The elevator descended for so long I managed to count three hundred heartbeats. The vibration of the floor radiated straight into my teeth. My head hummed. Zeno stood in the corner on one leg, leaning against the wall. His lens would go dark, then flare up again with short red sparks.
"Why not green?" I thought every time.
"Hear that?" Ephraim asked quietly.
I listened closely. A faint, thin whine cut through the grinding of the elevator. The kind of sound old CRT monitors make. Or high-voltage power lines under load.
"The air is ionizing," I said, watching the hairs on my arms stand on end.
When the doors slid apart, I squeezed my eyes shut instinctively. The massive hall before us was flooded with an even, blue light. The source wasn't lamps—the air itself was glowing.
Back in university, they taught us about the Cherenkov effect, when particles move through a medium faster than light does in that same medium. If you see it with the naked eye and without protection—consider yourself a walking corpse. But here, mana acted as a damper, containing the radiation within the lines of force.
"What the hell is this?" Ephraim whispered, shielding his eyes with his hand.
"It's time you learned that everything inexplicable is just physics," I said.
A massive cube hovered in the center of the hall, made of thousands of tiny segments. They constantly shifted and swapped places. As we got closer, the cube froze. A swarm of microscopic steel spheres detached from its surface. They arranged themselves into something resembling a human face.
Attention, the voice echoed directly inside my head. Biological contamination detected. Sector entropy level exceeds permissible parameters. Elimination of excess variables required for stabilization.
"I'll show you 'elimination,'" Ephraim growled, raising his staff.
I grabbed his arm.
"Stop. It doesn't understand threats. It's just an algorithm."
The swarm—the Guardian—pulsed with blue light.
Subject: Iron. Your calculations disrupt the local order. You bring chaos. To reach the Core, you must balance the equation.
A wall of shimmering, transparent haze rose before us.
Stick your hand in there, and it would simply be torn to atoms: the vibration frequency inside was absurdly high.
"I need to pass," I said, feeling the Skill begin to boil inside me again. "And they're coming with me."
Subjects 'Ephraim' and 'Zeno' hold no computational value. Access denied.
I heard Ephraim's breathing hitch. The radiation was hitting his heart.
[ACTIVATION: WILL TO LIVE]
The world lost its color once more.
I stepped toward the barrier. Spreadsheets and data instantly unfurled in my mind.
"Are you kidding me?" I said aloud. "To pass through this, I need to stop the movement of the particles, which is practically impossible."
Fine. At the same time, we'll see what I'm really capable of.
I extended my titanium arm. Mana flooded through the prosthesis. I began pulling heat from the space in front of me, dumping it into the arm's capacitors.
The metal of the prosthesis frosted over in seconds. The air around me crystallized. Fine snowflakes dusted the floor, even though the hall had been suffocatingly hot a moment ago.
"Iron..." I heard Ephraim's voice.
100 Kelvin... 50... 10... 1...
At some point, the barrier in front of my hand cracked. The molecules froze, losing their binding energy.
"Go. Fast," I said.
We slipped through the breach. The second I stopped extracting energy, the accumulated heat violently surged out of my arm. The prosthesis clanged fiercely. Superheated steam burst from the joints, scalding my shoulder.
"Kid!" Ephraim grabbed my shoulders and spun me to face him.
"Look at me!"
"Hold on, wait," he muttered, checking his pockets.
"Found it."
"Here, drink this," he said, handing me something green.
"What is..."
"Just drink it!"
I drank it in silence and... felt absolutely nothing.
"What was that?" I said quietly.
"A healing potion. Well? Do you feel better?" Ephraim asked.
"No. I feel exactly the same as before."
"Really? The effect will probably kick in later," he muttered. "Maybe. But for now, we have to keep moving. There's another elevator past the barrier."
"Are you crazy? You need rest, kid. If we go now..."
"You don't understand," I cut him off.
"I want to see if your potion actually works or not. If we stay here, I won't feel any effect."
"Yeah... but still..."
"Let's just go. Don't tell me you're scared, Ephraim?"
"Me? No, of course not. Fear and I are incompatible."
"If you're incompatible, does that mean you'll die of fright?" I thought.
We entered the final hall. There was a massive glass tank here, filled with murky liquid. Hundreds of cables ran into it. Inside the liquid floated something that vaguely resembled a human. Its body was half-fused with machinery.
"So this is the Core?" Ephraim whispered, crossing himself.
I stepped closer to the glass. The creature inside slowly opened its eyes. It had no pupils. Only endless streams of numbers scrolling across its corneas.
"Finally," a voice echoed from the ceiling speakers. "A new operator."
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