We walked in silence.

  In the maintenance tunnels of the City of Bridges, silence is never absolute. The walls hummed, somewhere far away water dripped, beams creaked under thermal strain. But between the three of us hung a thick, sticky quiet.

  I walked last.

  My new right arm — a masterpiece of titanium and stolen hydraulics — hung along my side without pulling at the shoulder. It was perfect.

  Too perfect.

  I kept catching myself flexing my fingers just to hear the faint, almost inaudible hiss of the pistons.

  Ephrem tried not to look at me.

  He limped ahead, leaning on his staff, and every time I quickened my pace, his back tensed. He was afraid. Not of the darkness. Not of the dog-sized rats.

  Of me.

  Of the version of me that had thrown him aside like a sack of rags a few hours earlier.

  “Ephrem,” I called. My voice echoed dully off the rusted vaults.

  The old man stopped, but didn’t turn.

  “I…,” the words stuck in my throat. Apologizing felt stupid. I had saved us. I had saved those lunatics.

  But I remembered the cold.

  The absolute indifference with which my mind, accelerated by the skill, had evaluated Ephrem as an obstacle.

  “I’m fine,” I finally said. “The skill is off.”

  Ephrem slowly turned his head. In Zeno’s lantern light, his face looked like a map of wrinkles and scars.

  “It’s not about the skill, malek,” he said quietly. “It’s that when you came back… there was nothing in your eyes. You looked at me like a butcher looks at a carcass. Just calculating where to cut so I wouldn’t get in the way.”

  I said nothing.

  He was right.

  The Will to Live gave me the power of a god — but it took something in return.

  My soul.

  I made myself a promise: only in the most extreme case. No trajectory calculations just for convenience. I would stumble, make mistakes, bleed — but I would feel.

  We followed Corvus’s map for another half kilometer.

  The tunnel widened into something resembling a service chamber.

  Then Zeno stopped abruptly.

  “Stop. Organic signature detected. Status: deceased,” his voice rang metallic. “Damage pattern… anomalous.”

  We approached.

  The beam of light pulled something out of the darkness.

  A man.

  Or what remained of one.

  He was nailed to the wall with steel spikes hammered into concrete.

  But that wasn’t what killed him.

  I stepped closer, bile rising in my throat.

  This wasn’t a ritual of the Wild Mages. They hang charms and smear oil on faces.

  Here — tools had worked.

  Where the man’s legs should have been, crude heavy springs had been implanted.

  They were screwed directly into bone.

  No anesthesia, judging by the distortion of his face.

  His chest cavity had been pried open with metal braces. Inside, among the ribs, some mechanism ticked.

  “Jesus Christ…” Ephrem whispered, recoiling, covering his mouth. “Is this torture?”

  “No,” I forced myself to look. I switched on the engineer in my brain, suppressing the nausea. “It’s an experiment.”

  I pointed.

  “Look at the joints. Someone tried to replace the knee with a hinge. But deliberately made every movement cause unbearable pain. Negative angle. The spring works by tearing the muscles apart.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I touched the mechanism in the corpse’s chest with the tip of my finger.

  The gears turned.

  Not a heart pump.

  A timer.

  Just a timer counting the length of his agony.

  “This is a signature,” I said, wiping my hand on my pants. “Someone was testing how long a human can survive when forced to become part of a machine.”

  “Component identification,” Zeno said. “Alloy: Imperial steel, Cerberus grade. Manufacturing style: Department of Technical Oversight. Inquisition.”

  We exchanged glances.

  Citadel inquisitors were usually mages. They despised iron except as armor.

  But this…

  This was done by someone who understood mechanics better than I did.

  And used it not to repair.

  But to break.

  “We need to leave,” I said. “Now.”

  The map led us into the Wind Zone — colossal ventilation shafts that once supplied air to the Precursor factories.

  The moment we opened the heavy pressure door, sound hit us like a wall.

  A deep vibrating roar.

  The air here wasn’t still — it rushed like a river, smelling of ozone and cold.

  “Stay close to the wall!” I shouted.

  We walked along a narrow maintenance catwalk.

  To the right — a drop hundreds of meters deep.

  To the left — rotating fan blades the size of houses. They turned slowly, lazily slicing the air, but the inertia in those multi-ton blades could cut a tank in half.

  I walked second.

  Zeno scanned ahead.

  “No active mines detected. No electronic traps.”

  But the engineer who killed that man didn’t trust electronics.

  Zeno took a step.

  I heard it.

  A faint click.

  Not a digital beep.

  A snapping string.

  “Back!” I shouted, grabbing Ephrem by the collar.

  From above, something dropped from the darkness.

  Not a bomb.

  A steel net weighted with lead blocks.

  It fell silently — pure gravity. Primitive mechanics. Lever and counterweight.

  Zeno leapt away, but the net was falling straight onto Ephrem.

  Time slowed.

  My hand twitched toward my temple to activate The Will to Live.

  The skill would show me every trajectory. Every falling weight.

  I could catch it perfectly.

  No.

  Don’t.

  I lunged forward.

  No calculations.

  No vectors.

  Just instinct.

  My titanium arm shot upward.

  Hydraulics screamed.

  The impact was brutal.

  A lead weight smashed into my palm, the force traveling straight into my shoulder. The joint nearly dislocated.

  But I held.

  The fingers of the Second Iteration clenched around the steel links.

  I roared and hurled the net sideways into the abyss.

  “Ephrem!” I dropped beside him. My shoulder burned, but it was honest pain. Real pain. “You okay?!”

  He nodded, pale as chalk.

  “Analog trap,” Zeno said, scanning the severed cable. “Primitive. Effective. Designed to bypass sensors.”

  Then another sound rose through the wind.

  A buzzing.

  A drone flew toward us.

  Not a Precursor machine.

  A grotesque thing.

  A large bird skull plated with brass, a camera shoved into the eye socket, and a propeller on its back.

  The drone hovered a few meters away.

  Its camera focused on my arm.

  “Impressive,” a dry voice crackled from the speaker, like a nail dragged across glass. “Titanium and tungsten. Pressure-differential hydraulics. You solved the weight problem, boy. Clever.”

  I slowly stood, pushing Ephrem behind me.

  Zeno aimed his weapons.

  “Who are you?”

  “The one who corrects mistakes,” the voice replied. “You think you’re an engineer, Iron? No. You’re a thief. You steal sacred mechanisms and turn them into toys to prolong your miserable life. You don’t understand the pain of metal.”

  The drone tilted slightly.

  “Metal must suffer to become perfect. As must flesh. I am Inquisitor Silas. And I see your prosthetic is… too comfortable. Heresy. A machine should be a trial.”

  “You’re insane,” I said. “Just a sadist with a screwdriver.”

  “We’ll see how you calculate this,” Silas chuckled.

  The drone’s LED flashed red.

  The hum around us changed.

  The tone rose into a shriek.

  I looked left.

  The giant fans were accelerating.

  The airflow turned into a hurricane.

  We were slammed against the wall as debris lifted from the floor and shot toward the spinning blades.

  “He started the purge!” I shouted. “The wind will throw us into the fans!”

  “Thrust increasing. Critical threshold in twenty seconds,” Zeno reported, claws digging into the grating floor.

  Ephrem was already lifting off the ground.

  I grabbed his belt.

  “We need to reach that!” I pointed ahead.

  Ten meters away — a service alcove recessed in the wall.

  Safety.

  But between us and it spun one of the accelerating fans.

  “Probability of passing without damage: twelve percent,” Zeno shouted.

  I stared at the spinning blades.

  They blurred into a gray circle.

  My hand twitched toward my temple again.

  Activate the skill.

  You’ll see the gap.

  You’ll see the rhythm.

  I looked at Ephrem.

  He looked back with trust.

  Absolute trust.

  “To hell with it,” I muttered.

  I didn’t activate The Will to Live.

  I started counting.

  Out loud.

  “One… Two… blade passes every one and a half seconds… acceleration… Three…”

  Simple physics.

  Speed.

  Distance.

  Time.

  I didn’t need god’s eyes to solve a school problem.

  “Zeno! Grab Ephrem!” I shouted. “On four! One!”

  The wind nearly knocked us over.

  The drone circled above, filming our deaths.

  “Two!”

  A blade screamed past us.

  “Three!”

  “Acknowledged,” Zeno scooped the old man up.

  “FOUR! GO!”

  We didn’t run.

  We let the wind throw us forward.

  Straight into the grinder.

  I saw the steel edge of the blade rushing toward us, serrated and gleaming.

  I curled inward, raising my titanium arm as a shield.

  One silent moment inside the chaos.

  We shot through the gap.

  The blade scraped Zeno’s back, showering sparks.

  Behind us it smashed into the drone.

  The bird skull exploded into brass shards and circuitry.

  We crashed into the alcove, rolling across the floor.

  The wind roared past the entrance but didn’t reach us.

  I lay on my back, gasping.

  My heart hammered in my throat.

  My right arm trembled — not from malfunction.

  From adrenaline.

  I did it.

  Myself.

  No cheats.

  No turning into a biological machine.

  “Alive…” Ephrem groaned, crawling out from under Zeno. “Holy Mother… we’re alive.”

  Zeno stood.

  A deep groove scarred the armor plate on his back.

  “Drone destroyed. Connection with operator lost,” he reported. “However, he now knows our tactical parameters.”

  I sat up against the warm wall.

  “He doesn’t know everything,” I said.

  “He thinks I’m like him. That I rely only on calculations and iron.”

  I clenched my fist.

  “He’s wrong.”

  But I knew this was only reconnaissance.

  Silas wasn’t a fanatic with a club.

  He was an engineer who had turned this entire sector into a laboratory of pain.

  And we had just stepped into his main workshop.

  “Let’s move,” I said, standing up. “If we stop, we freeze. Or he’ll come up with something worse than a fan.”

  We moved deeper into the darkness.

  Behind us the wind roared.