The phrase still remained suspended in the circular room when silence returned to occupy its place. Glory to the First Hammer. It was not necessary to repeat it. It was enough that the four of them had pronounced it at the same time for the room to remember its true form: not a meeting between equals, but a space subjected to an authority that did not need a face.

The hologram continued floating above them with the glass of whisky in the center, the fresh ice moving barely inside the golden liquid, calm, intact, as if on the other side of that transmission there were someone too certain of his position to grant them even the image of his eyes. Beneath the reinforced glass floor, the fish in the aquarium slowly returned to their routes among corals and shadows of filtered water, unaware that above them the Nine Hammers had just bowed their heads before a single word.

Some time passed before the meeting regained movement. It was not an empty pause. Lucien Valcrest explained what had happened with the cold precision of someone who does not allow ornaments when error can become weakness. He did not need to raise his voice or dramatize the combat. The account advanced like a sequence of data placed on an invisible table: the arrival at the institute, the identification of the two observed subjects, the impossible reaction of their gazes before an active camouflage, the interruption inside the Veil and the appearance of Narka in a complete form that did not correspond to any ordinary classification.

As the report occupied the room, Nixia stopped laughing. The man with the eyepatch listened without barely moving his face. The woman curled up beside the Fifth Hammer kept her eyes lowered, but her attention was still there, tense, gathered within her own fear.

Lucien also made it clear that the adolescents should no longer be treated as common humans. Not because of their age or their appearance, but because of what they had demonstrated at the exact instant of detecting him. That minimal gaze, almost invisible to any lesser observer, had been enough to turn them into active variables.

Then came the other part: the ancient creature, the unknown energy, the resistance of the Guardian, the need to use the seven Vertices and three of their variants, the calculated withdrawal before revealing more than necessary. He did not present it as defeat. No one there would have accepted that word without consequences. He presented it as an incomplete measurement, as an anomaly that demanded superior preparation. And within that conclusion was included his intention to evolve to the next meta-human level, not out of empty pride, but to eliminate with greater efficiency everything that stood in the path of the Blacksmiths.

When the report ended, the room did not respond immediately. The golden light continued falling over the silver metal and the glass. The smoke from Nixia’s cigarette consumed itself into a thinner line. The man with the eyepatch kept his single visible eye on the screen. Lucien remained standing, impeccable, with a cold face and still hands, as if even after delivering information of that weight he refused to appear affected by it.

The hologram of the glass of whisky did not change. The ice moved again, barely, brushing the crystal with a calm that felt more authoritative than any human gesture.

Then the First Hammer spoke.

—The new threats will be registered —said the male voice, distorted, deep, without anger and without surprise—. But they will not displace the old priorities.

No one interrupted. Not Lucien. Not Nixia. Not the man with the eyepatch. The authority of that voice did not need to demand silence because it already had it before formulating the first sentence. The screen continued showing only the glass. There was no face to measure, no eyes to challenge, no expression to interpret. Only a voice and a golden glass with fresh ice, as if the totality of power could be reduced to an absent presence.

—The Metahuman Academy continues to be a structure of interest. Its movements must remain under observation, but it does not represent a threat outside calculation. The meta-human families of the continent remain useful, problematic and manipulable according to territory, blood and ambition. The Council of Mages preserves influence, but its internal division facilitates containment. The aura users with whom conflicts have been generated must not be ignored either, although their masters continue acting within predictable codes.

Each name fell over the room like a piece placed on an immense board. They were not minor enemies. Each faction had strength, territory, history and enough pride to break entire organizations if treated carelessly. But in the First Hammer’s voice there was no fear. There was order. The Academy, the families, the mages, the aura users: all of them were threats, yes, but threats with form. Powers that could be studied, divided, bought, provoked, worn down or kept within relative limits. The true danger, in his tone, was not in how hard a faction could strike, but in how difficult it was to predict how far it could grow without breaking the balance.

The voice continued after a brief pause.

—All of that can be kept under control in a relatively simple way if each Hammer fulfills their function and stops confusing initiative with whim.

The phrase did not point to anyone directly, but it touched the entire room. Nixia smiled sideways without laughing. Lucien did not change his expression. The man with the eyepatch lowered his chin barely, as if accepting that such correction belonged to everyone and to no one. The curled-up woman did not move. Beneath the glass, a dark-colored fish passed under Lucien’s shoes and disappeared among the corals, small, silent, enclosed in a world where the surface was an impossible ceiling.

—The greater problem remains the same —said the First Hammer—. The Sovereign Pillars.

The air seemed to become colder. Not because of a technique. Not because of killing intent. Because of the simple gravity of the name. The Sovereign Pillars were not received like another faction within a list. Even Nixia stopped playing with the cigarette for an instant. The man with the eyepatch held his gaze on the glass of whisky with a different hardness, older. Lucien listened without showing surprise, but his green eyes sharpened by one degree.

That mention belonged to another scale. Not to groups that could be managed through money, political pressure or selective violence. The Sovereign Pillars were structures that sustained power from too high above, with organizations that did not only compete for territory, but for historical direction.

—Their organizations continue expanding influence —the voice added—. Some openly. Others beneath treaties, academies, commercial alliances, military routes and pacts that are still not convenient to break. But among all of them, one continues occupying special priority.

The image of the glass moved slightly closer within the hologram. The golden whisky received the light and returned it as a still gleam.

—The Sovereign Pillar of the Sky.

The name remained suspended over the aquarium, over the four Hammers present, over the silver room where luxury no longer seemed enough to hide the tension.

—And his organization: Azzurro.

No one spoke.

The mere mention of Azzurro was enough to change the quality of the silence. It was no longer the personal tension between Lucien and Nixia, nor the respect imposed by the First Hammer, nor the unease generated by the report about Narka. It was something else. A broader threat, higher, more difficult to touch without provoking consequences that would extend across the entire continent. Lucien understood why the voice had placed the new anomalies in the background. Sebastián, Virka and Narka were dangerous problems. Azzurro was an entire board.

The First Hammer let the name remain there a few seconds longer, as if he wanted to force them to remember that the Blacksmiths did not exist within a single war. The world was full of fronts, and only the weak confused the appearance of a new threat with permission to forget the old ones. The glass of whisky continued suspended in the hologram, serene, golden, without a face behind it.

—We will proceed without altering the hierarchy of priorities —the voice concluded—. The anomalies of the institute will be watched. Lucien Valcrest may prepare his meta-human evolution under supervision. But no resource destined to contain Azzurro will be diverted without my authorization.

The screen did not turn off.

The ice moved once more inside the glass.

In the circular room, the four Hammers understood that Lucien’s report had not opened the center of the meeting. It had only been a warning added to a much older map of threats. Beneath their feet, the aquarium continued breathing its enclosed life, beautiful and imprisoned, while above it the names of academies, families, mages, aura users, Sovereign Pillars and Azzurro remained ordered under the voice of the only man who could turn the Nine Hammers into listeners.

The meeting began to unravel without anyone announcing its end. The hologram of the cup remained suspended over the circular room, but the authority that sustained it had already finished ordering priorities. No one needed further explanations. The First Hammer had placed each threat in its place, had authorized Lucien’s evolution under supervision, and had made it clear that no resource destined for Azzurro would be touched by whim. That was enough. In an organization like the Blacksmiths, important orders rarely needed to be adorned with farewells.

Nixia was the first to move. She rose from the armchair with a haughty laziness, still holding the cigarette between her fingers. Her black leather jacket rustled slightly as she stood, the red details of her clothes caught the golden light from the ceiling, and her smile insinuated itself once more with that comfortable violence that seemed to form part of her natural way of breathing. The huddled woman moved after her, slower, still withdrawn into herself, as if leaving the shelter of the armchair meant exposing herself once more to the entire room.

Nixia drew her close with a possessive and brazen hand. She took her left breast over her clothes, without real delicacy, without ceasing to smoke with her other hand, as if even the discomfort of the huddled woman were something that belonged to her. She exhaled a thick puff of smoke, tilted her face close to her, and spoke in a warm, haughty whisper, private only in appearance, because she did not care if anyone inside the room understood the gesture.

—Come, Noira. We are going to have a good time.

Noira nodded. A blush rose to her face in an immediate, nervous manner, too vulnerable for a place like that. She did not answer with words. She only lowered her gaze and allowed herself to be guided, pressed against Nixia, while the Fifth Hammer walked toward the exit with the same insolence with which she had provoked Lucien minutes before. The door opened for them without resistance. Nixia did not look back. Noira did for a minimal fraction, barely enough for her downturned eyes to brush the room, the hologram, and the still figure of Lucien before disappearing along with the woman who carried her.

Afterward, the man with the patch rose. He did not need to adjust the black cloak that covered his body. He simply stood up from the reinforced glass with a dry slowness, letting his shadow lengthen over the fish that swam beneath the transparent surface. The white hair pulled back maintained its severe order, and the patch over his left eye gave his pale face an even more closed harshness under the golden light. His single black eye passed over Lucien without greeting, without farewell, without interest in prolonging the exchange. Then he walked toward the door and left the room with the same silence with which he had remained seated.

Lucien was left alone.

For several seconds he did not move. The aquarium kept breathing beneath his feet, with its fish passing through corals and shadows as if nothing had changed above them. The silver room seemed wider without the other Hammers, but no less heavy. Lucien kept his gaze on the hologram of the glass, although the image no longer said anything. His face preserved its usual cold neatness, but in the line of his mouth there was a sour hardness, a minimal tension that did not quite become a grimace and, even so, was enough to reveal that the meeting had not left him satisfied. Supervision. Priorities. Azzurro. Resources not diverted. None of that was an open refusal, but it was a limit. And Lucien hated limits when they had not been imposed by him.

In the end, he turned on himself and walked toward the exit. The door received him with the same perfect neutrality with which it had received the others. When Lucien crossed the threshold, the corridor light cut him for an instant and then lost him. The door closed again. The circular room was left empty above the aquarium, bathed by the gold of the ceiling, with the hologram still floating in the center and the glass of whisky represented in a stillness that seemed to look even without eyes.

Then something moved beneath the glass.

It was not a fish. It was not a current from the artificial system. At the bottom of the aquarium, among sand, stone, and coral shadows, a buried form began to rise. First the outline of an enormous back came loose. Then a shoulder. After that, a head covered by breathing equipment. The sand at the bottom opened around that body as if it had been hiding it since before the meeting, and the small ecosystem, ordered until then, was altered in an aquatic silence. The fish scattered among the corals. The plants bent under the sudden current. The figure kept ascending from the bottom with a heavy slowness, too human to be part of the aquarium and too large to have gone unnoticed by accident.

He measured more than two meters. He wore a black diving suit fitted to a body completely developed for fighting. The technical fabric clung to dense, functional musculature, made not for display, but for strength, pressure, and direct violence. His arms were long and powerful. His broad chest displaced the water as he rose. His shoulders seemed designed to break through resistance rather than surround it. When he reached the glass, he did not look for a hatch or an exit mechanism. He raised his bare fist inside the suit, closed his fingers, and struck.

The reinforced glass shattered.

Not in a small crack. In a total rupture of the central panel. The transparent surface burst upward and downward with a dry, brutal sound, while the aquarium water rose in a violent column and the armchair Nixia had occupied fell partially toward the hole, dragged by the sudden loss of support. The containment system reacted immediately. Metallic edges emerged around the opening, hidden drains activated, and lateral fields sealed part of the water to prevent the room from flooding completely.

Even so, the image was destroyed: the perfect luxury of the floor turned into an open wound above the living aquarium.

The man in the diving suit poked his head through the hole and pushed himself up until he was on the broken edge. Water ran down his shoulders and along the black material of his suit. He removed the respirator from his mouth with one hand and let the tube fall to one side. His face was hard, broad, with a heavy jaw, with an expression that did not seem to seek approval or surprise. When he spoke, his voice came out hoarse, deep, scraped by contained breathing and by years of obeying orders that did not need to be discussed.

—Boss —he said loudly—. How will you really proceed?

The hologram changed.

The image of the glass appeared again in the center of the room, but this time the glass was empty. There was no whisky. There was no ice. Only clean, transparent crystal, held inside the screen like a deliberate absence. The First Hammer’s voice returned from the projection with the same masculine distortion, deep, without anger, without haste, without useless emotion.

—My right hand —he said—. Watch Lucien.

The man in the diving suit did not answer. He only held his gaze toward the hologram.

—If he causes more problems, kill him.

The order did not alter the room. There was no dramatism. There was no exaggerated tension. Precisely because of that, it weighed more. The Second Hammer could sit before the others, could demand evolution, claim resources, and measure threats within the Veil. But even he had an assigned shadow, a right hand waiting under the water, ready to turn supervision into execution if the First Hammer decided it.

The man bowed his head.

—Understood.

Then he placed the respirator back on. Without more words, he let himself fall through the broken hole toward the aquarium. The water received him with a heavy jolt, and his body descended among the damaged corals, the shaken plants, and the fish that were still fleeing from his presence. He went down to the bottom, sank among shadows and sand, and little by little disappeared beneath the artificial structure of the ecosystem, as if he had never come out.

The screen remained.

The empty glass was served again. First the ice fell, clear, fresh, striking the crystal with a clean sound that the projection transmitted with uncomfortable fidelity. Then the whisky descended, golden, slow, filling the bottom of the glass until returning the image to its initial appearance. The First Hammer let a few seconds pass, as if that action were more important than any oath pronounced by the others.

—These new variants are unique —he said, now speaking only before the destroyed room—. Enough for that woman, Helena, to cover them with her conglomerate.

The glass remained still.

—But that will not prevent their elimination if it becomes necessary.

The whisky barely moved inside the glass.

—Even if to do it we have to destroy the pawns she keeps inside that place. Even if Helena’s conglomerate must burn with them inside.

There was no answer. There was no one left to give it. Only the water beneath the broken floor, the partially sunken armchair, the fish scattered among altered corals, and the holographic screen with the glass served again, suspended in the center of a silver room that no longer pretended purity. The First Hammer did not need witnesses to make decisions. He made them anyway, with the same calm with which he watched the whisky settle among the ice.

Far from the circular room, far from the broken aquarium, from the sunken armchairs and from the Hammers who had already left the room, the First Hammer remained somewhere else.

He was not in an office. He was not in a visible tower or in a command chamber surrounded by common screens. The space that contained him seemed like a subterranean mausoleum built to remember that even modern power needed, sometimes, to sit upon ancient bones. The enclosure was wide, cold, crossed by dark columns and sealed niches in the walls, each one marked with aged metal plaques and names that the light could not fully reveal.

Some tombs were embedded in the floor. Others rose like blocks of black marble on both sides of the central corridor. There were no flowers. There were no symbols of comfort. Only stone, silence, and a funerary solemnity too clean to belong to grief. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

In the center of that place, seated on a pale marble tomb, was him.

The First Hammer did not show his face. His entire body was covered by a black mechanical suit, advanced, fitted to his figure of almost one meter ninety with a military elegance that did not depend on ornaments, but on precision. The pieces of the torso seemed like overlapping plates of fine armor, polished, dark, crossed by internal lines barely lit. His arms were covered by integrated mechanisms, reinforced joints, and metallic fingers as thin as they were dangerous.

A heavy-cut black cape fell over his shoulders, and on his head he wore a modified admiral’s cap, rigid, somber, integrated into the helmet in such a way that it seemed less like an accessory than a declaration of command. Where there should have been human eyes, there was only a dark mask with a minimal glow, a depth without skin, without expression, and without promise of mercy.

Beside him, on the tomb, rested the glass of whisky.

The glass had fresh ice and golden liquid, the same one that appeared in the hologram projected before the Hammers. In front of the glass, a small black and silver disc remained tilted toward it, scanning every movement of the crystal, every vibration of the ice, every minimal variation of the whisky to transmit that image to another room, to another height, to other subordinates.

The power of the First Hammer did not need a face. A glass was enough for him. A voice was enough for him. Turning absence into symbol was enough for him.

The silence held for a few more seconds.

Then he spoke.

—I do not like being watched —he said to the air.

The voice came out from the helmet with a grave, authoritarian distortion, so controlled that it did not need to rise to dominate the mausoleum. He did not look toward any specific point. He did not turn his head. He remained seated on the marble tomb as if the entire enclosure were already within his reach.

—Come out before I have to take you out.

The shadows on the left side moved.

From between two funerary pillars, a woman appeared. She walked slowly, barefoot over the stone, with the caution of someone who knows she has already been discovered and, even so, cannot retreat. She had grayish hair, loose, mistreated, falling around a face marked by scars on both cheeks. Her eyes were light brown, tense, too wide under the low light of the mausoleum.

Her body had a firm proportion, made to resist, not to please. She was not beautiful in a clean way, nor unpleasant either, but an intermediate point hardened by war, hunger, and exposure. She wore a silver dress, worn and torn down to the knees, with irregular edges and dark stains that seemed to have belonged to too many roads. Her pale skin stood out against the torn fabric, and every step of hers made it clear that she had not arrived there as a visitor, but as an instrument.

The First Hammer finally observed her.

The mask did not change. It could not. But the air around him seemed to close with absolute disapproval.

—I made it clear that I did not want to see any Profane before me again.

The woman did not answer with words.

The First Hammer moved.

He did not rise with broad violence. He simply stopped being seated with a dry speed, impossible for the weight of his armor. In an instant, the black cape opened behind him and his mechanical body crossed the distance between the tomb and the Profane like a military shadow launched to execute an order. His right hand closed, the mechanisms of the fingers emitted a brief metallic sound, and the blow directed toward her had no intention of capturing, interrogating, or wounding. It was immediate elimination.

But before it reached her, the Profane exploded.

The explosion was not large in scale, but it was brutal in proximity. A pale and dirty light opened from the woman’s body, pushing the First Hammer backward enough to stop his momentum and shake the mausoleum from the floor to the upper niches. The marble cracked. Several funerary plaques came loose from the walls. The tomb where he had been seated received a long fracture that crossed its surface from side to side. The enclosure did not collapse, but the entire structure let out a deep groan, as if the place had been struck from within its own memory.

The First Hammer landed on his feet.

The black armor smoked in some places, but it was not broken. The cape fell again over his shoulders with a dark weight, and the minimal glow of the mask fixed itself on the center of the explosion. There, among scattered remains and smoke, a small organic-mechanical device began to vibrate, embedded among fragments of the decoy the Profane had been. It was not a corpse prepared to kill. It was a message covered in flesh.

The voice came out of that object.

Warm at first, similar to that of a woman speaking very close to the ear. Then, beneath that warmth, another layer appeared: mixed masculine tones, deep, multiple, as if the same throat were being used by more than one will.

—First Hammer —said the hybrid voice—. King of the Blacksmiths. He whose power equals that of a mid-rank Sovereign Pillar.

The mausoleum went still.

The First Hammer did not answer.

—Join our cause —the voice continued— or disappear.

The device emitted a red pulse.

Then it self-destructed.

This time the detonation was minimal, barely a snap of heat and smoke that burned the remains of the mechanism without touching the already damaged structure. The First Hammer remained motionless for a second, looking at the place where the message had just erased itself. Then he advanced one step and kicked the blackened fragment that remained on the stone. The piece rolled a few meters, struck the base of a tomb, and stopped.

—The Profane have become quite arrogant —he said.

There was no surprise in his voice. There was no fear. Not even open rage. Only a cold, almost administrative observation, as if he had just registered an annoyance that would soon have to be corrected. Beside him, the transmission disc continued pointing toward the glass of whisky. The glass remained intact on the fractured tomb, with the ice still floating inside the golden liquid.

The First Hammer looked at it for an instant, then turned the mask toward the darkness of the mausoleum.

The silence returned, but it was no longer the same.

Now it carried one more name within it.

The Profane.

_____________________________________________

END OF Chapter 104

The path continues...

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