CHAPTER 210: THE FINAL DANCE

The valley had decided on a bad kind of quiet—too heavy, as if the air were learning how to lie. Inigo sat with his back to the Black Dragon’s warm flank, M4 across his knees, and listened to the math of the place: HIMARS pod ticking cool, GAU-8 hydraulics settling with long, oil-thick sighs, the river’s hiss where it licked fresh stone. Beneath it all, the one sound that kept his spine straight—Lyra’s breath, thin and stubborn.

He checked her again because checking was something hands could do while a mind counted unknowns. Pulse: there. Skin: hot from the day, not the fever kind yet. The bandage at her temple had gone brown at the edge; he replaced it, slid the sling higher under her ruined shoulder, propped her with one more folded cloth so gravity wouldn’t get clever.

"Stay," he told her quietly, like talking to a dog that didn’t understand words but liked his voice. "I’ve got the door."

The door answered with a heartbeat.

It rolled through the ground, slow as a bellows. Stone under his boot vibrated a fraction against the pad of the Black Dragon. The crack he’d dared to taunt earlier remembered it had opinions.

It opened—not the surgical iris of obsidian the Lord had used in cities, not the ragged gash of earthquakes, but a clean, vertical seam that widened like a polite mouth. Heat breathed out. Light bent along the edges and made honest lines.

He came up out of it like a lesson returned rewritten.

Armor that had been patchwork now read as one sentence: fewer plates, thicker, beveled for purpose. The bright seams didn’t look like leaks anymore—they were channels, taking heat where he wanted it and teaching the skin to glow hard, not bright. The cloak of flame hugged him close. The hammer was gone; in its place he brought up an empty hand that wasn’t empty at all—runes lived along his palm and fingers, faint as tattoos until they decided to be work.

He paused, looking over the field, over the smoking pallet turret of the Vulcan, the sagging GAU-8 stand, the tripod scars where the GAU-19 had been eaten by a mouth of stone. Then his helm turned and found Inigo.

"Unbound Soul," he said, tone almost... pleased. "Cook of thunder. I had forgotten how iron speaks when a man makes it sing."

Inigo stood because sitting felt like bad manners in church. "We can sing louder."

A low sound rolled in the Lord’s helm, not a laugh, not exactly. "Louder hurts. I have missed hurt."

He took three steps forward. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t need to.

Inigo’s thumb found the cut along his nailbed with ease born of repetition. He dragged it across a fresh M4 magazine, quick sigils that were more pressure than poetry: line for flight, bite for the nose. He slammed the mag, racked the bolt, and took the kind of stance old instructors liked: feet under him, shoulders soft, cheek weld honest.

"Let’s start simple," he said.

The burst snapped sharp. Three rounds sparked on the starred web his thirty-millimeter had made in the visor earlier. One found an opening and disappeared like a swallowed swear. The helm tilted a degree as if tasting it.

"Better," the Lord said. "Speak again."

Inigo didn’t argue. He slid to the Mk 19’s low cradle, bit a pin free, and lobbed HEDP in a flat arc that made disciples of gravity. Grenades bounded and popped along the Lord’s path. The runes along his palm flared; pressure bled sideways harmless as wind. The next pair landed closer. One smacked his shin and wrapped it in a brief crown of ugly fire; the other punched into the seam where hip met thigh and thumped with a serious sound that made that leg decide on prudence for one step.

He pressed, because pressure buys seconds. "Shop," he said under his breath, and the pane came polite to the edge of his vision.

Explosives → Defensive

– M18A1 Claymore (200 rds steel balls, RDX) — 8 units + M57/M4 firing gear

Price: 3,600 Tokens → Buy.

Fire Control / Sights

– Thermal Weapon Sight (Clip-On) — Long-wave IR

Price: 1,200 Tokens → Buy.

Smoke / Obscurants

– M18 Smoke Grenade (Green/White) — Crate (24)

Price: 480 Tokens → Buy.

The crates thunked into being with the honesty of good wood. He grabbed two Claymores by their canvas bags, sprinted three steps while the Lord tasted afterimages, and propped them at shin height among shattered bollards, FRONT TOWARD ENEMY flashing as instruction and prayer. Wire spooled back under his left hand; the M57 clacker hung in his right like a hymn book.

"Talk," the helm said again, the word enthusiastic now.

"Since you asked," Inigo muttered, and squeezed.

The two Claymores coughed in a single, sharp exhale. A storm of steel balls carved a knee-high sheet across the cobbles. The cloak-skin flared tight; most of the balls hissed to uselessness in hot air. Enough hit the beveled edges of plate and ricocheted in, lodging where armor bent. The Lord’s step ate both blasts and came on.

He liked it.

Inigo saw it in the angle of the helm—not the arrogance of earlier, but something uglier and almost innocent: pleasure that had been denied too long. The brute rolled his shoulder as if offering it. Runes along his palm brightened. He breathed like a smith at the anvil between hammer drops.

Masochist, Inigo thought, and felt his mouth go dry. The worst kind: a strategist who enjoys losing pieces to learn the board.

"Okay," he said out loud. "We’ll feed you courses."

He slapped the thermal onto the M4’s rail, clicked the harness snug, and watched the giant swim into crisp white inside fog that had lied about what it hid. The visor glowed hot; the wound at his side ran down in a river of light; the palm sigils pulsed with each breath like a heartbeat he had moved to his hand.

"Mortar smoke," Inigo told himself, and dropped two white rounds down the tube. They bloomed obedient curtains, thick and cold, as fine as flour and kinder. He cut an alley with the clacker of his third Claymore, then ran the wire back and looped it around his wrist.

The Lord liked not seeing as much as seeing. "Hide and sing, little knife," he called, amused. "Make me earn it."

"Gladly," Inigo said.

He slid behind the GAU-8’s tired stand and kissed the power cart with a whisper-thin push—enough to keep the motor honest for one more burst. He thumbed the yoke, set the barrels where the thermal told him the helm would be when the smoke swirled, and squeezed. Thirty-millimeter thunder punished the white wall, shells punching a clean trench through smoke to the glow beyond. The first five walked high; the sixth and seventh hit edges and peeled plate; the eighth—willed hard with steady—dug along the visor’s cracked star and sent a bright flare inward.

The Lord made a low noise. Enjoyment. "There," he said. "There you are."

He lifted his palm and pressed. The smoke rolled away as if ashamed. The pressure found the GAU-8’s mouth and shoved it sideways. Inigo let it shove; fighting pressure burns energy you don’t have. He rolled, landed on his shoulder, and came up behind the low cradle of the Mk 19 again.

"Green smoke," he told himself, because order helps, even if color doesn’t matter. Two canisters hissed and poured a wall between Lyra and the giant. He threw a third high to distract the eye that didn’t need distracting.

"Freedom Shop," he whispered. "Bigger teeth."

Direct Fire Guns

– S-60 57mm AA Gun (towed) — Manual Traverse + HE/T AP

Price: 15,000 Tokens → Buy.

It slammed down with the pride of old Soviet steel: long barrel, spindly carriage legs, a handwheel begging for stubborn wrists. He didn’t enchant the gun; he stroked the AP rounds in the tray with quick runes—line and deep—and cranked traverse with a grunt that made his ribs object.

"Bite," he told it, and squeezed.

The 57mm bark punched honest holes through smoke and hit the Lord in the plate that guarded the rib of his left side. The first round smashed bevel and stopped. The second followed the first’s hurt and went a thumb deeper. The third arrived inside the second’s path and stayed, a black dot that flashed white on the thermal as it found meat.

The Lord rocked a half-pace. Pleasure flared again in his voice. "Teach me pain," he invited, drunk on it. "It makes the world speak clearer."

Inigo thought of Lyra unconscious behind the Black Dragon and decided this conversation did not need to continue. He planted a fourth Claymore low, clacked it as the giant’s foot crossed, and fired the Carl G while fragments still hung in the air. The HEAT stream licked into the fresh 57mm hurt and turned it into a tunnel. Molten light hissed out the back seam in a violent breath.

The Lord’s laugh came raw and involuntary, startling, like a man who had expected a slap and received an honest punch. He pressed his palm and the ground bucked, but not in a wave—he turned the buck into a roll, a fast tilting that tried to make Inigo and all of his guns choose a downhill.