling the tightness in her shoulders surrender to the steady certainty of his words.

She balled her large fists, listening to the solid crack of her knuckles.

"I hate being kept in the dark about my own meat, Dante," she said, her voice reclaiming its familiar rough resolve. "I'm not going to be a ticking bomb that detonates at the wrong moment. If this fire lives in my marrow, it's going to learn to obey my fist when I call on it."

"We will isolate the trigger, Maria," Dante promised, opening his notebook to record the temperature of forty-seven degrees and the twelve-second duration of the episode. "We log every fluctuation, track heart rate, and drill containment out in the courtyard the exact same way I calibrated the retention of my wings."

Nicole watched them both, pulling the hood of her black-scaled coat over her horn buds with an unhurried motion.

"You two are the strangest pair that ever set foot on this continent," Nicole remarked, a faint smirk touching her lips. "A Summoner who flies on stone wings and a Sentinel whose blood boils like an archdemon of the Seventh Ring."

"We get results, Nicole," Maria rose from the stool, grabbing a rag to wipe down her neck. "Now let's eat the leftover roast peccary from yesterday before my internal firebox decides it needs actual fuel."

Dante pocketed his pen, looking at the two girls in the workshop with his mind sharp and prepared for their next moves.

The mystery surrounding Maria's blood had opened a new front on this board, but they held the methodology, they had an inviolable sanctuary two seconds away in the Brazilian forest, and they had plenty of time to forge every anomaly within their flesh into the ultimate weapon against whoever was waiting for them in the depths of this empire.