Cold was the first thing I felt.

  Not the noble frost from fairy tales, but the sticky, briny chill of a coastal night—the kind that seeps through your clothes and starts chewing on your bones.

  I opened my left eye. The right was glued shut with something viscous—blood, maybe, or seawater mixed with sand. The world was tilted. Gray sky, gray sand, and a shard of rusted metal sticking out of the ground a couple of meters from my nose.

  I tried to push myself up with my right hand.

  And fell into nothing.

  A sharp jolt shot through my spine. I smashed face-first into wet pebbles, swallowing sand. Something clicked in my head, and a translucent, flickering message floated into view. It didn’t look like magic.

  It looked like a system error.

  [Status: 12%. Critical threshold.]

  [Pain shock: Suppressed by 75%.]

  [Warning: Right limb missing. Attempting recalibration… Error.]

  “Son of a—” I exhaled. Each word grated against my ribs. “Shut up. Go away.”

  The skill The Will to Live didn’t disappear. It just dimmed slightly, hovering in the corner of my vision like an annoying fly. It didn’t offer hope. It simply stated a fact: kid, you’re about to die if you don’t start moving.

  I rolled onto my back, breathing hard. My left arm—the only one I had left—felt heavy, filled with lead. I looked at my right shoulder. Where my elbow and hand used to be, there was now a stump wrapped in a strip of scorched fabric. The cloth was soaked with salt and blackened.

  “Alive?”

  The voice sounded like two sheets of iron grinding together.

  I turned my head.

  He stood in the surf. Massive. Absurd. Nearly three meters of matte-black steel that, in the twilight, looked like a hole torn in space itself.

  Kyle’s armor—no, now it was Zeno—looked awful. Dents. Scraped paint. Empty eye sockets in the helm, deep within them a faint green glow flickering.

  Zeno stepped toward the shore. His leg—a massive steel column—sank into the wet sand almost to the knee. He jerked; hydraulics in the joint emitted a drawn-out whine, and he nearly pitched face-first into the water.

  “Center of gravity,” he rumbled. “Displaced. Body mass exceeds ground bearing capacity.”

  “Get used to it, teacher.” I tried to smirk, but my lip split, and my mouth filled with the taste of iron. “You’re not in a cloud of data anymore. You’re in half a ton of scrap metal. Welcome to the real world.”

  Zeno froze, studying his hands—huge, clawed manipulators Kyle once used to tear people in half. He slowly clenched and unclenched a fist.

  Kh-h-h-ch. Metal on metal.

  “This is… inconvenient,” he stated. “I feel atmospheric resistance. I feel the salt corroding my contacts. Iron, your vitals are at twelve percent. If we do not find heat and fresh water, in three hours I will be alone in this iron coffin.”

  A head appeared from behind a large rock.

  Old Efrem. He looked as though he’d aged ten years overnight. He clutched a broken plank, staring at Zeno with superstitious terror.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Boy… what in God’s name… is that him?” Efrem pointed at the steel giant with a trembling finger. “That thing of yours… the one from your head?”

  “That’s him, Efrem.” I forced myself to sit up, using my left arm as a lever. “Help me.”

  The old man rushed over, circling Zeno in a wide arc as if he were a dormant volcano. He grabbed me under the arms and dragged me farther from the water, toward a pile of driftwood.

  “We need fire,” I said, slumping against a log. “Efrem, gather anything dry you can find. Zeno, don’t just stand there like a monument. Get over here. We need to solve the water problem.”

  Zeno moved onto firmer ground. Each step made the earth vibrate beneath my shoulder blades. He sat directly on the sand beside me. The hum of his internal systems sounded like a poorly lubricated machine.

  “We have no boilers. No fuel besides this rotting wood,” Zeno observed, looking at the driftwood pile. “Desalination via evaporation under these conditions would have an efficiency below five percent.”

  “Forget the numbers.” I shut my eyes, feeling Will to Live begin to pulse. “Use your head. Over there—” I pointed at the heap of debris washed ashore with us. “Fragments of Kyle’s armor plates. They’re concave. If we put one over the fire with seawater, and cover it with another—kept cool—”

  “Open-fire distillation without a sealed system,” Zeno interrupted. “Losses would amount to—”

  “I don’t give a damn about losses!” I snapped, and the shout dissolved into coughing. My throat was as dry as a forge bellows. “We don’t have a lab. We have dirt, salt, and your new hands. Do it.”

  Zeno fell silent. His visor flickered twice. He rose and approached the debris. His movements were strange—calculated, yet lacking human fluidity. He took a steel plate an inch thick and bent it like cardboard, shaping a crude bowl.

  Meanwhile, Efrem struggled with the fire. No flint—he was trying to strike sparks with a knife against stone. Miserable results.

  “Allow me,” Zeno rumbled.

  He approached the pit, leaned down, and extended his left hand. A frayed wire snapped out from his wrist joint. A brief flash, the crackle of an electric arc—and the dry moss under the branches burst into bright flame.

  Efrem stumbled back, nearly falling into the fire.

  “Holy miracle…” he whispered.

  “No, old man.” Zeno turned his empty helm toward him. “A short circuit of the mana accumulator into a grounded conductor.”

  I stared at the fire and felt something shift inside me.

  The triumph in the Citadel had been washed away by the first wave. We were nobody. A cripple, an old man, and a spirit lost in a steel body.

  An hour later, we had our first cup of fresh water. It reeked of smoke, copper, and something else—but when the warm liquid touched my throat, I almost cried.

  [Status: 15%. Positive trend detected.]

  “We can’t stay here,” I said, handing the cup to Efrem. “Valerius isn’t an idiot. He’ll send people to check where his ‘Key’ and his best Hound disappeared.”

  “They will track us,” Zeno agreed, staring toward the ocean. “My passive sensors detect vibration. Six… no, eight individuals. Approximately three kilometers east. Moving quickly.”

  “Trackers,” Efrem exhaled. “They’ll dig us out of the ground if they have to.”

  I looked at my left hand. Weak.

  Then at the stump of my right.

  “Zeno. I need an arm.”

  “Your tissues have not healed, Iron. An interface implantation under these conditions—”

  “I don’t need an interface,” I cut him off, staring at fragments of trophy bows Zeno had dragged from the shore. “I need a prosthetic. Crude. Heavy. Cable-driven. You’re an AI. You know how a shoulder works. Design me a lever system so I can control a grip using movement from my left scapula.”

  Zeno tilted his head. His drives gave a faint whine.

  “That is… primitive. Pure mechanics. Without feedback, you will not feel the object. You will either crush it or drop it.”

  “Then I’ll learn not to crush it. We don’t have time for fine tuning. Do the blueprint in your head. Efrem, gather every piece of metal you can find. We move to the mountains before dawn.”

  I tried to stand. The world tilted again. Will to Live flashed red, warning of pressure drop.

  “Iron.” Zeno stepped closer and placed his massive hand on my good shoulder. The metal was cold, but the grip—surprisingly careful. “Your body is at its limit. If I start attaching metal to your bones now, you may not wake up.”

  I looked into his green ocular.

  “Teacher, you said it yourself—entropy doesn’t wait. If they catch us, we die anyway. I’d rather die trying to hold a hammer than lie here like a slab of meat.”

  Zeno was silent for a long time. Only the crackle of fire and the surf filled the air.

  “Accepted,” he said at last. “Efrem, heat the knife in the fire. I will need to make incisions.”

  I lay back on the sand, staring at the stars—far more numerous here than above the Citadel. Cold. Indifferent to my calculations.

  “You know, Zeno…” I whispered as the Golem began bending steel for my future shoulder. “I used to think engineering was about building machines.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I think it’s about not letting yourself fall apart.”

  That night on the ocean shore, there was no magic.

  There was only the stench of burnt flesh, the rasp of a file against rusted steel, and Zeno’s calm, steady voice dictating my survival percentages as I slowly drifted into the darkness of shock.