The first explosion came from smelting pit seven.
Not an accident—a deliberate overload, timed to the second. Molten slag vomited skyward in a fountain of liquid fire, raining down on the guard patrol that had just passed beneath the catwalks. Their screams were brief. Then pit twelve erupted, then nineteen, then thirty-four. Across the entire mining complex, cells activated simultaneously with mechanical precision.
Cranes groaned and toppled, their support cables severed at calculated points. Conveyor belts lurched to sudden stops, becoming instant barricades across key corridors. Steam vents that had hissed benignly for decades suddenly roared with redirected pressure, scalding the air and obscuring sight lines. In the armory district, locks shattered from the inside. In the processing yards, ore carts broke free and thundered downhill like iron avalanches.
The slaves—no, the fighters—emerged from shadow with weapons that gleamed dully in the firelight. Sharpened pickaxes. Hammers weighted for war rather than labor. Clay vessels filled with molten slag, crude but devastatingly effective when hurled at flesh and armor. Steam-pressure traps jury-rigged from boiler components, ready to explode on command.
This was not chaos. This was not the desperate flailing of the oppressed finally pushed too far.
This was directed violence, surgical and absolute.
In the eastern watchtower, a guard captain realized too late that the uprising had been planned down to the minute. His last thought, before a sharpened gear-tooth took him in the throat, was simple disbelief. *Slaves don't organize like this.*
But they weren't slaves anymore.
---
Doom entered the central processing yard as dawn broke over the mountain peaks, his cloak scorched black at the edges, ash settling on the iron mask like snow. The gauntlets on his hands hummed with stored power, intricate mechanisms visible through gaps in the plating. He did not run. He walked, steady and inexorable, and where his boots touched ground, order followed.
Fighters who had been falling back in disarray saw the iron mask and straightened instinctively. Those who had been shouting contradictory orders fell silent and waited for his command. The rebellion had leaders—Mara in the north sector, Kael coordinating the sabotage teams—but Doom's presence was something else entirely. It was gravity. It was certainty made manifest.
He surveyed the battlefield with methodical sweeps of his head, taking in positions and trajectories, counting enemy numbers and calculating odds with the cold precision of someone who had spent years learning every pipe, every gear, every weakness in the Ironfields' infrastructure.
"Form ranks," he said, and his voice carried despite the roar of battle. "Three lines. Shields forward. Pike weapons to the gaps."
They moved to obey without hesitation. Men and women who had never held formation in their lives fell into something resembling military order through sheer force of will—his will, imposed upon them like a pattern pressed into hot metal.
Where Doom stood, the line held.
A squad of Karath's soldiers, twelve strong and armored in boiled leather and chain, charged the position with disciplined ferocity. They had dealt with slave uprisings before. Overwhelming force, brutal reprisal, and the rebellion would collapse into terrified surrender within hours.
Doom raised his right hand.
The central processing yard's power grid had been built to service massive smelting operations. Enormous amounts of energy flowed through junction boxes and transformers all around them. Doom had studied those systems for two years, mapping every circuit, every relay, every point where control could be seized.
He closed his fist.
Steam vents beneath the charging soldiers erupted with timing so perfect it seemed choreographed. Superheated vapor engulfed the squad's front rank, and their screams were lost in the hissing roar. The survivors stumbled back, blinded and disoriented—directly into the path of a crane arm that swung down with ponderous inevitability. Metal struck armor with a sound like a church bell being shattered. Bodies flew.
The remaining soldiers broke formation and scattered.
Doom was already moving to the next position, already calculating the next intervention. The Ironfields themselves had become his weapon, a vast siege engine that responded to his will through switches and levers and the brutal application of physics.
An ore cart, loaded with two tons of iron-rich stone, derailed on command and thundered into an advancing infantry rank. The impact shattered shields and bones with equal indifference. A water tower's supports, weakened earlier by Kael's team, gave way at precisely the right moment to flood a guard barracks, drowning men before they could don their armor.
Each action was surgical. Each intervention calculated for maximum effect.
The soldiers began to understand that they were not fighting an uprising. They were fighting the mountain itself, and it had chosen a side.
---
In the northern sector, Doom confronted his first true resistance.
A unit commander—veteran, scarred, competent—had rallied thirty soldiers into a shield wall and was methodically pushing back the rebel advance. His men moved with professional discipline, shields locked, spears probing for openings. They gave no ground to passion or fury, only to overwhelming force.
Doom approached alone, gauntlets flexing, mechanisms whirring.
The commander saw him and smiled grimly. "So. The ghost in the mask. Come to die like a man, or will you hide behind your slaves?"
Doom said nothing. Speech was wasted on the already dead.
The soldiers advanced. Doom waited until they were within ten paces, then moved.
His right gauntlet closed around the leading soldier's shield. Metal crumpled like parchment. The force of the grip propagated through the man's arm, and bones snapped in rapid succession—wrist, elbow, shoulder. The soldier fell screaming.
Doom pivoted, left hand extended. The gauntlet's palm glowed suddenly cherry-red with concentrated heat. He touched it to the second soldier's sword, and the blade went from steel to slag in seconds. The molten metal dripped onto the man's boots. He stumbled back, howling.
The shield wall buckled.
Doom moved through the gap like water through a cracked dam—inevitable, unstoppable. Each movement was precise. No wasted blows. No flourishes. His right hand crushed armor and bone. His left hand flash-heated weapons until they became liability rather than defense. He did not fight with rage or passion.
He fought with the cold efficiency of a machine built for a single purpose.
The commander lasted longest, deflecting two strikes before Doom's gauntlet closed around his throat and lifted him into the air. The man struggled, legs kicking uselessly.
"You will tell Karath," Doom said quietly, his voice modulated by the mask into something inhuman, "that the Ironfields are no longer his. Tell him Doom sends this message."
He released the commander, letting him fall gasping to the blood-slicked stone. "Run."
The man ran, and his soldiers ran with him. Behind them, the rebels surged forward, their war cries now unified and rhythmic.
Each kill had been instructional. Each display had taught fear.
But fear alone did not win wars.
The fighters found their voices as the battle wore on. Not chants or slogans, but names—their own names, shouted like prayers or curses as they charged into the fray.
"Mara!" Led a breakthrough squad using shields jury-rigged from furnace doors. She had been a miner three days ago. Now she was a warrior, and she remembered her name.
"Kael!" Rallied wounded fighters, dragging them back from the advancing enemy, his hands still clutching the wrench he'd used to sabotage the power grid. He had built in silence for years. Now he fought in the open.
"Dmitri!" "Lena!" "Kastor!" "Seph!"
Names rang across the battlefield like hammer blows on anvils. They were no longer property, no longer numbers in a ledger. Each name was an act of defiance, a declaration that they existed beyond the roles assigned to them.
They were soldiers now, and they would be remembered.
---
By midday, Karath's reinforcements arrived—three full companies, well-armed and furious.
The tide shifted immediately.
These were not garrison troops caught by surprise. These were professional soldiers who understood formations and tactics, who advanced behind locked shields and laid down withering crossbow volleys that sent rebels scrambling for cover. Blood pooled in ash-choked corridors. Bodies piled against barricades.
For the first time, Doom saw the true cost of open war.
The rebels were brave, determined, and utterly outmatched in conventional combat. Courage meant nothing against trained soldiers who had spent their lives learning how to kill. The shield walls pushed forward relentlessly, grinding through improvised defenses like millstones crushing grain.
Doom stood atop a smelting platform, watching the battle turn. He could see the moment when fear would overcome determination, when the rebels would break and scatter. They had taken the Ironfields through surprise and superior knowledge of terrain. They could not hold it through force of arms.
So he would not fight with arms alone.
His gaze traveled upward to the central tower—a massive structure that anchored the entire complex's power distribution system. It had stood for sixty years, built by engineers who understood that stability required a single keystone, a focal point that bore the weight of the entire system.
Doom understood this as well. He had studied those blueprints for months.
"Fall back," he commanded through runners. "Sector seven. Controlled retreat. Draw them forward."
The rebels obeyed, fighting as they withdrew, making the soldiers pay for every foot of ground but yielding nonetheless. The shield walls advanced confidently, sensing victory, pressing harder as the enemy gave way.
Doom descended from the platform and moved toward the tower's base, where ancient support columns bore the weight of decades. He had placed shaped charges there two weeks ago, hidden in maintenance alcoves, waiting for exactly this moment.
The soldiers pushed into the killing ground beneath the tower, confident now, calling for the rebels to surrender.
Doom pressed his gauntlet against the detonation mechanism.
"Doom remembers," he said quietly.
The explosion was not loud—barely audible over the battle's roar. But the effect was cataclysmic.
The tower's keystone shattered. Support columns cracked and buckled. For a moment, the structure hung impossibly in space, defying gravity through sheer inertia. Then physics reasserted itself, and fifty thousand tons of stone, iron, and fire collapsed into the courtyard below.
The sound was like the mountain breaking in half.
When the dust cleared, Karath's elite unit no longer existed.
The survivors—rebel and soldier alike—stared at the rubble in stunned silence.
Then someone shouted it. Just one voice at first, then ten, then a hundred.
"DOOM! DOOM! DOOM!"
The remaining guards broke ranks. Not from numbers or superior tactics, but from the cold certainty that they faced something beyond military opposition. They faced a force of nature with intelligence and will. They faced annihilation given form.
They ran, and the rebels pursued with savage joy.
By nightfall, the Ironfields belonged to Doom.
There was no celebration.
Fires burned uncontrolled across the complex, consuming guard barracks and slave quarters with equal indifference. Bodies lay everywhere—rebel and soldier mixed together in the ash, indistinguishable in death. The air stank of burned flesh and cooling metal.
Doom stood amid the carnage and felt nothing. Not triumph. Not satisfaction. Just the cold calculation of cost versus gain.
This was not liberation. Liberation suggested freedom given, earned through moral superiority.
This was conquest, pure and brutal.
"Gather the dead," he ordered. "Name them where possible. For those without names, markers of iron."
The survivors moved to obey, too exhausted to question. They dragged bodies from the rubble, searched pockets for identification, whispered names into the darkness. Where no name could be found, they drove stakes of iron into the ground—unmarked graves for the unmarked.
The rebels watched Doom as he moved among the fallen, and they understood something fundamental. He did not promise them that death would be meaningful. He did not tell them their sacrifices were noble.
He simply remembered them. Even when the world would not.
That was enough.
As full darkness settled over the mountains, Doom climbed to the highest point of the conquered Ironfields—a slag heap still hot from the day's fires. Below him, the complex burned in patches, flames dancing against blackened stone. Survivors moved like shadows through the wreckage, tending to wounded, securing positions, beginning the work of transformation.
The iron mask reflected firelight, turning Doom's face into a beacon visible from every corner of the battlefield. He stood motionless, watching his work, and the mountain's hum rose around him—steady now, no longer questioning.
The rebellion had teeth.
The war had momentum.
And Latveria had felt its first true blow against the chains that bound it.
Doom raised one gauntleted hand toward the distant north, toward the command posts where Karath would be receiving reports, toward the centers of power that had feasted on Latverian suffering for generations.
"This is only the beginning," he said to the darkness.