The fifth day started the same as the others.
Max climbed the mountain following the stream, arrived at the plateau, found Elder Soo sitting on his rock in the morning sun with his eyes closed and his tea cooling beside him.
He sat down.
He waited.
The old man opened his eyes.
"You're back," he said.
"I'm back," Max confirmed.
Elder Soo looked at him with the evaluating expression Max had learned to recognize over the past four days — not hostile, just measuring, the look of someone checking something against a standard only they could see.
He picked up his tea.
Set it down again.
"If you can beat me," he said, "I'll answer your questions."
Max looked at him.
The old man was perhaps eighty. Small frame, deliberate movements, hands that were steady but clearly old.
"I don't want to hurt you," Max said carefully.
Elder Soo looked at him with an expression that suggested he found this concern mildly offensive.
"That's very considerate," he said. "Beat me anyway."
"You're sure."
"I've been sure of very few things for as long as I've been sure of this." He stood from his rock with his usual unhurried ease. "Whenever you're ready."
Max stood.
He didn't activate Full Despair. Didn't call on Ruga or Stage Two or anything that felt disproportionate against an elderly man on a mountain plateau.
He activated Stage One.
The silver suit manifested. The katana appeared across his back and he drew it in one clean motion. The twin guns materialized in his left hand, ready to switch between them.
Proportionate. Controlled. Enough to demonstrate genuine effort without endangering someone who was technically offering hospitality.
"Okay old man ," Max said. "I'm ready."
Elder Soo reached beside his door and picked up a hammer.
Just a hammer. The kind a blacksmith use. Old iron head, worn wooden handle, nothing about it suggesting anything other than a tool that had driven a lot of nails over a very long time.
He held it loosely at his side.
"Go," he said.
Max moved forward with controlled speed — not his fastest, not his most committed, just enough to close distance and demonstrate intent.
Elder Soo swung the hammer.
The motion was casual.
The hammer was not.
It left his hand and crossed the distance between them in less time than Max's instincts could fully process and hit him in the chest with force.
Max went backward three feet and landed sitting down.
He looked at the old man.
Elder Soo had already called the hammer back — it returned to his hand like it had been on a string, the metal head trailing something that might have been sui energy in the light.
"Again," the old man said pleasantly.
Max got up.
He tried a different angle — coming from the left, faster this time, the katana raised into a genuine guard position.
Elder Soo swung the hammer again without apparent urgency.
Max blocked with the katana.
The impact drove his arms back into his chest with enough force that he felt it in his back teeth.
The hammer bounced off the katana and returned to the old man's hand like it was glad to be home.
Max sat down again.
Involuntarily.
"The hammer," Max said from the ground.
"Yes," Elder Soo said.
"That's your curse."
"Hammer Creation ," the old man said. "I can create hammers and they can multiple . Very simple curse. Very boring at parties." He looked at Max sitting in the dust. "I've had eighty years to become extremely good at it."
Max got up for the third time.
He tried the guns — silver bullets from range, forcing the old man to address the distance rather than letting him dictate the engagement's proximity.
Elder Soo created three new hammers.
They moved in front of him like a rotating shield, silver bullets striking iron heads and deflecting harmlessly into the mountain air, and while Max was watching the shield a fourth hammer he hadn't seen came from his left side and hit him in the ribs.
He went down sideways.
The hammers returned to Elder Soo's hands one by one like obedient dogs.
Max lay on the plateau looking at the sky.
The sky was very blue and entirely unhelpful.
He thought about the problem.
Ten hammers, the old man had implied. He'd used four. The other six were presumably available at any moment from any direction, which made conventional approach essentially impossible since every line of attack he opened became an opening for something he wasn't watching.
He couldn't block all of them.
He couldn't dodge all of them.
He couldn't outrange them because they could apparently travel indefinitely and always returned.
He lay there for another moment while Elder Soo waited patiently.
Then something occurred to him.
Not a technique. Not a plan exactly.
Just an observation.
The hammers always came back.
To the old man's hands specifically.
Which meant they always knew where his hands were.
Which meant they were tracking something — his hands, his energy, his intention, some signal that told them where home was so they could return to it.
Max stood up slowly.
He put the katana away.
He put the guns away.
He stood empty-handed in front of Elder Soo and reached inward for the Worio inheritance — not forcing it, just opening toward it the way he'd learned to open toward Vista's gift, invitation rather than demand.
He felt it stir.
Not fully. Not the deliberate sovereign refusal he'd used against Sovereign Rule. Just a quiet presence, the inheritance acknowledging it had been asked.
He looked at the old man's hands.
At the hammers resting in them.
He took one step forward.
Elder Soo swung.
All ten hammers launched simultaneously — from every angle, covering every approach, the full deployment that four days of observation had apparently been building toward, the old man apparently deciding this had gone on long enough.
Max didn't block any of them.
He closed his eyes.
The hammers hit him.
All ten.
He felt each impact.
They were not comfortable.
But they were lighter than they should have been — not because he'd done anything technically correct, but because whatever the Worio inheritance was doing in that moment had changed something subtle about how he occupied space, how the hammers' tracking registered his position.
The hammers couldn't quite find him properly.
Not fully — he still had what were going to be significant bruises across most of his body.
But the return path was disrupted.
Three of the ten hammers, on their way back to Elder Soo's hands, curved wrong.
They passed by him.
One hit the mountain face.
One disappeared over the plateau's edge.
One landed at Elder Soo's feet instead of in his hands.
The old man looked at it.
Looked at Max.
Max stood in the middle of the plateau covered in what were definitely going to be spectacular bruises, having technically allowed himself to be hit by ten hammers simultaneously, somehow having disrupted the return path of three of them through something he couldn't fully explain or reproduce on demand.
Not a victory by any normal standard.
Elder Soo looked at the hammer at his feet for a long moment.
In eighty years of using this gift, Max suspected, no hammer had ever landed at his feet rather than his hands.
The old man bent slowly, picked it up, held it.
Looked at Max.
"Lucky," he said.
"Yes," Max agreed.
A pause.
"Sit down before you fall ," the old man said. "I'll make more tea. And then—"
He turned toward his door.
"Then I'll answer your questions."
Max sat down on his rock.
His entire body was informing him in considerable detail about every hammer that had connected.
Vista materialized beside him, looked at his condition, and had the grace not to say anything immediately.
After a moment she said:
"Lucky."
"Don't," Max said.
She smiled and said nothing else.
Inside the small stone house Elder Soo's kettle began to heat and the stream moved beside the plateau and somewhere below the Lily Kingdom went about its day entirely unaware that an old man with a hammer had just agreed to explain the foundations of the world.
End of Chapter