Passing through the heavy armored blast door, we entered the absolute lowest core sector of the Old Capital.

  Unlike the bio-engineering lab above, which reeked of sickening formalin, this space was suffocatingly dry. It smelled of freezing machine oil, cold metal, and the heavy sediment of millennia.

  I raised my flashlight, sweeping the high-intensity beam across the impossibly vast subterranean cavern. The UI on my retinas finally caught a faint local signal ping, rapidly downloading the environmental telemetry:

  “Jasta.”

  I minimized the UI panel, turning to the fox merchant who was currently pinching his nose and surveying the dark space.

  “Your risk assessment was dead on. The geological structure here is flawless. If Skyreach really can't withstand the Dragon King rolling over, this is our new city.”

  Before Jasta could even flash his signature smug grin, the beam of my flashlight swept across the center of the massive hangar.

  In that exact microsecond, every single person in the crew stopped breathing. Our hearts practically stalled.

  Crouched silently in the deep, pitch-black shadows were two unimaginably colossal steel leviathans.

  They were super-heavy armored vehicles, easily three times the mass of the “Spider-Mechs” we had fought on the surface. Their absurdly wide, heavy-duty treads were sunk deep into the reinforced alloy floor grooves. Mounted on top of their massive chassis were twin electromagnetic acceleration rails, stretching over ten meters long and gleaming with a dark, lethal metallic sheen.

  Painted across the front of their dust-covered sloped armor were highly visible white serial numbers, stamped right next to faded nuclear radiation hazard warnings.

  “By the Creator...”

  Selena’s voice trembled through her respirator. She involuntarily took a step back, as if absolute terror had been hardcoded into her genetics.

  “Are those... the legendary ‘Chariots of Divine Punishment’? The ones the hymns say leveled half the continent with a single shot during the Twilight of the Gods?”

  “They were E.D.E.N. Punisher-Class Tracked Railguns.”

  “Two thousand years ago, these machines of pure, unadulterated physical violence had used hyper-kinetic slugs traveling at multiple Mach speeds to completely crush any mutated indigenous resistance or magical civilization that dared to fight back.”

  Brad swallowed hard. The veins on his forehead bulged as he instinctively raised the barrel of his portable steam autocannon.

  “Don't move a muscle.”

  I clamped my hand down hard over Brad’s barrel. Cold sweat dripped down my forehead, stinging my eyes.

  On my UI panel, an aggressively glaring, blood-red death radius was currently rendering around the two tanks:

  “We route around them.” I forced my voice down to a barely audible whisper, terrified to even breathe too heavily. “The main gun on that thing can shave the top off a mountain. The secondary battery’s rate of fire will turn us into a fine red mist in half a second. With the scrap metal we’re carrying, we aren't even qualified to scratch their paint.”

  Moving like rats sneaking through a dragon’s nest, we hugged the freezing ferrocrete walls, advancing with agonizing caution. Every step felt like walking on a minefield. Desperately suppressing any clinking of our gear, we finally managed to bypass the two sleeping reapers without triggering their proximity sensors.

  At the absolute far end of the hangar, inside a dust-sealed clean room, we hit the real payload.

  It was a massive, highly complex machine that looked like a multi-armed surgical table. Dozens of precision robotic arms hung limply in the air. The operating bed below was caked in dust, but dead center, a quantum printing nozzle still pulsed with a faint standby light.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  E.D.E.N. Universal Assembler / Matter Printer

  I reached out, gently wiping the dust off the freezing console. The industrial fanaticism boiling in my chest was almost impossible to suppress.

  “This is an industrial mother-machine. It’s capable of taking raw, unrefined ore and restructuring it directly into nano-precision components.”

  I looked at Mykra and Brad, my voice trembling slightly from pure adrenaline. “If we can secure that Main Processing Chip from the Golden Empire and boot this thing up, the Skyreach armory completely bypasses the steam age. We skip the Industrial Revolution entirely. We jump straight to guided munitions. We can build actual ballistic missiles.”

  Just as I was drowning in a manic blueprint of future heavy ordnance, Mykra—who had been running a scan behind the mother-machine—suddenly let out a choked gasp.

  “Boss! There’s a concealed bulkhead door back here!”

  I immediately hustled over, swiping the fractured Cat-kin key through the slot on the security terminal.

  Hiss—

  With the stale, heavy sigh of a depressurizing airlock, a cascade of dust fell from the ceiling as the heavy doors slid apart.

  It wasn't a material storage locker as I expected. It was a massive, cylindrical vacuum-sealed superconducting tunnel.

  A highly aerodynamic, silver maglev train—its hull long stripped of its luster—sat silently at the platform, looking like a dead metallic python.

  Hanging directly above the platform was a heavily oxidized electronic transit board. The English text read:

  Line Alpha: Sec. 01 to Sec. 04 (Mass Damping Bunker)

  “Sec. 01 to Sec. 04...”

  “This facility is physically hardwired directly to the bunker beneath Skyreach!”

  “This is a vacuum-sealed, superconducting subterranean railway buried deep in the mantle, running straight from the Old Capital to Skyreach!”

  I stared at the dust-covered, completely structurally intact train, my eyes burning with absolute ecstasy.

  “If we can re-route power to this train, we can haul all forty thousand citizens of Skyreach directly into this absolute safe zone in a matter of hours! We won't have to march tens of thousands of people and heavy logistics on foot across that godforsaken radioactive wasteland!”

  This was our extraction route! A flawless, dimension-breaking Noah’s Ark!

  However, in this cursed, bug-ridden world, absolute ecstasy usually came bundled with absolute lethality.

  Just as I swept my tactical flashlight over the massive magnetic levitation engines at the rear of the train, the high-intensity beam triggered a microscopic electrostatic discharge off the dust-caked superconducting rails.

  Zzzzt—

  A hair-thin blue arc of electricity jumped straight into an exposed security relay.

  The next millisecond, the dead silence of the hangar outside was violently shattered by an agonizingly loud, mechanical combat alarm!

  The seismic tremors had masked our footsteps, but the static discharge just woke up the guard dogs.

  The multi-faceted, red electronic optics on the heads of the two Punisher-Class Railguns—machines that had slept for two millennia—instantly flared to life, burning like the eyes of demons opening in the abyss.

  Accompanied by the deafening, earth-shaking grind of massive gears locking into place, the colossal railgun barrels began to slowly, inexorably rotate toward the clean room, projecting an aura of absolute, unavoidable death!

  “Run!!”

  Brad roared, pure instinct taking over as he tried to level his steam autocannon to return fire.

  “Hold your fire! They use dual thermal and kinetic tracking!”

  My UI panel was strobing a blinding red, instantly calculating the elevation angles and scanning blind spots of the twin railguns.

  “Selena! Dump a localized absolute-zero blizzard! Everyone else, on my six! Hug the blind spots behind the load-bearing pillars! Move!”

  In that split second of total crisis, Selena didn't hesitate. She violently slammed her palms together, burning through whatever mana she had regenerated.

  The ambient temperature in the subterranean hall instantly crashed below freezing. The thin moisture in the air rapidly condensed, generating a massive, hyper-dense smokescreen of white frost and ice fog. This extreme thermal drop severely scrambled the highly sensitive infrared thermal-imaging sensors on the railguns.

  Like five ghosts, we sprinted across the frost-covered floor, practically scraping our armor against the massive concrete pillars to stay in their blind spots, diving headfirst into the grated industrial stairwell we had used to descend.

  Scrambling on our hands and knees, we had barely hit the third-floor switchback landing when—

  THOOOOOM————!!!

  A terrifying, soul-shattering detonation erupted from below, the sheer flash of light temporarily blinding me.

  Their thermal locks scrambled by the logic error, the railguns unleashed a blind suppression shot.

  A massive, solid tungsten-steel slug, carrying an absolutely incalculable amount of kinetic energy, shrieked past the edge of the stairwell.

  The sheer vacuum shear generated by the projectile’s wake caught me like a hurricane, violently tossing me to the grated floor like a ragdoll.

  I watched in horror as that single slug hit the distant titanium-alloy wall, instantly liquefying the metal and punching a perfectly clean, three-meter-wide hole straight through it! The edges of the impact crater glowed a blinding red, molten steel running down the wall like water.

  The violent seismic shockwave nearly shook the entire stairwell to pieces. Rust and concrete dust rained down on our heads like a torrential downpour.

  “Keep moving! Do not look back!”

  Clawing our way up the stairs, driven by pure adrenaline and the immediate threat of death, we finally breached the upper level—the Bio-Engineering Lab.

  Without even pausing to drag in oxygen, I spun around, violently hauling the heavy blast door shut. I jammed the Cat-kin key through the terminal scanner as fast as my hands could move.

  Click.

  The physical hard-lock engaged. The thick alloy perfectly sealed the flawless subterranean sanctuary—along with the two awakened reapers—back into another two thousand years of darkness.

  A heavy, muffled kinetic impact hammered against the other side of the door, but it quickly faded into silence.

  ...

  When we finally broke the surface, scrambled aboard the Skyreach Fury, and punched through the radioactive fog under the violent roar of the steam turbines, every single one of us looked like we had just been dragged out of a river, completely drenched in sweat.

  Seeing the harsh, twilight sun of the wasteland spill through the viewport, I ripped off my gas mask and exhaled a massive, ragged breath. My lungs burned like fire, and I could taste the heavy copper tang of blood in my mouth.

  “Jasta,” I rasped, leaning heavily against the vibrating bulkhead, looking at the old fox who was currently petting down his singed tail, still hyperventilating.

  “Your risk assessment was flawless. The foundation of the Old Capital is perfect. If Skyreach hits the absolute point of no return, we can relocate everyone here. That subterranean railway is our Noah’s Ark.”

  Before Jasta could even flash his signature smug grin, I dropped the hammer.

  "But I wouldn't call it 'flawless' just yet."

  I pointed down at the sand-choked cyberpunk ruins beneath the airship, the phantom pressure of those two mechanical leviathans that nearly vaporized us still fresh in my mind.

  "It only becomes flawless after we paralyze that automated defense grid—or better yet, hack it and take it for ourselves."

  I turned around, walking slowly to the viewport, staring out at the distant, hazy southern horizon.

  My brain kept looping the data: the freezing subterranean railway, the colossal industrial mother-machine, and the audio log from the old scientist detailing the traitors who fled South with the main processor chip.

  A completely cold, massive logical discrepancy suddenly assembled itself in my mind, sending a fresh chill down my spine.

  I turned back, looking at the exhausted faces of my crew. My voice dropped low, sounding almost like I was asking myself:

  Sector 01 is right here beneath the Old Capital. Sector 04 is the damping bunker beneath Skyreach.”

  “So... where the hell are Sectors 02 and 03?”