CHAPTER 206: KNOCKED DOWN

Heat bent the air into a wavering sheet, ash riding it like snow that had forgotten how to cool. The Lord of Destruction stood thirty paces out, cloak of flame drawn tight, hammer head low enough to score the cobbles with a glowing groove. His armor was cracked now—real cracks, not cosmetic—molten seams hissing where Lyra’s shots and Inigo’s rockets had bitten. He was still inevitability given shape, but inevitability bled.

Inigo thumbed a fresh magazine from his vest and dragged two quick sigils along the brass with a dirty fingernail—simple augmentation marks, the kind he could etch by touch and push power into without a chant. Conventional brass, jacketed lead core, standard propellant—nothing exotic. The magic didn’t conjure new physics; it shoved the existing ones harder: straighter flight, tighter grouping, a moment of extra drive across armor seams. He seated the mag, racked the M4, and felt the faint hum in the receiver like a live wire.

"Left," he said.

Lyra’s chin dipped, eyes never leaving the brute. She had six good shafts in her quiver and one oddball she’d kept for a bad day—a bodkin head scavenged from a ruined armory, heavier than her normal cut. She palmed it to the front.

They moved together. Inigo cut a diagonal to split the Lord’s focus. The M4 chattered in three-round bursts, the augmented rounds stinging with a hard, clean ring when they struck plate. He walked his fire along the exposed hip seam they’d opened earlier. Sparks spat. Molten light leaked and sealed, leaked and sealed.

Lyra vaulted a low wall, landed on a broken lintel, and loosed. The first arrow kissed the collar seam and skipped. The second bit deep in the thigh joint. She felt it land like a chord thrumming through her fingers and moved again before the return swing came.

The Lord’s head turned, molten gaze cool as a surveyor’s. He rolled his hammer wrist and sent a pressure ring out with no effort at all. The air itself caved and snapped back. Inigo flattened behind a tooth of stone—shock hitting like a shove from a truck—then came up already firing. The enchantment buoyed his stance, bled off a slice of recoil, made the muzzle settle faster. The rifle sounded like a metronome against the ruin.

"Belt!" he barked, pointing with the barrel toward the toppled JLTV and the Browning they’d ripped free earlier.

Lyra was already moving. She slid down a slope of half-melted brick, skidded to the ripped .50 where it lay on its side in dust, and heaved. The receiver and barrel were intact; the cradle was bent. Good enough. She braced her boots against the stone, dragged the chunk of gun into the crook of a knocked-down pillar, and snapped an ammo can open with the heel of her palm.

Inigo drew a quick line of power along the links as he reached her. Enchanting individual .50s was a fool’s game; the belt got the push as a whole: drive, coherence, a thin, stubborn insistence to punch where directed. He shoved the feed into the tray, slammed the cover, and dragged the spade grips up, shoulders low behind the warped shield.

The Browning roared.

Augmented .50 slugs hammered the Lord’s chest like a carpenter with a grudge. The impacts chipped burned plate, then chewed. The giant rocked a fraction. Not panic—pressure. Lyra’s next arrow flashed under the pounding and buried itself in the narrow window the heavy had opened. Molten ichor hissed, spattering the stone.

He answered.

The hammer swept in a low lateral arc, not a showy blow—just precise. The pressure ring tore the Browning off its improvised perch and flung it back like an insult. Inigo rolled with it, letting it take him, coming up with the M4 already tracking. Lyra hit and slid, caught her breath on torn palms, then hopped to her feet with a grimace and kept moving. You didn’t stop. Stopping made the next hit bigger.

"Inigo," she snapped, "hip seam!"

"Working it."

He hammered the ragged edge where the rocket had blown the plate free. The enchanted 5.56 cracked with a bright, glassy note as they dove into that wound. Three rounds punched through, then three more stitched in. The Lord’s step changed: a knee dipped, a tiny catch he couldn’t hide.

"RPG!" Inigo called.

Lyra sprinted, skidding under a fallen beam to where the tube lay. She dragged the HEAT round from its sleeve, popped the cover, and slapped the fin cage open. Inigo slapped his palm across the warhead and shoved a thin wash of power in—not to make it magical, but to steady the jet, harden the cone for the first millisecond of collapse. He shouldered the tube, exhaled, and fired.

The rocket streaked, smoke slicing the fog of ash, and hit low on the chest. The shaped jet cut through burned steel, then bit meat. The detonation kicked him back a step. The Lord’s torso twisted, a snarl of molten light ripping across the breakwater as a plate tore loose with a sound like a bell being murdered.

Lyra’s next arrow flew the instant the smoke cleared. It drove into the new gap and vanished to the fletching. The Lord’s breath came out wrong—more a hiss than a word.

"Not invincible," Inigo said.

The Lord raised his hammer again and pressed it into the ground like a farmer testing soil. The cobbles around his boots cracked, lines racing in clean geometry out under the square. Everything along those lines forgot what it had been attached to. A tower scrap toppled and burst into chips. The ground beneath the ruined JLTV sagged and settled, rattling the microframe that held a certain case shut.

Inigo’s eyes cut that way. The case was a squat, dull-green thing with a hand slot and a little grin of cooling vents. He had bolted it into the JLTV’s rear during a week when optimism outweighed sense.

"Lyra," he said, "we’re going to need stupid."

"We’re already doing stupid."

"Stupider."

They pivoted under another shockwave, skirting the new fault lines like dancers who’d rehearsed for a stage that kept moving. Inigo slid to the JLTV, kicked the bent hatch twice, then ripped it open with an augmented yank that made something in his shoulder pop. The case clunked free. He popped the latches and lifted the XM214 Microgun out by its carry handle.

It wasn’t the romantic minigun from holovids. It was shorter, meaner—a six-barrel 5.56mm Gatling with a compact battery pack slung on a harness and a drum that latched to the left side. He snapped a drum in, slung the pack, and pressed two fingers to the polymer—pushing a shallow enchantment into the feed and the motor both: smoother cycle, steadier spin, less scatter in the first second before the barrels bit. It was still a conventional gun. It would just act like its tolerances had a better day.

Lyra gave him a look that was half You’re insane and half Good. "I’ll keep his eyes," she said.

Inigo thumbed the safety off, braced his feet, and spun the barrels up.

The Microgun sang.

It wasn’t thunder; it was ripping silk. A white hose of tracers lashed across the Lord’s torso, then his shoulder, then slid to the hip seam as Inigo rode the recoil with a grounded, rolling stance. The augmented stream walked tight, piston-steady, the motor whine rising into a clean, hungry pitch. Copper jackets splashed sparks, then dug, then stitched glowing lines where the armor had already thinned.

The brute staggered a half-step, cloak of fire guttering under the stream. He slammed the hammer down to make the ground buck. Inigo went with the lift, sliding, letting the barrels keep their line. Lyra loosed two more in that window—one into a visor seam that rang like a bell, one into the left elbow joint. The Lord shook the shaft out and swung high.

The warhammer hit air. The pressure ring ripped the world. Inigo ducked and dragged the Microgun with him, the barrels whining down, then biting back up as he rose. He was emptying a thousand-round drum in seconds; he knew it, didn’t care. Time was a fuel too.

"Reload!" Lyra shouted over the wineglass shriek of superheated stone.

"Working!"

He slapped the drum loose, caught it by the rim, and tossed it. Lyra snatched it one-handed, slid the next in from the case, and slammed it home while he kept the muzzle high to discourage pursuit. The second drum spun. The hose resumed.

The Lord had had enough.

He stepped through the stream with the ugly patience of a man walking through rain and swung the hammer in a short, savage arc at Lyra’s perch. She sprang, too late by a breath. The hammerhead clipped the edge of the stone she launched from, then the rim of the head itself took her across the side of her helm and shoulder.

The sound cut the air. Not a crack. A gong.

Lyra cartwheeled midair, limp on the last half of it, and hit the ground in a tumble that stole her breath and then the light. Her bow skittered away, clattering off broken tile.

"Lyra!"