Feeding the Engine

He did not try to dodge. His right hand reached into his inner leather pouch, his fingers wrapping around the cold, jagged surface of the [Crystalline Dross-Shard] he had harvested from the mite in Oraz-dar’s spice cellar.

The shard was unformatted mana—dense, highly concentrated, and completely incompatible with standard Overseer circuitry. In its raw state, it was a contaminant; to a corrupted machine already suffering from data latency, it was an explosive logic poison.

He did not need to break the armor. He needed to feed the engine.

As the grinding drum rushed toward his ribs, Sorosh rammed the pointed end of the Dross-Shard directly into the mech’s exposed air-intake manifold, forcing the crystal deep past the spinning cooling fan into the glowing mana capacitor.

"Choke on it," Sorosh grunted.

For an instant, nothing happened.

Then, the purple luminescence in the mech’s crystalline veins reversed direction.

The raw, unformatted mana of the harvested shard clashed violently with the regulated current flowing from the hub’s municipal grid. High-frequency electrical arcs leapt from the capacitor, jumping across the chassis and melting the delicate solder traces on the external diagnostic array.

The System’s overlay went entirely berserk, text boxes stacking on top of each other in rapid, corrupted cascades:

`[CRITICAL PARITY ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED ASSET INJECTION]`

`[INPUT FREQUENCY: MALFORMED]`

`[ATTEMPTING SYSTEM ROLLBACK...]`

`[ROLLBACK FAILED: SECTOR 4 AUTHORITY UNRESPONSIVE]`

`[EMERGENCY VENTING INITIATED IN 3... 2...]`

The heavy Scavenger let out a shuddering, grinding wail. Its internal hydraulics blew their seals simultaneously, jetting boiling oil across the sorting tables. The calcified crystals encrusting its joints turned chalky white and shattered into hundreds of brittle shards as their mana charge was siphoned into the short-circuit.

Sorosh kicked off the machine's chest, throwing himself backward into an empty luggage chute just as the primary power capacitor blew.

BOOM.

A concussive wave of heat and blue spark-smoke blasted through the sorting bay. Chunks of cast iron and shredded copper wire rained down on the conveyors, clattering like hail against the sheet metal.

Sorosh slid ten feet down the smooth steel chute before coming to a halt against a rubberized sorting bumper. He coughed violently, wiping grease and sulfur soot from his mouth, his ears ringing from the blast.

Floating in the dim haze above the smoldering chassis was a line of golden text that cut through the darkness with pristine clarity:

`[MAJOR THREAT NEUTRALIZED: CORRUPTED HEAVY SCAVENGER UNIT LV. 6]`

`[EXPERIENCE GAINED: +140 EXP]`

`[EXPERIENCE: 470/400 EXP - THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]`

`[CONGRATULATIONS: YOU HAVE REACHED LEVEL 6!]`

A sudden, sharp warmth blossomed in the center of Sorosh’s chest, spreading outward along his tired limbs like a draught of strong spiced wine. The dull ache in his bruised shoulder vanished, replaced by the crisp, invigorating snap of expanding mana capacity.

`[LEVEL UP ALLOCATION AVAILABLE]`

`[BASE ATTRIBUTES UPDATED]`

`[PASSIVE ENHANCEMENT: SENSORY CLARITY INCREASED BY 4%]`

`[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 2]`

Sorosh climbed out of the chute, rolling his left shoulder. The joint moved cleanly, without a trace of the stiffness that had plagued him five minutes ago. He took a slow breath, letting the Level 6 refresh settle through his pulse before reaching down to retrieve his brass censer.

The censer had survived without a dent, though its chain was blackened by soot. The coals within were still burning, their sweet, resinous juniper scent slowly overpowering the acrid stink of vaporized hydraulic oil.

He walked over to the smoking remains of the heavy Scavenger.

The machine was entirely wrecked. Its grinder drums were cracked down the center, and its torso had split open like a roasted nut, exposing the charred nests of wiring within. But deep inside the armored central chest cavity, nestled beneath the shattered capacitor mount, a small rectangular housing continued to pulse with a steady, rhythmic blue light.

It was an Overseer diagnostic core—the hardened data recorder used by municipal inspectors to log sub-station telemetry, maintenance commands, and internal memos. Unlike the cheap civilian units sold in the bazaar, this one was encased in heavy, heat-treated cobalt steel, completely insulated from the electrical explosion that had destroyed the surrounding chassis.

`[ITEM DISCOVERED: INTACT OVERSEER DIAGNOSTIC CORE (FIRMWARE VER. 8.4-T)]`

`[RARITY: RESTRICTED MUNICIPAL GRADE]`

`[CONDITION: FUNCTIONAL / SEALED WITH LEVEL-3 CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEY]`

`[DESCRIPTION: STANDARD TELEMETRY RECORDER ASSIGNED TO SECTOR 4 TRANSIT HUB MAINTENANCE DIVISION. CONTAINS RECENT COMMAND LOGS AND LOCAL ANOMALY REGISTERS.]`

"Not bad for a night's work in the scrap heap," Sorosh muttered.

He took his iron pry-spike, jammed the hardened flathead under the retaining clip of the core’s housing, and popped the heavy cobalt rectangle free. It fell into his palm with a satisfying, solid weight, its surface warm to the touch.

The front faceplate featured a tiny crystal monitor, currently flashing a lock icon:

`[ACCESS RESTRICTED: PLEASE PRESENT OVERSEER CREDENTIALS OR LEVEL-3 AUDITOR TOKEN]`

Sorosh scoffed. "If I waited for an auditor to show up with a token, the whole district would be turned to stone."

He didn't have an auditor token, but he knew how Overseer hardware grounded its security protocols. The cryptographic lockout relied on an active mana-handshake from an authorized beacon. Without a connection to the central administrative tower, the unit’s local buffer defaulted to a low-voltage maintenance bypass if exposed to a stable analog ground.

Sorosh unclipped the brass grounding chain from the base of his censer. He wrapped the bare copper link around the data core's secondary contact pins, then pressed the warm brass bowl of the censer firmly against the unit's diagnostic port.

The sulfur and juniper smoke billowed across the pins, purifying the stagnant mana charge clinging to the interface terminals.

The crystal screen on the diagnostic core flickered once, twice, and then snapped from locked amber to crisp municipal blue.

`[ANALOG OVERRIDE DETECTED: MAINTENANCE BYPASS ACCEPTED]`

`[LOADING LAST STORED TRANSMISSION...]`

`[SOURCE: SECTOR MANAGEMENT DESK - SECTOR BOSS TYMUR-RAN]`

`[TARGET: ALL TRANSIT HUB AUTOMATION & SUB-LEVEL MAINTENANCE UNITS]`

`[TIMESTAMP: 14 DAYS PRIOR TO MUNICIPAL SEAL]`

Sorosh leaned closer, the faint blue glow illuminating the grime and dried blood on his face.

The text scrolled across the tiny screen with brutal, bureaucratic indifference:

`[DIRECTIVE 44-B: SUB-LEVEL 3 ANOMALY SUPPRESSION]`

`"All maintenance drones and field auditors are hereby ordered to cease diagnostic reporting in Sub-level 3 conduits immediately. Any crystalline formations, structural calcification, or localized mana-latency spikes observed in the foundational struts are to be logged as 'Normal Mineral Sedimentation' under Category 0-Negligible.`

`All automated sortation units must purge visual logs upon contact with foreign crystalline masses.`

`Personnel failing to comply will face immediate credential revocation and salary forfeiture.`

`Signed, Tymur-ran, General Administrator, Sector 4."`

Sorosh stood motionless in the darkened sorting bay, the cold air circulating around the ruined machinery.

This wasn't an accidental glitch. It wasn't the result of budget shortfalls or delayed municipal repair requisitions.

Tymur-ran hadn't just ignored the Dross-taint eating through the Transit Hub's foundations; he had actively rewritten the maintenance routines to blind every sensor in the facility. He had programmed the automated defenses to pulp anyone who came looking, leaving the dead auditor at Platform 1 to calcify in silence while the taint rooted itself into the municipal power grid.

And Sub-level 3 was where the primary structural struts anchored Sector 4 to the bedrock.

Sorosh looked down at the diagnostic core in his hand, feeling the chill of the cobalt steel against his palm.

If Tymur-ran's suppression order held, the structural struts in Sub-level 3 would calcify until the bedrock gave way, dropping the entire district into the subterranean drainage abyss. With the dead auditor pinned to Platform 1 and an active municipal infraction logged against his name, there was no going back to scraping forty chits at a spice stall.

He slipped the diagnostic core into his deep coat pocket next to his remaining herbal powders.

The System gave him no reward notification for uncovering the truth. It merely hummed quietly in the background, updating its useless spatial maps while the foundations of the district rotted beneath his boots.

"Time to find someone who still has an auditor's badge," Sorosh whispered into the darkness. "And see how much they're willing to pay for their own clean hands."

He turned back toward the stairs, the steady clink of his censer chain keeping time with his footsteps as he climbed out of the wreckage.