Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - First Blood of Sector 7Damp morning air clung to the hig

h fern canopy like wet cotton, dropping heavy, cold water onto the back of Kae’s neck every time the wind stirred the branches.By zero-seven-hundred, Squad 7 had cleared the southern boundary of the riverbed, stepping into the jagged basalt hills known on Institute maps as Sector 7’s Ironhorn territory. Red clay had turned to grey gravel beneath their boots. The smell of rotting jungle pulp was replaced by something harsher—the heavy, musk-and-sulfur stink of large territorial beasts wallowing in thermal mud pits.”Hold up,” Kaelen whispered, dropping flat behind a knee-high ridge of black shale.Behind him, the squad melted into the foliage. Even Melissa managed to drop quietly into a clump of wet moss without whining, her hands clutched white-knuckled around her leather medical kit.Kae crouched near a lichen-covered rock, her oversized fleece sweater pulled up to her jaw. She was running on three hours of sleep and half a cold protein bar, her eyes bloodshot behind her smudged glasses. Her head throbbed with a dull, persistent ache—the classic hangover of a psionic forge operator who’d drained her bandwidth down to the sludge line before dawn.”What’s the tally?” Cassia breathed, creeping up beside Kaelen on her elbows. Her dark-purple sabers were slung across her lower back, the metal catching zero morning reflection.Kaelen peered through a pair of compact tactical macro-binoculars. “Herd of four. SS-rank Ironhorns. Three adults, one bull.”Through the low brush, fifty yards out, the beasts moved through a shallow thermal bog. They were terrifying creatures—the size of armored troop transports, covered in thick, overlapping plates of dark slate-gray chitin that could deflect standard-issue kinetic rounds without a dent. From their heavy snouts sprouted six-foot, forward-curving horns, glowing faint yellow with localized kinetic heat.In standard academy tactical manuals, engaging a single SS-rank Ironhorn required a five-man Vanguard wall, sustained sniper fire targeting the eye slits, and at least twenty minutes of coordinated attrition.”Four of ’em,” Torin muttered, resting his heavy warhammer against his thigh. He looked nervous, his knuckles white. “Kaelen, if we pull the herd, we’re gonna get flanked in this ditch.””We need the points,” Kaelen said, his eyes glued to his slate. “An SS-rank kill is worth five hundred points on the Institute tracker. Four of them puts us straight into the top twenty before noon.”He turned his head, his gaze sweeping over Rhys, Cassia, and Torin. “Rhys, you take the bull’s charge. Cassia, flank the left cow. Torin, Silas—keep the two smaller ones from circling behind us. I’ll drop suppression flares to split their line.””Don’t bother with the flares,” Cassia growled, a terrifying, crooked smile spreading across her face as her fingers closed around the purple grips of her new sabers. “Just don’t get in my way.” Before Kaelen could call her back, Cassia vaulted over the shale ridge.She didn’t run like a scout; she launched herself off the basalt ledge like a stone fired from a siege engine. Her boots hit the mud thirty feet out, her low-altitude skyboard unslung from her back and slapping onto the mud beneath her feet in one fluid, terrifying motion.WHOOSH.The repulsor plate flared. Cassia glided across the thermal mud at forty miles an hour, skimming two inches above the liquid sludge.The alpha bull Ironhorn roared—a deafening, subterranean rumble that shook the pine needles off the trees—and lowered its six-foot glowing horn to gore the intruder.Cassia didn’t dodge. She leaned hard onto her left heel, angling the skyboard into a sharp, muddy drift that brought her right under the bull’s massive neck.Her purple sabers flashed in a double-cross pattern.There was no sound of steel grinding against thick chitin armor. There was no resistance. Kae’s neuro-paralytic edge coating and mass-shifting runes worked in horrific harmony—the blades glided through six inches of bone-hard beast chitin like hot wire passing through lard.As the purple steel bit into the flesh, the Mud-Dread neuro-toxin bound inside the alloy matrix released instantly into the beast’s bloodstream.The three-ton Ironhorn bull didn’t even complete its charge. Its legs simply turned to jelly mid-stride. Its massive eyes rolled back into its skull, its central nervous system instantly paralyzed before it even felt the pain. The beast skidded forty feet through the mud on its side, plowing a trench through the bog before collapsing into total, motion-free silence.Kill time: three seconds.”What the…” Torin’s jaw dropped so fast his lower lip vibrated.”Move!” Rhys grunted, his stoic face transforming into a mask of pure, primal focus.The heavy Vanguard didn’t use a skyboard. He sprinted straight into the thermal pit, drawing his six-foot broadsword. The second Ironhorn cow lunged at him, its horn sweeping sideways to split him in half.Rhys raised Kae’s gravimetric broadsword with two hands.The windup felt as light as a wooden training stick in his grip, allowing him to swing the massive blade at three times his normal speed. But as the steel reached the top of its arc, the gravimetric counter-weight rune in the tang activated, shifting the weapon’s density back to full, crushing mass right at the point of impact.BOOM.It didn’t sound like a blade strike. It sounded like an artillery shell detonating against an anvil.The broadsword struck the Ironhorn’s head plate. The kinetic shockwave shattered the beast’s skull structure instantly, driving the animal’s head four inches deep into the basalt bedrock beneath the mud. The monster collapsed without even a twitch.Fifty yards away, Silas and Torin met the remaining two cows. Torin’s warhammer hit an armored shoulder with a dull CRACK, the kinetic shock-wave rune releasing a localized force-pulse that rattled the beast’s internal organs into liquid through three inches of chitin. Silas’s gauntlets shattered a snout plate with a single, mass-shifted left hook.In less than ninety seconds, the entire mud pit fell completely, utterly silent.Four SS-rank Ironhorns lay dead in the steaming mud. Not a single member of Squad 7 was bleeding. Not a single stasis band had flickered yellow.Cassia stood atop the fallen bull, flicking two drops of purple-tinted blood off her curved sabers before sheathing them with a crisp CLACK. She took a deep, shuddering breath, her chest heaving, her eyes wide as she looked down at her hands. “Holy… hell,” Cassia whispered into the morning mist, her voice trembling with an emotion that was half terror and half pure, unadulterated ecstasy. “They didn’t even feel the steel.” Kaelen stood on the ridge, his tactical slate hanging forgotten in his left hand. The screen was blinking wildly with green notification pings:— SQUAD 07 SCORE UPDATE —TARGET TERMINATED: SS-RANK IRONHORN x 4POINTS AWARDED: +2,000 MERIT POINTSCURRENT TOTAL: 2,450 MERIT POINTS CURRENT REGIONAL RANKING: 04Kaelen stared at the blue numbers, then looked down at the mud pit where four mountain-sized beasts had been dismantled in under two minutes.He slowly turned his head to look at Kae.She was still sitting by her rock, her baggy fleece sweater pulled up over her chin, staring at her boots while she sucked on a sour fruit lozenge she’d found in her pocket.”Cerys,” Kaelen said, his voice dropping into a quiet, stunned whisper that barely carried over the wind. “What did you do to those blades?”Kae nudged a pebble with her boot toe, not looking up. “I told you… the neuro-toxin binds to the iron grain. It’s just basic metallurgy.””That’s not metallurgy,” Kaelen breathed, a slow, disbelieving laugh escaping his chest as he looked back at the dead herd. “That’s a slaughterhouse.”