The colossal, bronze fingers of the Kyklops-Automaton were not merely clamping him; they were conducting. The grip was a magnetic field, and Josh—clutching the Aether-Core—was a live wire. The small, glowing shard in his hand, a humming jewel of trapped energy, began to thrum in a terrible unison with the Kyklops's single, cyclopean lens.
The lens, a circular sheet of polished, ruby-red crystal, was vast, easily the size of a shipping container. It focused a terrifying, heatless intensity on him, analyzing him with the patience of a programmed god.
"Analysis complete, Strategos Ajax. Your biological and cognitive profile is… unstable. A temporal anomaly. The Core will be safer with the Syndicate." The Kyklops's voice was a seismic event, a grinding of internal pistons that vibrated through Josh's very bones. It was not a voice, but a synchronized burst of steam and low-frequency resonance from massive vents flanking its mouth grille.
Josh forced himself to look away from the eye and down at Doric, who was limp in the automaton's opposite hand, his bald head resting against the bronze plating. He was alive, but the impact of the explosion had been total.
"The Syndicate," Josh gasped, trying to pull his thoughts together despite the crushing pressure and the Core's escalating vibration. "What is it? A corporation? A government?"
"The Chryseos Syndicate is the inevitable conclusion of Aethelosian sovereignty," the Kyklops declared, turning its massive head slightly to sweep its gaze over the floating city. Its movement was terrifyingly smooth. "We are the maintenance protocol. The current Senate is inefficient. The Aether-Core is the heart of Olympus Aethelos; its power must be regulated by logic, not emotion. You, Ajax, were a variable we intended to eliminate."
"You were waiting for me," Josh murmured, realizing a cold dread. The Tactical Over-Arc wasn't a secret; it was bait.
"Your designs were known. Your return was anticipated. The entire Pinnacle of the Strategos was a containment field. Your EMP only expedited the capture by neutralizing the Harpia-Automata—less collateral damage for the city. Now, surrender the Core."
Josh looked at the Aetheric Carbine, now uselessly jammed into the pressure valve four meters below, and a new, desperate idea sparked. The automaton spoke of "logic" and "maintenance protocols." This wasn't a person; it was a gigantic, complex machine. And machines have limits.
He looked down at the Aether-Core. It was vibrating so rapidly now that his hand was numb. In his modern life, Josh had designed circuits for fusion reactors—circuits designed to manage catastrophic power surges. The Core was not an object; it was a nexus of raw, impossible energy. The Kyklops's magnetic field was trying to extract it, not just crush it. The Kyklops was trying to sync with the Core to take control.
Josh grit his teeth. "You want logic? Here's a paradox for your processor."
He focused not on the Core's energy, but on the principles of resonance feedback. The Kyklops was using a massive inductive field to pull the Core's power. If he could reverse the polarity—not to push the Core away, but to momentarily amplify the inductive draw beyond the Kyklops's engineered tolerance—he might overload its internal regulators. It was the same principle as his steam blast, only a thousand times more complex and involving forces he didn't understand.
With a final, desperate act, Josh slammed the Core's crystalline surface against the Kyklops's bronze finger. It was a physical act meant to trigger an electrical shock.
The resulting surge was instantaneous and cataclysmic. It wasn't an explosion of steam, but an implosion of light. The Kyklops's single eye flickered violently, cycling from ruby-red to a blinding, corrosive white. Its steam vents shrieked, not with malice, but with a sound like a thousand safety valves blowing simultaneously.
"—ERROR. CRITICAL LOAD—INDISCRIMINATE AMPLIFICATION—MEMORY OVERLOAD—"
The bronze fingers loosened, momentarily paralyzed by the internal system shock. Josh didn't hesitate. He swung his free body down, tucking himself between the Kyklops's thumb and forefinger, and then launched himself toward Doric.
He managed to grab his companion's massive, armored wrist, then kicked himself off the Kyklops's weakening grip, pulling Doric's unconscious weight with him. They plunged into the black void.
The fall was measured in heart-stopping seconds. As they plummeted past the bronze pylon of the Pinnacle of the Strategos, Josh looked up. The Kyklops, momentarily blinded and seized, was already rebooting. But Phrixus and the other assassins—the winged Syndicate soldiers—were still airborne, closing the distance.
"Not good, not good, not good," Josh muttered, his engineer's mind searching for a physical solution. The fall was too far; even the leather chlamys and tunic wouldn't provide enough drag.
Then, a glint of brass. They were falling directly toward the Lower Tiers, the industrial sprawl of the city that had seemed so distant. Specifically, they were heading for a massive, slow-moving column of airship docking platforms, a lattice of brass-riveted airship docks connected by colossal, chain-driven elevators.
Josh spotted a network of thick, hemp-steel rigging used to stabilize the immense airship platforms against the turbulent updrafts. It was a giant, vertical spiderweb.
Using his momentum and Doric's weight as an anchor, Josh managed a desperate maneuver, wrapping his own body and Doric's around a spiraling support cable. The friction was agonizing, tearing at the leather of his bracers and smoking the wool of his chlamys, but the cable held. Their descent was brutally arrested, swinging them into a dizzying, pendulum arc beneath the airship dock.
They had landed—or, rather, crashed—onto the metal grating of an abandoned docking bay platform. The platform, labeled in weathered brass script as Dock 7-Gamma, smelled of stale machine oil, burnt coal, and the metallic dust of constant industry.
"Doric. Wake up, you mad genius," Josh whispered, shaking the larger man.
Doric groaned, his Aegean-blue eyes fluttering open. "By the forge… Ajax, you actually fell for it. You… you let the Kyklops catch you."
"I was performing a thermal-kinetic pressure release," Josh snapped, cutting his companion's sling using a small, sharp instrument from his wrist bracer. "Your Syndicate's logic failed to account for a modern engineer's ability to turn a power surge into a flashbang."
Doric sat up, rubbing his head and looking around at the labyrinthine Lower Tiers. Above them, the Kyklops was a distant, glowing behemoth, still rebooting its systems. The winged Syndicate assassins, however, were circling, like vultures realizing their prey had merely stumbled.
"The Syndicate," Doric said, his voice now a low, grave rumble. "It's more than a corporation. It's the new Oligarchy. They control the flow of Aetheric Steam—the gas that lifts the entire city and powers the automatons. The Senate, the supposed government, they're just puppets. The Syndicate believes the city has become too dependent on unpredictable organic governance, and they want to put the Aether-Core into the Promachonos Spire regulator to initiate a complete Synthetic Governance Protocol—a mechanical dictatorship, Ajax. They want to turn Olympus Aethelos into a giant automaton."
The sheer scale of the conspiracy made Josh's head spin. "So, the Core is the master key. And they need Ajax, the guy who designed the control system, to install it."
"Precisely. You are the Strategos of the old guard, the only one who can bypass the Senate's emergency protocols—the so-called 'Zeus Protocol'—and keep the city alive outside of their control. Now, if you're finished with your… dramatic entrance, we need to move. Dock 7-Gamma. This is Phrixus's old territory. The Syndicate keeps a close watch on the Lower Tiers. It's where they recruit their Psylli—the bronze-clad flyers who are essentially their shock troopers."
They moved quickly, keeping low under the shadow of immense, brass-riveted airship moorings. The Lower Tiers were a stark contrast to the Pinnacle of the Strategos. Here, the smog was thicker, the steam vents weren't polished bronze, but rusty, weeping iron, and the perpetual sound was the clanking, groaning misery of endless industrial labor. Beneath them, in the chasms between the platforms, the lowest tier—the Stygian Depths—was visible only as a turbulent, copper-hazed darkness, rumored to house the city's outcasts and its most volatile steam-driven generators.
"Where is the Spire from here?" Josh asked, adjusting the heavy, surprisingly comfortable wool chlamys.
"The Promachonos Spire is the central axis. It cuts through all four Tiers, connecting the Stygian Depths to the Pinnacle. From here, we need to cross the Iron Labyrinth—a massive, rotating maintenance segment connecting the docks to the central residential structures. It's a mess of interlocking steam pipes and moving gears. It should slow down the flying Psylli."
As Doric spoke, a distant, high-pitched whirr cut through the noise of the city—a sound too fast to be a piston, too sharp to be a vent. It was the sound of mechanized wings approaching rapidly through the thick smog.
"Too late for the labyrinth," Josh hissed, looking up. Three shapes, smaller and faster than the Harpia-Automatons, were diving toward them. They weren't Phrixus, but they were the Syndicate's Psylli—bronze-armored flyers with sleek, obsidian flight harnesses.
"We're on a dead-end dock, Ajax! There's no cover!" Doric roared, drawing a massive, spiked club—clearly salvaged from one of the Harpia wreckage—and positioning his immense body between Josh and the attackers.
Josh's eyes, however, were not on the attackers, but on the massive, stationary Cargo Lift bolted to the edge of the dock, its chains running into the Stygian Depths below. The lift was enormous, easily capable of carrying a hundred tons. On the side of the lift was a simple, copper-plated access panel, its gears slowly rotating, controlling the lift's massive steam engine.
"The lift's too slow!" Doric yelled, parrying the attack of the first Psylli with a clang of bronze against steel.
"Not going down," Josh corrected, his mind racing. "We're going up. To the Promachonos Spire. The long way."
The lift cables were thick, steam-forged chains. The access panel held the solution. He sprinted toward it, the Aether-Core still in hand, his engineer's instinct screaming at him. He didn't know how to fire the Aetheric Carbine, but he knew how to overload a pressure regulator. He knew the principles of steam engineering that held this ridiculous city together.
He wrenched the copper access panel open, revealing a terrifying nest of polished brass gears and glowing Aetheric Steam conduits. One of the conduits, a main pressure line, glowed with an intense orange heat.
The Kyklops had failed because it was too large, too powerful, and too reliant on logic. Josh was small, unpredictable, and running purely on desperate panic and applied physics.
"Doric! Get ready to jump!" Josh screamed.
He jammed the Aether-Core—the heart of the city's defense grid—directly into the main pressure line's steam regulator. It was reckless, insane, and instantly effective. The Core's energy, instead of regulating the steam, was now violently feeding the engine, turning it into a massive, steam-powered cannon.
The great chain-driven Cargo Lift, intended for a slow, mile-long journey, didn't move slowly. With a deafening, terrifying shriek of protesting brass, the massive chain snapped taut and the lift began to ascend at terminal velocity, screaming upwards like a rocket.
"Hold on!" Doric shouted, grabbing Josh and securing them both on the lift platform just as the platform reached a terrifying, blinding speed. The force of the acceleration was enough to crush them, pinning them to the floor as they were rocketed vertically.
They shot past the docking bays, past the main residential Tiers, and into the thinning, brighter air of the upper city, leaving the confused and outmatched Psylli far behind in the smog.
The lift chain, red-hot from the friction and speed, was groaning a death song. The entire lift was destabilizing from the uncontrolled steam pressure.
They were flying now, not falling, but ascending toward their goal—the glittering spire of the Promachonos.
They crashed through the atmospheric layer that separated the Lower Tiers from the Aethelosian Heights—the territory of the Senate—and with one final, ear-splitting screech of metal, the chain on the Cargo Lift snapped entirely.
The immense lift platform, having served its purpose, detached and plummeted back into the depths. Josh and Doric were now on the sheer, vertical face of the Promachonos Spire, clinging to the shattered remnants of the cable where it met the spire's structure, a thousand feet above the rest of the city.
A blinding, iridescent glow emanated from the spire's structure just a few meters above their heads—an impossibly strong, shimmering field of energy.
"That's it, Ajax! The Spire's main defense grid!" Doric coughed, blood trickling from his lip. "The Promachonos is protected by an Aetheric Plasma Field—nothing gets through it. Not even us."
"There has to be a regulator. A bypass," Josh said, staring at the energy field, the remnants of the Core's energy still pulsing in his hand.
Then, they heard a sound from inside the Spire. Not the heavy, industrial sound of the Syndicate, but a single, rhythmic, high-pitched tapping—like a small, brass hammer hitting glass.
The shimmer of the Plasma Field fluctuated. A sliver of the spire's obsidian surface peeled back, retracting like a segmented iris, and a small, mechanical arm—delicate, silver, and unnervingly precise—extended toward them.
It was not a weapon. It was an invitation.
But extending from a hidden compartment just beside the silver arm was a second appendage: a wickedly sharp, steam-driven bronze barb, aimed directly at Josh's chest. The voice that echoed in his mind was not the Kyklops's grinding resonance, but a dry, cold female voice that resonated with the sound of a thousand ticking gears.
"Welcome to the Promachonos Spire, Strategos Ajax. The Zeus Protocol can be engaged. But only one of you can enter the regulator chamber to install the Core. Choose, or the Spire will choose for you."
The bronze barb twitched, ready to strike Doric. Josh looked at his unconscious friend, then at the single, impossible doorway. To save the city, one of them had to die.