The underbelly of Sector 7 was not built for Meat-Bags; it was built for giants.
Jax, Ryla, and Pria stood on the "Web"—a rusted, hexagonal junction platform suspended in the dead center of the facility's massive foundation. Below them, five hundred meters down through the grated metal floor, was the Slag-Pit. It was a churning ocean of molten waste, a slow-moving river of orange fire that cast a hellish, wavering light up into the dark superstructure.
The heat was a physical weight. Even through their heavy rubber aprons and stolen industrial respirators, they could feel it pressing against their skin, aggressively sapping their moisture. The air shimmered, distorting their vision like a desert mirage. Ash flakes, light as grey snow, drifted upward on the violent thermals, coating their mirrored goggles in grime.
Above them, the massive bulk of Vorg's fortress hung like a dark moon, blocking out the faint, distant lights of the Top-Side. It was supported by three colossal pillars of reinforced durasteel, each as wide as a city block—The Primary Struts.
North. East. South.
These were the legs of the beast. They were wrapped in thick bundles of Mag-Lev cabling and studded with warning lights that pulsed a slow, rhythmic red. At the base of each strut, currently protected by heavy durasteel blast shields, were the magnetic anchors holding the city block to the crater wall.
"It feels like standing inside a furnace," Ryla shouted over the deafening roar of the distant extractors. She adjusted the heavy strap of her disguise, and beneath it, the newly installed military servo in her knee whirred with aggressive, smooth power. Even disguised in the bulky worker gear, she looked ready for a war.
"Thermal updrafts," Jax said, checking his cracked wrist-deck. The screen was severely glitching from the magnetic interference of the struts, but he could still read the ambient temperature climbing. "Keep your rebreathers sealed tight. If you take a breath of raw air down here, the superheated ash will cook your lungs from the inside out."
Pria walked to the edge of the Web, looking down into the fire without a trace of vertigo. The orange light reflected in her dark goggles. Surrounded by steam and shadow, she looked completely in her element.
"Three paths," Pria said, her voice calm. She pointed down the three long, narrow catwalks that radiated out from the central junction like spokes on a wheel. "One for each of us. One for each anchor."
Jax nodded. He checked his own deep apron pocket, feeling the jagged edge of his Polarity Shunt resting next to the heavy Class-A battery Silas had given him.
He looked at Ryla. "You have the North Strut. That's the structural spine. It'll be heavily reinforced. The schematic showed the maintenance walkway is old, but with your new leg, you should be able to clear any gaps."
He turned to Pria. "South Strut. That's near the main exhaust manifolds. It'll be completely fogged out with steam. Good cover, but zero visibility."
"I'll take East," Jax finished. "The main power coupling runs through it. It'll have the highest magnetic turbulence. It's going to mess with our comms."
Ryla pulled her tiny, jagged shunt from her belt pouch, weighing it in her palm. "So we walk to the end of the plank, plug these into the anchor consoles, and pray Silas drops the blast shields before Vorg notices?"
"Simple enough," Pria said dryly, adjusting her sleeves.
"Yeah right! It's never that simple," Jax interjected with a concerned look. "But it's the only play we have."
He looked at them. Ryla, the tunnel runner who had sacrificed her own mobility to save a camp of strangers, now vibrating with the power of stolen military chrome. Pria, the lethal Ghost of the Basin who had risked her people to pull him out of the fire. They were covered in grease, exhausted, and standing on a precipice over hell.
"Radio check," Jax said.
"Check," Ryla said, stretching her legs.
"Check," Pria whispered.
"Good. Once we split up, maintain silence unless it's an absolute emergency. We plug the shunts in on my mark. Three... two... one. Break."
They turned away from each other.
Jax watched them go for a brief second. Good luck, he thought, hoping desperately he would see them at the bottom.
He turned East.
He walked along the narrow gantry. The metal groaned under his mismatched boots. The further he got from the central Web, the darker it became. The orange glow of the pit faded, replaced by the cold, blue, localized hum of the high-voltage cables running thickly along the walls.
He was alone. Just him and the machine.
Bzzt.
A sharp, painful burst of static hiss cut through his earbud.
"Ryla?" Jax tapped his earpiece, wincing. "Pria? Signal check."
Krrrcchhhhh.
White noise.
A solid wall of electronic snow.
Jax stopped dead. He looked at his wrist-deck. The signal bars weren't just low from magnetic interference; they were entirely zeroed out. A "LOCALIZED JAMMING" icon flashed in angry red letters across the cracked glass.
"No," Jax whispered, his blood running cold. "The Dark-Mesh network doesn't just cut like that. That's an active jammer."
He spun around, his hand instinctively dropping to his Spark-Gap, scanning the catwalk behind him. It was empty. Just steam, shadow, and blue light.
But the air pressure had shifted.
The rhythmic thrum of the factory seemed to dampen unnaturally, as if a heavy, sound-absorbing blanket had been thrown over the sector.
He wasn't alone. And neither were they.
SOUTH STRUT
Pria stopped moving.
She was deep in the South steam tunnels. The air here was thick, white, and suffocatingly hot. Visibility was less than two meters. To anyone else, navigating this catwalk suspended over magma would be a paralyzing nightmare.
To Pria, it was normal.
She reached for her comms to update Jax on her position.
Static.
But she didn't panic. She didn't even bother tapping her earpiece or speak. She just froze perfectly still and held her breath, tuning her senses to the environment.
Drip. Drip. Hiss. The normal, chaotic sounds of the facility. But underneath them, there was an anomaly. An absolute void of sound moving rapidly through the steam.
Pria dropped.
She hit the metal grating flat on her stomach just as a monofilament wire whipped viciously through the exact space her neck had occupied a split-second before. The wire struck a pressurized steel steam pipe on the wall, slicing it cleanly in half.
HISSSSSS!
Superheated vapor exploded into the tight corridor, instantly blinding the area.
Pria rolled, violently ripping off her heavy, cumbersome worker gloves and apron to reveal the dual vibro-knives strapped to her forearms. She sprang up into a low crouch, her back pressed flush against the wall, her thumb activating the high-frequency hum of her blades.
A figure detached itself from the ceiling pipes. It landed silently on the grating, five meters away, completely unaffected by the scalding steam.
It was tall, unnaturally thin, and clad in light-absorbing armor. A Banshee. Its helmet was a smooth, featureless black oval, with delicate, fin-like audio sensors twitching rapidly on the sides to compensate for the visual blindness.
It didn't speak. It just tilted its head, listening.
Pria sank instantly into her mutation.
Thermal Damping.
She forcefully slowed her breathing, commanding her heart rate to plummet to a whisper, her body temperature dropping to match the cold durasteel of the gantry.
The Banshee's audio-fins twitched frantically, sweeping back and forth.
It had lost her pulse. It extended a second monofilament whip from its other gauntlet.
The Banshee lunged, unleashing a terrifying, overlapping cyclone of wire meant to shred the entire corridor. The whips moved faster than human eyes could track, carving the fog into ribbons, sparking violently as they scarred the metal walls and floor.
Pria couldn't dodge it all. She threw herself backward, bringing her left vibro-knife up.
CLANG-ZZZ!
The monofilament wire wrapped around the glowing edge of her vibro-blade. The sheer mechanical strength of the Banshee jerked her forward, ripping the knife completely out of her hand. It clattered uselessly into the abyss.
As she stumbled, the second whip lashed out. Pria twisted, but the wire sliced cleanly through her thick thermal hoodie, tearing a fiery, bleeding line across her ribs and biting deep into her left shoulder.
She gasped.
The sudden, blinding pain spiked her suppressed heart rate.
Thump-thump.
The Banshee's helmet snapped instantly toward her chest. It had her.
Disarmed of her left blade, bleeding heavily, and backed against the safety railing, Pria realized she couldn't out-range it. She had to get inside its guard, or she would be sliced to pieces.
She unclipped the heavy industrial goggles from her face.
She tossed them hard to her left, letting them hit the steel grating with a sharp clack.
The Banshee's audio-sensors tracked the sound instantly. Both whips lashed out to the left, instantly shredding the plastic goggles into dust.
It was a half-second distraction. Pria launched herself forward, diving straight under the arc of the retracting whips. She slid across the slick grating, ignoring the searing pain in her shoulder, and crashed directly into the Banshee's legs.
She drove her remaining vibro-knife fiercely upward, aiming for the unarmored joint under the Banshee's knee.
Black coolant sprayed into the steam. The Banshee staggered, its leg buckling. But the elite assassin didn't fall.
Instead, it dropped its right whip and grabbed Pria by the throat with crushing, mechanized force. It hoisted her into the air, her boots kicking frantically at the grating.
The metal fingers compressed her windpipe. Her vision exploded with black spots. She couldn't breathe. Her left hand clawed uselessly at the massive armored gauntlet choking the life out of her.
But Pria hadn't dropped her right knife.
She let her body go totally limp, feigning unconsciousness.
The Banshee didn't relax, but its audio-fins stopped twitching, assuming the struggle was over as it squeezed tighter to crush her neck completely.
In that microsecond, Pria engaged every ounce of strength she had left. She swung her right arm up in a brutal, desperate arc.
She slammed the humming vibro-blade upward, driving it deep into the base of the Banshee's skull, severing the heavy neural-column connecting the helmet to the cybernetic suit.
CRUNCH-SHUNK.
The Banshee went rigidly stiff. The sound-dampening field around it flickered and died. The mechanical fingers around Pria's throat released their grip.
Pria dropped to the grating, gasping violently for air, coughing up blood, clutching her bruised neck. The massive cyborg collapsed backward, twitching violently for a few seconds before going completely, permanently still.
Pria knelt over it, breathing hard, her chest heaving against her bindings. Her clothes were shredded, and blood was running freely down her waist and arm.
She ignored the pain, ripping a piece of cloth from her ruined apron and binding her shoulder tight. She stepped over the corpse, dragging herself the remaining twenty feet to the massive durasteel blast shields protecting the South Anchor.
She jammed the jagged Polarity Shunt into the port. A tiny LED on the tech flashed from red to solid green.
"South is Green," she wheezed into her comms, her voice a raw rasp.
Only dead static answered her.
NORTH STRUT
Ryla was breathing hard, but she was smiling.
The North catwalk was a structural disaster. Whole sections of the heavy grating had rusted through entirely, leaving gaping, ten-foot holes that looked straight down into the churning magma of the Slag-Pit.
A day ago, with a blown servo, this walk would have been impossible. But with the stolen Rust-King military motor humming in her knee, Ryla was leaping over the chasms with terrifying, effortless power. Every time she pushed off, the high-torque servo whined, launching her hyper-dense frame across the gaps like a missile.
She reached the midway point—a wider observation platform where the strut connected to the main wall. She checked her comms.
Static.
"Jax?" she whispered, tapping the side of her helmet.
"My radio is dead. Spark, you there?"
The darkness above her shifted.
Ryla spun around, her boots planting firmly on the grating. Perched upside down on a heavy support beam above her, staring down with a featureless, eyeless face, was a Banshee. It looked like a gargoyle carved from obsidian.
It uncoiled from the ceiling and dropped.
OOF.
The Banshee hit her squarely in the shoulders with the force of a falling boulder. Ryla's hyper-dense bone structure absorbed the horrific impact, saving her spine, but the sheer kinetic weight drove her violently backward.
Her boots skidded across the grating until her heels hit the lip of one of the massive, rusted-out gaps in the floor.
Before Ryla could draw her vibro-knife, the Banshee's armored hands shot out, clamping around her throat with the crushing force of an industrial vice. It hoisted her up, lifting her heavy boots completely off the grating, suspending her directly over the gaping hole.
Ryla stared down past her boots. Five hundred meters of empty freefall, ending in a lake of fire. The searing heat wafted up through the gap, scorching the soles of her boots.
Her hands flew up, frantically gripping the armored gauntlets crushing her windpipe, trying to pry the mechanical fingers apart. Her hyper-dense muscles strained, cords standing out on her neck, but the cyborg's hydraulic grip wouldn't budge.
Ryla's vision blurred. Black spots danced aggressively in her eyes. She gasped for air that wasn't coming, her lungs burning.
Her left boot kicked wildly at the empty air above the chasm, but then she intentionally let her body go slack. She let her right leg hang completely limp, like a dying animal giving up.
Assuming she was passing out from asphyxiation, and analyzing her limp leg as useless, the Banshee relaxed its defensive posture. It leaned its unarmored lower torso closer, silently watching the life drain from her face.
It was a fatal miscalculation.
Ryla hadn't passed out. She dug her fingers into the Banshee's forearms to securely anchor her upper body. Her vision was fading, but she glared fiercely at the featureless helmet.
"You think I'm broken?" Ryla gasped, her neon hair flashing in the red warning lights as she smiled a bloody, feral smile. "Chrome breaks."
She engaged.
A high-pitched, electric whine shrieked from her knee joint. With the explosive, hydraulic force of a pile driver combined with the raw, compact power of her own hyper-dense musculature, Ryla brought her right knee up in a devastating, vertical strike directly into the dead center of the Banshee's chest plate.
CRACK-BOOM.
The heavy, light-absorbing armor of the Banshee's chest cavity instantly shattered inward under the impossible force. Synthetic ribs snapped like dry twigs. The shockwave of the blow violently forced the breath from the assassin's lungs, and the hydraulic grip on Ryla's throat instantly failed.
The kinetic force of the upward strike lifted the massive cyborg completely off its feet. As the grip on her throat broke, Ryla used her fierce hold on its forearms to violently pivot her weight.
She hurled the shattered cyborg backward into the open chasm, using the momentum to throw herself forward onto the solid grating.
The Banshee plummeted down into the dark, desperately clawing at the empty air. There was a long, terrifying silence, followed by a brief, fiery splash far below.
"So do Banshees," Ryla wheezed, collapsing safely onto the metal floor, coughing violently, rubbing the deep, dark bruises already forming on her throat in the shape of metal fingers.
She stood up, then limped to the blast shields protecting the North Anchor.
She jammed the jagged Shunt into the port.
The light turned green.
"North is Green," she gasped, spitting a mouthful of blood toward the abyss. "Jax? Pria? You guys okay?"
Nothing but static.
EAST STRUT
Jax stood perfectly still on the narrow gantry.
His comms were dead. His wrist-deck was jammed. But he didn't need a screen. He closed his eyes and pushed his Techno-Organic Resonance outward, feeling the heavy, rhythmic pulse of the factory around him.
Thump. Hiss. Grind.Thump. Hiss. Step.
There. An extra beat in the rhythm. A heavy footstep that was acoustically silent but magnetically displaced the ambient energy of the catwalk.
"Come out," Jax said, his voice steady. His hand drifted to the Spark-Gap on his belt. It displayed 15% charge. But his other hand rested deep in his pocket, fingering the heavy Class-A battery Silas had given him.
The air ten feet in front of him shimmered violently. A Banshee decloaked, stepping smoothly out of an active camouflage field.
It was huge. Significantly taller and broader than the descriptions they usually heard. Dull gold rank-markings were etched into its black, sound-absorbing armor. The Alpha.
It drew a heavy, glowing shock-baton that crackled with blue energy, and simply advanced.
Jax backed up slowly, his mismatched boots clapping lightly against the metal grating. He let himself be cornered against the massive durasteel blast shields covering the anchor. The heavy magnetic coils of the strut hummed violently behind him.
The Alpha lunged, swinging the baton in a brutal arc aimed at Jax's skull.
Jax threw himself to the floor, rolling desperately. The baton missed his head but clipped his shoulder pad, sending a shockwave of electricity through his arm. Jax cried out, spinning across the grating. His Spark-Gap was knocked loose, skittering several feet away.
The Alpha loomed over him, raising the heavy boot to crush his chest.
Rat-Tactics.
Jax scrambled backward, grabbed the Spark-Gap from the floor, and simultaneously jammed the pristine Class-A battery directly into the jury-rigged power port. The igniter shrieked, instantly overloading, glowing white-hot in his gloved hand.
He didn't aim at the Alpha. He aimed straight up at the massive bundle of Mag-Lev cables hanging loosely from the ceiling and pulled the trigger.
ZAP-KRAKOOM!
The overloaded arc of electricity hit the cables. The magnetic field instantly collapsed. The heavy, steel-braided cables lashed out like massive, electrified snakes.
Because the Alpha was wearing heavy, magnetic-dampening armor, it acted as the perfect ground.
Three massive cables whipped down from the ceiling, magnetically adhering directly to the Alpha's chest and back with a deafening CLANG.
The overloaded cables violently retracted, magnetically pulling toward the main power conduit in the wall. The Alpha was ripped completely off its feet and slammed brutally into the steel bulkhead with the force of a speeding train.
The heavy armor crumpled. Sparks showered the catwalk as the high voltage surged through the assassin's suit, instantly frying its life support. The Alpha hung there for a second, pinned to the wall by the magnetic cables, twitching violently, before the cables sparked out and dropped the smoking, lifeless husk to the grating.
Jax stood up, his shoulder throbbing, his hands shaking so hard he almost dropped the Shunt. He tossed the completely melted, ruined Spark-Gap over the edge. It had saved his life for the last time.
He walked to the maintenance terminal at the base of the blast shields. He jammed the Shunt into the socket.
The tiny LED flickered, then turned solid green.
"East is Green," Jax whispered into the dead comms, leaning his head against the cool steel.
"We're in."
He looked at the massive, durasteel blast shields covering the anchors. They were still securely locked in place, blocking the Shunts from engaging the main system.
"Your turn, Silas," Jax prayed aloud to the empty gantry. "Drop the shields."
He waited.
Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. A minute.
The heavy shields didn't move an inch.
Instead, the main Holo-Screen in the center of the foundry floor, a massive projection usually used for factory quotas, clearly visible from Jax's high vantage point flickered to life.
Vorg's horribly scarred face appeared, filling the cavernous room.
He was smiling, his terrifying steel trap-jaw catching the sterile blue light of his surroundings.
He was standing in the pristine, white Glass Cage.
And behind him, thrown brutally onto the floor, bleeding from a massive head wound, was Silas.
"Did you really think," Vorg boomed, his metallic voice echoing terribly through the entire sector, shaking the dust from the rafters, "that I would leave the keys to my house unguarded?"