The golem's movements stutter. Slow. Its reaching arm drops six inches, then claws forward again, weaker. The runes on its skull flicker. Junia widens her stance, leans into the hose pressure, and drives the jet deeper into the core cavity. Packed magical soil turns to soup. Dark brown water gushes from every crack and seam in the construct's body, pouring out of its joints, streaming from its eye sockets, pooling in the trench around its trapped torso.
The arm goes limp.
The rune light gutters.
I step forward with the sledge and drive it into the crack. Once. The stone splits wider. Twice. A plate of rock falls away, exposing the golem's heart, a sphere of compressed Elven earth packed so dense it glows amber at the center.
Junia redirects. The full three thousand PSI hits the sphere dead center.
For one second, nothing happens.
Then the sphere dissolves. The amber light winks out. The compressed earth turns liquid and sprays outward in a geyser of mud that catches me across the body, the face, fills my mouth with the taste of clay and burnt magic. The golem's body sags. Collapses inward. The stone skeleton crumbles, grinding itself apart, root tendons snapping like wet rope, and the whole seven-ton construct just... melts.
Into mud.
A spreading lake of brown sludge fills the trench and overflows across what's left of the lawn, carrying fragments of stone and bits of root and the tiny golden shards of dead Elven runes that dissolve like sparks hitting water.
The hose sputters. Junia cranks the nozzle shut and drops it. The silence is enormous. Just the drip of water, the distant car alarms still wailing, and both of us breathing like we've run a marathon through a quarry.
I wipe mud from my eyes. Spit grit. Look down at myself.
My tee shirt is shredded from the stone shrapnel. Brown sludge coats every inch of skin from my jaw to my boots. My cargo shorts, the good ones with the reinforced stitching, have a six-inch tear along the left thigh.
Junia stands in the middle of the destroyed yard. My flannel shirt is plastered to her body with golem mud. Her curls are matted flat against her skull. Potting soil, regular mud, and magical clay form a three-layer geological study across her face. She's breathing hard, ribs heaving, and her eyes are wild and bright and locked on mine.
She looks at the mud lake. Looks at the ruined lawn. Looks at me.
"Your trench was the perfect depth."
I laugh. A real one. Deep and startling, but rolling out of me easier than before, because I cannot remember the last time I looked at destruction and felt joy instead of mourning. The mud squelches under my boots as I close the distance between us. She's grinning up at me, filthy and radiant and completely unhinged, and my hand finds the side of her face, smearing fresh mud across her cheekbone.
Across the street, a car door slams.
"That was hardly a registered HOA enforcement construct."
His voice is shaking. His coffee cup lies shattered on the asphalt. His hands shake at his sides.
Behind him, the neighborhood judging van pulls around the corner.
The judging van isn't a van at all.
It's a black town car with tinted windows and municipal plates, the kind of vehicle that carries people who have never touched soil in their lives. It glides to a stop at the curb with the quiet authority of a predator that doesn't need to hurry. The engine cuts. The driver's door stays shut.
The rear door opens.
A woman steps out. Five foot nothing. Charcoal pantsuit pressed so sharp the creases could cut glass. Silver hair pulled into a bun so tight it looks structural, load-bearing, the kind of hairstyle that holds together not just hair but entire bureaucratic systems. She carries a clipboard. Not a tablet. Not a phone. A physical clipboard with physical paper and a pen clipped to the top with a chain, like she's worried someone might steal it, like the pen is evidence in an ongoing case against the entire concept of fun.
The brass nameplate on her lapel reads: COMMISSIONER ELAINA VOSS, CITY ZONING & RESIDENTIAL STANDARDS.
She surveys the street.
Her gaze moves from Valerius, still trembling by his car, to the lake of golem mud that has now spread across both properties and into the gutter, to the crumpled remains of my garage door lying on the driveway like a shed skin, to the shredded remnants of my mailbox scattered across the road.
Then she looks at us.
Junia and me. Standing in the epicenter. Dripping.
I'm holding a twelve-pound sledgehammer in one hand and twenty feet of tow chain in the other. My shirt hangs off my torso in three separate pieces. Golem mud is drying in the grooves of my runic tattoos, turning the green glow a sickly brown.
