JOSHUA HARPER felt a searing, incandescent shock—not pain, but the sudden, violent reorganization of every molecule in his body. He was leaning over the schematics for the new fusion reactor, the fluorescent lights humming an irritating buzz, when the air thickened, tasting of ozone and ancient bronze. His last coherent thought was a futile, utterly human plea for control: 'Not like this!'
That was the epitaph of his twenty-first-century life.
RUMBLE RUMBLE ROAR
The sensation of electrical current was back, not flowing through him, but as him. He was a lightning bolt, a vessel for raw, uncontrolled energy. Before the chaotic sensation could consume him, a hand—heavy, calloused, and smelling faintly of machine oil and laurel—clasped his wrist. He was wrenched sideways, his entire being pulled from the void and slammed into something solid and rough. He felt uprooted.
Josh's senses, having been hijacked by the catastrophic transfer of his consciousness, returned with a slow, grinding inevitability, like an improperly oiled gear train. First came the sound: the hiss of pressurized steam, the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of a massive piston, and the deafening whirr of rotating clockwork.
He looked up. The sky was an impossible, copper-tinged panorama. Above him, massive, interlocked bronze gears, spanning hundreds of feet, rotated slowly against a backdrop of sickly orange and grey smog. It was a dome of intricate clockwork, starting from a massive, ornate bronze pylon to his left. It felt like being beneath a mechanical storm cloud. The aggressive sounds faded, but the omnipresent shhhhhh of steam remained.
What in the name of God was this? The large, bronze-braced hand still gripped his arm. Josh twisted, pulling his aching body into a sitting position to look at his savior.
The other man, already kneeling beside him, wiped a smear of grime from his bald head and offered a wide, confident, victorious smile. His eyes were the startling, clear blue of Aegean glass.
"The surge was textbook, Ajax! A flawless temporal anchor! We did it, you mad genius!"
'If it weren't for the very strong conviction that my brain just vaporized, I'd agree. It certainly looks like we accomplished… something significant,' Josh mused, his mind struggling to categorize the spectacle.
He didn't know the bald, grinning stranger. The man was a colossus, all sinew and polished bronze armor worn over a leather cuirass. He moved with the grounded confidence of a man familiar with both the forge and the battlefield. He helped Josh to his feet, adjusting his own knee-length, oil-stained chiton. Josh felt distinctly frail next to the muscular man.
'Am I in a fever dream? Did I… really cross over?' He looked at his hands, encased now in articulated, brass-and-leather bracers. He wore a heavy wool chlamys over a surprisingly well-fitting tunic, and a set of leather goggles sat askew on his head, covering his eyes. The air here was thick with a smell he quickly identified as burnt phosphorus and metallic exhaust, far more uncomfortable than the electrical odor he'd first sensed.
A prickle of danger, the primal survival instinct, made him instinctively reach for the weapon slung across his chest. It was not a sword, but a gleaming, segmented Aetheric Carbine, a beautifully destructive piece of steampunk engineering that felt both alien and terrifyingly natural in his grasp.
The big man—the one who called him Ajax—raised a heavy, steam-augmented bronze fist towards a vast, open expanse visible through the haze.
When Josh looked, he realized they were on the flat roof of a massive, tiered structure. Far below, the entire world was laid out like a relief map: a chaotic sprawl of lower-tier, smoke-belching industrial platforms connected by immense, brass-riveted airship docks and colossal chain-driven elevators. This place, he realized with a sickening lurch, was Olympus Aethelos, the Floating City of the Golden Age, a creation of impossible technology from a history that shouldn't exist.
A long, repressed, metallic howling echoed from the depths of the city's underbelly.
And the source of the horrible, acrid smell of burnt metal and flesh was the smoking wreckage nearby: the mangled remnants of several winged Harpia-Automatons, their bronze feathers melted, their internal clockwork seizing, their ceramic faces cracked and blackened by an intense electrical discharge. They were similar in design to the tall man at his side, clearly mechanical infantry.
Josh looked away, stomach churning. He had a brief, horrific mental image of his arc-flash event back on Earth, magnified a thousand times. 'I think... I overloaded their circuits.'
"Ten of the damned Phrixus-units down, Ajax! That EMP blast you theorized was magnificent! I won't question your methods again, even if you do stand there looking like you've been run through a time-press!" The big man slapped him on the shoulder, a blow that nearly buckled Josh's knees. He quickly began salvaging useful scrap from the smoking automatons.
Josh didn't move, still grappling with the transmigration. 'I am not Jsoh. I am Ajax. And I just wiped out a squad of lethal clockwork soldiers.'
"Ajax!" urged the large man, looking up from his scavenging. "We need to move! The Chryseos Syndicate knows we're here! There are at least three more patrol vectors before we reach the Promachonos Spire."
"Chryseos Syndicate? Promachonos Spire?" Josh spoke the words, and they tasted like ancient Greek and machine lubricant on his tongue. Who could blame him for not understanding a word?
He moved to the edge of the platform, looking out over the immense cityscape, ignoring his companion's looting. He could see the turbulent, cloud-filled void in the distance, and the deep copper haze that enveloped the lower city. The platform they were on was the peak of this sector, the Pinnacle of the Strategos, a military command center of polished obsidian and steam-bronze.
As the twilight deepened, he glimpsed silhouettes approaching the platform—winged, human-sized shapes that weren't automatons. They were fast, agile, and approaching from three distinct vectors. He heard the distant, sharp crack of air-rifle fire and the whirring sound of mechanized wings beating against the heavy air.
"Are we... surrounded?" Josh asked, his voice flat with disbelief.
Doric, the big man, stopped his work, his face grim as he joined him at the edge.
"Surrounded? You promised we'd get the 'Tactical Over-Arc' following your design! Your transmigration was supposed to be discrete!" Doric roared.
A man in a sleek, obsidian-colored flight harness—clearly not friendly—fired a grapnel from his wrist-mounted pneumatic device. The bronze hook slammed into the platform a few feet from them. He began winching himself up, powered by a small steam engine strapped to his back. A moment later, another flyer, an archer, was struck in the chest by a high-velocity bronze bolt, the impact spinning him into the smoggy abyss below.
Josh felt an overwhelming surge of nausea. There were no rules here, no polite engagements. It was a raw, dirty struggle for survival.
He watched one of the attackers, suspended by his harness, engage a defender. The attacker used a massive, saw-toothed clockwork shield to parry a blow, then slammed the shield's rotating edge into his opponent's face. The sickening crunch was audible even over the city noise. The attacker then snatched a small, glowing shard—a token, no doubt—from the fallen man's vest and clipped it onto a chain at his own waist.
Josh looked down at the similar chain of bronze tokens around his own waist. Trophies.
Doric pointed, his face twisted with hatred. "Ajax, that's Phrixus the Iron-Bound! The one who hunted the Senator! Look at his tally of tokens—he must have forty! He's lethal! How are we going to shake him off this time?"
Phrixus, already on the platform, looked up at them. His grin was a predator's promise, his eyes glinting behind his goggles like polished steel. He was coming for them, and Josh knew with chilling certainty that he was the target.
"Ahem… I think the transmigration has given me a slight concussion."
Doric's concern was immediate and genuine. "Are you all right, Ajax? If your mind fails now—"
How could he be all right? He was on a floating Greek city run by steam, surrounded by lethal, bronze-clad assassins, and the only weapon he had was a gun he didn't know how to clean, let alone fire effectively.
"What exactly… are we fighting for?" Josh, the newly-minted Ajax, asked, running a hand through his hair.
"The Aether-Core, you blockhead! The very thing that stabilized your arrival! It's the key to the city's defense grid!" Doric whispered, terrified that the assassin would hear. "We have no choice but to push through to the Spire. The whole lower city will destabilize without the Core in the regulator!"
"Run away?" Josh finished the question, his voice a desperate whisper.
"I never thought I'd hear the Strategos suggest flight," Doric's voice was full of shock and bitter disappointment.
"You don't know me well," Josh mumbled, looking away.
A loud, piercing whistle drew their attention to the edge of the platform. Three more assassins were climbing.
His heart hammered a terrifying rhythm in his chest. And the fear he had been fighting finally broke through with Doric's next words:
"The schematics for the Spire's regulator—you said they were memorized! The escape hatch! The overload sequence! How do we engage the 'Zeus Protocol,' Ajax? You designed it!"
'I'm the brain here. The whole city is relying on me, a former engineer who designs coffee makers.'
Panic was a cold, sharp knife. He fought it down, forcing his mind to rationalize.
"Okay... what's the closest pressurized steam vent?"
"A large pipe, four meters to your right, running under the main platform. Why?" Doric looked confused.
Josh looked at the Aetheric Carbine in his hands, then at the vent, and then at the assassins closing in. A ridiculous, terrifying idea, one that combined his modern knowledge of thermal dynamics with this world's absurd technology, suddenly clicked into place.
"I need to vent the main line. It's insane, but it might just be the diversion we need. Doric, prepare your club. I need exactly twenty seconds to reconfigure this rifle's regulator as an overload bypass valve. Don't let anyone touch me."
"Twenty seconds! Against Phrixus?!" Doric gasped, but the raw light of battle was already in his eyes.
Josh dropped to his knees, his mind racing through the complex physics of steam pressure and bronze metallurgy, his fingers flying over the carbine's gears and dials. If I miscalculate the pressure release—
The shadow of Phrixus loomed over him. The assassin raised a spiked, rotating steam-mace.
Josh jammed the reconfigured rifle into the valve of the massive steam pipe just as Phrixus brought the weapon down.
He heard the deafening shriek of the valve giving way, the pipe vibrating with catastrophic force. The steam was not venting, but building, trapped by the rifle's chaotic choke point. He knew what was coming.
"Doric, run—NOW!" Josh screamed, tearing his hands away.
The pipe beneath them swelled, the bronze groaning a final, terrible protest as the pressure reached critical mass. The entire platform was about to rupture. Josh shoved Doric hard just as the bronze exploded in a blinding, ear-splitting concussion, not of steam, but of superheated, pressurized air and fragmented shrapnel that tore into the night.
Josh was flung into the air, the world dissolving into fire, brass, and the screaming rush of the abyssal void below.
Did I kill them? Or did I just send myself and Doric plummeting to the smog-choked ground a thousand feet below Olympus Aethelos?
He tumbled, unable to right himself in the sudden, violent turbulence, the Aether-Core still clutched in his hand.
He closed his eyes, awaiting the impact—but the impact never came. Instead, the fall was violently interrupted by a massive, grinding clutch of bronze fingers. He was caught, but not by Doric.
He opened his eyes and saw not a hand, but a colossal, single-eyed bronze face staring down at him, its steam vents hissing with predatory malice. It was a Kyklops-Automaton, easily thirty feet tall, its one eye glowing like a forge. And in its other hand, it held the now-unconscious body of Doric.
The giant automaton raised him up to its single, cyclopean lens.
"The Aether-Core is MINE,Ajax**."**
TO BE CONTINUED