The Foundry Cities: How the World Ran Before the War

Before the Legion, there were the foundry cities. Not nations — nobody in them would have recognised the word. They were industrial settlements that grew up around a single great engine, and everything in the city was downstream of that engine: the heat, the light, the water, the work. A city was its foundry, and the foundry was the city.

There were dozens of them, spread across the territories that the campaign now crosses. Lock & Load was one of the richest, a mining and manufacturing town that forged weapons for everyone else. Chocolate Forest was farmland that happened to sit on a good seam of coal. Apple Pie Factory was a food city, and the only one that could feed a population that was not standing in a field. Danger was the frontier, a scattering of outposts where the maps ran out. And Steel City was the first, the biggest, and the one that built all the others.

For a hundred years they traded freely. Weapons went out of Lock & Load, food came in from the factory, coal moved both ways, and nobody who lived in any of it had ever had to hold a rifle. That is the part worth holding onto: the world before the war was not primitive or poor. It worked.

Each city was run by whoever controlled its foundry, which in practice meant a small group of engineers and quartermasters who had the technical knowledge to keep the engine alive. They were not kings. They could not be — the engine did not care who was in charge, and a city whose engine stopped was a city that was over.

So the cities were practical above everything. Disputes were settled by whoever could keep the gears turning. Trade agreements were measured in output rather than in gold. There was no army because there was nothing worth invading: taking a city meant inheriting an engine you did not know how to run.

That is the arrangement the Legion broke. It did not need the cities to keep working. It needed them to keep producing.

The first was GOLIATH himself — the engineer who built Steel City, and the only person who understood the foundry system well enough to see it as a single machine rather than a hundred separate ones. Everyone else saw cities. He saw a production line that had never been switched on.

The second was the conscription order. The Legion did not need soldiers in the ordinary sense; it needed bodies, and the foundries of a captured city could supply those. Weld a person into a suit, point them at the next city, and repeat. The army grew out of the war instead of being assembled for it.

The third, and the one people forget, was that the cities had no way to coordinate a defence. They had never needed one. By the time any two of them agreed to fight together, the Legion had taken four of the ones in between, and a hundred years of practical, local, sensible government turned out to be exactly the wrong shape for fighting a war that was being run from a single tower.

The campaign walks through the wreckage of four of them and ends at the fifth. Lock & Load is a working Legion factory now, its mines feeding the war instead of arming the peace. Chocolate Forest is poisoned, its groves turned sour by waste the Legion dumped there. Apple Pie Factory still runs, at a temperature that would kill an ordinary person, feeding an army that does not need to eat. Danger is rubble and craters.

Steel City is the one that never fell, because it was never attacked — it was already the Legion’s. It is where the tower is, and it is where the road ends.

The gunner is what is left of the free companies, which is a grand way of saying one man. That is the whole state of the world before the war: a hundred years of working cities, and one person still standing in the road.