The maintenance tunnel smelled of wet iron, mildew, and the copper tang of a reality that was bleeding.
Kaelen leaned against the rough brickwork, his chest heaving in ragged, sobbing gasps. He clutched his right wrist with his left hand, staring at his own skin in horror. The blue static leaking from his fingertips wasn't stopping. It wasn't blood. It was a viscous, glowing fluid that didn't drip to the floor; it evaporated mid-air, dissolving into strings of microscopic binary that flickered and died before hitting the dust.
[System Warning: Memory Leak Detected.]
[Corruption: 2.1%]
[Patching... Failed. User lacks root privileges.]
The pain was a cold, grinding ache, as if his bones were trying to rearrange themselves into a shape that didn't fit inside a human hand. Kaelen gritted his teeth, forcing his legs to move. He couldn't stay here. The barrier he had shattered downstairs was a beacon. Every Enforcer in the sector would be converging on the hallway where the body lay.
He pushed deeper into the service shaft. This was the Library's nervous system—a labyrinth of brass pipes, pneumatic tubes, and ventilation ducts that carried heat and information through the massive structure.
Above him, the ceiling vibrated. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
It felt like standing inside a giant clock that had just skipped a beat. The world felt heavy, pressurized, as if the air itself was thickening to crush the anomaly he had become.
He reached a vertical junction. A ladder, rusted and narrow, led upward into the primary ventilation network. Kaelen slotted the [Iron Knife] into his belt and began to climb. The metal rungs were cold, sucking the heat from his palms. With every pull, the blue static flared, illuminating the rust flakes dancing in the air like radioactive snow.
[Class Installation in Progress: 14%...]
The text hovered in his peripheral vision, undismissable. It wasn't a reward. It felt like a viral injection. His mind felt crowded, filled with new definitions for old words. Wall became Boundary. Air became Medium. Fear became System Stress.
He reached the horizontal ductwork. It was tight—a square tunnel of galvanized steel barely wide enough for his shoulders. He crawled, dragging his satchel, the heavy wooden horse bumping against his hip with every movement.
Scrape. Shuffle. Scrape.
He stopped.
Light filtered through a grate in the floor of the duct ahead. Voices drifted up—not the mechanical drone of the Sanctifiers, but the desperate, pleading tones of human beings.
Kaelen inched forward, the metal cooling his feverish skin. He peered through the slats of the vent.
He was looking down into the Scribe's Hall.
It was a scene of devastation. Rows of desks that usually held scholars transcribing holy texts were overturned. Inkwells lay shattered, staining the pristine white marble in pools of black that looked like oil spills. Scrolls were scattered like confetti.
In the center of the room, a group of twenty archivists had been herded into a kneeling circle. Kaelen recognized them. There was Old Thomas, who smelled of peppermint and always saved the morning paper for Kaelen. There was Jara, who had just started her apprenticeship last week and still stained her fingers with quill-blots.
And standing over them were the Silencers.
From this angle, looking down at the tops of their hoods, they looked like shadows cut from the fabric of the room. They didn't cast shadows; they were the absence of light. The gas lamps in the hall seemed to dim in their presence, the flames shrinking as if afraid to touch the grey robes.
One of the archivists—Lector Hame, a man Kaelen had known for ten years—stood up. His face was pale, sweat slicking his bald pate, but his eyes burned with the frantic courage of a cornered animal. His hands were glowing with gold Starlight.
"You have no right!" Hame shouted, his voice trembling but defiant. "We are the keepers of the Canon! We serve the Eye! I demand to speak to the High Pontiff! This is a mistake!"
The Silencer closest to him turned. The movement was instantaneous—frame one, facing away; frame two, facing Hame. No transition. No rotation of the hips. Just a glitch in position.
The Faceless mask tilted. It was a smooth oval of white porcelain, featureless and terrifyingly blank.
Hame thrust his hands forward, unleashing a [Tier 3: Sun-Bolt].
A lance of concentrated holy fire erupted from his palms, bright enough to sear Kaelen's retinas even through the grate. It was a spell that could melt steel. It was the wrath of the Church made manifest.
The bolt hit the Silencer.
It didn't burn. It didn't explode.
The light simply... stopped.
It hit the grey robes and vanished, deleted from existence upon contact. There was no smoke, no heat. The energy was simply negated. The Silencer didn't even flinch. It raised a hand—a long, pale limb with too many joints—and pointed a single finger at Lector Hame.
A sound tore through the air. Not a noise, but a frequency. A high-pitched, oscillating screech that bypassed the ears and drilled directly into the water in the cells.
[System Event: Deletion Protocol Executed.]
Lector Hame didn't scream. He didn't have time.
He unraveled.
It started at his chest. The flesh, the robes, the bone—they didn't burn or bleed. They dissolved into white dust. Then, the dust dissolved into wireframe geometry. Then, the geometry dissolved into numbers.
And then, there was nothing.
Hame was gone. No ash. No body. Just a gap in the air where a man used to be.
The other archivists screamed. It was a sound of primal, animalistic terror, the sound of a herd realizing the slaughter has begun.
"Processing," a voice echoed. It didn't come from the Silencers. It came from the air itself, an omnipresent, genderless monotone that sounded like stones grinding together. "Sector 5 Integrity: Compromised. Solution: Format."
The Silencers moved. They glided into the circle of kneeling scribes.
Kaelen squeezed his eyes shut. He clamped his hands over his ears, pressing his forehead against the cold steel of the duct, but the sound of the deletion frequency drilled through his palms. He couldn't block it out. He couldn't block out the knowledge that Jara was down there. That Thomas was down there. His friend Bren was down there.
These were the people he knew since he started working as an Archivist. Jara was his junior who always bickered with Thomas over which relic has high significance. Thomas had joined at the same time as him and Bren, he was more of a brother to him.
Do something, his conscience screamed. You have the System. You killed the Enforcer. Save them.
He opened his eyes, staring at the blue text overlaying his vision.
[Combat Simulation Initiated.]
[Enemy: Silencer (Tier ??).]
[Player: Kaelen Vance (Tier 1).]
[Win Probability: 0.0000%]
The numbers were cold. Absolute. The System wasn't mocking him; it was stating a fact. If he dropped through that vent, he wouldn't be a hero. He would be deleted before his feet touched the floor.
Through the blur of tears and the blue static of his own corruption, he watched the last of the archivists dissolve.
It took thirty seconds.
When it was over, the Scribe's Hall was empty. The ink stains remained. The overturned desks remained. But the people were gone. Not dead—gone. Erased as if they had never been born.
Kaelen bit his lip until he tasted iron. The taste grounded him.
For a moment he felt like there is no hope in living anymore., all the people he knew and loved were gone. But the little hope that there might be some way to bring all of them back stopped him from going after the Silencers. It kept him fearful but alive.
They aren't just killing us, he realized, the horror settling into a cold, hard knot in his stomach. They are freeing up memory space.
The Silencers turned. In perfect unison, three porcelain masks tilted upward.
They looked at the vent.
Kaelen threw himself backward, scrambling away from the grate on his hands and knees. He didn't care about the noise anymore. He clawed at the steel floor of the duct, dragging himself deeper into the darkness, away from the light, away from the silence.
[Status: Detected (Passive Scan).]
[Threat Assessment: Low Priority. Cleanup in progress.]
They weren't chasing him. Not yet. He wasn't worth the effort compared to the mass deletion below. He was a rounding error. A loose thread to be snipped later.
He crawled until his lungs burned and the skin on his knees was raw. The duct turned, sloping downward, leading away from the polished sectors of the Library and into the deep infrastructure that supported it.
The air changed.
The smell of ozone and magic faded, replaced by something older. Stale oil. Rust. The sharp, chemical tang of battery acid.
The metal of the ductwork changed, too. The galvanized steel gave way to a darker, pitted alloy that felt greasy to the touch. The rivets were larger, cruder. The smooth silence of the Library was replaced by the groaning of metal under stress.
Kaelen paused, his breath rattling in the confined space. He held up his hand. The blue static was fading, retreating back under his skin, leaving behind veins that looked like bruised lightning.
[Class Installation: 25%...]
[New Sensory Input Detected.]
He peered into the darkness ahead.
The tunnel widened into a junction box—a small chamber where several ducts converged. It was pitch black, save for the faint, bioluminescent glow of moss growing on a leaking pipe.
Something moved.
It wasn't a rat. It was too mechanical. The movement was jerky, precise—a series of rapid actuations rather than a fluid scuttle.
Click-whir. Click-whir.
Kaelen froze. He pressed himself flat against the bottom of the duct, pulling the shadows around him like a cloak.
In the center of the junction, a shape detached itself from the gloom.
It was the size of a dinner plate. It had eight legs, but they weren't biological. They were articulated pistons made of tarnished chrome. The body was a bulbous casing of cracked glass and brass wiring, pulsating with a faint, dying light.
It was a spider, but it was wrong. It didn't belong in Oakhaven. It didn't belong in a world of quills and candles. It looked like something built by a madman who hated nature.
It was a machine.
Kaelen stared at it, confusion warring with fear. He had seen Golems before—clumsy, stone constructs animated by runes. This wasn't a Golem. This was intricate. It was engineering, not magic.
The spider pivoted. A single, glowing red lens on its front chassis irised open. A beam of ruby light swept the tunnel, cutting through the darkness like a solid bar.
[Object ID: Scout Drone Model-4]
[Origin: Era 4 (The Chromium Singularity)]
[Status: Active / Hostile]
Kaelen blinked.
Era 4?
The System text hovered over the spider, mocking him with nonsense. The current year was 998 of the 7th Era. The history books said the world was created a thousand years ago by the Pantheon. Before that, there was only Chaos.
There was no "Era 4." There was no "Chromium Singularity."
What is this? Kaelen thought, his mind reeling. Is the System lying? Or are the history books?
The red beam swept closer. It hit Kaelen's hand.
The drone stopped. The lens focused, rotating with a soft mechanical whir. A high-pitched whine began to build in its chassis—the sound of a capacitor charging.
[Target Acquired.]
[Protocol: Alert Network.]
Kaelen gripped the iron knife. The System text flickered violently in his vision, urgent and red.
[Warning: Network Signal Detected.]
[If the drone transmits, the Hive will wake.]
The spider crouched, its metal legs digging into the rust. It wasn't just a scout. It was a trigger. And whatever a "Hive" was, Kaelen knew he couldn't let it wake up.