The battlefield still smoked.
Blackridge had held, but the stone bore the scars. Cracked trenches, twisted steel, scorched barriers still hissed as the last of the steam cooled beneath the Blood Moon's dimming glow. A heat hung in the air that didn't belong to the forge.
Riku walked the southern trench slowly, passing broken glaive shafts and bits of charred slag armor. Two wyrmlings limped alongside the spearmen as they searched for anything left behind—tracking scent trails, nudging ash piles. Their claws left faint glowing lines in the stone.
"They're adapting," Kael said, joining him, voice rough from smoke and a shallow gash across his neck. "Hunting even after the fighting's over."
"They remember who hurt them," Riku said. He paused to kneel by a broken helmet marked with the Nightforge sigil—split clean down the middle, the edges slagged by wyrmling breath. "So do we."
Sira's voice cracked through the comm bead. "Riku. You'll want to see this. Eastern tunnel."
He was already moving.
The eastern ventline had collapsed partially during the siege, likely from the pressure burst when the Nightforge creature's steam core detonated. The rock was still shifting, the vents hissing with slow-release gas.
Sira stood near the mouth of the collapse, her expression unreadable, a torch in one hand and her other resting on her blade hilt.
"Tunnel's deeper than we mapped," she said. "Kael's previous blueprints thought it was a dead shaft. It's not."
Riku followed the curve down, ducking beneath a low arch of glassed stone.
The air grew hotter as they descended, but not unbearable. Controlled heat. Like something had dug into the flow and redirected it.
Then the path opened.
A natural chamber—not large, but precise. Carved intentionally. Inside were six crates, sealed with slag-welded clamps. No insignias. No identifiers. Just the faint heat of stored potential.
Kael joined them minutes later, gaze dark. "They were building this under us?"
"No," Riku said. "They found it."
He opened one crate. Inside: obsidian plate cores, still warm. Another: a partially constructed heat-core regulator. Efficient. Uniform. The kind of work that suggested an organized sovereign—but not Nightforge. These weren't built for war.
They were built for access.
"The crater," Riku murmured. "This is one of the points they were going to dig from."
Sira looked to him. "We destroy it?"
"No." He stood. "We use it."
That night, Blackridge moved with quiet speed.
Kael and two engineers rerouted the forge's auxiliary pressure line directly into the eastern vent. With some coaxing—and a great deal of heat—they got it flowing beneath the chamber, charging the tunnel without letting the other end vent.
It was a gamble. But if it worked, the path beneath the ridge would become an engine.
Not just a defense.
A weapon.
At dawn, Riku stood atop the forge tower as the final heat signatures confirmed connection.
"We're set," Kael's voice echoed through the bead. "When you give the word, the tunnel burns outward."
"And the ridge?"
"Will hold. Barely."
Sira stepped up beside him, silent for a long moment.
"They'll feel this," she said. "Nightforge. Iron Veil. Anyone within three ridges."
"They need to."
"Why now?"
Riku looked east.
The new wyrmlings were stirring. Three had hatched in the night—without eggshell, without cradle. Just arrived. Breathing. Awake.
"We're not hiding anymore," he said.
He gave the order at sunrise.
The forge flared once—bright, sharp, a pulse through the stone.
Then the tunnel ignited.
It wasn't an explosion, not exactly. It was a release—superheated air tearing through the ventline, melting stone, shattering every faultline beneath the enemy's fallback ridge. Across the horizon, the earth cracked, and a geyser of red-lit steam burst into the sky.
Nightforge's fallback camp vanished beneath it.
Riku watched from the rampart as the plume stretched high into the Blood Moon's haze, painting the valley below in red mist.
He didn't cheer. Neither did his people.
But they understood.
The sovereign of Ash Veil was done surviving.
Now he was sending messages.