Iron violently jerked his body back and to the side, letting the steel fist blow past a centimeter from his face.
A muffled boom shook the entire room. The Golem's fist slammed into the stone wall at full speed—deep cracks instantly spiderwebbed in all directions, showering the floor with debris and dust.
"What the hell are you doing...?" Iron blurted out.
Instead of answering, the upper half of the Golem's body twisted a full three hundred and sixty degrees. Its torso spun clockwise at insane speed. The fist whistled through an arc and barreled straight toward Iron again.
The engineer instantly collapsed space and materialized a few meters to the right. Meeting only air, the fist slammed into the floor with full force, punching clean through it and slowing the mechanism's rotation.
Iron stared in utter bewilderment at the Golem as it regained its balance.
"Lumon, scan," he commanded.
The interface grid instantly unfurled across his retinas. Iron expected to see the internal schematic of its nodes, power relays, or at least energy flows, but the screen displayed nothing but total darkness. The Golem's insides were completely inaccessible to diagnostics.
"Alright..." Iron muttered, dropping the useless scan.
At that exact second, the Golem slowly turned its head toward him and, without any wind-up, launched itself forward. The distance between them vanished. Dozens of blows rained down on Iron.
The engineer spun, ducked under the strikes, and continuously retreated, feeling the dense gusts of displaced air against his face. With a sharp dash backward, he leaped out of the trash-strewn command center and landed back in the first room.
The Golem burst in after him, continuing to hammer out a series of straight jabs. Iron deftly dodged every single one, trying to gather his thoughts on the fly.
"Lumon, what happened?"
"Determination impossible," Lumon's dry voice echoed in his head.
"Does it have the same absorption as that wall?"
"Correct."
Iron collapsed space in front of him again and in the next instant found himself in the narrow, dark passage. Beside him, the yellow light sphere still bobbed quietly, illuminating the dusty walls.
Wasting no time, he spun toward the opening and thrust his palm forward. Triggering a localized shift in physical constants, Iron instantly increased the density of the rock's interatomic bonds. The air in the passage crackled, and right before his eyes, the open gap fused into a single, ultra-dense monolithic mass.
While the physical barrier blocked the way, Iron caught his breath and walked over to the severed cables that used to connect to the Golem.
"Hand regeneration complete," Lumon reported dryly.
Iron ignored Lumon, focusing on the thick communication mains. He ran a surface scan for residual charge in the wires. A flat blue line swept across the interface—there was absolutely zero electron movement detected inside the cables.
"Lumon, how long have these lines been without power?" Iron asked, examining the torn cores.
"Analysis indicates an absence of power supply for fifteen to twenty years."
"I see..." Iron muttered.
If the system had been sitting idle without power for decades, the Golem couldn't have booted up from a simple external impulse.
He didn't get to finish the thought. A deafening, splitting crash rang out—the ultra-dense barrier Iron had created fractured into a web of deep faults. In the next second, the Golem's giant steel fist punched whistling through the monolith, showering the passage with debris as it hurtled straight at Iron.
Iron instantaneously dropped the temperature around the breach to near absolute zero.
The air froze with a sharp crack, and the walls and floor were instantly coated in a thick crust of frost. The moisture from the damp air encased the Golem in a massive block of ice in a fraction of a second.
Iron relaxed for a second, lowering his hand.
Well, that's that... he thought to himself.
But before he could even catch his breath, thick, hissing steam billowed from the ice. The crust began to rapidly smoke and melt: the Golem had instantly adjusted the temperature of its chassis. A deafening crack echoed, and the Golem broke out of the ice with brute force.
It immediately reared its right arm back for a strike. Iron dove to the side, dodging the fist that smashed into the wall behind him, sending deep fissures spiderwebbing across the stone.
Wasting no time, Iron clamped the Golem's striking arm to his side with his left hand, locking it under his armpit. He instantly multiplied the local mass and striking force of his right fist.
Iron slammed his fist into the Golem's steel head. The metal skull snapped back. Iron delivered a second blow without a pause, but on the third, a sickening crunch echoed right from inside his own hand. The bones gave out—the Golem's armor was hardening right before his eyes.
Suddenly, the Golem's right arm spun three hundred and sixty degrees on its axis.
Because Iron still held it tightly under his arm, the insane rotational inertia caught him and whipped him around along with the joint. Iron was dragged across the floor, scraped along the walls, and when the Golem returned its arm to its starting position, Iron was hurled back-first into the opposite wall with crushing force.
The wind was knocked out of his lungs. Squinting through the flaring pain, Iron saw the Golem's left fist already rearing back above him, ready to pound him in.
Not losing a fraction of a second, Iron collapsed space once again.
The world instantly compressed, and in the next second, he was outside.
Iron dropped to his knees, leaning heavily against the wall, and spat a clump of blood onto the cobblestones. Lumon's translucent interface immediately flashed on his retina: hand damage, regeneration status—50%, 51%...
"So it even adapted to that..." Iron scoffed, looking up. "That's not just absorption anymore..."
He hadn't even taken a step before the ground beneath his feet buckled and cracked. The earth bulged with a rumble, and right from beneath the street, tearing up chunks of stone and soil, the Golem burst to the surface.
The oculars on its head shifted their glow from white to crimson. The Golem locked onto the townsfolk running past. Green projection tags flickered over the people's heads: an instant layout of their internal organs—and a number—0%. The Golem stomped heavily forward down the main street. People around shrieked, dropping their goods trays and scattering for their lives.
Iron bolted after the Golem. On the run, he dropped the friction coefficient right under the Golem's feet to absolute zero.
Its pivot foot instantly slipped, like on perfectly smooth ice. The multi-ton chassis lost its balance and fell face-first, sliding several meters on sheer momentum.
Iron didn't waste a second. Collapsing space, he materialized right on the fallen Golem's armored back. Pressing his palm to a flat metal plate, he unleashed a massive wave of resonance and immediately backed off, jumping away to a safe distance.
Lumon's scan instantly displayed the result: the impulse didn't penetrate the chassis. The armor acted like a perfect mirror—the resonance wave fired straight up into the air.
The Golem, meanwhile, effortlessly rose back to its feet, instantly compensating for the zero friction by redistributing its center of gravity.
Iron returned the physical properties of friction to normal and chuckled slightly:
"What kind of metal are you made of? I really don't want to destroy you... Lumon, I need a deep analysis: how do I disable it without damaging it, or override its controls?"
"Request acknowledged. Initiating data collection to search for vulnerabilities in the control protocols."
The Golem charged at Iron. Steel fists blurred in front of his face, slicing the air with a hum.
Since his right hand was still throbbing from the regeneration, Iron pushed off with his left hand, executed a sharp half-backflip, and vaulted high into the air, hovering a couple of meters off the ground.
Extending his arm toward the Golem, Iron activated thermodynamics. At the Golem's exact location, the temperature instantly skyrocketed to several thousand degrees.
The air around it warped from the savage heat. For a split second, the metal carapace on its shoulders and chest flashed white and began to slide off in liquid beads. But a fraction of a second later, the armor drastically darkened, hardened back up instantly, and completely stopped reacting to the extreme heat.
Hovering in the air, Iron narrowed his eyes and quietly muttered:
"I think I get it..."
At that moment, rapid footsteps and the clanking of iron echoed from the end of the street. A squad of royal knights in heavy plate armor rushed into the square. Seeing the unknown steel entity in the middle of the ruined street, the squad commander immediately drew his sword:
"What is that beast?! Ready yourselves! Destroy it!"
The Golem slowly turned its head toward the arriving guards. The crimson oculars locked onto the armed men. The scanning grid instantly flashed red.
The Golem bolted forward before the knights even had time to lock their shields.
The first warrior didn't even have time to raise his sword. The Golem's massive fist drove him straight down into the earth. The armor crumpled instantly, his bones and internal organs were reduced to a pulp, and blood spewed in all directions.
Without stopping, the Golem twisted its chassis and backhanded the second knight with its left arm. The heavy steel palm crashed right into his helmet. The warrior's skull burst into pieces; bone fragments, brains, and blood splattered across the armored cuirasses of his comrades standing nearby.
The remaining knights recoiled in horror, staring at the steaming remains:
"Call for reinforcements! Now!"
One of the knights turned and sprinted toward the castle gates as fast as his legs could carry him.
The remaining knights, pushing past their fear, charged at the towering bulk with a battle cry. They simultaneously brought their swords down in slashing strikes against the armor, but both blades shattered into hundreds of tiny shards with a ringing clash, leaving the warriors holding nothing but broken hilts.
Iron watched this carefully through Lumon's scan. Metrics popped up on his retina. He immediately caught the core principle: the Golem's armor was getting stronger with every physical impact. Only a fraction of a second had passed between the first knight's strike and the second's, but the durability of the metal carapace had already increased by 0.5%.
The Golem twisted its torso a full one hundred and eighty degrees, then snapped its legs around with a dry click, standing squarely in front of the disarmed men before lunging into the attack.
A knight instinctively threw his heavy-plated arms in front of himself, trying to block the swing. But the Golem's fist punched straight through the armor, snapping his arm bones with a crunch, pulverizing his head, and driving his remains into the ground in one fluid motion.
"Kane!" the last remaining knight screamed in terror.
He wanted to surge forward, but seeing the steel fist flying at him, he merely flinched backward slightly. The heavy fist blasted right through the left side of his body, violently tearing off his shoulder and arm, ripping out half his ribs, and clipping part of his heart. The knight howled in savage agony. He gripped his hilt, preparing to strike the Golem, but instantly froze and collapsed dead into a puddle of his own blood.
Iron descended smoothly onto the cobblestone street. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and spoke in his mind:
I've figured out how to beat you, Golem.
At that same time, the knight sent for help reached the high main gates of the royal castle, pushing himself to the absolute limit. In a panic, he tried to sprint inside, but the guards stationed at the post instantly crossed their spears in front of him, blocking the way.
"Let me through!" the knight screamed hysterically. "Report to His Majesty that there's a disaster in the rear districts of the capital! There's an unknown creature out there, killing everyone in sight!"
The guards remained unyielding.
"His Majesty gave you only one order—to maintain order," one of the guards answered strictly. "You failed to keep it. You deal with it."
"But it slaughtered the whole squad!" the knight tried to shout, taking a step forward.
The second guard shoved him back with force:
"No 'buts'! This is a direct order from His Majesty. Failure to follow orders or attempting to infiltrate the castle is high treason. It is punishable by death."
The knight stared with wild fear at the cold faces of the guards. Realizing that no help was coming, he trembled and stammered out in a choked voice:
"I-I'm sorry..."
And, turning around, he ran back toward the ruined street.
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