Josh's eyes met Doric's across the revolving, heat-intensifying floor. The iron hound lunged.
The thing was a mechanical nightmare, low to the ground and silent, driven by interlocking gears concealed beneath overlapping plates of dark, magnetic iron. It moved with unnatural speed, its four steam-driven limbs pumping with precise, furious energy. Doric, a man of brute force and simple mechanics, met his opponent head-on with a roar. His spiked club, salvaged from the Harpia wreckage, slammed into the hound's flank with a sound like a church bell breaking. The blow was solid, but the hound merely shuddered, its momentum unchecked, and its head—a simplified, brass-muzzled automaton skull—lashed out with teeth that were serrated, rotating blades.
Josh, meanwhile, was paralyzed by analysis. His hound was coming, a blur of dark metal against the luminous bronze script of the floor. He was not a warrior. He was an engineer.
I am not Ajax. I am Joshua Harper, and I am the brain here.
He ignored the hound racing towards him and focused on the center column, where the holographic schematic of the Bypass Nexus was still glowing an iridescent red. The column itself pulsed with blue light—the Regulator Chamber access.
The Crucible is a test of logic, not strength. Ajax designed it to force the Strategos to find an alternative to the Zeus Protocol's self-destruct function. The Bypass Nexus is the key, but it requires a power surge—a controlled, chaotic one—to activate.
Doric bellowed as the first hound tore a gouge in his bronze shoulder plate. Josh knew his friend couldn't hold them both. The floor was heating up, the metallic scent of ozone turning acrid. The second hound reached Josh, not attacking, but circling, herding him.
Josh remembered the Core—the source of controlled chaos. He looked to his hand, then realized his mistake: he'd jettisoned the Core moments ago.
Loss acknowledged.
"Doric! The club!" Josh yelled, dodging the hound's snapping maw by rolling over one of the luminous floor-schematics. "The hound you hit—its gears! Aim for the joints!"
Doric, bleeding but unbroken, understood instantly. He pivoted, using the hound's momentum against it, and drove the club's spike into the thin seam of brass where the automaton's front leg met its shoulder plating. A shriek of tortured metal and a violent blast of steam erupted as the hydraulic joint blew. The hound crumpled, its limbs seizing.
But the second hound, Josh's opponent, seized the opportunity. It sprang. Josh threw himself backward, landing against the central Regulator Column. He slammed his fist, not in anger, but in calculation, onto the bronze script glowing on the floor next to him.
"You want Aetheric Flux, you machine? Take it! The Overload Protocol!"
He wasn't Ajax, but he was a nuclear engineer who knew how to turn a surge into a solution. He jammed the metal tip of his wrist-bracer—the one he'd used to cut Doric free—into the glowing, etched line of the Bypass Nexus.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. The entire Regulator Column flared, not blue, but a raw, blinding white-and-gold. The bronze script on the floor shrieked, sucking the ambient Aetheric energy from the chamber's air. The Core was gone, but the Aetheric Plasma Field—the shield protecting the Spire—was still running on an immense, untapped capacitor. Josh had just hotwired the Bypass Nexus directly into the Plasma Field's primary power conduit.
The surge was too much for the second iron hound. Mid-leap, its iron plates glowed cherry-red, its internal clockwork grinding to a halt with a smell of burnt copper and oil. It crashed, immobilized, at Josh's feet.
The female voice of the Oracle-Sentinel boomed in his mind, no longer screaming, but defeated: "—CRUCIBLE DEFEATED. LOGIC PARADOX RESOLVED. STRATEGOS AJAX—BYPASS NEXUS ACTIVATED. CITY DEFENSE GRID: STABILIZED. PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: DEFEAT CHRYSEOS SYNDICATE. SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: AVOID SELF-DESTRUCTION (ZEUS PROTOCOL). FINAL CHOICE REMAINS: PROCEED WITH REGULATOR INSTALLATION."
Josh had won. He hadn't installed the Core, but by activating the Bypass Nexus with a catastrophic surge, he'd effectively told the Spire: I am Strategos Ajax, I've disarmed the self-destruct, and now I'm in charge of the system. The Spire, bound by its own logic, accepted the result.
However, the victory came at a cost: the wrist-bracer he'd used as the conductor, an articulated piece of ancient Aethelosian brass and leather, had been completely fused. He pulled the molten metal away from the glowing rune, confirming his loss: the bracer contained the sharp, small instrument he'd used to cut Doric free, and, more importantly, a collection of micro-schematics—detailed clockwork blueprints of the Spire's controls, etched onto brass filament. The heat had melted the filaments into slag. This loss of the specific engineering blueprints would force him to rely solely on his modern, theoretical knowledge in the future.
"We need to go, Ajax," Doric grunted, pulling Josh to his feet, his eyes wide. "Before its tertiary protocol kicks in."
Josh nodded. The Bypass Nexus had stabilized the Spire—it was a shield, but not a weapon. Without the Core, he couldn't initiate the true attack on the Syndicate. He needed the Core, and it was plummeting toward the bottom of the city.
They found a vertical maintenance chute—a dark, grease-stained hole in the floor that promised a brutal, fast descent.
"Ready to fall a mile into a smog-choked abyss?" Doric asked, a grim laugh escaping him.
"I'm getting used to it," Josh replied, pulling his leather goggles down over his eyes. "We need a new plan. Find the Core, then figure out the installation."
They plunged into the chute. It was a dizzying, rattling, near-vertical descent, punctuated by the scrape of metal and the roar of displaced air. They dropped past the residential Tiers, the air growing thick and oily, until finally they slid out onto a rusty, weeping platform in the Iron Labyrinth.
The Labyrinth was a nightmare of sound and motion. Massive, greasy pistons slammed up and down, immense bronze gears rotated within inches of the walkway, and pipes the size of trees vented scorching steam with the continuous roar of a waterfall. The entire segment was constantly moving, the walkways shifting and sliding. The chaos was a perfect shield against the Syndicate's high-tech flying Psylli, who couldn't navigate the confined, moving space.
As they reached the edge of the Iron Labyrinth, a massive gear-toothed bulkhead shuddered open, revealing the Stygian Depths. It was not just dark; it was a swirling, turbulent mass of copper-colored smoke and shadow, lit only by the occasional, violent flare of volatile steam. It smelled of sulfur, ozone, and desperation.
"Welcome to the bottom," Doric muttered. "We're technically on the fourth Tier now—the most unstable. No Syndicate. But plenty of other problems."
As if on cue, a piercing, metallic shriek echoed from the darkness below. Not the grinding of an automaton, but a human cry, filled with pain and raw panic.
"It's a trap," Doric growled.
"Maybe," Josh said, gripping a loose piece of pipe he'd salvaged. "But if it's an outcast, they might know how to find the Core down here."
They dropped down to a lower, barely-there platform. The source of the scream was a small encampment, a fragile nest of salvaged metal and canvas tucked beneath a massive, pulsating pipe. Two figures, shrouded in rags and leather, were struggling with a third—a skinny, frantic man being dragged toward a pit that vented raw, high-pressure steam.
"He's been claimed by the Fumer! He must pay the toll!" one of the attackers shrieked, his voice ragged.
Doric roared and charged, his club becoming a blur of spiked bronze. Josh, meanwhile, didn't fight the second attacker, a woman. Instead, he kicked a massive support brace, timing his impact to the rhythmic thump-thump of a nearby piston. The vibration was enough to shake the unstable steam pipe above them, causing a controlled, localized jet of raw Aetheric Steam to vent right over the combatants. The assailants scrambled away, vanishing into the smog.
A woman stepped out of the shadow of the steam pipe—the leader of the camp. She was small, clad in patched, heavy leather, with her face masked by a pair of sophisticated, four-lensed brass welding goggles. She carried a weapon Josh immediately recognized: a highly modified, hand-forged steam-rifle. She pointed it directly at Josh.
"You saved him," she said, her voice a low, gravelly alto. "But you're from the Heights. A Strategos with his big, armored pet. You're no Demos. What do you want down here?"
"My name is Josh," he said, holding up his hands. "And my 'big, armored pet' is Doric. We're running from the Chryseos Syndicate. And we're looking for a chunk of glowing crystal about the size of my fist. It fell from the Spire."
The woman lowered the rifle slightly. "The Syndicate? Running from them? That's new. I'm Kalea. And down here, that 'glowing crystal' is not a master key. It's an engine part."
Kalea, it turned out, was not a simple scavenger. She was a former Aetheric Steam Regulator Technician for the Senate, exiled after she refused to implement the Syndicate's early, covert regulatory controls. She knew the city's underbelly intimately.
"The crystal—the Core—is a power nexus, but down here, it's just raw fuel," Kalea explained, leading them to a hidden, shielded section of the camp. "When you jettisoned it, it sank past the Iron Labyrinth, past the volatile conduits, and landed where the city stores its raw Aetheric Steam. The Boiler Pit."
"Can we retrieve it?" Doric asked.
Kalea shook her head. "The Boiler Pit is a mile across, the air is pure steam, and the pressure is lethal. But that's not your main problem. You think you lost the Core. You haven't. You've simply activated the Syndicate's next move."
She pulled a crude, steam-powered projector from a crate and cast an image onto a greasy sheet of metal: the sprawling silhouette of Olympus Aethelos.
"The Syndicate wasn't just after the Core," she said, pointing to a diagram of the Stygian Depths. "They were after Ajax—to install the Core in the regulator. But you failed the installation by losing it. Your logic worked. You bypassed the self-destruct. But the Syndicate isn't stupid. They had a contingency plan—a counter-protocol for a Core loss."
She traced a line from the Boiler Pit to the Kyklops's last known location.
"Your Core, down in the Pit, is doing the opposite of what it was designed for. Instead of regulating the city's lift-steam, it's going to prime the core-engine."
"Prime it for what?" Josh asked.
"For Flight," Kalea whispered, her voice barely audible over the industrial drone. "The Synthetic Governance Protocol was never about control. It was about escape. The Senate has been inefficient because the entire foundation of the city is failing—the Aetheric Lifts are wearing out. The Syndicate's plan is to put the Core in the Spire, stabilize the Aethelosian Heights with a complete mechanical government, then detach the Heights from the Lower Tiers and use the Core's energy to rocket the Senate's territory into the upper atmosphere, leaving the rest of the city, the Lower Tiers and the Stygian Depths, to fall."
"They're going to sacrifice the bottom three Tiers," Josh breathed, looking out at the Lower Tiers.
"You lost the Core, Josh. Now it's not a master key—it's a massive, volatile bomb that will power their escape and doom the rest of us," Kalea confirmed. "We have to stop the priming sequence."
"How long do we have?" Doric demanded.
Kalea pointed to the projected image. The ruby-red light, previously creeping, was now spreading with startling speed, engulfing the Heights.
"The lockdown is complete. The detachment sequence has begun. We have less than an hour before the first seismic tremors begin."
Suddenly, the whole dock shuddered, not from an internal piston, but a deeper, terrifying grind from the city's axis.
"Too late," Kalea said, her voice strained.
A new sound joined the industrial chaos: the high-pitched, triumphant whirr of mechanized wings cutting through the heavy air. The Psylli had found a breach in the Iron Labyrinth. They were coming for them.
But the new sound wasn't just from above. It was from below.
A colossal, rusted section of the platform they were standing on gave way, peeling open like a can lid. A figure ascended from the blackness, shrouded in pure, white, high-pressure steam, his eyes glinting behind his polished steel goggles.
"Strategos Ajax," came the low, predatory voice. "You gave me a good chase. But you sent the Core where it needed to go. The Senate is dead. The Syndicate is ascending. And I am here to personally collect my final token."
It was Phrixus the Iron-Bound, his spiked, rotating steam-mace whirring to life, standing between Josh and their only path forward. And the platform beneath them began to tilt, the first true tremor of the detachment sequence shaking the very foundation of the Lower Tiers.
TO BE CONTINUED