Siphoning the Rot

Lia did not crawl through three miles of stagnant sewage just to hand Kallias's medicine to three scavengers in salvage armor. The cracked masonry of the aqueduct arch vibrated beneath her boots as another iron bolt ricocheted off the wall, spraying mortar dust across her neck. Below in the flooded basin, the Grade-2 Chitin-Stalker raised its spiked forelegs, its segmented carapace clicking in agitation as purple Blight steam hissed from its breathing spiracles.

[Environmental Hazard: Silt Runoff (Grade 1)]

[Effect: -5% Traction on wet surfaces. +100% chance of smelling like a dead crab.]

Lia dismissed the notification with a flick of her wrist. The System had a charming habit of offering insults instead of armor ratings.

"Step down or get pinned to the stone," the scavenger leader repeated through his brass rebreather. He cranked the heavy arbalest with a greasy lever, the weapon's rusted guide rail squealing loud enough to echo off the vaulted ceiling.

Lia counted the bolts remaining in his side-quiver—four left—and glanced sideways at Kallias. The old blademaster stood balanced on the two-inch lip of the broken ledge, his gray cloak drawn tight. He was not looking at the scavengers' cleavers. His eyes were locked on the stalker's lower tarsal joints, tracking the beast's twitching claws against the shallow sludge.

"They want the beast to turn on us first," Kallias murmured, his voice cutting cleanly through the splashing water below. "The leader spent eighty credits on a polished rebreather filter and didn't have two coppers left to grease his track. The release pawl is sticking."

"I could just drop down and take his head before he cranks it again," Lia whispered. It was her usual answer to tactical complications: if a target had a pulse and bad footing, why turn it into a geometry problem?

"Because you have three agility points over him, zero armor, and a coach who prefers his investments alive," Kallias said without turning his head. "Take the beast. Let them pay for their noise."

He reached into his belt pouch and flicked a packet of caustic lime toward the center of the pool. The powdered mineral hit the stagnant surface with a sharp crack, foaming white and sending a violent pulse of acoustic vibration through the shallow water.

The stalker's head snapped toward the southern sluice tunnel. To a blind predator navigating by tarsal tremors, three men in iron boots splashing sounded like an invading herd.

With a deafening shriek, the beast surged forward, eight armored legs churning the foul water into a frothing wake. The scavenger leader swore behind his brass filter, swinging the arbalest toward the charging mass. He yanked the trigger twice. The first bolt glanced off the monster's dorsal crown; the second jammed in the rusted track, exactly as Kallias had predicted.

"Flank it! Break the rear joints!" the leader yelled, dropping the useless weapon and drawing his notched cleaver.

The two side scavengers rushed outward, trying to encircle the thrashing stalker with their weighted bronze wires.

"Now," Kallias told her. "Drop behind the dorsal crest. Do not crush the core chamber. If you smash the glass, the time evaporates into the ceiling."

"And if I miss the drop?" Lia muttered under her breath.

"Then I have to find another student with good footwork, which is a tedious bureaucratic nightmare," his voice drifted back. "Don't miss."

Lia did not hesitate. She pushed off the crumbling brick arch, dropping ten feet into the churning spray behind the stalker's blind arc. The cold muck swallowed her boots, but she kept her weight forward, absorbing the impact on the balls of her feet just as Kallias had drilled into her back in the clinic yard.

The monster's antennae twitched at the ripple, but it did not turn; it continued lashing furiously at the scavengers hacking at its front mandibles. As the beast reared up to drive its serrated scythe through a scavenger's bronze shield, its thick thoracic plates parted, exposing the pale, pulsating membrane along its rib junction.

Lia stepped in. The creature's left middle leg swept backward in a violent reflex arc, whistling inches from her ribs.

[Skill Triggered: Inside Slip (Grade 1 - 29%)]

Her hips pivoted on instinct. She ducked beneath the sweep, using the beast's forward momentum to slide into the narrow dead space between its mid-leg and its lower ribcage. The pungent smell of sulfur and decayed salt burned her nostrils, but her hands remained steady.

Instead of plunging her blade straight into the core to kill the beast outright, she twisted the edge flat. She pressed the etched channel of her bronze challenger token against the exposed pulse node, driving the sharp bronze point three inches into the living membrane.

The beast locked up with a shuddering tremor.

[Direct Vessel Contact Established]

[Warning: Living Blight extraction carries an 8% feedback risk]

[Initiating Channel: Siphon Conduit...]

A searing rush of heat flooded through the metal token and into Lia's arm. It was not the cold, dead time awarded by the arena registry, clipped and taxed by Drakonias's clerks. It was raw, unrefined vitality, roaring through her system channels like molten glass. The purple glow beneath the beast's shell faded, turning a dull, chalky gray as the living energy drained through her blade.

"Hold the channel," Kallias's voice came from the ledge above, sharp and unyielding. "Don't let the pulse flutter. Match its heartbeat until the chamber collapses."

Lia gritted her teeth, feeling the skin on her forearm prickle with static charge. The stalker let out a dying hiss, its heavy legs buckling beneath its weight before it crashed into the shallow water, stone dead.

A chime rang in her ears, accompanied by an amber banner of system script:

[Grade-2 Blighted Chitin-Stalker Neutralized]

[Direct Vessel Harvest Complete]

[Reward: +120 Time Credits (Untaxed / Direct Vitality)]

[Current Balance: 300 Time Credits]

[Skill Acquired: Vessel Siphon (Grade 1 - 0%)]

Across the pool, the three scavengers froze. The leader stared at the drained, hollow husk of the monster, then looked up at Kallias standing on the ledge with an ash baton resting lightly on his shoulder.

"You drained it alive," the leader rasped, taking an involuntary step back toward the sewer tunnel. "That's illegal salvage. The Registry tracks every living core above Grade 1."

"Then file a formal complaint with the magistrate," Kallias said evenly. "Or you have ten seconds to pick up your broken arbalest and leave. Unless you want to find out how many memories your respawn token has left."

Lia wiped a spatter of alkaline slime from her sleeve, watching them scurry like flooded roaches. Her rookie instinct was still to chase them down and strip their brass buckles for scrap metal, but Kallias’s voice had already infected her skull: Never spend three minutes chasing four copper bits when the curfew bell rings in twenty.

The scavengers didn't argue. Dragging their injured flanker whose shoulder had been clipped by the stalker's dying lunge, they backed into the southern sluice pipe and disappeared into the dark.

Lia pulled her blade free from the desiccated shell, shaking the tingling numbness from her fingers. One hundred and twenty untaxed credits. In the official arena, Drakonias's clerks would have levied a twenty-percent maintenance fee, an eight-credit sand tariff, and a surcharge for breathing the high-tier air. Out here in the sludge, the math was wonderfully simple: kill the bug, take the time, keep the ledger intact. Enough to pay for Kallias's lung purges for the next two months with coin left over for decent steel.

Before she could smile, a second, blood-red prompt flashed across her vision:

[System Alert: Anomaly Detected in District 04 Conduits]

[Telemetry Event: 120 Unregistered Vitality Units Siphoned]

[Incident Logged to Central Registry Node - Overseer Drakonias]

Lia stared at the burning glyph, then glanced up at Kallias. The old blademaster didn't flinch. He merely turned toward the eastern exit stairs, dusting a fleck of dried sewage from his gray cloak.

"A hundred and twenty credits in thirty seconds," Lia called after him, picking up her pace across the flooded stones. "Tell me you're at least mildly impressed."

"I am impressed the arbalest didn't blow your ear off," Kallias said without looking back. "Sheathe your iron before the conduit patrol logs our bootprints. Drakonias knows where we were, but he doesn't know what we're going to spend it on."