The concrete floor was ice-cold, but I barely felt it. My knees were numb from crawling through the mud, and my palms had turned into raw pulp — skin torn away, mixed with coal dust. I breathed heavily, wheezing, coughing concrete powder out of my lungs.

  Beside me, slumped against the slick wall of a maintenance alcove, lay Efrem. He looked like a dead fish thrown onto shore — gray, soaked, motionless. His left shoulder was nothing but shredded fabric and crushed bone.

  “Leave him…” Zeno’s voice in my head no longer thundered — it rustled, like dry leaves underfoot. “His heart rhythm is unstable. Probability of fatal outcome: eighty-two percent. You are wasting your remaining calories on a corpse. Move to the node while the thermal trace from the collapse is still active.”

  “Shut up,” I rasped, wiping my face with a filthy sleeve. “I don’t throw away tools just because the chisel got bent.”

  I crawled closer to the old man. My right hand — the one the crystal had turned into a green nightlight — was shaking. I looked at it. The skin had become thin as parchment, and I could see the bones beneath it — no longer white, but translucent, like cloudy quartz.

  I had to understand what was happening to him.

  I closed my eyes and pressed my glowing palm against Efrem’s chest.

  The world instantly transformed into a blueprint.

  I didn’t see Efrem — I saw a system.

  Pressure in the main lines was dropping. Somewhere near the clavicle there was a “leak” — an artery severed by a stone fragment. Blood was flooding into the soft tissue, building internal pressure that was compressing neighboring nodes.

  Pure mechanics.

  If the leak wasn’t stopped, the pump — his heart — would fail due to lack of working fluid.

  “Alright… okay…” I swallowed thick saliva. “We seal it.”

  My fingers — чужие, unnaturally long — touched the wound. I didn’t know healing spells. The Order never taught them — cannon fodder doesn’t get self-repair privileges.

  But I knew physics.

  I focused on my fingertips, forcing the crystal in my chest to vibrate at a high frequency. Pain exploded — like red-hot needles being driven under my nails.

  “What are you doing?” Zeno sounded confused. “You’re burning your own channels for this scrap heap?”

  I ignored him.

  I found the ruptured vessel — pulsing, pumping life out of Efrem. I clamped it with my finger and released a short, focused thermal discharge.

  The smell of burnt flesh filled the air.

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  The vessel sealed — fused shut, like a copper pipe under a blowtorch.

  “Stage one complete,” I exhaled. Sweat streamed down my face, burning my eyes.

  Now the bone.

  The clavicle was shattered into three segments. One wrong movement and the jagged edges would puncture his lung from the inside.

  No cast. No splints.

  I reached for the magical filaments protruding from my hand like microscopic spider silk. These weren’t spells — they were force-lines of the crystal itself.

  I began carefully “stitching” them into Efrem’s flesh, building an external frame around the broken bone.

  Like engineers reinforcing a cracked column with steel bands.

  When the last thread locked into place, I collapsed backward. My fingers no longer glowed.

  They smoked.

  Efrem jerked and opened his eyes. He didn’t scream — he didn’t have the strength. He only wheezed and stared at me in horror, like I was a demon crawled out of the abyss.

  “What… what did you do…” he whispered, staring at his arm, where a faint green glow pulsed beneath the skin — my “stitches.”

  “I fixed you,” I wiped my hands on my pants, smearing more dirt. “Artery sealed. Bone stabilized. You’ll live. If you walk.”

  Efrem tried to rise — and immediately groaned. He looked at his arm. Then at me.

  “You’re not human, Iron. Zeno… he actually did it. He put knowledge in your head that mortals aren’t meant to have. You don’t heal. You… reassemble.”

  I wanted to say it was just basic material resistance theory.

  But then the sound came from the tunnel behind us.

  BOOM.

  A deep, heavy удар — like a giant hammer slamming into stone.

  BOOM.

  “He’s digging through the collapse,” Efrem went pale. “Kyle. He doesn’t have lungs, kid. He doesn’t need air. He’ll dig until he chews his way through.”

  I stood, swaying. The skill [The Will to Live] blinked red: 7% energy.

  An empty tank running on fumes.

  We moved on.

  The tunnel widened into a massive chamber filled with pipes and rusted valves.

  The Distribution Node.

  Three paths lay before us.

  The left tunnel rose steeply upward. Cold and ozone flowed from it.

  “That way,” Zeno commanded. “Technical shafts. Two kilometers to a reserve Order terminal. I can intercept door control.”

  The right tunnel was choked with debris and animal skeletons.

  “We can’t go there,” Efrem shook his head. “Crawler nests. Swamp burrowers. They’ll eat us before ten steps. We need the middle — abandoned mines. We can disappear there.”

  I looked at both paths.

  Then I looked down.

  Beneath my feet, behind a rusted drainage grate, was a narrow vertical shaft — clogged with old rags and trash.

  “We’re going down,” I said.

  “You’re insane,” Efrem stared at it. “That’s a sewage chute! It’s full of rot!”

  “Statistically illogical,” Zeno added. “Probability of that path leading anywhere: under five percent.”

  I crouched and tore the rusted grate free. My fingers screamed with pain, but the crystal fed me unnatural strength.

  “Valerius expects us to go up — into his system. Or into the mines — where we can be boxed in,” I growled, throwing the grate aside.

  “He predicts logic. He knows you’ll choose the network, Zeno. He knows you’ll choose concealment, Efrem.”

  I stared into the black mouth of the shaft.

  “But he doesn’t know how an engineer thinks without a blueprint.

  An engineer always looks for bypass routes — through technical voids.”

  I jumped first.

  Cold, stinking slime wrapped around my body.

  “Jump, old man! Or stay and greet Kyle. He’s close.”

  Above us, stone collapsed.

  Kyle broke through.

  His heavy, metallic steps echoed through the chamber.

  Cursing, Efrem squeezed his eyes shut and jumped after me into the darkness.

  We fell only briefly, landing in a pile of soft, rotting waste.

  Darkness sealed above us.

  “You made a mistake…” Zeno whispered.

  But in his voice, I heard something new.

  Not anger.

  Curiosity.

  I lay in the filth, heart pounding in my throat.

  We were in the system’s blind zone.

  No magic. No rules.

  Just me, a wounded marauder, and darkness.

  And somewhere deep in my mind, in the darkest corner, Zeno suddenly laughed quietly.

  “You really are a defect, Iron.

  And that’s the only thing that might save us.”