Free Weir Codex 1: The Cestus Concern by Mat Nastos

a baseball like grip on the tool’s handle, Zuzelo added, smiling wickedly, “Trust me. I’m a professional.”
    “Trust you?” repeated Mal as he widened his stance and lowered his center of gravity in preparation. “This is payback for the choking thing, isn’t it?”
    Zuzelo’s only response as he started his swing, “No comment.”
    The hammer slammed into Mal’s braced right arm, just above the elbow. It should have pulverized every bone in the area. Instead, the force of impact knocked Mal from his feet and sent him bouncing roughly across the dirty, oil-covered floor to slam into, and knock over, one of the rusted steel art pieces Zuzelo had created from the salvage.
    Mal slowly pushed himself up to a rather unsteady standing position, teeth still vibrating from the blow. Looking down, the cyborg noticed the living metal of his arm was unmarked, completely unblemished from the hammer strike. His eyes went wide and met with Zuzelo’s own astonished orbs.
    “Holy shit.”
    “Yeah,” agreed Zuzelo, resting the hammer’s shaft on his shoulder. “Do you know what just happened?”
    “You just hit me with a sledgehammer?”
    “Besides that, Mal. Don’t you understand?”
    Mal’s eyes bunched together and their lack of realization made Zuzelo shake his head in frustration.
    “The amount of forced delivered by a sledgehammer is one half the mass of the hammer’s head times the square of its speed at the time of impact.”
    “…and that is?”
    “It’s approximately…” Zuzelo’s face scrunched up, eyes gazing towards the ceiling, and mouth silently working through what seemed to be a rather intense equation. Nodding, the engineer answered, “…a shitload.”
    “A…shitload, you say,” grinned Mal. “Is that a technical term?”
    “Yup,” replied the man, mirroring Mal’s smile as he dropped the heavy tool back to the ground and used its shaft as a cane to lean on.
    “So what, pray tell, did you learn from that shitload?” requested Mal.
    “Quite a bit, actually. You see this?” Zuzelo flipped the sledgehammer back up for the cyborg to examine. “It’s got a tungsten-alloy head. One of the hardest metals around—it’ll dent, even punch through solid steel.”
    Mal gripped the hammer’s head in his right hand to examine it. He hardly felt its 35-pound weight in his hand.
    “Go on.”
    “The tungsten-alloy has a Mohs hardness rating of about nine—diamond has a ten.”
    “So?” Mal responded, unsure of what Zuzelo was trying to say. Unconsciously, his finger had begun to gouge thin strips of material from the side of the sledge’s hammerhead.
    “Look at your arm…I hit it full on with a sledgehammer made of one of the toughest substances around. It should be dented. Crushed. Damaged in some way.”
    They both stared hard at the gleaming, unblemished surface of Mal’s living metal arm, stunned.
    “It’s not even scratched…” came Mal’s voice in a half-whisper.
    “Not even scratched,” repeated Zuzelo, knowingly. He grabbed Mal’s arm and pulled him over to an open area of the workroom that contained a dark metal worktable nearly 10 feet long, a number of dark red gas canisters, each standing nearly five feet in height, and a welding set-up of some kind. “Come over here. Let’s try something.”
    Zuzelo popped on an old welder’s goggles and a pair of thick, dirty brown gloves. After a moment of fiddling with the machine’s controls, a bright white light emerged from the tip of the welder, and the engineer moved towards Mal.
    “What the hell are you doing?” gulped Mal as he shielded his eyes with one hand.
    “This is a gas tungsten arc welder. It burns at just over 3400 degrees Fahrenheit and slices through reinforced-steel like butter,” Zuzelo grabbed Mal’s hand dramatically, pausing for effect. “I’m going to try and cut your arm off, Mal.”
    Mal found himself unable to move as Zuzelo jammed the pulsating blue-white flame of the GTA welder to the