We walked in silence following Corvus’s map for half a kilometer. The tunnel widened, and Zeno stopped abruptly.
"Stop. Organic signature detected. Status: dead. Nature of damage… anomalous."
We moved closer.
It was a man... or it had been. He was pinned to the wall with steel spikes driven into the concrete. I stepped forward, feeling bile rise in my throat.
Where a man’s legs should have been, heavy springs had been implanted. They were screwed directly into the bone. The chest cavity had been pried open with metal spacers. Inside, among the ribs, something was ticking.
"Is this torture?"
"No. It is likely an experiment."
I pointed to the joints:
"Look at the connections. Someone tried to replace the knee with a hinge. But they did it intentionally so that every movement would cause unbearable pain."
I touched the mechanism in the corpse’s chest with my fingertip. The gears turned. It wasn't a heart pump. A timer. Just a timer.
"This is a signature," I said, wiping my hand on my pants. "Someone was testing how long a person could last if forced to become part of a machine."
"Identification of components," Zeno spoke up. "Alloy: Imperial steel, 'Cerberus' grade. Fabrication style: Department of Technical Oversight. The Inquisition."
"We’re leaving," I snapped. "Right now."
The map led us here... colossal ventilation shafts. As soon as we forced the heavy airlock door open...
"Press against the wall!" I shouted.
We walked along a narrow technical bridge. To the right—a drop hundreds of meters deep. To the left—fan blades the size of a house. They rotated slowly, slicing the air, but the inertia in those multi-ton blades was insane.
I walked second. Zeno scanned the path ahead.
"No active mines detected. No electronic traps."
Zeno took a step.
A faint click.
"Back!" I yelled, grabbing Ephraim by the collar.
Something plummeted from the darkness above. Primitive mechanics. A lever and a counterweight. Zeno leaped back, but a net was falling directly onto Ephraim.
Time slowed down.
Will to Live, acti—
No. Not now.
I lunged forward. The titanium hand shot up. The lead weight slammed into my palm, the force of the impact traveling straight into my shoulder. The joint nearly popped out. The fingers of the "Second Iteration" clamped onto the steel links.
I snarled and hurled the net aside.
"Ephraim!" I collapsed beside him. "Are you okay?!"
"Analog trap," Zeno stated, scanning the severed cable.
And then, through the wind, came another sound. A buzz. A grotesque creation: a large bird skull clad in brass, a camera fitted into the eye socket, a propeller on its back. The drone hovered a few meters away. Its camera focused on my arm.
"Impressive," a dry voice crackled from the speaker. "Titanium and tungsten. Clever."
I stood up slowly, pushing Ephraim behind my back. Zeno leveled his weapons.
"Who are you?"
"The one who fixes mistakes," the voice replied. "Stealing sacred mechanisms and turning them into toys just to prolong a miserable life... You do not understand the true pain of metal."
The drone tilted slightly.
"Metal must suffer to become perfect. As must flesh."
"You're just a psycho," I said.
"Let’s see how you calculate this," Silas, as he would later call himself, chuckled.
The drone's LED flashed red. The pitch rose to a scream. I looked to the left. The giant fans began to accelerate. We were pinned against the wall as debris from the floor took flight, hurtling toward the spinning blades.
"He’s starting the purge!" I shouted. "It’s going to throw us into the blades!"
"Thrust is increasing. Critical threshold in twenty seconds," Zeno reported, digging his claws into the grated floor.
Ephraim was already being lifted off the ground. I gripped his belt.
"We have to reach that!" I pointed ahead.
Ten meters away was a service niche in the wall. Safety. But between us and the niche, one of the accelerating fans was spinning.
"Probability of passing without damage: twelve percent," Zeno roared.
I watched the rotating blades. They were blurring into a gray circle.
"To hell with it," I muttered.
"One... Two... A blade passes every second and a half... accelerating... Three..."
"Zeno! Grab Ephraim!" I screamed. "On four! One!"
The wind nearly knocked us over.
"Two!"
A blade hissed past.
"Three!"
"Acknowledged," Zeno scooped up the old man.
"FOUR! GO!"
We let the wind hurl us forward. I saw the steel edge of the blade rushing at us. I tucked my body in, raising the titanium arm like a shield.
We flew through the gap. The blade grazed Zeno’s back, sending up a shower of sparks. Behind us, it smashed into the drone. The bird skull shattered into brass fragments. We slammed into the niche, tumbling across the floor. The wind roared past the entrance but couldn't reach us.
"Phew..." Ephraim exhaled, crawling out from under Zeno.
Zeno stood up. A deep gouge remained on his back armor plate.
"Drone destroyed. Connection to operator lost," he reported.
"If we stop, we’ll freeze."
We moved deeper into the darkness.
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