The Last Mortal

CHAPTER 3: DROWNING THE TITHES

 

"If you don't have the essence to pay the tribute, we'll take your lifeforce straight from your marrow."

The voice echoed from the top of the basement stairs, cold and sharp enough to cut through the heavy scent of starch in the workshop. I froze, my hand hovering over a roll of null-threaded silk on Mira’s workbench.

Beside me, Mira’s mechanical eye whirled into a tight, panicked pinprick. She grabbed my forearm, her grip white-knuckled as the heavy thud of military boots vibrated through the floorboards above our heads.

"It’s Master Boros," Mira whispered, her voice barely a breath. "He’s the Grand Patriarch’s primary tithe-collector for this sector. He wasn't supposed to audit this block for another three weeks."

"How many men did he bring?" I asked, keeping my voice entirely level as I slipped my hand into the pocket of my coat, gripping the silver registry token I had stolen at the gate.

"Three vanguards," Mira said, looking at a small copper monitoring screen on the wall that flickered with the external security feeds. "He carries a Bronze-rank fluid lineage. He can manipulate the moisture in the air to dehydrate a target in seconds. If he detects your lack of an aura, we are dead before we hit the street."

"Stay down here," I said, pulling my arm from her grip. "Keep the database cores safe."

I climbed the wooden stairs silently, pushing the concealed floor hatch open just enough to slip into the back room of the showroom. Through the velvet curtains, I could see four figures standing in the center of the shop.

Master Boros stood at the front, wearing a heavy ceremonial coat embroidered with golden waves. His fingers were long and skeletal, surrounded by a swirling, high-pressure ring of clear liquid that hissed as it spun against his knuckles.

Behind him, three standard vanguard guards were already tossing bolts of expensive silk onto the floor, stamping their muddy boots into the pristine white carpet.

"Solenn!" Boros called out again, his voice dripping with aristocratic boredom. "I know you're hiding in the back, girl. Your shop's energy consumption signature spiked ten percent during the border reset. You're buffering unauthorized data, or you're harboring a runner. Step out and present your ledger, or I'll drain the moisture from your lungs right now."

I pushed the velvet curtain aside and stepped into the showroom, my hands tucked into my pockets. "The owner is downstairs sorting the inventory, Master Boros. I am her new assistant."

Boros stopped spinning the water ring around his knuckles. He turned his head slowly, his eyes narrowing as he looked at my face. He didn't offer a polite greeting. He raised a small brass diagnostic rod, pointing the tip directly at my chest to scan my lineage signature.

The brass rod hummed, registering the fake Iron-rank pulse I was projecting from the stolen border guard's token.

"An Iron-rank laborer?" Boros sneered, lowering the rod with an expression of pure disdain. "A common Stone-Shaper acting as a boutique assistant? This district is deteriorating by the hour. Where is the ledger for the monthly essence tax, trash?"

"We paid the tax six days ago," I said, stepping closer to the counter, keeping my weight balanced on the balls of my feet. "The receipt should be logged in the sector mainframe."

"The mainframe underwent a critical hard reset twenty minutes ago due to an undocumented error at the gate," Boros said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, low register. "All digital receipts from the lower trades are temporarily voided. The Grand Patriarch requires a physical titration to compensate for the server downtime. Five liters of raw essence, or the equivalent value in bloodline marrow."

One of the vanguard guards stepped forward, pulling a heavy brass extraction needle from his utility belt. "Hold still, laborer. We'll start with your primary veins."

"I don't think so," I said.

Boros laughed, a dry, rattling sound that made the water around his fingers expand into a jagged crescent. "You don't get a choice, Iron-rank. If you resist a holy audit, your entire family line is flagged for total formatting."

He thrust his right hand forward. The clear liquid around his knuckles erupted into a high-speed jet of pressurized fluid, targeting my face. The water didn't just move fast; it possessed a unnatural, parasitic pull, designed to violently extract the cellular moisture from my skin upon contact and leave me a withered corpse.

The fluid stream struck my chest dead center.

There was no wet impact. There was no spray of water across the white carpet.

The moment the Bronze-rank fluid essence touched the fabric of my tunic, the bottomless throat inside my chest opened wide. The absolute emptiness of my mortal body swallowed the elemental current whole, drinking the pressurized moisture directly into my pores. The high-speed jet vanished into my skin like a drop of rain falling into a desert, leaving the front of my clothes completely dry.

Boros froze, his extended hand still trembling in the air. The water around his knuckles stopped spinning, sputtering out into a few harmless drops that splattered onto the glass counter. He stared at his empty palm, his internal tracking metrics returning a catastrophic data failure. "What... where did the volume go? My script didn't execute."

"Your script is mine now," I said.

I lunged across the glass counter before the three guards could draw their kinetic sidearms. My bare hand shot forward, my fingers clamping tightly around Boros's throat. The physical loop was established instantly. The Null key inside my consciousness slammed open with the force of an iron gate, locking onto the rare, fluid-based DNA structure within his blood.

I could feel his Bronze-rank lineage—a denser, more complex sequence than the guard's iron stone, but still incredibly fragile when exposed to a total vacuum.

I pulled.

Boros let out a wet, strangled gasp. His eyes rolled back into his head as his knees buckled beneath his fine ceremonial coat. The vibrant blue warmth in his veins was violently dragged upward, flowing through his neck and straight into the static of my palm. He thrashed against my grip, his fingers clawing uselessly at my wrist as his divine connection to the ancestor was uninstalled line by line.

Divine Energy Input: Water-Weaver (Bronze-Rank) detected.

Action: Executing total consumption.

Status: Complete. Core data archived in storage bank.

I threw him aside. The grand tithe-collector crashed into a display mannequin, his body rolling onto the floor. His skin was dry, pale, and completely devoid of the healthy luminescent glow of an elite noble. He lay there shivering, gasping for air as a baseline human being.

The three vanguard guards backed toward the door in absolute terror, their hands shaking so badly they couldn't even unholster their weapons. They looked at their groveling master, then back at my grey eyes.

"Run," I told them.

They didn't hesitate. They threw the door open and scrambled out into the neon-lit alleyway, leaving their leader behind in the dust.