Ironhaven was a city that breathed. Its breath was the hiss of steam, the hum of reactors, and the rhythmic, percussive clang of a thousand hammers shaping destiny from ruin. For Lin Feng, it was a sensory overload after the profound silences of the deep Wastes and the whispering Nexus. Everywhere he looked, he saw the principle of Symbiosis made manifest, not as a cosmic ideal, but as daily, grimy, practical reality. A woman with a crystalline arm calibrated the spiritual flow into a plasma conduit. A man with optic-fiber hair woven into a braid communed with the diagnostic systems of a half-dismantled shuttle. It was breathtaking and intimidating.
They were given a small, clean cell in a barracks made from a repurposed cargo container. The moment the door hissed shut, the Mantis projected a detailed schematic of the room, highlighting no fewer than seventeen separate monitoring devices—audio pickups, energy sensors, and motion trackers.
[Observation: Welcome is conditional. Surveillance is comprehensive.]
"Of course it is," Lin Feng murmured, not surprised. Trust was a currency earned slowly in the Wastes. "We play by their rules. For now."
The next morning, a messenger—a young girl with a vocalizer implant that gave her a melodic, synthetic voice—informed them that their presence was requested at the Anvil. This, they had learned, was the heart of Ironhaven, both its town square and its supreme court.
The Anvil was a massive, circular plaza dominated by a single object: an anvil the size of a ground-car, forged from a single, impossibly dense piece of dark, star-fallen iron. It was pitted and scarred from millennia of use, and it hummed with a low, powerful resonance that seemed to quiet the surrounding city. Around it stood the Assembly—a council of Ironhaven's senior Artificers, including the gate-warden, Bor. They were a diverse group: men and women whose bodies were testaments to their craft, sporting prosthetic limbs, enhanced senses, and in one case, a torso that was mostly a transparent housing for a complex, bubbling chemical reactor.
At the center of the Assembly stood a woman who commanded attention without raising her voice. She was older, her hair a steely grey, her face lined with intelligence and authority. Her left eye was organic, sharp and discerning. Her right eye was a complex multi-lens apparatus that glowed with a soft, golden light. She wore functional artificer's leathers, but over them, a long coat woven from what looked like spun platinum and data-stream filaments.
"I am Kaelen," she said, her voice carrying easily over the Anvil's hum. "Master Artificer and Speaker for the Assembly. You answered the Scrap-Song. Few from the outside can even hear it. It calls to those with an affinity for the unity of spirit and machine. Your bond," her golden lens focused on the Mantis, "is… notable. But Ironhaven's sanctuary is not granted on potential alone. It is earned through utility. We must know what you are. We must see the quality of your fusion."
She gestured to the Anvil. "You will undergo a Evaluation. A three-fold test of your symbiosis. The Test of Resonance, the Test of Repair, and the Test of Defense. Your performance will determine your standing here."
Lin Feng felt a knot of tension in his stomach. This was it. Their first true trial in a society of their peers. Failure meant exile back into the hunted wilds. "We accept," he said, his voice clear.
The Test of Resonance
A heavy, sealed crate was brought forward and opened. Inside was a jumble of components—a cracked spirit-core from a cultivation beast, a burnt-out logic board from a starship's navigation system, and a piece of corrupted data-crystal. The task was simple: using only their symbiotic bond, they had to identify the one item in the pile that still held a viable spark of life or data, and coax it into a stable state.
The Mantis stepped forward, its Luminal Claw glowing with a soft, peach-colored light. It passed the claw over the jumble, its sensors and Lin Feng's own heightened awareness working in tandem through their link. The spirit-core was dead, its energy dissipated. The logic board was a lost cause, its pathways fused. But the data-crystal… Lin Feng, through the Mantis, felt a faint, trapped flicker within it, a pattern of information caught in a recursive error loop, like a bird beating itself against a glass wall.
[Target identified. Data-crystal. Error: Corrupted recursive sequence. Proposed solution: Harmonic resonance to break the loop.]
Lin Feng nodded, placing his hand on the Mantis's carapace. He didn't direct; he amplified. He fed his own calm, ordered qi into their bond, and the Mantis focused it through the Luminal Claw. A beam of gentle, harmonizing energy enveloped the crystal. There was no flash, no drama. The chaotic, frantic flickering within the crystal simply… stilled. A single, clear line of data—a star-chart fragment—flashed into being within the crystal's heart before stabilizing into a soft, steady glow.
A murmur of approval rippled through the Assembly. Kaelen gave a slight nod.
The Test of Repair
Next, they were led to a workshop where a large, four-legged transport walker sat inert, one of its leg actuators shattered and sparking. The task was to repair it using only the materials from a provided scrap pile.
This was the Mantis's element. It moved to the scrap pile, its sensors and Lin Feng's knowledge of basic mechanics merging into a single, efficient purpose. It identified a compatible actuator housing from a different machine. But the housing was too large. Without being asked, the Mantis's original scythe-limb flashed, shearing away excess metal with micron precision. Meanwhile, Lin Feng focused on the spiritual side. The walker's core was distressed, its energy flow disrupted by the physical damage. He wove a thread of stable earth qi and gentle stellar energy, using it to soothe the core, convincing the walker's spirit to accept the new part.
The Mantis used its Luminal Claw not as a tool, but as a welder, fusing the new housing into place with beams of coherent energy that sealed spirit and metal simultaneously. In less than ten minutes, the walker shuddered, its lights flickered on, and it rose to its feet with a healthy hum. It took a tentative step, then another, fully operational.
The approval from the Assembly was louder this time. Bor gave a grunt that might have been admiration.
The Test of Defense
The final test was not against a person, but a phenomenon. They were taken to a shielded chamber where a captured "Data-Phage" was contained—a voracious, self-replicating scrap-code entity that fed on information and spiritual energy, a common hazard in spirit-tech systems. It appeared as a swirling, malevolent cloud of black and purple static in the center of the room.
"Your task is to survive its presence for five minutes," Kaelen said. "And to protect this." She pointed to a small, pristine data-crystal on a pedestal next to them, which contained Ironhaven's foundational schematics. "If the Phage corrupts it, you fail."
The moment the shield dropped, the Data-Phage lunged. It was a tide of pure entropy, screaming with the voices of a thousand deleted systems. It hit the Mantis's sensors like a physical blow, and Lin Feng felt a wave of disorienting nausea as it tried to attack their neural-link itself.
The Mantis's initial reaction was a defensive blast from its scythe, but the plasma passed harmlessly through the non-corporeal entity. The Phage swarmed over it, seeking to corrupt its core programming, to turn its logic into madness.
[Defense ineffective. Entity is non-physical. Switching to harmonic countermeasures.]
The Luminal Claw blazed. But this time, the Mantis didn't project harmony. It projected identity. It broadcast the complex, braided pattern of its own core—the story of its rust, its steel, its light, its memories, its bond with Lin Feng. It was a signal of immense complexity and stability, a fortress of self.
The Data-Phage, which fed on simple, corruptible data, recoiled. This was not food. This was a labyrinth. It tried to attack again, but the Mantis, with Lin Feng feeding it a constant stream of focused will, began to actively push back. The Luminal Claw's beam became a scalpel, not attacking the Phage itself, but severing the connections between its constituent parts, disrupting its cohesion.
The Phage shrieked, its form becoming diffuse, less focused. It turned its attention to the prize—the pristine data-crystal on the pedestal. It surged towards it.
Lin Feng acted on pure instinct. He didn't step in front of it. He threw a handful of common scrap-metal components from his pouch onto the floor in front of the pedestal. To the Mantis, he projected a single, urgent thought: "The Song! The Scrap-Song! Play it!"
The Mantis understood. It focused its Luminal Claw on the pile of mundane scrap—a few gears, a broken circuit board, a length of copper wire. It pulsed a specific, rhythmic frequency, the same one that had called them to Ironhaven.
The scrap began to vibrate, to chime, to sing. A simple, beautiful, and utterly ordered melody filled the chamber. It was the antithesis of the Phage's chaotic scream.
The Data-Phage, confronted with this pocket of perfect, resonant order, this music born from scrap, simply… unraveled. Its static cloud dissolved into harmless motes of light that faded away. The five minutes were not yet up, but the threat was gone. The foundational crystal was untouched.
Silence descended upon the chamber, broken only by the fading chime of the singing scrap.
Kaelen looked from the crystal, to the scrap, to Lin Feng and the Mantis. Her golden lens whirred softly. The other members of the Assembly were utterly still.
"You did not just defend," Kaelen said, her voice hushed with something akin to awe. "You created. You used the Song not as a beacon, but as a weapon of creation against entropy." She stepped forward, her gaze intense. "The Scrap-Song has not just called a survivor. It has called a composer."
She placed a hand on the Anvil. The hum deepened, a sound of acceptance.
"By the judgment of the Anvil and the Assembly, you are granted full sanctuary and the rank of Novice Artificers of Ironhaven. Your bond is recognized not as a curiosity, but as a craft. A new, living craft."
As they were led from the chamber, now as accepted members of the community, Lin Feng felt a profound shift. They had passed. They had a place. But as he looked at the singing scrap on the floor, now inert again, he realized the true nature of the test. It wasn't about power. It was about philosophy. They had proven that their symbiosis wasn't just about survival or combat; it was about bringing a new kind of order into the world.
And in a city built on order pulled from chaos, that made them more than just refugees. It made them potential revolutionaries. The Ghost in the Wires had been defeated, but Lin Feng couldn't shake the feeling that they had just attracted the attention of far greater, and far more curious, entities. Their simple life of survival was over. Now, they had to learn to live in a society, with all the politics, expectations, and new dangers that came with it.