Chapter 3: The Unplanned Sabotage
The silence before the storm was a single, held breath. Know crouched on the gantry, the forge's heat painting his skin with sweat and orange light. Below, the machine-beat was a heart of industry.
"Initiating dialogue," Silo chimed in his ear. The drone's lens focused on the central stamping press—a titanic block of enchanted steel that rose and fell with earth-shaking finality, KA-CHUNK, imprinting Guild runes onto glowing sword blanks.
Know felt it before he saw it. A subtle shift in the Principle of Kinetics flowing through the chamber. The press's next descent was a micro-second out of sync, a hesitation as Silo's ghost-in-the-machine signal whispered to its control runes. It hit the metal slab not perfectly flat, but at a slight angle.
KER-ANG!
The sound wasn't a clean stamp but a wrenching screech. The sword blank, misshapen and hot, shot from the press like a cannonball. It streaked across the forge and slammed into the main coolant pipe leading from the Stabilizing Core's pedestal.
The pipe didn't just crack. It ruptured.
A geyser of pressurized, icy blue coolant erupted, not onto the lava, but in a wide, spraying arc across the primary conveyor belt carrying newly forged weapons toward an annealing chamber. Superheated steel met sub-zero magical coolant.
The result was instant and catastrophic.
SHHHHH-BOOM!
A chain reaction of violent thermal contractions detonated down the line. Armor plates warped and shattered like glass. Conveyor motors seized and screamed. The careful, automated rhythm of the Crucible Forge shattered into a chorus of shrieking metal and popping mana-conduits. Klaxons began to wail, a new, panicked counterpoint to the dying beat of industry.
Chaos was not the plan. Chaos was the ingredient.
"Now!" Know hissed, and moved.
He dropped from the gantry, not down into the main floor, but onto a secondary service walkway that snaked behind the waterfall of molten metal. The heat was a physical wall, scorching his lungs. He focused on the Principle of Thermodynamics, not to fight the heat, but to understand its gradient. He saw the pockets of cooler air swirling near the rock wall, the paths where the radiant energy flowed in predictable waves. He moved through them like a fish through current.
Enforcer drones, confused by the systemic failure, zipped past him toward the site of the explosion, their threat-recognition algorithms overloaded by the scale of the "accident."
The Stabilizing Core's platform was ahead, now wreathed in steam from its own leaking coolant. A single, heavy-built Guild labor-drone stood guard, its programming evidently too rigid to abandon its post. It turned, lifting a rivet-gun arm.
Know didn't break stride. He vaulted onto a control console, his eyes reading the structural symbology of the platform. He saw the stress point—where the guard drone's weight was concentrated on a section of grating weakened by constant thermal cycling.
He jumped, landing not on the platform proper, but on the edge of this weak section, his weight a perfectly placed final tap.
CRUNCH.
The grating gave way. The labor-drone plummeted into a bed of superheated slag below with a final, whirring shriek.
Know lunged for the Stabilizing Core. It was the size of his fist, humming with pure, stable power. As his fingers closed around it, he felt its perfect, resonant frequency—a song of order in the symphony of breakdown. He wrenched it from its housing.
Instantly, the remaining coolant systems failed. The great lava-flow, no longer being actively cooled near the Guild's machinery, began to swell and rise.
SILO: "Catastrophic cascade in progress. Withdrawal is now 137% more urgent than projected."
"One second," Know breathed, his eyes catching on something on the fallen console. A physical ledger, bound in heat-resistant scale-hide. He snatched it.
A final, heavy clang echoed on the platform. Know turned.
A man stood between him and the exit. He wore the polished grey and blue of a Guild Enforcer, but without the bulk of powered armor. He was tall, lean, and moved with an unnerving, silent precision. His face was sharp, impassive, and his eyes were the flat, pale grey of a system interface. In his hand was not a standard-issue shock-baton, but a long, silver needle-sword, its edge humming with a high-frequency mana field.
Kaelen Vance. The Perfect Blade.
"Anomaly," Kaelen stated. His voice was calm, devoid of anger or curiosity. It was a diagnostic report. "You have induced systemic failure with a 4.7% efficiency loss to this production node. You will be deleted."
Know's mind raced. The Anarchist screamed to fight, to use the core as a bomb. The Artisan analyzed. The needle-sword was a mono-filament conductor, designed for perfect, efficient kills. The Enforcer's stance was textbook, flawless, leaving no openings a Codicil-guided opponent could exploit.
But Know wasn't Codicil-guided. He was Pathless.
"You're not here to capture me," Know said, stalling, his senses stretching to feel the rising heat, the vibration of the buckling floor.
"Correction. Capture implies utility. You have none. Your existence is an error in the code. I am the resolution." Kaelen took a step forward, his movement a study in optimal kinetics.
Know's back was to the rising lava. The heat was blistering. He had one path—past the Enforcer.
SILO: (A urgent, silent pulse in his auditory implant) "His left ankle. A prior injury, perfectly repaired. It is the only component not original factory specification. It has a 0.05% slower impulse response."
A flaw. Not in the man, but in the machine.
Kaelen lunged. The needle-sword was a blur, aimed with surgical precision at Know's neural stem. Know didn't try to parry. He dropped, letting the blade pass over him, and kicked out not at the man, but at a loose, half-molten coupling on the floor, sending it skittering toward Kaelen's left foot.
It was a child's move. Illogical. Inefficient.
Kaelen's programming dictated optimal defense: a slight shift of weight to the pristine right foot to avoid the debris. For a nanosecond, his balance was committed.
Know moved with the Principle of Systemic Friction. He didn't attack the man; he attacked the system. He threw the heavy ledger not at Kaelen, but at the Enforcer's face—a chaotic, unpredictable variable.
Kaelen's head moved minimally, letting the book graze his temple. His focus, for a fragment of a second, was on processing this illogical input.
It was enough. Know was already past him, not running like a fugitive, but moving with the frantic, escaping flow of superheated steam from a broken main. He was another piece of chaos in the failing machine.
He heard Kaelen's calm voice cut through the din, not raised, but perfectly clear. "Anomaly logged. Query: Unpredictable. Escalation protocol initiated."
Know didn't look back. He climbed, the Stabilizing Core burning a hole in his pack, the ledger clutched to his chest. He burst out of a ventilation shaft onto a windswept, crystalline bridge that marked the ascent to Floor 22. The hellish glow of the forge receded below.
Gasping, he leaned against a glowing crystal formation and opened the ledger. It was a shipping manifest. Column after column of Compliance Ore ingots, their destinations coded. And one frequent, highlighted destination: "Athenaeum Refinement-Code: Gammon."
Beneath it, in smudged charcoal, a dwarf had scrawled a translation in the old tongue: "The School That Unmakes Minds."
The core was power. But this… this was the target. This was where they turned the Ore into the filter that broke his sister.
The hunt was over. The war had just found its battlefield.
End of Chapter 3
Preview of Chapter 4: The School That Unmakes Minds
Pursued by Kaelen and a newly activated "Anomaly-Hunter" drone squadron, Know and Silo must infiltrate the "Athenaeum," a place disguised as a prestigious Guild academy for gifted Codicil users. To find the truth, Know must do the unthinkable: walk into the lion's den and pose as one of them, relying on his hard-won Principles to mimic the very system he hates, while surrounded by those who would unmask him in an instant.