Steel City: The Tower, the Capital, and the Last Free Place

Steel City was the first foundry city and the one every other city was copied from. It sits at the top of the map and it is bigger than the rest of them combined, because it was not built to do one thing — it was built to build the others. Every engine in every city on the road was designed here, and every engineer who ran one of them learned the trade here.

That is why it is the capital. Not because the Legion conquered it — it did not have to. Steel City was always the Legion’s, in the sense that GOLIATH built it, ran it, and was standing in it when he wrote the first conscription order. The city did not fall to the Legion. It became it.

From the outside it looks like what it is: an industrial city running at full tilt, permanently, with no concern for whether anyone inside it is comfortable. It is loud in a way the other maps are not. The whole place is one long shift.

The tower is in the middle of it, and it is the reason the campaign exists. Every foundry the Legion runs, in every captured city, answers to the tower. The conscription orders come out of it. The production schedules come out of it. There is no general staff, no council, no second-in-command — there is a single point that the entire war runs through, and it has been the same point for a hundred years.

It is also where GOLIATH is. He is the largest thing the Legion has ever made and the only one of them that has never been beaten, and he has not left the tower since the war began. He does not need to. Everything outside it is an extension of him.

The eighth level of Steel City is the tower. There is no map after it, and no level after it. Whatever happens in that fight is the end of the run.

Four territories stand between the gunner and Steel City, and each one is held by a commander the Legion left behind on purpose. They are not a defensive line — the Legion does not really do defensive lines. They are what the Legion does when a specific place needs somebody standing in it, and each of them is a person the Legion ruined in a specific way.

Lock & Load has a quartermaster who has never lost a shipment. Chocolate Forest has a chemist who poisoned the ground he was standing on. Apple Pie Factory has a woman who has not left the floor in years. Danger has something that was posted to watch the horizon and got an answer.

Every one of them is a warning about what the tower does to the people near it. By the time you reach Steel City you have seen four versions of the same thing, which is roughly the point.

The gunner is the last of the free companies, and the free companies are the last thing that was not the Legion. Steel City is the last place that was never taken — because it never had to be.

That makes the end of the campaign a strange kind of homecoming. The road to Steel City runs through the ruins of everywhere else, and the last map is the city that built all of them. If it falls, there is nothing after it, in either direction.