The Last Mortal

CHAPTER 8: THE OUTSIDE ASCENT

 

"The maintenance shafts are compromised," Mira's voice cracked frantically through the earpiece, accompanied by the muffled, rhythmic boom of heavy demolition charges detonating a few floors above. "A vanguard execution squad just dropped a chemical suppression barrier down the main vent lines. If you try to climb out through the service ducts, you'll melt before you hit the mezzanine."

I slid to a halt at the edge of the access corridor. Behind my black visor, the internal HUD painted the structural framework of the palace in shimmering blue wireframes, but the route upward was rapidly lighting up in violent, warning crimson. The service ladders were flooded with toxic, aura-eating gas.

"What about the external maintenance crane?" I asked, my boots already turning back toward the broken glass windows at the western end of the archive floor.

"The high-altitude window washers use a magnetic tether system on the outer hull, but the power lines to the tracks were severed during the security lockdown," Mira explained, her mechanical eye clicking rapidly on her end of the feed as she cross-referenced the building schematics. "Even if you force the emergency manual releases, you'd be climbing a vertical obsidian sheet at eighty thousand feet with zero gravity assistance."

"I don't need gravity assistance," I said. "I have Dominic's script."

I charged forward, my long duster coat snapping behind me as I smashed my shoulder straight through the reinforced frost-glass panoramic window. The thick pane shattered into thousands of diamond-like fragments, instantly sucked out into the roaring, high-altitude slipstream of the Upper Ring’s skyway.

I stepped out onto the narrow ledge. The wind at this altitude was a vicious, howling beast, screaming with a freezing current that instantly threatened to rip the coat from my back and fling my body into the endless neon abyss of the lower city miles below. The sky-scar pulsed directly above the grand spires, bleeding thin, erratic lines of purple and gold light across the dark atmosphere.

I looked straight up the vertical face of the spire. The outer wall was a continuous, unbroken mirror of polished obsidian stone, slick with high-altitude condensation and devoid of any natural handholds.

I raised my right hand, focusing on the heavy, rotating vortex of purple energy floating within the gray static of my directory. Instead of running Dominic’s gravity script as a wide environmental field, I compressed the code, forcing the gravity vectors to isolate themselves entirely to the soles of my boots and the palms of my gloves.

I slammed my left palm against the obsidian wall.

[Executing Code Modification: Gravity Orientation Inversion.]

[Target Parameters: Localized Contact Points Only.]

The purple light flared beneath my fingers with a sharp, low hum. To the rest of the world, down was still a lethal, miles-long drop into the industrial slums. But to my body, the vertical surface of the palace spire was now the ground. I stepped off the freezing ledge, my boots snapping onto the obsidian surface with a heavy, magnetic thud as my center of mass flipped ninety degrees.

I began to sprint straight up the side of the building.

The sensation was a violent assault on my equilibrium. The wind tore at my collar from what felt like the side, while my body processed the sheer momentum of running forward along a wall that should have rejected my weight. Every stride left a small, spiderweb crack in the dark glass panels beneath my heels as the condensed gravity code fought to anchor my mass against the high-altitude gale.

"Ren, what is your current elevation?" Mira demanded, her voice cutting through a massive wall of atmospheric static. "My terminal is registering a rogue kinetic vector moving up the western face at eighty kilometers per hour. You're tracking like a missile."

"I'm at seventy floors," I said, my voice entirely flat as my legs pumped, eating the distance panel by panel. "Keep the data lines clear."

Suddenly, the air thirty meters above my position warped violently. A defensive drone squadron—sleek, silver discs armed with twin-linked kinetic repeaters—dropped from the higher balconies, their blue optical lenses locking instantly onto my charging silhouette. They didn't pause to run a registration scan. The Ministry had already marked my physical coordinates as a terminal virus.

The twin barrels of the lead drone flashed a blinding white. A hail of high-velocity kinetic slugs chewed through the obsidian wall, chasing my footsteps as I cut hard to the left, running in a jagged zigzag pattern across the face of the mirror. The glass exploded in a rhythmic chain behind me, showering my duster in sharp, icy shards.

I didn't stop to fight them. As the second drone angled its chassis to cut off my trajectory, I reached deep into the directory, pulling the Stone-Shaper code I had taken from the border guard in Chapter 1. Without losing a single beat of my stride, I let the brown elemental energy flow through my left arm while keeping the gravity loop anchored through my boots.

I punched the obsidian wall as I passed a shattered panel. The stone-shaper essence instantly rewrote the molecular structure of the broken glass, drawing a jagged, three-meter spike of solid granite directly out of the smooth facade.

The unexpected stone barrier erupted right in front of the lead drone. The silver machine couldn't adjust its velocity in time, slamming headfirst into the heavy granite projection with a spectacular crunch of metal and fuel. The explosion bloomed into a bright orange fireball that lit up the dark surface of the tower, sending burning debris spinning into the sky.

I sprinted straight through the smoke, my black visor filtering out the sudden glare as I leaped over the burning wreckage. The remaining two drones swiveled their turrets, but their tracking software was completely unoptimized for a target that could manipulate environmental weight and material structure simultaneously.

I closed the distance in a single, gravity-assisted leap, landing directly on top of the closer drone's chassis. The moment my bare hand gripped its silver armor plating, the Null key inside my consciousness opened wide.

The machine’s essence-driven battery didn't just short-circuit; the absolute vacuum of my physical frame drained the storage cells dry in a fraction of a second, pulling the electrical current straight into my pores. The drone died instantly, its internal lights going black as it dropped like a stone into the clouds below.

I used the falling chassis as a stepping stone, launching myself toward the open balcony of the 95th floor just as the final drone’s gun barrels began to glow for another volley. I grabbed the golden railing, flipped my gravity vector back to real-space, and rolled lightly onto the marble floor of the upper executive tier.

[Directory Status: Stable.]

[Target Floor: 99—Four Levels Remaining.]

I stood up, unbuckling the top strap of my duster coat to let the excess thermal heat vent from my chest. The central spire was within reach, and the air up here tasted like old silver.