Searing slag splattered against his cheek. Kai screamed, pressing himself flat against the ceiling of the duct, but there was nowhere to run. The blade of the plasma cutter tore through the steel directly beneath him with a deafening, ear-splitting shriek, leaving behind a blindingly white scar that radiated unbearable heat.

  The temperature in the cramped space hit critical. The air scorched his lungs with every breath, settling on his tongue with the acrid taste of melting insulation and rust. A few more seconds, ten at most, and the carved-out rectangle of flooring would simply give way, dropping the suffocating boy right into the hands of the enraged pack.

  A harsh, anticipatory laugh barked from below: "Come on, push it! A prime cut of roast meat is about to drop right out of this oven!"

  Kai squeezed his eyes shut. Tears instantly vaporized on his soot-streaked cheeks. He curled into a tight ball, wrapping his arms around his head. Was this it? Had he survived the Culling, eating dirt in the pitch black, only to burn alive in a ventilation shaft because of a bunch of scavengers?

  "They want to tear you out by the roots," Avelo’s voice stated directly inside his skull—indifferent, like stating a mathematical fact. The vibration was so intense it made Kai's teeth ache.

  Help me! Kai screamed mentally, bordering on hysteria. The floor beneath him was already starting to buckle dangerously, suffused with a cherry-red glow. Do something, Avi!

  "This is not my conflict, brother. This is your weakness." The rustle of the Substrate felt like an icy contrast to the crushing heat. "You hid. You tried to negotiate with parasites. The garden is overgrown with weeds, Kai. Weeds take the water. Weeds take the light. What does a good gardener do?"

  Kai broke into a heavy coughing fit, swallowing black smoke. "He... he weeds them! Kill them! Please, kill them all!"

  "Give me permission to weed."

  "Yes! Yes, do whatever you want!" the boy croaked, feeling the rubber soles of his boots beginning to melt.

  In that exact fraction of a second, the temperature in the duct plummeted so fast that the metal groaned. The cherry-red glow of the sliced steel died instantly, replaced by a cold, pulsating neon.

  A startled shout echoed from below: "What the hell? The cutter died! Voltage dropped..."

  Those were the last coherent words ever spoken in that utility tunnel.

  Black veins ruptured the steel from the inside. Not smoothly, the way Kai had seen it before, but with explosive, primal kinetics. The metal floor of the duct warped outward and burst with the roar of a cannon, showering the men below in a hail of razor-sharp shrapnel. But that was only the beginning.

  Kai, clinging desperately to the structural ribs, stared down through the ragged hole.

  The tunnel beneath him had transformed into a living biomechanical nightmare. Dozens of thick, glossy-black tendrils erupted simultaneously from the walls, the concrete floor, and the main pipes. They moved faster than human optics could track.

  The screams that hammered his ears sounded nothing like noises a human being could make. It was crystal-clear, absolute agony. The Substrate wasn't just killing—it was dissecting the scavengers, brutally hardwiring their central nervous systems into its network.

  The sound of tearing fabric, the heavy crunch of snapping spines, and the wet, nauseating squelch of meat echoed down the corridors.

  One of the attackers, a massive brute with a gear tattooed across his bald scalp, lunged for the exit. A black cable whipped across his legs, shattering his shins with a wet snap, coiled around his waist, and slammed him into the wall with monstrous force.

  The concrete instantly softened, swallowing his body. The man pounded his fists against the gray stone until a thick Substrate spike punched straight through the base of his skull, paralyzing his motor functions.

  The plasma cutter hit the floor with a metallic clang, still hissing weakly, but the sound was quickly drowned out by the heavy, steady hum of the system greedily digesting its fresh batteries.

  Ninety seconds later, a dead, ringing silence fell.

  Kai unclenched his white-knuckled grip and dropped like a dead weight into the tunnel. His knees buckled, and he sagged heavily against the cold concrete, drawing in ragged, shuddering breaths.

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  Around him sprawled a gallery of grotesque art. Five of Bulldog's cutthroats were now part of the City’s architecture. Their bodies were contorted at impossible angles, half-entombed in the walls. Glowing purple capillaries pulsed just beneath their rapidly graying skin, pumping bioelectricity deep into the bowels of the Obelisk.

  The one who had been holding the cutter jutted out of the bulkhead almost to his waist. His glassy eyes stared blindly at the ceiling, while his ribcage rose and fell in slow, heavy rhythm, synced perfectly to the heartbeat of the Abyss.

  The boy slowly climbed to his feet. He was shaking. Adrenaline withdrawal lashed at his frayed nerves, but alongside the fear, a strange, ice-cold sense of absolute power crystallized in his chest. He looked down at his filthy, blistered hands. He was the undisputed master of these depths now. At his single word, the stone came alive and claimed the meat.

  Kai walked over to the dead man with the cutter. The man wore a heavy, long jacket cut from thick, battered leather. At this depth, thermal insulation was synonymous with life. The eight-year-old planted his boot against the wall right beside the body and violently yanked the jacket off the integrated human.

  It weighed a ton, saturated with industrial grease and machine oil. Kai draped it over his frail shoulders. The hem dragged along the concrete, and the sleeves had to be rolled up three times, but inside, the jacket still held the dead man's heat. It became his armor.

  Then he looked at the man's head. Eliminating five grunts was only half the equation. Bulldog would just send twenty more, arming them with military-grade kinetics. Kai needed a negotiating argument. A final one. The kind that would make a seasoned predator choke on his own terror.

  The colossal entity read his impulse without a word. A thin black thread, like a molecular monofilament, slid out of the wall, whipped cleanly through the integrated man's neck, and snapped back. The head hit the floor at the boy's feet with a dull, wet thud.

  Kai hoisted it up by the greasy hair. Five kilos of dead weight dragged heavily on his thin arm. The boy looked around, picked up a filthy rag soaked in waste oil, dipped his finger into the black sludge, then into the blood welling at the severed stump. Slowly, with geometrical precision, he traced a horrifying smile across the dead man’s pale forehead. The exact same smile his brother, Avelo, had worn when he stepped into the abyss of the distribution block.

  Grunting with the effort, he shoved the heavy trophy into a canvas parts-sack, clamped both hands around the neck of the bag, and strode off into the dark, dragging his burden across the concrete.

  The trek to the Rusties' sector took over an hour. Kai navigated the maintenance tunnels, hunched under the weight of the oversized jacket and the sack. The rare scavengers and scrap-hounds he passed took one look at the emaciated child drifting through the gloom, leaving a slick, wet trail in his wake, and silently pressed themselves deep into the alcoves. In the Lower Sector, people knew how to recognize death, no matter what shape it took.

  The syndicate's bar was holed up in a former water-treatment distribution node. It was a massive, echoing cavern crammed with pressed-plastic tables. The air here was heavy, thick with the fumes of synthetic alcohol and harsh chemical reagents.

  Bulldog—a massive, slab-like man sporting a crude red optical implant where his left eye used to be—sat at the head of a long table, enthroned in a heavy chair welded together from salvaged leaf springs. He was unhurriedly shuffling a greasy deck of plastic cards while listening to a report from one of his lieutenants.

  The massive metal blast doors of the bar didn't just open—they blew wide with a deafening crash, slamming hard against the concrete bulkheads.

  The low roar of dozens of gritty voices died instantly. The predators of the Lower Sector snapped toward the entrance. Down here, loud noises usually meant an Enforcer raid; hands reflexively dropped to the grips of kinetic sidearms and shivs.

  Standing on the threshold was an eight-year-old boy. Smeared in soot, burn marks marring his pale face, practically drowning inside a gigantic leather jacket.

  No one laughed. The visual was far too unnatural.

  Bulldog measured him with a heavy, scanning glare, and only then did a crooked grin split his face, flashing chrome teeth. "What piece of bio-waste just washed out of the pipes?" the boss rumbled. "Hey, defect. You wander into the wrong sector?"

  Kai stepped forward in dead silence. The soft scuff of his boots and the heavy, wet drag of the sack across the floor were the only sounds cutting through the ringing quiet of the bar. He reached dead center of the room and stopped.

  Suddenly, the child’s scrawny arms coiled tight. With unnatural, explosive effort, they whipped upward, launching the heavy payload forward.

  The canvas flared open mid-flight. The object slammed onto the plastic table with a meaty thud, plowing right through the spread of cards. It rolled, knocking over glasses, and skidded to a dead stop squarely in front of Bulldog.

  It was the severed head of the search team leader. A jagged smile, painted in engine oil and blood across the pale forehead, stared directly up at the boss of the Rusties.

  A perfectly synchronized, metallic chorus of racking slides tore through the room—every weapon in the bar was suddenly trained on the lone child in the center.

  Bulldog's chrome optic whirred furiously, dialing in on the boy's face. "You're dead, you little bastard," the boss snarled, rising slowly from his throne. He ripped a heavy assault shotgun from under the table and leveled it straight at Kai's narrow chest. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  The boy didn't retreat a single millimeter. He didn’t raise his hands. Didn't even flinch. He slowly met the boss's stare, and his soot-caked face warped into a terrifying, perfectly symmetrical, ice-cold smile. An exact replica of the one carved onto the dead man's forehead.

  And in that absolute silence, every living soul in the room suddenly heard it: deep behind them, inside the thick concrete walls, the water mains, and right up in the ceiling overhead, thousands of tons of solid stone began to let out a hollow, grinding shriek, and violently crack apart.