The silence in Silas’s laboratory after the fight was more terrifying than the scream of lasers.

  It was heavy. Vacuum-like.

  I sat on the tiles, leaning against some steel support beam, listening to the orchestra inside my body die.

  My organism now resembled an overheated reactor.

  The mana I had poured into the Skill hadn’t vanished. By every law of energy conservation, it had simply transformed into heat.

  I could feel my blood boiling in my veins.

  Literally.

  My body temperature had spiked to something like forty-two degrees Celsius. If I hadn’t been an “engineer,” I would have simply died right there from brain swelling.

  “Malek… you… you okay?” Ephrem’s voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.

  I didn’t answer.

  I couldn’t.

  Every movement demanded a colossal act of will.

  I pressed my titanium prosthetic arm against the cold steel beam.

  Come on, thermodynamics, you bastard… do your job, I growled silently.

  I began forcing the internal heat into the prosthetic, and through it—into the beam.

  This wasn’t magic in the usual sense.

  I was simply creating a temperature gradient.

  The metal of my arm began changing color: gray… crimson… cherry red.

  The skin at my shoulder—where flesh met steel—started blistering and hissing.

  The pain was so intense I nearly bit through my tongue.

  But the heat began leaving my chest.

  Entropy demanded an outlet.

  And I gave it one.

  A minute later I managed my first real breath.

  The air felt freezing, even though the lab was warm.

  “Alive,” I rasped, pulling the glowing arm away from the beam. A molten scar remained on the metal. “Zeno… what about him?”

  The old man sat beside the robot.

  Zeno lay motionless, thin bluish smoke still rising from his joints.

  “Your bucket of bolts isn’t saying much,” Ephrem muttered. “Looks like Silas cooked him for good.”

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  I forced myself to stand.

  My knees trembled like a newborn fawn’s.

  I walked over and placed my hand on Zeno’s chassis.

  The electromagnetic pulse had burned through bridges on his central board.

  A regular mage wouldn’t be able to help here—golems run on spirits.

  Zeno ran on logic.

  I closed my eyes.

  I didn’t need the Skill for this.

  Only pure physics.

  I guided mana into his circuitry—not as brute force, but as a directed stream of electrons.

  I had to rebuild the magnetic domains in his memory, manually rewriting the damaged sectors.

  It was insanely dangerous.

  One microamp too much—and Zeno’s processor would become a lump of dead silicon.

  I felt sweat sliding down my temple.

  Blood vessels burst in my eyes from the strain.

  I didn’t see the robot anymore.

  I saw the electronic lattice.

  One shift.

  Another.

  Resonance.

  Zeno jerked.

  His lens flickered with a dim blue glow.

  “S-system… restored…” he rasped. “Iron… your vitals… critical. I recommend… immediate cardiac arrest.”

  “Shut up, Zeno,” I said weakly, managing a smile. “I already know I’m a corpse. I just forgot to fall down.”

  We moved deeper toward Sector Zero.

  The tunnels were changing.

  The walls were no longer concrete—they were made of some matte polymer that vibrated faintly beneath my fingers.

  Physics was beginning to lose its mind down here.

  At one point our path was blocked by a stream of frozen fire—ionized gas trapped in a magnetic field.

  “Don’t touch it,” Ephrem said, blocking me with his staff. “I’ve seen that in the Underflows. That’s the Breath of the Abyss. It burns the soul.”

  “There’s no soul here, old man,” I wiped blood from under my nose. “Just gas. And gas has a frequency.”

  I extended both hands forward.

  I could feel the field.

  If I tried to disperse it directly, the feedback would smear me across the walls.

  So I began searching for resonance.

  Every substance has its own vibration frequency.

  I started pushing the gas molecules out of phase.

  It was like trying to stop a speeding train by nudging it with your finger at exactly the right moment.

  My brain began overheating again.

  I got so absorbed in calculating the amplitude that I stopped feeling my body.

  All I saw were waves. Interference patterns. Graphs unfolding in midair.

  I was so close to a mistake.

  One extra hertz—and the gas would detonate.

  “Iron! Stop!” Ephrem shouted.

  The yell snapped me out of it.

  I froze.

  The gas cloud before us collapsed into gray dust.

  The path was clear.

  But I stood there unable to move.

  My fingers were curled rigidly.

  White spots drifted across my vision.

  “Why were you yelling?” I asked, turning toward him.

  Ephrem stared at me with open horror.

  He even stepped back slightly, tightening his grip on the staff.

  “You… did you see yourself? Your eyes, boy. Again.”

  “Again what?” I frowned.

  “Steel,” he said quietly. “Gray-white. Like a corpse’s eyes. You stood there whispering numbers… and they were glowing with that dead light. You didn’t even blink.”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s a damn bad style, Iron. Looks like a demon crawled into your skull. A machine demon.”

  I touched my eyelids.

  I felt nothing unusual.

  To me my vision was normal—just a bit too sharp.

  “It’s a side effect, Ephrem. Concentration. Physics doesn’t forgive carelessness. If I mess up even a single sign in the equation… we all turn into steam.”

  “You’re too deep in it,” the old man said sharply. “You’re not just calculating. You’re dissolving into it. One day those eyes might stay that way.”

  We reached the massive gates of Sector Zero.

  There were no locks.

  No handles.

  Only an engraving in the center:

  the ideal gas equation and Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

  I placed my hand on the metal.

  It was warm.

  Alive.

  “This isn’t magic, old man,” I whispered, feeling the mana in my veins resonate with the mechanism beyond the door. “It’s a machine. A very big one.”

  “And it looks like I’m the only one who brought the instruction manual.”

  I began feeding energy into the lock, searching for the code by shifting force vectors inside the mechanism.

  Something inside me clicked.

  The Skill—The Will to Live—whispered quietly in the back of my mind, offering control.

  Offering to turn my eyes gray-white again.

  Offering to solve the problem in a second.

  I clenched my teeth and held onto consciousness.

  The price of full power was too high.

  And Sector Zero was only beginning.