12 Miles Below-Chapter 33Book 7. : The forgesmith’s origins

The path home was simple, following the digital stream back the way I’d come. Soon, in the murky depths of the digital sea, I saw a small beacon of land. A tiny floorplan, that quickly filled up my vision, fully developing back into the Icon’s office space.

I landed firmly on the floor grounds here. And then had to navigate and stumble around all the junk and garbage that had appeared basically everywhere. Even had to step around what looked to be a life-sized cardboard cutout of Wrath, drawn up like she was cheering someone on, arms extended out.

The Icon was staring at that with murder in her eyes, still behind her desk, while Aztu remained relaxed in her sofa, waving a hand around while more junk appeared and fell on the floor, further turning the once perfectly clean space into a hoarder’s first junkyard.

Aztu gave me a head nod. “So, how’d it go?”

I wordlessly pointed at the stuffed animals, the cardboard cutout, random unplugged toaster, and the several hundred bottles, tin cans, food bowls, and coffee mugs.

A lazy few armored plates from the reclining protofeather waved in the Icon’s direction. “She wasn’t making progress fast enough, so I decided to properly motivate her. Can’t let my apprentices get soft now, can I?”

My eyes looked over to Wrath’s little cheerleader cutout. “Want to be a little more specific?”

“Spite and hatred are powerful motivators.” Aztu said, arms now readjusting behind where her neck should have been, piles of plates rising up to land on the small table, knocking a few bottles off. “Feel free to copy anything you want from my hoard of treasures. I’ll allow it.”

I strolled over to the sofa on my end, sat down and equally kicked my feet up on the table, pushing aside some of the empty bottles there, while one hand reached out to my old experimental bottle. I could see Aztu had been investigating it while I was gone. “I didn’t yet manage that, you know. The bottle’s empty.”

She waved me off. “Worth checking.”

I could see a few of the items in the room started to fizzle out for a moment before returning where they were. Almost like a hand slapping away a misbehaving kid, putting things back to where they should be. I could sense it through the occult, like the pressure of a wave lapping at my knees in the clan baths. Subtle, present, unseeable but could be felt if I focused and looked for it. There was a straight war going on inside this office space, with the Icon trying her best to clean it all up, and Aztu applying her centuries of experience with the occult to put a stop to that.

“So? Did your chat with the enemy pan out?” Aztu asked again.

I shrugged, shaking my hand a bit. “Yes and no. To’Orda’s head was a ruin, so now I’m extra sure he’s different than other Feathers. For good or bad, we’ll find out eventually. He still tried to kill me the moment I suggested we talk it out, but I did get the message across and he accepted. The Odin should be off my back soon enough, without me having to do political shenanigans with them.”

The Icon’s eyes turned to me, and she gave what I felt was the first genuine smile since we’d met. “I am most happy to hear your business ventures have returned in success mister Winterscar.”

“Good for the birds, bad spot for them to be in.” Aztu agreed. “I did get to chat with the Icon about her ‘minor pest problem’ as she’s officially forced to designate them as. She’s very fond of them.”

Speaking of the Odin, I reached out to check my connection with Journey, getting an update on what was going on around me. The smoke in the local area was clearing off, and the deadlands Odin were all surrounding the tower, rebuilding things and generally preparing for something.

Journey itself was content within its soul fractal, aware that I was keeping an eye on its systems and from what I could sense of the soul, pleasantly happy with the arrangement. So long as its user was up to date on the surroundings and could be warned, I could do whatever I wanted.

“So, where we left off before I had to go was that Urs found a balance of some kind in his grove, and even with all his body modifications and a fractal of resilience, he couldn’t beat things further downwards. You mentioned the mites did something that changed his life after that, what was it?”

Aztu smiled. “The best and worst thing they could do of course, they reconnected him with humanity.”

Quite literally as I learned. One day, while out gathering food and items for some engineering project he'd been passionate about, he stumbled on a mite portal that led him far from his strata. And spat him out near a human city. The portal then closed behind him, and the mites refused to help him travel around unless he went into the city and recovered something deep within.

“They baited him in with a fetch quest?” I asked, more curious how the mites even functioned. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just order Urs to speak to the people there?”

“Not how mites work. They can’t give orders like that, or they just don’t want to.” Aztu shrugged. “I always found that the mites tend to do things with really obscure methods. If they want you to explore something, they’ll move the entire earth to put it nearby and wait for you to eventually get curious.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Huh.”

She nodded. “If you ever become a mitespeaker, you’re going to have to learn how to decipher what they really want. And also how to negotiate deals with them. Give them an inch, they’ll shuffle that inch until it’s a giant circle and pretend it’s still an inch.” ɽᴀ𐌽óᛒËS

With his objective in the center of that human city, Urs was forced to be social for the first time in years.

Which meant he was immediately arrested.

Strange men walking from the wilds, looking like half a machine, did not usually make people feel safe.

It was apparently an ordeal, as he was shuffled from precinct to precinct over the next few days, nobody knew what to do with a human who was strong enough to bend metal and couldn’t be killed by bullets. Anymoment, Urs could simply walk out of their jails and nobody could stop him. To Urs, this was an expected result. Any other time he’d known humans, he’d been seen as a cursed kid who would bring misfortune. He thought he was doing the world a favor by staying away from everyone.

Eventually, a group of red-robed humans came to speak to the wild hermit. They had great sway in the city council and easily had him clothed, fed, and brought to their tower as an esteemed guest.

This was Urs’s first encounter with humans, and his first encounter with warlocks. The mites hadn’t sent him to just any human city, they’d sent him to one they knew would possess knowledge of the occult. Hoping to nudge actors into position, and then see what theater would happen next.

Like Aztu said, Mites lined things up on their stage, and then watched the fallout like a performance.

The warlocks of old went by a different name in that time period. They saw the hermit of the wilds, with his strange mechanical body, his ability to speak with the mites, and his sharp mind - and they decided he was worth teaching. Driven by greed to extract what he had learned of the mites, they taught him all they knew and learned secrets of lost tech from multiple eras of humanity in exchange.

And by mixing their occult with the technology the hermit taught them, that city became powerful. Something Aztu was certain the mites had equally expected would happen. Which led to one inevitable conclusion for any human city that grew too powerful in that era.

One day when he made the journey to visit his distant teachers, he found their city burned down, with not a single trace of their works left.

Relinquished had woken up, turned her gaze to the obvious black spot on her white walls, and ripped it apart. He’d arrived weeks too late.

Tsyua said that the event scared him deeply. While the warlocks of that city were trying to take knowledge from him, and many were driven by greed for what he brought - there were still others within the city who truly grew to be friends with the wild hermit. In this new city, he wasn’t seen as a curse or a malidication. He was a hero, a man who was bringing back unknown eras of humanity. He taught them a lot, and in turn they faithfully did teach him all they knew.

This chapter is updat𝓮d by freēnovelkiss.com.

Urs wanted to avenge them.

He inscribed fractal after fractal on the metal grafts within his skin, building on his original fractal of Resilience, until he grew far stronger than any man known. As a mitespeaker he could move around the world in ways the machines could not follow. And with the grove that remained unnoticeable to both Relinquished and Tsuya, he could always vanish away when the machines came hunting for him. With the powers of a full city’s occult teachings, he could take on threats far beyond his league.

Like the mites had intended this entire time, he was now traveling again further down, no longer meek and seeking to avoid conflict with the machines. He became a terror to the machines, where he walked, machines were crushed, mained and ripped apart by forces beyond their power to stop.

But the lower he went, the more of Relinquished’s old and venerable warriors lay dormant. The ones she could not easily replace, and kept safe for when she might actually need them again. And they were powerful. Eventually he reached a strata that contained enemies that put a stop to his progress, and then outright forced him to retreat. Their armor too thick to penetrate with the weapons and powers he’d brought.

So, he turned to the mite forge, and searched for a fractal that he could forge into a weapon.

The mites were all too happy to supply him, if he asked the right question. And he did. They gave him a fractal that would divide matter itself. A weaker version, to keep the balance, but powerful enough if he knew how to apply it.

He combined that fractal with his metalsmithing and engineering, and forged the first occult blade. He made eight in total, and commanded them with his mind.

For a time, it let him continue. Eventually, he once more reached a dead end.

Urs was strong, but he had never been a soldier. His power came from his weapons, his modified body, and the occult he wielded. Battles were won almost immediately with little skill on his part required or forced him to escape within the first few seconds. When faced with an impossible challenge, he continued down the path he always had: Improve himself with technology.

He returned to the mite forge, and searched for a means to fortify and enhance his body, beyond the mechanical additions he’d done. He paid a dear price, but directly searched through the archives the mites had until months later he found what he needed.

It came from an age of humanity before fractals, power cells, and nanoswarms. When robotics still operated with hydraulics and electric motors. Technology that had been left behind, rotting deep within landfills.

The same landfills buried with millions of computers from the 90’s, a paradise of outdated technology, software and junk - all perfectly preserved from the madness that would later happen above - and then eaten completely by the mites, their schematics becoming part of the mite gravemind, one landfill at a time.

In those untouched graveyards, the mites eventually found it. A prototype sealed in a shipping container, buried deep within the junk, the only one of its kind ever made by a bankrupt company that failed to secure any contract to build more. And they consumed it as they consumed everything else, saving its schematic. Left unused for centuries later, until Urs found it, and demanded this as his payment.

The mites went to work and the forge reanimated the old relic.

Clunky, lacking fractals, limited by the technology of its time, built to excavate asteroids, exo-planets and other deep-rock hostile environments. Requiring a wired power supply to move in the earth’s gravity.

A failed and discontinued mining exo-suit.

But Urs would take that suit and forge an empire on its shoulders.