CHAPTER 212: EXHAUSTED

He snatched an M18 smoke, yanked the spoon, and lobbed it low past the Lord, not at him. The can hissed white against black stone. Inigo wasn’t hiding—he was backlighting. The thermal against the new cold wall told truths the bright world fudged. The palm-sigils’ cadence sped. The helm leaned as if curious.

Inigo shot the visor star with the M4 again because stubbornness makes small storms matter. Two rounds skated. One found that impolite candle hole and went inside.

The helm jerked. A sound like a swallowed curse, low and honest.

"Human iron," the Lord said, delight ragged now, reverent as a penitent, "is so good."

"Stay for the tasting menu," Inigo said.

He grabbed a TOW-2A for old time’s sake and sent it not to the chest, not to the helm, but to the bright palm itself. The Lord tried to cup it. The shaped charge folded his geometry into a longer, uglier line. Copper bit rune. The light along one finger guttered, then steadied. The next shove cost him.

The ground still rolled—less from power now than from habit. The Lord walked inside it the way a man who has lived near waves learns to walk on wet sand. He pivoted toward the Black Dragon and Lyra and took a long, deliberate step.

"Don’t," Inigo said, not loud. He laid a hand on the Black Dragon’s flank like he would on a pan he trusted, breathed once to remind his hands of their job, and pulled a fresh kinetic dart from the rack.

Fracture. Ugly, jagged, disobedient. He pressed it into the dart’s spine and felt the metal accept the idea with a shudder that traveled into his bones. He rammed it home and drove the elevation down a hair.

The Lord lifted his palm for that neat wall he liked.

The Black Dragon fired. The dart hit the pressure shape and cracked it like spring ice over a culvert. It hit the chest and shattered into six flat razors that chose malice over efficiency. The Lord stopped laughing. The seams along his torso fountained light, then tightened down like a man gritting his teeth.

He didn’t fall. He didn’t speak for a breath. When he did, the joy had focused into something serious.

"Yes," he said softly, as if to himself. "That was new."

He took another step. The cobbles powdered under his boot. His visor star leaked a steady white now. The palms came up slower. He was spending.

Inigo found that he was smiling. It wasn’t sane. It wasn’t polite. It was tired satisfaction for a man who cooks and finally sees the crust set just so.

"Shop," he said, because madness and logistics are cousins.

Rockets → Saturation

– BM-21 Grad (122 mm, 40-tube) — 40 HE rockets 210,000 Tokens → Buy.

The truck appeared wrong in the square, Soviet shoulders broad and proud, rails tilted like an organ that had an opinion. Inigo didn’t have time to counsel it on aim. He traced fall along the front rank and finish along the back—only that, because too much talk makes some instruments sulk—then slammed the safeties off and hammered the salvo key.

Forty trails of smoke rose and then descended in a sheet that made a new sky. The first dozen arrived ragged and rude, pocking the world with potholes friendly to no cart. The next dozen learned to group as the smoke sucked heat and the Grad remembered it had been built to make men put their heads down on three continents. The last two volleys hammered a ragged rectangle around the Lord.

He stood in the middle of it and took the lesson like a man in a cold shower after a long run—hurt that reads as relief. He pressed, smoothed, drank, let the blasts rip cloak-skin away in sheets, and then sloughed new flame up from seams that were learning to be veins.

"More," he whispered, hoarse, drunk on it. "More."

"Not today," Inigo said, throat raw, vision tunneling at the edges with the kind of fatigue that turns stairs into suggestions. "Bill me later."

The Lord looked at Lyra again—one glance, almost curious—and back to Inigo. He lifted his palm, and this time the light along his fingers didn’t flare clean; it stuttered. The push he sent at the BM-21’s rails bent three tubes and left the rest to sulk intact.

"Unbound Soul," he said, the title tender in that furnace of a voice. "You made the day remember its edges. I have been starving a long time."

"I noticed," Inigo said.

The helm dipped a fraction. Respect chosen, again. "Keep your iron singing. Gather your seven. Teach the city to bite. I will come back hungry."

He tapped two fingers against the torn star at his visor as if marking the place where the world had finally kissed him, and stepped backward into the seam he’d left in the air. It closed over him like polite cloth.

Silence tried to stand. It wobbled.

Inigo stood with the Grad’s control box dead in his fist and remembered to let go. He put it down on the truck’s step like you put hot cookware on a trivet. Then he stumbled—honestly now, because there was no one here to impress—and made it to Lyra on sheer habit and taxes owed.

Pulse: there. Stronger than a few minutes ago. Her mouth had more color. Her eyelids fluttered once and didn’t open. He adjusted the sling again, because doing something small on purpose keeps you from doing something big and stupid out of fear.

"You missed the part where I invented a salad of steel," he told her. "It was crunchy."

He sat with his back against the Black Dragon and let the shakes have him for the span of two breaths, then three. He shoved a canteen at his face and managed to drink water without apologizing to anyone for how much it burned his split lip. He tore a strip off something clean and wiped carbon and grit from the M4’s ejection port because the rifle had earned that much tenderness.

The square looked like a diagram of bad decisions: the Avenger canted on a tired stand, the Pion sulking with a crumpled mouth, the 105 with its breech still warm and its carriage proud, the S-60 posing like Soviet steel does, the BM-21’s rails smoking like cheap incense, the Mk 19 grinning down an alley of ankle-eating potholes, the mortar tube bent into a regretful cane. The Black Dragon, murder-sleek, hummed steady against his spine.

Beyond, the river spoke to new stone in sibilants. Ash fell like slow, black snow. The bells in Elandra had found a single note that meant hold and held it, stubborn as a farmer.

Inigo tipped his head back until it clunked against the Dragon’s plate and closed his eyes for exactly one count of ten because any more would turn into sleep. He opened them to the same ruin and, somehow, a world that felt heavier and easier both.

"Human weapons are so good," he echoed under his breath, tasting the Lord’s delighted blasphemy and making it theirs. "Good enough."

He looked west where the mountain wore its new teeth and addressed the unseam in air that might be hearing him.

"Next time you come hungry," he said, soft and unkind, "I’ll have more courses."

He set the M4 across his knees, checked Lyra’s breathing one more time, and started counting what he still had that could be made to bite. Hours to buy. Receipts to keep. A door to hold until the rest of the city learned to love the taste of iron.