The hall was silent except for the slow, measured beat of Kael's boots on ancient stone.
Storm-runed pillars shouldered up to a vaulted ceiling where amber lanterns swung in a breeze that had no business existing underground. At the far end, a figure waited—more statue than man—wrapped in plates of dark bronze, shoulders like the first rise of a mountain. When Kael crossed the last mosaic line, the helm turned. Lightning crawled once behind its visor.
You've returned, said a voice, not from the figure's mouth but from the ground beneath Kael's feet. To wear the armor of Draga is to bear the weight of every step your blood has taken. Will you stand?
Kael loosened his jaw, set his hand to the sword at his hip, and found the floor with his breath. "I will."
The earth split.
A shockwave rolled from the bronze giant's stance. Tiles lifted and fell like a slow wave. Kael bent his knees and let the tremor pass through him instead of fighting it. A moment later the giant moved—no warning, no wind-up—just a fist the size of a shield, arcing in.
Kael met it not with steel but with his own forearm. Gauntlet rang; bone complained. A hot thread of force shoved him back three steps.
"Too light," Draga's voice thundered. "The ground does not flee."
"Then watch," Kael said.
He stepped in, sword dragging a low crescent that bit air and sound together—Stone Breaker. The blade hammered the pauldron; metal groaned. Lightning spat up the steel—Thunder Pulse—and bit deep into muscle. For a breath his grip failed. He let the failure become motion, dropping the blade to his off-hand and cutting his stance flat to the floor.
Quake Step.
His heel stamped. The tile cracked in a spider's web. The returning recoil set the giant a fraction off his line.
Kael took that fraction and climbed it. He drove upward, both hands now, cutting down into the breastplate. The giant answered with a palm like a door slamming shut. Fingers seized Kael's collar and lifted him so his boots lost their argument with the ground. Helm and visor filled his world.
"Your father's strike had more conviction," Draga said, voice lowered until it was the idea of thunder. "Show me you are his son."
The words landed where hurt turns to heat. Kael let the sword go. It fell and clanged; the sound rang around the hall like a bell telling the truth.
He clenched both fists.
The gauntlets hummed as he sank his weight—not into his shoulders, not into his anger, but into the floor. He drove one punch into the breastplate, then a second, each a drumbeat. The third carried his whole stance with it, a short, ugly, necessary step that split the pressure like stone giving under frost.
Faultline Drive.
Bronze cracked. A web of fractures ran out from his knuckles across the chest.
Draga released him. The giant took one step back. Plates unlocked. Seams unlatched. The statue flowed—not falling apart, but melting forward, a slow cascade of dark bronze and white fire. The flood climbed Kael's shins and thighs, shoulders and chest, cool and heavy, and then the heat came, quick as breath, running the seams like lightning. For a heartbeat he stood inside a storm of metal.
When it cleared, he wasn't holding armor. He was inside it.
The weight was there, but it moved with him. Where his breath went, the plates made room. Where his bones braced, the lines of the cuirass settled and agreed.
"You walk as your own man now," Draga said, and the voice resonated from within Kael's ribs. "I will hold the line at your side. Do not let your steps falter."
Kael rolled one shoulder, then the other. The joint answered like a hinge that had finally been oiled. He bent his knees and felt current answer under the greaves, a low animal readiness.
"Then we stand together," he said.
The hall did not applaud. It tested.
Panels flipped. Spears slid from slots in the walls with a hiss like rain. The floor shivered and went slick as if it remembered a river it used to be. Three stone wards woke in the far corners and started walking toward him on too many legs.
Good, Kael thought. "Let's talk, then."
He advanced at a run that stayed close to the ground. The first spear thrust for the gap under his arm; he turned in and took it on his forearm. The bronze along his bracer coiled, a spiral tightening, and the impact burrowed into the coil and then back out again.
Aegis Coil.
The spear jolted; the ward holding it skipped a step, joints misjudging. Kael cut across its knee with the edge of his gauntlet—no blade, just metal and intent—and as it dropped he stamped a circle into the tiles.
Seismic Guard.
A thin ring of pressure bloomed from his boot, a low curve that caught the next two spears and bled the force sideways. The wards' thrusts slid off the invisible slope and bit stone instead of him.
One tried to pin him high—clever, for a lump of animated masonry. The floor heaved under the rush of hidden pistons, sending Kael half airborne.
The armor felt the air under his feet and behaved like a patient teacher: No ground, no gifts.
Kael hissed through his teeth and made ground. A fast jab of heel and will raised a low spike of stone beneath him. He hooked it with the edge of a greave, dragged himself back into contact, and the armor's hum returned like a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.
"Understood," he said to Draga, to the hall, to whatever ran this place. "We stay honest."
He finished the wards with workmanlike cruelty. A forearm check to stagger. Thunder Pulse up the haft to seize a joint long enough to choose the angle. Faultline Drive in short form, a quick, sinking step and a punch that made the cracks run where he wanted them. When the last ward's chest split, the pieces fell inward and went still.
The spears retracted. The panels closed. The floor remembered it was a floor.
Kael breathed until the room matched him. The armor quieted along his limbs, lightning sleeping at the seams.
"This isn't your father's," Draga said, calmer now, almost wry. "Not the fit. Not the oath. He wore me like a banner. You wear me like a promise."
"I'm not him," Kael said. Saying it cost less than he expected. "But I'll carry what he meant to."
"Carry it with your feet," Draga replied. "Not with your throat."
Kael laughed once, short. "I'll try."
He crossed back over the broken tiles and gathered his sword. The weight surprised him—a relic of a life a few minutes old. He sheathed it anyway. He wasn't done with steel; he'd simply met the reason he had learned it.
At the threshold, he tested what the armor had taught him. He set his stance and reached his left arm forward. Bronze along the vambrace tightened into a spiral and then uncoiled with intent; the air in front of his knuckles shivered. He caught that shiver, pulled it down, and let a low charge ride the movement into the flagstones.
Quake Step—gentler now, fit for company.
"Limitations," he said, because a soldier who doesn't ask for the bill gets cheated. "Tell me."
"You already felt them," Draga said. "Ungrounded, and you are only iron. Rooted, and you are riverbed. Spend your strength on taking hits and returning them, and your lungs will send the price to your legs. Abuse the pulse, and your hands will forget how to close."
"Then I won't abuse it," Kael said. "I'm not here to look brilliant. I'm here to hold."
Draga did not praise him. The approval was there anyway, in the way the greaves stopped testing and started trusting.
Kael climbed the last steps into a corridor that carried the outside's smell in its stones—rain somewhere, far off. He set his palm to the wall and felt the storm's low promise under his skin. In his mind, he drafted the message that would go back up to the Sanctum and out along the road to two friends:
In position. Moving to rendezvous at first light.
He flexed his hands once. The sigils along the base of his fingers lit and went dark. The armor adjusted where it touched his shoulders, as if it had noticed the thought and approved the work.
"Stand with me," he said.
Until you choose not to stand, Draga answered, and for a heartbeat Kael could have sworn the bronze smiled.
He stepped out of the reliquary into a night that had made room for dawn, and for the first time in years he felt the ground answer him as if it had been waiting to hear his name said correctly.