The red zone did not believe in greetings.
Kael knew he was close when the air started chewing back. Heat shimmered off sheet-metal in visible waves, distorting the mangled landscape into slowly undulating waves. Fumes leaked from cracks in the ground in the specific shade of red that suggested the heap had started storing sunsets underground and they'd gone rancid.
He tied cloth over his mouth and nose until the knot said serious, then added a second knot that said suicidal but tidy. He crouched behind a jutting slab of collapsed plating and peered down.
The valley ahead looked like a forgotten hellscape. Old war scars he'd only heard about in lies were carved into the ground—long black gouges where something had burned steel until it ran in molten rivers, there were craters with glassy bottoms that still steamed in little tantrums. Shapes moved between the craters in the lazy, confident way of things that had never been introduced to consequences: mutants with joints twisted at unnatural angles, junk-wisps in glimmering fogs, a rustborn giant kneeling to the wind like it was trying to remember the word for knees.
Kael tasted the air through the cloth. Acid, hot coins, smoke with ambition. Smells like someone set a rotten food heap on fire inside a dragon and told it to breathe it into my face, he thought. Perfect. Love that for me.
He slid a bolt from his pocket and tossed it onto a plate ahead. The landing clanged, then skittered, then fell silent. He counted. No answering hiss, no enthusiastic claws. He crept forward a meter.
Mirror shard next. He settled low, slid the glass around a bent strut, and angled it until it captured the blind corner. The reflection wobbled in ripples of heat, but he saw enough: a nest of tangled cables where cables had no right to nest, and—ah—something with too many elbows tucked under them like a secret.
He backed away, ribs tight. Tried a different path, the one with worse footing and fewer witnesses.
The red zone's heap-song had its own tempo. Plates sighed in fever-dream chords. Slag cracked underfoot with the precise crunch of expensive mistakes. Twice, vents puffed scalding breath in his face. He skirted a basin where the air shimmered and a pool of rare unappetizing liquid sat stagnating.
When he reached the valley floor, the heat climbed inside his shirt. He ignored it on principle. Ignoring had kept him alive longer than courage had.
The thing in the middle caught his eye because it didn't want to be here.
Not a ship. Not a tank. Not anything human enough to be insulted by the comparison. It rose from the slag like a cathedral had molted—ribs of black material arcing up, smooth surfaces warped by ancient heat but not broken. Angles that hurt if you stared too long. Seamless plates with soft veins of light pulsing beneath, like a heartbeat in stone.
Kael wiped fog from the mirror with the heel of his hand and gave himself one more look at every exit. In. Out. Alive. Preferably in that order. He tucked the mirror away.
Something growled behind him like metal reconsidering gravity.
He spun, crowbar up.
The beast trotting out of the fumes looked like a porcupine had tried on a bulldozer. Six legs bent the wrong direction, lacquered plates jutted from meat in a style choice nature would not endorse, and a column of rebar ran through its back like a forgotten design note. Its head split open vertically to hiss at him, showing teeth in places that really needed permits. Two eye voids glowed faint, like leftover coals remembering a fire.
"Ah," Kael said. "Customer service."
The beast lunged.
He sidestepped and chopped down. The crowbar met plating with a sound like two pans clanging and stung his arm to the shoulder. The beast whipped around startlingly fast and clawed, gouging a trench where he'd just been. He ducked under the swing, rolled, came up on one knee with a grunt that failed to be dignified.
Too fast. Too plated. Congratulations, Kael, you found the deluxe model.
It came again. He jammed the bar into the vertical mouth and shoved. Teeth clamped, sparks fell, both of them locked on opposite ends of the same mistake. The beast's lower jaw flexed. The crowbar buckled a whisper. Kael's biceps announced they had been underfunded for this project.
He let go with his left hand and ripped the cracked power cell from his shirt. Dangerous. Stupid. Desperate. He slammed the cell against the beast's chest and held it there.
The indicator flared white. Gel hissed into angry steam. The cell made a sound like a small sun deciding to try performance art.
Light punched outward, flat and mean. Kael flew backward. He landed on his spine, air knocked out of him, ears stuffed with white noise. Black dots did fireworks in his eyes. He coughed and coughed again and argued privately with the rising vomit.
When the world stopped yelling, the beast lay on its side with a smoking cavity where it's abdomen had once been. The crowbar stuck in its split skull, the handle wobbling like a sad flag.
Kael staggered up, his joints screaming in protest. Blood warmed his lip and brined his tongue. The taste of sizzling gel sour in his mouth.
"Worth it?" he asked the air. The air shrugged. He limped to the carcass and yanked the crowbar free. It left like a sword being pulled from a stone by someone who had done something wrong to the sword first.
He scouted the valley edges again, because beasts loved friends, and he had no interest in meeting the whole club. Silence held, if you ignored the red fog's gentle hiss and the low, constant hum that wasn't exactly sound coming off the cathedral machine.
He went in.
Inside the cracked seam, the temperature stepped down as if the room had heard of comfort and was willing to imitate it for a fee. The air tasted clean in a way that made Kael suspicious. Pale veins of light pulsed under seamless walls, not in any color he could name, more in the flavor of working. Symbols drifted across surfaces like fish exploring a lake of glass, rearranging themselves too deliberately to be random and too fluid to be in writing he understood.
His crowbar suddenly felt prehistoric.
"Hi," he whispered, because sometimes you introduced yourself to the room that might kill you. "Local rat. Here to steal your secrets. I promise not to lick anything glowing unless it licks me first."
At the chamber's center, a pedestal grew out of the floor. On it hovered a sphere pitch-black enough to look like it warped the light around it. Thin lines chased themselves around it in precise routes, breaking and recombining, making patterns that insisted they weren't patterns right up until they were.
Kael circled it with the skeptical reverence of a man assessing a miracle for resale value. The sphere pulsed once, so faintly he might have imagined it. He did not imagine the second pulse, which arrived with the gentle certainty of a debt.
No touching, his brain said.
Just one poke, his hand said.
Rock-paper-scissors? his survival instinct said.
The sphere saved them all the trouble. Threads of light snapped out and took his wrists before outrage could even get its shoes on.
Cold ran under his skin. Not temperature — the precise absence of permission.
He yanked; the threads held without bothering to pretend they were trying. Light slid up his arms and into his eyes and ears and every place inside him that spelled private.
Kael's scream ricocheted, got absorbed by the walls, and echoed back faintly.
The room blinked.
So did the world.
Darkness. Then stars. Not the movie kind. The how dare you be small kind.
He fell without moving. He floated without falling. Perspective forgot its job.
A voice arrived that wasn't a voice. It existed inside his head, inside the bones that complained about weather, inside the breath he set on the bench when he went to sleep. It spoke in chords, in numbers, in something that tasted like metal if metal were a sentence.
—CANDIDATE LOCATED.
The stars rearranged into a branching lattice, each fork blooming into a hundred smaller forks, each of those into more, until the shape felt like a thought reproducing unchecked. A tidal wave of data ran over him—glyphs, equations, maps of places no sensible human ever drew because paper would have refused.
—BASELINE: MALNOURISHED ADOLESCENT BIOFORM. ENVIRONMENT: HAZARDOUS. MORTALITY PROBABILITY WITHOUT INTERVENTION: 71.3% (24H).
"Flattering," Kael said, or thought, or dreamed saying. His voice sounded like it was wearing echo for clothes.
—ASCENDENT PROTOCOL: BOOTSTRAP SEQUENCE.
Something like a schematic spun open around him—rings within rings, a tree unfurling in clean angles. Each node bore a symbol. Some glowed cold. Most stayed dark, sleeping with meaning. Lines connected clusters like veins.
—PREREQUISITES: NONCOMPLIANT. RESERVE ENERGY: NEGLIGIBLE. ACCESS: PROVISIONAL.
"Hold on," Kael thought as politely as he could while being dissected by light. Do I get to not sign? Is there a 'decline and go back to dying in peace' button?
—QUERY: IRRELEVANT.
The lattice reoriented. A central ring brightened.
—SURVIVAL KERNEL: SEEDING.
He felt something pinch his chest without touching it. The cold became busy.
—SUBMODULES AUTHORIZED (PROVISIONAL):
[LUNG-PATCH v0.1] — Micro-adaptive filtration. Toxic load damped.
[KINETIC SYNC v0.05] — Motor planning enhancement. Predictive micro-trajectory overlay (low fidelity).
[SCAV-SENSE v0.0X] — Electromagnetic whisper; salvage density hinting. UI crude.
[PAIN THROTTLE v0.0?] — Sensory gating under duress.
[MEM-ANCHOR v0.0] — Recall tagging. Accuracy: you get what you pay for.
"v0-point-what now?" he managed. Is that… beta? Pre-alpha?
—STATE: EVERYTHING IS BETA.
Light pressed into his temples like new fingers trying on a skull. Lines crawled under his skin—imaginary lines, surely—mapping muscles like they were interesting. He felt his breath slide smoother, as if the air had decided to get filtered out of professional courtesy. He tasted the fumes and found them downgraded from murder to insult.
—DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE. ADAPT. ASCEND.
"I noticed the branding," Kael muttered. Do I at least get a pamphlet?
—RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS: ENERGY, MATERIAL, TIME. SEE: THE THING YOU DON'T HAVE.
The lattice flickered. Hundreds of nodes remained dark. A few at the very bottom glimmered like cheap coins.
—ADVISORY: YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST CANDIDATE FROM LOW-CAPACITY CIVILIZATIONS. YOU WILL NOT BE THE LAST.
He hated the calm in that sentence like he hated Enforcer smiles.
"So if I climb your tree, I become what? A better rat? A rat who reads?"
—OUTCOMES VARY. YOUR PROGRESS CURVE IS A FUNCTION OF INPUT. TRY HARDER.
Kael laughed, or the idea of laughter did. Even the alien horror has a work ethic. Of course it does.
The stars folded. The sphere with its patience returned. The threads unraveled from his skin.
—INTEGRATION: INCOMPLETE. MODULES: LIVE (PROVISIONAL). FURTHER ACCESS LOCKED UNTIL ADEQUATE INPUT. TRY NOT TO DIE.
The world hit play again. Kael staggered. The pedestal still hummed. His hands shook with a new tremor that felt less like fear and more like the aftertaste of a word you couldn't translate.
He blinked. A faint lattice overlayed the room for half a blink—hair-thin lines tracing possible steps on the floor, ghostly arrows when he moved his hips. It disappeared the moment he tried to look at it directly, the way a joke stops being funny when explained.
He breathed. The fumes bit less. His chest expanded without the familiar there's-glass-in-here complaint. Lung-patch, he thought, trying not to grin because grinning in alien tombs seemed awkward.
Something tugged at the back of his eyes—a quiet there when he glanced toward the machine's left flank. He followed it with the suspicion you reserve for friends who sell knives. In a melted rib, half-hidden by slag, a dark lump sat. To the eye, junk. To the new whisper in him, denser. He pried it loose. Not metal. Not stone. Something like both, heavy for its size, flecked with faint lines that wanted to be light but were resting. The whisper purred.
"Hello, jewelry," he said, pocketing it. "Please be the kind of curse I can fence."
The pedestal turned its pulse down to annoyed heartbeat. Kael, who had good manners, bowed to it with just enough irony to amuse himself, then turned to leave.
Outside the crack, the red valley hadn't become kinder. But his lungs approved.
He limped toward the slope. Suddenly before his eyes a grid flashed again—there with a bright outline, a step that would not slide; there, glowed a plate promising to betray; there, an angle that meant momentum would turn into a faceplant. The flashes came and went like lightning with stage fright.
From the haze to his right, claws ticked. Low. Fast. Not one set. Two. Maybe three.
"Oh good," he said. "Friends."
Beasts trotted out of the red like bills after payday—two smaller than the first, one larger and worse in the ways that count. The big one's head had an extra jaw. Its chest plates bore black scorch marks where something determined had once tried fire and failed. It saw him, decided he was a solvable problem, and accelerated.
Kael's body did something it rarely got to do: use an upgrade.
The world edged slower by a hair, not dramatic, just enough to make choices visible. Thin lines scribbled across his vision—ghost arcs of where the claw would be, where his knee shouldn't be, the exact slot between plates where the crowbar would slide freely for maximum damage.
He did not think this is impossible. He thought yes, finally, and moved.
He slid left under the first swipe. The bar snapped up from hip to jaw with his shoulders moving like he had practiced it a million times. Steel shrieked. The smaller beast's mandible cracked. He pivoted on trash that would have eaten him yesterday, shoved the bar into a gap the overlay insisted was good, and twisted with the kind of confidence you only get when the future tells you it's on your side for the next half second.
The beast folded into itself.
The second beast leaped. He ducked and felt teeth find the cloth at the back of his neck and rip the air where his artery had been only seconds ago. He kicked backward into a knee no anatomy class would honor. Something tore. The beast skidded, legs everywhere at once.
The big one arrived too quickly. He had time to notice the gouge down its left plate, the place the overlay painted with the faintest glowing halo, and he realized that his arms were not going to love him tomorrow.
"Sorry," he told them.
He feinted high, then slammed the crowbar low into the gouge right as the grid's line went from gray to bright. The bar wedged, bit, and found leverage. He heaved. Something gave with a crack that vibrated his teeth. The beast reeled, chest opening like a door that had long rusted shut
"Open house," Kael panted, and drove the bar home.
Sparks sputtered about. The big one convulsed, legs thrashing about. He jumped back and let the surrounding junk take the impact. The beast staggered and brought half a heap down with it. Kael rode the small avalanche by going with the flow, sliding, grabbing, bouncing off a pipe that complained in a language he understood.
When he stopped moving, he had three beasts in pieces, a crowbar that felt promoted, and the new knowledge that [KINETIC SYNC v0.05] came with the notification blinking ran on adrenaline, will require energy next time, don't be cocky.
He lay there for a second and let [PAIN THROTTLE] turn the body-wide emergency siren down to a steady grumble. The world's edges sharpened again. Heat came back with notes of raspberry and failure.
He laughed once because any other noise would have been unproductive. Then he rolled to his knees, retrieved his bar, and considered the carcasses with the detached professional interest of a rat who had rent to pay. The overlay whispered again, soft there pulsing under one of the smaller beasts' chest plates. He dug. His fingers found a puck of hard material nestled in old meat—the size of a coin-stack, faint lines lit like the thing he'd pocketed inside the machine.
He added it to his bag. The whisper approved. He tried not to enjoy being praised by a ghost.
He climbed.
The slope acted like it had missed him and wanted to hold hands. He denied its hand politely. The grid flickered when he reached for a support that would have turned into a slide, and he switched to a pipe that accepted his weight like a professional.
Halfway up, his new lungs earned their keep again. The vent he'd have had to sprint past last week huffed spitefully. He kept moving with dignity instead of panic. It felt like cheating. He considered writing a thank-you note to whoever designed reality to be hackable.
Near the ridge, voices bled into the red—a crackle of radio in the black-jaw frequency range, the pop of a rifle shot somewhere far off that had missed whoever it was meant for and was now announcing to the valley that someone had opinions about someone else's afternoon.
Kael flattened into shadows. His chest moved like it had read about moving and wanted to practice later. He edged along a rib he trusted because yesterday it had failed to kill him, and yesterday was the only qualification some ribs had.
He reached the seam. He listened. He did not hear boots. He did hear the heap groan like a theater waiting for the audience to shut up. He pressed his fingers to the fake bolt and the tired panel and slipped inside before anyone decided to learn curiosity as a hobby.
In the vestibule, he let himself be a person again. He set the crowbar on the bench carefully because it had carried him farther than his arms should have. He leaned both palms on the scarred top and bowed his head in exhaustion.
The inspection light came on with its usual offended buzz. The room looked exactly the same and absolutely different in the way rooms do when you come back with a new perspective.
Kael pulled the dark lump from his pocket and set on the workbench. He held his breath. The whisper in his head ticked like a Geiger counter politely waiting its turn to speak.
"Payment?" he asked no one, and everyone.
His vision hiccuped. A corner of his eye filled with a simple bracketed line of text that wasn't text, just meaning wrapped in the costume of letters because his brain needed training wheels.
[INPUT: ACCEPTED]
ENERGY: MINUSCULE. MATERIAL: INTERESTING.
SURVIVAL KERNEL: STABILIZED.
[LUNG-PATCH v0.1] → v0.2 (FILTER EFFICIENCY +13%).
[KINETIC SYNC v0.05] → v0.06 (TRACE PERSISTENCE +0.07s).
[SCAV-SENSE v0.0X] → v0.01 (SIGNAL-TO-NOISE SLIGHTLY LESS TERRIBLE).
NEW SUBMODULE: [GRIP-MATRIX v0.0] — PALMAR ADHESION MICRO-PATTERNING (MANUAL ACTUATION; DON'T BE DUMB).
"Hello," Kael breathed, then laughed because he sounded like a boy being handed his first real tool in a shop where everything else had been rock.
He flexed his hands. Nothing glowed. A prickling ran across his palms like calluses remembering a better story. He pressed his skin to the bench and felt the adhesion hum on and off as he asked, a polite invisible suction that promised to make climbing less like begging and more like choosing.
"Oh I am absolutely going to be dumb," he told the bracket in his eye.
—ADVISORY: THAT TRACKS.
He drank water, which tasted like reward for once. He let [PAIN THROTTLE] sit where it sat and didn't poke it because he liked moving. He picked up the puck and tilted it into the inspection light. The etched lines inside winked back like streets in a city he had not yet earned the right to be lost in.
He set the puck in the little hide inside the bench meant for if this ever happens. He set the lump beside it. He added one chalk mark to the wall—not the day kind, a new small slash under the map where his arrow pointed to the city—and then rubbed it out because rituals kept you from being eaten by your own optimism.
He closed his eyes. The inside of his lids was a starfield with paperwork. The phrase survive, adapt, ascend had set up a folding chair in his skull and was filing its nails.
He opened his eyes and grinned at the room because no one else would enjoy it. "Massive success," he told the coil, which did not care. "Delivered. Receipt pending."
Outside, somewhere high on the ridge, a black-jaw radio crackled: "—copy that, heat bloom logged in Theta-Red. Might be a battery det—" The sentence parked itself and waited for later.
Kael turned the inspection light down, checked his alarms by reflex, and took the crowbar in hand again. He was not strong. He was not lucky. He was not, by any measure, finished.
But he had a ghost in his head that filtered poison, drew thin lines between him and death, and promised future tricks if he fed it the right flavor of trouble.
He could work with that.
He looked at the chalk map, at the red triangle, at the line toward the city wall with its teeth. He tapped the spot where the gate should be.
Not forever, he told it. And maybe sooner than you think.
Far away, something huge in the heap shifted, and the whole mountain answered in a long, low groan like a door learning it had hinges.
Kael smiled like a boy who had just learned the word for lever.
Then he turned the light out, lay down with the knife where a friend would be, and slept the way you do when tomorrow has already sent you a letter and you've decided to write back.