The revelation of the jade stela hung in the suffocating heat like poisoned mist.
Mortals who ascended.
Haiiro's knuckles cracked as he stared at the churning bronze vortex. The idea burned worse than the sulfur stinging his nostrils. All those grand inquiries he had bellowed at the quartz thrones—demanding to know why the universe was built on suffering, why the divine demanded blood for rain—had been addressed to charlatans. Thieves who had reached the mountain peak, kicked down the ladder, and declared their own greed to be cosmic law.
Before the molten colossus of Stambhesvara could fully solidify from the lake of ore, a series of dull iron gongs sounded from the darkness below the catwalks.
Screeech—clack.
Heavy sluice gates of rusted pig-iron ground open along the chamber's lower trench. The air, already thick with the stench of molten copper, soured beneath a sudden influx of unwashed rot, wet hair, and gangrenous skin.
Look down, Zai's voice sharpened in his skull, her claws digging deep into the linen over his collarbone. The filth of the foundry. They aren't Temple Wardens.
From the subterranean drainage canals poured hundreds of wretched shapes. They were the Aino—a wretched, captive race bred in the pitch-black foundations of the temple to clean the slag flues and dredge the toxic run-off.
They stood barely four feet tall, their bodies grotesque caricatures of goblins and starved ogres. Their hide was the color of boiled tripe, mottled with weeping chemical burns from decades of swimming in sulfur water. Their limbs were shockingly frail, skinny as dry kindling, with knobby, swollen joints that clicked with every desperate lurch forward. Their faces possessed no eyes, only translucent patches of skin stretched over empty sockets, navigating by the sound of vibrating bronze and the smell of blood.
Around their necks hung rusted iron collars stamped with the mark of the sickle.
"Reclaim the altar!" a surviving elder shrieked from the high gallery, striking a bronze bell with a bone mallet. "Pity not the wretches! Kill the heretic or your broods will be cast into the crucible!"
The bell's frequency triggered a frantic, shrieking hysteria in the creatures.
The Aino did not possess weapons of steel. They had only their brittle, blackened claws, filed teeth, and long iron slag-picks tied to their wrists with hemp cord. Hundreds of them surged up the stone ramps like a tide of pale carrion flies, shrieking in high-pitched, wet rattles that echoed off the basalt vaults.
"Commander... move..." Bradley wheezed from the revolving wheel, his ruined chest rattling as he strained against the golden spikes pinning his wrists. "They... they don't know anything else... they only obey the iron chime..."
Haiiro didn't strike them down.
He didn't unleash the black shockwave coiled tight within his dantian. As the first wave of Aino crashed against him, their frail, emaciated hands clawed frantically at his legs. Their skinny arms had no real power—to his indestructible frame, their blows felt like dry twigs snapping against granite.
Yet they kept throwing themselves onto him.
Snap. Crack.
When an Aino drove its crude slag-pick into Haiiro's thigh, the iron snapped, and the creature's brittle wrist bone shattered beneath the kinetic recoil. It shrieked in agony, rolling in the soot, clutching its mangled forearm—only for three more to clamber over its twitching body, biting blindly at Haiiro's knees, breaking their own rotten teeth against his unbroken skin.
Haiiro stood frozen amidst the swarm.
A terrifying dissonance gripped his spirit. His mind remembered the horror of the Council, the grand, theatrical war of titans—yet here in the mud of the world, the weapons of the gods were not holy thunderbolts. They were starved, broken slaves, forced to break their own fragile bones against his unyielding shell just to buy their masters another heartbeat.
Haiiro, get them off! Zai hissed, batting away a skinny, three-fingered claw that lunged for her face, her tail flicking frantically. The bronze is coalescing! If you let yourself be buried under these wretches, you won't be able to meet the descent!
"They are already dead, Zai," Haiiro whispered, looking down into the blank, weeping eye-patches of an Aino creature desperately tearing its own fingernails to bloody stumps against his linen trousers. "Look at them. What is the difference between this creature... and what the gods made of me?"
The hesitation cost him.
From the high gallery, the elder rang the bell three times in rapid succession.
The frenzy reached a fever pitch. A sea of skinny, pale bodies piled upon Haiiro, climbing over one another in a writhing mountain of ribs, sores, and blind panic. Fifty, then a hundred—the sheer physical mass of the wretched horde began to drag his feet into the stone trench, pinning his arms to his sides under the dead weight of their terrified, self-destructive press.
And above them, the molten vortex reached its zenith.
Stambhesvara had taken form.
A titan twelve cubits tall, forged of smoking, liquid-gold bronze. Its face was a brutal, featureless visage crowned by eight horns of twisted adamant. In its massive right fist, a war-hammer of compressed celestial gravity began to gather light, ready to bring down the unyielding weight of an ascended ancient upon the squirming pile of flesh below.
The god did not care that five hundred of his own slave-creatures were in the strike zone. To an ascended sovereign, the meat of the wheel was infinitely replaceable.
He's bringing it down! Zai screamed through their tether. Haiiro!
Haiiro tried to wrench his arms free, but his reluctance to pulverize the frail bodies had bound him too tightly; the weight of the descending hammer was already warping the space around the platform, sealing his escape.
Then, the darkness of the subterranean cavern turned inside out.
SHING—!
A blinding, silver-white flash erupted, sharp enough to scorch the retinas of the high priests on the balconies. It was not fire, nor was it holy radiance.
It was the cold, clinical gleam of a drawn edge moving faster than perception.
A shockwave of compressed wind sliced horizontally through the chamber, inches above the heads of the cowering Aino. The sheer vacuum of the stroke peeled the swarming wretches off Haiiro in a clean, non-lethal wave, hurling them safely into the drainage ditches like dry chaff.
The blinding light collapsed into a single, slender silhouette standing atop the iron crossbeams above the platform.
A woman draped in moth-eaten grey silk, her hair as white as frost, held a scabbard wrapped in dried executioner's rope. Her right hand rested lightly on the pommel of a thin, curved blade that was already sliding back into its sheath with a soft, metallic click.
Click.
Above her, the descending bronze war-hammer of Stambhesvara suddenly sprouted a razor-thin, horizontal hairline crack across its center—and sheared cleanly in half, tumbling into the boiling ore below with a thunderous splash.
The woman did not look at the roaring god.
Her cold, silver eyes looked straight down into the pit, locking onto Haiiro.
"Still hesitating to step on ants, Commander?" she asked, her voice clear, sharp, and biting as winter ice. "You haven't changed a bit in seven years."