The brick facade of the old workspace loomed through the freezing mist like a rotting tooth.
Arkan stopped at the base of the concrete stairs, his right hand still locked onto the heavy fabric of his coat pocket, pinning his useless left arm against his ribs. The building had once borne a blue metal sign reading Novara Printing Holdings, but two years of exposure to the elements had stripped the letters down to ghost imprints on rusted iron.
"The rear window," Bhas murmured, his voice cutting through the heavy silence of the dead zone. He didn't wait for an answer, already stepping into the narrow, weed-choked alley that ran along the side of the structure. His boots crunched softly over abandoned plastic crates and pieces of cracked slate.
Chan closely shadowed Bhas, his oversized mechanic’s jumpsuit swishing loudly as he practically vibrated with nerves. He kept glancing up at the blank, dust-filmed windows above them. "Arkan, you're absolutely sure this place is empty? Like, completely empty? No automated security droids left over from the corporate evacuation? No squatters with axes?"
"The chemical spill ruined the lower basement levels, Chan," Arkan said, walking slowly behind them. His teeth were clenched against the cold, hollow ache that had settled into his left wrist. "The corporate liquidators didn't even bother to salvage the heavy press machines. It’s too expensive to clear the contaminated soil. Nobody comes here."
"Except us," Ela whispered. The silver boy drifted seamlessly through a rusted downspout, his pale form casting a dim, silver luminescence onto the brickwork. He looked down at his own transparent legs, his face tightening with a sudden, anxious frown. "It’s really cold here, Arkan. Not like the fog outside. It’s... a different kind of quiet. Like the air is holding its breath."
"It's an abandoned printing shop, Kir. It’s supposed to be quiet," Arkan muttered, his tone intentionally sharp to deflect the ghost boy's creeping dread. He reached the narrow basement window at the back of the building. The glass was entirely covered in thick soot, and true to his memory, the old brass latch was bent outward, leaving a three-inch gap.
Bhas didn't hesitate. He jammed his thick utility boot under the rotten wooden frame and heaved upward. The old wood splintered with a sharp, echoing CRACK that made Chan jump a foot in the air, his hands instantly clapping over his orange beanie.
"Clear," Bhas said, peering into the pitch-black square opening. A wave of stagnant air rushed out, smelling heavily of dried black ink, industrial mold, and old paper. "Chan, you’re the smallest. Crawl through and see if the stairs are still stable."
"Why is it always me?" Chan wailed in a harsh whisper, his eyes wide as he stared into the dark hole. "It's dark! What if there's a body in there?"
"Because if you break the floorboards, you weigh less," Bhas countered dryly, grabbing Chan by the shoulder of his jumpsuit and shoving him toward the opening. "Go on. Don't make the zero-percent-muscle squad wait."
Chan whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut as he wriggled through the broken frame. A second later, a muffled thud echoed from inside, followed by a shaky, "I'm alive. The floor is concrete. But... guys, you need to see this."
Arkan forced his legs forward, his expression turning into a grim, defensive line as he prepared to haul his dead weight through the window.
Arkan slid through the broken window frame next, maneuvering his rigid left side with a sharp, defensive grunt as Bhas caught his shoulder to steady him.
The basement floor was solid concrete, but it felt slick beneath their boots, coated in a greasy glaze of ancient soot and damp particulate matter. The beam of Chan’s weak penlight cut through the absolute blackness, shaking violently as the smaller boy pointed it toward the center of the subterranean room.
"What is that?" Chan whispered, his teeth chattering so loudly the sound bounced off the brick walls. "Arkan, you said they left the heavy press machines because they were too expensive to move. But those aren't printing presses."
Arkan stepped forward, his eyes narrowing as the dim yellow light illuminated the shadows.
Lining the far wall were three massive, industrial-grade iron cylinders. They weren't the flatbed rollers or ink trays of a standard commercial printing house. They were upright, brutalist vats, wrapped in thick bands of insulation tape that had dried and peeled away like rotting skin. Heavy, severed copper cables hung from the ceilings like dead vines, their thick internal cores cleanly sheared off.
But it was the floor that made Arkan’s breath catch in his throat.
Surrounding the base of the cylinders, the concrete was stained with deep, concentric rings of a dull, synthetic purple residue—the exact same chemical hue as the fluid that had filled the laboratory tanks beneath the school garden.
"A chemical spill," Bhas said, his voice completely dropping its sarcastic edge as he walked up to the nearest vat, tracing a thick layer of black grease with his index finger. He looked back at Arkan, his sharp eyes hard. "That’s what the news report called it in 2024. But your dad didn't run a chemical refinery, Kan. He ran a mid-tier textbook printing company."
"He rented out the lower storage slots to secondary logistics contractors to pay off the bankruptcy debt," Arkan muttered, his voice dropping into a cold, defensive stone wall. His right hand clenched tightly inside his coat pocket, his fingernails digging into his palm to distract himself from the sudden, aggressive throbbing in his left wrist. They were here. Two years ago, the network was already using this sector. "I didn't know what they were storing. He never let me down here."
Ela drifted into the center of the room, his silver form casting a soft, pale halo over the rusted iron cylinders. He didn't hover near Arkan this time; instead, he stopped directly in front of the center vat, his large silver eyes wide with a blank, hollow stare. He reached out a translucent hand, his fingers stopping millimeters away from a thick, brass serial plate riveted to the iron hull.
"The numbers..." Ela whispered, his dual-layered voice fracturing into a tiny, rhythmic frequency of static. "They aren't serial codes, Arkan. It’s a routing sequence. It... it feels like the terminal registry in your eye. It’s just older."
"Don't touch it, Kir," Arkan snapped, stepping between the ghost boy and the metal cylinder, his tsundere walls slamming down to hide the spike of sheer dread in his gut. "We didn't come here to audit the dead stock. We came here to hide. Bhas, find the breaker box for the internal service lift. If the mechanical gears are still intact, we can use the shaft to reach the upper administrative offices."
Before Bhas could move, a low, mechanical thunk echoed from the floor directly beneath their boots.
It wasn't the sound of a drone or a vehicle. It was a deep, rhythmic vibration, like an old, automated sump pump shifting its gears deep within the sealed drainage channels below.
Chan froze, his orange beanie sliding down his forehead as he stared at the floorboards. "Guys... if this district has been completely dead since 2024, why did something just turn on?"
The low, vibrating mechanical hum didn’t rise in pitch; it stayed deep, a sub-bass rumble that rattled the loose gravel sitting in the cracks of the concrete floor.
Bhas dropped flat against the side of the nearest iron vat, his hand instantly clamping over the sleeve of Chan’s oversized jumpsuit to anchor him. "Light out, Chan! Flashlight down, now!"
The weak yellow beam snapped off, plunging the basement back into a heavy, suffocating darkness. The only illumination left was the pale, ghostly silver radiance bleeding from Ela’s silhouette. The ghost boy’s form was trembling, his silver hair drifting wildly as if caught in an invisible, localized updraft.
"It’s not a sump pump," Arkan muttered under his breath, his teeth locked so tight his jaw felt like a rusted hinge. He pressed his back against a crumbling brick pillar, using his right shoulder to take the weight off his rigid, burning left side.
Beneath the canvas layers of his heavy coat, the cold vibration in his dead wrist had begun to mirror the frequency of the floorboards. The dull grey text in his peripheral vision didn't flare with a critical alert, but the letters began to shift, rewriting themselves in slow, sluggish loops.
[UNMAPPED SECTOR ACTIVITY: COLD RE-BOOT DETECTED]
[REGISTRY TYPE: LEGACY HARVESTER]
[ALERT: EXVI_COMPILING...]
"Arkan," Ela’s dual-layered voice called out from the dark, sounding incredibly small, thin, and terrified. He was staring down at his own hands. The translucent edges of his fingers were beginning to shed pale, glowing silver pixels again, but they weren't dissolving into the air this time. They were drifting downward, drawn toward the greasy purple rings on the floor like metal shavings to a magnet. "The basement... it’s hungry. It feels like the drainage tunnels under the garden. It’s trying to... to draw a baseline from me."
"Don't give it one, Kir," Arkan snapped, his voice a harsh, defensive hiss. He weakly reached out with his right hand, his fingers slicing through the icy air to grip the fabric of Ela’s translucent sleeve, forcing the ghost boy closer to his side. "Stay away from the cylinders. Bhas, where is that lift shaft?"
"Ten feet to your left, behind the drainage intake," Bhas’s voice came out of the ink-black shadows, tight and pragmatic. A sharp, metallic scraping sound followed as he dragged a heavy iron pipe out of a rotting wooden rack. "The steel door is counterweighted. If the power line is dead, the mechanical release should still drop the safety teeth. Chan, grab the back of my belt and don't let go."
"I-I'm holding, I'm holding," Chan whimpered, his boots scuffing frantically against the slick concrete as he buried his face into the back of Bhas’s gray utility jacket. "Please tell me we aren't going down. Tell me the only way out is up."
"We're going up," Arkan muttered, his eyes boring into the dark corner where the industrial lift loomed like a iron cage. "The administrative offices have physical lockbolts. If the lower level is running a legacy script, we put three flights of solid reinforced concrete between us and the harvester."
A sharp, violent CLACK echoed from the center cylinder.
The brass serial plate riveted to the iron hull suddenly flared with a series of dull, pulsating violet characters, illuminated from the inside by a decaying, long-dormant filament. The routing sequence didn't connect to the main tower—there was no signal bar in Arkan’s vision—but the localized network was alive, waking up from a two-year hibernation just to register the anomaly that had crossed its border.
The violet light from the cylinder’s plate pulsed in a slow, suffocating rhythm, carving sharp, sickly shadows across the brick ceiling. With every flash, the static in Arkan’s vision crawled faster, weaving the garbled code into a tighter knot behind his retinas.
"Bhas, the lift," Arkan rasped, his right shoulder grinding against the pillar as he forced himself to stand straight. He couldn't let his knees buckle—not in front of Chan, and certainly not while Ela was actively fraying at the edges. His useless left hand felt like an iron weight trying to tear itself through the lining of his coat pocket. "Open the damn thing before the loop finishes compiling."
"I'm on it. Shut up and keep your eyes peeled," Bhas hissed from the darkness. A heavy, metallic clunk echoed through the bay as Bhas slammed his iron pipe against the rusted manual release lever of the service lift. The ancient mechanism screeched in protest, throwing down a small shower of orange rust into the grease-slicked concrete.
Chan gripped the back of Bhas’s utility jacket so hard the seams groaned. "Bhas, it’s clicking. The floor... the drainage grates are clicking! Something is sliding inside the pipes!"
Ela didn't look at the floor. His wide, silver eyes remained locked onto the pulsing violet characters on the central cylinder. The glowing silver pixels rising from his shoulders were drifting faster now, pulled toward the metal hull like smoke sucked into a furnace vent. "Arkan... it's calling the index," his dual-layered voice vibrated, dropping into a mechanical drone that made the hairs on Arkan’s neck stand up. "It’s not looking for you. It’s looking for the... the redundant unit. It thinks I belong to the 2024 ledger."
"You don't belong to anything, Kir," Arkan growled, his tsundere armor locking down into a hard, vicious snarl. He stepped out from the pillar, his right hand shooting out to grab Ela’s freezing, translucent forearm. The contact was like plunging his bare flesh into dry ice, but he clamped his fingers down anyway, anchoring the ghost boy with pure, stubborn defiance. "I told you to stop reading the framework. You’re with us. The system is dead."
"The system isn't dead, Kan! It’s just old!" Bhas roared, throwing his entire weight against the iron pipe.
With a deafening, echoing CLANG, the safety teeth of the service lift finally disengaged. The heavy, counterweighted iron mesh door slid upward with a grinding screech, revealing the black, empty square of the vertical shaft.
"Chan, get in! Move your legs!" Bhas yelled, shoving the smaller boy through the narrow opening. Chan didn't even whimper this time; he simply scrambled into the darkness of the iron cage, his oversized mechanic’s overalls scratching loudly against the metal floorboards.
Before Arkan could drag Ela toward the shaft, the pulsating violet light on the cylinder snapped into a solid, brilliant glare. The rhythmic mechanical hum beneath their feet instantly shifted into a high-pitched, electric whine—the unmistakable sound of ancient capacitors flooding with a sudden, localized surge of raw power.
Across Arkan's retinas, the grey text went completely red.
[LEGACY HARVESTER: COMPILED]
[TARGET COMPILATION: ANOMALY_04_SURYA]
[ATTEMPTING PHYSICAL RE-LOCK...]
The heavy iron mesh door of the service lift rattled violently as the elevator shaft began to hiss, a jet of pressurized, metallic-smelling air bursting from the floor vents below.
"Kan, pull him in! Now!" Bhas roared, his knuckles white as he threw his shoulder against the iron frame of the lift cage, desperately holding the manual release lever down.
Arkan didn't think. He locked his fingers around Ela’s wrist, his right arm straining until the tendons in his neck stood out like wires. The ghost boy’s body felt completely weightless, yet the physical drag against the cylinder's vacuum was immense, like trying to pull someone out of a localized whirlpool. The pale silver aura around Ela was stretching, distorting into jagged, horizontal lines of code that snapped and crackled against the concrete floor.
"Arkan, it hurts!" Ela cried, his dual-layered voice breaking completely into a sharp, piercing whine of raw audio feedback. His silver eyes were wide with a childlike terror, staring down at the thick, red text floating directly between them. "The ledger... it’s deleting my parameters! It’s overwriting me!"
"I told you to shut up and hold on!" Arkan snarled, his tsundere armor flaring into a vicious, desperate anger to mask the absolute dread freezing his chest. He refused to lose him. He refused to let a piece of rusted, automated garbage from 2024 decide who got to stay. "You think I went through that entire drainage run just to watch you turn into a dead data packet? Move your legs, Kir!"
With a final, violent heave, Arkan threw his entire weight backward into the dark lift cage. His heels caught the edge of the iron platform, and he tumbled into the metal mesh floor, dragging Ela’s shivering, pixelated form straight down over his chest.
Bhas immediately let go of the manual release.
The heavy iron door slammed down with a deafening, echoing CRASH, the massive lockbolt dropping into place just as a brilliant, blinding pulse of violet light erupted from the central cylinder outside. The high-pitched electric whine peaked, then suddenly died, followed by the heavy, rhythmic clack-clack-clack of automated fire-suppression valves sealing off the basement pipes.
For a second, the only sound inside the pitch-black lift shaft was the frantic, hyperventilating breath of Chan, who was curled into a tight ball against the back corner of the cage.
"Is... is it over?" Chan whimpered, his voice barely a squeak. "Did it lock us in?"
Arkan slowly pushed himself up with his right arm, his chest heaving as he stared down at his chest. Ela was still there, curled tightly against his side, his translucent hands gripping the oil-stained canvas of Arkan's coat. The silver boy was weeping quiet, glowing trails of static, but his silhouette had stabilized, the pixelated fractures along his arms slowly stitching themselves back together in the dark.
[LEGACY HARVESTER: TARGET LOST]
[COMPILATION: FAILED — INTERRUPT_SIGNAL_RECEIVED]
[CURRENT STATUS: ISOLATED SHAFT — MANUAL ASCENT REQUIRED]
Bhas let out a long, slow breath through his teeth, his hand hitting the heavy mechanical winding crank set into the wall of the elevator cage. He looked back at Arkan, his sharp eyes cutting through the gloom to check the rigid, hidden shape of the MC’s left arm.
"We’re clear of the basement grid," Bhas said, his mouth settling into a hard, grim line as he grabbed the heavy iron handle of the crank. "But the system just verified that an anomalous unit is physically present in this sector. The administrative floor above us isn't going to be a hiding spot for long. Hold onto something. We're going up the old-fashioned way."
With a harsh, metallic groan, the heavy steel cables above them began to twist, dragging the iron cage slowly upward into the black vertical void of the shaft.