Caleb sprinted until his lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. He reached the mouth of the alley leading to Block 4, his breath tearing at his throat.
But he didn't run straight in.
Fifty meters from the entrance, Caleb skid to a halt, diving behind a rusted, overflowing dumpster. His heart hammered against his eardrums, drowning out the distant wail of sirens.
In front of the lobby, bathed in the strobe of flickering neon, a group of men blocked the entrance.
It was them.
Leading the pack was Vorg—the scrapyard's enforcer. He was a mountain of a man, his right arm replaced by a crude, industrial hydraulic claw designed for crushing car chassis. Beside him stood Gary, the warehouse manager, a man with a weasel's face and shifting eyes.
Standing opposite them, blocking the shattered glass doors of the lobby, was Granny Martha.
She sat on her stool, unmovable. In her hands, the "Black Widow" shotgun was leveled, the twin barrels staring directly at Vorg's gut.
"I'll say it one last time," Martha's voice rasped, rough as sandpaper but steady. "This is private property. Get off my porch, you scrapyard dogs. Or do you want me to call the Sector Guard to collect your carcasses?"
Vorg sneered, the sound like metal scraping on metal. He took a heavy step forward, his massive shadow swallowing the old woman. His hydraulic arm hissed, the pistons flexing menacingly.
"Senile old hag," Vorg growled. "You think that toy firecracker scares me? Before you can pull the trigger, I could crush your grey skull like a rotten egg. Move!"
Martha's finger tightened on the trigger. She didn't blink.
But before Vorg could swing, a thin hand clamped onto his shoulder.
"Easy, Vorg. Easy," Gary interjected, his voice oily and smooth. He glanced up at the surrounding windows, where curious eyes were peeking through the grime. "Let's not be hasty. This is a residential zone. The old bat is crazy; she'll actually shoot. We don't want the Guard sniffing around Rictus's business."
Gary stepped forward, adjusting his collar. He flashed a poisonous, mocking smile at Martha.
"Martha, be reasonable. We're not here to fight you. We just want Caleb."
"He's not home," Martha spat, the saliva landing on the toe of Gary's boot.
"He's not hiding well enough," Gary narrowed his eyes. "That little rat stole a very valuable piece of 'high-tech' inventory from Mr. Rictus yesterday. We're just here to recover company property."
"Liar!" Martha shouted. "The boy works himself to death for your stinking yard, and you don't even pay him enough for medicine. You're lying through your teeth! You dock his pay, you exploit him, and now you want to rob him too?"
The smile vanished from Gary's face. He leaned down, placing his face inches from the shotgun barrel. His voice dropped to a whisper, dripping with venom.
"Why defend him, old woman? He's just trash. And his sister? She's nothing but dead weight."
Caleb, crouching behind the dumpster, dug his nails into his palms until the skin broke. Heat rushed to his face, burning with shame.
Gary smirked, raising his voice so the whole street could hear.
"The brother is useless, and the sister is about to be 'deleted' anyway. Keeping her alive is just a waste of food. He should have tossed her into the incinerator years ago. A pair of trash siblings, that's all they are."
"SHUT YOUR MOUTH!" Martha roared, standing up and jamming the gun barrel into Gary's forehead.
Gary raised his hands in mock surrender, but his grin remained. "Alright, alright. We're leaving. But you tell him..."
Gary turned, signaling Vorg to retreat. He looked back over his shoulder, his eyes sharp as razors.
"He can't hide forever. He still has to drag his carcass to work to feed that dying girl, doesn't he? When he shows his face, we'll be waiting."
The thugs retreated, Vorg's metallic laughter echoing down the dark alley.
Caleb waited until their shadows dissolved into the smog. He let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He was trembling. Not from fear, but from a humiliation so deep it felt like acid in his veins.
Trash. Dead weight.
The words cut deeper than any knife.
He adjusted his collar to hide his pale face and stepped out from the shadows, walking quickly toward the lobby.
Granny Martha was still standing there, her chest heaving, the gun still raised. She saw Caleb approach. Her eyes softened, but the worry in them only deepened.
Caleb didn't speak. He couldn't. He gave her a quick, jerky nod—avoiding her gaze, avoiding her pity—and slipped past her. He bolted up the stairs, running from the kindness of the only person who defended him.
He needed to get to his room. He needed to see Lyra.
Caleb slammed the heavy iron door shut, his hands trembling as he threw the bolts. One. Two. Three.
The dry metallic clicks echoed in the silence, transforming Room 404 from a home into a solitary confinement cell. Or perhaps, a tomb.
"Caleb...?"
A weak voice drifted from the corner, pulling him from the edge of panic. Caleb rushed to the bed.
Lyra was still curled up in the blankets. The nightmare on her arm had spread. Below the right elbow, the flesh was gone entirely. In its place were jagged patches of flickering pixels, revealing a cold, blue wireframe skeleton underneath.
"It's so cold..." Lyra whimpered, her eyes squeezed shut, sweat beading on her forehead.
Caleb fell to his knees. He reached into his chest pocket and pulled out the Silver Slate.
The liquid metal surface was pristine, reflecting his own desperate face. Eight hundred credits. Enough to buy medicine for a month. Enough to save Lyra right now.
But it was useless.
He couldn't leave. He was a billionaire stranded on a desert island, dying of thirst next to a mountain of gold.
"Damn it!"
Caleb roared, hurling the Silver Slate against the wall with all his strength.
CLANG!
The metal plate ricocheted off the concrete and clattered to the floor, coming to rest among a pile of scrap components. It remained scratchless. Its perfection felt like it was mocking his impotence.
Caleb slid his back down the iron door, collapsing onto the floor. The burst of rage drained the last of his energy, leaving a hollow pit in his stomach. A sharp cramp reminded him that he hadn't eaten since yesterday noon.
His eyes fell on the can of soup he had bought that morning. It was still sitting by Lyra's pillow. Stone cold.
"Lyra," Caleb called softly, forcing his voice to be steady. "Wake up. You need to eat something."
Lyra shook her head weakly. "I feel sick..."
"You have to eat."
Caleb crawled over and popped the tab on the can. A layer of white, congealed grease had formed over the grey-brown liquid. The smell of synthetic preservatives wafted up—it didn't smell like food; it smelled like chemical sludge.
He used the flimsy plastic spoon to scrape aside the fat and lifted a scoop to his sister's lips.
"Just a little."
Lyra obediently swallowed. But after the third spoonful, she pushed his hand away.
"You eat. Your stomach is making noise."
"I already ate. At the vending machine..." Caleb lied.
GRR-RUMBLE.
His traitorous stomach let out a loud, long growl, tearing his clumsy lie to shreds.
Lyra smiled—a weak, crooked thing on her pale face. "You're a terrible liar, Caleb."
Caleb looked down, ashamed. He didn't argue. He took a large spoonful of the cold soup and shoved it into his mouth. The salty, greasy taste of the cold synthetic meat coated his tongue. He swallowed it down, feeling the meager energy spread through his exhaustion.
They passed the can back and forth. One spoon for him. One spoon for her.
The meal passed in silence, accompanied only by the soft fizz-pop of Lyra's glitching arm and the heavy thud of boots patrolling the hallway downstairs.
When the can was scraped clean, Caleb set the empty shell on the floor. He tucked Lyra back in.
"Sleep. When you wake up, everything will be okay."
Lyra closed her eyes. Her breathing was heavy, but steady.
Caleb stood up. He felt a little sharper. The hunger had been pushed back, replaced by the cold, hard resolve of a man with nothing left to lose.
He walked toward his workbench. His eyes swept over the mess and stopped.
Something was wrong.
The backpack he had thrown down earlier was open. The white spherical robot he had scavenged from The Edge had rolled out.
The floor was level, but the robot was inching forward, rolling slowly but deliberately toward the corner of the desk where he had hidden the Black Cube.
It was like a moon being pulled by the gravity of a planet.
And on the cracked surface of the robot, the faint orange LED was blinking faster. Beep... Beep... Beep...
It was reacting. Was it fear? Or was it subservience?
Caleb pulled the rag off the Cube.
There it sat. Black. Cold. Silent.
But as Caleb brought his hand closer, the fine hairs on his arm stood on end. Static electricity. The air around it felt dense, heavy.
"You're not dead," Caleb whispered, his voice raspy.
He remembered the feeling at The Edge. When he found it, the scanners had glitched.
"You're not a brick. You're a machine. A machine that's starving for power."
Caleb looked down at the shivering form of Lyra, then out the window at the dark street where the wolves were waiting. He didn't know what this box was. A bomb? A nuclear battery? A weapon?
But it was the only variable left in this equation.
"Fine," Caleb gritted his teeth, his ash-grey eyes burning with a terrifying resolve. "If you're a bomb, I'll use you to take those bastards downstairs with us. But if you're something else... then do me a favor. Be useful."
He swept the trash off the table with one arm. He placed the Cube in the center. He reached for his soldering iron, wire strippers, and a coil of copper cable.
"Let's see what makes you tick."
Caleb clicked the desk lamp on. A pool of jaundice-yellow light flooded the Black Cube sitting in the center of the table.
He strapped a jeweler's loupe to his right eye and picked up his soldering iron. The tip glowed angry red. The smell of rosin and burnt tin filled the air—Caleb's personal cologne.
"No data ports. No screws. No heat vents."
Caleb muttered, rotating the object in his hands. It was perfectly smooth. To a normal person, this was a brick.
In this damned world, this was where an Artificer—a magical smith—would give up. They were too used to using Mana to "negotiate" with matter. They looked at the world through the lazy prism of Magic: Runes, Flows, and Crystals. They had forgotten the roots of technology.
But Caleb was a Null.
His Mana Index was 0.00. He had no miracles. He couldn't sense the flow. All he had were rotting textbooks on Physics and Electrical Engineering he had scavenged from the waste library—knowledge the modern world had dismissed as "Dead Tongues."
"You fools forgot one thing," Caleb sneered, grabbing his knife and prying the cover off the wall socket. "Before Mana, this world ran on Electrons."
He worked with bare hands, deftly separating the Live wire from the Neutral. He glanced at his battered multimeter. The needle twitched.
"Alternating Current (AC). 15 Amps. Too weak."
This Cube had swallowed the energy of a city block when it fell. 15 Amps was a drop in the ocean.
Caleb scanned the room. He needed a transformer, or a massive capacitor. He had neither. Then, his eyes landed on the air conditioning unit hanging on the wall—a relic from the Golden Age.
People still used these shells, but instead of refilling the chemical coolant, they just shoved magical Ice Crystals into the compressor to cool the air. They treated it like a crude icebox, completely ignoring the sophisticated electrical architecture inside.
Caleb rushed over and tore the casing off. He ripped out the Capacitor, a cylinder the size of a beer can, still intact after decades of neglect.
"450V Start Capacitor," Caleb whispered, weighing it in his hand. "Welcome back to duty."
He returned to the bench. His hands danced over the components. He cut wires and spliced the capacitor into the wall circuit, creating a crude but powerful Surge Starter.
Now for the hard part: Where to inject the juice?
The Cube had no socket.
Caleb pressed his loupe against the glossy black surface. He wasn't looking for Mana signatures. He was looking for Heat and Magnetism.
"Top left corner: slightly warmer. Processor," he analyzed. "Bottom right: Cold. Heat sink. Center... magnetic flux leakage."
He dipped the soldering iron into a bead of tin, then hovered over the microscopic grooves in the center of the Cube.
He was about to perform Live Soldering. He used the molten tin to create four dummy contact points directly onto the casing, forcing the electricity to find a path into the core through the path of least resistance, bypassing the useless magical shielding.
Caleb's hands didn't shake. Sweat stung his eyes, but his grip was as steady as a neurosurgeon's. He knew exactly how much heat the strange alloy could take before melting.
One point. Two points. Four contact points created.
He wrapped the bare copper wire around the new leads.
The room went silent. The only sounds were the hiss of the cooling iron and Lyra's labored breathing.
Caleb stepped back to admire his "abomination."
A web of exposed wires ran from the wall socket, through the scavenged AC capacitor, and stabbed directly into the Black Cube. It looked like a time bomb built by a madman.
A street-trash Tier F Mage could have lit this box up with a snap of their fingers. But Caleb? He was speaking the language of the Old Machine Gods: Ohm's Law and High Voltage.
"Eat up," Caleb whispered, his hand hovering over the makeshift breaker switch. "I don't have Mana for you. But I have 220 Volts of pure, unadulterated current."
He flipped the switch.
CLICK.
The moment Caleb flipped the breaker, hell broke loose in the tiny room.
There was no soft chime of magic. Instead, there was a BANG like a gunshot.
BOOM!
The 450V capacitor dumped its entire charge in a millisecond. High-voltage current tore through the air, creating a blinding blue-white electrical arc across the table. The copper wires glowed white-hot and vaporized instantly.
"Caleb!" Lyra screamed.
Caleb was thrown backward by the shockwave, his back slamming into the iron door.
POP.
The ceiling light died. The entirety of Block 4 plunged into darkness. He had shorted out the building's entire grid.
Silence. A heavy silence, thick with the smell of ozone and burning plastic. Outside, the streetlights had vanished, leaving only the pale moonlight filtering through the smog.
"Are... are you okay?" Lyra's voice trembled in the dark.
Caleb opened his eyes, ready to admit failure.
But then...
OOOOOOOM....
A low, sub-bass hum vibrated from the table, shaking the floorboards beneath him.
In the pitch black, the grooves on the Black Cube began to ignite.
Not magical Purple. Not Neon Red. Cyber Blue. Cold. Sharp. Pure.
The light raced along the artificial veins of the box, converging on the center. The white robot on the floor lit up in response, its LED shifting from orange to a synchronized blue, standing perfectly still as if saluting a flag.
The Cube slowly detached from the table, levitating five centimeters into the air on a cushion of magnetic fields.
Caleb held his breath, his eyes wide.
Suddenly, one face of the Cube rotated, aiming directly at him.
ZAP.
A scan beam, thin as a razor blade, shot out and struck Caleb directly in the eyes.
"Aaaagh!"
Caleb screamed, clutching his head. It felt like someone had driven a hot nail into his frontal lobe. He collapsed to the floor.
But even with his eyes squeezed shut, he could still see. The darkness vanished. In its place, a data interface floated directly within his retinas, overlaying reality. The font was sharp, jagged, and glitchy.
> SYSTEM REBOOT... [SUCCESS]
> POWER SOURCE: CRITICAL (EXTERNAL BYPASS).
> SCANNING BIO-METRICS...
> MATCH FOUND.
> WELCOME, USER.
Caleb's head felt like it was splitting open. A normal human brain—Tier 0—was not designed to handle this raw data stream. Blood began to trickle from his nose.
The final lines of text flashed rapidly:
> IDENTITY: LEGACY ADMIN.
> ACCESS LEVEL: INSPECTION MODE (RESTRICTED).
> DOWNLOADING INTERFACE PACKAGE... 1%...
1%.
At just one percent, Caleb felt like every neuron in his body was being incinerated. His vision blurred, fading into white static. Lyra's panicked voice sounded like it was coming from underwater.
"Caleb! You're bleeding! Caleb!"
He tried to reach out to his sister, but his body no longer obeyed him.
The world spun and went black.
Caleb slumped onto the cold floor, unconscious, bathed in the eerie blue glow of the levitating machine.