POV: Kunle "Scrap King" Adeyemi
The Dumps of Ago-Iwoye never slept.They coughed. They screamed. They bled rust.you could feel the treacherousness of the time in the air,
The gods had forsaken us, countless years of silence had made people turn unbelievers and the path of the old had become forgotten and disdained.
At 3:17 AM, the rain came down like broken wires, sizzling on hot metal. I was knee-deep in a mountain of corpses that used to be cars, drones, and God only knew what pandora Dynamics dumped here when they were done harvesting them.units,power cords,htlc circuits i grabbed whatever i could get my hands on.
My name is Kunle Adeyemi, impoverished,hungry, tattered,Twenty-one,No family,No papers.No decent future that life would give me.
But I had hands And in this era of survival, hands that could fix things were worth more than prayers.
"Black heart k"the other scrap rats would call,a little bit of a stretch,i know maybe i had beat other scrapers like me half to death.but that maybe because some people take me has fools sometimes and refuse to pay up for services rendered.
I am a pretty good blacksmith and could make good money if i had joined Pandora's dynamics but that company is evill as hell
But Tonight I was looking for something else.
A rumor,A red light.
"Three blocks in, past the leviathan hull," Old Taju had wheezed yesterday before the Corp took him. "Red core.still humming. Don't touch it, boy. That's not scrap. That's god-stuff.he shouted at me to the point i thought the old bastard had finally lost it.
Old taju wasn't so loved in the slumps,having a record for been a blackhearted trader,serves him right for catching the eyes of the great hegemon that his pandora dynamics
God-stuff. Right.(I scoffed inwardly)
Since "The Silence" 100 years ago, when Olodumare went quiet and the sky turned white, people had been desperate for anything divine. The mega-corps built God-Machines to fake it. The cults sold fake Àṣẹ in bottles and terror and chaos reign all around
This is a dog eat dog era
I just wanted to have a better life and secure a house,get married and have 10 kids,this are aspirations a man must have
The smell of ozone hit me first. Then the hum. Low. Like a heartbeat.
There. Buried under a collapsed pandora hauler.
A sphere. About the size of my fist. Red,pulsing. Cracks of black light running through it like veins. It wasn't warm. It was cold,The rain around it evaporated before it touched the surface.
Ọ̀gún's iron.
The word came from nowhere,i automatically knew the name in my mind,my mind become filled with visions of crimson red,a giant sat on a stool,he was in a sea of fire,his muscular back seems to pierce through the heavens.
"Ọ̀gún,the primordial Orisha (deity) of iron, war, metalwork, and hunting,the first diety to descend to earth in the ancient time.
I could see he was forging something,a red core was been hammered continuously on the blacksmith table he was using,he looked back and my consciousness was almost torn to pieces,i didn't dare look directly at him, he pushed out his hand and did a motion like he was handing something to me
I reached for it.
The sky tore open, but at the moment i cant explain it,8 could feel different lifeforce energy,8 could feel the iron components in the hair,i could feel something scanning the place i was standing at
I could hear loud hums in the distance.
"UNAUTHORIZED DIVINE SIGNATURE DETECTED. TERMINATE."
Three pandora Enforcer Drones dropped from the clouds. Sleek,Black. Each one with a Thunder Cannon mounted on the shoulder. Corp issue. Meant to kill Demi-Gods.
Meant to kill me.
"Drop the asset, civilian," the lead drone buzzed. "Or be recycled."
My heart slammed against my ribs. I was Initiate level at best. I could fix a carburetor and hotwire a truck. I couldn't fight that monstrosity
The core pulsed in my hand. Once.
Pain shot up my arm,Not burning.forging,like someone was hammering my bones on an anvil.
Visions. Flash Again
A man with a hundred arms, all holding hammers. A road cut through a mountain. Blood on iron. A voice, ancient and tired"the path is broken. Forge it anew."
Then the pain stopped And the anger came.
"I'm not a civilian," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine,it sounded deeper. Older. "I'm a smith.
The first drone fired.
I moved or the core moved me.
I threw myself behind the hauler as blue lightning tore the spot I was standing. The heat washed over me and peeled paint off the metal.
Second shot. Third.
I had maybe ten seconds.
The core was burning now, but not me. It was feeding me. I felt it in my teeth. In my marrow. Àṣẹ: Divine authority. The thing cultivators spent decades meditating to get a drop of.
I had a flood.
Scrap surrounded me. Tons of it. Twisted rebar, engine blocks, drone limbs.
"Path of Ọ̀gún,I whispered. The words felt right. "Iron, obey."
The rebar moved
It ripped itself from the ground and slammed into the first drone. Crushed it. Sparks and hydraulic fluid.
The other two drones pivoted.
"Threat level upgraded. Lethal force authorized."
They fired together.
I grabbed a car door and swung. Not with muscle. With Àṣẹ. The door became an iron shield, glowing red. The lightning hit it and I screamed,My arm bones felt like they were melting.
The shield held. For one second. Then shattered.
Shrapnel went into my side. Three pieces. Hot. I hit the ground, tasting blood and copper.
Near death. That was the word for it. I could feel it. The cold coming in.
The drones hovered over me.
"Target neutralized. Recover core."
The core was still in my hand. It was screaming now. Not with sound. With need.
Forge it said Or be broken.
I looked at my arm. The shrapnel. The blood.
Ọ̀gún didn't heal. Ọ̀gún took what was broken and made it stronger.
"Fine," I choked. "Then forge me.
I drove my hand into my own wound.
The pain was white. I pulled the shrapnel out and slammed it, with the core, into the open flesh of my forearm.
The core melted.
It poured into me like liquid metal. Down my veins. Into my bones.
The last thing I saw before black was the drones. Their cannons charging.
Then fire.
I woke up to the smell of burnt circuitry.
Dawn. The rain had stopped.
I was standing.
My left arm was... different. From elbow to wrist, it was iron. Not a prosthetic. Veins of red light ran under the metal skin. Where my hand should be, there were five fingers of layered plating. And in the palm, a faint red glow.The core.
The two remaining drones were scrap around me. Melted. Twisted. Like something had wrung them out.
My side didn't hurt. The wounds were closed, sealed with scar tissue that had iron flecks in it.
I flexed my new arm. It moved. Heavy. Perfect. I could feel the metal in the ground 20 meters away. I could feel the shape of things. What they could become.
A vision hit me. Not gentle like before. A command.
Above.
I looked up. Past the haze and smog. Past the pandora tower in the distance.
From up there, Ago-Iwoye wasn't a city. It was a machine. Gears of roads. Pipes of rivers. And at the center, a black spire drinking the sky.
A higher standpoint.
"The treacherous man sits on the throne," the voice in my head said. It was mine, but not. "He harvests gods. You will unmake him.
Then it was gone.
Footsteps.
I turned, iron arm raised.
A kid. Maybe 12. Dump-rat. Eyes wide.
"Scrap King?" he whispered. "Is that... is that you?"
I looked at my arm. At the wreckage. At the red light in my palm.
"Yeah," I said. My voice was my own again. But underneath it, something else. A hammer. Waiting. "It's me."
The kid pointed to the sky. More dots. More drones. Coming.
I smiled. It hurt.
"Then we better forge something," I said.
And the Iron Path began.