Chapter 110: Blessed Steel

“I said put me down, you scum-peddling shit-mouths!” Jason shouted at the top of his lungs, beating on the helmets of the people carrying him. It didn’t do any good, but it made him feel better.

They were sprinting at top speed up a stone-pathed road cut into the mountainside, wide enough to field an army and greyscale in the dim light of pre-dawn.

Above, the Graneshian fortress was looming larger and larger, the gates yawning open to swallow him.

They were only a few hundred feet away from the fortress now, and-

BOOOM!

William Oh landed beside the group, the earth twisting violently at his arrival before launching him forward.

The ensuing battle was a fast, bloody thing, as one of his captors simply disappeared in an explosion of gore while the rest rushed forward, unsheathing their weapons.

Jason’s friend wove through them in a strange zig-zag pattern, the earth rippling behind him like the coils of a snake as he lashed out, dispatching one after another with brutal efficiency.

The one carrying Jason cursed and broke into a sprint, aiming to deliver Jason to the fortress while his comrades were distracting Will.

“AGH!” The man’s steps faltered and he collapsed to the ground, dropping Jason onto the cobblestones.

Jason tumbled, rearing to his feet as quickly as he could, his skin going cold as the man’s chest burst open, revealing a wasp nearly the size of Jason himself, which proceeded to attack the others.

In the distance, Loth sank below the horizon, descending the opposite side of the mountain.

In a matter of seconds, the fight was over, and his fellow orphan was sheathing his sword, approaching Jason. In a heartbeat, it occurred to Jason that maybe Will was just as dangerous as the church had made him out to be…

“Are you alright?” Will asked, crouching down to study Jason’s expression.

But even if he is, he’s on my side. I call that a win.

“Yeah,” Jason said, nodding, trying not to look at the carnage. “I-“

“Cool, we gotta GO!” Will shouted, throwing Jason over his shoulder and sprinting at ungodly speeds as the Nukers on the walls began to take potshots at them.

Ear-shattering explosions soon became the only thing Jason could hear, along with dust and fire the only thing he saw around Will’s shoulder.

They broke into the forest on the south side of the mountain, bathed in the morning sun, revealing the surrounding trees as they made it out of the Nuker’s range.

In all his life, Jason had never moved that fast. It felt like he was dreaming, the world sliding around him, disconnected from any sense of effort.

It almost made a man reconsider choosing a Charm Build.

…almost.

After what felt like hours of running, Will finally staggered to a halt.

“Gonna…take…a…break,” he muttered, hoisting Jason off his shoulder and onto the loamy soil before collapsing against a tree, gasping like a fish.

Jason wasn’t feeling much better, having a shoulder jammed into his stomach for an hour.

Loth disconnected the tiny string she’d wrapped around Will’s waist, her insects setting her on the ground. She’d hovered along behind them like a kite the entire time.

“When we first entered the forest, I had my bugs trap two exit corridors.” She said, drawing a little map of Bone Mountain, marking an arrow to the southeast and one to the southwest.

“If we can buy time until the regular army is standing directly on it. I can use these to punch a hole in their ranks, or at the very least, distract them long enough for us to slip through in the chaos.”

She glanced up at Will.

“Which way do you want to go?” She asked.

“Stevie couldn’t find me a tomahawk I liked,” Will mused. “And Billy-bob never found a suitable item that could allow us to concentrate the Miasma. We might as well cut our losses. Whichever direction gets us out of here.”

Loth’s eyes began to scan the air, as if she were reading.

“There is a town with a dead volcano to the southeast. Its people are highly Graneshian and the town itself lies at the intersection of three large roads. The monk’s records indicate that the church makes a large portion of its money selling ‘blessed steel’ that seem to originate from the town. It seems to be some kind of processing center. It bears investigation.”

Loth’s brow twitched. “Dead volcano. Lava tubes.”

“What tubes?” Will and Jason asked as one at the unfamiliar word.

“Lava. Molten rock from a volcano. When it flows underground, sometimes it will leave behind tubes of stone where it used to flow. Caves. These tubes can be the size of an entire building. Plenty of space to hide the church’s secrets without conspicuous construction on the surface.”

“…Rock can melt?” Will asked with a curious expression that mirrored Jason’s own.

“Everything can melt.” Loth replied with a chilling, matter-of-fact tone that spoke of experience.

“Oh. Cool. Well, sounds like as good a place as any,” Will said as he paled a bit. “Southeast it is.”

Loth nodded and scrubbed the drawing out of the ground with her clawed foot.

On the other side of the mountain, Caddock called off the chase.

“Why are we stopping? They’re right there!” Hiro said, peering off the edge of the mountain. “I think I can see them.”

“When we’re there, they’ll be there, and so on,” Caddock said, pointing further afield. “We didn’t get ahead of them last time by blindly chasing them. We did it by anticipating their actions, and we’ll do it again. Plus, I have to shit, and the fortress has toilets.”

Caddock patted Hiro on the shoulder and went to take care of business, ignoring the screaming of high-ranking church officials on the way into the fortress.

Once that was complete, Caddock invited the myriad church officials to a debriefing so he didn’t have to repeat himself.

That was naïve of him.

Naturally, the church officials tried to flex their authority to pin him down and answer stupid questions, stretching what he had hoped to be a short debrief out to a week.

As long as his Harriers were busy wearing William Oh down, he had the time.

Technically a lot of them did outrank him, but Caddock was both the most powerful Paladin they could field, and also retired. The threat of dismissing him from service as a punishment was laughable. He actually laughed.

Still, he had to slog through the week-long debrief out of a sense of duty, if nothing else.

The most frequently asked stupid question during the debrief was ‘why didn’t you tell us William Oh was hiding on the north slope?’ spoken in an accusing tone, as if they somehow could’ve contributed if they knew.

They couldn’t’ve, but high-ranking church members were politicians, and like any good politician, pinning the blame on others was practically reflex.

Caddock’s response was that William Oh was flightier than a hare on speed, and the assembled officials couldn’t pull off a successful ambush against a blind and deaf cow. Some enterprising fool would’ve tried to seize the glory, tipped off their quarry and made everything even worse.

“As it stands, I’ve got the army surrounding the area in a staggered double line.” Caddock said, marking the suspended map for his audience.

“Regardless of what they try, they won’t be able to break through that. We’ve got them locked into this small mountain range. All we need to do is methodically grind them down with harriers.”

“Harriers?” Someone with a big hat asked.

“Rangers specialized in nipping at their prey’s heels. Once they’re tired and out of Charge, the paladins will move in and finish them off. In the meantime-“

“Sir,” one of Caddock’s messengers arrived. Tommy, I think. “Report from the scouts.”

Caddock tuned out the church officials and read the report, which detailed ghost sightings from the last few weeks.

There were a few that stood out, where butler-looking ghosts tried to steal Crafting and Charm specific Sacrifices, stole several tomahawks and quizzed several crafters on how to refine miasmatic ash while they slept.

Interesting. He’s modified one of his Abilities to refine items. He’s trying to use miasmatic ash to refine a tomahawk…

That’s…

Is a slightly fancier tomahawk worth risking his life? This makes very little sense to me. Where would he find miasmatic ash from any monster of any significant power outside…the…tower?

Caddock’s eyes narrowed as a sneaking suspicion began to build inside him.

Why would he attack us?

Because he thinks we have a large amount of miasmatic ash. A lot of large organizations keep quite a bit on hand for their crafters, and we’re no exception.

But why us specifically?

It would have to be the specific type of miasmatic ash he wants.

…Deceiver Ash. Lots of it.

Oh crap, he’s trying to make a Set.

Caddock cleared his throat, glancing up from the report.

“Good news, I know what William Oh is aiming for, and even better, due to our methodical method of encircling him, he won’t be able to-“

“Sir,” one of Caddock’s messengers arrived. Nigan, this time. The messenger’s forehead was sweating profusely. “Report from the frontli-.”

Caddock snatched the letter out of his hand and opened it up.

The letter contained lots of misleading statements about what had happened, and softened the language as much as possible without explicitly lying to their leader, but the long and short of it was this:

One of the enterprising fools commanding the southeast section of the circle hemming William Oh in, one Hagar Graziano, thought to seize glory and ordered his wedge of the circle to close ranks and pursue William Oh against Caddock’s direct orders.

Once they were packed in tight enough, and surprising no one, the ground beneath their feet exploded, causing general mayhem and allowing William Oh to slip through the containment zone.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been in command, what’s the punishment for disobeying orders nowadays?” Caddock asked Hiro. “Still a beating?”

Caddock’s first instinct was to make it brutal and personal, but any good military should have standardized rewards and punishments, so that soldiers knew what was at stake and did not fear cruel punishments from a particularly sadistic commander spilling over to their family, friends, or personal life.

“A lynching with wooden rods.” Hiro said. “Iron if they’re Officer rank, Blessed Steel for anyone above level fifty.”

 “Make a note. One iron-rod lynching for Hagar Graziano, Hiro.”

Hiro nodded.

“Gentlemen,” Caddock said, turning his attention back to the assembled church-folk. “As much as I can’t say I enjoy this, I’m afraid I must call an end to this debrief. Unforeseen circumstances dictate that I be elsewhere.”

“Wait!” the man with the biggest hat, Saint Strauss raised his voice before Caddock could leave. “Where is William Oh going? This time, tell us.”

“He’s going to the town of Basalt, where he’s going to take the ashes of all the thousands of his siblings you’ve stashed there over time and use them to make a Legendary Set keyed to his own bloodline.”

The silence stretched out for several seconds, the high-ranking officials staring back at him like startled prey.

Caddock shrugged. “Or maybe he’s just running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I’ll let you know which it was after I kill him.”

Outside the containment zone, Will used Malleable Space, the Stormfist gauntlets and the Phantom Hand pushing them forward to eke out every ounce of speed he possibly could and close the distance between themselves and Basalt in a matter of hours.

They wouldn’t be hard to track, so time was the key here.

They arrived before the sun even set, the radiance of The Tower to the south dimming only slightly, signaling dinnertime.

The town of Basalt was a rather large town, not quite a city, but definitely a healthy size, skirting a conical mountain that gave Will an odd feeling. The surrounding vegetation was lush and the dirt had an interesting red hue.

“Now we just need to scout this place to see if I was right without sounding the alarm,” Loth mused as they overlooked the town that sat in the center of the three massive roads that diverted around the mountain. “We needn’t cause a stir here if they don’t have what we’re looking for.”

“On it,” Will said.

Phantom eye.

31->30 Charge remaining.

The phantom eye was as fast as the Phantom Hand, and in less than the two minutes he had available, he searched every single building in the town, seeing a couple things he quite frankly would rather not have, but nothing that looked like what they were looking for.

After a moment, Will remembered Loth’s Lava tubes.

Underground caves, huh? Will thought, sending the phantom eye ten feet underground and scanning.

Nothing but blackness.

Will sent it through the earth under the town at lightning speeds as the phantom eye came down to its last few seconds of life.

A single flash of light caught Will’s attention an instant before Phantom Eye expired.

29 charges remaining.

He resummoned the eye and sent the eye back to where he’d caught the flash of light, moving it back and forth until he found it.

Finally it revealed itself to him.

Ten feet underground and near the town’s southern border, was an endless stone hallway lit by dim lamps, with labelled black urns packed tightly together, stretching out into the darkness.

Each black urn was inscribed with a familiar name, from the ledger of slain Deceivers.

“Oh yeah, these people have something we want,” Will muttered, his Phantom Eye following the hallway back to an enormous underground smithery near the heart of the volcano.

Dead volcano, my ass, Will thought, watching teams of men load the massive stars unto red-hot patches of molten rock, heating the foot-thick, gigantic steel mirrors up to cherry-red before heating up smaller parts with Abilities and carving them away, forming them into ingots.

I think I know how they make their ‘Blessed Steel’, Will thought. But where the Abyss did the church of Granesh get stars!?

“So, what are we doing?” Loth asked, drawing his attention.

“We’re going in.”