The impact wasn’t sharp — it was viscous, dragging. First I felt my back sink into something soft and yielding, and then that something gave way, swallowing me from all sides. The darkness was absolute, but not silent. Around me, things rustled, popped under my weight, and squelched wetly.

  I opened my mouth to inhale and immediately broke into a coughing fit. My lungs burned from a mix of ammonia, stale dust, and the stench of rotting flesh. I was lying face-down, my nose pressed against something cold and slimy — maybe a piece of an old leather boot, or someone’s tongue.

  I tried to push myself up with my right arm.

  Nothing.

  Memory came back in a short, painful jolt. My right arm — now it was just a chunk of dead crystal. I tried to move my shoulder. The weight was unbearable, as if a thirty-kilogram weight had been chained to the joint. The arm didn’t bend. It simply dragged behind me as I groaned and gagged, clawing my way out from beneath layers of rags.

  I made it to the top of the pile. It was slightly brighter here — dull beams fell from somewhere far above, hundreds of meters up, through ventilation shafts, illuminating a gray haze hanging in the air.

  “Efrem…” I rasped. My voice was gone, reduced to a whisper. “Efrem, where are you?”

  No answer. Only somewhere to the right came a heavy metallic groan — a beam that had fallen with us.

  I started digging through the trash with my left hand. My fingers brushed broken ceramics, rusted springs, and bones. Lots of bones. Thin, fragile ones — children’s. Massive, twisted ones — those the Order had “reassembled” and discarded as useless.

  I found him ten minutes later. Efrem lay wedged between two crushed steel containers. He wasn’t fully pinned, but one leg was trapped at an angle that promised nothing good.

  “Hey, old man, wake up,” I shook him by the shoulder with my good hand. “Come on. Get up. We don’t have time.”

  Efrem opened his eyes. His gaze was unfocused, pupils blown wide.

  “Iron…” he whispered. “Are we… in hell?”

  “Worse. We’re in the Pit. Can you feel your leg?”

  He tried to move — and immediately screamed, biting his lip until it bled.

  “Pinned. Bone’s… I think it’s done.”

  I examined the container. A multi-ton slab crushing his shin. Moving it by hand? Impossible. My energy was at zero, the crystal in my chest barely flickering like a dying match.

  I looked around. A lever. I needed a lever.

  A couple meters away, a thick water pipe stuck out of the junk pile. I crawled toward it, dragging my “stone” arm behind me. Every movement sent flashes of pain through my ribs. I grabbed the pipe with my left hand, braced my legs against the container, and pulled.

  “Pointless,” Zeno’s voice suddenly cut in. It sounded weak, distorted, like a radio on bad reception. “Your efficiency is below five percent. Shoulder girdle tissues are torn. You’ll just break what bones you have left.”

  “Go… to hell…” I growled through clenched teeth.

  I wasn’t counting on muscle.

  I was counting on leverage.

  I jammed the end of the pipe under the container’s edge, propping it with a chunk of concrete. My right arm — that cursed crystal — now worked as a counterweight. I leaned onto the other end with my full body weight, using the inertia of my dead limb.

  Metal screeched. The container lifted a couple of centimeters.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Crawl out!” I shouted at Efrem. “Now!”

  The old man wrenched his leg free through the pain. I released the pipe, and the container slammed back down with a crash, kicking up a cloud of toxic dust.

  We lay there, gasping.

  “Thank you,” Efrem grabbed my shoulder. “But it’s over. Do you hear that?”

  I listened. In the darkness beyond our weak circle of light, something was moving. Not Kyle’s footsteps. It was the rustling of hundreds of bodies. Crawling. Whispering, like dry leaves.

  Shapes began to emerge from the shadows. They had once been human. Now they were remnants. Some moved on all fours; others had rusted hooks welded in place of hands. Faces covered in sores, eyes clouded blind by eternal darkness. Rejects. Those who survived the drop, feeding on whatever fell from above.

  They didn’t attack right away. They circled, testing the air, sensing our fresh blood and warmth.

  “You got a knife?” I asked Efrem.

  “Lost it in the fall.”

  My hand closed around the same pipe I’d used as a lever. Heavy. Rusted. Jagged edge.

  “Stay behind me.”

  One of the scavengers — a creature with a dislocated jaw — lunged first. It didn’t scream, only rasped. I didn’t swing. I simply thrust the pipe forward, using its own momentum. The metal punched into its chest with a wet crunch.

  The recoil jolted my shoulder. The others froze. They weren’t afraid of death — they were calculating risk.

  “To the wall,” I ordered. “Harder to surround us.”

  We backed away. Efrem limped, leaning on me. More scavengers gathered. In the dark, dozens of red and yellow points lit up — eyes waiting for the moment.

  Then a sound rang out that made even them stop.

  Clack… Clack…

  A figure rose from the junk pile twenty meters away.

  It was Kyle.

  The fall hadn’t killed him — it had finished him. His left side was crushed, sparks and steam venting from torn armor joints. His red eye flickered in rhythm with some internal malfunction.

  He saw us.

  And he saw the scavengers.

  For his damaged recognition system, everything that moved was now a target.

  Kyle swung the broken blade, cleaving the nearest scavenger clean in half. Chaos erupted in the Pit. The creatures swarmed the iron giant, clinging to him, biting into armor joints.

  “Run!” Efrem yanked my sleeve.

  We bolted deeper into the Pit, away from the fight. Skulls and metal crunched underfoot. We ran until our lungs burned as if filled with molten tin.

  The wall of the Pit wasn’t stone.

  It was a colossal slab of darkened titanium, stretching upward into infinity. No runes. No Order symbols. Just bare, cold metal of the Precursors.

  “A dead end…” Efrem sagged against it, sliding down. “We ran into a dead end.”

  I ran my palm over the surface. It was warm. Slightly. Something was working behind it.

  “No,” I said, searching for seams. “Not a dead end.”

  My right eye — the one glowing emerald — suddenly focused. The world turned into a blueprint again. I saw the internal structure of the wall. Behind the titanium shell: massive locks and… optical cables.

  I found a small recess — a perfect circle, palm-sized.

  “Don’t,” Zeno’s voice went panicked. “Iron, this is the Zero Sector. There’s no magic there. It’s what existed before it. If you open this—”

  “If I don’t, we’ll be eaten or Kyle will smear us across this wall,” I cut him off.

  I pressed my right, “stone” hand to the circle.

  At first — nothing.

  Then the crystal inside my arm began to resonate. The titanium vibrated under my palm. A thin ultrasonic whine pierced the air, blood trickling from my ears.

  [Biometric key detected. Identification… Carrier 0. Access granted.]

  The voice was mechanical. Emotionless. Nothing like Zeno’s whisper.

  This was a machine. Pure. Logical.

  The wall screeched as it split apart. Heavy plates slid into recesses, revealing a spotless corridor flooded with dead white fluorescent light.

  “What is this?” Efrem squinted.

  “Our salvation,” I dragged him inside.

  The шлюз sealed behind us with a heavy pneumatic sigh. The noise of the Pit — the scavengers’ cries, Kyle’s metal screams — vanished instantly. Silence fell. Real silence.

  We stood in a hall filled with rows of servers and capsule-like structures. No rot. No filth. Only ozone and old plastic. A central console lit up as we approached, screens flickering to life.

  I stepped to the main terminal. My hand touched the smooth surface.

  “Iron…” Zeno howled inside my head. Not a voice — a wave of pure terror. “We made a mistake. Valerius couldn’t open this place from above. He needed the key from below. He needed you.”

  A red warning flashed on the main screen.

  [WARNING. Self-destruct protocol initiated for Purification System “Citadel”. Timer: 15:00… 14:59…]

  Then, from ceiling speakers, came Valerius’s calm voice.

  “Thank you, Iron. You have no idea how hard it was to guide you here. Magic is just a superstructure. Now we will discard it and begin with a clean slate.”

  “You… you’re going to blow everything up?” I stared at the camera. “There are thousands of people here!”

  “People are a resource,” Valerius replied. “A resource due for renewal. Fifteen minutes, Iron. Try to survive the reset.”

  “Zeno,” I clenched my teeth. “How do we stop this?”

  Silence.

  “Zeno!”

  “We can’t,” the voice whispered. “This isn’t magic. It’s logic. To stop the explosion, the code in the core must be rewritten. And the core… is right in front of you.”

  I looked at the massive column in the center of the hall, white light pulsing inside.

  “Fifteen minutes,” I repeated, staring at my hands. “Then we have fifteen minutes to hack this world.”

  Efrem looked at me. There was no fear in his eyes. Only exhaustion.

  “Well, engineer,” he gave a bitter smile. “Show me what you can do without your textbooks.”