The Slag Wastes begin where the city gives up. No gradual transition. The last row of tenement buildings simply stops, and beyond them the earth turns black and cracked and wrong. Centuries of magical industrial runoff have cooked the ground into something between glass and charcoal. Nothing grows. Nothing lives here that doesn't have armor plating and a venom sac.
The road disintegrates within the first half mile. I leave it. The Thunderhog's tires chew through slag crust and spit black gravel in a rooster tail behind me. Geothermal vents hiss sulfurplumes across my path. The air temperature spikes twenty degrees, then thirty. My wet clothes start to steam.
Sector 7 is nine miles in. The terrain gets vertical. Slag ridges rise like broken teeth, forcing me to thread through gaps barely wider than the handlebars. Twice I have to muscle the bike over ridges too steep to ride, my boots sliding on glass-slick rock, every muscle in my back and thighs burning with the effort of keeping the Thunderhog from tipping and crushing my legs.
Feels good.
Burns out the other thing. Almost.
Almost.
Five miles in, I find the first carcass. A Slagworker extraction wagon, the heavy iron frame peeled open like a tin can. Acid scoring on the metal. Deep gouges in the rock where something massive dragged itself through. The crew's helmets are scattered in the slag dust. Eight of them. I count them the way she counted eggs in the country club kitchen, quick and precise, her lips moving silently with each one.
I gun the throttle so hard the front wheel lifts off the ground.
The crawler's territory announces itself at mile seven. The slag changes. The random cracks organize into a pattern, concentric circles radiating out from a central point. Burrow marks. The rock here is softer, heated from below by whatever geothermal vent the creature has claimed as her nest. Acid residue glistens on every surface, catching the dull gray light and throwing it back in oily rainbows.
I kill the engine.
Silence crashes in. Not true silence. The Wastes groan and tick and hiss constantly, cooling slag contracting, vents releasing pressure, the deep subsonic vibration of the earth doing something unhealthy far below. But no birdsong. No wind. No sound of a woman laughing in a walk-in cooler with buttercream on her jaw.
I dismount. Unstrap the broadsword. Draw it slow. The blade is four feet of blackened steel, heavy enough to require two hands for any creature without Orcish bone density.
The ground beneath my boots vibrates.
Not from a vent.
Something underneath is moving.
The slag crust shatters six feet to my left.
Forty feet of segmented black chitin erupts from the ground like a launched torpedo, spraying razor-edged rock fragments in every direction. A slab catches my forearm and opens the skin. Green blood, hot and immediate. The pain barely registers.
The rock crawler's head is a nightmare. No eyes. Just a broad, flat skull plated in overlapping iron rust armor scales, crowned with two massive mandibles that scissor open and shut with a sound like shears cutting through sheet metal. Her body coils upward, segment after armored segment rising from the burrow hole, each one bristling with barbed legs that grip the broken ground and churn it to powder.
The stinger tail curls overhead. Eight feet of segmented weapon tipped with a translucent barb that weeps yellow venom in thick, slow drops. Wherever the drops hit slag rock, the stone dissolves with a wet hiss and a curl of acrid smoke.
She's bigger than forty feet. Closer to fifty. The Slagworkers' Union lowballed their estimate, probably because nobody survived long enough to take proper measurements.
Good.
I charge.
No strategy. No flanking assessment. No weak-point analysis. Just boots on broken ground and a broadsword already swinging.
The first strike connects with her lower mandible. Steel meets chitin and the impact travels up both arms like I've hit a boulder. The blade bites a quarter inch into the armor platingand sticks. She screams. The sound is not a sound. It's a pressure wave, a subsonic shriek that turns my guts to water and makes my broken tusk ache down to the nerve.
I wrench the sword free. Strike again. Same spot because that's what discipline would dictate, widening the wound, exploiting the fracture. But my second swing drifts wide. Three inches to the right. Sloppy. Because between the backswing and the follow-through, my brain fills the gap with Magnolia shoving the gold back into my hands, her fingers so small against the leather pouch, her brown eyes swimming with something I was too much of a coward to name.
The mandible catches me across the ribs.
I fly.
Eight feet, maybe ten. I hit a slag ridge spine-first and the rock crumbles behind me. Something in my left side goes crack. A rib, probably two. The pain is a white flash, then a deep red throb that syncs with my heartbeat.
Get up.
I get up.
