CHAPTER 209: HE WASN’T DONE PART 2

The giant blurred forward—no sprint, just less respect for distance. He ate two grenades along the hammer’s faces; the runes buckled, then drank the blasts like salt.

Carl Gustaf. Inigo shouldered, slapped HEAT, scored a quick punch rune with his nail, and fired. The jet bit where chest met arm and pulled metal inward with a wet hiss. The Lord looked down at the wound with the clinical interest of a man finding a tear in a beloved coat, then chose necessity.

He raised the hammer high.

Inigo bled a thumb along the next thirty GAU-8 rounds—steady heavy—and held the trigger down. Thirty-millimeter punishment met descending certainty. The runes drank, bled off, drank more. The blow fell anyway.

It wasn’t a ring. It was a drop, a sheet of weight that made stone sag and air obey. Inigo’s joints popped like an abacus. He hit one knee, kept the muzzle up by habit and spite, and rode the quiver until sight returned in a narrowed tunnel.

Lyra lay where he’d tucked her, just beyond the main fan of the shock—blessedly still. He would have crawled. He stood, because crawling would make a truth he refused.

The Lord stepped toward her.

Inigo moved to be the obstacle he’d promised to be. The M4 came up by reflex; the burst he sent into the visor seam sparked, skated, and—one round—vanished inside the starred web the 30mm had begun. The helm tilted a hair. In another fight, that would have been a flinch.

"Enough," the brute said, and set his foot on the mortar’s baseplate.

Inigo grabbed the tube with both hands and rang the ankle seam with the muzzle like a gong. The sound that came out was low and wrong. The Lord’s foot shifted half a hair. He set the hammer to catch balance. It skated on a glaze the Black Dragon’s blast had laid across the street. He sank to one knee.

Inigo fired the Carl G again, point-blank into the earlier wound before the giant could stand. The jet dug a finger-width deeper. This hiss had anger in it at last.

The answer arrived as a hammerhead against the mortar tube. The steel collapsed into one sulking line. The shock ran up Inigo’s arms into his shoulders and wrote its name behind his eyes. He flew backward, met a wall with his spine, and discovered new honesty in his ribs.

He saw Lyra, breath still moving. He got up.

The Lord stood too, slower now, drawing heat inward to work on himself. Runes along the double maul’s faces flared to a relentless white.

"ATACMS," Inigo said again, throat raw. One left. He keyed ground zero beneath the Lord’s feet. The missile leapt, rolled in air like a hawk, and drove its certainty down. Runes bled off the hit, collapsing a ring of stone instead of the core.

"Talk," Inigo told the weapons, slamming a fresh kinetic dart into the Black Dragon’s breech. He traced spine and finish quick as breath. He fired while the world still argued about what the last explosion meant.

The dart crossed debate and made it moot. It struck the hammer at the collar between heads and haft. The double-face tore free like a tooth. It spun end over end, cutting light in crooked hoops, and buried itself down the street with a vault-door thud.

For the first time since noon, surprise lived in the molten eyes.

Then murder decided it had wasted enough minutes. The Lord pressed his hand down. The bright seams flared and held. A crack wrote itself from his feet to Inigo’s boots, not opening so much as forgetting to be closed. The world tilted toward hunger.

Inigo hosed the starred visor with the GAU-19. Bite bit. The web deepened. A tracer vanished inside like a swallowed curse. The fissure reached him and opened a mouth. He planted a heel on the Black Dragon’s pad and threw himself to safe stone as the tripod slid away and disappeared with an almost embarrassed gulp.

Across the wound, the Lord stood framed in heat, helm starred, side bleeding light, empty hand clenched. He took a step toward Lyra.

"Hey!" Inigo shouted, voice cracking on rage and smoke. He brought the M4 up one more time because small storms keep big gods honest. He carved line line bite across six rounds and sent them where eyes lived. Three sparked wide. Three went into the star-snow. One disappeared.

The giant touched his visor seam; molten light licked his gauntlet.

"You endure," he said, and in that was the worst thing—respect chosen. "Hours, little knife. You buy them."

He looked past Inigo, toward the city that had learned to ring its bells together. "Keep buying."

He stepped back—not into an obsidian ring, but into the crack, as if it belonged to him. The fissure closed, not with a snap but with the busy indifference of a wound scarring too fast.

Pressure eased. Heat slackened half a truth. The ruin remembered it could be quiet.

Inigo stood bent over his knees, the M4 dangling from its sling. He counted until the black at the edges of his vision agreed to leave, then went to Lyra because all fights end where they began.

He set one hand under her head, the other on her wrist. Pulse: there. Breath: steadier. He replaced the bandage at her temple, slid a rolled cloth under her shoulder again, and dragged her higher behind the Black Dragon’s pad, building a low wall of broken stone with fussy care because care is what you do when you can’t fix anything else.

When the work was done, he sat against the warm armor and let his hands shake. The Shop’s pane hovered politely at the edge of his sight. Tokens: still a sea. But seas run out if you drink like a god.

He tipped his head back and watched ash drift like black snow. "Hours," he said. "I’ll keep the receipt."

Somewhere far off, Elandra’s horns and bells found a shared rhythm that meant hold. The river hissed where it found new stone. The valley tried on a silence and decided it fit badly.

Lyra breathed.

Inigo wiped grit from the M4’s ejection port, reset the sling, and watched the west where mountain met sky. The Avenger’s stand groaned. The Vulcan ticked. The HIMARS pod, empty now, sat patient as a dog that had done exactly what it was asked.

"Come back," he told the crack in the world. "We’ll be here."

He didn’t know if Thorne had riders in the saddle. He didn’t know if Elise had stopped pretending her ledger was something to hide behind. He didn’t know if the other Platinums would reach them in time.

He knew how to ask the Shop for heavier ways to say no. He knew how to scribe line and bite with a thumbnail he couldn’t feel anymore. He knew how to stand between a hammer and a woman who hated quiet.

The wind shifted. It smelled of salt and cinders and something older.

Inigo rested the rifle across his knees and waited for the mountain to finish deciding whether it would move again.