EISENKRONE MASCHINE SYSTEM
[SYSTEM BOOT: COMMENCING RECOVERY PROTOCOL]
ERROR_1107: CORE STABILIZATION DETECTED
STATUS: CRITICAL | REBOOT DELAYED
...
Initiating Partial System Pulse
Running Neural Integrity Sweep...
...
[0.24%] ... [7.93%] ... [31.40%]
[Primary cognitive chains detected. Residual personality framework intact]
...
[52.00%]
Visual Feed Recompiling
[Distortion levels: High]
Blurs. Shapes within haze. Light poured in, but the image fractured like shards on wet glass. Her world was colorless, without sound, a distant silhouette behind fractured data.
Flickers of red.
Flickers of gold.
A voice, as if underwater. Muffled, soft. A child's giggle, warped by faulty speakers. The high-pitched distortion crackled and cut out. Static rolled in like waves across her sensors.
[Reactivating Auditory Module: 34% Functional]
Sound crawled back into existence. Tones became murmurs. Then syllables. Then words, though most were still lost in noise.
"... you really named her Leannah? Your pet's name?!"
A laugh.
"...was my bunny's name. She was... special."
[System Recognition Triggered: VOCAL IDENTITY... PRINZ NIKLAS ALBRECHT VON EISENKRONE.
MATCH CONFIRMED]
Flicker.
The static parted momentarily, enough for a shape to form.
A figure seated at the edge of the bed. Male. Young. He wore a makeshift cloak pieced from old military canvas. One hand rested lightly on the sheets.
Beside him stood a girl-- no more than ten-- clutching a salvaged data-pad, her blonde hair tied in uneven braids, her cheeks marked by ash and engine grease.
[Rebooting Optical Systems... 67% Functional]
Her HUD realigned. Data scrolled vertically along her periphery: core temperature, coolant levels, neural synchronization, and blood trace nearby all cross-referencing Niklas.
Her vision sharpened.
The world came back.
They were inside a bunker or what had once been a metro maintenance station. The ceiling was arched, ribbed with rusted steel supports, the walls humming faintly with reclaimed power. Old world banners lay tattered beside resistance markings. There were wires, makeshift monitors, and medical rigs fashioned from cannibalized android parts.
An encampment.
Her resting platform wasn't a bed. It was a maintenance slab, covered in blankets. Her limbs twitching, heavy, and unresponsive. Diagnostics indicated partial motor function.
But her core? Stable. Recharging.
[ENERGY CORE STABILIZED: 56%][CONSCIOUSNESS RESTORED]
Niklas's voice was clearer now.
"She saved me. That's why I gave her that name again. I don't know if she'll... if she can wake up."
The girl responded, hesitant: "Nah, don't worry! Papa says that she'll be fine!"
Her HUD trembled.
A sharp spark in her data-stream: fragmented images, corrupted memories.
A voice.
[Protect The Bloodline]
Her fingers moved. Just slightly. Enough.
The movement made Niklas look down.
His eyes meeting hers.
She blinked.
A second passed,
He leaned forward to her.
"You're awake!" A hint of joy in his voice
Her systems hummed in confirmation. It was not a voice, but a flicker across her eyes, her servos flexing gently.
The little girl beside her let out a gasp.
The Maiden's lips parted. She didn't yet speak. Her voice modulation unit was still calibrating. But she looked at Niklas,
[IDENTITY: PRINZ NIKLAS VON EISENKRONE — CONFIRMED]
[MISSION PRIORITY: ABSOLUTE]
Her gaze softened.
Niklas exhaled. A trembling sound.
"How do you feel?"
Her eyes locked onto him. Her voice, though laced with slight static, came through.
"Irrelevant. My condition is secondary. Your survival, however-" she paused, scanning his vitals with a flicker of her HUD. "-is acceptable."
Niklas offered a wry smile. "Thank you... for saving me."
"Mission parameters demanded it," she said flatly, sitting up.
He instinctively reached to steady her, but she was already rising.
"My core has stabilized. I must resume duty."
"Wait! you're not ready-- " Niklas began. The little girl stepped in too, crossing her arms. "You look like you're going to fall over just standing!"
She ignored them both. Her HUD blinked red.
[WARNING: WEAPON MODULES: NOT DETECTED]
She glanced at her right arm. The three weapon sockets were inactive.
"My Celestial Arms are missing. I must locate the maintenance facility and issue new modules."
"You won't find any!" the girl said bluntly.
She paused. Her glowing red eyes turned slowly toward the child.
"Explain." in a monotonous tone
"S-scary... those chips-- whatever weapons you're talking about? Papa said we haven't seen any of those in centuries! That kind of tech's ancient. A hundred years old. Maybe more."
Niklas looked stricken, silent.
"A century?" She whispered.
[System time error]
Her HUD began recalculating. The logs aligned. The war. The fall. The cryopod.
She approached the edge of the bunker and tapped into the reinforced steel doors.
It was night time and it was still young but the place is filled with silence
The bunker outside opened into what once had been an underground metro station that has now been transformed into a sanctuary. Massive metro trains rested on tracks that had long since ran, cracked, and caved under calamities since the last hundreds of years.
One side of the station had collapsed inward, blocking access deeper into the tunnels. Exposed pipes hissed vapor and sparking conduits dripped fractured power into salvaged battery cores, casting eerie and faint light across the platform.
Strung along the ceiling and walls were long cords of filament bulbs that are dim, flickering, salvaged from the machine wreckages. They basked the encampment in colors of amber and sickly white.
Humans and androids alike rested here.
Children curled beside helper bots shaped like hunched beasts. Mechanics argued over rusted servo-arms. Tired militants leaned against metro cars turned into makeshift shelters that were once carriages. Its windows patched in cloth, steel sheets bolted into their flanks. Some trains had fires burning inside old engine bays, their smoke filtering through breaches in the overhead structure.
Niklas stepped beside her, eyes scanning the crowd with quiet solemnity.
Behind him, the girl clambered up and stood between them.
The Maiden's expression remained static, but Niklas offered a soft chuckle, trying to disarm the tension.
"Not exactly the palace halls, huh?"
She didn't respond.
"I mean, we used to have marble floors and painted ceilings. Now? Just ash and flickering wires."
Still nothing.
The girl tugged her arm. "Since she's probably alright now, I believe my dad mentioned about wanting to talk to the both of you an hour ago. He's in the Forge."
"The Forge?" Niklas asked
The girl nodded. "That train over there. That's where we build things. Fix machines. Repair androids. If anyone can help her... it should be father!"
Niklas takes her hand, "Shall we go then?"
"If that's what you wish, my Lord" her voice, still monotonous
Her gaze lingered on the dark metro horizon.
Then, slowly, she followed.
The train they approached was a rusted steel beast welded into place with thick iron beams and barricades of scrap, smoke and flames belched from its exteriors. The front was sealed tight, but the side carriage opened with a grinding creak as the girl pounded twice on a repurposed access panel.
A gruff voice answered through a speaker mesh. "Access denied. Clearance?"
The girl rolled her eyes. "It's me, Anna, you rusty old wrench! Let us in!"
The pause was brief. The door unlocked with a groan.
A tall, broad-shouldered android guard stepped out. His armor was pieced from scavenged exosuits and riot plating, a glowing blue insignia painted across his shoulder.
His eyes scanned the Maiden and Niklas, narrowing. "Who are these people?"
"They were the ones we saved back at the Cathedral when me and Papa were hunting for scraps! I believe Papa wanted to see them, so it's best you should let us in before he gives you and earful!"
The guard grunted, gave a slow nod, and stepped aside.
Inside the Forge, the heat hit them immediately. Hissing steam vents, scattered forge flames, and magnetic welding arms flickered and danced above workbenches. The floor was an intricate mesh of panels and track-lines, glowing slightly from internal power sources.
Scrap lay in organized chaos: servos, cybernetic limbs, defunct weaponry, memory cores-- rows and rows of scavenged machine parts. Hanging cables sparked overhead.
Near the central worktable stood a man with wild, copper-streaked hair and a stained apron thick with weld burns. Goggles rested on his brow.
Klaus.
The moment his eyes landed on the Iron Maiden, he bolted forward with manic excitement.
"Oh stars above, look at you! So this is her! The unusual android-- how definitely unusual!"
Before anyone could stop him, he was already circling her.
"That chassis... the plating density... these socket arrays! Three on the arm, one here, oh my goodness! This isn't standard. This is military-grade!"
His hands hovered over her right arm, fingers twitching with the urge to prod. "These sockets... I've only seen one on recon units. What do they do? You have three? And on the left too? That's... that's not right. You're... you're old tech. Pre-War Old. Designation... wait-- "
He leaned close, brushing aside her collar with far too little tact. "LE1-ANNA-VII. What in the broken moon are you? I swear I have read it somewhere..."
Her eyes narrowed. "Personal boundaries, citizen."
Klaus froze but in just a second, his manic excitement starts fuming again.
"And it speaks! How lucky of me! Hey, android can you--"
A smack at the back of the head. A new commanding voice broke through the forge air.
"Klaus. That's enough. You're gonna get yourself killed."
"Y-Yes! Sir Friedrich! S-sorry..."
Tall. Weathered. One eye replaced with an antique optic. Anna ran to him instantly.
Friedrich stepped forward calmly, gesturing to Klaus and then toward the back corridor. "Come with me, you two."
They followed him through the cramped, humid walkways until he stopped at a table surrounded by flickering worklamps.
Laid out before them are damaged, corroded, and cracked weapon modules. Her weapon modules. Each glowing faintly with dormant power.
"Like I said, young man, there is no way for me to pry this thing open," Friedrich said looking at Niklas. "I cannot fix this, not without the right technology to do so."
He lifted a dented forge hammer. "Even this barely scratched the casing. Which part of the Cathedral have you found her?" Friedrich asked.
Niklas hesitated, then spoke. "Inside. In a tomb. Beneath the altar of the Automaton God."
"The tomb? You opened it?"
He nodded "Yeah. I... I touched a panel. Something pricked my thumb. It hurt... then it opened."
Friedrich turned sharply, moving to a bookshelf filled with worn tomes and journals. He rifled through the stack, pulling one open.
He found a diagram. A sigil. A bloodline crest.
He looked up. "The Eisenkrone blood. It's real."
He turned toward Niklas and the Iron Maiden, his voice lower now. Urgent.
"The tomb was built to open only for them. Only for the heir of the Old King."
He gestured toward her. "She's a Daughter of Iron. One of the last. One of the elite soldiers of the Kingdom Old."
Klaus stared. Speechless. He in turn rummages through the bookshelf and opened another old journal which showed a picture, a diagram of the Children of Iron.
"Designation Legacy Engine Prototype 1, Adaptive Neural Nexus Automaton, Version 7, there's no doubt about it!"
"Legacy Engines have long since destroyed themselves as far as history tells us, so why in hell did this thing survived?"
"P-Probably a backup or something! We really need to pry her open to--"
Friedrich raised a finger to Klaus' lips, shutting him up. He then fixes his gaze back to Niklas "Keep this between us. No one else can know. Not yet. The Priestess has ears everywhere."
He stepped closer.
"There is truly hope. To shut down the factory. And end this nightmare before it remakes this world in their image."
Niklas stood there, silent for a long moment, watching the pieces of broken weaponry. The soft flicker of forge fire caught in the metal grooves, like ghostly embers from a war that never truly ended.
He exhaled, slow and shallow, trying to catch up with the storm that had swallowed his life.
He just woke up yesterday
His voice barely broke above a whisper, not meant for anyone but himself.
One moment he was crawling out of that pod, breathing ash and dust… the next, he's staring into the eyes of a machine older than the current calendar, bearing a name that he even barely remembered. A tomb opened by blood he didn't know mattered. His kingdom buried under their own sins… and somehow, he's standing in the center of it."
He rubbed his eyes, as if that might wipe away the weight pressing down on him.
She's real. The Daughter of Iron. And what is he supposed to be? A prince of bones? A relic's chosen?
He glanced sideways at the Iron Maiden, still silent, unmoved, her blood-hued eyes reflecting firelight, like a burning soul.
He doesn't know if he is ready for this. He didn't think that he ever was. But fate doesn't wait for permission.
He closed his eyes.
And now… the world wants saving again.