The captured guards talked easily once separated from their comrades. Fear made men generous with information, especially when the alternative was being returned to the general population of former slaves who remembered every lash, every humiliation, every casual cruelty.
Dragos had gone to ground in the administrative tower deep beneath the Ironfields. Intelligence reports pieced together from three different prisoners painted a clear picture: barricaded doors, stolen provisions enough for weeks, a cache of weapons, and most importantly, decades of records documenting every transaction, every sale, every slave who had passed through his domain.
He had turned the tower into a tomb, waiting for Karath's reinforcements to retake the complex.
Doom studied the tower's blueprints in the war room that had once been Dragos's planning chamber. Maps covered the walls, marked with movements and supply lines. Kael stood nearby, waiting for orders, assuming this would be another tactical problem to solve with overwhelming force.
"We'll need at least twenty fighters," Kael said, tracing potential entry points. "The lower corridors are narrow—defensible. He'll have sight lines from the upper floors. We could smoke him out, or—"
"No," Doom said quietly.
Kael stopped mid-sentence.
"No raid. No assault. No chaos." Doom's iron mask turned toward the engineer. "This is not a battle."
"Then what is it?"
"An execution."
Doom walked alone through the tower's entrance as sunset painted the sky the color of cooling iron.
He had forbidden anyone to follow. The rebels protested—Mara most vocally, arguing that commanders should not expose themselves needlessly—but Doom's word was absolute now. They had learned that his commands were not suggestions, and disobedience carried consequences.
The tower's corridors stretched before him in flickering half-light from emergency lamps that sputtered and died at irregular intervals. Dust hung in the air, disturbed by his passage. The architecture was old Latverian stonework, predating the mines, built when this had been something other than a prison complex.
Each step echoed deliberately. He did not hurry. He did not attempt stealth.
The sound of his boots on stone was designed to be heard, to carry through the empty passages, to announce his approach with the inevitability of a funeral bell.
Fear should be cultivated before blood was spilled. The anticipation of violence was often more effective than violence itself. Dragos would hear those footsteps and understand what they meant. He would have time to contemplate, to imagine, to let terror do its work before Doom ever reached him.
This was a lesson Doom had learned in the forges, watching metal break not from sudden impact but from sustained pressure applied at precisely the right points.
He climbed the stairs without haste, gauntlets humming softly in the silence.
Dragos's office occupied the tower's highest floor, a circular chamber with windows that once looked out over the entire mining complex. Now those windows were barricaded with furniture and crates. A single lamp burned on the massive desk that dominated the room's center.
Dragos stood behind that desk, holding a crossbow with hands that trembled just slightly. He was a large man, running to fat now after years of comfortable authority, but still solid beneath the excess. His face was red from drink or fear or both.
"Stay back," he shouted as Doom entered. The crossbow's aim wavered between Doom's chest and head. "I'm armed. I'm not some helpless slave you can—"
He stopped.
The iron mask tilted slightly, catching lamplight. Doom said nothing, simply stood in the doorway and waited.
"You're just a scarred slave," Dragos said, but his voice had lost certainty. "Hiding behind metal. Playing at being something you're not."
Doom took one step forward.
"I said stay back!" The crossbow bolt flew wild, clattering off stone three feet to Doom's left. Dragos fumbled for another bolt, fingers clumsy with panic.
Doom continued his measured advance, closing the distance with patient inevitability.
"I know you," Dragos said suddenly, and now genuine recognition crept into his voice. "The boy. The witch's bastard. You were—" His eyes widened. "Victor. Your name was Victor."
"Was," Doom agreed.
Dragos's face went pale. "I remember. The branding of Iron." He swallowed hard. "You should have died that day."
"I remember as well," Doom said, his voice modulated by the mask into something that bypassed human and landed somewhere near mechanical. "Shall I recite what I remember?"
He began to speak, not with anger or passion, but with the flat recitation of a clerk reading from inventory logs.
"Seventy-three brandings performed between spring and summer, Year of the Iron Moon. Forty-two men, twenty-six women, five children under the age of twelve. Three died from infection within the week. You noted the losses but continued the practice."
Dragos's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.
"Nineteen executions for theft—mostly bread, twice for water. Twelve for insubordination. Seven for attempting escape. You kept a tally board in the courtyard. You called it 'discouragement.'"
"That was—those were orders from—"
"Eleven thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven slaves processed through this facility during your tenure," Doom continued as if Dragos hadn't spoken. "You reduced them to numbers in ledgers. You measured their value by output. You assigned them costs and depreciation schedules."
He stopped directly before the desk, close enough now that Dragos could see his own reflection distorted in the mask's polished surface.
"You taught me how power speaks," Doom said softly. "You taught me that people become what you decide to call them. Numbers. Property. Inventory."
"I was following orders," Dragos whispered. "Karath's orders. The law. I was just—"
"Doing your duty," Doom finished. "Yes. I understand."
Doom walked slowly to the wall where trophies hung—commendations from Karath, certificates of efficiency, and there, mounted like hunting prizes, instruments of the Overseer's trade.
The branding iron hung in a place of honor, its handle wrapped in fine leather, its business end shaped into Karath's mark: A blazing sun.
Doom took it down carefully, reverently almost, as one might handle a sacred relic.
"Please," Dragos said. "I have information. Supply routes, guard rotations, Karath's strategic plans. I can help you. I can be useful."
Doom held the iron in his left gauntlet. Mechanisms whirred and clicked. Heat built in the palm, radiating outward, until the metal began to glow—first red, then orange, then white-hot and trembling with barely contained energy.
"I have wealth," Dragos continued, words tumbling over each other in desperation. "Hidden accounts. Enough to fund your rebellion for years. I'll swear loyalty. I'll serve you. I'll—"
"I know," Doom said.
Dragos's face brightened with desperate hope.
"And I refuse."
Doom moved.
He did not rush. Did not strike in rage or fury. He moved with the same deliberate patience he had shown entering the tower, crossing the room, approaching the desk.
His right gauntlet closed around Dragos's wrist with crushing force, pinning the Overseer against his own desk, scattering papers and ledgers to the floor. Dragos struggled, but he was soft from comfortable years, and Doom's gauntlet was forged from necessity and precision engineering.
The branding iron descended.
Doom carved slowly, deliberately, taking his time with each line and curve. Not Karath's seal—that symbol had lost its power the moment the Ironfields fell. Instead, he burned a new mark into Dragos's flesh: a stylized pattern that would become synonymous with judgment, with retribution, with the new order rising from the ashes.
Doom's sigil.
The screams echoed through the tower's empty corridors, carrying down stone stairs and through barricaded doors, reaching the ears of rebels standing guard outside who heard and understood the message being delivered.
This was not cruelty for cruelty's sake. This was not vengeance dressed as justice.
This was messaging—clear, unambiguous, and terrible in its clarity.
When the branding was finished, when Dragos had screamed himself hoarse and hung limp in Doom's grip, Doom lifted the iron one final time.
"You taught me this language," he said quietly. "I am merely speaking it back to you."
The blow was precise. Dragos died not as a man but as a symbol, killed by the same instrument he had wielded, burned by the system he had upheld with such casual brutality.
Doom held the body until he was certain life had fled, then let it fall.
He did not look away. He studied the result with clinical detachment, noting the pattern of burns, the way flesh had responded to heat and pressure, the effectiveness of the message carved into dead meat.
Knowledge gained at terrible cost should never be wasted.
At dawn, Dragos's body hung from the tower's highest window, displayed for all to see.
The brand on his chest was clearly visible even from a distance—Doom's sigil, rendered in scar tissue and char. No proclamation accompanied the display. No explanation was offered. No justification was given.
None was needed.
Word spread through the captured territory like fire through dry grass: Doom had found Karath's Overseer. He had used the branding iron. He had reclaimed the mark and made it his own.
The message reached Karath's remaining outposts by midday, carried by deserters and refugees, by merchants who had seen the body and soldiers who had heard the screams. Fear rippled through the chain of command like a wave through water.
If Doom could reach Dragos in his fortified sanctuary, he could reach anyone. If Doom could take the time to brand and execute rather than simply kill, then his vengeance was not impulsive but calculated. If Doom displayed bodies as messages, then he understood the language of power in ways that transcended mere military force.
Officers who had served under Karath for decades began to reconsider their positions. Guards at remote outposts looked over their shoulders with new wariness. Administrators who had grown comfortable in their authority suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable.
The rebellion had been dangerous. But Doom was something else entirely.
Alone in the tower that night, Doom cleaned the branding iron with meticulous care.
He sat in Dragos's chair—his chair now—and worked the dried blood from the metal with cloth and patience. The process was meditative, allowing him to examine the day's actions with the clarity that followed completed work.
He had killed before. Many times in recent days, and more impersonally in the machinery-driven slaughter of the Ironfields battle. But this had been different. This had been intimate and symbolic, designed not merely to eliminate an enemy but to send a message that transcended the simple mathematics of war.
Mercy inspired loyalty. He had seen it in the slaves who had been freed, who followed him now with genuine devotion because he had released them from bondage.
Justice inspired order. He had seen it in the way fighters fell into ranks, accepting discipline because they believed in the fairness of his commands.
But terror ensured obedience.
The realization settled over him like a cloak, neither welcome nor unwelcome, simply true. Those who loved him would follow. Those who trusted him would obey. But those who feared him would submit even when love and trust were absent.
Latveria would need all three to survive what was coming.
The branding iron gleamed in the lamplight, clean now, ready to be used again if necessary.
Doom set it aside and rose, moving to the window where Dragos's body still hung in the predawn darkness.
The sun rose slowly over the Ironfields, painting the sky in shades of blood and iron.
Rebels gathered in the courtyard below the tower, drawn by instinct or rumor or the simple need to witness what their revolution had become. They stood in silence, hundreds of them, staring up at the displayed corpse that twisted slowly in the mountain wind.
Doom emerged onto the tower's balcony and stood beneath the body, letting them see him in full daylight—the iron mask, the scorched cloak, the gauntlets that had crushed armor and heated brands.
The mountain's hum rose around him, deeper than before, resonant with something that might have been approval or acknowledgment or simply recognition that power had changed hands in ways that transcended simple violence.
Doom did not smile. The mask prevented that, but even without it, he would have maintained the same expression of absolute certainty. He had learned how rulers were heard—not through speeches or promises or appeals to better nature.
Through demonstration. Through consequence. Through the careful cultivation of fear in those who would oppose and certainty in those who would follow.
He raised one gauntleted hand, and the gathered rebels knelt as one.
Not in love, though some felt that.
Not in trust, though many believed.
In understanding. In recognition that they served something larger than themselves, something that would burn away the old order and forge the new in fire and iron and blood.
The body above him swung gently in the morning breeze, a message written in flesh that needed no translation.
This was how power spoke in the new Latveria.
And Doom had learned the language perfectly.