The runoff tastes like copper and old thunder.
Fox learned that at five, back when his hair was still black and his eyes hadn't bled red yet. Back when he thought the white-haired kids in the lower stacks were just unlucky, not marked.
He was twelve now. White hair. Dark-skin. Red eyes. Vòlè Pwason—Thief Beneath the Fish Kingdom—like every other nameless bastard born in Bidonvil ki anba Wayòm Pwason an.
The slums had a rhythm. Mana runoff dripped from Fisscasia's underside every six hours, regular as clockwork, thick as oil and twice as hungry. It pooled in the reclamation basins, seeped into the water supply, saturated the air until breathing felt like swallowing lightning that had already decided to kill you slowly.
Fox pressed himself flat against the access shaft's rusted lip and waited.
Above him, five hundred meters of vertical city, black stone towers that pierced clouds, arc-powered lift arrays that hummed with stolen Solomon-era gravity research, Fisscasia floated. Wealthy. Advanced. Clean.
Below him, two hundred meters of scaffolding, shanties, and desperation built into the superstructure's underbelly like barnacles on a corpse, Bidonvil endured.
The city above didn't look down.
The city below had stopped looking up.
Fox checked the lens in his pocket one more time. Still there. Still warm. Still worth more than his life, which wasn't saying much, but it was something.
The cannon was three levels up, mounted to a support strut that had been marked CONDEMNED for six years. Nobody touched condemned structures. Not because of the warning. Because condemned meant saturated—mana-soaked metal that would burn through skin on contact, maybe take a hand if you were unlucky, maybe rewrite your Arc if you were very unlucky.
Fox had wrapped his hands in treated cloth. Pig had taught him that trick two summers ago, right before Pig lost three fingers to a mana pocket and stopped teaching anyone anything.
The cloth was expensive. The cannon's focusing lens was priceless.
He moved.
The climb was muscle memory—fingers finding holds that weren't visible, feet trusting weight to welds that screamed but held. The air got thicker as he ascended. His lungs protested. His eyes watered.
The runoff was early today.
Shit.
He could feel it condensing in the pipes overhead—pressure building, valves straining. Fisscasia's waste management system didn't care about schedules. It cared about efficiency. When the upper city flushed its arcane excess, Bidonvil got baptized.
Fox reached the cannon platform and stopped breathing through his nose.
The weapon was beautiful in the way that violence could be beautiful—sleek, angular, runes etched into the barrel in script he couldn't read but recognized. Alexandrian work. Military-grade. The kind of thing that shouldn't exist this far from the world hub, mounted to a condemned strut in a slum nobody remembered.
But it was here. And Fox knew why.
Fisscasia bought Alexandrian tech through back channels. Tested it in Bidonvil. If it worked, they kept it. If it failed, they scrapped it and dumped the evidence where the white-haired kids would scavenge it for parts.
Fox was very good at scavenging.
He pulled the treated cloth tighter around his right hand and reached for the focusing lens housing.
The metal sang against his palm—not heat, not yet, but warning. Mana density this close to the source made materials remember what they'd been forged to do. Cannons remembered firing.
"Don't wake up," Fox whispered to the weapon. "Just let me take the shiny part and we're good."
The lens housing clicked open.
Inside, the focusing lens caught the dim light from the city above and bent it. Not reflected. Bent. Light curved around the glass like it was negotiating, like it wanted permission before passing through.
Fox grinned.
"Hello, gorgeous."
He pried the lens free with a hooked tool Pig had made before the accident—thin metal, just enough give to avoid shattering arcane glass, just enough strength to insist.
The lens came loose.
Fox caught it in his left hand, wrapped it in spare cloth, pocketed it.
The cannon's barrel dimmed. Without the focusing lens, it was just expensive metal. Still worth money, but too heavy to carry, too obvious to sell.
Fox turned to climb down—
—and heard the click.
Not mechanical. Not physical.
Magical.
The sound reality makes when someone with authority decides you're noticed.
Fox looked up.
She was standing on the strut above him, silhouetted against Fisscasia's glow. Small. Maybe his age, maybe younger. White and gold armor segmented too cleanly to be handmade—each piece fitted with runes that pulsed in sync with her breathing.
In her hands: a cannon. Not mounted. Not scrap.
Hers.
Alexandrian work. Twin barrels. Compact enough to hold, powerful enough to punch through stone.
Arc Cannon. Personal issue.
Which meant—
"Cannon Saintess," Fox said aloud, and his voice stayed steady because panic was a luxury he'd never been able to afford.
She didn't respond. Just adjusted her aim.
Fox saw the barrel's interior light up—Force and Storm, married in the weapon's core, compressed into a shell that would unwrite him on contact.
He moved.
The first shot took the wall beside his head.
Stone didn't shatter, it peeled, like reality had been scraped thin, like the concept of "wall" had politely excused itself from existence.
Fox dropped, hit the lower platform, rolled, came up running.
"STOP MOVING!" Her voice echoed from above, amplified—not magic, tech. Clean. Military. Alexandrian doctrine made audible.
Fox shouted back over his shoulder: "HOW ABOUT YOU STOP TRYING TO SHOOT ME!"
The second shot came faster.
Not aimed at him.
The walkway ahead collapsed—metal screaming, support struts folding inward like hands in prayer, the entire structure deciding it was tired of being structural.
Fox skidded, barely caught the edge, fingers burning as mana-saturated metal went active under his grip. He swung down, dropped into the lower lanes, vanished into steam and hanging cloth and the press of bodies that didn't ask questions because questions got you involved.
Behind him, the Saintess landed without sound.
No cloak. No ceremony. No wasted movement.
Just armor, weapon, and the absolute certainty of someone who'd been trained.
She moved.
Not chasing.
Predicting.
Fox burst through a market corridor, overturned a spice vendor's cart (Hen Yellow was going to be pissed), sent dried fish scattering, bodies shouting, chaos blooming like blood in water.
He wanted chaos. Chaos was cover.
The third shot clipped his shoulder.
Not lethal.
Intentional.
His right arm went numb instantly—not pain, not yet, just the sudden awareness that his body had forgotten how to be attached to itself. Mana shock. Arc of Force applied with surgical precision.
He slammed into an alley wall, gasping, and his left hand—still working, still his—went to his pocket.
The lens was intact.
He pulled it out.
Small. Unmarked. Wrong in ways he didn't have words for.
It felt heavier than it should. It felt like it was looking at him.
Fox held it up with a shaking hand and yelled into the corridor: "YOU SHOOT ME AND THIS DROPS!"
Silence.
Then: footsteps.
Measured. Unhurried. The sound of someone who knew they'd already won and was just deciding how to finish the sentence.
She stepped into view.
Gun leveled. Eyes locked—not on him, on the lens.
Her finger rested against the trigger guard. Professional. Patient.
Waiting.
Fox smiled through blood. His shoulder was starting to remember how to hurt.
"Yeah," he said. "You feel it too, don't you?"
Her jaw tightened.
"Set it down."
"Can't."
"Set it down or I will fire."
"You already did. Three times." Fox leaned back against the wall, breathing hard, lens still held up like a shield. "If you were gonna kill me, I'd be dead."
That landed.
A fraction of hesitation—barely there, but real.
Her eyes flicked to his feet, calculating angles. Ricochet probability. Crowd density. Drop trajectory. All the things they'd drilled into her at whatever facility turned children into this.
Fox pressed his advantage, because advantages in Bidonvil lasted exactly as long as you could talk.
"New Saintess?" he asked.
Her eyes snapped back to his face.
He grinned. It hurt. "You still remember your instructor's voice, don't you? The one that said don't improvise unless you're sure."
"Shut up."
"See, I don't think you're sure." He shifted the lens slightly, watching her pupils track the movement. "You don't know if this thing breaks. Or explodes. Or wakes up. Or just disappears into concept and takes half the district with it."
The gun didn't waver.
But she didn't fire.
Fox kept talking because talking was breathing was living. "Alexandria didn't tell you, did they? Just said retrieve. Didn't mention what happens if it gets damaged. Didn't warn you it might be alive."
The lens pulsed once in his hand.
Warm.
Almost like a heartbeat.
The Saintess saw it too. Her trigger finger twitched.
Fox played his last card.
"They barely even trained you, didn't they?" His voice dropped, quieter now, almost kind. "You're what—thirteen? Fourteen? How long you been out of the facility? Week? Two?"
Her expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes flinched.
"You don't know what this is," Fox continued. "You just know it's important. You know if you come back without it, they'll ask questions. You know if you come back with it broken, they'll ask harder questions."
He lowered the lens an inch.
Not surrendering. Negotiating.
"So here's the deal, Saintess. You let me come with you to Alexandria. You get credit for retrieval. I get to sell it."
"That's not—"
"I found it," Fox interrupted. "Fair salvage. Bidonvil rules. You want it? You buy it. You want me to hand it over for free?" He smiled. "Shoot me. See what happens."
They stood there—two kids pretending they weren't terrified, pretending they had authority neither of them possessed.
Above them, Fisscasia hummed. Distant. Clean. Uncaring.
Below them, Bidonvil held its breath.
The Saintess exhaled once. Sharp. Decisive.
"You're coming with me."
Fox blinked. "...What?"
"To Alexandria." She lowered the gun an inch. Not holstering. Not trusting. Just... accepting. "You will carry the artifact. You will not run. If you attempt to flee, I will kill you."
Fox laughed—short, ugly, disbelieving. "I'm selling it."
Her eyes hardened. "You don't understand."
"No," Fox said. "You don't. I found it. I bled for it. It's mine. That's how it works down here."
The gun stayed trained on him.
But she didn't fire.
She spoke quieter now, and for the first time, she didn't sound like a weapon.
She sounded like a girl who'd made a mistake and was trying to fix it before anyone noticed.
"If you run, I will kill you."
Fox nodded slowly. "If you try, I'll drop it."
Then she turned, gun still raised but no longer aimed, and started walking.
"Move," she said.
Fox pushed off the wall, tucked the lens carefully into his pocket, and followed.
His shoulder screamed. His lungs burned. His head was already calculating how much an Alexandrian relic was worth on the black market, minus travel expenses, minus the risk of traveling with a Cannon Saintess who'd probably been told to kill him if he got inconvenient.
But he was alive.
And he had the lens.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, the part that had learned to survive by watching, by adapting, a thought formed
This is gonna be interesting.
Behind them, the market corridor slowly resumed its rhythm.
Hen Yellow cursed his name in three languages.
The runoff dripped.
Bidonvil endured.
In a place where pressure replaced air and darkness replaced sight, something broke.
Not shattered. Not cracked.
Remade.
A boy floated in the abyss, held by something vast and patient and impossibly old. His bones had been broken and rebuilt too many times to count now. His lungs had learned to breathe without oxygen. His eyes had been trained to see in the absence of light.
He was twelve years old.
He had never seen the sun.
The Leviathan Goddess wrapped around him like a trench, like a grave, like a mother who loved through reforging.
She whispered in his mind—not words, not language, but pressure shaped into meaning:
Soon.
The boy—who had no name because names were surface things, because the Deep did not care what you called yourself—opened eyes that glowed faintly in the dark.
His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse from disuse.
"How long?"
A few more days, the Goddess answered. Then you surface.
"Will it hurt?"
She paused.
Then, with something that might have been fondness
Yes.
The boy nodded.
He had expected nothing less.
He closed his eyes and let the pressure rebuild him one more time.