The sewers beneath Sector 8 were the iron intestines of a monster that never slept. The air here felt like a thick soup of sulfur steam, ammonia gas, and the sharp, biting scent of oxidized machine lubricant. Elian Laurent waded through ankle-deep wastewater, but he soon noticed something unsettling: the ripples in the filth parted with a rhythm that was far too consistent.
His footsteps landed with absolute pressure. He never once slipped on the slick, metallic moss.
"Stop staring at your own feet, Elian. You're starting to look like someone falling in love with the mud," Caelus's voice echoed through the narrow tunnel.
The mad poet walked a few paces behind, lifting his silver cloak with his fingertips. He continued to spin his silver coin, yet his gaze was fixed on Elian's back with an unusual intensity. "You know," Caelus murmured, "the way you walk now reminds me of an Inquisitor with a measuring rod driven through his spine. Too straight. Extremely unartistic."
Elian didn't respond. His focus was split between the darkness ahead and the alien sensation crawling through his bone marrow. Physically, he no longer felt the pain from his broken ribs. However, the absence of pain was more terrifying than the suffering itself.
He tried to clench his left hand. Click. A very faint sound traveled beneath his flesh. The movement was precise, devoid of biological inertia. No human muscle moved like that.
"Mechanic's instinct," Elian reasoned quietly, more to soothe himself.
He attempted to consciously activate Null Perspective to track the remnants of Lyra Vance's refraction trail. His eyes narrowed, forcing his brain to dissect the atmospheric variables.
Zrrrt—KRAK!
Instantly, his vision exploded. Not with neat rows of code, but with a storm of blood-red static. Vectors collided, cancelling each other out and creating an error loop on his retina. An extreme cold pierced his brainstem.
Elian's stride halted. His body refused his commands. He fell to his knees in the middle of the waste-puddle.
"Elian?" Caelus stopped.
"Cough! Cough... HAAKK!"
Elian doubled over, his chest convulsing violently. He spat something into his palm. His red, watery eyes stared at the fluid with blurred vision.
It wasn't blood. It was pitch black. Viscous.
A hauntingly familiar scent hit his nostrils—the smell of high-tier synthetic hydrocarbons. Elian was a mechanic. For ten years of his life, his hands had been stained with this very substance. He knew exactly what this thick fluid seeping between his fingers was for. This was gear lubricant. This was a friction-reducing agent for industrial machine chassis.
A pure, suffocating revulsion exploded in Elian's chest. Oil? Why are my lungs pumping oil? His breath came in wild gasps. He felt like he was rotting from the inside, being turned into an inanimate object. Bolts and cables replacing the mesh of flesh. An overwhelming nausea made him tremble. He was nothing but a piece of scrap machinery being forced to run.
Behind him, Caelus's silver coin hit the water with a pathetic plop.
The poet's mask of comedy shattered into pieces. Caelus's eyes widened, staring at the black stain on Elian's hand with pure horror. He took a step back, his breath held.
"That... that's military-grade Bio-Synthetic lubricant..." Caelus whispered, his voice shaking violently. He was from the Upper Sector; he knew what kind of technology was capable of doing something this horrific to a human body. "That's from... Sector 1. It's impossible..."
Elian turned, his gaze pleading for an explanation, but Caelus immediately looked away. The poet rubbed his face harshly, forcing a stiff, satirical smile back onto his lips, though cold sweat drenched his temples.
"W-what did you drink up there, Elian?" Caelus's laugh sounded discordant and nervous. "Because I swear, if you start growing antennas and asking to be charged every night, I'm seriously leaving you."
Elian roughly wiped the remaining black fluid onto his cloak. His disgust hadn't faded, but they were out of time. "Shut up, Caelus. I just... I need to adjust."
He forced himself to stand. His steps now felt heavy and awkward, but they finally reached a massive circular chamber that served as a steam-pulley junction. Ventilation fans spun slowly in the center of the room.
Right in the exit path, three silhouettes stood waiting. Rust Ravens. They weren't mere grunts; the trio wore thick industrial gas masks and gripped steel spears surged with orange Thermodynamic energy that scorched the air.
"Closed area!" One of the guards leveled his spear. The room's temperature surged instantly. "The Bloodhound ordered a total quarantine. No one passes without clearance!"
Caelus swallowed hard, his fingers tightening over his golden harp. "Elian, you can't even breathe right. Let me—"
"No," Elian cut him off.
His brain began to calculate again. His logic tried to push aside the nausea from the oil. He remembered how The Bloodhound had defeated him. He didn't need full speed; he just needed to reverse the enemy's attack vector. Vector Rejection. Utilizing the opponent's inertia.
The lead guard lunged. The spear shot straight forward, aiming for Elian's solar plexus.
In Elian's eyes, the calculation was perfect.
Angle: 45°
Velocity: 12 m/s
I just need to shift my hand at t = 1.2s and touch the base of the shaft to invert the thermal gradient.
His brain sent the lethal command to his arm.
But his body did not obey.
Glitch.
The joint in Elian's left shoulder locked suddenly, as if a gear had jammed due to a lack of grease. The 1.2s mark passed. His hand only moved at t = 1.4s . A delay of 0.2 seconds in the world of Axioms was the abyss between life and death.
"Damn it—!"
The thermal spear slipped past Elian's stiff parry. The boiling spearhead grazed his right arm hard, incinerating the cloak fabric and searing his skin.
An agonizing pain—a very real, human pain—exploded. His pain-suppression system malfunctioned. Elian let out a stifled scream, reeling back while clutching his severely blistered arm.
"Die, rat!" The second and third guards advanced together, ready to impale the helpless Elian. He wasn't a Terminator; he was a failed cyborg whose systems were collapsing.
TRING!!!
A deafening harp chord exploded in the air.
Caelus was no longer smiling. The poet swept the strings of his harp with all his might, activating high-level destructive probability. A surge of silver energy shot toward the ceiling.
A high-pressure steam support pipe above the three guards suffered "spontaneous material fatigue" with a probability of one in ten million. The pipe shattered into fragments exactly as the two guards stepped forward.
BSSSSSHHH!!!
Steam at hundreds of degrees blasted down like a waterfall, striking the three guards. They screamed behind their gas masks, dropping their spears and rolling on the ground as their skin blistered.
Elian panted, his body trembling violently. Caelus ran to him, grabbing Elian's collar and hauling him up roughly.
"You almost got split in two, you broken calculator!" Caelus snapped, his panic no longer hidden. "I told you, don't try to be a hero when you don't even know whose body you're wearing!"
Elian didn't argue. His arm throbbed painfully, the flesh raw. He stared at his scorched hand, then at Caelus, realizing he had just been saved by the poet who usually only provided sideline commentary.
"Thank... you," Elian whispered through gritted teeth.
"Save your thanks until we're no longer being burned alive," Caelus dragged Elian past the groaning guards, toward an open balcony at the end of the room.
As they stepped out of the dark tunnel, a cold wind smelling of rusted copper slapped their faces. The view below took Elian's breath away for a moment.
Inside a massive underground crater lay a city within a city. Thousands of cheap purple and red neon lights flickered amidst a perpetual haze of industrial smoke. Buildings were stacked haphazardly from scrap containers and airship hulls. The clanging of hammers, the shouts of haggling, and the screams of suffering merged into one heartbreaking orchestra.
The Rust Market. The black district where everything broken in Aethelgard was collected and traded.
"Lyra went down there," Elian leaned against the rusted balcony railing, clutching his burned arm. The metallic taste on his tongue returned, bitterer than before. "She needs energy supplies and wound dressing. She'll head for the black medical district."
Caelus stood beside him, staring at the sea of vice below with a dark expression. "Black medicine in the Rust Market isn't a hospital, Elian. It's a slaughter-shop. The people there dissect human bodies and stitch them back together with scrap cables just to stay alive."
Hearing that, Elian's stomach churned again. He stared at the palm of his hand that had previously vomited synthetic oil. The mirror of his future lay stretched out below. If he didn't stop the malfunction in his body soon, he might end up like the people of the Rust Market—inanimate objects trying to pretend they were alive.
"We're going in," Elian muttered, his eyes darkening. "Before I truly turn into a monster."