All Chapters of HIS REJECTED GODDESS: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

BOOK THREE: THE DEEP FORGE(Jace’s Perspective)Surviving the end of the world leaves you with a very strange problem: figuring out what to do with a Tuesday.I sat on the edge of a wide, fur-lined cot in the high healing dens of Iron Crest. The air in the stone chamber was biting and crisp, carrying the scent of pine and high-altitude snow. Through the arched window, the morning sun was just beginning to hit the jagged peaks of the caldera, turning the ice to spun gold.I looked down at my hands.They didn't hurt anymore. The blinding, static agony of my scorched nervous system had been smoothed out by Elias’s healing current. But the physical toll was permanent. The veins in my hands and forearms were pitch black, stark against my pale skin—the iron in my blood literally cooked into the tissue from holding the localized gravity tunnel at Mount Cinder.I tried to make a fist.My fingers curled inward, trembling slightly, but they stopped an inch short of my palm. The knuckles were st

BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)You cannot negotiate with the ocean. The ocean does not have a heartbeat; it has a tide. And for the first time in a century, the tide was listening to the earth.I stood at the very edge of the massive, stone-paved docks of the Aethelgard harbor. The air was thick with the smell of salt brine, raw kelp, and the sharp, metallic tang of hot slag."Lower it!" Corren’s gravelly voice roared over the crash of the waves.Above us, a towering, steam-powered iron crane groaned under immense strain. Suspended from its heavy chains was a forty-foot-long, cylindrical pylon made entirely of matte-black Starved Iron.Corren’s miners, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat in the cool ocean breeze, hauled on the thick guide ropes, aligning the massive pillar over the dark water of the bay.I watched with my black-veined hands clasped behind my back, my eyes tracking the geometry of the drop."The angle is off, Corren," I called out, my voice e

BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)Gravity is not a force; it is an argument. It is the earth demanding that everything return to its center. If you want to win that argument against an entire ocean, you cannot just raise your voice. You have to speak with something infinitely denser than water.I sat at the massive drafting table in the Grandmaster’s spire, surrounded by crumpled, rejected blueprints. The sun had set hours ago, leaving the room bathed in the flickering amber light of the oil lamps and the faint, rhythmic blue glow of my black-veined hands."It won't hold," I muttered, scratching out another complex geometric array with my graphite pencil. "The mathematics are impossible."Elara sat across the room, meticulously polishing the soot from her iron staff. "Why won't it hold? You held a localized gravity tunnel at Mount Cinder to let Kael drop the Anchor. The precedent is there.""I held a tunnel fifty feet long, and it permanently cooked my nervous system,"

BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)Time does not exist at the center of the earth. There is only the rhythm, and the crushing, absolute dark.CLANG.Cord’s Starved Iron sledgehammer slammed into the Sunken Anvil for the twentieth time. The kinetic shockwave hit Elara’s gravity bubble like a physical battering ram. The seventeen-year-old Grandmaster let out a strangled cry, her boots sliding backward across the freezing stone floor. A thin stream of bright red blood ran from her nose, instantly crystallizing into red dust in the absolute zero air."She's failing, Cord!" I shouted, the words ripped from my throat by the sub-audible hum of the core."Twenty-one!" Cord roared in response, ignoring me entirely.The seventy-two-year-old wolf was an absolute terror to behold. His massive, silver-furred hybrid body was completely drenched in sweat that froze the instant it hit his skin, encasing him in a thin, shifting layer of frost. The immense gravitational pressure of the ro

BOOK FOUR: THE ABYSSAL TIDE(Jace’s Perspective)An ambush only works if the prey doesn't know it’s being hunted. When both sides see each other in the dark, it stops being an ambush and becomes a race.We dropped the first ten core splinters in under an hour.Corren’s miners operated the heavy steam-cranes with terrifying efficiency. The iron containment boxes swung out over the bay, Elara projected her kinetic strikes to shatter them mid-air, and the localized gravity wells sunk into the bedrock.A mile-long invisible wall of impossible mass was forming across the mouth of the Aethelgard harbor. The ocean was physically bowing outward, unable to flow past the massive gravitational pillars.But down in the deep sight, the velvet shadow shifted.The hive-mind of the Leviathans wasn't stupid. It felt the physics of the bay warping. It realized the door to the human capital was closing.They're moving, I shouted, my black-veined hands gripping the iron railing of the dock. Corren! The t