The hydraulic testing platform in the heart of the forge roared like an awakening subterranean beast. Massive cast-iron clamps snapped loose with a series of deafening booms, and the thick wooden floorboards were violently catapulted out of the way. From the depths rose colossal, magically driven treadmills of blackened steel, reinforced with dark Thokcha contact plates. Their surfaces were fitted with rotating cutting elements and heavy impact dummies that glowed faintly and hummed through the thick steam.
At the edge of the battleground, Miki and Ren watched intently. Ren felt a light tension in his chest. He lifted his arm and felt how the flexible slats of his pauldrons glided effortlessly with every muscle fiber. Miki took a step closer to the platform. Her fingers rested lightly on the side of the tiara across her face. Her breathing was calm, her gaze locked firmly onto the heat surging up from the depths, ready to intervene with her own concentrated flames if things went off the rails.
In the center of the platform stood Nicola, Beat, Apollo, Jane, Silarias, and Nyx. Their breathing was heavy in the scorching heat of the furnaces.
Oslo climbed onto the wooden observation bridge, grabbed his copper bullhorn, and leaned far over the railing. His face was dark with soot, and his eyes glinted with a nervous, almost wild anticipation.
“Alright! No slacking!” Oslo roared, his voice echoing against the stone arches of the vault. “Beat! Apollo! Onto the treadmill! I want to see your maximum acceleration! Pump those powers directly into the secondary conductors on your arms and legs, NOW!”
Beat and Apollo exchanged a brief look. Beat let out a grim smile, dropped into a squat, and set his foot onto the rapidly spinning metal of the treadmill. Apollo closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and shot onto the belt beside him in the exact same second.
“Let’s see what that blacksmith built!” Beat shouted.
With a rough sound, Beat unleashed his Rajin Volt Anting. The air around him began to vibrate at a maniacal frequency. The friction between his soles and the spinning metal produced bright yellow sparks. Apollo ignited his solar ether. A brilliant, golden-green light exploded around his silhouette, as if the sun itself were rising inside the forge.
They ran. The movements of their legs turned into a blurred smear. Apollo channeled the solar heat directly through his forearm guards, while Beat rammed the fierce vibrations through his shoulder and chestplates.
But the Thokcha prototypes on their bodies couldn’t endure the brute, uncontrolled overload.
BOOM.
A sharp, loud explosion tore through the forge. The right shoulder plate of Beat’s armor snapped in half with a dry crack, shattering into dozens of glowing metal fragments. Apollo cried out from the heat as the forearm guards at his wrists simply turned to liquid. The frictional heat shot so high that the metal turned white-hot within a fraction of a second, dripping down his arms like thick, golden syrup, straight onto the fast-moving treadmill.
“Goddamn it!” Beat cursed furiously. He brought the treadmill to a skidding halt and grabbed his smoking, bare shoulder where the leather underneath was scorched.
Apollo leapt off the platform with a wild swing, waving his hands to dispel the biting heat. He looked with narrowed eyes at the molten metal dripping onto his shoes. “A bit more balance in the Thokcha, blacksmith! This stuff boils faster than an egg in the sun!”
Oslo slammed his massive fist against the wooden railing so hard that the wood creaked dangerously.
“Don’t whine, test it out! The alloy bonds, idiots! It doesn’t just obey because you scream power into it!” he roared. His burning eyes locked onto Beat. “And your vibrations are completely off the charts! Right now you and that armor are fighting each other. Stop forcing it and let the damn thing find you!”
Beat frowned and looked down at the broken edge of his shoulder plate.
His fingers brushed the cracked Thokcha.
For the briefest fraction of a second, something answered.
A faint vibration pulsed back through the metal, almost perfectly opposite to the rhythm coming from his own body. Beat’s brow tightened. He rubbed his thumb across the fractured surface again, but the strange sensation was already gone.
“Tch… whatever,” he muttered, assuming it was nothing more than leftover recoil.
Oslo bent far over the edge, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted toward the dark corners of the forge.
“Gnk… mogo mogo! Yuk yuk brrr kwak!”
Behind the cabinets, snickering and hectic foot-scuffling immediately sounded.
The Yerfs came crawling out by the dozens at once. They rolled their eyes, chattering along out loud for show with Oslo’s incomprehensible noises, but their movements betrayed their true nature. They weren’t stupid at all. With sharp, extremely efficient precision, two Yerfs carried a heavy copper cooling core between them, while a third Yerf stood on exactly the right ledge with a steel scraper to chip the molten metal off the treadmill.
“Ooh yuk yuk… idiot,” the front Yerf muttered under his breath in a razor-sharp accent to his buddy, pouring the bucket of ice water over the glowing belt with surgical precision. “Does that big blacksmith really think we need that baby talk to get that there’s a mess to clean up?”
“Kwak yuk!” the second Yerf answered out loud for the audience, adding softly afterward: “Let that giant keep his delusion. As long as he rambles, we don’t have to answer difficult questions. Lift your side, bring the scraper.”
With a hiss, the steam shot upward, and within three seconds, the ‘dumb’ Yerfs had swept the track spick and span again, after which they scurried back to the shadows with fake-clueless expressions on their faces.
Oslo aimed his bullhorn straight at Jane. “Jane! The dummies are coming up! Testing liquid Thokcha! Use the current of your Lynx to send the Boa spirit through the armor lines!”
Jane didn’t hesitate for a second. She made a low, flexible ducking motion beneath a rotating impact arm. As the purple-blue, spiritual contours of her tiger Boa lit up above her back, she discharged her Lightning Lynx. The purple lightning strikes didn’t burst into the air, but were swallowed by the viscous, silver-blue metal around her torso. The Thokcha moved smoothly along with her spine, swelling at the impact and conducting the electrical charge straight toward her claws, with which she cleaved a test dummy into three pieces with a single strike.
While Jane moved through the steam like a phantom, Nicola remained standing in the middle of the vibrating floor. He looked at his own chest, where the Etherheart pulsed in a calm, blue-white rhythm. He looked at the armor, looked at the lights, and finally raised his hand toward the observation bridge with a completely expressionless face.
He looked at Oslo dryly. “Uhh… how do you try something you’ve never done before?”
Oslo leaned so far over the railing that the wood began to bend dangerously. He slid his heavy magnifying goggles down over his eyes with a loud clack and let out a deep, soot-filled sigh.
“Yeah uhh… how did you breathe before you thought about it?” the giant snapped ice-coldly.
Before Nicola could even blink, Oslo stepped off the bridge, took three giant strides toward the platform, and gave Nicola a brutally hard shove straight into the active test field with his massive palm.
Nicola stumbled three meters forward, flailing his arms wildly to avoid falling on his face, and barely regained his balance in front of a spinning iron dummy post.
He turned around with a red face and yelled at the giant: “GREAT! That was super helpful!”
“Less talking, more feeling!” Oslo roared back from the platform. “Let that Etherheart work!”
Muttering curses under his breath, Nicola turned away. He mechanically dodged a swinging wooden impact arm and closed his eyes for a second. The racket of the forge, Oslo’s shouting, the crackling of Jane’s lightning; he shut it all out.
Ether… current… he thought, as his breathing slowed. Normally I try to force electricity through my muscles and through those chains. I force it. But what if I don’t see Ether as fuel, but as a medium? Oslo said Ether has far more applications…
Nicola relaxed his shoulders completely. He stopped pumping muscle power. Instead, he routed the pure, raw energy from his Etherheart straight to the vacuum-compensated copper rings built into the joints of his armor.
The effect was instant.
A bright, ice-blue, etheric glow flared up around his entire silhouette. It wasn’t fire or lightning, but a rippling, liquid radiation. The energy became so dense that the light refraction around his body began to distort. Within two seconds, the visible image of his clothes, his face, and his armor dissolved into space. He didn’t just vanish; the refraction of the ether made him virtually invisible to the naked eye. Only a faint, transparent ripple in the air betrayed where he stood.
Inside the floating, transparent glow, Nicola looked at his own hands, which he couldn’t even see anymore. A broad, dry smirk slowly spread across his face.
He extended his invisible arm and muttered with satisfaction: “Mm… I could get used to this.”
Oslo’s eyes began to glint behind his goggles again. He turned his gaze toward the two remaining in the center of the field.
“Silarias! Nyx!” Oslo yelled, his voice trembling with tension. “You two! The central Thokcha-cored dummy column is activated! I want to see the limits of the Curse and the Moon! Combine those powers and let the Thokcha absorb the tension! NOW!”
Silarias looked at Nyx and nodded firmly. The Soulbound Gem on his forehead flared with a deep, purple-red light. He brought his fists together and let his Curse Mode bleed through. Black, glossy horns broke through the upper edge of his helm with a sickening cracking sound. His chest broadened, muscles strained to the absolute limit, and the dark, tearing aura of the Void Hydra surged around his torso like an inky storm.
The scale-metal Oslo had forged for him didn’t tear. The pliable Thokcha stretched, flexed, and expanded flawlessly with his changing physique, while the engraved runes on his chest neutralized the dark Void pressure.
Nyx stepped in sync at his left side. With a graceful, circular sweep of her arms, she called upon the ice-cold energy of the moon. A radiant, silver-blue frost cloud transformed the air around her into frost. The silver accents on her armor caught the cold and reflected it out into a rotating, protective moon disc that rushed around her body.
“Together!” Silarias shouted.
Silarias struck out with a Void-enveloped fist thrust, while Nyx whipped her arms forward, launching the moon disc like a sawblade.
The two forces met halfway and fused into a monstrous shockwave of black-silver energy. The central Thokcha-cored dummy wasn’t simply hit; the combined mass of cold and void matter overwhelmed its weighted core, pulverizing the surrounding structure in a fraction of a second and blasting straight through toward the back wall of the workshop.
RIP.
The inky silver shockwave cleaved a massive stone support pillar at the rear of the forge completely in two. Debris and dust drifted down into the silence that followed.
Oslo looked at the smoking ruin of his own support beam, slowly pushed his goggles up to his forehead, and let out a deep, satisfied laugh that came from the depths of his lungs.
“Look at that…” the blacksmith muttered with a proud grin. “Now THAT is what I call a successful test.”
The heavy steam from the very first test phase still hung like a dense, azure mist over the forge floor. The thick layer of soot covering the floorboards had been burned away in several spots by the pure discharge of soul power and ether.
Oslo gripped the heavy magnifying goggles on his nose with his calloused hand and flipped them up to his forehead with a dry, metallic clack. He looked sharply through the haze. His gaze glided more slowly than usual past the steaming figures on the platform, until it locked onto Kaelid and Lila. They stood a bit further off waiting by the giant wooden workbenches, as if they didn’t quite know yet what their role in this spectacle was going to be.
A broad, almost maniacal grin slowly spread through the black soot streaks on Oslo’s wrinkled face. His deep-set eyes glinted with a dangerous spark.
“You two over there…” the old Nephilian muttered with a deep, rough laugh coming from deep within his chest. “Yeah… did you think you were escaping the dance? Let’s put your gear through its paces.”
Kaelid looked doubtfully at the massive, dark metal forged around his forearms and shoulders. The Thokcha felt cold against his skin, heavy, but in a strange way flexible too, as if it were breathing. He took a deep breath, his chest visibly scraping against the chestplate.
Oslo sauntered over to him, hands on his hips. He stopped right in front of Kaelid, looked at him casually, and took a pinch of chewing tobacco as if he were simply talking about the weather.
“Uhh… Kaelid,” Oslo began dryly, tapping a calloused knuckle against the boy’s pauldrons.
Ting. Ting.
“You do know what kind of stuff this is, right? Thokcha isn’t ordinary iron. The meteorite ore carries ancient, stone-like mineral structures inside it, harder and more conductive than anything I’ve ever worked with.”
He tapped the armor again.
Ting.
“And the alloy bonds. That’s the strange part. Almost like it senses its host through vibration. Not a mind… not exactly. More like it listens. Every body, every Anting, every form of ether carries its own rhythm. If the Thokcha finds that frequency and synchronizes with it, it stops acting like armor sitting on your body.”
Oslo’s grin widened beneath the soot.
“It starts acting like part of you.”
Farther behind him, Beat’s gaze subconsciously drifted toward the broken shoulder plate lying near the treadmill.
For half a second, his fingers twitched.
That strange counter-vibration from earlier flashed through his mind.
He said nothing.
Kaelid froze. His pupils narrowed. He looked slowly from Oslo’s grinning face to his own armor gauntlets, where the thin rune lines lay like extinguished volcanic fissures in the dark metal.
“Wait…” Kaelid stammered as realization struck him. “Stone?”
“Stone, yeah, idiot,” Oslo laughed under his breath. “Put that power to work.”
Kaelid closed his eyes. Calm returned to his breathing for a fraction of a second. Then he tensed his muscles and let the power of his Stone Anting flow through his veins.
The Thokcha around his arms didn’t just glow; it reacted with a deep, rumbling sound that seemed to come from the depths of the forge floor. The metal and the stone components within it began to deform, expand, and shift with a grinding noise. The thin runes filled with a fiery orange light. Within seconds, the streamlined gear around his torso and arms transformed into a massive, rocky golem structure. The Thokcha changed into thick, overlapping plates of living volcanic rock.
With a rough push, Kaelid launched himself forward. He planted his feet on the stone forge floor, but instead of walking, the soles of his boots fused with the floor. He literally surfed across the stone forge floor as if riding a lightning-fast landslide wave. Dust and sparks flew up on both sides. Right in front of a row of hydraulic test dummies, he struck out; from the rocky Thokcha structure of his forearm, a razor-sharp, massive stone sword emerged with a deafening crunch. With a single, wide sweep, he cleaved three steel dummies in half simultaneously. The halved steel structures slammed against the wall with a thundering crash.
Beside him, the air began to smell of fresh earth, resin, and burnt flowers.
Oslo had milled special, organic rune lines into Lila’s chestplate. They looked like the veins of a leaf. Lila stepped forward, closed her eyes, and relaxed her shoulders. As soon as she let her flora powers flow, glowing, green-silver tendrils sprouted directly out of the seams and crevices of the Thokcha.
The plant fibers intertwined on a molecular level with the heavy metal. The Thokcha didn’t seem to reject the organic life, but nourish it. The fine flora energy transformed. With a whip-crack sound that snapped through the space, meter-long, metallic tendrils shot out from her wrists. They didn’t move like limp branches, but like pliable, razor-sharp whip-cables covered in diamond thorns. With a few flashing strikes, she sliced the remaining test mechanisms to ribbons, the steel of the dummies sliced apart like paper beneath the cutting plant power.
The entire forge fell silent for a moment, save for the heavy breathing of Kaelid and the soft rustling of Lila’s tendrils.
Oslo looked at the ruins of the first testing platform. He clapped his hands together so hard the rivets on his apron nearly flew off.
“Look at that!” the Nephilian roared with satisfaction. “Now that’s what I call fitting the gear! Well done! First Selection complete! You guys definitely warmed the place up!”
Nyx wiped a strand of hair from her face and looked back at Silarias, who was examining his bare forearms with a faint smile. Nicola, Beat, Jane, Apollo, Kaelid, and Lila followed them. With steaming armor, heavy steps, and a look of absolute fulfillment, they stepped off the testing platform one by one. The air behind them still hung thick with steam, the sharp scent of molten iron, and the tingling static charge of burned ether.
But there was no time to catch a breath.
As the first Selection left the platform, the second Selection stepped forward with a slow, marching resonance. The forge floor began to vibrate rhythmically beneath their combined mass.
Vulkan, Bonk, Zax, Renuardo, Lyn, Valeria, Aurelius, Balamore, and Izamaru stepped onto the raised platform.
A heavy, charged silence fell over the forge. The atmosphere instantly shifted from dynamic speed to an imposing, massive pressure.
Vulkan clenched his fists and slammed his massive forearms together with a deafening KABOOM. A dull, kinetic shockwave of pure weight shot through the platform, causing the loose nuts on the workbenches to jump a meter into the air. Aurelius reached calmly, with an ice-cold glare, for the hilts of his two conflicting swords; on his left side, the dark, corrosive aura of the Cursed Sword was already eating at the air, while the right side glowed with the clear soul power of the Soulbound Sword.
Bonk and Zax flared their nostrils wide. The heavy breathing of their inner beasts and the heat of their flaring fire distorted the air around them. The thick, engraved pressure rings around their necks and wrists began to hum and softly squeak under the immediate pressure of their power.
Yet somewhere, they were still hesitating.
Izamaru bounced lightly on his knees a few times on the brand-new, layered soles of his boots. With every slight bend, the metal under his feet threw off a tiny shower of sparks. Valeria drew her two spirit fans and whipped them open with a fast, dry clack; the cutting airflow coming off them blew the steam around her face away in perfect circles. Renuardo lowered his shoulders, ready to let his muscles expand for the hybrid form.
The giant testing platform, built to absorb tons of violence, began to vibrate at a dangerous frequency beneath the immense weight and the cruel, mounting tension of this new Selection. The guide rails along the edges glowed from bright orange to blood red. The heavy hydraulic pumps lying deep beneath the forge floor began to whine under the rapidly building pressure.
And deep from the copper pipes above their heads sounded the first, cutting whistle of steam trying to force its way out.
Oslo grabbed his copper bullhorn with two hands. His beard hairs stood on end from the static heat, and his eyes were wide open in the glowing reflection of the flaring fire.