The interior of the transport lift shimmered with containment sigils, flickering slightly with strain. Benedict leaned back against the padded wall, sharing the quiet cabin with Arden Vel and Eline Vort.
"Comfortable enough," Arden said, tapping the bracer on his wrist. The dwarf adjusted his toolbelt for the third time in ten minutes, muttering, "I think better drunk, but I suppose sober thinking will have to do for this ride."
"And draw attention?" Eline replied. She fidgeted with her coat's seam, a restless halfling habit she hadn't shaken since her apprenticeship. "You're underestimating how loud innovation sounds when it's working."
Benedict grinned faintly. "Besides, I like trains."
They rode in companionable silence, each absorbed in their own projections. Pale light flashed across Benedict's lenses as he reviewed a schematic for a modular spellcore socket. Then the lift shuddered.
Then stopped.
"Unexpected halt. Railpath maintenance in progress," the automated voice chimed. "Please remain calm."
The three exchanged glances.
"Does that sound rehearsed to you?" Eline asked quietly.
Benedict moved first. "Get behind me."
He activated the bracer's recording function and slid a fingernail-thin shard of spyglass crystal into his cuff: a prototype surveillance charm designed to auto-bind with nearby arcane signatures and relay passive data.
"Spytech's live," he muttered. "Let's see who's dumb enough to get recorded."
The doors hissed open—not to a station platform, but to a dusty, overgrown junction stop, long out of use. Six figures stood beyond the threshold.
Leather-bound. Armed. Marked with arcane brands.
The lead slaver, a broad-shouldered orc with grey-green skin and a prominent tusk cracked at the tip, stepped forward. His accent marked him as western lowlands, and the way he rolled his shoulders revealed the half-second delay of someone used to wearing heavy armor. "Manifest shows one traveler," he said, eyes scanning Benedict. "He'll do."
At his side stood a pair of wiry elves—possibly twins—with gray-blue skin and sunken eyes. Half-dark elves. Their quiet movements and flickering sigils suggested extensive augmentation. Instead of speaking, they signed to each other using sharp, fluid hand gestures—Underdark sign language.
Behind them, a nervous gnome fiddled with a glyph-etched chain, his fingers moving with a compulsive tic: tap-twist, tap-twist. A spell calibrator, no doubt. Slavers often hired twitchy ones to run unstable binds.
Eline stepped forward with a slow, deadly calm. "You should recalculate."
One of the slavers raised a chain-sigil. "Three's better than one."
The air snapped with latent threat. Slaver brand magic—not sophisticated, but brutal.
"Wrong train," Benedict muttered.
He twisted his stabilizer cuff. Mana surged.
The corridor lit with arc-light as a controlled burst erupted—disarming their front line.
Arden's prism hummed with pale white heat as he invoked a kinetic pulse, knocking a slaver off his feet. He pivoted mid-cast and shielded Benedict's flank with a rotating mirror spell, refracting incoming bolts into flickers of scattered light.
Eline, for her part, pulled three shimmering glass orbs from her belt, each one pulsing with nested glyphs. She slammed them to the ground and spoke a trigger word—"Engram."
Instantly, the orbs emitted blinding sound-bursts: not loud, but disorienting, tuned to disrupt spellcasting concentration.
One slaver managed a chain-lash—but Benedict redirected it through a circuit loop built into the lift's side panel, overloading the sigil and sending the man tumbling into a rail buffer.
Two slavers were already down. One screamed as his brand ignited and failed. The rest turned and vanished into the ley brush.
Benedict stepped over the lead slaver, cuff still warm.
"Tell your masters," he said, "Vehrmath-bound trains are under new ownership."
As the transport lift hissed shut and resumed motion, Arden exhaled.
"So much for an uneventful travel."
Benedict shrugged. "That was uneventful."
The cabin fell into silence for a beat. Then Arden glanced at Benedict.
"That lead slaver," he said slowly, "he was wearing a merchant's registry chain. Off-record trade, black-listed port seals. You thinking what I'm thinking?"
Eline was already scanning through her bracer logs. "Slave trade syndicates need communications networks. Secure ones. Private ones."
Benedict nodded. "And we just made a dent in their logistics. That's leverage."
He tapped his schematic.
"We make the comms. We seed them in the underbelly. We watch where the signals move. Trace slaver networks and test the hardware at the same time."
Arden raised an eyebrow. "You're proposing we use the worst parts of society as your beta test."
"Not just test," Benedict said. "We turn their demand into a data funnel. By the time they realize we're the ones monitoring traffic, they'll be dependent."
Eline smirked. "And we get field stress data under live conditions. No better way to harden the system."
Benedict sat back. "Product launch begins underground. Ends on every wrist."
They said nothing more. But the next time the lift doors opened, all three of them stepped out—not just as artificers.
As engineers of disruption.
Before leaving the junction stop behind, Benedict crouched beside the unconscious slavers. One was still breathing. The spytech shard in his cuff blinked faintly, having recorded the entire exchange.
"Slap a tracker on this one," he said. "Let's see where they run to."
Eline handed him a pebble-sized rune anchor, encoded to transmit in the low-signal gap between leyline pulses. Benedict attached it beneath the man's collar.
Arden was already salvaging materials from their broken sigils. "These aren't street thugs. Their glyph patterns use old academy structuring—someone's selling mage training to criminals."
"Or they're ex-disciples," Eline muttered.
Benedict didn't answer. He turned to the shattered interface box near the rail buffer and pried loose a damaged but intact core from the control panel.
"I'm going to turn this into a prototype relay node. If they're using black-market lines, we can piggyback off their framework."
He glanced back once more before stepping into the lift.
"We let them flee. Now we watch who they crawl back to."
As he replayed the signs the half-dark elves used, an idea flickered.
"Underdark routes… underworld networks… we could mirror those communication paths," he murmured. "Expand the net below the surface."
A second market. Hidden. Silent. Waiting.