Chapter 16
FLYNN
The golem's foot lifts from the crater where my roses should be.
Forty-seven days of cultivation. Fourteen pounds of magical loam. Three near-death experiences in a ravine. Gone. Pulverized under a construct that is all wet gravel and Elven spite.
The warband roar climbs my throat, rattles my tusks, and rips loose across the quiet suburban morning like a chainsaw through tissue paper.
The golem turns its boulder head toward me.
Good.
"Flynn!" Junia grabs my arm. Her fingers are small and fierce and covered in the remnants of last night. "The garage. Now."
She's already running. Barefoot, still wearing my flannel shirt and nothing else, tearing across the shattered sidewalk toward my garage.
The door is still jammed from the storm damage, stuck at that six-inch gap I forced open days ago.
She drops flat and rolls under it like she's done this a hundred times.
The golem takes a step toward my porch. The porch I built with hand-planed cedar and copper nails and seventeen coats of weather sealant.
No.
I sprint to the garage door and rip it upward. The metal screams. The track bends. The door accordions and I hurl the crumpled panel sideways onto the driveway, and Junia is already inside, pulling heavy chains off the wall rack where I keep them coiled by gauge and load rating.
"Tow chains." She throws me the three-quarter-inch links. Twenty feet of case-hardened steel, rated for twelve thousand pounds. "What else?"
"Sledge. Top shelf. Red handle."
She scrambles up the shelving unit like a feral cat, potting soil shaking loose from her curls.
The twelve-pound sledgehammer drops into my free hand.
Familiar weight. Proper balance. I bought it to set fence posts.
Never imagined I'd use it on a magical siege engine in my front yard at seven fifteen in the morning.
The golem punches through my mailbox. The heavy cedar post snaps like a matchstick and the brass box goes spinning into the street.
That mailbox was regulation height. Regulation distance from the curb. I measured twice.
I come off the porch at a dead run. The chain whips behind me, links singing through the air, and I launch the weighted end at the golem's left ankle. Steel wraps stone three times. I dig my heels into the lawn, what's left of it, and pull.
The golem's foot stutters. Slides two inches in the churned mud.
Not enough.
Its root-system arm swings down at me like a battering ram. I roll sideways. The fist craters the earth where I stood, spraying sod and gravel, and I come up swinging the sledge in a rising arc that connects with its kneecap. Stone chips explode. A crack spiders up its shin.
From behind me: the shriek of pressurized water.
Junia has dragged the industrial hose from the garage, the one I use for power-washing the driveway every third Saturday, and she's cranked it to full.
The jet hits the golem's midsection at three thousand PSI.
Packed soil dissolves. Brown water cascades down its torso, exposing the raw stone skeleton underneath, and the construct staggers backward.
"The joints!" I roar. "Hit the joints!"
She redirects the stream to its right shoulder where root meets rock. The mud binding sloughs away in heavy sheets. The arm sags. Droops. I charge in with the sledge and drive it into the exposed stone socket. The shoulder joint shatters.
The golem's right arm falls. Hits the ground like a felled oak, root fingers still twitching, and the impact bounces Junia's rescued orchid pots three feet into the air.
One arm down. Three limbs to go. A head full of Elven magic still directing the whole ugly mess.
The golem lurches sideways, compensating.
Its remaining arm sweeps low across the yard, a horizontal strike designed to clear everything in its path.
I shove Junia down and the root-arm passes over us close enough to rip leaves from the bushes behind our heads.
The wind carries old stone and broken earth.
Junia rolls to her feet with the hose still in her grip. Her jaw is set. Soil streaks her face. The flannel shirt hangs off one shoulder.
"Wrap the other knee!" She's already aiming, already blasting the left hip joint.
I swing the chain overhead. Once. Twice.
The weighted end cracks against the golem's left knee and wraps tight.
I plant my feet in the ruined flower bed, bend my legs, and pull with everything the warbands put into me.
Shoulders. Back. The old muscles, the ones that don't come from lawn care. The chain goes taut. The steel sings.
The golem's left leg buckles.
It drops to one knee. The impact shakes every house on the block. Car alarms cascade down the street in a chorus of electronic panic.
Across the road, Valerius sets his coffee cup on the roof of his car. His expression shifts. The smug amusement drains, replaced by something I recognize.
Fear.
Junia hits the cracked knee with the full force of the hose. I raise the sledgehammer over my head.
"My mailbox," I snarl, "was regulation height."
The sledge comes down.
Every ounce of warband training, every morning spent driving fence posts into frozen ground, every rep of swinging the heavy axe behind my garage where no one can see me pretend I'm still a soldier.
All of it channels through my shoulders, down my arms, into twelve pounds of hardened steel that connects with the golem's cracked kneecap at terminal velocity.
The stone doesn't chip this time.
It detonates.
Fragments pepper my arms like shrapnel. A chunk bounces off my collarbone and I barely register it because the sound, the deep, grinding crunch of magical stone giving way, is the most satisfying thing I've heard since the day I bought my first zero-turn mower.
The golem's left leg separates below the joint.
The severed stump plows into the earth, root tendrils flailing, grasping at nothing.
The construct pitches forward, its remaining arm swinging wild, and I throw myself sideways as seven tons of animated rock and soil crashes face-first into the trench Junia and I dug three days ago for our combined garden bed.
Perfect trench depth. Regulation eighteen inches. Sometimes precision pays off in ways you don't expect.
The golem's torso slams into the ditch and wedges there.
Its arm thrashes, carving grooves into the soil, fingers of twisted root clawing at the edges.
The head swivels. Those hollow stone eyes lock onto me.
Elven runes pulse bright gold across its skull, and the thing tries to drag itself forward on its one remaining arm like a wounded siege engine refusing to die.
"Junia! Core! Now!"
She's already moving. Bare feet slapping across the wet, demolished lawn, hose braced against her hip with both hands, the industrial nozzle aimed at the golem's exposed midsection where my sledge cracked the creature open.
Brown water and clay dust cascade down the construct's torso.
The high-pressure stream punches into its armor and hits the packed earth core underneath.
The effect is immediate.
The golem's movements stutter. Slow. Its reaching arm drops six inches, then claws forward again, weaker.
The runes on its skull flicker. Junia widens her stance, leans into the hose pressure, and drives the jet deeper into the core cavity.
Packed magical soil turns to soup. Dark brown water gushes from every crack and seam in the construct's body, pouring out of its joints, streaming from its eye sockets, pooling in the trench around its trapped torso.
The arm goes limp.
The rune light gutters.
I step forward with the sledge and drive it into the crack. Once. The stone splits wider. Twice. A plate of rock falls away, exposing the golem's heart, a sphere of compressed Elven earth packed so dense it glows amber at the center.
Junia redirects. The full three thousand PSI hits the sphere dead center.
For one second, nothing happens.
Then the sphere dissolves. The amber light winks out.
The compressed earth turns liquid and sprays outward in a geyser of mud that catches me across the body, the face, fills my mouth with the taste of clay and burnt magic.
The golem's body sags. Collapses inward.
The stone skeleton crumbles, grinding itself apart, root tendons snapping like wet rope, and the whole seven-ton construct just.. . melts.
Into mud.
A spreading lake of brown sludge fills the trench and overflows across what's left of the lawn, carrying fragments of stone and bits of root and the tiny golden shards of dead Elven runes that dissolve like sparks hitting water.
The hose sputters. Junia cranks the nozzle shut and drops it. The silence is enormous. Just the drip of water, the distant car alarms still wailing, and both of us breathing like we've run a marathon through a quarry.
I wipe mud from my eyes. Spit grit. Look down at myself.
My tee shirt is shredded from the stone shrapnel. Brown sludge coats every inch of skin from my jaw to my boots. My cargo shorts, the good ones with the reinforced stitching, have a six-inch tear along the left thigh.
Junia stands in the middle of the destroyed yard.
My flannel shirt is plastered to her body with golem mud.
Her curls are matted flat against her skull.
Potting soil, regular mud, and magical clay form a three-layer geological study across her face.
She's breathing hard, ribs heaving, and her eyes are wild and bright and locked on mine.
She looks at the mud lake. Looks at the ruined lawn. Looks at me.
"Your trench was the perfect depth."