"An hour?" Kaelen spat a dark stream of tobacco juice onto the scorched concrete, his grease-caked fingers tapping the side of his arc-welder like a metronome of skepticism. "This isn't some luxury loft in the upper sectors where you flip a switch and the maid brings you chilled water, stranger. The primary manifold has been dead since the collapse, choked with forty years of calcified slag and toxic scale. You want power in Sector 5, you bleed for it, or you burn with it."Hanzo didn't blink, keeping his weight balanced evenly over his tape-wrapped boots as the cold wind whipped a loose edge of his canvas jacket against his ribs. "I didn't come here to ask for a handout, Kaelen. I came to offer you a closed circuit. You let me hook into the refinery bypass, and I’ll reroute the secondary drainage gravity-feed from the north basin straight into your filtration tanks. Right now, your people are spending six hours a day hauling barrel-water up three flights of rusted stai

"Watch your step on the cat-walks, outsider," Kaelen muttered, leading the way past a rusted bulkhead that groaned in the sub-zero draft. "The grating hasn't held a proper structural load since the third corporate purge."Faelwyn ignored the warning, his boots already clanking rhythmically against the oxidized iron stairs as he descended into the cavernous belly of the old refinery bypass. The air down here smelled thick, heavy with the ancient stench of sulfur, burnt insulation, and stale machine oil. He pulled a heavy leather-bound ledger from beneath his arm, flipping open the damp, grease-stained pages under the flickering orange glow of a halogen drop-light."The structural integrity is garbage," Faelwyn said, his voice echoing off the massive turbine casings that loomed like sleeping iron leviathans in the shadows. "But the layout matches the pre-collapse schematics Elias pulled from the federal archives. Which means there's a fortune sitting right beneath our bo

"I didn't trip the breakers, Hanzo. Someone else just threw the manual isolating switch in the lower drainage junction," Jorvanna said, her fingers blurring across the amber-lit keys of the analog control console as a sharp, rhythmic tapping sound echoed through the primary data loop. "And they aren't just siphoning auxiliary power. They're trying to inject a payload directly into our isolated subnet."Hanzo dropped the coil of insulated cable onto the grease-stained concrete with a heavy, metallic thud, his hand instantly dropping to the grip of his sidearm. "An outside tap? I thought Kaelen secured every access hatch from the upper slums to the river.""He did," Faelwyn muttered, stepping out from the shadow of a towering turbine casing, his eyes narrowed as he slid his rifle off his shoulder and checked the chamber with a crisp, mechanical rack. "Which means whoever is down in the lower sumps didn't come through the maintenance hatches. They crawled up through the o

"Drop the soldering iron, kid. Slowly. Unless you want to weld your fingers to your own circuit board," Hanzo said, his voice cutting through the damp, echoing gloom of the lower maintenance vault like a cold razor.The small, grease-smudged figure crouched behind the towering stack of cooling fans froze instantly. The faint, amber glow of a makeshift terminal screen illuminated a face no older than twelve, framed by a shock of matted, dark hair and wide, defiant eyes that darted frantically between Hanzo’s leveled sidearm and Faelwyn’s raised rifle."I wasn't stealing anything," the kid snapped back, voice cracking slightly with the high-pitched friction of forced bravado. "You can't steal open-source packets drifting on a dead corporate subnet. It's public domain data graveyard scrap. Look it up in the pre-collapse municipal codes, old man."Faelwyn lowered his rifle barrel just an inch, his brow furrowing as he looked down at the pathetic array of

"The perimeter sensors are screaming, Hanzo! We’ve got movement across the outer access road—heavy treads and corporate plates!" Kaelen’s boots thundered across the workshop floor, his broad chest heaving beneath a heavy leather vest stained with machine grease and black oil.Hanzo didn’t blink, his hand already dropping smoothly to the grip of his sidearm as he straightened up from the workbench. "How many vehicles? Are they scouting or deploying?""Two personnel carriers and a flatbed hauling concrete blocks and heavy wire," Kaelen barked, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of a calloused, soot-blackened hand. "They aren't just looking around this time. They’re setting up a literal blockade. If we don’t seal the compound right now, they’ll lock down our fuel lines before noon.""Not if we get there first," Faelwyn said coldly, his rifle already chambered with a sharp, metallic clack that ec