The air in the Core of the Thermal Engine was a violent, shimmering haze of orange and violet. It felt like standing inside the throat of a volcano that had forgotten how to erupt. The massive sphere—the Second Node—spun with a sick, off-kilter wobble, its brass housing groaning under the weight of the thousands of black, oily cables that constricted it. They looked less like machinery and more like the charred veins of a giant, pulsing with a stolen heat that was being dragged upward, away from the freezing world below.
"They're siphoning the thermal bleed," Borin shouted over the deafening roar of the spinning core. He had his goggles down, the brass-rimmed lenses reflecting the hellish glow of the chamber. "The engine is redlining because it's trying to heat the whole damn sky! If you plug in now, Vane, you're just feeding the beast at the summit!"
I stood at the edge of the control gantry, the soles of my boots beginning to smoke against the superheated metal. My bronze arm was no longer just humming; it was screaming. The indigo fire in my palm was lashing out in tiny arcs of static, hungry to bridge the gap between my soul and the machine. I could feel the Node's distress—a digital, agonized wail that vibrated in my teeth. It was begging for a pilot, for someone to tell the gears how to turn again.
"Kaelen!" I turned to the scout, who was perched precariously on a swaying coolant pipe. "Can you reach the primary junction? If we don't cut those siphons, I can't stabilize the pressure!"
Kaelen looked up at the ceiling, where the black cables converged into a single, massive trunk that disappeared into the dark shaft leading to the summit. "I can get there, but those aren't just cables, Vane! They're alive! I can see them twitching!"
"Go!" I roared. "Borin, give him cover! Use the steam-vent to mask his heat signature!"
The Precision Strike
Borin didn't hesitate. He jammed his hammer into a manual override valve and twisted. A wall of white, blinding steam erupted between us and the upper rafters, providing a temporary veil. Kaelen vanished into the mist, his obsidian daggers drawn, moving with a desperate speed.
I turned back to the console. This was the moment of the Precision Strike. I couldn't just dump my power into the machine; I had to act as a scalpel. I reached out with my bronze hand, not to the key-slot, but to the exposed copper wiring of the regulator.
The moment my metal fingers touched the wires, my vision exploded.
I wasn't in the cavern anymore. I was inside the Code. I saw the Thermal Engine as a vast, interconnected web of golden light, but it was being choked by a suffocating, oily darkness. The Sunderers hadn't just plugged in cables; they had injected a viral corruption—a digital rot that was rewriting the mountain's purpose. They were turning the "Lung" into a "Forge" for something much darker.
"Vane! They're coming back!" Borin's voice pulled me back to the physical world.
From the dark tunnels surrounding the core, a new wave of Sunderers emerged. These weren't the foot soldiers we had faced in the vents. These were Cinder-Guards—monstrosities whose flesh had been almost entirely replaced by molten slag and iron plating. They didn't carry weapons; their hands were glowing branding irons, and their breath was a cloud of lethal sulfur.
"Hold them off!" I yelled, my teeth gritted against the feedback from the Node. "I'm almost through the firewall!"
The Dance of Iron and Ash
Borin let out a roar that rivaled the engine's thunder. He swung his mallet in a massive overhead arc, the kinetic discharge blowing a Cinder-Guard backward into the lava-vents. But for every one he felled, two more stepped over the charred remains. The heat was becoming unbearable, the air itself beginning to catch fire.
Above us, a series of wet, tearing sounds echoed through the chamber. Kaelen had reached the junction.
"Vane! The cables... they're bleeding!" Kaelen's voice was high-pitched, frantic.
I looked up. The black cables weren't just cables—they were conduits for the Silver Rust in its most concentrated form. As Kaelen's obsidian blades sliced through the outer casings, a thick, silver ichor sprayed out, sizzling as it hit the hot brass of the core. The cables began to lash out like wounded serpents, trying to coil around the scout.
"Cut the main trunk, Kaelen! Don't stop!"
I turned my focus back to the Node. The pressure was reaching the breaking point. If the siphons weren't severed in the next ten seconds, the entire chamber would atomize. I shoved my bronze hand deeper into the console, the metal of my arm beginning to glow a fierce, translucent violet. I wasn't just talking to the machine anymore; I was commanding it.
"SYSTEM BYPASS: ARCHITECT OVERRIDE," I whispered, my voice echoing with a thousand overlapping tones.
I felt the moment Kaelen severed the final tether.
The black cables snapped back with the sound of a whip cracking across the world. The stolen energy, denied its path to the summit, surged back into the core all at once. The Node let out a deafening, metallic shriek as the sudden influx of power threatened to tear it apart.
The Architect's Burden
"Vane, the feedback! It'll kill you!" Borin shouted, throwing himself over the gantry rail as a Cinder-Guard exploded into molten sparks nearby.
The indigo fire in my arm wasn't a glow anymore—it was a sun. The power was so intense that the bronze lattice began to liquefy, the molten metal flowing up my shoulder and onto my neck. I felt the mountain's history—the centuries of silence, the slow rot, the arrival of the Sunderers—pouring into my brain.
I saw the "Peak Project." It wasn't a weapon. It was a Transmitter. The Sunderers weren't trying to destroy the world; they were trying to call something from the stars. Something that the mountain had been built to hide.
"Not today," I snarled.
I grabbed the sapphire key-slot and twisted.
The Precision Strike hit home. Instead of allowing the surge to flow upward or explode outward, I funneled the entire energy of the Thermal Engine into a Localized Purge. I sent a pulse of pure, architectural frequency back through the severed cables, straight toward the summit.
"K-BOOM!"
The shockwave didn't make a sound; it made a silence. A wall of indigo light expanded from the core, passing through Borin, Kaelen, and the remaining Sunderers. For the humans, it was a warm breeze. For the Cinder-Guards and the corrupted machinery, it was an eraser.
I watched as the Sunderers simply dissolved into ash, their stolen technology failing as the "Corrective Code" rewrote their atoms. The black cables withered and turned to dust, falling into the depths like burnt hair.
The Cost of the Core
The spinning sphere slowed, settling into a smooth, rhythmic hum. The orange haze vanished, replaced by a soft, sapphire glow that filled the cavern. The air temperature dropped instantly, the lethally hot steam condensing into a gentle mist.
The Second Node was stabilized. Oakhaven was safe. The Thermal Engine was breathing again.
But the cost was written on my body.
I collapsed onto the gantry, my bronze arm smoking. The metal had cooled, but it had grown again. It now covered the right side of my chest entirely, the bronze filigree forming a protective cage over my heart. My right eye was no longer indigo; it was a piercing, electric white.
"Vane? Lad, talk to me," Borin was there, his heavy hands surprisingly gentle as he rolled me onto my back.
Kaelen dropped down from the rafters, his cloak scorched and his face smeared with silver ichor. He looked at the core, then at me, his eyes wide with a new kind of fear. "You did it. You cut them off. The signal to the peak... it stopped."
"It didn't stop," I wheezed, my lungs feeling like they were full of glass shards. "I just... delayed it. They know I'm here now. They know an Architect is walking the path."
I looked at my hand. The bronze talons were longer, sharper. The "Inheritance" was no longer a sphere in my pocket; it was the engine that was keeping me alive. I could feel the Third Node now—much further away, buried beneath the Glass Sea. It was cold. So cold it felt like a hole in the world.
"We can't stay here," I said, struggling to my feet with Borin's help. "The purge alerted every Sunderer within a hundred miles. They'll be coming for the core."
"Let them come," Borin grunted, picking up his hammer. The black iron of his weapon was now permanently etched with blue runes from the surge. "I think I'm starting to like the way this hammer swings when it's angry."
Kaelen looked up at the shaft leading to the summit. "What did you see, Vane? When you were plugged in... what are they building up there?"
I looked at the sapphire glow of the Node. "They call it the Voice of the Void. It's a bell, Kaelen. And if they ring it, the mountain won't just wake up. It'll scream. And everything living on it will be deafened forever."
The Departure into the Wastes
We emerged from the vents an hour later. The Iron Peaks were still jagged and cruel, but the air felt different. The "Silver Rust" fog that had been choking the passes was thinning, retreated by the renewed heat of the engine.
To the south, the valley of Oakhaven was visible—a tiny patch of green in a world of grey. It looked peaceful. It looked like a lie.
"Where to now, Architect?" Kaelen asked, his obsidian daggers glinting in the pale morning light.
I pointed to the western horizon, where the sun was setting over a shimmering, crystalline plain. The Glass Sea. It was a desert of razor-sharp sand and ancient, buried ruins, where the wind itself could cut a man to ribbons.
"The Third Node is in the Sunken Library," I said. "It controls the world's memory. If the Sunderers get to it first, they'll rewrite history so we never even existed."
Borin spit a glob of soot onto the snow. "A library, eh? I never was much for reading. But I'm a hell of a hand at clearing the shelves."
As we began the long descent from the Iron Peaks, I felt a vibration in my bronze arm. It wasn't a warning this time. It was a message.
"Find the others," a voice whispered in the back of my mind—a voice that sounded like a thousand turning gears. "The Architect is not enough. The Machine needs its Crew."
I looked at Borin and Kaelen. A smith and a scout.
"The mountain is talking to me," I whispered.
"What's it saying?" Mara's face flashed in my mind, but the vision was quickly replaced by a blueprint of the Glass Sea.
"It's saying we're not alone," I said, my white eye fixed on the distant dunes. "There are others like me. Other 'Inheritances' that have woken up. And if we don't find them first, the Sunderers will turn them into parts."
The journey to Chapter 340 was no longer just a quest to save a village. it was a race to assemble the broken pieces of a god. And the Glass Sea was the first place the pieces had fallen.