The darkness was so dense it felt chewable. It clogged the mouth, the nose, wrapped around the eyes with a sticky shroud. Here, on the “technical horizon,” the world had reduced itself to sounds and smells. The stench of old rust, wet limestone, and something stagnant—like a basement that hadn’t been opened for a hundred years.

  I lay face down, feeling a heap of junk sag beneath me—either old rags or someone’s dried bones. Nearby, Efrem was breathing heavily, wheezing with every inhale. Each breath echoed inside me as dull pain. My “stitches” were holding his vessels together, but they couldn’t replace the blood he had lost.

  “Alive?” I croaked. My own voice sounded alien, like sandpaper scraping dry wood.

  “For now… I think,” the old man replied. “Where did you drag us, kid? There’s nothing here. Absolutely nothing.”

  He was right. For the first time in a long while, silence settled inside my head. Zeno was quiet. The crystal in my chest no longer pulsed with furious emerald light—it barely glimmered, like a dying ember. Cut off from external mana, severed from the Order’s network, the “virus” in my mind had entered deep hibernation.

  The relief was so overwhelming it almost made me cry. At last, my thoughts belonged to me alone. No “probabilities.” No “directives.” Just me, an engineer, and my broken world.

  I forced myself up. My body answered with a protesting groan. The skill [The Will to Live] flickered before my eyes, its icon dim and barely visible.

  [System Status: Critical exhaustion. Energy reserve: 4%. Muscle tissue degradation initiated.]

  Four percent. That meant I had maybe thirty minutes of active movement before my organs started shutting down one by one. I needed fuel. And I needed to understand where we were.

  I pulled a flint striker from my pocket—magic was far too expensive a luxury right now. One strike. Then another. A spray of sparks lit the space around us for a single meter.

  We were in a maintenance chamber. Above us, rusted ladder rungs vanished into darkness—the shaft we’d fallen through. The walls were built from rough stone blocks, but between them I could see lead gaskets. The ancient builders had known exactly what they were doing: lead dampened magical noise, creating a true “dead zone.”

  “Look,” Efrem said, pointing with a trembling hand into the corner.

  Half-sunken into the floor stood a massive iron structure. It looked nothing like the Order’s altars. No runes. No decorations. Just gear teeth, a huge flywheel, and pistons coated in a century-old layer of grease.

  “That’s a… pump?” I stepped closer, running my hand over the cold metal.

  “Old tech,” Efrem rasped, trying to sit up. “The Order calls it heresy—using steam or leverage. They say only a Magister’s will may move water. But whoever built this foundation thought differently.”

  I examined the mechanism closely. My brain, trained on schematics, instantly began reconstructing the design. A classic piston pump for draining groundwater. If I could start it, we might find an exit—or at least ventilate this suffocating place.

  But the problem wasn’t the pump.

  The problem was the scraping.

  It came from the ventilation shaft above us. Dry. Rapid. Like hundreds of tiny claws scratching against sheet metal.

  “Crawlers,” Efrem whispered, gripping the broken shaft of his staff. “They’re drawn to the smell of blood. Blind creatures. But they sense heat. Your heat. Right now, you’re a blazing furnace in an icy wasteland to them.”

  I froze. I had no weapon. My “modified” arm was useless without energy. I scanned the room—scrap, rusted metal, remnants of some kind of leather harness.

  “I need five minutes,” I said, grabbing the pump’s flywheel.

  “You don’t have five minutes! They’re already in the shaft!”

  I didn’t listen. I locked onto the seized lever. Four percent of energy. I dumped it all into my muscles, feeling the fibers in my shoulder literally begin to tear.

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  “Come on… move!”

  The flywheel didn’t budge. The scraping grew louder. From the darkness, the first snout emerged—pale, eyeless, lined with rows of needle-thin teeth. The crawler flared its nostrils, catching my scent.

  “Iron!” Efrem shouted.

  I roared in pain and threw my full weight onto the lever. Metal shrieked. A century-old crust of rust cracked with a sharp snap. The flywheel turned—slowly, reluctantly.

  Clack. Clack. Clack.

  The mechanism came alive. Pistons drove through their cylinders, forcing compressed air out—and then I saw what I’d been hoping for. From a side nozzle, a jet of stagnant, oily water mixed with sand blasted out under enormous pressure.

  The first crawler leapt. Fast as a spring.

  I didn’t strike it with my arm.

  I simply twisted the lever, redirecting the stream straight into the creature’s face.

  Ten atmospheres of water pressure isn’t a shower. It’s a battering ram. The crawler was smashed backward, plastered against the wall. Its bones cracked like dry branches snapping. The others hissed and retreated into the shaft. The thunder of iron and the vibration of the floor disoriented them. For creatures born of absolute silence, the pump was a divine cataclysm.

  I dropped to my knees, gasping.

  [Energy: 1%. Critical degradation. Immediate resource replenishment recommended.]

  I was dying. For real. My heart stuttered, skipping beats, gray spots swimming across my vision.

  “Efrem… the ampoules…” I forced out.

  The old man crawled over and pressed a glass vial filled with blue liquid—concentrated Order mana—into my left hand.

  “If you drink it, Zeno will wake up,” he warned. “And Valerius will feel you.”

  “If I don’t… they’ll bury me here,” I ripped the stopper out with my teeth.

  The taste was vile—ozone mixed with rotten mint. It burned down my throat, and electricity surged through my veins. This wasn’t food-energy. It was raw current for my magical channels.

  The crystal in my chest flared instantly.

  “…Synchronization restored,” Zeno’s voice returned, sharp and clear. “Idiot. You nearly destroyed the host. Sector analysis complete. We are in the Zero Cycle—the waste disposal system. Directly above us is the Citadel’s main mana supply artery.”

  I looked up. Beneath the ceiling ran a thick pipe wrapped in layers of protective fabric and lead. It vibrated. The hum inside it sounded like a jet engine.

  The Order was draining the swamps. All the power stolen from the land flowed here—just a few meters above my head.

  “I won’t drink from the vials anymore,” I whispered, rising to my feet. My fingers began to glow emerald. “I’ll tap the source.”

  “That’s suicide!” Efrem tried to grab my leg. “The pressure will atomize you!”

  “I’m an engineer, Efrem. I know how safety valves work.”

  I approached the pipe. [The Will to Live] was now running at full capacity, projecting stress diagrams and metal fatigue points. The Order was lazy. They hadn’t maintained these pipes for centuries, trusting in “sacred seals.” But any seal is just a program. And every program has vulnerabilities.

  I found a microfracture in the weld. Pressed my modified finger against it. The crystal inside me trembled with anticipation.

  “Zeno,” I called silently. “Help me crack this lock.”

  “With pleasure,” the ghost replied. “Let’s show them what a short circuit really is.”

  I closed my eyes. My mind resonated with the pipe. I felt the mana flow—dense, violent, like molten metal. Slowly, micron by micron, I pried the fracture open, shaping a needle from my own energy.

  Then—rupture.

  It felt like trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Mana flooded my channels with such force that I screamed. My body arched; the soles of my boots began to smoke from excess potential.

  But I held on. I drank, filtering the torrent through Zeno’s crystal. My reserve filled at a manic pace. 5%… 20%… 50%…

  And then reality itself shuddered.

  I no longer saw the pipe.

  I saw an immense white space. An endless hall flooded with cold light. At its center, a man sat at a table. He wore a perfectly white uniform, and his hands were so pristine they looked porcelain.

  He slowly raised his head.

  His eyes were empty—two flawless mirrors.

  Valerius.

  He wasn’t surprised. He looked at me the way one looks at an annoying insect that dared to bite a finger.

  “Found you,” he said softly. His voice didn’t reach my ears—it formed directly in the core of my consciousness. “Little thief. You decided to steal my blood?”

  I tried to sever the connection, but his gaze held me tighter than any chains.

  “You’re an interesting error, Iron,” Valerius continued, rising slowly from his chair. “Zeno always loved trash. But trash belongs in the furnace.”

  He extended his hand, as if reaching for my face across space and time.

  “Do you know what we do when a parasite appears in the system?” A hint of a smile crossed his face. “We flush the pipes.”

  The contact snapped.

  I collapsed onto the chamber floor, tearing my hand from the pipe. The fracture sealed instantly as the Order’s magical self-regeneration kicked in.

  “We’re leaving!” I shouted, grabbing Efrem by the collar. “Now!”

  “What happened?” the old man asked, panicked.

  “He felt us. He gave the order.”

  Somewhere above, heavy gates opened. A crushing hydraulic shock rolled through the pipes.

  “Valerius opened the sluices,” I dragged Efrem toward a narrow maintenance crawlspace leading even deeper. “He’s flooding this entire level with liquid mana waste.”

  “We won’t make it!” Efrem pointed upward. From the vents, a viscous, phosphorescent fluid began to seep. It smelled of death and acid.

  “We will,” I looked at my hands. The energy inside me boiled, demanding release. “I know their frequency now.”

  I turned back toward the running pump.

  “If Valerius wants to play hydraulics,” I said grimly, “I’ll show him what they teach in first-year engineering.”

  “Efrem—hold on to me!”

  I redirected the accumulated mana not into an attack, but into the pump’s flywheel. The iron glowed red-hot. A mechanism designed for slow labor screamed as it transformed into a mad rotor.

  We weren’t just running.

  We were about to use the pressure Valerius created—against him.