Chapter 45 - The Forge Waiter

The sale of the four black ferrite tusks netted six hundred and twenty gray scrip at the armorer's counter on the corner of street four.

The smith, an elderly demon in a rawhide apron reinforced with lead slats, weighed the raw mineral tusks on a spring hook scale, verified the alloy density by filing a notch into one tip, and paid the full sum in six hundreds and two tens, asking for neither receipt nor hunting permit.

With the money in their pockets and the fresh game meat salted and curing across the flagstones of their townhouse workshop, Maria slapped her dusty palms against her denim thighs with a dry crack.

"No more grain mash boiled in engine runoff," she declared, fixing Dante with a resolve that brooked no mathematical debate. "We're sitting on over four thousand scrip, we have clean beds to sleep in, and I want real food. Roast meat, hot gravy, and draft ale straight from an oak cask."

Dante pocketed the brass townhouse keys into his coat.

"There's a large tavern where Avenue Three meets the elevated tram plaza," he replied, straightening the collar of his heat-resistant leather vest. "The district guide lists it as the primary watering hole for foundry masters and crawler pilots coming off the afternoon shift."

They left the Boilermakers' Village and walked ten blocks toward the center of the Third District.

The tavern was called The Copper Boiler.

The establishment commanded the corner of a three-story dark-brick building, fronted by wide tempered-glass bays that showcased a sprawling, boisterous dining hall lit by circular brass chandeliers housing soft yellow arc lamps.

The draft wafting through the open double doors was a thick, rich meld of pork ribs roasting with red onions, warm malt bread, and ash-goat cheese sizzling in cast-iron skillets.

Dante and Maria entered the dining hall, steering clear of servers weaving with loaded platters between crowded oak tables.

The clientele consisted predominantly of skilled Legion mechanics, master smiths in clean leather aprons, and stray mercenaries in light plate armor nursing two-pint earthenware flagons. No one paid them any mind, as armed fighters were the most ordinary fixture across the streets of this empire.

They found a four-top table tucked against a riveted iron support pillar at the rear of the room.

Maria took the bench with her broad back set against the timber, while Dante sat opposite her, securing a clear sightline toward the kitchen doors and the central bar counter.

The girl reached for the stamped brass menu sheet and tapped her finger against the lead house specialty.

"A full rack of slag-boar ribs with manioc baked in rendered lard," she said loudly as a floor runner passed with a docket pad. "And a half-gallon pitcher of dark ale, cold as you've got it."

"And a bowl of shredded beef stew with malt bread for me," Dante added, handing two fifty-scrip notes to the server.

The runner took the paper with a quick nod, scrawled the order with a stub of graphite, and hurried toward the service counter.

Maria crossed her heavy arms over the oak table, letting out a long breath as she surveyed the bustling tables around them.

"Now this is civilization," she remarked, her voice carrying a tone of unburdened relief. "No coal soot drifting into your flagon, and no worry that some abomination is about to chew through your boot while you chew."

"The standard of living in the Capital is high for anyone holding hard currency," Dante replied, turning the brass focus ring on his right middle finger. "Scrip velocity here is four times higher than in the Fourth Continent. If we maintain our harvest rate in that mire for three weeks, we bank enough to buy Korgan's black boiler steel blade outright."

The busboy carrying their pitcher of dark ale and two earthenware mugs stepped through the service hatch beside the taps.

The youth wore a long apron of grease-splattered gray denim, a long-sleeved shirt with the cuffs bound tight by twine, and a flat cloth cap pulled low over his brow to shield his vision from the glare of the overhead arc lamps.

Across the lower half of his face, masking his chin and mouth, he wore a band of gray cotton cloth tied off behind his nape with a square knot, the sort of makeshift dust rag many foundry workers used to filter boiler smoke.

Balancing the heavy iron serving tray on his left forearm, the busboy stepped up to their table and lowered his right hand to set the two-liter pitcher onto the wood.

He lifted his head to confirm the table number stamped into the corner of the oak top.

In that exact second, their eyes met.

Beneath the brim of the work cap, four dark, multifaceted orbs blinked in staggered succession.

The chitinous mandibles behind the cloth mask clamped shut with a sharp click that was swallowed by the ambient laughter of the room.

Dante froze with his hand resting inches off the table.

Maria's brown eyes dilated, her mouth parting slightly before freezing in sheer, dumbfounded shock.

It was Miro.

The sniper from Crane Four. The youth with grafted chitin mandibles and chemical burn scars who had put a half-inch slug through Dante's sleeve less than four days ago inside Piston Gorge.

Time seemed to stall between the three of them for a full heartbeat.

Miro did not scream. He did not stammer an apology.

He let go of the serving tray in mid-air.

CRASH-CLATTER.

The pitcher of dark ale and the two earthenware mugs crashed against the hardwood floorboards, shattering the pottery into dozens of shards and splashing dark foam across the trousers of patrons at the next table.

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Three laborers drinking nearby sprang up with loud curses, wiping spilled beer from their legs with dirty hands.

Miro was already moving.

He didn't bolt down the center aisle toward the front entrance. Spinning on his heel, he ducked his head and sprinted straight for the swinging timber doors leading into the tavern's kitchen.

"IT'S HIM!" Maria roared, lunging out of her seat so violently that the oak bench flipped onto its side behind her with a heavy thud.

The girl wasted no breath on courtesies. Vaulting over the overturned bench in one massive stride, she bulldozed through the tables, her broad shoulders shoving drunken laborers out of her way like rotten fence posts.

Dante slapped a fifty-scrip note onto the table to cover the broken glassware and took off right behind her, his rubber soles skidding slightly in the puddle of spilled ale.

"After him!" Dante yelled, combat adrenaline spiking his pulse rate instantly.

Maria threw both hands forward, slamming the double swinging doors open.

The timber flaps banged against the brick walls with the crack of furnace bulkheads colliding.

The kitchen was a sweltering gauntlet of billowing steam, titanic iron stockpots bubbling over coal ranges, and five demon cooks gripping cleavers who froze mid-slice to gape at the six-foot-three girl barging through their station at a dead sprint.

"Out of the way!" Maria roared at the head chef, who reflexively raised an iron ladle toward her.

She hip-checked a stainless-steel prep table aside, clearing a six-foot lane just in time to see the tail of Miro's duster whip past the rear service exit.

The back door spilled out into the alleyways behind the Third District.

The night air hit Maria's face like a cold sheet as she crossed the service threshold, her boots digging deep into the alley's black mud.

The lane was a ten-foot-wide chute running between the basalt walls of two five-story residential blocks. The ground was channeled by open graywater ditches and heaps of broken timber crates, crisscrossed overhead by a dense web of steam conduits and riveted fire escapes.

Miro was already forty-five feet down the lane, sprinting toward the cross-street connecting to the tram tracks.

Dante burst from the kitchen right on Maria's heels, breathing through his nose, his right hand leveled forward.

With thirty-four Intelligence, the range resolved on his retina with mathematical precision: forty-seven feet.

Within reach of [Forced Transposition].

"Maria! Draw your steel!" Dante shouted, his Mana already surging through his arm channels to warp the spatial metric between them.

Miro glanced over his shoulder at that exact instant.

His four faceted eyes caught the gathering blue spark of Mana condensing atop the gem of Dante's brass ring.

He knew down to the bone what that light meant. He had watched that exact bolt shatter his cast-iron mask from eight hundred feet away in the gorge.

Miro did not keep sprinting in a straight line along the mud.

He executed a maneuver Dante had not factored into baseline terrestrial combat models.

Retractable claws of dark chitin snapped out from the tips of his boots and gloves with crisp clicks of sinew.

Rather than attempting to bank around the alley corner, Miro leaped sideways against the vertical basalt wall of the five-story building on his right.

His claws gouged directly into the masonry mortar with terrifying traction. He did not scramble like a human climbing a ladder, he sprinted up the vertical stone face at a seventy-degree angle, scaling thirteen feet in two blurring strides, like an iron spider mounting the hull of a tank.

Dante's calculation for [Forced Transposition] lost its ground anchor in the middle of its channeling cycle.

The skill's matrix required unobstructed flat ground within three feet of his linked ally to deposit the target without risking molecular fusion with solid matter. With Miro clinging to a sheer wall sixteen feet off the deck, the spatial fold aborted under matrix safety protocols.

[-10 MP due to spell interruption.]

[Target on unanchored surface. Skill aborted.]

"He's scaling the pipes!" Maria wrenched her greatsword from her back with a raspy hiss of leather, but the reach of her forty-pound blade was useless against someone already vaulting onto the first overhead steam gantry twenty-five feet up.

Miro caught the upper conduit in an agile bound.

Planting his claws along the hot cylindrical pipe, he twisted his torso around for half a beat to peer down.

The cloth rag covering his mouth had slipped off during his sprint through the kitchen, laying bare his chitin mandibles twitching beneath lips still scabbed from Maria's bare-knuckle punch.

The look in his four eyes was unvarnished, cornered panic.

He was not trying to set up another sniper ambush. He believed, with every scarred synapse of a mind mangled by past experiments, that these two were trackers dispatched by the white-jacket outfit, having run down his trail from the gorge to drag him back to a dissection slab.

He vaulted backward, vanishing into the square opening of a galvanized sheet-metal ventilation duct running across the third-floor roofline.

The clatter of tin rumbling beneath his weight echoed twice down the canyon of the alley, then ceased entirely.

The night quiet of the metropolis settled back over the narrow brick corridor.

Maria walked two paces to the base of the stone wall, looking up with her greatsword lowered, her broad chest heaving from the sudden burst of speed.

"He took off through the duct," she said under her breath, blowing hot air through her teeth in sharp frustration.

Dante pulled up beside her, resting his right hand on his knee to catch his breath after the sprint.

He inspected the punctures left by four claws ten feet up the basalt mortar. The depth of the indentations spoke volumes about the structural density of the youth's chitin.

"He works here," Dante said, his voice steadily regaining its analytical cadence. "He landed an under-the-table busboy gig in that tavern to scrape scrip together so he wouldn't starve."

"And he thought we came to finish the job," Maria sheathed her greatsword back across her shoulders with a sharp snap. "The kid was terrified, Dante. He looked at us like we had surgical needles in our hands."

Dante adjusted his sleeve over the bandaged arm.

He looked up toward the dark exhaust vent on the roofline.

They had lost his trail across the rooftops, and hunting a wall-crawling demon through the pipe network of the Third District by night was an invitation to draw a Legion rifle squad within ten minutes.

Yet the operational picture had completely shifted.

Miro was no longer a phantom sniper entrenched in an inaccessible canyon twenty-six hundred miles away.

He was right here, breathing the exact same coal soot in the exact same district, working ten blocks from their townhouse in the Boilermakers' Village, carrying in his flesh the identical scars of that white-jacket apparatus that had drafted their own quest.

"He isn't fleeing the city," Dante said, turning back toward the alley mouth. "He has no funds, no heavy weapons, and his jaw hasn't finished setting. He needs rations just as badly as we do."

Maria wiped a bead of sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, letting out a dry, wry chuckle.

"We just wanted to eat some damn roast ribs in peace, Dante."

"We head back to the tavern, pick up the meal we already paid for, and eat it across our workshop bench," Dante answered with his customary pragmatism, walking back into the light of the avenue. "Tomorrow we figure out which hole our four-eyed busboy crawled into.”