Grand Saint Alloy

Fear, even the dead feared it. Hadrid had no idea if there was an afterlife, but he did not care. A just god would have struck him down decades ago, so it was not a concern he worried too much about. It was one the elemental lord would be finding out.

Scorched and rotting cobblestones crunched under his weight as he strode purposefully towards the interloper. Metal in the area started levitating. The domain abilities of the mental piece, interesting. When the jagged shards struck, he reinforced his skin, but let them strike the armor. Hadrid was skeptical of the durability of a liquid, but it held up admirably. Some points found his skin but stopped before drawing blood.

A wave of essence tried to take control of the armor, however he was able to rebuff it with his own essence. His force of alloy subjugated the familiar substance and refilled Hadrids kern. This creature thought itself a ruler simply because it could disarm most of its foes, granted that worked for most rulers so it may not have been an incorrect assumption.

The elemental seemed to want the first strike, “Die mortal!”

It launched itself forward in a blast of fire and stone. An earth and fire anima, Hadrid noted the effects. Enhanced speed, most likely from flame, and strength and mass from the earth part. Hadrid created a metal wall, which the elemental smashed headlong into. It did not stop it, but it both stunned and slowed it long enough for Hadrid to bring his hammer down upon its skull.

It staggered, but its essence invaded the wall, stopping Hadrid from reclaiming it. He had yet to use his essence, so it was no loss. Then the wall was thrown at him.

Hadrid was willing to tank shards of metal, but a wall was a little much. He caught the piece of metal and shunted it aside. The elemental followed it in with a full-bodied punch, sending Hadrid’s half ton frame bouncing down the ruined street. He started laughing, when was the last time he had been hit that hard? Rail, yes, Luke’s father was the last one to strike him like this.

“You hit hard for a rodent,” Hadrid yelled.

“You are stupid for a human,” The elemental lord said.

No, he didn’t go there. No one insulted Hadrid's intelligence and survived. Well, Ruth had at first, but she had been an important hostage. The creature would die.

Hadrid charged in, his peak tier five body was fast, though still too slow to truly take the elemental lord by surprise. The elemental lord smirked and reached out to catch the head of the hammer. It smirked until Hadrid activated the final effect, it pulled all metal, not carrying the owner’s signature towards it. This did not work on living creatures, but the elemental was not living.

The pull dragged it off balance, and by the time it had stabilized itself, Hadrid smashed it in the chest with the hammer. It was not elegant, but it had power. Hadrid launched the elemental backwards and through the retaining walls of a few homes, before bouncing to a stop two blocks away. Hadrid retrieved a glowing bead filled with a crackling blue light. A two-pronged fork was generated on the back of his arm.

The elemental lord stood with a grimace. It placed one hand on the ground like one of those competitive runners. Hadrid never understood why running quickly was something to be proud of. They were just people who could play fetch the best, like Fealy.

He calmly inserted the reservoir into the port he had built into a construct. It had taken a lot of work to create constructs that accepted reservoirs, the key was the alloy infusion force. He set the hammer down, leaning its shaft against his leg, and generated a long metal cylinder.

The elemental pushed off, and the glowing lines of fire across his body dimmed with the essence expenditure. A sonic boom rocked the decimated city, but Hadrid calmly aimed the weapon at the Elemental Lord. Maybe he thought he could tank this, maybe he had no clue what it was. It didn’t matter dead was dead.

The magnetic accelerator cannon, Mac for short, discharged its payload. A quarter of Hadrid’s reserves vanished as the metal rod and the Lord of the Underworld collided at supersonic speed. Everything within five feet of the projectile was shredded, the elemental tried to dodge but it was moving too fast.

Hadrid smirked as he sidestepped and let the ruin of the rodent’s body skid past, “That’s why trespassing is ill-advised.”

He hefted his hammer and started stalking towards the broken body. Somehow it was still alive, well half its body was gone, the left half. It would die soon. Ruth was screaming something, but the armor did make it hard to hear. Hadrid looked over at her, she was jumping around and waving her hands. That was what made Ruth so endearing, she was always excited to see him. He waved back.

A moment later he stood over the dissipating corpse of the elemental lord. It had been born as a rodent, and it would die as a rodent. He loaded a slug into the Mac and aimed it at the remaining half, he paused when the elemental spoke.

“Did I do good? Tell me I did good?”

“No, you forsaken creatures suck,” Hadrid said. Then the black and red anima of the elemental flickered as it finally died, dispersing into essence. Light essence. A light elemental wearing a helmet.

Something long, sharp, and made of dense stone, punched through Hadrid’s spine. He staggered forward from the blow, he tried to turn to look, but he could not feel his legs. The creature dropped him, he reflexively activated the healing reservoir, but the stone spike needed to be removed first. Now that he was on the ground he could see the real elemental lord, he had been tricked. That was the most galling thing about this situation, being outsmarted by a corpse.

“You know, if I was a brute, you would have won. However, a king has soldiers for a reason. Hestia did a good job, and yes it is poetic that one of this nation's civil protectors brought down the only creature with the resources to stop me.”

It crouched down and picked up the hammer. Hadrid refused to let go, it was his flyswatter, and he still had control of his arms. He used his essence to reinforce his grip, he had just as much essence as this bastard, and he would win a battle of endurance. At least that was what his blood-deprived brain said.

“Still you fight, I can see why the False God hates you usurpers so much. Fine, I will end this,” The Lord of the Underworld created a construct axe, it was made of obsidian, fire, and a smoky darkness.

Hadrid growled, he would not let this creature have the last laugh. Before the axe could remove his head, he did something that everyone in the Caldera had assumed that he would do from the start. He absorbed the essence contained in Ajax’s hammer. The force of alloy assimilated it in seconds, pulling into his kern. He broke into tier six, which felt cold, and probably would have been better without a giant hole in his chest.

“What did you do?” The elemental lord roared.

Hadrid grinned a bloody grin as he looked up at the mole, “I’m a hero now, turd!”

The confusion in the elemental lord's expression turned to rage. Hadrid survived the first blow. In his anger the lord used his fist, he struck three more times before Hadrid’s armor finally cracked. The man was spent, the next blow killed him. The Lord of the Underworld yelled in anger. He had lost the weapon, he had lost Hestia, he looked over the remnants of the wall, and he had lost most of his army. None of the elemental lords had survived, most of the elementals were dead.

In a disgusting turn of events one out of five mercenaries escaped, their lack of true loyalty causing them to flee when their master fell. All this to kill one insignificant mortal, one mortal that would have ended him if Hestia had not broken through the swarms of the enemy to aid him. This was a blow he was not sure he could recover from. Not without finding the other half of the Flying Fortress. He was running out of high tier elementals with which to create elemental lords.

“Time to send a message,” He muttered.

With the dregs of his metal domain, he felt for the pieces of metal around him and slowly levitated them. He had to be careful, as while humans could benefit from a broken kern, he would die. A pulse of metal essence came from beside him.

The Lord of the Underworld looked down at the body. How did this man possess so much essence? He would inspect the corpse after leveling the castle. Then the essence seemed to be skewed, the Lord of the Underworld recognized dissonance. The boundary between metal flame and air thinned. He couldn’t, not in this primitive place.

The Lord of the Underworld abandoned the message in favor of survival. He moved as fast as he could, but even he was almost too slow to escape the detonation of the alchemist's kern and all the essence in his body. Silver flames consumed everything as the oxidation flame was known for instead pumping flakes of metal into the air.

The pressure wave threw the Lord into the lake. He hated water, but it was still preferable to the flame that burned on its surface. He floated halfway between the lake floor and the surface. Maybe he would need to be more wary around mortals.