Part 31: The Price of Life
The alarm siren sliced through the bunker’s silence like a scalpel.
Vance tried to push himself up—but his body refused to obey. The motion threw him back onto the floor.
Red diagnostic lines flooded his vision.
**[CRITICAL CHASSIS FAILURE]**
**[Main Frame Deformation: 65%]**
**[Left Leg Hydraulics: FAILURE]**
**[Spinal Servos: JAMMED]**
He understood immediately.
His old Loader skeleton had simply folded under the Tyrannosaur’s impact, crushed and locked inside the mangled armor.
He couldn’t move.
He was a prisoner inside his own protection.
Vance clenched his teeth—or whatever passed for them now—and keyed in the emergency release command.
Pneumatics hissed.
The locking clamps of the **Red Titan** detonated outward.
Heavy plates—those same plates that had saved his life—crashed onto the floor with a metallic thunder. Vance slid out of them like a mollusk from a shattered shell.
His internal frame was crooked. His left shoulder hung lower than the right. But he could crawl.
He dragged himself to the observation panel.
Near the entrance stood a massive armored cargo truck mounted on a grav-cushion. The logo on its side glowed in clean corporate light:
**CYBER-SPECTRUM.**
Nexus stood before the camera—calm as always.
Vance hit the gate release.
There was nothing left to lose.
### The Merchant’s Visit
When Nexus entered the main hall, he froze for a fraction of a second.
He had seen many things in the Wastes.
But this…
In the middle of the room lay Marcus—torn clean in half—his exposed internals barely pulsing with dim blue light. Nearby, leaning against the wall, stood Vance, twisted and dented. His “elite” armor lay in a heap of scrap metal on the floor.
Nexus didn’t ask a single question.
His processor evaluated the scene instantly.
*They survived hell.*
“I brought everything on the list,” the merchant said evenly. “Plus an expanded resuscitation kit of my own choosing. This is my mobile warehouse. I’m used to… urgent calls.”
He glanced at Vance.
“I need help unloading. I came alone. Where’s your technician? He was supposed to brief me. The equipment is delicate.”
“He should be on his way,” Vance rasped, trying to straighten his back. “If he heard me.”
Nexus tilted his head, eyeing the Tank’s ruined chassis.
“You’ve been chewed up badly. How did you even make it back?”
Vance stayed silent.
The memory of a dinosaur’s jaws was still too fresh—too sharp.
“Patch me,” he said finally. “Temporarily. So I can haul crates.”
Nexus wasn’t a mechanic, but he had basic repair protocols. He retrieved a universal tool from his truck.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“I’ll replace your knee actuator and brace your spine,” he said, working quickly, though without the precision of a true specialist. “This isn’t a repair. It’s crutches. Don’t even think about running.”
Ten minutes later, Vance could stand straight.
They started carrying containers: bio-gel canisters, voltage stabilizers, neural chains, sealed coolant cells.
When the last crate was inside, Nexus wiped grease off his hands.
“You do realize how much this is going to cost you?” he said with a thin, practiced hint. “This was a custom order.”
For the first time in what felt like forever, Vance opened his interface.
He checked his balance—and froze.
He almost collapsed again.
**[Balance: 115,450 credits]**
**[Level: 34 → 50 (+16 levels!)]**
**[Available Stat Points: 80]**
**[Status: Inventory Overloaded]**
He opened the inventory tab.
Among the piles of junk and salvage, one item shone with legendary quality.
**[Alpha Tyrannosaur Skeleton (Full Set)]**
*Description: A bio-mechanical structure of impossible resilience. Adaptive metal.*
Vance slowly closed the window.
They hadn’t just killed a monster.
They’d killed the god of this biome.
“How much do you want?” he asked flatly.
Nexus, reading micro-reactions and hesitation delays, understood immediately:
*There’s money.*
“We’ll settle it later,” the merchant replied diplomatically. “Right now, the priority is your client. Shall we wait for your master?”
“I’m not sure I can pay everything at once,” Vance lied, unwilling to reveal all his cards.
### A Storm at the Gate
Suddenly, the silence shattered with a brutal pounding.
Someone was slamming the armored gate from outside.
*BANG! BANG! BANG!*
Vance blinked in confusion.
The security system remained silent—no siren, no warning.
He glanced at the monitor.
On the camera feed, an old truck sat smoking in the dust. A small figure hammered the metal with a massive wrench, like a man trying to break into a fortress through sheer rage.
“…Spark,” Vance exhaled, and hit the door release.
The gate hadn’t even fully parted when **Spark**—also known as Doc—slipped through the gap.
Two small assistant drones rolled after him, squeaking, overloaded with tools.
Spark looked like he’d escaped a fire.
His jumpsuit was smeared with oil and soot. His optic goggles were shoved up onto his forehead, and his breathing was ragged—more from stress than exhaustion.
He burst into the hall, clearly about to shout something—
Then his gaze snapped to the table.
“Oh no…” was all he managed.
“Oh, damn it…”
He forgot the greeting instantly.
Spark sprinted to Marcus, unfolding multifunction manipulators as he ran.
“Fast! What do we have?” he shouted without looking back. “The core’s unstable! It’s pulsing in emergency mode! A little more and it either goes dark—or it blows this place straight to hell!”
Nexus, stunned by the small man’s speed, forwarded him the cargo manifest.
“Class-four bio-gel!” Spark barked, plugging into Marcus’s systems. “Stabilizer here! Drones—hold the shunt! No cryo-loop? Fine, nitrogen line! Move, move, MOVE!”
Work erupted into controlled chaos.
Spark was a virtuoso.
His hands flickered like machinery possessed, reconnecting severed chains, reinforcing cracked channels, overriding dead safety locks. He cursed, muttered formulas, and commanded his drones and Nexus simultaneously.
Even Vance—still half-broken—felt the room shift under the weight of Spark’s competence.
### Diagnosis
Three hours passed in tense silence.
Marcus lay inside a special chamber Spark had assembled on the spot. His reactor, which had been strobing in chaotic pulses, now emitted a steady—if weak—blue glow.
The body began to warm.
Spark wiped grease from his brow and sat heavily on the floor beside Vance.
“Stabilized,” he exhaled. “The spark is there. His consciousness is trapped in an emergency loop, but he’ll come back.”
“What happened to him?” Spark asked, nodding toward the chamber.
“The cryo-shell cracked,” Vance said.
“I can see that. The reactor suffered extreme cooling,” Doc nodded. “He almost froze himself to death. We’re warming him up now, but we’ve got a new problem.”
“Overheating?” Nexus asked.
“Yes.” Spark kicked the pile of scrap that used to be Marcus’s legs with pure contempt. “His old skeleton… this is garbage. It can’t handle the load of that reactor. No protocol except emergency will run. He needs a new body.”
“Completely.”
Then Spark looked at Vance.
“And you too, big guy. You look like a tin can that got chewed up by a hydraulic press. Your spine is holding together on sheer stubbornness.”
Vance nodded.
He didn’t argue.
### The Fugitive
“Why are you here, Spark?” Vance asked. “And why didn’t the security system detect you?”
Spark gave him a tired, crooked smile.
“It didn’t detect me because I bypassed it. Sorry. Old hacker habits.”
He pulled out a flask of coolant and took a long swig.
“As for why I’m here… the city is recovering.”
He paused.
“But not the way we wanted.”
“Iron Horizon sent in enforcement squads. Total sweeps. They’re checking everyone: documents, licenses, the origin of parts.”
He tapped his own badge.
“My master license expired five years ago. I’ve been working in the gray zone. When the raids started, I realized I’d either get arrested—or dismantled.”
“So I loaded the most valuable equipment into my truck and ran into the Wastes.”
“I was already beyond the perimeter when your message came through.”
Nexus nodded solemnly.
“Smart move. The city is hot right now.”
Spark stood and approached Marcus’s chamber.
“All right. Here’s the situation.”
“Marcus will live. I built a temporary cooling loop.”
“But until we find him a new, high-tech skeleton capable of handling the output of his reactor and processor…”
“…he’s going to be a vegetable.”
“He’ll wake up, but he won’t even be able to stand.”
Vance glanced at his inventory again—at the Alpha Tyrannosaur skeleton sitting there like a miracle wrapped in metal.
“We have resources,” he said, and for the first time that day, his voice carried something dangerously close to hope.
“And we have the best technician in the Wastes.”
“We won’t search for skeletons.”
“We’ll build them.”
