The error message wasn't visible, but Kaiden felt it like a drill bit grinding through bone. It started as a low, humming vibration in his sternum, directly over the glowing core that powered his pathetic existence. Then the familiar, agonizing spike: SYSTEM OVERRIDE.
He was shackled, wrists cuffed to the steel table in the demon engineers' Maintenance Pit. Not the clean, clinical white of the old hospital, but a hellish forge smelling of hot sulfur and burnt oil. Around him, the walls wept copper dust and the shadows danced to the rhythm of unseen hydraulic pistons.
"Still fighting, K-01?"
Grolak—a head engineer with skin the color of rusted iron and a voice like stones in a tumbler—leaned over him, a rune-etched copper wire plugged into the main port at Kaiden's neck. Grolak's face was inches from his, the demon's breath smelling of stale meat and cheap victory.
"We'll fix that little defect of yours," Grolak sneered, twisting the plug. "You've been overriding the loyalty subroutine for three cycles. Sloppy work. But the core is still ours, dog. And we own the leash."
A fresh spike of pain shot through Kaiden's spine, a deliberate short-circuit designed to remind him who held the power button. His fingers, heavy plates of brass and failing servos, clenched uselessly around the shackles.
Leash. The word snapped through the haze, tearing a hole in the electric noise. It wasn't the pain that fueled him, but the old, sharp pride. The same useless pride that had made him lunge at his old manager—the potato-headed fool—before the train hit him. He was a corporate man, silver-tongued and sharp-suited. He didn't take orders. He certainly didn't wear a collar.
"You've got it backwards, engineer," Kaiden's voice scraped out, a dry, mechanical wheeze. "You didn't give me a leash. You just built me a better cage."
Grolak laughed, a grating sound that made Kaiden's internal vents whistle in protest. "A cage that keeps you alive, scrap-heap. And now, we turn down the volume on that human noise. No more messy memories."
The demon cranked a dial on his console. A sudden, crushing weight slammed down on Kaiden's mind, drowning out the brief flicker of a forgotten street lamp. Grolak was throttling the power, attempting to turn the core from a volatile energy source into a simple battery—reducing Kaiden's consciousness to the bare minimum needed for combat.
No.
In that agonizing silence, where the pain should have been but was instead replaced by chilling emptiness, the memory flashed through: Arvan Callister. The mysterious mage who had observed his battle months ago, the one who said Kaiden was "torn through" the veil, not summoned.
Not their creation. Not their dog.
If they turned down the volume, he'd never be able to hear that cryptic truth again. He'd just be a collection of rusty parts with a glowing light. He'd be dead for real.
Kaiden focused every ounce of his defiant, human will on the core. It was his power source, the burning heart of brass they had ripped from the ground and forced into his chest. He didn't try to shut it down; he did the opposite. He overclocked it.
A high-pitched screech ripped through the Pit. Not from his mouth, but from the overworked tension cables in his shoulders. The core's orange glow flared to a blinding, dangerous white-hot incandescence.
Grolak staggered back, the copper wire sizzling as the feedback overloaded his console. "What in Dyrmont—! The limiter is failing!"
Kaiden didn't answer. He just pulled. With a hydraulic shriek and a shower of metallic sparks, the shackles sheared clean from the table. His servos screamed in protest, tearing muscle fiber and sparking brass against steel, but he was free.
He swung the heavy, severed cuff still attached to his wrist, slamming it into Grolak's jaw. The demon staggered, blood spraying against the grinding gears.
Kaiden rose from the table. His body was glitching violently, his vision flickering between black-and-white static and the lurid orange of the Pit. He was a mechanical catastrophe, a time bomb of failing parts. But for the first time since he died, he wasn't following a script.
He ripped the overloaded copper wire from his neck, tossing it onto the floor where it sparked and died.
The system malfunctioned.
And this time, Kaiden decided, the malfunction was going to write its own damn update.