The Undercroft didn't have an atmosphere. It had a stench.
It was a thick, oily soup of chemicals that tasted like battery acid and old pennies. Kieran lay face down in it, the black sludge covering his broken body like a shroud.
[Integrity: 1%.] [Critical Failure: Motor Functions Offline.]
He tried to move his legs. Nothing. The connection between his brain and his lower body had been severed when his spine snapped against the shipping container. He was a doll with its strings cut.
"Statistically," Spam's voice beeped from the darkness, low and devoid of its usual energy, "you are already dead. The System just hasn't filed the paperwork yet."
Kieran didn't answer. He couldn't. His lungs were collapsed, filled with fluid. Every breath was a bubbling, wheezing struggle against drowning.
But his left hand—the metal one, the one he had stolen from the Scrap-Crab and the Cultist—still worked. It dug into the muck, dragging his paralyzed torso forward inch by agonizing inch.
Scrape. Drag. Wheeze.
He was looking for the rod.
He had seen it earlier, gleaming faintly in the dark before the pain blinded him. A strut from a destroyed mech. Titanium alloy. Reinforced. Unbreakable.
His fingers brushed against cold metal.
"Found... it," he gurgled, blood bubbling past his lips.
"Kieran, stop," Spam hovered in front of his face, casting a dim, flickering blue light over the horror show of Kieran's back. "You cannot perform neuro-surgery in a sewer with a rusted pipe. If you sever the spinal cord completely, you won't just be paralyzed. You'll be a vegetable."
Kieran rolled onto his side, screaming silently as his shattered ribs shifted. He looked at the robot with eyes that were bloodshot and manic.
"I'm already... a vegetable," Kieran rasped. "Make me... a machine."
He gripped the titanium strut. It was about three feet long, jagged at one end where it had been sheared off in some ancient battle. It was heavy. Brutal.
He dragged it over his body, positioning it along the line of his spine.
"This is insane," Spam muttered, his optic lens spinning in distress. "This is a violation of every medical protocol in the database. You are voiding the warranty on your soul, you know that?"
"Just... run... the script," Kieran hissed.
He placed his metal hand onto the titanium rod. The violet circuits on his arm flared to life, casting long, eerie shadows against the tunnel walls.
[Script Selected: PATCH (v.1.0)] [Target: Vertebral Column (L1-L5).] [Material: Grade-A Titanium Alloy.] [Warning: Anesthetic not found. Proceed?]
Kieran didn't hesitate. "Execute."
The violet light shot out of his hand like liquid fire. It wrapped around the titanium rod and plunged into his back.
Kieran threw his head back and opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. The pain was absolute. It wasn't just physical; it was data overwriting data.
The System was ripping out his shattered bone fragments and replacing them with cold, hard metal. It was weaving his nervous system into the alloy, forcing biological synapses to interface with dead steel.
CRACK. SQUELCH. SNAP.
The sounds of his own body being rearranged echoed in the silent tunnel.
"Heart rate critical!" Spam warned. "BP is spiking! You're going into shock!"
Kieran couldn't hear him. He was lost in a white void of agony. He felt the metal fusing to his pelvis. He felt it drilling into the base of his skull. He felt the cold, unyielding strength of the alloy replacing the weakness of his humanity.
Skitter.
The sound cut through the haze of pain.
Spam spun around. "Movement! Six o'clock!"
Kieran couldn't move. He was pinned to the ground by the Patch process, his back arcing as the metal took hold.
From the shadows of the sludge, they emerged.
[Entity: Wire-Worm.] [Status: Scavenger.] [Description: Bottom feeders. They eat the copper out of dead machines.]
They looked like centipedes made of rusted barbed wire, each one about the size of a cat. Their mandibles were wire-cutters. They smelled the fresh exposure of Kieran's nervous system—the ultimate copper wire.
There were three of them.
"Kieran! Wake up!" Spam shouted, firing a weak laser at the lead worm. The laser bounced off the worm's rusted carapace harmlessly. "My offensive capabilities are offline! I can't stop them!"
The lead worm lunged. It landed on Kieran's legs—the legs he couldn't feel.
It bit down.
Kieran felt a dull thud, but no pain. Not yet. The worm began to chew, gnawing through his pants and into the flesh of his calf, looking for the nerves.
The second worm crawled up his side. It chittered, sensing the open wound on his back where the violet light was working. It raised its wire-cutter jaws, aiming for the exposed spinal cord.
"Kieran!"
[Patching Process: 80%...] [Nural Interface: Syncing...]
The worm struck.
It bit into Kieran's shoulder.
The pain jolted Kieran out of the trance. His eyes snapped open. They weren't brown anymore. They were glowing with a faint, violet rim.
He saw the worm on his shoulder. He saw the mandibles tearing at his flesh.
[Integrity: 1%.]
He didn't scream. He didn't panic. He accessed the new hardware.
[Sync Complete.] [Motor Functions: ONLINE.]
Kieran's hand—his human hand, the right one—shot up. It was broken, the fingers twisted, but the command came from the new spine. The signal traveled down the titanium rod, bypassing the pain, bypassing the weakness.
He grabbed the Wire-Worm by its throat.
"Get... off."
He squeezed.
His grip strength wasn't enhanced, but his will was. He ripped the worm off his shoulder, tearing a chunk of his own shirt with it. He slammed the creature into the ground.
The worm shrieked and coiled around his arm, biting him again and again.
Kieran ignored it. He rolled over.
The titanium spine held. It didn't bend. It didn't break. It moved with the smooth, hydraulic precision of a machine.
He sat up.
The worm on his legs hissed and lunged for his face.
Kieran moved his left arm—the metal one.
WHAM.
He backhanded the worm out of the air. The metal fist connected with the creature's head, shattering its carapace. It flew across the tunnel and splattered against the wall in a spray of black oil.
The third worm—the one that had bitten his shoulder—tried to flee.
Kieran reached out and grabbed its tail.
"No," Kieran whispered. His voice was different. Deeper. Hollower. "I need... spare parts."
He pulled the thrashing worm back. He pinned it to the ground with his metal hand.
[Skill: Deconstruct.]
The violet light flared. The worm stopped thrashing as its code was ripped apart. Kieran didn't just delete it; he harvested it. He stripped the copper from its body, the iron from its shell.
[Materials Acquired: Low-Grade Copper.] [Integrity: 1% -> 2%.]
He turned to the last worm, the one he had smashed against the wall. It was twitching, half-dead.
Kieran crawled over to it. The movement was strange—stiff, mechanical, but powerful. He didn't feel the sludge on his skin anymore. He felt the hum of the titanium backbone vibrating against his ribs.
He picked up the dying worm.
"Kieran?" Spam hovered back, his light trembling. "You... you look..."
Kieran looked at his reflection in the oily black puddle beneath him.
His face was gaunt, covered in muck and blood. But his back...
Where his spine used to be, there was a ridge of jagged, silver metal protruding from his skin. The flesh around it was red and angry, fused crudely to the alloy. He looked like a cyborg Frankenstein, stitched together in the dark.
[New Trait Acquired: Titanium Spine.] [Effect: Immune to Paralysis. Strength +10. Dexterity -5.] [Description: You traded your flexibility for rigidity. You will never bend again.]
Kieran crushed the last worm in his hand, absorbing its data.
[Integrity: 3%.]
He stood up.
He didn't wobble. He didn't stumble. He stood straight, the titanium rod forcing his posture into an unnaturally rigid, upright line. He towered over the sludge.
"Spam," Kieran said.
"Y-Yeah?"
"My right arm is broken. The bone is powder."
He looked at the mangled, useless limb hanging at his side.
"Find me a piston. A hydraulic ram. Anything."
"Kieran, you just underwent major trauma. You need to rest. Your heart is doing things that hearts shouldn't do."
Kieran turned to look down the dark tunnel of the Undercroft. His Scavenger's Eye illuminated the path ahead—a endless graveyard of discarded machines, broken droids, and failed experiments.
To him, it didn't look like a graveyard.
It looked like a shopping mall.
"I'll rest when I'm dead," Kieran said, taking his first step on his new metal spine. "Right now? I'm going shopping."