The preliminary heating and safety inspection had taken a full hour after Kaelen opened the sluice. His martial window closed quietly at its sixty-minute limit; Track One had risen from 960 to 961 hours and Track Two’s retained balance from 480 to 481. Track Three had stayed on its elected hold at 240 hours. With twenty minutes left before noon, he released that hold as Torin began the competitive hammer sequence.
The black flagstones shuddered under the weight of Torin Pyre’s first swing.
A hundred pounds of solid meteoric iron whistled through the smoke. The spiked hammer smashed into a glowing billet of star-iron sitting on the bronze anvil. White-hot sparks showered thirty feet into the air, raining over the stone parapet like burning hail.
“Watch closely, blind boy,” Torin shouted, his chest heaving as crimson beast-fire flared across his forearms. “This is the ancestral heritage of the Pyre clan, the Nine-Fold Magma Hammering technique. It takes thirty years of bitter training in volcanic chambers just to comprehend the first three folds.”
The heavy hammer rose again, spinning in a tight crimson circle above Torin’s broad shoulder.
CLANG.
The second strike struck the glowing iron billet, folding the molten metal in half. The sound rattled the tea leaves at the bottom of Kaelen’s earthenware cup.
