Morning in the slums didn't look much different from night.
The lanterns were dimmer. That was it.
Smoke still crawled along the rooflines. Artillery still boomed somewhere beyond the outer walls, each distant impact shaking dust from cracked rafters. Voices still muttered, argued, bargained in the rubble-strewn streets below.
The only real difference was that now Kaiden could see the dried blood under his boots.
He sat on the floor by the broken window, back to the wall, one knee up. The guard's body was gone. Rein and Jex had dragged it out before dawn, muttering about drainage ditches and collapsed cellars.
The stain on the floorboards remained.
No one stepped on it.
Sylen dropped down beside him, back against the same wall, leaving a gap of two fists between their shoulders. Close enough to talk. Far enough not to crowd.
"Your watch ended an hour ago," she said.
"I noticed."
"You didn't move."
"I noticed that too."
She snorted softly. "Want to tell me what happened last night?"
"I killed a guard."
"Before that."
His jaw clicked. Old habit, new material.
"He saw us," Kaiden said. "He would've raised the alarm."
"He didn't have time."
"Because I reacted fast."
"Because something reacted fast," Sylen corrected.
They let the silence sit.
Outside, a child laughed, high and brief, cut off quickly like someone had clapped a hand over their mouth. A dog barked once. A spell whined overhead, then faded.
Kaiden stared at the stain.
"I remember deciding with the boy," he said quietly. "The hero. Zarkus's test. I heard the order, knew what obeying meant, and still had time to hate myself before it happened."
Sylen watched him without blinking.
"Last night?" he continued. "There was no decision. Just input and output. A threat appears. The world skips. The threat is gone."
"The world skips," she repeated.
He lifted his hand, flexed the fingers. They obeyed perfectly. Too perfectly.
"Something in there is cutting frames," Kaiden said. "I don't see the middle anymore."
Her gaze flicked to his chest.
"To the Core," she said. Not a question.
He nodded.
Zarkus's voice slid up from memory.
As long as your fear can endanger an entire wing… we can't deploy you safely.
Then Plan B becomes necessary.
Kaiden's Core hummed once, like it agreed.
Sylen rubbed her eye with the heel of her palm.
"Look," she said, "I don't care if it's your Core, your brain, or Zarkus whispering sweet nothings into your spine. Just don't turn on us."
He glanced at her. "If I could promise that, I would."
"That's what worries me," she muttered.
Mara's voice drifted from the next room. "If you two are done brooding like tragic statues, the engine isn't going to fix itself."
"Engine?" Rein grumbled. "It's a broken, half-bombed human atrocity."
"A beautiful atrocity," Mara shot back. "Now move."
Sylen pushed herself up with a small groan and offered Kaiden a hand on reflex. He ignored it and stood on his own. The leg caught once, then settled.
Not broken. Just miscalibrated.
Like the rest of him.
The human teleport gate — the "engine," in Mara's stubborn words — squatted at the heart of the town like a dead god halfway buried.
From above, it would have looked like a ring carved into the square: concentric circles of pale stone etched with glowing runes, intersecting lines forming geometric patterns too precise to be decorative. From ground level, it was a ruin — cracked segments, shattered pillars that once held focusing crystals, chunks of stone blown inward where artillery blast marks spidered across the surface.
Wards lay in pieces. Residual mana flickered like embers under ash.
Human soldiers kept a perimeter at a respectful distance. Demon rebels lurked closer, pretending not to be guarding it too. Everyone pretended not to look at it for too long.
Kaiden and his squad watched from a half-collapsed balcony overlooking the square.
Mara had taken over a corner of the balcony floor, parchment spread out, a stolen piece of chalk dancing in her fingers as she traced the gate's arcs from memory. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bright.
"This isn't just a tactical jump circle," she said. "This was meant for scale. See the triple-channel nodes? You don't stress those for a squad hop. This thing was built to move battalions. Maybe more."
"Then why isn't it?" Rein asked, leaning against a broken column, arms folded.
Mara jabbed the chalk at a fracture near the center ring.
"Because someone hit it with enough mana to fry half the anchor lines," she said. "Artillery mages, probably. They damaged the binding sequence without completely rupturing the core glyph array. It's… asleep and bleeding at the same time."
"Like most of this town," Sylen muttered.
Kaiden watched the faint shimmer above the stone.
Even half-dead, the gate made his Core uneasy. The runes' residue hummed at a frequency that scraped along his ribs, like someone running their fingernails across metal instead of glass.
"You can fix it?" he asked.
Mara hesitated.
"Define fix," she said.
"Make it work once," he clarified. "Long enough to send something big and angry far away from here."
She chewed her lip.
"In theory?" she said slowly. "Yes. If we had… let's see… replacement foci, fresh mana-conductive filaments, stabilizer rods, a sane power source, and no one trying to kill us while we work."
"So… no," Rein said.
Mara bristled. "I didn't say no."
Kaiden tore his gaze away from the gate and studied her scribbles.
"List what you actually need," he said. "Not the luxury components. The minimal set that won't cause us to explode on activation."
She sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Three things."
She held up fingers as she spoke.
"One: mana-conductive scrap we can rig into replacement circuitry for the damaged anchor lines. Preferably human-grade, but I can make demon-forged plates behave if I have to."
"Okay," Kaiden said. "Two?"
"Two: a power source that can feed it without burning the remaining glyphs to ash. That means steady, high-output, and tolerant of feedback. Crystals, minor cores, maybe a captive mage if we get desperate—"
She stopped. Looked up at him.
His Core pulsed once, as if on cue.
THUM.
"Oh," she said softly. "Right."
Jex swallowed. "You want to plug him into that?"
"I don't want to do anything," Mara said. "But if we're being practical… his Core is already aligned to survive ridiculous throughput and has a built-in death wish. It's… ideal."
Kaiden didn't flinch.
He'd expected that from the moment he saw the circle.
"Three?" he asked.
Mara dropped her hand.
"Three is time," she said. "Which we don't have. Not really."
Artillery boomed again as if to underline the point.
Kaiden traced the gate's outer ring with his eyes, then the routes humans and rebels took around it. Patrols. Supply lines. Patterns.
"We can get scrap," he said. "This town is made of it. Human hardware half-buried in rubble. Old wards. Broken nodes."
"Demons bombed most of it on purpose," Sylen said. "To make sure nothing like this could spin back up."
"Then we steal what they missed," Kaiden replied.
Rein shrugged. "And the power source?"
Kaiden tapped his chest once.
"Already installed."
Jex winced.
"That just leaves time," Mara said.
"We make it," Kaiden said. "Before either side realizes someone else is trying to wake their dead god."
Rein grunted. "So we're sabotaging a human engine for the Empire while demon rebels and human defenders try to keep the town alive, and we're using your Core as the fuse."
"When you say it like that, it sounds reckless," Kaiden said.
"It is reckless," Rein replied.
"Good," Kaiden said. "Reckless works. Cautious got this town shelled for months."
They broke up into pairs.
Sylen and Jex went hunting for usable scrap — wards, broken spellplates, bits of artillery shells with surviving channels. Rein went to map load-bearing routes and possible fallback paths in case the square turned into a killing pit.
Mara and Kaiden stayed.
She sketched. He watched.
Humans came and went. A healer knelt by a wounded soldier's leg near the edge of the square, hands glowing faintly as she muttered prayers. Two demon rebels in scavenged human armour argued quietly with an officer over distribution of food. Children darted between legs, pretending they couldn't see the gate at all.
Kaiden's mind looped.
Train station. Fortress. Slums. Gate.
Earth. Dyrmont. Nowhere.
"You're doing it again," Mara said.
He blinked.
"Doing what?"
"Staring like you're seeing three different worlds at once," she said. "Your lens flares when you dissociate. It's very subtle. And by 'subtle' I mean 'terrifying.'"
He exhaled.
"How long was I gone?" he asked.
"Maybe ten seconds," she said. "Long enough for a human archer to line up a shot. Short enough that none of them did."
"Lucky," he muttered.
"Or unlucky," Mara said. "Depending on how you feel about existing."
Her tone was too light. The edge beneath it wasn't.
"Why are you here, Mara?" he asked.
She blinked. "Because I was ordered to be."
"No." He turned to face her fully. "You're not a front-line soldier. You're an engineer. Why put you with me on a mission this dirty?"
She hesitated.
"Because if you go rogue," she said finally, "they want someone there who understands how to break what you are."
He held her gaze.
"Can you?" he asked.
"Right now?" She laughed once, empty. "No. Not without help. And not without dying in the process."
"That's reassuring," he said.
"For you, maybe," she muttered.
The day crawled.
By nightfall, their stolen tenement was cluttered with war trash.
Sylen and Jex dumped a sack of broken spellplates and ward fragments onto the floor. Rein added chunks of metal still humming faintly from old enchantments. Mara fell on the pile like a starving dog on meat.
"This is… terrible," she said. "And I love it."
She sorted, stacked, and cursed in equal measure.
Kaiden watched.
His hands itched.
"Give me something to do," he said.
Mara tossed him a charred focus rod.
"Strip the dead glyphs," she said. "We only want the channels. If you crack it, we're down one potential conductor."
He snapped the rod cleanly between thumb and forefinger by accident.
Mara stared.
"So… maybe something less delicate," she said.
He grunted.
They found a rhythm.
Mara traced new lines. Kaiden reshaped metal with his bare hands, bending plates into crude arcs that could mimic human designs. Sylen checked every window and door three times. Jex hovered near the stairs, ears tuned for boots and shouts. Rein sat by the entrance with his hammer across his knees, watching Kaiden like he was waiting for a monster to surface.
Sometimes, the work steadied Kaiden.
His mind narrowed to force and angle, to heat and pressure. His Core hummed in a low, consistent way as he pushed mana into metal just enough to make it pliable.
Other times—
His hands shook.
A plate slipped. His fingers clenched too hard, crushing a carefully etched path in the conduit.
"Dammit," Mara hissed. "That took an hour to salvage."
"Make it again," he said.
"With what?" she snapped. "We're running out of salvage that isn't actively cursed."
He opened his mouth.
Static answered.
The walls flickered. The tenement became the Dome for a breath — runes floating like stars, Zarkus's presence pressing down on his Core until it forgot how to beat like a human heart and just thrummed like a reactor.
"Still," Zarkus's voice echoed.
Kaiden froze.
His hands refused to move.
For three seconds, he was back under that command. Locked. Paralysed. A weapon on a stand.
"Kaiden?" Sylen's claws clicked on the floor as she moved closer. "Hey. Breathe."
He dragged in air on reflex.
Control snapped back.
His fingers twitched on their own once before obeying.
He looked down.
He'd driven a groove into the floorboards with his heel.
"Logic loop," he muttered.
"What?" Mara asked.
"Nothing," he said.
It wasn't nothing.
He could feel the pattern now, buried under the constant hum of his Core.
Threat. Command. Action. Gap.
Sometimes the command came from outside — Zarkus, orders, danger. Sometimes it came from inside — fear, disgust, guilt. The Core responded to both.
Sometimes it moved faster than he did.
Hours later, they had a rough plan.
"It's ugly," Mara said, gesturing at the sketch. "But it might work."
Lines of ink looped across the parchment, showing where they'd splice new conduits into the broken segments of the gate's anchor ring. Symbols marked where Kaiden's Core would need to interface, feeding power directly into the structure without detonating it.
"We'll need to get this junk close," Rein said. "No way we can haul in half a scrapyard without someone asking questions."
"We don't," Kaiden said. "We bring in small pieces and assemble as we go. Work during bombardments. Noise covers noise."
Sylen rubbed her temples. "You realise if either side catches us tinkering with their favourite disaster, they'll skin us."
"I realise," Kaiden said.
"You sound almost pleased," Rein muttered.
Kaiden didn't answer.
Later, when the others slept in shifts, Kaiden sat alone amid the scrap and sketches.
His lens dimmed. His human eye burned.
He stared at his hands until the fingers blurred.
You spared a girl.
You killed a man.
You're about to wake a weapon that will tear this town apart if you blink wrong.
A reasonable person would stop.
A decent person would walk away.
Kaiden flexed his hand again.
Metal. Scar tissue. Tremor.
"If I walk," he whispered, "they send someone else. Someone cleaner. Someone who doesn't hesitate at all."
Someone who doesn't spare children.
Someone who doesn't feel anything when a guard's neck snaps.
Was that better or worse?
His Core didn't care.
It just wanted input.
"Kaiden," a voice said.
He looked up.
No one.
The tenement was silent. Sylen's breathing came softly from the next room. Jex snored once like he was apologising for existing. Rein muttered in his sleep, words too low to catch. Mara's fingers twitched even unconscious, still drawing lines on invisible paper.
The voice hadn't been any of them.
It had been clean. Calm. Precise.
"You weren't meant to be here."
Arvan's tone, but wrong somehow — closer, as if he'd spoken directly into the Core rather than Kaiden's ears.
His chest tightened.
He pressed a palm against the plating, fingers splayed.
"Get out," he growled.
The Core pulsed once, amused or annoyed. Hard to tell.
THUM.
When Sylen relieved him later, she didn't comment on the way his hand was still pressed to his chest.
She just looked at the metal he'd twisted, the broken conduits in the corner, the ruined focus rod on the floor.
"How's the great engine coming?" she asked.
"Badly," he said. "Which means it's on schedule."
"You look like hell," she said.
"Hell would be an upgrade," he replied.
She snorted.
As he lay down on a half-rotten mattress in the corner, joints protesting, Core humming too loud for real rest, one last thought drifted through his mind before the dark grabbed him.
He had spared a dying human scavenger earlier that day — an old man cradling rusted supplies in a ruined shop, eyes too empty to bother hating anyone anymore. Kaiden had stepped past him, let him live.
Minutes later, in another alley, he'd ripped a demon informant's throat out when the man tried to signal a rebel patrol.
Mercy. Brutality.
No pattern. No logic.
Unless the logic belonged to someone else.
Sleep came in jagged cuts.
In one dream, he was on the train platform again, except the tracks were carved with runes and the approaching train was a burning gate. In another, Zarkus stood in the slums, hand on the human teleport circle, saying, Plan B with something like pride.
In all of them, his hands were either feeding power into engines…
…or wrapped around someone's neck.
When he woke, he couldn't tell which version was worse