Chapter 116: Magic-Forged Steel

The workshop had come to a halt. Pale smoke wafted from brick forges, which crackled aflame with charcoal nuggets moments ago, but have since been suffocated by concave iron lids. Naval mine casings and half-converted voltech rifles lay unattended on workbenches and anvils, their still-warm surfaces cooling with every wintry gale that permeated the half-height log walls. The blacksmiths gathered around. Brown aprons powdered with black dust, they gossiped in hushed tones.

“Sir?” muttered a boyish apprentice. “If His Holiness makes lots of steel, are we gonna have floors of gold again? Like in those stories?”

“Boy,” his master said, “unless you’re Coldust’s shah, the only floors of gold you’ll ever find are in the tales of minstrels and in the babbling of old men whose memories have grown sweet with age and bitterness. The war took a lot from us, though it couldn’t take what we never had.”

“Oh.”

The elderly smith palmed back his balding white hair. “Still, if the apostle transmutes steel, the shah himself will come knocking on the castle doors.” His unblinking gaze returned to a central table. “Especially if he can do it with that.”

Like everyone else, both boy and man took turns ogling a clay pot, a lustrous green vol ingot, bright iron shavings peeled from a cracked halberd, and a mound of dark shards plucked from the remains of a blown-up barrel. The reagents for today’s experiment. Standing left of them was Katerina, the enchantress who’d hopefully channel a spell that’d fuse cast iron and wrought iron into a steel fit for gun barrels, and across from her waited Saphiria, a plainly dressed princess who rocked the test subject—a small, trembling rabbit—in her arms.

Between the two ladies was Dimitry. He took a deep breath and exhaled through his teeth. The next heathen wave could strike at any time. This had better work. Straightening his spine to give the illusion of certainty, he gave each of his honored assistants a nod. “Katerina, Your Highness, we’re just about ready to start. Let’s take a few steps back as a matter of precaution.”

Katerina retreated without delay. She was there when his freezia enchantment went berserk.

Saphiria, however, hesitated. Though the girl feigned resolution, dignified royal scowl and all, her fear shone through her mannerisms. She glanced down at the snow-white rabbit in her arms, then looked back up at Dimitry. “Do you anticipate hazards?”

Her concern wasn’t without merit. Saphiria knew about the previous test subjects: rats who suffered from irritable bowels while dying from the plague and a chicken who clucked in panic as an accelall enchantment popped the blood vessels within its body. She could only imagine what awaited her helpless rabbit.

Dimitry knew this would happen. Leave it to Saphiria to bond with a wild, undomesticated animal before the hour. He hoped for a less adorable sacrifice to ease the parting, a chicken perhaps, but sourcing livestock from a years-abandoned coastline was taking too long. Dimitry had settled on a rabbit his hunters had trapped for supper instead. They were plentiful in the surrounding forest, and their mammalian biology emulated a human’s much better than a chicken. A much-needed boon.

Even if the magic didn’t devolve into a calamitous spectacle of flashing colors like freezia, it might suffocate anyone who wandered too close by violently dismantling the oxygen carriers in their blood and the many mitochondrial proteins that played a role in the production of ATP via the electron transport chain.

The reason was simple: Dimitry planned to channel an enchantment that liquefied iron. If he enabled the room-temperature blending of cast iron and wrought iron, Saphiria could search for the ratio that produced the much sturdier steel.

Unfortunately, the human body contained iron as well: within hemoglobin, ferritin, and countless respiratory enzymes. If his magic compromised those molecules, anyone who so much as brushed up against the enchantment would start gasping for breath and die shortly after. Not even Earth’s technology could resuscitate a patient with such severe anemic hypoxia. Animal testing was the best preventative medicine.

“Your Highness,” Dimitry said, “my visions aren’t perfectly clear. If anything goes wrong, the rabbit will let us know.”

Saphiria scratched the fuzzy scalp between the critter’s long ears, and its quivering subsided. “She is not a rabbit. She is a leveret.”

“A leveret?”

“An adolescent hare. Birthed late summer at the earliest, struggling to survive her first season without her mother. The loneliness and anguish she feels is beyond comprehension.”

Although Dimitry cherished Saphiria’s compassionate nature, now was not the time to adopt a fur baby. “If it’s any consolation, I am taking every precaution so that no one gets hurt: neither man nor animal.”

She stared into his eyes as if to prod the brain beyond for truth. A while passed before her guarded stance loosened. Saphiria begrudgingly stepped back. “I… I shall pray with my heart and soul for your triumph.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.” Dimitry swept the assorted iron fragments into his pocket and moved to action before the girl could change her mind. “Katerina, we need to weave the clay pot from a distance.”

“Understood.” The enchantress snatched the vol ingot and untied the strings crisscrossing the back of her robe, exposing her upper back.

He aligned his palms with the cores beneath her shoulder blades. “Ready?”

“I wait on you, Your Holiness.”

One could hear only gentle chanting and the wind hissing through chinks in the walls. The blacksmiths prayed. Their humbled postures came not from piety but necessity: they yearned for success no less than Dimitry. Abundant steel would revitalize their trades. Their kingdom. Their lives.

Feeling the weight of their hopes, Dimitry rolled his neck and took another deep breath. He thought of the spell he intended to cast. It was the same one Ignacius used to cleave Saphiria’s collar months ago. The old mage had liquefied two bands of solid steel into room-temperature metal droplets. A feat with staggering chemical implications. It meant that magic could induce phase transitions regardless of temperature or pressure.

If Dimitry could limit that effect to iron and make the enchantment safe to handle without reflectia apparel—a pricey vol investment that attracted heathens—he would enable the cheap mass-production of firearms.

The issue was how? What modification could do all that?

Dimitry thought he knew. By applying vol’s energy as heat to the metallic bonds of solid iron, which differed from the bonds of complex metal ions within the human body, his magic would fulfill every criterion. Or so he hoped.

He envisioned heating the electrons that stabilized iron-iron bonds, cleaving them and therefore liquefying the metal into a room-temperature ferrous slurry. “Meltia.”

Even as vol flowed into her palm, Katerina gasped at his chant. Prayers turned to erratic whispers. Blacksmiths and their apprentices slammed back against the walls as if to escape the indigo aura that now enshrouded the clay pot, growing darker and bleaker. Saphiria tucked the baby hare under her chin, backing away slowly, her wrist emitting an unnatural azure light.

What the hell was going on?

The unease reached a peak when the enchantment had fully layered the container. Everyone gawked at the dark magic. Everyone except Dimitry. His attention didn’t leave Saphiria’s arm. That light, it had come from where she wore her pairing band—the dungeon artifact both of them had put on earlier that month. Was it reacting to the modified spell? If so, why?

Saphiria gave him a panicked glance, almost one of guilt.

It only made Dimitry more curious. He stared her down, demanding an explanation, yet the girl turned away. Something was off. He didn’t ask what. It was a poor topic to interrogate the princess about in front of her subjects, especially since no one else seemed to notice the obscure light.

As if to change the topic, Saphiria looked to the deep indigo enchantment, whose undulating light had enraptured the blacksmiths like a nuclear cloud too beautiful to ignore. “Remain calm and still,” she announced to all around.

The guildmaster of the smiths, Elias, slowly nodded in agreement. None of his men dared approach.

Though the magic’s ominous hue unsettled Dimitry as well, sent shivers down his spine, he couldn’t give in to doubt. The fallout from another unstable enchantment would harm his reputation when he needed it most. His alleged divinity was the only thing keeping his soldiers from running away despite a rapidly approaching Night of Repentance. If his holy magic was going to go berserk, he needed to kill it before anyone else found out. The only way to know was the initially subtle flickers in color. Hoping to catch a calamity early, he ventured forward for a closer look.

Something tugged back on his wrist. “Halt,” Saphiria said. “It is as you said. We must keep our distance.”

“No need to worry. I don’t plan to get hurt—“

“You shan’t know until it’s too late,” she said. “My ancestors have attempted to tame meltia since its discovery, to forge untold metals, yet each time we were met with disaster. The faces of alchemists have slipped from their skulls. Good men have lost their fingers and hands, skin and flesh peeling from bone like wax from a candle. I cannot allow you to meet a similar fate.”

Ah. The face melting part explained the trepidation. Dimitry’s ignorance led him to break a taboo. Fortunately, the divine were exempt from the limitations of common men. “I am aware, Your Highness, but Zera made this meltia different from the others.”

She paused. “Indeed. It does not liquidize its vessel nor the table it rests upon. Still, we must take caution. The error of running flesh can only be made once.”

“But it’s an error only one of us has to make.” His gaze fell to the hare that cuddled in the folds of her arms.

Her eyes shot open. “Surely there is another way.”

“It’s the only way to know for sure.”

Saphiria scoured left and right as if searching for an alternative. Or maybe an excuse. All she found was the pity of blacksmiths, hulking men who struggled to watch their kindhearted princess wrestle with a brutal quandary. Most looked down at their boots. Others turned away. Some might have even sacrificed themselves in the hare’s stead if she had only asked. But she didn’t. Without recourse, Saphiria stroked the cheek of her beloved bundle of white fur. “She is just a child. A baby.”

“I know she is, but I need this. We need this.”

“You are right. My people rely on us. And your benign magic—it has never led the innocent astray. Why should today be different?”

“If Your Highness prefers, you can wait outside.”

“No.” She inhaled sharply. “No. This burden is mine to carry. I shall take a moment to compose myself.”

While the girl said her preemptive goodbyes, Dimitry bound the hare to a shovel shaft like a rotisserie chicken. He couldn’t help but apologize to the trembling furball while he tightened the noose around her four fuzzy paws, little nose sniffing at Saphiria’s finger as she caressed the bridge of her snout. With one last knot, the hare popsicle had reached completion.

“Be well, my love,” Saphiria said.

Silence filled the room as the hare prodded towards the meltia enchantment, the dark indigo glow tinting the white of her fur. With a final, feeble squeak, she entered the clay pot, vanishing from sight.

Time seemed to slow.

Dimitry bounced his heel. Though he would have preferred to keep the test subject within the aura’s area of effect for an hour at least, to guarantee the magic’s safety, every moment was an eternity. He glanced at Saphiria.

She did not meet his gaze. Chest undulating with shallow, rapid breaths, the girl could only stare at the clay pot. Her nails dug into her palms.

One minute passed. Then two. Three, four, five. Ten.

That was all Dimitry could take. Saphiria was the last person he’d ever want to hurt, and right now, he was torturing her. The enchantment was unlikely to go berserk or kill if it hadn’t already. He retracted the shovel.

The affixed hare didn’t budge. Not even to flex its whiskers.

Oh, no.

“Cecilia?” Saphiria croaked. “Cecilia, wake up.”

Distressed like a housewife watching a soap opera’s devastating climax, a blacksmith edged closer. “Come on, you rascal.”

“Yo, Cecilia!” yelled another.

“Cecilia!”

Dozens of grown men were yelling the hare’s name when she decided that playing dead wasn’t stopping the noise. The critter jerked to life.

Saphiria’s hands reached to cover her mouth.

The workshop erupted into hoots and cheers. People were clapping, shaking hands, and chest bumping as the girl tore away the hare’s binds. It was a heartfelt reunion, and proof that the archbishop had successfully tamed meltia through Zera’s divine might. One by one, dozens of gazes turned to him. The blacksmiths yearned to see more. The magic was safe, but could it produce steel?

Only one way to find out. Dimitry dug through his pockets, loose metal jingling within. He grabbed a cool handful of wrought iron shavings and cast iron shards, then sprinkled them into the enchanted pot.

At first, nothing. But slowly, the surface of each iron fragment bubbled, steam drifting up the clay walls.

Dimitry’s heart skipped a beat. He jumped back and pulled up his uniform to mask his face. That wasn’t melting. The metal was boiling! “Don’t breath in the mist,” he warned the flabbergasted audience. “Katerina, kill the enchantment.”

The enchantress didn’t respond. She could only stare as metal spewed from the pot like vapor from a tabletop humidifier, rising to paint lustrous gray murals on the bark ceiling or solidifying mid-air and scattering across the unpaved floor as millions of microscopic iron grains. Whispers accompanied the hissing of ferrous sand.

“It’s like shiny snow,” said a smith while gripping clumps of his braided ginger beard.

“Celeste guide me.”

Awed murmurs surged, and then stalled when the enchantment flashed colors. Scarlet. Indigo. Blue, yellow. Indigo. Green, pink, gray. Indigo. The clay pot writhed and warped and blistered and chunked.

Shit!

Saphiria pulled the hare to her chest, two frantic hind paws peddling against her apron as if to escape.

Dimitry glanced back. “Katerina!”

She twitched to him, intrigue and terror dilating her onyx eyes. Katerina hastily nodded. Her one hand aimed at the clay plot while the other shot towards the vol ingot. “Dispelia.”

The aura faded, and the iron vapor petered out.

Quiet followed. Everyone watched Dimitry with disturbed astonishment, awaiting an explanation for the spectacle they had just seen.

He didn’t have one. His gaze turned to the distorted clay pot, whose whole yet contorted innards gleamed silvery white. It was like freezia all over again. What went wrong? Why did the enchantment wait until Dimitry had introduced the iron substrate to go berserk? And why did meltia boil the metal? It was almost as if he had cast a completely different spell.

A different spell?

A different spell…

His eyes widened as realization took hold.

Every spell Dimitry had seen boasted a unique color: incendia was red, ignia was orange, reflectia was gold, dispelia was gray, witheria was purple, illumina was beige, preservia was pink, and so on. However, whenever Dimitry modified a spell’s functioning, the hue darkened, and every time his enchantments went berserk, they flashed colors, destabilizing until the mass of chaotic energy glowed white. What if color correlated with effect?

Assuming that was true, an enchantment flashed colors when a modification forced it to enact an effect that deviated from its original purpose. Meltia went wild because it was boiling solid iron like some sort of sublimation spell instead of melting it. When Dimitry had programmed freezia—a spell that normally produced cold—to cleave formic acid with energy from the environment, it had gone crazy because it acted as a heat pump first and a producer of cold second.

But perhaps the problem wasn’t so simple. Although a layman’s preservia stifled microbial growth, the modified enchantment had worked when Dimitry used it to destabilize the DNA of the bacterial class that included the one responsible for the plague. Surely a vector of attack so complex would do more than stifle microbes, just as his freezia didn’t only produce cold. So why was one stable and the other not?

Dimitry didn’t know. All he could tell was that modified enchantments abided by a complex set of rules, and that violating them destabilized their color. But what were those rules? Where did they come from? Why did they exist? And could an awareness of their existence help determine where meltia went wrong?

“Are you well?”

The whisper snapped Dimitry back to the workshop he stood in. He glanced down at a princess petting her hare. “Fine. I’m fine.”

Saphiria looked away from him and around the room, now full of people gossiping in their cliques. Her warning was clear. While Dimitry parsed his thoughts, the unease he left behind gave ignorance a chance to roam free. Who knew what damning stories they’d come up with?

“Can you distract them for a bit?” he asked. “I need a moment.”

She turned away, long black hair streaming behind her, and leaped atop an anvil as if it were a podium. Her platformed heels boots rang across the dented metal surface.

The mutters ended.

“My most talented artisans,” Saphiria announced. “While the archbishop communes with Zera and divines steel through the holy art of science, I shall communicate to you the truth of…” Her speech went on and on. Every word was resolute, captivating, and meaningful, despite having no meaning at all. What a woman.

No one noticed Dimitry as he approached the clay pot. If meltia became corrupt because he had violated the bounds of its original effect, his modification must have asked too much of the spell. But how? After some thinking, he thought he identified the problem.

Liquids and solids evaporated when each component particle had enough energy to overcome the molecular forces attracting them to their neighbors. The same must have been true for metal. By breaking every metallic bond, nothing remained to hold the iron atoms together, so they drifted apart as gases. If only Dimitry had realized that sooner. Unfortunately, thirteen years had passed since undergrad with his chemical understanding slipping further each day.

Still, the issue remained: if intact metallic bonds kept iron solid and cleaving them formed a gas, what would create a liquid? Dimitry deduced that an intermediate state must have existed between the two extremes. Only experimentation could prove him right. He gave Saphiria a nod, and she concluded her speech to the sound of falsely enlightened applause.

The blacksmiths crowded around, their expectant countenances now glued to the battered clay pot, expectations lifted by a princess who spoke a bit too highly about the archbishop’s ‘sacred’ talents. For the sake of his reputation, his colony, and all of Malten, Dimitry couldn’t fail. This had better work.

Through Katerina, he weaved another enchantment, visualizing the addition of heat to iron-iron bonds as before. But Dimitry didn’t break them. He only added enough energy to weaken the attraction between iron atoms and the valence electrons of their neighbors, imparting fluidity without forcing a complete disassembly. “Meltia.”

Saphiria’s pairing band shone once more as a dark indigo aura entrapped the clay pot. This time, it was a deep, tranquil blue. The girl was calm, still, and when Dimitry asked, she didn’t hesitate to let him borrow Cecilia to test the experimental enchantment’s volatility.

Her abrupt change in attitude concerned Dimitry. Was she merely being supportive?

No.

Saphiria patiently waited while the hare lay in the enchanted clay pot. After five minutes or so, she marched ahead of him to reclaim Cecile as if assured of the hare’s safety, and then she gaped into the glowing pot. Her indigo eyes sparkled. “It is like a furnace, yet without the fire.”

Dimitry joined her. She was right. The iron was melting, and the enchantment kept a stable color, meaning the color-spell theory carried a hint of truth. But unlike him, the girl took his success for granted. “How did you know?” he whispered.

“Zera illuminates the path of all who open their hearts,” Saphiria said.

While the blacksmiths neared to gawk at the latest miracle, Dimitry looked down at Saphiria’s pairing band. That light it emitted whenever he weaved a modified enchantment—the dungeon artifact seemed to revel in his secret. It knew something. What was that thing? “Sometimes, her light can be blinding. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Worry not, my concerned archbishop. Instead, oblige me. What is that?”

Dimitry heaved a relieved breath. If she was safe, then all was well, especially since no one else had noticed the pairing band’s light. After what he had learned, it was a topic best saved for when they spoke in private. Steel production took priority for now. “What is what?”

“That.” She pointed to a series of small grains, brown and black and yellow, which rose from the murky gray mixture and merged into small rafts.

Were those… impurities? Dimitry wasn’t sure. Logically, the loosening of iron-iron bonds would unravel the crystal structures of wrought iron and cast iron, releasing any molecules trapped in the infinitesimally small chinks between metal atoms. That could be good. Or it might be bad. Very bad.

If the rising grains consisted solely of contaminants, Dimitry would obtain steel purer than this world had ever seen. But if they contained carbon as well, none would remain within the molten metal. He’d get elemental iron—completely useless for firearms. “Can you tell if something is made out of steel?”

“Even if I lacked eyes,” Saphiria said, “I could differentiate crucible steel from the patterned steels of the Sundock Confederacy. You may place your faith in me as Cecilia and I did in you.”

That was enough to convince him. Dimitry scooped out the buoyant grains and poured the molten metal into a mold. A small, black-gray ingot solidified within minutes.

Saphiria collected the sample. “Elias!”

The giant stomped over to a thick grinding wheel, plunked down onto the adjacent bench, and pedaled with both meaty legs until the bumps on the spinning surface vanished into a swift blur.

Saphiria held the metal square at an angle, then pressed it to the wheel. Sparks bolted every which way. “It is…”

“It is?” Dimitry asked.

“No more than cast iron.”

A chorus of dejected groans followed her announcement. One blacksmith held his head like a gambler who lost his second mortgage in a horse race.

Dimitry, however, wasn’t as upset. “How do you know?”

“The sparks don’t fork, are vermilion in hue, and travel little,” she said. “It could be nothing else.”

Anticipation bubbled in Dimitry’s gut, the thrill emerging as goosebumps on his arms. If they had produced cast iron, plenty of carbon remained dissolved within the room-temperature ferrous slurry. Steel was a possibility. “That’s great.”

“It is?” Saphiria looked up at him with big indigo eyes. “Why?”

He grinned. “You’ll see.”

“That look. I have seen it before. We are on the cusp of another miracle, are we not?”

“I think so.”

It was then that the real work began. They smelted ingot after ingot, varying the ratio of cast iron to wrought iron with each iteration. At first, cast iron was all the enchantment could produce, but within the hour, Saphiria had trouble differentiating which results were iron, what type of iron they were, or if she had even seen that alloy before.

The smiths’ prayers grew louder. Men who looked hardened by countless tavern brawls fell to their knees, tears streaming from their eyes, begging Zera for the revelation that’d revive their trade. Their pleas were soon answered.

Cecilia’s ears poking out from the pouch of her apron, Saphiria lowered a chunk of mystery metal to the grinding wheel. Raspy buzzing accompanied the shooting of sparks. She watched them in silence, disbelief on her face.

The blacksmiths gathered near to hear the metallurgist princess pass judgment.

“Well?” Dimitry asked. “What’s the verdict?”

“This pattern… it is much like raw blister steel.”

“Blister steel?” Elias uttered. “In just an afternoon? Are you certain, Your Royal Highness?”

“There is no doubt.”

Ear-shattering roars filled the workshop. Apprentice and master alike approached Dimitry and raised their arms to Celeste before dancing away. Some men took off their shirts and aprons and swung them over their heads, while others remembered they were in the presence of royalty and slapped each other on the back instead.

Saphiria didn’t seem to care either way. She examined the ingot and its previous iterations like an appraiser fortunate enough to hold a recently uncovered Fabergé egg.

Dimitry didn’t know the implications of blister steel, but the smiths seemed to think the alloy was a big deal. He hoped it would be for him as well. “Hey, Saphiria.”

She held the steel chunk to her eye, twisting and turning the metal sample with focused scrutiny.

“Saphiria?”

No response.

He shook her shoulder.

The girl jerked forward. She turned to him. “Did you say something?”

“I wanted to know: can we make gun barrels with this?”

Saphiria cupped his hand and pressed the steel to his palm. “Dimitry, with this, we can make the world.”

Angelika still couldn’t believe it. They may not have been voltech rifles, but those things… they actually worked. And man, did they sound good. She yelled the command she had been shouting since dawn once more. “Load!”

A platoon of Hospitallers startled into action. Usually some peasant and his wife, they worked in pairs, caressing their weapon as if it had come out of Zera’s own asshole. The squire would ram black powder, some cotton, and a cast iron ball down the barrel, while the archer poured a finer powder onto the flash pan and aimed forward.

Having the soldiers operate in teams was Angelika’s idea. She had hundreds of troops and only twenty-four ‘guns’. To minimize the time spent reloading, which took five times longer than rearming a normal rifle, she delegated the laborious endeavor to someone who would have otherwise been jerking off on the sidelines. Now her soldiers shot twice as fast. They might not have been as good as a squad of combat sorceresses, but gun archers were a massive improvement over serfs swinging halberds.

And they’d only get better. Soon, Angelika wouldn’t even need teams. Most of the guns she had were bastardized voltech rifles, but as of this morning, the workshop began delivering progressively larger shipments of a new model. The barrels were long, smooth, and gleamed silvery-gray—the color of a newly transmuted metal. Jade Steel, the smiths called it. A Zeran miracle. The blessing that’d catapult Malten into a new age of prosperity.

Angelika didn’t know how much of that was true, but one thing was certain: Dimitry was at it again. And he kept his promise. She had all she needed to massacre heathens.

The power.

It felt good.

Her men shared the sentiment. Done loading, they fidgeted with anticipation. Each soldier eagerly awaited to hear the echoes of divine judgment ring at their discretion.

Well, actually, at Angelika’s discretion. From behind the firing line, she pointed to the ocean and the gray horizon beyond. “Release!”

A deafening cacophony of crackles popped in tandem, enshrouding everyone in blinding white mists and the acrid scent of rotten eggs and furnace fumes. Though you couldn’t see the massive grins through the fog, one could hear them through the elated howling all along the sandy shore.

For over a week Angelika had instructed her troops to run around with mock guns—basically wooden tubes—like a bunch of dumbasses, and at last those drills had paid off. She had her own militia. They might even be able to murder a crawler or three.

“Won’t you order them to stop their yelping?” a moan came from behind. “It’s been an entire month since my last drink. My head is killing me.”

Angelika glanced back at a worn-out hag—the mercenary sorceress that had attacked the cathedral on the Night of Repentance. She was twenty-five at most, but those dark circles under her eyes and the way she trolled around like a grandma with a bad back added another decade to her age. Dimitry put her under Angelika’s command. He thought she could help protect the troops from flier feathers while they fought crawlers and carapaced devils. He was wrong. Mercenaries were loyal only to their stomachs and their pouches. Trusting them was like asking to get stabbed in the back.

If Angelika had her way, she’d treat the hag’s head with the same tenderness that a housewife stomped wine grapes after the summer harvest. “A cravings headache, huh? That sounds terrible. Tell you what, if you volunteer to be a rifle target, I know a way to make it go away.”

The hag massaged her temples. “If you’re going to kill me, do it quietly.”

“Would if I could, bitch. The archbishop is the only reason you’re still breathing. I’d grovel at his feet the next time I see him if I were you.”

She chuckled. “You really look up to him, hm? That’s fine. We were all young and dumb once. You just take it a step further.”

“Dumb?” Heat rushed into Angelika’s face. “How the fuck am I dumb? You’re the one who looks like she got chewed up and rowed down shit brook.”

“Sweetheart, you try going a month without a proper bath.”

“Ew.”

“And although I’m a prisoner without a mark to my name, I have something you never will.”

“An itchy crack?”

“Dignity,” the hag said. “Let me guess, the archbishop complimented you on your bust, told you that you look good in furs? He said you’re special and that no one can replace you, so now you follow him forever and ever? They’re all swindlers, doll. A proper woman lives only for herself and by herself, doing whatever she pleases when she pleases. I may be his prisoner, but you’re the one living in a cell.”

“I don’t know what kind of fucked up shit you’ve been through,” Angelika said, “but I’m here for that.” She pointed back with her thumb. “See those guns? Right now, the archbishop is making hundreds of them, and soon, they’ll purge every single fucking heathen in the kingdom so that morons like you can safely spew their trauma at everyone they meet.”

The hag pulled her greasy hair away from her face. “I see them, your Zera’s Chosen and their fire pipes. They’ll blindly charge into battle and die while their master demands tithes from their families just like his predecessors from the Church. They were the greatest crooks of all, and now that they’re gone, your beloved archbishop is here to collect the scraps. Every gift he brings will be repaid in blood. Their blood. Your blood. My blood. The difference is that when I’m bleeding into the dirt, gasping for breath, I won’t have the stinging betrayal to go with it.”

The troops jeered the hag as if she was an arsonist at a hanging.

That pessimistic asshole was pissing Angelika off, too. “Know what? Why don’t you take a cattle prod and shove it directly up your crusty—“

An iron bucket clanged.

“Two waves!” the scout screamed. He rushed atop the northern watchtower—a platformed oak tree—and pointed in the directions of the incoming heathens. “Four and eight! Five hundred strides!”

What a timely opportunity. Angelika could brutalize those heathens alongside her ‘Zera’s Chosen’, and then laugh in the hag’s face. That’d shut her up. The only problem was Dimitry. He had asked Angelika to wait until she had more guns before fighting, but he wasn’t here, and she would come up with an excuse. A good one. Probably. Something about training.

Before the sorceresses patrolling the inlet could split off into squadrons and kill Angelika’s target practice, she looked to her troops. “You folks looking to murder some fucking heathens?”

A man raised his shiny new gun over his head, revenge burning in his eyes. “Let’s kill those bastards!”

Others followed his lead, including the ammo lady. She wasn’t even gonna fight. Her only job was to lug the powder barrel around. “About time!”

“Yeah!”

“For Zera!”

The chanting crescendoed until every seagull on the nearby pier had flapped away.

And that was that.

Angelika marched ahead. A rowdy platoon and a shambling hag on her trail, she passed a mound of stone corpses and frozen dirt—the coastal wall the masons were ‘building’ until they could erect a proper heathen barrier—before arriving at the barren shore that would soon become her battlefield.

Four crawlers arose from the depths, water trickling down the azure circuits engraving their half-submerged cores.

Compared to the heathen wave that struck two days ago, these guys weren’t organized at all. They weren’t using carriers for cover, nor did they have air support. Pure gun archer fodder. Angelika would get three volleys off before they washed onto shore. “Line formation!”

The troops scrambled, fighting over where to stand. Sadly, they weren’t any more organized than the heathens.

A shit-eating smirk spread across the hag’s face. “Perhaps referring to them as Zera’s Chosen was an undue compliment. Even those knuckle-dragging Church grunts were more reliable than this.”

“Hey,” Angelika said. "They’re just excited, alright?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Bitch.

Every man and woman eventually found their place.

“Load!” Angelika commanded.

The sound of iron balls slamming into metal barrels and the brushing of cotton ramrods followed. Meanwhile, the stone-plated kneecaps of crawlers were already peeking out from the ocean surface.

Angelika bounced on her heel. Come on, come on. At this rate, she’d have two volleys tops. Maybe one. No, two. Two. Probably one. Damn it!

“It’s not too late to leave this farce behind and live for yourself,” the hag said.

“It’s not too late to shut the fuck up.”

The gun archers aimed forward, weapons rattling in their shaky arms. Anxious chuckles and muttered gospel verses punctuated the tense silence.

With only one volley, every shot had to count. Angelika watched for an opportunity where the crawlers moved close enough to eliminate the space between them, but not enough for them to overlap. Attacking then would maximize her troops’ accuracy and the spread of injury. “Aim for the center of their formation and hold steady!”

“Just run away,” the hag whispered. “Go to Feyt, Ontaria, or better yet, somewhere inland. Find a countryside baron. Pledge your loyalty. Find his valuables, and in the night—“

The crawlers aligned.

Angelika’s chance. “Release!”

Twenty-four guns crackled in tandem, cutting off the hag’s stupidity and pelting the heathens with iron. Stone legs shattered. Pale blue blood poured from gaping wounds. Three corpses splashed into the ocean with the survivor shambling forward, only to bleed out before reaching the shore.

Hospitallers cheered and shouted slurs at their drowning foes. The sorceress reinforcements that had just arrived from the inlet watched with disbelief, iron balls rolling onto the sand from the barrels of their voltech rifles. And best of all, the hag’s mouth hung ajar, her expression almost as stupid as her.

Angelika folded a hand around her ear. “Pardon me, I couldn’t hear you. You were saying something about my troops?”