I woke up five minutes before the heavy bronze bell rang, summoning us to formation. In the underground tiers of the Lower Horizon, time wasn’t measured by the sun—it was measured by the rhythm of pumps and the tolling of those damned bells.

  My head felt like it was splitting apart. Yesterday’s “heroics” in the reactor zone of Sector Zero hadn’t gone unnoticed by my body. The smell of burnt flesh and ozone still clung to my nose, and my mouth tasted stubbornly of rusted iron.

  I sat on the edge of the cot. The old boards squealed under my weight. Every strap of armor I tightened felt twice as heavy as usual. The metal seemed to have absorbed lead overnight.

  [Will to Live] was silent. The whisper that once itched beneath my skull had collapsed into a cold, dense knot in my gut. The skill wasn’t helping me recover—it was waiting. Like a vulture perched on a branch, watching for the moment I finally stopped resisting so it could claim full control of my body.

  “Come on, you bastard… work,” I hissed through clenched teeth, struggling to fasten the left pauldron. Pain shot through the joint so sharply that my vision dimmed for a second.

  Zeno stood in the doorway, leaning against the stone frame. In the half-dark of the technical bay, he looked like a shadow carved out of the deepest night. He didn’t help me dress—he knew I had to do it myself. But there was too much tension in his gaze.

  “They’re sending us up,” he said evenly, his voice dry as snapping bone. “Dead Quarter, Sector Four. A Shade broke through. Class B breach. The Order decided it’s time to test what their ‘special acquisition’ is worth.”

  I nodded shortly, pulling on my gloves. The burned skin on my palms throbbed beneath the fabric.

  “They figured if I survived the reactor, a Shade won’t eat me. Convenient.”

  “Not just convenient, Iron. They know what you can do now. And they’ll squeeze you dry until you break.”

  The surface greeted us with a rotten dawn.

  In Sector Four, the sky always looked the same—dirty oatmeal gray, soaked in magical smog and the stench of fires no one had put out in years. We rode in an open cart pulled by two gaunt lizards. Their hooves clacked against cracked slabs of an ancient road, the sound like a funeral march in the morning silence.

  Riding with us was the “elite.”

  High Mage Valt—an old man whose face resembled a plum dried too long in the sun, wrapped in a heavy robe embroidered with gold thread. And Kyle—a swordsman from the executioners—who sharpened his long blade the entire way, watching me like an amusing but potentially dangerous animal.

  “Listen carefully, subject,” Valt said, spreading a yellowed map across his knees. The symbols pulsed with an anxious crimson glow. “The Shade has anchored itself in the ruins of the old town hall. It’s distorting space around it. We’ll establish an outer perimeter. Your task is to enter head-on. Provoke it into releasing a surge of power and absorb the impulse with your skill. Once it’s drained, we’ll deliver the finishing strike.”

  I looked at the skeletal remains of buildings sliding past us. Empty windows stared like hollow eye sockets.

  “What about the people?” I asked. “Refugees are living in the basements. I saw smoke from their fires.”

  Valt looked at me as if I’d suggested he kiss the Shade on the gums.

  “There are no people in the Dead Quarter, boy. Only debris. Cleansing Protocol does not account for mercy toward incidental elements. Your task is to neutralize the anomaly. Everything else is statistical error. Understood?”

  I tightened my grip on my sword. My palm flared with pain instantly, but I didn’t loosen it.

  “Understood. Perfectly.”

  We stopped two blocks from the town hall.

  The air was so thick it felt cuttable. The walls of buildings oozed black slime, and sounds died before they could fully form. The Shade waited ahead—a massive, shapeless mass of absolute darkness, blades of pure distortion protruding from it like the ribs of some prehistoric beast.

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  “Move!” Valt barked, raising his staff. Its tip flared with cold blue fire.

  I stepped into the dark.

  Zeno followed ten paces behind, knife drawn, eyes flicking across rooftops. He trusted neither the Shade nor the ones at our backs.

  [Will to Live] suddenly shrieked inside me. Like a string pulled too tight, ready to snap. Red markers flared before my eyes—target grids, trajectories, vectors. The world flattened into a schematic.

  “Direct magical discharge. Recommended action: absorb through central channels. Probability of target annihilation: 98%. Structural collapse of adjacent buildings: 100%. Acceptable.”

  The skill’s voice was cold. Final.

  And then I saw her.

  Second floor of a shattered pharmacy window. A small, filthy face. A girl—five, maybe six—clutching a rag doll to her chest. She stared at the Shade. No tears. No screaming. Just hollow shock. Space distortion had trapped her there.

  “Subject, strike! What are you waiting for?!” Valt screamed behind me.

  Time slowed.

  Use me, the skill hummed. You will survive any blast.

  Be a good instrument, the Order demanded.

  “Yeah… screw all of you,” I breathed.

  I lunged forward—but not toward the Shade’s core. I leapt onto a broken cornice, my left shoulder nearly tearing from its socket under the armor’s weight. The pain was sharp, real. It anchored me, kept the skill from turning me into a machine.

  Instead of shattering the Shade’s core and letting the energy detonate—collapsing everything around us—I drove my mana into the ground. Beneath the pharmacy’s foundation.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” Kyle shouted. I heard his blade clear its sheath.

  I ignored him.

  I turned my magical channels inside out. It felt like dragging rusted barbed wire through my veins. Mana boiled within me. Skin split along my forearms, fine sprays of blood evaporating instantly in the warped air.

  The Shade sensed the threat to its stability and struck. One tendril—sharp as a monomolecular blade—sliced into my side, punching through armor. Hot blood sprayed across stone. The smell—salt and iron—blew the last fuses.

  I didn’t absorb the force.

  I became the anchor.

  “I… won’t… let you… bring… it… down!” I snarled, forcing the last of my strength into a gravitational node.

  I pinned the Shade to the earth, creating a zone of crushing pressure around it. My ribs creaked under the strain. Black spots flooded my vision. [Will to Live] raged inside me, demanding I cease this “irrational” expenditure of energy.

  I held.

  “Valt, you old bastard!” I spat thick blood. “Hit the vortex center! Angle it! Now!”

  He hesitated. My maneuver wasn’t in the protocol.

  But he saw the Shade compressed, immobilized.

  He didn’t want to die here.

  He struck.

  A blinding blue beam pierced the condensed darkness. For a heartbeat, the world ceased to exist. Flash. Thunderclap. I was hurled through the air. Brick met bone. Something inside me cracked. Then gray cotton silence.

  When the ringing in my ears faded, I found myself in a pile of shattered stone and dust. Black ash drifted slowly across the quarter like snow in hell. Breathing felt like swallowing knives.

  I turned my head.

  The pharmacy stood.

  Burned. Windows blasted out. But standing.

  The second-floor window was empty. The girl had fled deeper inside once the distortion collapsed.

  The Order didn’t approach me immediately.

  Valt, Kyle, and the spearmen stood at the edge of the melted crater, staring at me like a rabid animal that had suddenly spoken their language.

  “You… do you even understand what you’ve done?” Valt’s voice trembled with restrained fury. “You disobeyed a direct order. You jeopardized mission success for what? For a rotting building and a pair of gutter rats?”

  I pushed myself upright on my good arm. Blood poured into my left eye. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, smearing dirt across my face.

  “The Shade’s gone, Valt. Everyone’s alive. Write whatever you want in your report—call me incompetent. I don’t care.”

  “This isn’t incompetence,” Kyle stepped closer, hand on his sword. “It’s systemic failure. You’re a defective tool, boy. And defective tools in the Order are either reforged… or discarded.”

  Zeno appeared beside me so quietly I flinched. He dropped to one knee, placing a hand on my shoulder. His fingers tightened briefly—the only sign of support he could afford in front of them.

  “Enough…” I rasped, pulling away. “I’ll stand on my own.”

  “You did this,” Zeno whispered for my ears alone. “They won’t leave you alone now. They know you’re not just a battery. You’re dangerous to them.”

  I rose, swaying on useless legs. My shoulder burned. My ribs screamed with every breath.

  And inside me, [Will to Live] fell silent.

  As if it had finally encountered a variable it couldn’t calculate.

  My will.

  I looked at Valt. The old man looked afraid. He wasn’t used to resources having opinions.

  “Let them come,” I said, spitting blood at his feet. “I’m done just surviving, Zeno. If the price of not being a piece of trash is war with your Order—so be it.”

  We walked back to the cart in a silence so deep I could hear plaster crumbling from the walls of the Dead Quarter.

  I knew interrogations were coming. Shackles. Maybe attempts to pry open my mind.

  But for the first time since I’d fallen into this world, I felt alive.

  The pain in my body was mine.

  The blood on my hands was mine.

  The comfort of being an obedient weapon was over.

  Now the war for the right to remain human had begun. And from the look on Zeno’s face, he would stand with me to the very end.

  I climbed into the cart, feeling the skill slowly begin to stitch my wounds.

  But now I knew.

  I set the rules.

  And if that meant burning the Order to its foundations, I would find a way.