Chapter 11: The Scavenger's Request
The near-catastrophe with the Volatile Orb had achieved two things: it had officially branded Lance Silverwoods as a student reliant on his Stabilizer Matrix, and it had delivered a crucial spike of contained chaos exactly where Kian needed it.
That evening, after the remedial hall lights were dimmed, Lance and Opal slipped out of their dormitory, heading back down to the service tunnels. Opal was nervous, her wristband pulsing faintly despite Lance's continuous, subtle effort to dampen her residual stress.
"We almost blew up the training vault," Opal whispered as they navigated a maze of hissing steam pipes. "Kian better have used that surge for something worthwhile."
"He did," Lance confirmed. "The power grid flicker was logged as a Matrix malfunction, not a siphon attempt. It gave him the cover he needed." Lance felt a strange sense of accomplishment—their failure had been highly successful for someone else.
They found Kian in the same spot, hunched over his collection of metal scraps. This time, he wasn't just scavenging; he was meticulously soldering a copper coil to a flat, circular slab of magnetized metal.
"Look who managed to keep their integrity intact," Kian greeted them, not looking up. He held up the magnetized slab. "Thanks to the beautifully brief, contained chaos you provided, I managed to reroute enough residual energy from the Annex's filtration system to power this: my first external stabilizer prototype."
"So, you used my near-explosion to build yourself a power source?" Opal asked, trying to sound offended but failing due to genuine fascination.
"A beautiful exchange, wouldn't you say?" Kian smirked. "But now, I owe you. And I need the textbook."
Lance handed over the thick, Mundane history textbook. Kian flipped through the pages, his expression bored, until he got to the glossy cover. He carefully placed the slab of copper and the textbook cover-to-cover.
He then concentrated his Mote-Drain skill. Instead of pulling motes, he used his ability to create a localized vacuum against the cover.
The effect was similar to Lance's earlier "Flicker," but controlled by Kian's superior skill. The textbook didn't flash; it simply became deeply, unnaturally cold. The temperature change immediately caused the air around it to shimmer.
"Okay, Silverwoods," Kian breathed, watching the effect. "You were right. This thing is an anchor for something. I'm not getting the sound you described, but I'm seeing layers of static charge that shouldn't be there."
"The sound is a language," Lance reminded him. "The true history of the Aethelgard era."
Kian grabbed a small, ornate copper spyglass from his pouch and focused it on the cover. He whistled low. "I recognize this interference pattern. This isn't just static; it's an obfuscation spell—ancient and powerful. It's designed to actively make the reader forget the text. But the Mundane paper is trapping the original history beneath the spell's surface."
"Can you read it?" Opal asked, leaning closer.
"I can read the patterns of the lie," Kian corrected. "But to decode the true language—that musical trill you heard—we need a better source. We need an Ancient Residuari."
Kian pulled out a crude, hand-drawn map. "The Aetherium is built on the ruins of the first magical community. Everything old and sensitive is archived in the deepest, most stable part of the fortress: the Forgotten Debris Vault in the Research Quarters."
He pointed a greasy finger at a heavily guarded section of the map. "Dean Eris hates Key Bearers wandering the Research Quarters. They assign low-aptitude students to catalog discarded magical relics in the Debris Vault—the stuff too broken to use, but too valuable to incinerate."
"The remedial job," Lance realized. "The tedious assignment no one wants."
"Precisely," Kian confirmed. "If you can get yourselves assigned to Debris Cataloging, you'll be surrounded by genuine artifacts that still pulse with the Founder's power. You need to find a relic—maybe a scribe's stylus, or a discarded stone fragment—that still carries the audio residue of that Forbidden Language."
Opal's face was bright with purpose. "So, we use our remedial status—our greatest shame—as our cover story to break into the most secure part of the school? That's brilliant."
Kian gave a rare, genuine smile that included both of them. "It's a plan built for the slow, the volatile, and the highly resourceful. We stick together—you two get the artifacts, I get the energy secrets the Aetherium is hiding inside the debris."
The trio shook on the dangerous alliance. They were no longer just remedial students; they were a team of amateur archaeologists with a shared, platonic goal: finding the truth hidden in the lies.
The immediate obstacle: getting assigned to the tedious Debris Vault.