Don't Look at Me, I'm Forging - Duel of the Metallurgy

Sparks skittered across the gray g24  Duel of the

Sparks skittered across the gray granite like dying fireflies as purple light slammed into pale blue plasma.Cassia didn’t bother with a formal opening guard.

Gideon’s guard unit shifted, she vaulted off a lichen-crusted boulder, her skyboard kicking up a shower of loose shale as she dropped right into

Gideon’s reach.

Her twin purple sabers swung in a brutal, overlapping cross-strike, aimed directly at his collarbone.Gideon didn’t blink.

With a crisp, textbook parry honed by eight years of

Inner-Rim tutors, he brought his primary longsword up to deflect the blow, his secondary blade whipping around to catch her ribcage.CLANG-THUNK.The impact vibrated right through the stone floor.

Cassia didn’t give an inch.

She twisted her wrists, her purple blades gliding smoothly along

Gideon’s edge, using her skyboard’s residual momentum to drive him back two full steps. “Rough,” Gideon muttered, his voice cool, though a flicker of annoyance crossed his eyes as he felt the sheer, unexpected density behind her swing. “Unrefined brute force.

Mid-Rim duelists.” “Less talking, prep-schooler!” Cassia roared, ducking under a horizontal arc from his left longsword and sweeping her right blade up toward his chin.Gideon parried again, stepping cleanly into a classic

Drake stance—the

His feet moved over the slippery granite with absolute, practiced perfection.

He swung three times in half a second, his twin blades glowing with that blinding, highfrequency blue light.Cassia met every strike.

The plateau rang with a deafening, rhythmic barrage of steel against steel.Standing thirty paces back behind

Rhys’s massive shoulder,

Kae watched the duel through her smudged lenses.

She wasn’t watching the footwork or the blade guards.

She was staring at the junction where

Gideon’s blue plasma edge met his hilt.Every time

Cassia’s purple sabers struck

Gideon’s swords, a faint, erratic violet ripple ran up the length of his polished steel.There it is,

Kae thought, her mouth slightly open.

He’s trying it.Gideon sneered, locking his left blade against

Cassia’s right. “You think these

Rim-forged toys can hold an edge against

Drake steel?

Let me show you what real metallurgy looks like.” Gideon’s psionic current flared.Deep inside the hilts of his custom longswords, a secret internal resonance core activated—House

Drake’s proprietary

Shatter technique.

The blue plasma edges vibrated at forty thousand cycles a second, a high frequency designed to shatter the crystalline lattice of cheaper, lower-grade iron weapons on contact.”Break!” Gideon shouted, shoving his full weight into the lock.A high-pitched, screaming whine echoed across the plateau as the high-frequency vibration hit

Cassia’s purple sabers.Gideon waited for the familiar

CRACK of shattered metal.

He waited for

Cassia’s blades to burst into a hundred useless fragments.Nothing broke.Kae’s weapons didn’t have a standard metallic crystalline lattice.

S-iron in her blades was bound at a molecular level with organic cellulose from the

Frost-Lily roots and the liquid-phase toxins of the

The bio-organic hybrid steel didn’t resist the high-frequency vibration—it absorbed it like a sponge, damping the shockwave and reflecting the kinetic energy straight back down the blade toward the hilt.Worse still, the two-millimeter thermal gap

Kae had noticed earlier in

Gideon’s hilt couldn’t handle the massive, reflected energy loop.PZZZZT.A violet arc of feedback electricity snapped out of

Gideon’s crossguards.The

Mud-Dread neuro-paralytic toxin, activated by the sudden spike in thermal feedback, traveled right through the metal hilt grip.Gideon’s eyes widened in sudden, absolute terror.He didn’t feel pain.

He felt his wrists, palms, and fingers go completely, terrifyingly numb in a fraction of a second.

The psionic link to his weapons severed instantly.

His fingers twitched, opened, and lost all grip strength.CLATTER-CLANG.Both of

Drake’s legendary,

SS-rank custom longswords dropped out of

Gideon’s hands, hitting the cold granite gravel with a dull, pathetic thud.Gideon stood frozen in the middle of the plateau, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides, his face drained of every drop of color as he stared down at his own empty, limp palms.”My… my hands…” Gideon stammered, his voice trembling violently as he tried and failed to curl his fingers into a fist. “What did you… what is this?!” Cassia didn’t waste a single millisecond.

She brought her right saber up, stopping the purple-tinted edge an inch from

Gideon’s bare throat.”Metallurgy,” Cassia grinned, her dark eyes flashing with pure, ruthless triumph as the wind whipped her red hair across her face. “Rim style.”