The golem's foot stutters. Slides two inches in the churned mud.
Not enough.
Its root-system arm swings down at me like a battering ram. I roll sideways. The fist craters the earth where I stood, sprayingsod and gravel, and I come up swinging the sledge in a rising arc that connects with its kneecap. Stone chips explode. A crack spiders up its shin.
From behind me: the shriek of pressurized water.
Junia has dragged the industrial hose from the garage, the one I use for power-washing the driveway every third Saturday, and she's cranked it to full. The jet hits the golem's midsection at three thousand PSI. Packed soil dissolves. Brown water cascades down its torso, exposing the raw stone skeleton underneath, and the construct staggers backward.
"The joints!" I roar. "Hit the joints!"
She redirects the stream to its right shoulder where root meets rock. The mud binding sloughs away in heavy sheets. The arm sags. Droops. I charge in with the sledge and drive it into the exposed stone socket. The shoulder joint shatters.
The golem's right arm falls. Hits the ground like a felled oak, root fingers still twitching, and the impact bounces Junia's rescued orchid pots three feet into the air.
One arm down. Three limbs to go. A head full of Elven magic still directing the whole ugly mess.
The golem lurches sideways, compensating. Its remaining arm sweeps low across the yard, a horizontal strike designed to clear everything in its path. I shove Junia down and the root-arm passes over us close enough to rip leaves from the bushes behind our heads. The wind carries old stone and broken earth.
Junia rolls to her feet with the hose still in her grip. Her jaw is set. Soil streaks her face. The flannel shirt hangs off one shoulder.
"Wrap the other knee!" She's already aiming, already blasting the left hip joint.
I swing the chain overhead. Once. Twice. The weighted end cracks against the golem's left knee and wraps tight. I plant my feet in the ruined flower bed, bend my legs, and pull witheverything the warbands put into me. Shoulders. Back. The old muscles, the ones that don't come from lawn care. The chain goes taut. The steel sings.
The golem's left leg buckles.
It drops to one knee. The impact shakes every house on the block. Car alarms cascade down the street in a chorus of electronic panic.
Across the road, Valerius sets his coffee cup on the roof of his car. His expression shifts. The smug amusement drains, replaced by something I recognize.
Fear.
Junia hits the cracked knee with the full force of the hose. I raise the sledgehammer over my head.
"My mailbox," I snarl, "was regulation height."
The sledge comes down.
Every ounce of warband training, every morning spent driving fence posts into frozen ground, every rep of swinging the heavy axe behind my garage where no one can see me pretend I'm still a soldier. All of it channels through my shoulders, down my arms, into twelve pounds of hardened steel that connects with the golem's cracked kneecap at terminal velocity.
The stone doesn't chip this time.
It detonates.
Fragments pepper my arms like shrapnel. A chunk bounces off my collarbone and I barely register it because the sound, the deep, grinding crunch of magical stone giving way, is the most satisfying thing I've heard since the day I bought my first zero-turn mower.
The golem's left leg separates below the joint. The severed stump plows into the earth, root tendrils flailing, grasping at nothing. The construct pitches forward, its remaining arm swinging wild, and I throw myself sideways as seven tons ofanimated rock and soil crashes face-first into the trench Junia and I dug three days ago for our combined garden bed.
Perfect trench depth. Regulation eighteen inches. Sometimes precision pays off in ways you don't expect.
The golem's torso slams into the ditch and wedges there. Its arm thrashes, carving grooves into the soil, fingers of twisted root clawing at the edges. The head swivels. Those hollow stone eyes lock onto me. Elven runes pulse bright gold across its skull, and the thing tries to drag itself forward on its one remaining arm like a wounded siege engine refusing to die.
"Junia! Core! Now!"
She's already moving. Bare feet slapping across the wet, demolished lawn, hose braced against her hip with both hands, the industrial nozzle aimed at the golem's exposed midsection where my sledge cracked the creature open. Brown water and clay dust cascade down the construct's torso. The high-pressure stream punches into its armor and hits the packed earth core underneath.
The effect is immediate.
