The atmosphere inside the observatory bunker didn't just feel heavy—it felt curdled. Static hung in the air like microscopic shards of glass, stinging every time Ruan drew a breath. He crawled across the pitted concrete toward the fallen remains of the console, his joints screaming in a protest that he barely acknowledged anymore. His fingers, shredded and stained with the grease of a hundred miles of travel, searched the floor until they found the ragged remains of the terminal interface.Across the room, the dust cloud cleared, revealing the full extent of their vulnerability. Julian Vane wasn't fully offline. His upper torso was fused to the bunker wall, a nightmare of grinding servos and twisting copper piping. He looked less like a man and more like a car wreck in progress. His infrared optics flickered with a violent, arrhythmic strobe—a visual representation of the Sovereign Core’s panic. The Core knew it had been breached, and it was screaming for a

The scent hit them before the mouth of the quarry even came into view—a cloying, stomach-churning cocktail of stagnant rainwater, pulverized granite, and the scorched-hair stench of overheating hydraulic lines. It was a smell that Ruan had come to associate with his own personal hell: the smell of the machine age dying, or worse, refusing to stay dead."Stop here," Ruan whispered, though his voice sounded like dry gravel shifting in his throat.Elzandri hauled on the handbrake of the stolen utility truck, the metal lever groaning under her weakened grip. The engine died with a rhythmic shudder that rattled their teeth, then plummeted into a silence so profound it felt heavy. Through the cracked, dusty windshield, the mouth of the Olievenfontein Copper Quarry yawned before them—a colossal scar in the earth, swallowed by shadow and reinforced by layers of pre-collapse steel siding that had been welded, poorly and brutally, onto the surrounding cliffs.

The heat inside the central boiler room of the Olievenfontein Quarry was so thick it felt like inhaling pulverized stone and boiling oil. Ruan stumbled over a discarded industrial cable, his left knee locking with a dry, excruciating *pop* that echoed off the massive, sweating steel tanks. He clutched his side, his breath coming in shallow, ragged hacks that burned his throat.Julian Vane stood at the far end of the gantry, blocking the path to the manual pressure-relief valves. He didn't look human anymore. The brass wires that laced through his skin were fused to the heavy structural girders of his remaining limbs, turning him into a nightmarish puppet of salvage and rage. His face, half-caved in by the debris of their earlier run-in, was a twisted sculpture of exposed servos and pulsing orange optics. "Ruan," Vane grated, his voice sounding like two rusty saws scraping against one another. He didn't speak with a tongue; he spoke through a malfunct