The Calamity roared, which sounded like thousands of weapons screaming at the same time, and then it flew at him. Greg's whole family moved.

Marina turned up the heat on her frying pan to its highest setting, making a wall of fire that made the Calamity change its course. Lylia and Tunner worked together to hit the construct in such a way that one of its lower appendages broke off, making its flight unstable.

Seraphine used up all of her mana to make an ice platform that gave Greg a higher place to stand. Felix's Infinite Luck System seems to have set off a chain reaction of probabilities that made some of the Calamity's weapon parts stop working at important times.

Elwen's vines came out of every crack in the street and wrapped around the Calamity's lower parts, holding it in place for a few seconds. "NOW!" she yelled, her voice hoarse.

Greg lifted the Resonance Hammer with his mind, and the huge thing moved as easily as his own arm. He could feel the kinetic energy that had built up in it, hours of potential force squeezed into one spot.

As he focused all of his energy on one clear goal, the Thoughtforged Hammer in his hand glowed white-hot.

END! THIS!

The Resonance Hammer fell down.

The impact was more than sound, more than sight, and more than any other normal sensory experience. The universe seemed to take a breath and hold it.

The hammerhead hit the Calamity's core, which was made up of all the ore at its center. All of the stored kinetic energy was released in a single, terrible instant.

The Calamity didn't go off. It broke.

Four hundred and fifty feet of broken metal and stolen souls fell apart like glass hit by a sledgehammer. Some pieces were as big as buildings, while others were no bigger than coins.

The huge amount of kinetic energy broke the magical bonds between the weapons, forcing them to come apart. The yelling stopped, and the negative energy went away like smoke in the wind.

It rained metal for what seemed like hours. Greg fell to his knees, and the Thoughtforged Hammer fell from his limp fingers.

The Resonance Hammer broke into pieces that disappeared before they hit the ground. His mind felt like it had been scraped raw from the strain of having so much power, and his body reminded him of every injury, every time he had pushed himself too hard, and every time he had ignored the pain.

But they had won.

"Greg!" Marina was there to catch him before he could fall into the rubble. "You crazy genius! You really did it!"

Everyone else came over, and they all looked like they had just come back from war. Lylia had a cut above her eye that was bleeding a lot.

There were a dozen cracks in Tunner's armor. Felix was holding Seraphine up because she had fallen. Greg couldn't tell if Elwen was crying because she was relieved or worn out.

Greg was able to ask, "Is everyone alive?"

"Mostly," Bork said as he limped over with Mira's help. "Hilda's fine. I'll be fine too, probably. Everyone else has injuries, but none of them are life-threatening."

"The most important thing is that... we won!" The words seemed too good to be true.

After everything, all the death, destruction, and desperate fighting, they had really won. But winning meant having to take on more responsibility.

"Survivors," Greg told himself to stand up even though Marina didn't want him to. "We need to search because there could be people trapped in the debris."

"People who were caught up in the Calamity."

No one disagreed with hearing that. They spread out across the giant field of debris, calling out for any sign of life and carefully picking up smaller pieces of wreckage in the hope of finding someone who could be saved.

The Calamity had taken thousands of lives during its rampage. Most of the victims were likely dead, as their bodies were too intertwined with the mass of the construct to have survived the collapse. However, there was a slim possibility that some had been taken recently and were still alive.

They discovered three. A city guard who had been knocked out during the first attack but was still breathing.

A civilian who had been caught in the western district, which had once been a cage of swords. A shopkeeper who tried to protect their store and ended up in the nightmare as a result.

Greg personally took each one to the makeshift medical area that had been set up in a building that had somehow stayed mostly intact. He was in pain with every step, but he wouldn't stop until all three were in the healers' hands.

He saw it while he was on his way back to look for more. The core.

There was a crater in the middle of the debris field, where the Calamity had been when it broke up. And at the bottom of that crater, something glowed with a sickly purple light, partially buried in rubble.

The ore matrix as a whole. Agatha's twisted craftsmanship turned Voidsilver, Chaosweave Alloy, and Calaminite into a single cursed object.

Greg climbed down into the crater, and his blacksmith instincts told him to look at the core to figure out how it had been made. It was both fascinating and disgusting at the same time.

It was the kind of work that showed off wonderful skill for the worst possible reason. He heard the applause when he reached out to touch it.

Not fast, but slow, like step by step. Greg turned around right away, and his blood froze.

Agatha Crowbane stood at the edge of the crater and smiled down at him. It wasn't a silly smile.

Her hair was whiter than before, and her face had more lines, as if she had aged ten years in the time since they last saw her. But there was something in her eyes that could have been madness or victory.

"Good job, blacksmith who refused to make weapons," she said, and her voice was clear even though they were far apart. "You destroyed the Calamity."

"You showed that peaceful ideas can win over weapons-based destruction. You saved the city and became the hero."

Greg saw that she was leaning heavily on her staff as she took a step closer to the edge. She had to pay a lot to break whatever link she had with the Calamity.

"You must be very proud of yourself," Agatha said again. "Feeling all accomplished and right in what you believe."

Greg asked, "What are you doing here?" as he reached for the Thoughtforged Hammer but then remembered that he had dropped it in the rubble.

"I don't know... probably watching or maybe waiting while getting ready for something more." Agatha's smile grew bigger. "Did you really think the Calamity was the end?"

"Did you think I spent thirty years planning just to make one destructive construct?"

Greg's stomach sank. "What are you trying to plan now...?"

"I gave you what you needed to win, which was a clear enemy, a just cause, and a fight that would push you to your limits." Agatha's eyes sparkled. "And in doing so, I proved my point."

"When they feel threatened enough, even the most peaceful blacksmith will make weapons, embrace destruction, and become exactly what they say they are against."

Greg said, "The Resonance Hammer wasn't a weapon," but he knew how weak it sounded even as he said it.

"It was a fifty-foot structure that used kinetic force to destroy things. You used it to break something into a million pieces."

"Tell me, blacksmith, what else would you call a weapon?" Agatha laughed, and the sound echoed in the crater. "You've already made my point."

"The Warhammer Saint didn't really die... he just got better at lying to himself!"

"Now then," she said, and the same purple light that came from the ore core began to shine on her staff. "Now that you've passed the test and shown that you can still destroy things when you want to, let me show you what I've really been working toward."

The ore core at Greg's feet began to pulse, and he could feel the ground move under him.

"The Calamity was never meant to win," Agatha said, her voice getting louder. "It was supposed to show you who you really are."

"Now that the lesson is over..."

She held her staff high, and the whole field of debris started to glow with a nasty purple light.

"The real test starts."

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