The Scorchlands: Day 4

  The wind didn't howl. It shrieked.

  Amari stopped walking. He tasted the air. The faint, bitter flavor of hot copper was gone, replaced by something sharp and metallic. Blood.

  He looked at the horizon. The red haze wasn't just rippling anymore. It was fracturing.

  "Down," Amari ordered.

  Niko collapsed to his knees, his breath coming in ragged gasps. "I can't. My legs—"

  "Get down!" Amari grabbed the assassin’s collar and dragged him toward a jagged outcropping of black basalt.

  A second later, the sky shattered.

  It wasn't a sandstorm. It was a Glass Storm. The ambient mana in this zone of the Scorchlands was so dense, so violently compressed by the heat, that it crystallized the silica in the air.

  A gust hit Amari’s shoulder. It tore through his Academy-issue jacket like a razor blade, slicing a clean, shallow line across his bicep.

  They dove into a narrow vertical fissure in the basalt monolith just as the main wall of the storm slammed into the rock.

  Shh-crack. Shh-crack.

  Millions of microscopic glass shards hammered the stone outside, stripping away layers of rock in seconds. To be caught in the open meant being flayed to the bone.

  The fissure was barely wide enough for Amari’s shoulders. He pressed his back against the cold stone, pulling Niko in tight against his chest to keep the assassin’s legs out of the storm's reach.

  It was pitch black. The air inside the crack was freezing. The Scorchlands had no middle ground—it burned you alive in the sun, and froze the marrow in your bones in the shade.

  Niko was trembling violently. "How long?" he chattered.

  "Until it stops," Amari said.

  Amari closed his eyes.

  Mistake, his instincts warned.

  The Void Engine was starving. The scorpion core had burned out hours ago. His tongue felt too large for his mouth. Every swallow scraped. His body temperature was plummeting, and without fuel, the Engine began pulling energy from his nervous system to keep his organs functioning.

  The sensory deprivation of the dark fissure amplified the strain.

  The shrieking of the glass storm outside began to change pitch.

  At first it was only the pitch. Then the rhythm changed. The wind began arriving in pulses—almost like distant marching feet beneath the shriek.

  The dark behind his eyes split open.

  Ash was falling like snow.

  It wasn't red sand. It was the grey, greasy ash of the Capital burning. The sky above him was torn open, bleeding violent violet light.

  Amari was standing in the ruins of the First Sector. His hands were covered in blood that wasn't his.

  At his feet lay the bodies of the 4th Resistance Vanguard. Thirty men and women. The only ones who had listened to him. The only ones who had survived the purge.

  They were all dead.

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

  "You calculated the yield," a voice whispered from the ash. Amari looked down. It was Elias, his second-in-command from the first timeline. Half of Elias’s face was burned away by a Dread-Dredge beam. His remaining eye stared up at Amari, cold and accusing.

  "You said the shield would hold, Commander," Elias rasped, blood bubbling on his lips. "You said we had the leverage."

  Amari couldn't speak. The ash was choking him. He fell to his knees. "You treat us like numbers," another voice echoed. A woman’s voice. Sarah. A scout. She was missing both her legs. "Resource. Threat. Leverage. But we just ran out of mana, Amari. We burned out. And you let us burn."

  The dead began to stand. Their eyes were hollow. Their mouths hung open, pouring grey ash.

  "The Scorchlands is just a grave," Elias said, stepping closer. "You didn't come back to save us. You just came back to watch us die twice."

  Amari bit his own lip.

  He bit down until his teeth cut through the flesh, until the sharp, hot copper taste of his own blood flooded his mouth.

  Pain is real, he told himself. The ghosts are a lie.

  He forced his eyes open. The dark fissure rushed back. The dead faces vanished, replaced by the suffocating black rock.

  His chest heaved. The Void Engine hummed a dark, metallic rhythm, instantly cannibalizing the few drops of blood from his lip for fuel. It was eating him alive, piece by piece.

  I am a monster, Amari thought, letting the cold reality of the stone ground him. I have to be. Because a man can't kill a god.

  He pressed the back of his head hard against the rear wall of the fissure, trying to steady his breathing.

  The wall moved.

  It wasn't a shift in the rock. It was a mechanical click.

  Amari froze. He reached his hand behind his back, running his fingers over the stone. It wasn't basalt. It was perfectly smooth. Cold iron, coated in centuries of dust.

  No runes. No mana channels. Whoever built this trusted metal more than magic.

  "Niko," Amari whispered, his voice steadying instantly. The tactician returned. "Give me your knife."

  Niko fumbled in the dark, passing the hilt of his dagger.

  Amari didn't use the blade. He used the heavy pommel. He tapped the back wall.

  Clink. Clink. Clink.

  It was hollow.

  Amari ran his fingers along the edge of the smooth plate. He found a seam. He wedged his fingers into the gap and pulled. The hunger in his muscles screamed in protest, but the Void Engine fed on the pain, converting it to dense, raw strength.

  With a grinding groan of neglected gears, the heavy iron plate slid inward.

  Stale, cool air poured over them. It smelled of old dust and dry rot.

  "A cave?" Niko asked, feeling the draft.

  "A door," Amari corrected.

  Amari squeezed through the opening, pulling Niko after him. The iron plate slammed shut behind them on a counter-weight, cutting off the deafening shriek of the glass storm instantly.

  They were in a subterranean tunnel. It was unnervingly geometric. The floor was perfectly level, cut straight through the bedrock.

  Amari clicked on his military-issue flashlight. The beam cut through the dark, illuminating a corridor that stretched downward into the earth.

  "We found it," Niko breathed. "The outpost."

  Amari didn't move forward. He shined the light on the ceiling, then the walls.

  Some of the iron plates were dented inward—not from attack, but from something trying to escape.

  Resource. Threat. Leverage.

  "Don't take a step," Amari said softly.

  He aimed the beam ten feet ahead. Strung across the width of the tunnel, barely visible in the dust, was a wire. But it wasn't metallic. It was made of Aura-Glass—a highly sensitive material used in Academy targeting arrays.

  Above the wire, the ceiling was packed with jagged iron spikes, held back by a series of heavy pneumatic pins. Embedded in the walls were dull, pulsing blue crystals.

  "Mana-Sensors," Niko recognized, his assassin training kicking in.

  "If an Academy Mage walks into a dark cave, what do they do?" Amari asked.

  "Flare a light spell," Niko whispered.

  "And the moment mana touches the Aura-Glass, the crystals resonate. The pins retract. A hundred tons of iron drops."

  Amari looked down the long, dark corridor. There were dozens of identical wires crisscrossing the path. A gauntlet of lethal paranoia.

  It was a beautiful, terrifying design. Not a fortress to keep enemies out—a filter to keep the dependent out.

  Amari turned off his flashlight. The tunnel plunged into absolute darkness.

  "Can you suppress your core?” Amari whispered into the darkness where Niko stood.

  "Yes," Niko whispered. "The Royal Knives learn to walk without an aura."

  "Good," Amari said. He had no core to suppress. His Engine was a sealed black hole. He leaked nothing.

  "Follow my voice," Amari said, stepping perfectly over the invisible line in the dark. "Let's go meet your uncle.”