The silence in the Zero Sector was… wrong.

  It didn’t press against the ears like the dead void of the dungeons. It vibrated. A steady, barely perceptible itch crept through the soles of my boots and climbed up my spine. That was the hum of an enormous, perfectly tuned mechanism running idle.

  I was sitting on the floor, my back against the sealed. The air here was different—dry, sterile, reeking of ozone. No swamp dampness. No stench of rot. I opened my mouth and took a deep breath. My lungs burned from the purity.

  “Kid, you still alive?” Efrem sat across from me. He looked like hell. His knee was swollen and bluish, his pant leg soaked through with blood. He gripped a broken pipe as if it were the greatest sword in history.

  “Alive,” I breathed.

  I tried to stand. My left arm obeyed, but my whole body ached as if I’d taken a proper beating. My right arm—this heavy chunk of gray crystal—dragged lifelessly behind me. I looked at it. Under the local lights, it looked alien.

  Then I looked around the hall.

  And my breath caught.

  This was nothing like the Citadel. At all. In the Order, everything was built on pomp: columns, statues, ornate runes, floating candles. Here, everything was… logical. Long rows of gray racks with blinking indicators. Perfectly aligned cables laid into transparent conduits. No magic. I couldn’t feel the familiar “taste” of mana—the metallic tang in the mouth that always accompanied spells.

  I approached the central table. The smooth, dark surface flared to life beneath my fingers.

  “What is this?” Efrem whispered, squinting against the bright light.

  “This is…” I hesitated. “This is a control panel. But there are no runes here, Efrem. Not a single one.”

  Icons appeared on the glass. The text was in a language I didn’t know, but the schematics… schematics were universal. I saw pumps, valves, reservoirs.

  14:48

  14:47

  The numbers in the corner of the screen were steadily counting down. A red sector pulsed on the diagram.

  “He wasn’t bluffing,” I began sliding my finger across the panel. “Valerius opened the bypass lines. They’re pumping mana from the upper accumulators straight down here, into the foundation. But it’s not just energy. These are waste products, Efrem.”

  I froze, staring at the schematic.

  “You don’t understand…” I turned to the old man, and my glowing eye was probably burning brighter than usual. “That entire ‘Sacred Source’ the Order worships—on these schematics it’s labeled ‘Sector 7 Drainage System.’ They’re living on top of a gigantic purification facility! What the mages call a gift from the gods is just industrial runoff that, over time, became toxic and acquired magical properties.”

  “What the hell are you babbling about, kid?” Efrem frowned, understanding barely half the words.

  “That our entire world is a mistake on the outskirts of someone else’s construction project!” I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “Magic is just a malfunction in this equipment. And now Valerius decided to ‘flush the pipes.’ If that pressure hits the foundation, the Citadel won’t explode from a spell—it’ll be a simple hydraulic shock.”

  BOOM!

  A heavy impact against the шлюз cut me off. The metal plate we were hiding behind shuddered.

  BOOM!

  “The Hound…” Efrem rasped. “He won’t stop.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  I turned back to the panel. My fingers flew over the glass. I was looking for a way to close the dampers. It was incredible—the system responded instantly. No prayers. No “visualize the flow.” Just press—and the contact closed. But the screen kept flashing the same message:

  [Error 403: Override Protocol Active. Manual confirmation required at the Core.]

  “Locked,” I slammed my fist into the table. “Valerius entered a top-level code. He cut off control by software. To stop the discharge, you have to intervene physically. Right at the Core.”

  The timer blinked: 10:12.

  I looked around. In the center of the hall stood a massive column of armored glass, inside which enormous disks rotated. A mechanical stabilizer. Blue-white arcs of electricity leapt between the disks—but this wasn’t mana. This was raw energy.

  “Efrem, listen to me,” I grabbed his shoulder. “That door… Kyle will break it down. Soon. You need to crawl behind that rack. See it? It’s shielded. If I don’t make it, and everything blows—you might get a couple of seconds there.”

  “And you?”

  “And I’m going to break some gears.”

  I approached the Core. At the base of the column was a service panel. I tore it off—not with magic, just prying the edge with a broken pipe lying nearby. Inside was a nightmare of components that would have driven any Master of the Order insane with complexity.

  A shaft as thick as my head was spinning so fast it whistled. Every few seconds it jerked, opening another pressure-release section.

  “Iron…” Zeno’s voice in my head was barely audible. “You can’t… This isn’t a rune circle… You don’t know the clearances…”

  “Shut up,” I whispered. “You don’t need clearances here. You need a wedge.”

  I looked at my right arm. The crystal was dense, solid, nearly indestructible. The Order believed it was a curse—or a supreme gift. I saw an excellent piece of ultra-durable material.

  Timer: 05:30.

  BOOM! A crack appeared in the шлюз. Kyle was striking the same spot with the persistence of a steam press. Another couple of minutes, and he’d be inside.

  I stepped in front of the spinning shaft. Heat scorched my skin, the air reeked of overheated oil. It was so simple—and so terrifying at the same time. No mysteries. Just enormous force that had to be stopped mechanically.

  I shoved my right arm into the narrow gap between the driving gear and the frame.

  At first, nothing happened. The crystal simply scraped against steel, throwing showers of sparks. Then I leaned in with my whole body, forcing the “arm” deeper, straight into the teeth of the mechanism.

  The sound was as if the planet itself had decided to stop.

  The shriek of metal on metal slammed into my ears, tears bursting from my eyes. My right arm was being dragged in. I felt the vibration travel into the bone, pulverizing the shoulder joint, the crystal biting into hardened steel.

  “Come on! Bend, you bastard!” I screamed, bracing my feet against the floor.

  The crystal didn’t break. It was harder than the gears. A deafening crack rang out—one of the shaft’s teeth gave way and flew off, punching through the casing of a rack near Efrem. The shaft lurched, thrown out of alignment.

  The entire column began to shake. Sparks flooded the hall like a festive fireworks display. Something burst inside the Core, and thick white steam poured out.

  [Warning: Mechanical Failure. Emergency venting sequence aborted.]

  The system’s voice was calm, even as everything around it collapsed.

  The timer froze at 00:04.

  I collapsed to my knees. My right arm was jammed deep inside the machine. I couldn’t feel it. At all. As if it was no longer part of me, but just another component of this massive mechanism.

  “It worked…” Efrem breathed from his cover.

  But it was too early to celebrate.

  Behind us, the шлюз let out a final dying groan. The heavy titanium plate tore free from its mounts and crashed to the floor with a clang, raising a cloud of dust.

  Kyle stood in the doorway.

  He looked like a pile of scrap metal brought to life by mistake. His armor was slick with oil, his helmet crushed, one arm hanging limp. But his red eye burned with a steady light. He didn’t feel pain. He felt only the order.

  The main lights in the hall went out. The system switched to emergency red lamps along the floor.

  “Target…” Kyle rasped. His speaker spat out broken sounds. “De-stroy.”

  Valerius’s voice came through the speakers again. This time it trembled. Not with rage—with genuine astonishment mixed with hatred.

  “You jammed it…” the Magister whispered. “You sacrificed yourself to stop the machine. Iron, you really don’t understand, do you? You’ve just proven that you are the finest tool I have ever created. A tool capable of self-sacrifice for the sake of function.”

  “I… am… not… your… tool,” I forced out, groping the floor with my left hand for something heavy.

  “We’ll see,” Valerius chuckled dryly. “Kyle, kill the old man. Leave the boy alive. We’ll need to extract him from that column… piece by piece, if necessary.”

  The Hound took a step forward. The red emergency light traced every scar on his mangled armor.

  I looked at my trapped arm. Then at Efrem, who was trying to rise, holding the pipe in front of him.

  “Efrem,” I said quietly. “Remember when you said that sometimes you have to cut off what’s extra to survive?”

  The old man looked at me. His eyes went wide.

  “Iron, no—”

  “Cut,” I nodded toward my shoulder. “Quick. Before he gets closer.”

  In the Zero Sector, among technologies that could have changed the world, we stood in crimson half-light, preparing for the dirtiest and most primitive surgery of our lives. We had no magic to heal wounds.

  We had only Efrem’s rusty knife—and a will that turned out to be harder than any crystal.