The Black-Iron Forest did not grow; it loomed. The trees were not wood and leaf, but jagged spires of carbon-dense obsidian, their needles as sharp as barber's razors.
"Don't go deeper than the white stones, my Lord," Garrick warned, his one good eye fixed on the treeline. "The forest is a siphon. It doesn't just take your heat; it drinks your Ichor. A Rank 1 will be a husk in ten minutes. A Rank 3 might last an hour."
Cyprian stood at the edge of the rot, adjusting the heavy leather gloves he'd reinforced with copper mesh. "The Iron Duke needs his tithe, Sergeant. And Oakhaven needs a forge that doesn't rely on charcoal we don't have. Black-Iron burns three times hotter than coal. It's the only way."
He stepped past the white stones.
Immediately, a localized Status Pressure slammed into him. It wasn't the arrogant weight of his father's aura, but a cold, predatory vacuum. The forest was hungry.
Cyprian knelt by a fallen branch, his fingers hovering over the bark. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a small vial of "Catalyst Oil"—a mixture he had prepared instinctively, his hands moving with a confidence his mind couldn't quite justify.
As he poured the oil onto the wood, a thick, acrid smoke curled into the air.
Sniff.
The scent hit him like a physical blow. It didn't smell like the sterile, lavender-scented labs of the Capital. It smelled of burnt hair, cheap ale, and the rhythmic, bone-deep clink-clink-clink of a heavy hammer hitting a cooling ingot.
For a heartbeat, the forest vanished. He wasn't a Prince in exile. He was a boy in a soot-stained room, his lungs burning with the heat of a massive bellows. A shadow of a man stood over him—huge, scarred, and smelling of honest sweat.
"Keep the rhythm, brat! If the iron cools before the weld, the blade is fit for nothing but the scrap heap!" Cyprian gasped, dropping the vial into the mud. He clutched his head, his vision swimming. The memory was too loud, too heavy. It didn't feel like a story he'd been told; it felt like a ghost trying to claw its way out of his skin.
"My Lord?" Garrick called from the safety of the stones. "Are you alright?"
Cyprian wiped a streak of cold sweat from his lip. "Fine," he croaked. "The forest... the pressure is just stronger than I anticipated."
He looked at his hands. They were shaking. A Thorne does not work a forge, he reminded himself, trying to summon the cold pride of his lineage. We are the masters of the flame, not its servants.
But his hands didn't believe the lie. As he reached out to begin harvesting the wood, his fingers fell into the perfect, calloused grip of a master blacksmith—a skill he had no record of ever learning.
"Lord! Behind you!"
Cyprian spun. From the shadows of the obsidian trunks, a Blight-Wolf emerged. It was a Rank 2 monstrosity, its fur replaced by jagged shards of black iron, its eyes glowing with the sickly red of a Rust-Vein.
It didn't growl. It just lunged.
Cyprian's mind went into "Butcher's Calculus." Weight: 200kg. Velocity: 15 meters per second. Point of impact: My throat.
He didn't have time to activate the External Circuit. Instead, he dropped low, his hand finding a jagged piece of Black-Iron wood he'd just oiled. As the wolf passed over him, he didn't swing like a duelist; he braced the wood like a spear-man, using the creature's own momentum against it.
The oily wood slid into the wolf's soft underbelly with a sickening crunch.
Cyprian rolled through the mud, coming up with a dagger in his hand. The wolf thrashed, its metallic fur scraping against the stone.
"Garrick! The flank!" Cyprian shouted.
The veteran moved with surprising speed, his heavy iron boot pinning the creature's head to the mud while Cyprian drove the dagger into the base of its skull.
The wolf went limp.
Cyprian stood, his heart hammering. He looked at his hands—covered in black ichor and mud. He hadn't used a Thorne "Signature Technique." He had fought like a brawler in an alleyway, utilizing leverage and grit over grace.
"You've got a strange way of fighting for a Prince," Garrick muttered, wiping blood from his brow.
"Efficiency over elegance, Sergeant," Cyprian said. His voice was steady, but his mind was still back in that smoky room with the hammer.
He didn't know who that man in his memory was. He didn't know why his body knew how to kill a wolf with a stick. But as he looked at the Black-Iron wood, he knew one thing: he was going to build something this world had never seen.