Chapter 1684: Violent Engine
Lucille didn’t hear them. She was staring at the ground with the focus that preceded her wildest ideas, and the ghost healers exchanged a look that said this assignment was going to be significantly more painful than dying for the first time.
Her eyes were on the dwarf’s weapon.
A two-handed warhammer.
Blacksteel head.
Heavy enough to crack foundations.
Her eyes lit up like a child’s on the morning of a feast.
She bent down and grabbed it with her left hand, and the weight settled into her grip with a rightness that had no business being there.
Two-handed weapon, held in one hand.
Her Strength stat didn’t care what the weapon was designed for.
Furthermore...
She hadn’t dropped her axe.
Both weapons hung in one hand each, the magma-coated axe in her right and the blacksteel warhammer in her left, and Lucille twirled both in a slow, testing rotation that carved a lazy circle through the air.
Her whole face lit.
Magma pooled beneath her boots and hardened into footholds that cracked and reformed with each stride, driving her forward with a stability that anchored her thin frame and turned every swing into a planted, full-body detonation.
"Be nice and line up, kids, so that mommy can tend to you! Oh, I mean, mister dwarves!"
"Hah?!" A dwarven veteran who felt particularly insecure about his height snarled from behind his visor, and the fury in the word was personal enough to override his training. "I’ve forged more weapons than you’ve drawn breaths, you insufferable brat!"
The Bloodmonger laughed with utmost freedom and joy in her voice, as she and the Bloodfather’s mark pulsed in the same rhythm as she charged the line, and the synergy between the two classes became far too apparent.
Every kill fed the Crimson Reservoir.
Her class existed to kill enemies en masse.
The mark amplified every strike, and every death she dealt poured fuel back through the bond for her sisters to burn across every front of this battlefield.
She was the engine that would let her family ascend to never before seen heights, and her heart was singing with joy as the realization struck.
The hammer hit first.
Lucille drove the magma-coated blacksteel head into the nearest dwarf’s breastplate with everything she had behind it, and the impact cratered the armor inward with a sound like a forge bell struck at full force.
Magma splashed from the point of contact in a spray of molten droplets that scorched the blacksteel around the dent and clung to the cracks, glowing orange in the seams, and the dwarf staggered backward with his chest plate fractured and softening at the edges.
Her axe followed before he could recover, a wild horizontal swing that hit the exact same spot with the full weight of her Strength and Agility behind it, and the magma-coated edge carved through weakened blacksteel like it was mere iron.
His breastplate split. He folded.
One dwarf. Two swings. Hammer to crack, axe to kill.
The axe alone couldn’t cut through blacksteel plate because it was a slashing weapon against the heaviest armor on the continent, and no amount of relentless swinging would change that unless she was far, far stronger than even the continent’s heavyweights or had special armor piercing skills.
She had neither.
But she did have a warhammer now.
The warhammer didn’t need to cut. It needed to break, to dent, to fracture the metal until the structural integrity gave out, and once the armor was cracked and the magma had softened what remained, the axe had a wound to exploit.
Bludgeon. Melt. Slash. Melt.
The Crimson Reservoir pulsed warm against her womb, and the second kill fed into it more than it took out.
She could feel her sisters drawing from it across the field, the entire family’s combat output allowed to remain high one moment longer because Lucille was killing efficiently now.
A third dwarf met the hammer to the pauldron, magma splashing across her shoulder and neck guard on impact, and Lucille’s axe came from the opposite side before the molten droplets finished landing. Cracked armor peeled open and the woman went down choking.
A fourth caught the hammer square in the chest and the axe took his throat in the same breath, both weapons trailing arcs of magma that spattered the soldiers behind him and sent them flinching away from the heat.
"Goddess... Goddess pres-" The prayer from a fifth never finished.
Her healer constructs flooded her with restoration between exchanges, spectral light knitting the cuts she earned from the hits she refused to dodge.
And what made all this such a spectacle...
The woman carving through the dwarven front line had caramel hair, beautiful eyes, a thin, feminine waist, and the kind of gentle beauty that people trusted on sight.
Lucille was everybody’s friend.
She got along with every woman in the harem, made newcomers feel welcome, and her contribution to any room she walked into was making it feel like home.
But here, with her family ambushed and the lives of her friends at risk, she transformed and became a menace.
Then her axe sank into the neck of a dwarven officer, and the woman’s knees buckled beneath her.
"Gh... Mother..."
The fall was slow. Heavy.
The way armored bodies fell when the strength left them all at once, and the officer’s weight carried her sideways in a long, grinding descent toward the earth.
While the dwarf fell, Lucille’s hand released the axe.
Her fingers found her womb, pressing against the brand that pulsed warm beneath her armor, and she stroked it once, slow and loving, and every trace of the berserker drained from her face for a single, long moment.
"Quinlan..." Her voice came out small and nothing like the woman who had been snarling through a dozen kills a breath ago. "This is... I love you so much I can’t even put it into words..."
Her left eye blurred, and the tear that spilled down her cheek tracked a line through the blood and grime on her skin.
Everything she was standing in the middle of right now, every part of this second chance at life, the family, the sisters, the daughter she could protect with her own hands, the strength to swing two weapons that each weighed more than she did, started with the man fighting alone on the ridge above her.
The same man who had once found a dejected innkeeper’s wife with nothing to her name and saw something in her that Lucille never knew existed.
The dwarf’s body hadn’t finished falling.
Lucille grabbed the handle before it could and wrenched the axe from the officer’s neck in a spray of dark blood.
Magma reignited along both weapons. The footholds beneath her boots cracked fresh and molten.
One tear still tracked down her cheek as she stepped forward, and the magma coursing through her veins reached it. The droplet blazed orange at its edges, glowing hotter as it rolled, and evaporated against her skin in a faint hiss of steam that caught the light like a tiny dying star.
The sole apprentice of the Primordial Dread broke into a sprint, and her first legendary rampage in the recorded history of Thalorind began.
