Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 230: Chapter 230: The Concrete Tomb

Chapter 230: The Concrete Tomb

The blue holographic projection of Lord Commander Gunther Stillbane hummed in the center of the underground arena.

Gunther crossed his massive, heavily scarred arms. Even as a projection of light, the ruler of Bastion Six radiated a heavy, suffocating pressure. He stared at Bram Stonehelm.

"Aight, let me look at you," Gunther rumbled, his deep voice carrying through the runic amplifiers. "You big. You eat cannonballs for breakfast. I watched you tank a hit that woulda folded a fortress gate like wet paper."

Gunther leaned forward. The imposing swagger dropped out of his voice all at once.

"And two days ago a pack of rabid mutts chewed your shoulder down to the bone," Gunther said flatly. "So let me put you on game right now, big man. You unmovable. That ain’t the same thing as unbreakable."

Bram stood in the center of the sparring mat. His left arm was heavily strapped across his chest in a thick white sling. He did not say a word. He just nodded slowly.

He had held eleven Miasma-fed beasts off the tower housing. He had held the line.

He had also nearly bled out doing it.

"You fight like a wall," Gunther diagnosed. "You plant yourself in front of everybody you care about and you let them hit you till they get tired. That is your whole plan. That is the entire playbook."

Gunther shook his heavy head.

"Wall only gotta fail one time, kid."

He let that sit.

"Wall comes down, everything behind it dies."

Bram looked down at his combat boots.

He knew exactly what the Lord Commander meant. When he triggered [Titan’s Anvil], he absorbed kinetic force and fed it straight back into his own regeneration. It was a magnificent skill.

It also meant he was a piece of meat standing in the road, taking the impact.

"My Valor ain’t a wall," Gunther said quietly.

Bram remembered watching Gunther fight in the central plaza of Bastion Six. The Lord Commander had not stood in the road and taken hits.

He had triggered [The Concrete Tomb]. He had turned the entire plaza into a grinder and let the ground do the killing.

"I do not stand in front of the battlefield," Gunther said. "I am the battlefield. You protect people with your body because your body is the only tool anybody ever gave you. Now you gonna learn to protect them with the dirt."

"I pulled [Titan’s Bulwark] out of the bedrock," Bram said softly, his voice echoing in the quiet arena.

"Nah." Gunther cut him off instantly. "Nah, you did not. You pulled the rock into yourself. You made your own meat heavier. You did not command nothing, big man, you just wore the mountain like a coat and called it magic."

Gunther pointed a thick, holographic finger at the floor beneath Bram’s boots.

"You got no relationship with the ground," Gunther said. "You only got one with you. That is the whole problem and it ain’t a talent problem. It is a habit."

Gunther did not summon a sparring partner. He did not tell Bram to pick up a weapon.

"Take your stance," Gunther ordered. "Feet shoulder width. Drop your center."

Bram bent his knees. He lowered his massive frame into a flawless combat stance.

"Now feel the mass under them boots," Gunther commanded. "Do not pull it up. Do not push nothing down. Just sit there and feel how heavy this planet is."

Gunther crossed his arms again.

"And do not move till I say."

Bram did not move.

One hour passed. Then three. Then six.

It was agonizing, visibly useless work. The giant stood in the center of an empty arena locked in a deep squat. Sweat ran off his jaw and hit the stone. The muscles in his uninjured arm trembled from the sheer effort of holding a static pose.

He did not complain.

Bram had never once complained about carrying something heavy.

Gunther watched him through the uplink. The Lord Commander’s eyes softened.

"I stood in my own plaza and I did not move," Gunther said quietly.

Bram kept his eyes locked straight ahead. He listened.

"Three hundred Knights behind me. I told them hold the line, and then I put myself out in front of them. I thought that was what a Lord Commander is."

Gunther uncrossed his arms.

"My little brother had been putting poison in my wine for six months."

The vulnerability in his voice was ugly and plain and he did not dress it up.

"The Elder popped it while I was standing there swinging. Whole thing shut off. My legs went first." A pause. "I went down on my knees in front of my own men."

Gunther stepped closer to the projector.

"And I was awake for every second of what came after. That is the part nobody tells you about. I did not black out. I laid there and I watched."

He looked directly at Bram.

"Being the one everybody stands behind is a curse, kid. Ain’t nobody gonna say that to you out loud because it sounds ungrateful. So I am saying it. The day you finally break, everybody behind you goes with you."

Gunther’s voice dropped.

"You already know that. You felt it at that tower two days ago."

Bram closed his eyes.

He saw it perfectly. Eleven of them, low and silent, coming past the berms and the trench line and the two hundred warm bodies, going straight for the housing. He saw himself crossing forty meters in three strides.

He saw his own shield hit the ground because he had dropped it to catch one bare-handed.

And he saw the eight seconds it had taken Aegon and Reina to reach him, and he remembered thinking, very clearly, that eight seconds was a long time.

CLACK.

The heavy iron elevator doors slid open.

Natalie Tokks stepped out into the arena. The Tempest Sniper carried a small medical kit. She crossed the polished stone floor and stopped beside him.

Sella was out at the tower site running logistics for Halvers, and Bram flatly refused to let the Vanguard medics near him.

Natalie did not tell him to stop training. She knew better than that.

She gently pulled the sling away from his chest. She unwrapped the blood-spotted bandages covering his shoulder. She cleaned the deep, jagged laceration and laid down fresh gauze.

Bram did not flinch, though the pain must have been blinding.

"I would rather not do this every week," Natalie said softly.

It was not a complaint. She had stood shoulder to shoulder with him on a rooftop during their own memorial and said nothing at all, and she was not going to watch him bleed out.

"I know," Bram said.

Natalie finished tying it off. She slid the sling back over his arm, picked up her kit, and walked to the elevator without another word.

The heavy iron doors closed.

It was late into the night.

Bram stood alone in the arena. Nine hours into the stance. His legs felt like poured lead and his vision was going soft at the edges.

’Protect with the terrain,’ Bram thought.

He focused on the polished stone under his boots. He reached for it. He tried to grip the rock with his mana and force the flagstones up into a wall.

Nothing happened.

He could not move the stone.

Bram let out a long, frustrated breath. He was too tired to force anything. He stopped trying to hold his dense mana core in a fist.

He simply let go.

THUMP.

Bram went completely still.

It was microscopic. Barely a tremor. But he felt it.

He had not pulled the rock into himself. He had not pushed anything down into the floor.

He had felt the crushing, endless mass of the bedrock under the Vanguard facility. He had felt the slow, silent weight of the planet pressing up against the soles of his boots, the way it had been pressing up against them every second of his life.

Through the uplink, Gunther went dead quiet.

The Lord Commander of Bastion Six saw the small shift in the boy’s posture. He saw the ambient dust on the arena floor pull in and cling to Bram’s boots like it had been called.

That was exactly how his own had started.

"Session over," Gunther said softly. "Get some sleep, kid."

Gunther severed the connection. The blue hologram vanished and left Bram standing alone in the dark.

---

Miles away, in the war room of Bastion Six, Gunther stared at a blank wall.

His city was half rebuilt. The central plaza was still scorched black. His garrison was down to two thirds and most of that two thirds was walking wounded.

Gunther picked up a heavy iron pen and pulled a requisition ledger across the desk.

He signed his name at the bottom of the page.

It was an authorization to release another heavy crawler transport, loaded with military-grade grain, straight into Sirius Statanham’s smuggling network.

Gunther set the pen down.

He was starving his own city. His people were eating half rations so Helion’s people could eat at all, and the quartermaster had come to him twice this week with a face like a funeral.

Gunther had not said a single word about it to Bastion Seven.

He was not going to.

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