The Iron Gorge was a place where the wind didn't just blow; it screamed like a dying beast. High above the jagged black peaks of the northern range, Alpagu lay flat against the freezing granite. Beside him, Ghost was a silent shadow of white fur, his breath coming in faint, rhythmic puffs of mist. Below them, tucked into a deep, jagged scar in the earth, lay the Southern Empire's Site-04 Cobalt Mine.
To any other man, it was a hive of activity. To Alpagu, it was a map of tension and weight. He didn't see "technology" in the sense of gears or sparks; he saw the desperate struggle of wood against gravity, of hemp rope against the crushing pull of the deep earth. The South had expanded too fast, and their haste was etched into every poorly braced timber and every over-strained winch.
"The South is arrogant," Alpagu whispered, his voice barely audible over the gale. "They build on scale, but they forget the foundation. Look at those wooden towers, Bögü. They stand tall, but they are top-heavy. The timber is dry, and the moorings are anchored in loose silt. They trust in the sheer mass of their wood, but mass without balance is just a slow-motion collapse."
Bögü, crouching low behind a jagged rock, gripped the hilt of his black iron sword. "They have three hundred men down there, My Bey. And the walls are thick. If we charge, we die before we reach the first winch."
"We aren't charging," Alpagu said, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the main lifting mechanism—a massive wooden drum powered by a dozen slaves walking in a hamster-wheel arrangement. "We are going to let the mountain do the fighting for us. But first, we need that blue ore. Without it, our steel is just brittle iron. If we take their cobalt, we don't just arm ourselves—we disarm their future."
The Descent into Shadow
They moved like ghosts. Alpagu had trained the Alpha-Squad to move in what he called a "broken rhythm." Most guards listened for steady, rhythmic footsteps; Alpagu's men moved like the wind—sometimes fast, sometimes stagnant, mimicking the natural rustle of the steppe and the irregular falling of pebbles.
As they reached the perimeter of the pit, Alpagu pressed his bare palm against a primary support beam of the outer fence. He closed his eyes, his mind reaching out to feel the "pulse" of the structure.
He didn't have a "system" in the modern sense; he had a memory of how things worked, a deep-seated intuition about the laws of the universe. He felt the vibration of the slaves' footsteps traveling through the wood. He felt the groan of the main axle. He was looking for the Resonance—the specific frequency where the wood would lose its structural integrity.
He closed his eyes, sending a tiny, rhythmic pulse from his own body into the beam.
Thump. Thump.
He frowned. The wood was stronger than he thought. It was oak, likely imported from the Western coastal forests. His first calculation was off. He wasn't a god; he was a man trying to remember the laws of a world he no longer lived in. The moisture content in the air was higher here than in the high peaks, making the wood more flexible, less prone to snapping under a high-frequency pulse. He had to adjust. He moved his hand higher, feeling for the grain of the wood. There. A knot. A flaw in the growth.
"Here," he whispered to Bögü. "When the signal comes, don't cut the rope. Strike this knot with the butt of your axe. The whole tower will twist and fold on itself because the tension is concentrated right at this point."
The Breach
They slipped into the darkness of the lower shafts. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, wet stone, and the sharp, metallic tang of raw cobalt. Alpagu led them deep into the "Blue Vein," where the walls shimmered with a ghostly, azure light under the flicker of the guards' torches.
They encountered two sentries at the tunnel entrance. They were wearing "Gilded" plates—not solid gold, but iron dipped in a yellow-hued alloy. Alpagu didn't draw his sword. He watched the way the first guard stood. All the weight was on the man's right heel.
Alpagu stepped forward, swept the guard's foot, and as the man fell, Alpagu struck the center of his chest plate with a rigid palm. He didn't use brute strength; he used a Focused Shockwave. The vibration traveled through the metal and momentarily stopped the guard's heart. The man collapsed without a sound. Bögü took care of the second guard, a quick strike to the throat that ensured silence.
"There," Alpagu pointed. The cobalt was embedded in a wall of hard quartz.
Bögü swung his pickaxe, but the stone barely chipped. The sound echoed through the tunnel like a bell. A guard shouted in the distance, asking who was there.
"Quiet!" Alpagu hissed. He stepped forward, tracing the lines in the quartz with his fingers. "You're fighting the stone, Bögü. You have to find where the stone is already fighting itself."
He pointed to a hairline fracture, nearly invisible to the naked eye. "Strike here. Not hard, but fast. Like a heartbeat. We need to create a harmonic crack, not a blunt shatter."
Bögü obeyed, his movements precise under Alpagu's guidance. Clink. Clink. Clink. On the fourth strike, a massive slab of quartz simply fell away, revealing the pure, dark-blue ore beneath. It was beautiful—a deep, metallic indigo that seemed to absorb the light of the torches.
"Fill the sacks," Alpagu commanded. "We have ten minutes before the relief shift arrives. Take only the concentrated veins. We don't have the horses to carry the slag."
As the Alps worked with frantic efficiency, Alpagu stood in the center of the shaft, looking up at the ceiling. The South had used a "Column and Beam" structure, but they had neglected the diagonal bracing. They relied on the thickness of the vertical pillars. It was a classic mistake of an empire that valued speed and visual dominance over long-term stability.
"My Bey, the sacks are full," Bögü reported, his face glistening with sweat and blue dust.
"Good. Now we leave them a gift that the South will remember for a generation."
The Weight of the Mountain
As they emerged from the mine, the alarm finally sounded. A guard had found the two unconscious sentries. The Southern boru horns blared—a deep, mournful sound that signaled the approach of the heavy cavalry from the nearby fort.
"They're coming! Hundreds of them! I see the torches at the vadi mouth!" one of the Alps shouted, his hand shaking on his bow.
Alpagu didn't panic. He walked to the main support pillar of the vadi entrance—a massive stone monolith that had been partially hollowed out by the South to make room for a Western-style winch system. This winch was the only way to get heavy loads in and out of the pit.
"Bögü, get the men behind the ridge. Now! Do not stop for anything!"
Alpagu knelt at the base of the monolith. He pressed both hands into the dirt. He needed to find the Shear Point—the exact place where the stone's internal stress was at its maximum. He breathed deeply, letting his consciousness sink into the earth. He felt the weight of the mountain pressing down. He felt the tension in the stone.
He struck the ground. Not a punch, but a focused, vibrating slap meant to send a ripple through the damp soil.
Nothing happened.
The Southern cavalry was visible now—a sea of gold-and-red surcoats, their horses thundering up the narrow vadi. They were less than two hundred yards away, their lances lowered, the earth shaking under their hooves.
"My Bey! We have to go! They will trample us!" Bögü screamed from the ridge.
Alpagu gritted his teeth. I missed the angle, he thought, his mind racing through variables. The soil is too damp. The vibration is being absorbed by the clay layer underneath. I need more force, or a higher frequency. He shifted his stance, digging his heels into the mud. He remembered a principle from his past: Constructive Interference. He needed two waves to meet at the same point to double the force.
He struck the ground twice, in rapid succession, with both hands.
CRACK.
A sound like a lightning strike echoed through the canyon. The monolith didn't fall; it shifted three inches. That was all gravity needed.
The massive stone block, held in place for years by a delicate, forced balance, slid forward. It hit the wooden winch system with the force of a falling moon. The oak beams, despite their Western quality, snapped like dry twigs. The chain reaction was instantaneous. Without the support of the monolith and the winch, the loose shale of the upper ridge—already unstable from years of mining—began to slide.
A roar filled the air—the sound of the mountain reclaiming the valley.
Thousands of tons of rock and earth cascaded down in a terrifying landslide, burying the mine entrance and the first three ranks of the Southern cavalry in a tomb of granite and dust. The dust cloud was so thick it turned the moonless night into a gray, suffocating void.
"Go!" Alpagu ordered, swinging onto his horse as the debris was still falling. "Before the dust settles and they see which way we fled!"
The Ride Back
They rode for hours, deep into the safety of the Iron Gorge, using the narrowest, most dangerous paths where the Southern horses couldn't follow. When they finally stopped to water the horses at a hidden spring, the men were silent. They looked at the blue stones in their sacks, then at the dust-covered boy who led them.
They didn't see a "Bey" by blood anymore. They saw a man who could talk to the mountains and command the very earth to swallow his enemies.
Alpagu sat by a small, shielded fire, his hands still trembling from the effort. He looked at the cobalt. He knew the theory: cobalt would refine the grain of the iron, making it tougher, less likely to shatter under cold or impact. But he didn't know the ratio for this specific ore. In his old life, he had machines to measure parts per million. Here, he had only a clay furnace, his eyes, and his intuition.
"Bögü," Alpagu said softly, staring into the flames.
"Yes, My Bey?"
"Tomorrow, we will fail."
Bögü looked confused, almost hurt. "We won, My Bey. We have the blue stone. The men are celebrating."
"Tomorrow, we try to forge the 'Sky Steel.' And the first blade will likely shatter. And the second will melt into a puddle of useless slag. We will fail because I do not yet know the soul of this specific iron. Do not let the men lose heart when the forge turns cold and the first swords break. Perfection is not a gift; it is the result of every mistake we are about to make."
Bögü nodded slowly, though the concept of "planned failure" was foreign to him. "If you say it is so, Bey. We will keep the hammers swinging until the steel obeys."
Alpagu looked up at the stars, the same stars that had watched over him in a world of glass and light. He missed the precision of his old life, the certainty of a computer-calculated blueprint. But as he felt the cold, hard weight of the cobalt in his hand, he felt a strange, primal satisfaction. He wasn't just building weapons; he was building a nation from the dirt up, one broken blade at a time.
"The South will send more than cavalry next time," Alpagu mused, his eyes turning toward the southern horizon. "They will realize that the landslide wasn't an accident. They will send their master builders, the men from the West who designed those winches. They will bring engines of siege—catapults and rams. We need to be ready to fight not just their men, but their structures."
"We will be ready," Bögü said, striking his chest.
Alpagu nodded, but his mind was already back at the forge. He needed to calculate the heat of the charcoal. He needed to understand the "quench"—how fast the metal should be cooled. He was a Mimar in a world of warriors, and his greatest battle wasn't with a sword—it was with the furnace and the hidden flaws within the metal.
As the Alpha-Squad rested, Alpagu stayed awake, scratching diagrams into the dirt with a stick. He was mapping out a new kind of forge, one that used the natural draft of the canyon to reach temperatures the Southern smiths couldn't even imagine. He didn't need magic. He just needed to understand the air.
By the time the sun began to peek over the eastern ridges, Alpagu had his plan. He stood up, his body aching but his mind sharp.
"Bögü! Wake the smiths!" he shouted, his voice echoing through the gorge. "The age of iron is over. Today, we begin the age of Sky Steel."
The men scrambled to their feet, energized by the conviction in his voice. They didn't know what Sky Steel was, but after seeing the mountain fall at his command, they would have followed him into the heart of a volcano.
Alpagu watched them work, his eyes cold and analytical. He was the Architect of their survival, and he would not let them fall. Not yet.
.-.-.