The metal didn’t just enter his body; it remembered him. It started with a twitch in Elias’s ring finger—a rhythmic, hydraulic clicking that sounded like a cooling radiator. He thought it was a tremor brought on by too much caffeine and the relentless hum of the city, but when he looked down, the skin was taut and shined with the dull, oily luster of galvanized steel.

The city spoke to him then. Not in words, but in frequencies. He could feel the subway trains screaming through the earth like iron worms; he could hear the structural groans of the skyscrapers leaning into the wind. He wasn't Elias anymore. He was a blueprint coming to life.

He reached for a glass of water, but his hand wouldn't obey. The fingers had fused, elongated into a jagged cluster of copper wiring and rusted rebar. He watched, paralyzed by a mixture of horror and a burgeoning, electric ecstasy, as a television cable snaked out from his wrist and plugged itself into the wall socket. The surge was divine.

By midnight, the apartment felt too small, too organic. The drywall seemed to breathe with a moist, suffocating heat. Elias collapsed against his workbench, his breath coming in ragged, metallic rasps. Every time his heart beat, it sounded like a hammer striking an anvil. Clang. Clang. Clang.

A scream tore from his throat, but it came out as a burst of static. His jaw unhinged, held together by gleaming bicycle chains. His skin cracked open, revealing a chassis of scrap metal and pressurized tubes. He felt the "Great Rust" itching at the back of his brain—the primal urge to consume, to weld, to integrate.

He tried to peel it away, expecting a scab. Instead, he felt the sickening, grinding slide of a piston under his ribs.

Elias stepped out onto the fire escape, his new limbs clanging against the iron slats. He looked at the sprawling metropolis and saw not a city, but a graveyard of unrefined ore waiting for a god.