Grand Saint Alloy

“Pretty disorientating isn’t it?” Luke said.

Tristan could only nod as he looked up at the circle of light at the top of the hole. The first four floors had all been copies of each other, arranged in disks that suggested that people walked on the walls. Hailey had seemed comfortable with sitting on a wall, but she was being held there by the spinning of the fortress. She was also insane.

The floors had been around ten to fifteen feet tall with another ten to fifteen feet of dirt and soil between them, so the hole Tristan was seeing was almost one hundred feet straight up. As his metal sense only went around eighty feet the first time, Siren wanted him to take another measurement now that they were around the dangerous area.

“It is,” Tristan answered. He fingered the rope and harness that would be used to pull him up, “you sure this is safe?”

Luke shrugged, “Safety is not something that I concern myself with overly much. Some of the smiths wanted to make a stairway out of packed dirt. Siren did not want to give the elementals an easy way out, we don’t know how fast that big one will be.”

Tristan knew that was not quite true. Because every tier was a fifty percent increase of the previous one, it was a simple geometric scale to determine its capabilities. An average mid-tier nine should be effectively fifteen times faster than a warrior at mid tier three. Tristan pulled up short, he was not built for speed, and the injured lung slowed him, but even he could still maintain an easy three-minute mile all day.

“You’re telling me this thing can jog at around three hundred miles per hour,” Tristan stared in shock at Luke.

“And fight at around the sound barrier,” Luke said, “The tier scaling is always proportional to the one before it, but truly unfair to anything below that. It's why tier ones don’t fight tier threes.”

“No joke,” Tristan could only shake his head. He had only been able to stand up to higher tiers because of his cheat-like daggers. His new ax was nice, it had a nice impact, but he was not sure he could get through Siren's stone armor with it.

Kneeling down, Tristan placed his palm on the metal. It was unnecessary, but the contact helped him focus. His range had also extended and sharpened, within thirty feet he could make out small moving objects, though not their exact shapes. The normal sense went out a little more than one hundred feet.

He could feel broken-off shards of the fortress that had embedded themselves in the earth just a few feet past the wall of earth. Tristan could feel the razor-sharp blade of Hesia’s Sickle and the metal plates sown inside Luke’s boots. He could feel the two eyes staring straight at him from below.

Tristan jumped back with a shout, “Oh, hell no.”

Luke only cocked his head slightly, “What, did the little under lord scare you?”

“Under lord?” Tristan asked, “And yes, I could feel his metal eyes looking right into mine.”

“Oh, you weren’t there,” Luke said, “That dark elemental lord kept pining after this bastard like they were lovers. The name was so long that I abbreviated it to under lord.”

Tristan could only shake his head. One day Luke would insult someone who could punt him through a wall. He had not actually gotten a sense of the shape of the room below, so he sat and pulled out his sketch pad. After he spread his senses out he felt the eyes again and something else. A ball? No, it was too flat.

“He’s a slime elemental!” Tristan said.

Luke swore, “That’s the worst-case scenario.”

The slime elementals set up a domain to give elementals like themselves a home-field advantage. It was not such a big issue in this tower as a flame attribute slime elemental would often be placed next to other elementals weak to its influence. Dark would have its shadows driven away and air elementals would get burned.

The domain would also help kerns of matching affinities, speeding up the absorption of essence. It was like they were a gateway to the primordial essence and people could use that. If they weren’t so violent, they would be quite useful. A metal one was unpredictable, maybe metal in the area would erode or a storm of metal would be created with the elemental at the core. Either way, it would be a problem if its range was too large. Tristan felt confident though, If it could have broken out, then it would have, so tower steel was not something it could use.

“Do we have a way to deal with it?” Tristan asked.

“Yes, it should have tier nine abilities as a tier six elemental lord,” Luke said, “We have killed similarly dangerous things before.”

“Really?” Tristan asked skeptically. He was not aware of the caldera ever killing anything at that tier.

“Sure, mythical beasts sometimes get that high, and the caldera is still here,” Luke pointed at the walls around them, “ it has everything to do with setting the stage, and buying a stupid powerful artifact from Hadrid.”

Tristan chuckled at that, of course, they needed Hadrid, he was the very description of a necessary evil. It did put him at ease though, in the worst case, they could just bury him again. If anyone asked for his opinion, that would be his advice.

The rooms below were massive, the larger one taking up the whole floor and going down around forty feet. A metal chair sat there and it appeared that the metal elemental was floating above it. As Tristan could not see other affinities, that confirmed it was an elemental lord. The room itself seemed empty save for a few desks that had been smashed in the fort’s impact.

A smallish room sat off to the side. It was odd, Tristan could feel metal, but it was so dense. If he compared the essence in steel to tower steel, there was only a slight difference. This essence was so much more, Tristan almost thought it was a solid chunk of metal. It was flavored with something unyielding. He tried to grasp for a word to define the feeling, and what came to mind was adamance.

There was an extremely powerful artifact down there, one that had come from a hero at the very least. Maybe it was Ajax’s real weapon. Tristan had to get his hands on it, that artifact might be his only opportunity to get his hands on a matching artifact.

Luke noticed the reaction, “What? Did you find something juicy?”

Tristan nodded, “Yeah, I think I found a high-tier metal artifact. It has a force, adamance, I believe.”

Luke snorted, “A metal artifact has a force related to hardness. A bit redundant, don’t you think.”

He had to admit that it was a bit redundant. Metal was not invincible, but it was almost always strong enough to get the job done. It was often not as hard as stone, but its resilience was much better. There was a reason why even some people with earth kerns wore metal armor.

Tristan quickly sketched out the room. It was a long square, though the throne was attached to the wall. If the fortress was oriented correctly it would have been the floor. As it was there was a thirty-foot drop to the crushed front and around halfway between the bottom and where they were standing was the room that the artifact sat in. Past that, there was nothing but earth with small traces of iron and other metals in it.

Tristan stood, “I think we have everything we need.”

He was placing the pad of paper back in his bag when the eyes moved. Tristan jumped again, getting a laugh out of Luke. A laugh that died when something hit the other side of the metal. The whole platform shook, vibrating like a gong staggering both of them. The elemental lord had tried to bash his way out.

Tristan felt a tug from below, not at the metal on his body, but at his memories. He frantically pulled on the rope, signaling for extraction. Luke for once was doing the sensible thing and calling for extraction as well.

“What are you?”

Tristan jerked back, it was in his head. Did he still have some of the elemental’s soul in his kern? He needed to get out before the elemental lord did anything. The rope went taut, Siren’s prodigious strength hauling Tristan off the ground.

“Cut the tether.”

Tristan’s hand wandered to his ax. There was a lot he could probably learn down here. Where else could he find a teacher? Hadrid wanted to experiment on him, but he could… Tristan grabbed the blade, the pain broke the fake desires and he took an unsteady breath.

“Stay out of my head!” Tristan yelled down at the abomination. He did not know if it could hear him through the metal, but he suspected it could feel his intent.

“Obey!”

“Go to hell!” Tristan yelled, despite the fact that listening was in his best interest. He gripped the ax tighter and that impulse was broken as well. It was most certainly not in his best interest.

“What’s going on?” Luke asked with a concerned expression.

Concern was such an odd expression for his friend, but it was reassuring, “The elemental lord is speaking to me, right into my head.”

Luke placed a hand on the cable holding him and sent a current up it. They both stopped.

“What are you doing?” Tristan yelled.

Luke pulsed a few more times in a rhythm. He was jerked up twice, before being lowered again to Tristan's level. They were about halfway up, and Tristan was not keen on hanging fifty feet above a steel plate. The fall probably would not kill him, tier threes were tough, but he was missing a third of his essence weakening his kern’s reinforcement.

“We need to know what it wants, how it thinks,” Luke said, “I just asked Siren to hold us here for a bit to dig up some information. Who knows, maybe he’s a reasonable guy.”

“Kill him.”

Tristan drew his ax, his anger at Luke’s actions making him easier to manipulate. The tail end of the thought was all that stopped Tristan from swinging. It wanted a loyal soldier, it wanted Luke to become an elemental loyal to it.

“It just told me to kill you,” Tristan said, shuddering at the strain of putting his ax away.

Tristan tried to communicate back, but all he got was another bang as the elemental lord tried to smash its way out of its prison. It was a lot less impressive from up here, no vibrations shook Tristan’s bones. Evidently, the elemental lord picked up his irreverence.

“Do not mock your master. Subjects only obey!”

“He’s some sort of insane dictator,” Tristan said, pushing down the desire to say holy king, “can we go now?”

Luke nodded, pushing some lightning into the cable, “What exactly did he say?”

Tristan started explaining, and after the seventy-foot mark, he felt the connection get cut off. The elemental left him with a parting word.

‘Traitor. I will kill all….”

Of course, the super-violent elemental would want to go on a murder spree. Tristan was of the opinion that they should just bury him and walk away. They had a small hill of tower steel, not enough to equip the whole army, but well over half of it. Elder Forest was already guaranteed his victory, why risk releasing it for no benefit?

Except, Tristan would benefit. There was a chance to get ahold of a metal artifact, and a strong one at that. Even if it was something ridiculous like tier seven or eight, he could eventually grow into it. He was conflicted as he was pulled up, how much of the desire was his, and how much was the elemental lord’s.