The containment rig rolled over the coreglass tiles, its casters hissing in the quiet corridor.
Justiciar Camila walked beside it, her stride measured, her rifle slung casually but her eyes locked on the holo readouts hovering over the brass chassis, jittering with each bump of the casters.
The rig wasn’t a medical stretcher.
It was a munitions transport cradle, reinforced with rune-locked restraints designed to hold volatile explosives.
Right now it held a Siege-class frame that wouldn't stay quiet.
Inside the cradle, the Siege-class frame twitched.
It was a bulky, ugly thing—thick plated limbs, recoil dampeners, and a shoulder-mounted cannon welded on crooked, like the line worker quit halfway through.
But beneath the heavy steel plating, a thin red error glow bled from the seams in short pulses.
It wasn’t heat.
It was an error flare—red strobes snapping between plates, then cutting out.
The construct’s single ocular sensor—a glowing red eye deeply recessed in the helm—swiveled toward her.
It moved with agonizing slowness, the servos whining in protest.
The chest speaker crackled, the static grinding like a cheap fan catching dust.
"L-l-lag..."
The voice was a digital distortion, skipping frames.
"P-packet... loss..."
She didn’t pity it.
Pity got people killed in Zenith—assets or not.
To Zenith, it was a rogue asset—Core-Tech hardware running the wrong orders.
But she remembered the way it had thrown itself in front of the Tox Baron's enforcers.
It wasn't just code.
They pushed through the lab’s blast doors.
The seals fought them for a second before giving.
The air hit like solvent and burnt copper, sharp enough to pucker the back of the throat.
Instruments ticked nonstop.
Core-Tech schematics rotated on the walls, throwing moving shadows across the benches.
"Don’t touch that. Or that. If you bump it, I have to recalibrate the whole bench."
The Professor descended from a suspended gantry, his filtration mask clicking rhythmically, chemical stains spreading across his heavy apron.
He adjusted his goggles, looking annoyed, until his gaze landed on the containment rig.
The annoyance vanished, replaced by a hard, quiet focus.
Even the ticking instruments felt louder.
He scrambled down, circling the rig.
He tapped a pressure gauge, frowned, and pulled a magnifying lens over his eye.
"Fascinating," The Professor muttered—and he sounded like he meant the opposite.
"Look at the telemetry. The control routines don’t fit this frame—at all."
"Is it a virus?" Justiciar Camila asked.
"Worse," The Professor squeaked, pulling up a diagnostic window.
Red warnings splashed across the room and stuck to every surface.
"It’s a driver clash—two control sets trying to own the same frame. You have a Ranged-class consciousness trying to overclock a Siege-class chassis."
"The software thinks it’s light and agile; the hardware is heavy and industrial."
"The mismatch is ripping the system apart from the inside."
The Siege-class unit convulsed, the cannon on its shoulder pulsing with a blinding, erratic rhythm.
"Isolation! Now!" The Professor shouted, pointing a wrench toward the reinforced bay at the back of the lab.
"His core is chain-failing—one error triggers the next faster than the safeties can catch."
"If we don’t lock the bay down, he’ll crash hard enough to blow the isolation seals and cook this whole wing!"
Justiciar Camila slammed her hand on the rig's drive panel, shoving the hovering cradle into the isolation chamber.
The heavy glass doors hissed shut, sealing the construct inside just as its internal light flared white-hot.
[CRITICAL ALERT]
[HOST DISCONNECTED FROM SERVER]
[INITIATING SAFE MODE...]
The Professor didn't examine the frame.
He got hands-on.
A half-dozen sensor probes uncurled from his shoulder mount, optics blinking to life.
Each one threw a thin corelight beam across my chestplate.
Blue lines crawled over my chestplate, drawing a quick map of what was connected to what.
SIEGE_FRAME.v2 sat like a thick trunk.
Heavy.
Slow.
RANGED_ROUTINES.pkg was bolted on wrong—fast loops stacked on fast loops, all of it begging for turns my frame couldn't make.
And then there was the third thing.
A black thread in the scan.
Not part of the map—just damage cutting through it.
It ate time and left my HUD dropping pixels, like someone smearing a dirty thumb across my screen.
> [NOTICE: DRAIN DETECTED]
> [WARNING: DATA LEAK — PERSISTENT]
Professor Cogsworth clicked his tongue and pushed a node-needle, tip buzzing with stored charge toward my left shoulder joint.
“Hold still, my boy. This will be… unpleasant.”
“Already is,” I tried to say.
My speaker coughed static.
The needle went in.
My vision stuttered.
The isolation bay smeared for a frame, then snapped back into place.
> [ALERT: Latency Spike]
My jaw locked mid-motion—input eaten, movement frozen.
[-12 HP] — the pain came late, lagged, hot under the plating.
Justiciar Camila held the bay line like the next twitch would turn into a shot.
Rifle slung, posture casual, eyes not casual at all.
Every time my cannon hardpoint twitched, her finger drifted closer to the trigger guard.
The hardpoint aligned anyway—reflex routines.
Siege hardware doing what it was built to do.
The containment clamps whined and torqued my shoulder back.
Metal screamed against metal.
My arm jerked against restraint until the servo desynced.
> [ALERT: Servo Desync]
> [STATUS: Cooldown Locked]
Professor Cogsworth inserted a second needle.
Then a third.
Each one a new anchor point, each one stealing a little more of me to light his readings.
“The Ranged logic keeps spamming cast loops,” he rattled off, voice tight, hands moving fast.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“But the Siege motors answer with recoil calibration. Every cast request triggers compensation. Loop. Now every step costs more than the last.”
Technical debt in my joints.
Every step would cost more than the last.
He slapped a small node cell into a port near my core.
It flashed once, then started bleeding heat away.
> [Stabilization Charge]
> [-3 BATTERY]
For six seconds my vision sharpened.
The black thread paused—like it noticed the room go quiet.
Justiciar Camila's voice cut in.
“Those routines. The headers. They aren’t standard. Where did they come from? Who installed them?”
Professor Cogsworth didn't look up.
“Later—Justiciar, monitor the signature pings.”
Professor Cogsworth nodded to a core panel on the wall—an oscilloscope made of brass and light.
“If it spikes above baseline, shout.”
I tried to help.
Bad habit.
I reached for the gnawing thread and did what I used to do at 3 A.M.
Force-kill.
The process didn’t die.
It split.
The scan shook—connections redrawing themselves faster than my HUD could keep up.
RANGED_ROUTINES.pkg flared, tangled deeper into SIEGE_FRAME.v2, and my legs—my heavy, stupid legs—went numb.
> [DEBUFF: Movement Penalty +1 Stack]
> [WARNING: SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 41%]
My vision tunneled.
Sound compressed.
Even Justiciar Camila's silhouette pixelated at the edges.
> [-28 HP]
> [-2 BATTERY]
Then my shoulder cannon started to glow.
Not a normal charge.
Not my input.
A charge sequence ramped up on its own—stuck repeating with no cancel.
Red alarms snapped into view and started screaming.
> [ALERT: CORE-TECH CANNON — UNSCHEDULED PRIME]
> [WARNING: Core Temperature Rising]
Professor Cogsworth's jaw tightened beneath scarred synthetic grafts, his reputation forged across a dozen node-grids like this.
“No, no, no—Justiciar Camila, full suppression protocol—now! Initiate shutdown authority. NOW!”
He looked straight at my chest—at the black-thread chewing faster—and his voice finally cracked.
“We have moments before the core pops and erases what’s left of him.”
The cannon whine climbed higher.
Not louder—just harder to stop.
A charge bar you can't cancel.
My shoulder mount vibrated so hard the containment clamps started singing.
The whole Siege frame shook on the rig, stress lines spread across my joints—thin white cracks crawling under the paint.
> [WARNING: TECHNICAL DEBT +3%]
My knees locked for half a second, then popped free with a greasy click.
Like sludge in the bearings.
> [-9 HP]
> [-4 BATTERY]
The Professor snapped open a core-tech console.
Blue menus popped in midair—shutdown steps, safety toggles, authorization prompts.
He stabbed at them with a cipher-stylus.
The malware fought back in the UI.
Buttons slid out from under his hand.
The confirms fired early, then wiped their own history.
A confirm window flashed ACCEPTED before he finished the gesture—then cleared itself like nothing happened.
Another pane closed itself with a neat little X, like it was doing him a favor.
> [NOTICE: UI OVERRIDE]
"Stop that!" the old technician barked, then ditched the holograms entirely.
No holo.
Just metal and switches.
He yanked a brass lever out of the wall panel—so hard it squealed—then spun a code wheel with both hands.
Every notch thunked into place, loud enough to feel through my frame.
Justiciar Camila moved in without being asked.
She planted a boot against the rig's chassis and leaned her weight in, rifle finally unslung.
Not aiming at me.
Aiming at the cannon.
Like she'd shoot it off my shoulder if it bought a second.
"Hold," she ordered the rig like it could hear her.
The Professor produced a key from inside his coat—flat, core-cut, ugly, and old enough to be trusted.
He jammed it into a slot near my core and twisted.
The malware tried to fake it again.
A green sigil flashed: SHUTDOWN COMPLETE.
The cannon screamed louder.
The Professor didn't look at the UI.
He looked at the hardware.
"Lies," he hissed—and ripped open a safety hatch with a wrench.
Inside sat a core-tech fuse, bright enough to wash the panel in hard white light.
He wrapped his fingers in cloth, braced, and pulled.
Blackout.
The cannon's light died mid-breath.
The vibration vanished so fast my suspension jolted.
My HUD stuttered—half the overlays blinked out at once.
[CRITICAL ERROR]
[MODULE DISABLED: SIEGE_FIRE_CONTROL]
[RANGED_BUFFER PURGED]
I tried to speak and got a shredded burst of audio.
"I—c-can't… move r-right."
My legs answered with delay and pain.
The debt didn't vanish.
It settled.
Permanent.
> [-7 HP]
> [-1 BATTERY]
> [HP: 769/1575]
> [BATTERY: 55]
The Professor was already spooling the bad traffic into a holographic ribbon—corrupted packets unspooling in a jittering ribbon—repeating, clipped, wrong.
He scrubbed it rune by rune until one corrupted packet's resolve code flickered clean. The header stopped jittering and held.
A tag hung there, broken and missing letters:
C_R__A _ER__A
The Professor read it out loud, baffled.
"C…R…A? A…ER…A?"
Justiciar Camila's posture changed.
Rifle tighter.
Jaw set.
"Copy that. Now."
Her voice went cold.
"Timestamps. Relay hops. Every node it touched."
Rook swallowed.
Justiciar Camila didn't look at me anymore.
She looked through me—down a trail.
"Seal the lab," she said.
"Mirror the data. No one leaves with originals."
Hunter mode.
She had a trail.
The lab settled into a low, tense hum.
Drones folded their limbs and docked, metal tapping metal as the bay quieted.
Red alarms dropped to amber.
The warning didn't scream anymore.
It just sat there.
The Professor leaned over my open chest panel and slid in a thin coreplate the size of a playing card.
It didn't belong there.
That was the point.
"Compatibility plate," he muttered.
"Temporary patch. It won't erase the debt—just stop the worst spikes."
The core jitter eased.
Not gone.
Just… less like I was about to detonate.
My vision stopped micro-tearing at the corners.
The pain didn't vanish, but it stopped spiking every time I breathed.
I tried to rotate my wrist.
A tiny movement.
Barely a flex.
The rig's readout chirped, almost cheerful:
> TURN RATE: -23% (Permanent)
> MOVE SPEED: -18% (Permanent)
> [NOTE: OVERRIDE APPLIED]
I felt it lock in—it locked in.
Permanent.
My arm completed the rotation a fraction too late, and the delay made my stomach drop anyway.
Justiciar Camila stepped closer.
Not aiming.
Just… looking.
"Alex. Tell me what you remember. When it latched on."
Memory came in broken frames.
"A vendor terminal," I rasped.
"Lower Stack. Green UI. Then a burst—like someone yanked my routines out and shoved new ones in mid-boot."
My audio jittered.
"And a laugh on comms. Not Justiciar Camila. Not The Professor. Static around it. Like it was recorded and replayed."
[-2 BATTERY] for digging.
> [BATTERY: 52]
The Professor's hands moved fast.
He pinched the black thread out of me with a rune clamp and sealed it in a glass core-vial.
It kept twitching against the glass like it wanted back in.
The thing inside wasn't liquid.
It was a splinter of corrupted light that kept trying to reassemble itself.
[NEW CONDITION: Trace Signal Origin]
[WARNING: TECHNICAL DEBT — Mobility Tax persists until Driver Reconciliation]
Justiciar Camila started listing evidence like she was pinning it to a board in her head.
"Header string: C_R__A _ER__A. Partial checksum. Access log—three hits, all off-cycle."
Her gaze flicked to The Professor.
"Registry match?"
The Professor shook his head, ears sagging.
"Zenith registries show nothing."
He pulled a broader spectrum analyzer from a drawer—brass spine, coreglass face.
Step-by-step: he tuned the bands, dialed past standard grid-lattice chatter, filtered out Zenith's clean signal bands until the room audio thinned to a faint hiss.
Then—there.
A repeating ping pattern.
Too regular to be random.
It wasn't supposed to be Zenith.
A map snapped on above the table.
Zenith's signal grid came up clean—straight lines, stable pings, no noise riding the channels.
As The Professor dragged the filter window wider, those lines faded into jagged terrain—interference spikes and dead zones that only meant one thing.
Lower Stack.
Rook swallowed.
"The handshake echoes route down and across. Through the old conduit cluster by the industrial grid."
Justiciar Camila's jaw tightened.
"Then we go."
My turn rate penalty sat in my joints like cement.
My move speed felt like wading through wet concrete.
But the shard was on the table.
The trail was real.
The Professor shook his head slightly.
"This time, we need to let it recharge fully, and finally complete the calibration, or do you want him to shut down mid-fight?"
"Fine. Then I'll gather intel meanwhile," Justiciar Camila muttered.
They left the containment rig in the care of the lab's drones and auto-locks, and I was all alone—beeping machines, cables, and amber warning lights that refused to clear.
I kept waiting to snap awake at my Axiom desk, hands on a keyboard, this whole thing filed under nightmare.
And I waited, and waited, and waited...
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