THE GLUTTONY SYSTEM

Chapter 25: Friction

Chapter 25: Friction

"The weight distribution is completely wrong," Chai muttered, his voice sounding like two sheets of corrugated iron sliding across each other in a windstorm. "If I trip on a rung, this thing doesn't just short-circuit. It's going to cook my spine like an over-fried circuit board."

"Then don't trip, you ungrateful scrap-heap," Lin snapped from the bottom of the maintenance shaft, her voice echoing upward through the metallic cylinder like a drill bit hitting limestone. She was standing on the platform below, holding the stabilization cradle steady with both hands, her knuckles white against the dark grease of her gloves. "I didn't spend three hours rewiring that auxiliary bypass just so you could take a tumble on the third tier. Climb!"

Chai grunted, his massive, carbon-plated shoulders pressing hard against the cold, vertical ribs of the service ladder. Strapped securely to his back with three rows of heavy-duty webbed tungsten-alloy strapping was the overload battery Lin had forced upon him—a thrumming, rectangular behemoth of containment gel and high-density capacitors that radiated an intense, dry heat right through his makeshift armor. Every time he shifted his weight to take a step upward, the battery groaned against the harness, its internal coolant pumps whining at a pitch that set his teeth on edge.

[WARNING: CORE TEMPERATURE AT 78.4 DEGREES CELSIUS,] Box chimed inside his skull, the interface flickering with sharp, frantic lines of amber light that danced across his optical nerves. [PROXIMITY TO THERMAL THRESHOLD: CRITICAL. ACCELERATED CLIMBING WILL INDUCE CELLULAR SEPARATION IN THE LUMBAR REGION.]

"Shut up, Box," Chai rasped, his left hand locking around a rusted iron rung with a force that made the metal groan and bend slightly under his grip.

[LOCAL AMBIENT AIR PRESSURE IS DROPPING,] the interface continued, completely ignoring his command as usual, its cadence dipping uncomfortably into Vachirawit's old, sycophantic baritone. [SUGGESTED ACTION: CEDING CONTROL TO ADMINISTRATIVE BACKUP TO OPTIMIZE ENERGY EXPENDITURE. LET US HELP YOU CARRY THE BURDEN, CHAI. IT'S MUCH EASIER IF YOU STOP FIGHTING THE ARCHITECTURE.]

"I said shut it," Chai snarled between clenched, heavily calcified jaws. He heaved his body upward, his right boot finding the next rung with a heavy, metallic clang that reverberated through the hollow core of the service shaft.

As his weight shifted, the friction between his mutated, scaly hide and the scorching metal of the battery casing generated a sudden spike of localized heat. His skin hissed—a sharp, wet sound followed by the unmistakable smell of scorched keratin and burning insulation. A jolt of pure, white-hot agony shot up from his tailbone straight to the base of his skull, making his vision flare with blinding spots of violet light.

"Careful!" Lin yelled from below, her voice cracking slightly with strain. "You're venting too much heat! The weld on the lower bracket is starting to glow!"

"It's not the weld," Chai wheezed, his chest heaving as he forced another rung upward, his massive biceps straining until the carbon-weave plating across his shoulders threatened to pop its rivets. "It's the... the intake. The air up here is too thin to cool the coils."

"Then move faster, you idiot! If you linger in the transitional zone between Level 60 and the Upper-Middle administrative core, the automated fire-suppression sprinklers are going to target your bio-signature as a localized hazard and flood the shaft with liquid nitrogen! Do you want to be flash-frozen like a side of corporate beef?"

"I'd rather be frozen than melted," Chai growled, though he obeyed, driving his boots into the rungs with reckless, bone-shattering force.

Every upward movement was a struggle against gravity and biology. His body, half-flesh and half-salvaged data-drone, was caught in a permanent state of cellular rebellion. The organic parts of him screamed for oxygen and rest, while the implanted industrial steel and routing cables demanded more voltage, more throughput, more fuel. His internal hunger spiked violently, the digital ticker in his lower peripheral vision flashing an ominous red: 82%.

"Hungry again, big guy?" Lin shouted up, her footsteps ringing out as she climbed a few meters up the lower section of the ladder to keep pace with him. She wasn't carrying the battery, but she was lugging a heavy tool bag loaded with pneumatic wrenches and spare fuses that clanked together like a bag of loose bones. "You burn through calories faster than a district-level heating plant."

"Shut up and keep climbing," Chai panted, his forehead pressed against the freezing metal of the ladder upright as he paused for a fraction of a second to catch his breath. A thin trail of dark, viscous fluid—part blood, part synthetic coolant—dripped from his chin, hissing softly as it hit the hot casing of the battery strapped to his back. "If I stop... I'm going to start chewing on the rungs."

"Don't you dare. Those are proprietary structural assets of the Sky-Ark Logistics Division. If you eat the stairs, the whole middle management wing will collapse into the ventilation shafts, and then we'll really have paperwork to deal with."

Despite the grim reality of their ascent, a harsh, grating sound escaped Chai's throat—something dangerously close to a laugh, though it ended in a cough that tasted of copper and burned oil. "You've got a strange sense of humor for a woman living in a rusted-out pipe, Lin."

"You live long enough down in the mid-tiers, Chai, you either laugh or you let some mid-level bureaucrat repossess your liver for unpaid water taxes," she replied, her voice dropping slightly as she hauled herself past a junction box marked with faded safety warnings. "How's the battery holding up? Is the bypass stable?"

Chai tilted his head back, pressing his optical sensors against the rung above him to get a better reading through Box's HUD. The amber warning lights had settled into a steady, pulsing thrum, but the temperature gauge had climbed another three degrees.

[WARNING: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE BACKPACK HARNESS COMPROMISED BY 14%. RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE REDUCTION OF LOAD OR DISPOSAL OF NON-ESSENTIAL BIOMASS.]

"It's holding," Chai lied, his fingers digging so deeply into the iron rungs that his steel-reinforced fingertips scraped grooves into the metal. "The housing is cracking, but the cable's locked. We've got maybe another hundred meters before the core melts through my shoulder blades."

"A hundred meters? That's nothing. That's just three maintenance levels and a tax-processing dead zone," Lin said, though her tone lacked its previous absolute confidence. He heard the scrape of her boots against the metal below as she paused, catching her breath. "Listen to me, Chai. When we clear this shaft, we're going to pop out right into the auxiliary transit hub for the Upper-Middle tiers. It's usually swarming with compliance officers and low-level VPs trying to catch the last elevator before the lockdown reaches the lower spires."

"Good," Chai muttered, his muscles trembling with fatigue as he forced himself up another three rungs. "I was getting tired of eating file clerks and IT contractors. I hear executives have a better marbling."

"Just focus on the climb, you monster," Lin snapped, though there was no real venom in it now, only the sharp, driving edge of mutual survival. "When those doors open, you're going to need every ounce of that ugly strength. They aren't going to roll out the red carpet for a guy carrying an overheating reactor on his back."

"They never do," Chai said.

With a final, explosive heave that bent the lower third of the ladder out of alignment, Chai drove his heavy boots through the final service hatch, his shoulders slamming against the reinforced steel flooring of the Upper-Middle transit hub with a deafening crash. The battery on his back shrieked, a high-pitched alarm that echoed across the polished, white-tiled corridors of the corporate luxury zone, scattering a dozen well-dressed middle managers who were clustered around a dead transit terminal.

Chai pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, the air around him suddenly changing from the stale, greasy smell of the maintenance shafts to the crisp, chemically purified ozone of the upper tiers. His internal hunger meter flashed a steady, blinding red 82%, and as he raised his head to look at the terrified faces of the men in expensive, tailored suits staring down at him, he realized that Lin hadn't exa

ggerated at all.

The menu had just been upgraded.