Chương 60: Chapter 59 - Flinkgear's Shame

"You call it necromancy to give a machine a heart, yet you worship the System that turns our lives into numbers. I am not creating life but merely attempting to speak the language of those who gave us ours. If the steel can learn to sing it is because the music was already there, hidden in the foundation of the mountain, waiting for a conductor." - Excerpt from Perrin Flinkgear's Defense before the High Council.

MASON"Shielded," I said, leaning heavily on Liarra as we stepped through the door, the nullification easing noticeably as we did. Mana poured back in, a huge hole in the wall breaking the containment field. It was a shocking relief, the exhaustion moderating into a manageable tiredness. With Liarra's help, I moved to the nearest wall, running my hand over the smooth white paneling. It was cold to the touch, though my nerves were still firing in odd ways, and it thrummed with a repellent charge.

It was a composite alloy infused with the same null-mana properties as the obsidian of Peristonia, but engineered, stabilized.

"Where... Where are we?" she asked.

"Null-mana plating," I whispered, tracing the invisible lattice.

"This isn't part of the dungeon, Liarra. The System didn't build this because it can't see it." I approached a workbench, my fingers hovering over a set of brass calipers that looked more like jewelry than tools. Every surface was covered in projects, prototypes of clockwork limbs, half-assembled drone cores, and alchemical distillations that still glowed in the darkness. It was an unorganized but wildly impressive museum of genius.

Amongst the ruin, my eyes were drawn to the huge drafting desk at the far end of the room. It was piled high with slate tablets and leather-bound journals, the epicenter of his research. Flinkgear's research. I approached the desk, an open logbook two feet wide lay in the center, its pages filled with dense handwriting and complex geometric diagrams. Lying beside it were schematics I recognized immediately as the Genesis Core that Fin protected at this very moment, the lines precise and angular.

I turned the book to face me, wincing at the pain in my wrist. The page was dominated by a charcoal sketch of a towering monolith, a thick needle of black stone. Flinkgear had drawn a small gnomish figure beside it to demonstrate scale; it was the size of an adult redwood. He had also annotated the drawing with measurements, energy readings, and runic calculations. Symbols from the surface of the monolith had been reproduced in detail, intricate geometric carvings that I was able to read as High Exaltian script.

To anyone who didn't know the language, they were meaningless arcane decorations. To me, they were a warning label. Flinkgear had labeled the primary rune cluster "Infinite Source." I translated the actual text: HARVEST INTAKE - SECTOR 874. He had labeled the secondary cluster "Output Regulator." What it actually read was: CONTAINMENT FIELD - DO NOT BREACH.

"Brilliant work, but tragically incomplete," I whispered, my chest tightening at the realization of what had actually happened here. I flipped through the pages, reading Flinkgear's notes. He wrote of an 'Aetheric Fountain,' a divine artifact buried by the gods to power the world. He theorized that the ambient mana of Caldera radiated out from these points, a gift to the mortal races. He believed he had found the engine of creation. In truth, he had found the pump exaltians used to fuel their immortality.

"What is it?" Liarra asked, coming to stand beside me. She looked at the alien script, then at my face.

"You can read it?"

"I can," I admitted - we were beyond lies now.

"There's no denying Flinkgear is brilliant, to have learned so much flying blind like this..." I traced the diagram of the monolith with a finger.

"But he was too certain, he made assumptions he shouldn't have."

"What are you saying? What is all this?" Liarra asked, a hint of fear in her voice.

"Flinkgear discovered a small piece of a much larger planetary grid, it's First Magi tech..." I turned the page. Flinkgear had mapped seismic data, triangulating the location of other "anomalies" based on the vibrational frequency of the one in this mountain. He had drawn a map of the continent. A red dot marked Kaz-Varr, another marked the Sunken City of Aeloria to the south, and a third lay deep in the Glass Wastes in the kingdom of Sendaria far to the west across the ocean.

I knew there must be thousands more, but they were buried so deep nobody would ever come across them. They had pinned the planet down like an insect on a board. Flinkgear realized the connection between them, but he got the direction of the flow backwards. He thought he could tap into the grid to power his machines so he tried to open the valve. And the West Forge exploded.

"He didn't understand it, not fully," I said, pointing to a final, hasty scrawl in the margin: Spatial distortion imminent. Reality matrix destabilizing. Containment failure.

"The artifact defended itself when he tried to change its core function, the System triggered a quarantine and warped space around the breach to seal it off. The anti-magic plating Flinkgear used as a precaution saved him from the resulting catastrophe. The dungeon is scar tissue formed over the wound the quarantine inflicted." I looked up from the book, staring at the sealed blast door at the back of the lab. The sign above it read SECTOR ZERO.

"He was a genius," I said.

"He found a piece of god-tech and managed to build a regulator that kept it from cracking the world in half, but he was trying to drink from a firehose. The Stone-Sworn, they're trying to do the same thing, but they're using hammers instead of math. If they break that containment field again, without the regulator... well, it will be a lot worse."

"How do you know all this?" Liarra said, running her hands over the diagrams as if she might deduce the answer just by looking.

"I told you who my mother was, she left behind information on what her counterparts were up to." I closed the book, slipping it into my inventory. The knowledge inside was dangerous, but it was also the only manual we had.

"We need to move." I turned from the desk.

"The Stone-Sworn are ahead of us, and they are walking blindly into a second Cataclysm." I scanned the room again. Flinkgear had left more than just notes, the shelves were lined with prototypes, half-finished experiments that utilized the null-mana alloy. If I could adapt this technology to an arrow tip, Liarra's arrows could slice through warding like shearing through a spider's web. And on the central workbench, clamped in a vice, was a skeletal frame of intricate, articulated steel.

It looked like a leg brace, or perhaps the chassis for a golem's limb. I stepped closer, examining the workmanship. It was exquisite. The joints were ball-and-socket gears that moved with zero friction, the plating forged from the same heat-resistant alloy as the walls.

"He was building a suit," I realized.

"Environmental protection, to survive the heat of the deep molten environs that must surround the Seed." It was unfinished, useless as a full suit, but the components... the components were compatible. I looked at my own prosthetic, the heavy steel Frida had forged twisted and useless now. I could strip the plating, harvest the joints that remained, and integrate the heat-shielding directly into my own frame.

"Liarra, do you have untipped arrow shafts?" I asked.

"If I adapt this alloy to an arrowhead they'll punch through the Stone-Sworn magic shields like paper. I need an hour at the bench."

"We don't have an hour," she argued, even as she handed me a bundle of untipped arrows from her inventory storage.

"The Stone-Sworn think we're dead, or at least out of the picture." I disengaged the magnetic locks on my arm and detached it from my shoulder once again. I set it on the workbench next to Flinkgear's prototype.

"Their numbers were diminished and they'll need time to recover. If we meet Hek again, we're going to need more than we've got to best him."

"Isn't that exactly why we need to get ahead of them? If they think we're dead that's a major advantage we should exploit. Clear the dungeon before they have a chance to regroup."

"We don't even know what the third zone is yet, it might take a month to clear. We have to be prepared, not just rush headlong into the unknown." I activated [Mana-Forging], the blue fire coating my hand as my pool surged back up. I began to strip the null-mana plating from the prototype. It resisted my mana but I forced it to comply, reshaping it, molding it to fit the chassis of my arm.

It was some sort of titanium base, though the exact mix of the alloy was hard to determine, its anti-magic properties throwing errors in my analysis. I wove the heat-resistant alloy into the molecular structure of the steel, creating a composite that should withstand the heart of a volcano. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. When I finished, the arm was transformed, sleeker, darker, the metal possessing a matte, ceramic finish that swallowed light.

I reattached it, the improved modular docking design clicked home with a smooth integration. I flexed the fingers. They moved instantly, lighter and faster than before. I formed Liarra's arrowheads, melding the alloy directly to the shafts, the slight smell of burning wood as the superheated metal singed the edges. I grabbed a crate and piled up as much of the alloy as I could, shifting it into my inventory for future use.

"Ready," I said, turning to Liarra who was strapping a quiver of the freshly-crafted white arrows to her hip. Now that the nullification had dulled, we both consumed a health draught. My health returned to the yellow and I could feel the bones in my wrist stitching back together, the nerves in my hand reconnecting as a tingle returned to the tips of my fingers. [Bio-Feedback] completed the last of the repairs, the pain now dulled by [Pain Suppression]. I was far from a hundred percent, but it would serve.

We walked to the blast door on the opposite wall, the same heavy wheel of cold iron, but this one turned easily, a hiss of pressurized air escaping as the door swung outward. The tunnel beyond was gone, the rock floor sheared off into a grey, featureless void where the laws of physics seemed to have given up. Floating in the nothingness were jagged islands of stone, fragments of the mountain that the System's dungeon protocol was unable to reconcile around the lab's nullification field.

We stood on the edge of a precipice where the lab's containment bubble ceased. It was as if a giant chunk of the inside of the mountain had been scooped out like a melon, everything past the threshold was chaos.

"What happened here?" Liarra said, staring into the cavernous expanse of floating rocks.

"I'm not entirely sure," I replied, activating [Architect's Vision]. The cavern exploded into a chaotic wireframe of broken code and raw aether.

"Reality has come apart at the seams. We have to climb the glitches."

"Glitches?"

"The System's gone haywire around this lab's nullification field, it's resulted in an unpredictable distortion. We fell down into the Depths, but the Depths have been broken by the dungeon and the dungeon is back up. I don't see any other way." I looked up. Far above, through the swirling grey mist, I saw the underside of a massive spinning brass gear. Stratum Three. Between us and it lay a thousand feet of broken physics. Liarra stepped up beside me, her boots crunching on the last few inches of stable tile.

She looked out at the floating debris, her face pale.

"It looks like the world has shattered," she said.

"How do we climb air, Caden?"

"We don't climb," I said, pulling a coil of heavy silk rope from my inventory, an addition I'd made after our mess fighting the cave fishers - stronger and lighter than hemp rope but easier to cut in a pinch.

"We jump." I tied the rope around my waist, checking the knot before handing the other end to Liarra. She secured it to her own harness. I channeled [Unbreakable Will], fighting down my surging anxiety.

"Listen to me," I said, grabbing her shoulders.

"The danger here isn't falling. There is no down and there is no up. The danger is stopping. If we lose our momentum in the middle of that void, we get stuck... I'll let you imagine the rest." Liarra swallowed hard, nodding.

"Momentum. Keep moving."

"Exactly." I reached into my inventory and pulled out a heavy iron ingot, one of the spares from the chest construction.

"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I throw this iron backward, I move forward. Understand?"

"I understand you want me to throw rocks backward to go forward, but beyond that I have no idea what any of it means," she said, the absurdity of the statement struggling against her desperate need for a plan.

"If you get stuck, throw something heavy. Hard and in the opposite direction of where you want to go. That's all you need to remember. Just do what I do, don't get stuck. We'll aim for that big boulder floating ahead, but we need to time our jump so the rope doesn't get taut and dampen our momentum." I took a breath, centered my mind with [Unbreakable Will]. I squeezed Liarra's hand, she nodded and we jumped. The sensation of zero-g was instantaneous and disorienting.

My stomach lurched as gravity vanished and was replaced by the sickening freedom of freefall. I drifted away from the safety of the lab, floating into the grey, Liarra's grip on my hand almost painfully tight. The silence was total, a heavy shroud that smothered the sound of my own heartbeat. I drifted toward the nearest floating island, a jagged slab of granite the size of a carriage. I reached out with my prosthetic hand, the metal fingers finding a purchase on a protrusion of rock.

I absorbed the impact with my arm, converting the momentum into a swing that brought Liarra trailing behind me on the rope. She landed with the grace of a cat, her boots finding footing on the stone.

"Okay," I said, my voice muffled in the magically dense air.

"Next jump. That spire at two o'clock." We moved through the void like frogs leaping between lily pads. Push, drift, catch, stabilize. It was a methodical ascent, a dance in three dimensions. My [Telekinesis] proved invaluable, allowing me to grab distant handholds and pull us toward them, or to shove loose debris out of our path. We were halfway across the void when the environment shifted. The grey mist thickened, swirling into patterns that hurt my eyes. Ahead of us a massive chunk of rock flickered.

One second it was solid stone, the next it was a wireframe outline of blue light, then it was gone, then it was back.

"What is that?" Liarra gaped, pointing with her bow.

"Instability," I said, watching the flicker.

"I think the System is trying to render the terrain and failing. If we touch that rock when it phases out..."

"We go around," I decided.

"Wide berth." We adjusted our vector, aiming for a cluster of smaller debris to the left. I kicked off the granite slab and soared through the empty air. The gap was wider than it looked, the lack of depth cues in the grey void playing tricks on my depth perception. I was going to miss the handhold by three feet. I floated in the dead space, my momentum dying, drifting slowly past the target.

"Caden!" Liarra shouted from the end of the tether.

"I've got it," I grunted, pressing down the rush of panic. I reached into my inventory and pulled out a heavy sack of copper ore dust. I activated [Kinetic Impact], channeling mana into the sack until it hummed. I threw it behind me with a roar of effort, triggering the kinetic charge at the moment of release. The explosion of force against the heavy ore acted like a rocket thruster. The recoil slammed into me, violent and sudden, launching me backward away from the blast.

I crashed into the target rock, my prosthetic hand punching into the stone to arrest my momentum. I hauled on the rope, pulling Liarra across the gap.

"Subtle," she commented, landing beside me, breathless.

"Physics," I said, rubbing my shoulder. We were getting closer to the ceiling. The colossal brass gears of Stratum Three loomed above us, a sky of grinding metal. The scale was terrifying. Each tooth on the gears was the size of a house and moving with an unstoppable crushing force. But there was a problem. The air around them was turbulent, an unpredictable storm of wind generated by their movement.

Worse, between us and the gears lay a dead zone, a span of empty space nearly fifty yards across and devoid of any floating debris.

"We can't jump that," Liarra said, staring up at the gap.

"Even with your exploding rocks." I scanned the void with [Architect's Vision]. The wireframe overlay revealed the invisible currents of mana and wind swirling around the gears. It also revealed something else. Hanging in the empty space, invisible to the naked eye, were threads of distortion. Thin, shimmering lines where the gravity of the massive gears bled into the void. Gravity wells.

"We don't jump," I said, a plan forming.

"We fall."

"Fall?" Liarra looked down at the grey abyss below us.

"Into that?"

"No. Into the sky." I pointed at the largest gear, a behemoth of brass directly above us.

"That gear has mass. Huge, magical mass. It's generating its own gravity field. If we get close enough, we won't need to hold on. We'll land on it."

"And how do we get close enough?" I looked at my inventory. I had one trick left. A trick I had been saving for an emergency, but this qualified. I pulled out the [Aetheric Capacitor Bracer] I'd bought in Kaz-Varr. I'd managed to fix it during a lull on Stratum One but had been afraid to deploy it in a combat situation without having had the time to practice using it. It was fully charged, 750 points of mana stored in a perfect portable battery.

"I'm going to overload the kinetic dampeners on my arm," I explained, checking the seals on my prosthetic. [Limit Break] should work, the prosthetic should hold. A lot of 'shoulds' when both our lives hung in the balance, but, as ever, what choice did I have?

"I'll create a directed shockwave. It will launch us upward."

"And the landing?"

"We aim for the flat face of the gear," I said.

"And we pray the gravity catches us before we splatter against the metal." Liarra looked at the spinning gear, then at me. She tightened her grip on the rope.

"I hate this. I hate everything about this."

"Ready?"

"Just do it." I wrapped my arm around her waist, clamping her to my side. I raised my prosthetic hand toward the rock we were standing on and triggered the bracers. 750 points of mana flooded into the [Kinetic Impact] rune in a single microsecond. The world turned white. The rock beneath us exploded, the force of the launch like being fired from a cannon. My vision greyed out as the G-force crushed the air from my lungs. We rocketed upward, a screaming projectile aimed at the heart of the machine.

The wind roared, tearing at my clothes. The brass sky rushed toward us.

"Brace!" I screamed, though I couldn't hear myself. We crossed the threshold and the grey void dissipated, dissolving into the brilliant blinding blue of the Stratum Three skybox. And then the stomach-churning lurch of shifting gravity. Up became down. We weren't rising toward the gear anymore, we were falling onto it. The gigantic brass face stretched out below us like a plain of gold. I triggered [Telekinesis], pushing against the air, trying to slow our descent. It wasn't enough, we were coming in too hot.

I deployed the heater shield on my arm, angling it to take the impact and pulsing a [Kinetic Burst] into the metal. It triggered with a quiet pop, the air around us undulating like an invisible barrier. We slammed into the brass surface of the gear and the shield groaned, sparks flying as we skidded across the metal and slid toward the edge of the gear where a thousand-foot drop waited on the other end. I dug my heels in and slammed my pickaxe into a groove in the metal.

It shrieked, screaming metal on metal as the harder pickaxe dug into the soft gear, coils of hot brass ripping up along the length of the gash. We slowed. I stopped just in time, but Liarra's momentum carried her over the edge. I reached out but failed to grab her. She fell over the edge, disappearing. Thinking quickly, I laced the silken rope around my other arm, bracing against the driven pickaxe. The rope unspooled and then snapped taut, taking Liarra's weight.

"Caden!" Came a shout from over the edge.

"Caden! Pull me up!" I could feel her fear, but the adrenaline focused my mind. I hauled myself up, pulling the rope one arm length at a time until mercifully a hand appeared on the edge of the platform, then another, followed by a tuft of blond hair. I grabbed Liarra and pulled her back up on the platform, collapsing, my whole body trembling. We lay there, gasping, head hanging over the edge of an inverted world.

I turned and looked down into an infinite blue sky, we were upside down, clinging to the underside of a gear suspended in the heavens, gravity facing the wrong direction.

"We made it," I wheezed. Liarra groaned, pushing herself up. She looked around at the impossible landscape, floating islands of clockwork, clouds somehow drifting below us, the wind singing through the gears.