The riverbank offered no sanctuary, only a wider view of the devastation. The golden silt in the Hydros river didn't flow like sand; it crawled, sticking to the rocks in heavy, metallic clumps.
Midarion stood at the edge of the water, his chest heaving behind the charcoal filters. His silver threads were still humming, twitching with the residual vibration of the village. He looked at his hands. They were trembling—not from exhaustion, but from the sensory overload of hearing a girl's heart turn to lead.
"We have to move," Lior stammered, his eyes darting back toward the smoke of the collapsed tunnel. "That... thing. The blacksmith. It's still coming, isn't it?"
Rondo didn't answer immediately. He was crouched on the ground, obsessively checking the seals on the large metal case chained to his wrist. "The case is intact," he whispered, more to himself than the others. "We have the air concentrations. We have the saliva from the weaver. We have the skin scrapings from the child. If we lose this case, Tilda died for nothing."
"Scholar," Midarion said, his voice sharp and cracking—the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy trying to anchor himself in a nightmare. "What was that blacksmith? He wasn't like the others. He was... solid. Like a mountain made of gold."
Rondo looked up, his glasses fogged slightly inside his mask. "That, Midarion, is the final stage. Most die long before they reach that state. Their hearts seize, or their lungs solidify and they suffocate in the middle of the transition. But him? His body must have been strong enough to endure the molecular restructuring."
"But he was a monster," Reikika said, her voice hollow. She was leaning against a golden-barked tree, her frost-covered fingers tracing a jagged leaf. "He wasn't the blacksmith anymore. He didn't even speak. He just... hunted."
"Because he is brainless, Reikika," Rondo explained, standing up. "The gold doesn't just coat the organs; it replaces them. It mimics the shape of the brain but lacks the electrical impulses of thought. What you saw is a biological machine driven by a single, vestigial instinct: to vibrate. And that vibration is what spreads the Scourge."
Midarion's brow furrowed. "So... he's the cause? If we kill the big ones, does the sickness stop?"
Rondo shook his head grimly. "No. He is a symptom, not the source. But he is a carrier. Every time he swings that hammer, he shatters the air, turning it into a mist of gold dust. He is a living walking catastrophe. And no, you cannot beat him. Even you, Reikika, with all your spirit—your ice would shatter against his density. You'd be trying to freeze a sun with a bucket of water."
A heavy thump echoed from the direction of the village. Then another. Thump. Thump. It wasn't a walk; it was the rhythmic stride of something that didn't care about obstacles.
"He's tracked us," Midarion whispered, his ears picking up the specific, grinding frequency of the blacksmith's joints. "He can 'hear' our heartbeats through the ground, can't he?"
"Worse," Rondo said. "He senses the lack of gold. We are the only 'soft' things left in his radius. We are anomalies that his frequency wants to 'correct'."
"Wait," Lior said, pointing at the river. "Look at the fish."
Floating in the shallows were several trout. They weren't rotting. They were glistening, their scales turned into rigid gold leaf. They had died in the middle of the transformation, their bodies too small to handle the weight of the metal.
"They all die," Midarion realized, his voice trembling. "Even the blacksmith. He's not alive. He's just... a statue that hasn't realized it's dead yet."
"Correct," Rondo said. "The energy required to move a body of solid gold is immense. He is burning through the last of his biological life force. Eventually, he will simply stop and become a permanent monument. But he has enough 'life' left to kill us ten times over before that happens."
The bushes at the edge of the clearing exploded.
The blacksmith didn't scream. It didn't have lungs for air. Instead, it emitted a screeching, metallic sound from its very skin—a sound that made the glass in the recruits' masks vibrate. The golden giant stood seven feet tall, his hammer dragging on the ground, leaving a trail of sparks that turned into golden embers.
"Run," Midarion commanded.
"Where?" Lior cried. "The carriage is miles away!"
"The river!" Midarion shouted. "If the gold is heavy, he'll sink! He's solid metal—he can't swim!"
"The silt will contaminate your suits if you submerge!" Rondo warned, clutching the case.
"It's either the silt or the hammer, Scholar! Make a choice!" Midarion grabbed Rondo by the shoulder and shoved him toward the bank.
As the blacksmith raised his massive hammer for a crushing blow, Reikika stepped forward. She knew she couldn't win, but she could buy seconds. She didn't use a blast of ice; she focused all her spirit into the ground beneath the giant's feet.
"Veynar... please," she hissed.
The ground didn't just freeze—it became brittle. The golden crust, already under immense pressure from the blacksmith's weight, shattered like a mirror. The giant lurched, his leg sinking into the soft, muddy earth beneath the gold.
"Now!" Midarion yelled.
He didn't jump into the water. Instead, he fired his silver threads at a large, un-gilded rock on the opposite bank. He wrapped a thread around Rondo's waist and another around Lior.
"Hold your breath!"
With a violent yank of his Kosmo, Midarion swung the two men across the river like a pendulum, their boots skimming the surface of the golden water. He turned to grab Reikika, but the blacksmith had already recovered.
The giant swung his hammer, not at Reikika, but at the ground. The shockwave sent a spray of golden pebbles flying like shrapnel. A jagged piece of gold sliced through the air, heading straight for Reikika's mask.
Midarion moved. He didn't think; he felt. He intercepted the shard with his own forearm, the lead-lined leather of his suit tearing with a sickening rrrip.
"Midarion!" Reikika screamed.
He ignored the pain. He grabbed her waist, fired a final thread, and launched them both across the river just as the blacksmith's hammer pulverized the spot where they had been standing.
They tumbled onto the far bank, gasping. Midarion immediately looked at his arm. The tear was small, barely an inch long, but the air of Hydros was already touching his skin.
"The seal," Lior whispered, his voice trembling. "Midarion... you're exposed."
Midarion looked back across the river. The blacksmith stood on the opposite bank, his golden eyes glowing with that mindless, predatory heat. The giant stepped into the water, and just as Midarion predicted, he began to sink, his immense weight dragging him into the golden silt. But even as he disappeared beneath the surface, his golden hand remained above the water, reaching, grasping, until it finally went still.
A permanent, golden hand reaching out of the river. A tombstone for a village.
Midarion looked at the metal case in Rondo's hand. "We have the samples," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He looked at the tear in his own suit. "I hope they're worth it."
Rondo looked at Midarion's arm, then at the case. For the first time, the Scholar's eyes showed something other than calculation. They showed pity.
"We need to get you to the carriage," Rondo said. "Every second the air touches that wound, the 'Rasp' gets closer."
Midarion stood up, his silver threads retreating into his skin, leaving him feeling cold and small. He wasn't a hero. He was a fifteen-year-old boy with a hole in his suit, walking through a world that was trying to turn him into a statue.