The fog smells like coins. It scrapes the throat, leaves a copper taste at the back of the tongue, sticks to the eyelashes like a web.
Beached hulls creak against drowned quays, arches of wood swollen with water that exhale with each swell. Hemp moorings look like braided bones.
Farther out, a lighthouse, black like a glass heart, sleeps in the middle of the harbor. If it lights up, I'll have safe corridors. If it stays dead, the fog will decide the rules.
[Zone] Rusted Tide (Tier C) • Debt: 8% → 12% (if Nexus siphon)
Main Objective: Relight the Black Beacon (0/1)
Side Objective: Find 3 Barnacle Seals (0/3)
Local Rule — Beacon Law: OFF (in line of sight of the beacon = weakened fog)
Hazard — Corrosive Fog: −1% durability/minute when exposed
Timer: Fog pulse in 04:30 • Visibility drop in 09:50
[Human Lineage] Tier: S1 — Steel Nerves (minor fear resist) | Anchor (brief knockback resist)
[Chain Breaker] Tier: S1 — Micro hyper-armor 0.3 s/10 s | Micro-damage assimilation (stacks 0/10)
I tighten my reinforced gloves. Joints creak, leather swollen with salt. My Silent Boots bite into algae-slick wood.
The Clarity Amulet, cold against my sternum, keeps shadows at the edge of my vision, where they can whisper without crossing the line.
They're already here: saline figures sliding between overturned stalls, shapes of sailors petrified and sculpted by tide.
Not zombies. Bodies molded by salt, with froth-hard angles at the elbows. When they "sing," it isn't a sound.
It's a pressure that sinks into joints, an invisible finger behind the knees pushing down until the thighs burn.
The customs square opens up: snarled chains, water-swollen crates, a fountain where rust-flowers glint like dead stars.
Beyond, the stone islet, the steps of the Black Beacon, the iron door. The catwalks that linked it have snapped like broken teeth.
A wet wind passes and sprays my face with salt dust that stings the lips. The copper taste returns.
"Xi, quick status."
[OK] Gloves A: 84% • Cuirass B: 90% • Boots: 92%
The chorus swells. The Salt Choir turns their heads as one. Crystallized hoods glint. The song presses.
My knees tick. I inhale, designate the entry wound: inner edge of the right quadriceps. Pain isn't a fate; it's a material.
Chain Breaker swallows the clean pain; I offer it, measured, send it back cooled through the fibers. A dry heat runs down my leg.
[Breaker] Stacks: 1/10 — +Contextual Resilience (pressure)
I won't take the square, not with that many figures and open fog. High-route: lean-to → broken mast → crane → parapet → steps.
On the ground, I drown. In the air, I draw lines. The eye hunts edges, weight that won't give.
I jump to the lean-to. Slick tiles try to throw me into the water; I lighten, slide, correct.
The gutter shrieks and almost wrenches out a curse. I swallow the metal spit, stabilize. On the other side, the broken mast waits, planted at an angle like a black tooth.
A saline figure appears in a shop window. Its shoulders kept the shape of an oilskin. Its hood froze droplets into spikes.
It cocks its head, listens to my breathing, then sings. The wave catches me, heavy, bears me down to the tiles.
"Now," I tell the air.
Hyper-armor: 0.3 s. The world hardens. I pass through the trough and keep my center low. The chant slides; the tile wins nothing.
The mast quivers under my weight. Fog thickens around the stays, sound of wet rope. Another figure climbs a hull below, fingers in calcified clusters.
It doesn't really know how to climb. It remembers it was possible.
"Bad idea," for myself.
I run, load the jump, take the mast and brake on a knot hard as bone. My gloves growl.
The crane pulls me in. Cabin open like a box. Inside, a ring of valves bolted in hastily: Tide, City, Sluice, Drain, Pressure, Equalize… and an eye scratched with a point. Audit.
On the floor, plates of salt have taken the shape of boot prints, as if someone paced here for hours hunting the order.
I don't touch the valves. Not now. Beacon first. I memorize their order like digits on a lock: T–C–S–D–P–E–Eye.
A dry gong strikes the fog. Not a harbor bell: a clean mark on a sheet being ticked. It vibrates through teeth, resonates in sinuses.
The fog answers by pleating, then relaxes, as if a very high eye blinked.
"Tick all you want," I say. "I'll light it."
I roll along the parapet. Below, the Choir bunches and sings in waves. The pressure bites my shoulders. Hyper-armor, 0.3 s: I short-circuit the surge and keep moving.
The steps climb, salt veins in stone. Each step, crystals crack beneath my boots like caramel glass.
The door: heavy iron, runes clogged with salt like blanched scars. I push. Nothing. I try the handle: fused by oxidation, cold and greasy.
I set my palm. The Stormglass Compass in my satchel vibrates, a low tick in the bone. It's the kind of vibration that speaks in lines, not objects.
"Options, Xi."
[Power Options]
(A) Local fuel: unavailable
(B) Nexus Siphon (+4% Debt) — locks Breaker 24h
(C) Heat jury-rig: slow (resources: 0)
The fog eats. My gloves will lose another 2% if I drag this. (C) is dead. (B) bumps the numbers. But the Beacon Law will clean the map at once.
I count: 04:30 earlier, 02:10 now until the next pulse.
I see the square, the Choir massing. Time stacks, a small wall in my nape.
"We pay," I breathe.
[Confirm Nexus Siphon?] (Y/N)
"Y."
Pain goes up the forearm like iron turning to water and climbing the bone. It slips through the wrist, bites the ulna, hooks tendons, crosses the elbow, buzzes in the humerus.
The Amulet heats. The runes wash themselves under the crust, fine and silver, one by one, as if an invisible hand retraced them with a burin and a clerk's seriousness.
[Convergence Debt] 8% → 12%
[Chain Breaker] LOCKED (23:59)
[Beacon Core] RELIT
Light doesn't burst. It unfolds. A column of night rimmed with cold fire rises and carves corridors through fog.
The fog recoils like a beast recognizing a blade. Saline silhouettes stagger. Their songs desynchronize; one laughs, the sound of a shell breaking, then powders at the elbow.
I press my forehead to the warm door. My aura beats time against metal. My hand trembles once, then steadies.
[Main Objective] Relight the Black Beacon — Complete
[Rewards] Stormglass Compass — points at rule-fissures | Barnacle Seal #1 (bound to beacon)
[Rule] Beacon Law: ON — in line of sight = reduced pressure, softened corrosion
[Note] Observer: interest ↑
The spiral stair smells of wet chalk and rancid oil. Steps are polished by footsteps that feel ancient; edges gnawed by brine.
I count without counting: twenty steps, landing, twenty-five, landing. The lantern's light doesn't burn yellow; it cuts in black. It's light that doesn't want to please; it wants to work.
At the top, the gallery opens on a harbor striped with crisp corridors and opaque pockets. The corridors look like knife roads cut through puree.
In one pocket, something long moves just under the surface, deceptively slow, massive: the Harbor Warden. Its dorsal scribbles a signature on fog like wet ink.
I set Seal #1 against the rail. Veins of light run beneath the barnacles then dim. A low click answers from the stone, old machinery waking.
On the gallery wall, scratched by a nail hard as a spike: KEEP YOUR OWN ACCOUNT.
I try to picture the hand. Nail split, salt under skin, calm fury. I smile. I don't argue with the dead, but I take their lessons.
I watch the corridors a minute, the map they draw. Two main ones: one cuts the square toward the crane; another skims the customs warehouse and pinches at the entrance like a throat.
Between them, alleys of sealed fog, gray and heavy, where figures wait, hoods bowed, hooks dangling, unhurried.
They know now the line hurts. They'll try the corners.
Outside, I descend. The Beacon Law works: a perfectly clear band runs from the steps to the crane, then to the customs office roof.
Inside the band, the fog presses less. The Choir won't cross. They skirt, watch, wait for the mistake. One tests the edge, puts a foot across, retreats; the salt-crystal that is its ankle squeals and chips.
I take the band. My speckled cuirass barely loses a point.
[Durability] Cuirass 89% • Gloves 83% • Boots 92%
Under the broken office awning, the warehouse yawns. Swollen swing-doors, wood gorged with water, lifted nails. The Compass warms my palm.
In its hexagonal heart, a clear fissure swivels and points inward, to where the black water rests and concrete weeps. A fissure in rules. A likely Seal.
Electric shadows rake the surface. Hookjaw eels. Their frills flick blue like misfired matches.
I won't dive. I'll map. I like a plan that's as clean as a rivet.
Short bridge: a plank pinned between two posts, a net of chains, a hoist still half-wound. I pull, lash, stretch a narrow passage across the water.
The eels strike below, panting wet sparks. One rises, a droplet of mercury taking air, bares staple-teeth, drops back.
At the far side, a half-torn sign hangs by a chain: DECLARATIONS. Under it, a pillar furred with barnacles. The Compass' fissure pulses on it. Seal #2.
I stop just before the water.
"Tomorrow, the valves," I murmur. "We raise the level, we cross dry."
I head back along the bridge and feel the fog change, as if it were inhaling. The pulse. Surfaces crack; chains hum in slow motion.
I keep my eyes on the clear band, not the angles. The habit of looking aside kills more than teeth.
At the entrance, a saline figure waits, mooring hook in hand. It won't step across the clear band the beacon pushes through the broken window.
It taps the stone twice. Tok. Tok. Not a chant. A signal. Then it points the hook toward the far dock, where a huge capstan sleeps, ringed with thick chains.
The gesture is simple, old, human. It might have been a longshoreman once, before the sea chewed its tendons.
"The tax, huh?" I say. "Pay to move. Got it."
The figure inclines its head a hair. It rolls the hook in a circle, once, like drawing a coin. Then it slides back and dissolves into a recalcitrant tongue of fog.
I stand a second where I am. The beacon frames a clear window around me. The world outside is heavy gray, methodical.
There's no hatred here. There are laws. You can hate a man. A law, you read it, bend it, or pay it.
I take the band back to the crane. The metal sweats brown. The valves wait, patient.
I set my hand on "City," feel play; on "Equalize," feel a detent ready to yield. "Sluice" is seized like a clenched jaw. "Tide" is cold, "Drain" lies a little. "Pressure" knows it matters.
I turn nothing. I visualize. The warehouse catwalk must rise half a meter to cross without feeding eels. Half a meter is a city bathtub, three minutes of flow if the pipe is thick.
I memorize the sequence. I'll return with time on my side, not with a short breath.
I follow the parapet, an improvised watch post. The clear band follows the center of the square; islands of safety open where the lantern has line of sight.
I test the edge: when I put my hand outside the band, the air turns heavy, even without a chant. Corrosion goes to work, a stubborn little beast.
I pull back, shake out the tremble that wants to believe it can remain.
On the way back to the beacon, the Choir decides to try. Three figures present at the corner of a cart.
One wears a rope across its torso, twisted into barnacles; another holds a mooring hook; the third has only rigid hands. They advance out of phase—left, right, pause—as if an inner swell governed them.
"Not now."
I walk. They sing. The first wave tests my ankles, the second my nape.
I don't answer; I choose. Breaker drinks a little more.
[Breaker] Stacks: 2/10 — +Resilience (pressure) ↑
I keep my center low. When the second figure lifts its arms, I pass into the shadow of a broken post. The clear band tightens there; pressure drops.
It's like taking a sharp turn on ice and suddenly finding asphalt. My steps regain purchase; the hook-bearer hesitates, plants the hook in nothing, scrapes.
I brush by without touching. It can't cross the line. Not now.
I make the steps. The stone sweats lightly; water weeps from joints. A thin moss dared to grow at the very limit of the clear band, a small green frontier.
I put a foot on the first step and that's when it comes again: a far gong, clean, neat. Not a toll. A transaction. Like a receipt. I look up.
Sky doesn't exist here; only ceilings of fog. But I feel it: above, someone ticks boxes with the patience of a needle. The Observer. The Ledger. Give it any name you like, Mark Sorel, as long as it counts.
"Xi?"
[Note] Persistent observation. No intervention. Stay efficient.
I climb. The beacon's heart room receives me with the smell of hot oil. The lantern, black and keen, breathes without flame.
The light it sends has no warmth; it has edges. It cuts, the way a woodworker cuts plywood with a sharp band.
I sit against the stone for a minute. Not from fatigue. Ritual. We don't always go fast; we go in the right order.
I pull the Compass, look. In the hexagonal heart, the clear fissure pivots slowly, hesitates, then settles toward the warehouse.
It doesn't point to the capstan yet. Seal #2 first. Then the tax. Then the Warden, maybe. Or not. I'm not married to courage; I'm married to progression.
I descend. The stair air has gained a fine dust of hope; it changes how the chest remembers being tight.
Outside, the clear band seems wider than on the way up, but that's an illusion: it's me understanding it better.
I feel where it pinches at corners, opens at angles, fractures into ribbons around obstacles—and how to ride those rebounds.
I walk to the shadow of an awning for a second, just to listen. Sounds differ inside the band: the fog loses its teeth.
The hulls' noise becomes rubbing, not grinding. Chains don't complain; they tell stories.
Farther, a rope starts beating a mast in a steady rhythm, and I realize it isn't wind, it's a deep breath: the Warden below the water.
I return to the crane. The valves feel more familiar. I brush them, sense the order. I mark a faint wet-chalk line near "City" and "Equalize," nothing obvious, just my own memory.
I don't need sight to know; I need not to forget when it matters.
I cross the square along the band and allow a detour by the quay edge, where stone meets water and algae braid in mats.
An overturned buoy shows faded letters: QUARANTINE. The fog licks, leaves fine foam, recedes.
No translation needed: I've known since arrival that everything here is procedure. Even fear has boxes.
Back to the beacon. I stop at the foot because something is wedged between two steps— a shard of stormglass, small and clear, that wasn't there going up.
I pry it free with a glove tip. It sings at the touch, colder than the stone around, and I feel an intuitive line stretch between it, the Compass, and the lantern above my head.
[Item] Stormglass Shard (quality: low) — partial conductor
"You're coming," I say. "We'll see what you do when it's time to jury-rig."
The figures have dispersed, or rather redistributed. Two remain by the dock, motionless, in a posture of waiting. Another has posted itself at the end of a lane of crates; it watches without eyes.
I salute with a nod, simple. It doesn't answer. Good: we'll get acquainted by trial.
The clear band takes me back to the first step. Stone still weeps, but softer, as if the beacon, content, sweated less.
I lay a hand on the rail, and that's when the fog whispers my name. Not "Mark" the one my mother uses when I break a vase. "Mark Sorel," short, flat, inventoried.
Like a label on a crate. I shut my eyes a second. I don't ask where it comes from: in a dungeon, questions can be invitations.
I do what I do best: sort.
"Xi?"
[Source] blurred. Beacon resonance likely. Continued observation.
I climb again. On the second landing, someone left, besides the line about accounts, parallel ticks, tiny bars by fives, like marking days.
Fifteen, then a gap, then three, then a long horizontal stroke. The kind of note you make when you don't want to forget time still has meaning.
I run a finger over it. Salt cracks. The bars no longer serve. They did their work.
I step back out onto the gallery, one more look over the harbor. The corridors almost seem luminous now that I know what they do.
In one, a brief, sharp ripple runs. Eels. In another, a discreet reverse current heading for the dock—a vein I'd missed. The Compass vibrates.
I think of tomorrow: valves, catwalk, Seal #2. Then the capstan. The tax. Then we'll see whether to touch the Warden or if opening suffices.
I descend for good. In the lantern's drum, the glass hums softly, cocoon noise.
At the foot, I take a minute to retie straps, check glove seams, count the air that's mine and the air I still owe.
I don't think of Debt as punishment; I think of it as temperature: sometimes you have to set the fire to boil the water. Then you air the room.
I walk to the band's edge. Beyond, the Choir has pulled back, but not far. It remembers.
One of them, the hook-bearer, has returned. It sets the iron into a plank, gently, to make a clean sound. Tok. Then again. Tok.
It's building a rhythm. You could almost mistake it for language. Maybe later. For now, I understand what matters: capstan, tax, movement.
A low rumble passes beneath the square, long, heavy. The capstan answers with echo, a chain clacks once, goes back to sleep.
I didn't lay a hand on it. That wasn't me.
I glance at the beacon; the lantern keeps its rhythm. The clear line didn't flicker. So what? Inner tide of rules, maybe. Or… someone else trying, somewhere.
I lift my chin toward the fog—not to defy it, to make space in it.
I head for the beacon. On the way, I pry a nearly intact nail from a crate, slide it into a pocket. It'll serve as shim, lever, mark. You never know what proves to be the hinge before the turn.
The fog runs across my skin like a breath on hold.
I give it a smile I don't show with teeth. We'll meet again, you and I, at the capstan.
I climb the steps one last time to check the gallery, superstition as much as method. Ferns of salt have grown there, fine, precise, fragile.
I brush one. It melts into a puff that smells of hot stone.
The lantern purrs without flame. I touch the rail just to feel the warm metal.
I have no words to say here, no prayer to offer. I keep the simplest promise: come back with Seal in hand.
I go down in silence. On the third step, I wedge the stormglass shard into a crack so I won't lose it when running. It holds, stuck, ready to serve.
I pass the door. The clear band unspools ahead of me like a strap. I take it.
The beacon's light cuts roads outside a child could follow. In a pocket of shadow, something lengthens its back under the water, patient as an old promise.
I tighten my glove straps. The warehouse awaits. And the tax. And behind them, wars that don't tire.
But tonight I've only one job: keep the account, hold the line, sleep on my seams, wake with the map already in my feet.
[Window]
Level: 7 • Debt: 12% • Zone: Rusted Tide (C)
Lineages: Human S1 — Steel Nerves | Anchor • Chain Breaker S1 — Hyper-armor 0.3 s / 10 s (Stacks: 2/10)
Condition: Gloves 83 • Cuirass 89 • Boots 92
Items: Stormglass Compass • Clarity Amulet • Silent Boots • Stormglass Shard
Seals: 1 / 3 • Boss: 0 / 1
Next: Customs warehouse (valves) → Seal #2 • Dry dock/Capstan: scout
Flags: Black Beacon ✓
Rule: Beacon in sight = reduced pressure.