The cold wasn’t just weather. For me, it had become a physical enemy, creeping under my skin and draining life through metal. The steel prosthetic strapped tight against my chest had, after an hour in ambush, turned into an ingot of ice. Iron conducts heat far faster than flesh, and I could literally feel my bones cooling where the pins bit into them.

  [Warning: Local hypothermia. Tissue temperature at contact zone: 4.2°C.]

  [Necrosis risk: Moderate. Recommendation: Movement.]

  “Be quiet,” I rasped into the dark. My breath came out in thick white plumes.

  I sat behind a rocky outcrop fifty meters up the trail from the mill. My right arm—this seven-kilogram monstrosity of black iron—rested on my knee, heavy and still. I tried to flex the clawed fingers and heard only a faint, ugly grind. The goose fat Ephrem and I had worked into the joints had turned into sticky glue in the frost. Friction inside the mechanisms had risen so high that a jerk of the shoulder was no longer enough to overcome the resistance.

  I was an engineer turning into a heap of rusted scrap before the battle even began.

  “They have entered visual range,” Zeno’s voice sounded directly inside my head, dry and monotone.

  The Golem himself stood lower on the slope, hidden in the shadow of an old alder. He hadn’t moved in three hours, conserving what little charge remained. In the dark he looked like another boulder—if not for the faint shimmer of warm air rising from his reactor.

  I peered into the forest. Lights flickered between the trees. Not torches. Three floating spheres of soft blue light drifted lazily a meter above the ground, illuminating the trail. Behind them walked men.

  Three. Two in light leather armor with short swords—trackers. And one in the center, wearing a heavy gray hooded cloak. A mage. A junior Inquisitor, judging by the confidence with which he carried his staff.

  For them, this was routine. They didn’t hide. They trusted their “Glowlights,” which not only illuminated the path but functioned as mana detectors. The irony was that neither I nor my traps contained a drop of magic. Only chemistry and ugly physics.

  “Come on,” I whispered to myself.

  The trackers reached the fallen tree. Beneath a layer of pine needles lay my first “pipe.” A copper casing packed with the same gray filth Ephrem and I had brewed for three days. I wasn’t counting on a shockwave—the powder was too slow. I was counting on pressure.

  I pulled the thin sinew line attached to the striker igniter.

  Pssshhh—

  The quiet hiss sounded like thunder in the night. The Inquisitor instantly raised his staff; the sphere above his head flared brighter, ionizing the air. He sensed danger—but he was searching for a magical trace. His perception was tuned to fluctuations in the ether, not to a chemical oxidation reaction of sulfur and saltpeter.

  CRACK.

  Not a fireball from a storybook. A sharp, dry report—like an overheated boiler bursting. The copper tube split along its seam, and the built-up pressure blasted a jet of superheated gas into the pursuers’ faces, mixed with sharp gravel and shards of old nails.

  “My eyes!” one of the trackers screamed, dropping to his knees and clutching his face.

  The second managed to leap aside—but his left leg plunged into a deep pit Zeno had dug the day before. There was a distinct, nauseating crunch of bone. He screamed and collapsed.

  The mage reacted fastest. A “Luminous Field” unfolded around him—a translucent dome meant to deflect spells. But my trap wasn’t a spell. A cloud of thick, acrid white smoke engulfed the trail.

  Stolen story; please report.

  For the mage, it became a prison. His Glowlights began darting wildly in the smoke, scattering off every particle of soot and sulfur. Diffraction. The light refracted and dispersed, turning everything into impenetrable white milk. He blinded himself with his own magic.

  “Now,” I forced myself up.

  I slid down the slope and landed hard. Pain speared through my right shoulder—the prosthetic jerked, and the pins in the bone acted like levers, threatening to tear the joint apart.

  [Warning: Traumatic shock. Level: Low. Mitigation—]

  I burst from the smoke straight at the Inquisitor. He heard my steps and snapped up his hand. A beam of pure light lashed from his fingers—“Punishing Flame.” In fantasy novels it kills instantly. In reality it was a stream of high-frequency energy seeking a conductor.

  The smoke worked as a dielectric, diffusing part of the discharge, but the remainder struck my chest. I was thrown back, the smell of burned leather and wool filling my nose. If not for the steel plate I’d taken from Kyle and hidden under my coat, I’d have a hole in my lung.

  I hit the mud, gasping. The mage stood five paces away, his face twisted with fury beneath the hood. He began lifting his staff for a second strike.

  “Die, filth!” he spat.

  I knew I couldn’t get up in time. My left hand slipped in wet grass. And then I remembered my right-hand “burden.”

  I rolled onto my side and simply hurled the prosthetic forward. I didn’t try to punch. I used seven kilograms of dead weight as ballast. Centrifugal force dragged my body after it. The claw—stiff with frost and frozen grease—slammed into the mage’s shin.

  Crunch.

  He screamed, losing balance. His spell shot into the sky, carving a useless white scar through the clouds. He fell into the mud beside me.

  It wasn’t elegant. Not a duel of masters, but two cripples grappling in freezing sludge. He tried to jab my eye with his staff; I wheezed and threw my full weight onto him. My task was simple—pin him so he couldn’t move his arms. Magic requires gestures. Physics requires only mass.

  I gripped his throat with my left hand and laid the iron one across his chest.

  “Drop… the barrier…” I rasped.

  He tried to speak, but I pressed harder. The prosthetic, numb and merciless, bore down on his ribs. I felt steel bending bone—not flesh, only the cold echo through the pins in my arm.

  Then Zeno emerged from the shadows.

  His arrival was quiet but terrible. Each step came with a strained, whistling grind. Friction in his knee joints was so severe the metal began to heat, carrying the smell of scorched oil.

  The tracker with the broken leg tried to draw a knife. Zeno didn’t even look at him. He stepped forward, and his heavy steel foot came down on the man’s hand. The sound was like splitting timber. The tracker passed out from shock without a scream.

  Zeno stopped beside us. His ocular lens flickered dim green.

  “Energy expenditure: fourteen percent in two minutes,” he rumbled. “Joint friction exceeds acceptable parameters by two hundred percent. Iron, if I continue in this mode, my drives will burn out within three hundred meters.”

  I released the mage. He lay there gasping, ribs shattered, staff cast aside.

  “We… we stopped them,” I tried to stand, but the prosthetic dragged me back down. I had to push myself up with my left hand against a rock. “Zeno, we have to move. The main force—”

  I fell silent.

  In the stillness came a strange sound.

  Click. Click.

  Zeno tried to step toward the mill, but his left leg froze mid-stride. A sharp metallic shriek split the air; sparks flew. The Golem lurched, barely catching himself against the rock.

  “Seized,” Zeno stated. His voice dimmed. “Abrasive wear. Powder residue mixed with lubricant. My knee joint is locked.”

  I stood in the middle of the trail, filthy, scorched, my prosthetic now feeling like it weighed a ton. Three enemies lay around us—one dead, two dying. And my only defender had become a statue in the road.

  [Status: 8%. Critical fatigue. “The Will to Live” maintaining consciousness at threshold.]

  From the darkness near the mill, Ephrem appeared, running with a torch. His face was pale with horror. When the light fell on Zeno and the carnage, he stopped dead.

  “God… boy… what have you done?” he whispered. “You crushed them. Like insects.”

  “Help me,” I ignored him. “Ephrem, grab Zeno’s arm. We have to drag him back. We’ve got an hour before the others arrive.”

  I looked east. Beyond the ridge, the sky was brightening. Not dawn. The lights of a large force. Dozens of magical spheres rising into the air. Valerius hadn’t sent scouts. He’d sent an army.

  “Zeno,” I pressed my forehead to his cold armor. “You have a Plan B?”

  “Plan B presumes available resources, Iron,” the AI replied. “In current configuration, we are a stationary target. Survival probability in the next engagement: 0.04%.”

  I looked at my steel claw, smeared with the mage’s blood and flour dust. One thought pulsed in my skull—simple, mechanical: if a mechanism has seized, you either lubricate it… or break it completely.

  “Ephrem, bring every scrap of fat we have left,” I began undoing the prosthetic straps to ease my back. “And my toolbox. We’re not running. We’re turning this mill into what it should have been from the start.”

  “A fortress?” the old man trembled.

  “No,” I spat blood onto the snow. “A trap for those who think fire answers only to their gods.”

  I stared at Zeno’s locked knee. In my left eye, the “Will to Live” interface recalculated the odds. The numbers were terrible.

  But they were above zero.

  And that was enough.