THE IRON MOTHER — CHAPTER II: THE SOUND OF STEEL

The rain did not stop. It drilled into the hospital roof like a thousand mechanical nails, each drop a heartbeat echoing through the dim corridors. Nurses whispered, afraid to speak the name that would curse them all—the “Steel Child.”

The General sat motionless, her back against the bed’s metal frame. The white sheet beneath her had turned a dull gray, soaked with sweat, blood, and rain leaking from the cracked ceiling. She stared at the newborn in her trembling arms. The child was quiet now, eyes open—too open.

Those eyes were not the eyes of an infant. They glimmered faintly, as though small electric currents were flowing through the veins. One iris shimmered brown, the other—cold silver.

“Ma’am,” a nurse whispered from the door, voice quivering. “Should we… call Command?”

The General did not answer. Her thoughts crawled through a battlefield of memories—cities burning, metallic skies, the roar of tanks, the smell of gunpowder and oil. She remembered the experiment. Project ARMA. The final stage that was abandoned when peace was declared.

Peace. What a fragile, temporary illusion.

Her breath came heavy. The doctor’s lifeless body still lay on the floor, a pool of blood expanding beneath him like a red shadow. She whispered to herself, almost in prayer, almost in confession:

“They said the war ended. But it never left us. It just found a new body to live in.”

The child blinked. The silver scale on its shoulder pulsed faintly, like a living heart of metal. A faint click sounded from inside its chest—mechanical, precise. The General froze.

The child moved.

Tiny fingers flexed, but they made no sound of skin and flesh—only the quiet rasp of metal brushing against bone. The cry that followed was no longer weak; it split the silence with eerie resonance, like a siren calling through a dead city.

The nurse screamed. The General rose, staggering toward the door. “Leave,” she ordered. Her voice was cracked but commanding, the voice of a soldier who had buried entire platoons. “Leave us.”

When the room emptied, she turned back to the child. Her reflection stared back at her from the steel patch glinting under the hospital light. For the first time, she felt truly defeated—not by bullets, not by armies, but by fate itself.

The storm outside reached its peak. Lightning flashed through the cracked window, and for a moment, it illuminated everything—the body of the fallen doctor, the trembling instruments, and the steel marking on the child’s skin.

Then came the sound. A low hum. Not from the machines. From the child.

The General leaned closer. The hum grew louder, transforming into a pattern—like coded whispers, or data being transmitted through invisible airwaves. She couldn’t understand the sound, but she felt it. Deep inside, in her blood.

The child’s silver eye flickered once. Then, faintly—impossibly—it smiled.

Outside, the hospital’s power grid flickered and went dark.

The city plunged into silence.

And for a brief, terrifying second, the world held its breath.

The Iron Mother stood in that darkness, holding the child of war in her arms. The storm raged on, but she no longer feared it. She knew what had been born that night wasn’t just her child. It was the echo of every explosion, every scream, every forgotten soldier who had fallen under her command.

A legacy she never asked for. A weapon disguised as life.

She whispered to the sleeping infant, her voice breaking:

“If the world made you out of steel, then I’ll teach you how to be human.”

The wind outside howled, carrying away the scent of rain and gunmetal. The Iron Mother closed her eyes, and for the first time in years, a tear rolled down her face—warm, human, fragile.

It fell onto the child’s silver shoulder. The metal hissed softly.

And then… the steel shimmered.