The stench of rotting lilies didn't lift. It clung to the back of Arkan's throat, thick and oily, carrying a heavy metallic undertone that tasted distinctively like copper pipes left to corrode in stagnant pond water.
He stayed flat on his back for three long seconds, his right hand buried in a drift of damp, black leaf mold while his chest heaved against the tight collar of his dark canvas coat. Above them, towering through the cracked and milky glass panes of a high, Victorian-style greenhouse ceiling, the monolithic concrete block of the Novara Advanced Academy science building loomed against the gray morning sky. It looked wider from this angle, its smooth, windowless facade casting a sharp, geometric shadow over the entire overgrown courtyard.
"My knees," Chan wheezed from a pile of overturned plastic crates. He was curled into a tight ball, his hands clamped over his orange beanie as he violently rocked back and forth on the damp soil. "I left my kneecaps on a rusted rivet back in mile two of that pipe. I can feel it. There's old industrial dust inside my bone marrow."
"If you have breath to complain about your joints, your lungs are functioning within normal parameters," Bhas muttered, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He pushed himself upright, his heavy utility boots crushing a patch of pale, translucent weeds that grew through the cracks of the stone floorboards. He immediately reached down to retrieve his salvaged iron pipe from the refuse heap, checking the weight with a quick, clinical flick of his wrist. "Kan. Get up. We're sitting in an open bucket."
Arkan didn't answer right away. He rolled onto his right side, his teeth grinding together as he forced his body into a crouch. Moving his left arm was like trying to hoist a sack of wet mortar; the dead weight hung completely limp within his sleeve, the skin beneath his wristwatch throbbing with a persistent, icy vibration that felt like a localized network error. Across his retinas, the familiar grey registry lines didn't shift into a full red alert, but the layout remained unstable, minor diagnostic indicators flickering along the lower margin of his vision.
[LOCAL DOMAIN: SECTION_04_RESTRICTED]
[ATMOSPHERIC STATUS: CALIBRATED STATIC]
[SIGNAL RECEPTION: DEGRADED — 12%]
"Arkan..." Ela's dual-layered voice vibrated from the shadow of a decaying stone fountain three feet away. The ghost boy was hovering inches above a circular pond filled with black, motionless water, his silver hair casting a thin, trembling circle of light over the dead water lilies floating on the surface. His silver eyes were wide, fixed on a series of thick, black insulation cables that snaked out from the base of the fountain and vanished straight into the mud beneath the science block. "The roots... they aren't drawing water. The system bypassed the irrigation lines when they laid the secondary foundation in 2024."
"I don't care about the botany, Kir," Arkan snapped under his breath, his tsundere armor locking down instantly to suppress the tremor trying to climb up his neck. He forced himself to his feet using only his right leg, his hand remaining shoved deep in his coat pocket where the scuffed telemetry node still radiated a low, residual heat. "Keep your parameters low. If those security lenses on the main roof tilt three degrees downward, we're within their optical field."
"The lenses won't tilt," Bhas said, his sharp eyes tracking the perimeter wall where a row of thick iron spikes was choked with thorny, synthetic ivy. He walked over to the edge of the fountain, his boots making a soft, wet squelch against the mossy brickwork. "Look at the alignment. The academy board didn't put cameras in this garden during the expansion. They didn't just restrict access—they completely removed this entire sector from the central facility map. It's a literal blind spot."
"A blind spot filled with white poison smoke behind us and a giant concrete wall in front of us," Chan groaned, slowly lifting his head from his knees. He wiped a streak of wet black soil from the front of his jumpsuit, his small frame still shivering from the cold. "That's not a defensive position, Bhas. That's just an upscale holding cell. We can't go back through the vent, and if we try to climb that iron gate, those security spikes will turn us into shish kebabs before the drones even get here."
Arkan didn't look at Chan. His gaze was fixed on the hidden directory prompt still burned into the lower corner of his retinas—the cached file from his father's office that sat like an unexploded shell behind his digital mask.
[FILE CACHED: DIRECTORY_UNMAPPED_04]
[PROJECT_ELA_PHASE_01_MANIFEST.DAT]
He forced his mind to slide past the prompt, locking it behind three separate layers of system noise. He wasn't going to look at it. Not here. Not while his left arm felt like a frozen block of iron and Chan's breathing sounded like a broken bellows.
"We stay near the western foundation line," Arkan commanded, his tone dropping into that cold, biting frequency he used to keep everyone at a distance. He stepped away from the ventilation exhaust, his right boot kicking aside a shattered ceramic insulation node that looked identical to the ones they had seen in the lift shaft. "The drainage map my dad kept showed an auxiliary overflow valve near the old boiler room under the science block. If the pipes haven't been sealed with corporate grout, we can use the low-pressure channel to reach the switching yard without breaking the external glass."
"It's not sealed," Ela whispered, his form drifting away from the dead pond until his silver silhouette was cast against the dark concrete wall of the main building. He dropped his head, his fingers touching a small, square iron hatch set into the foundation stone, completely hidden beneath a heavy curtain of dead wisteria vines. "The latch... it doesn't have an electronic lock, Arkan. But the network registry says it's an 'invalid directory'. It's like a folder that was renamed so the search bar can't index it."
Bhas walked over, his broad frame instantly cutting off the cold wind coming off the rail yard as he used his salvaged iron pipe to peel back the matted, rotting vines. The iron hatch was small, barely two feet wide, its surface covered in heavy, flaky layers of red rust that looked like dried blood in the grey morning light. There was no keyhole, only a thick manual lever that had been welded flat against the frame.
"It's been sealed from the inside, Kan," Bhas muttered, his teeth bared as he rammed the tip of his iron pipe into the narrow gap between the hatch and the stone foundation. He leaned his weight into the lever, the iron pipe groaning under the pressure, but the rusted weld didn't yield a single millimeter. "The steel is high-grade. This wasn't put here by a textbook printer or a transport engineer. This is industrial-tier containment hardware."
"Let me try," Chan said, suddenly scrambling over from his pile of crates, his panic temporarily shifting into that weird, frantic energy he got whenever he thought he could find a tool to solve a problem. He reached into the deep pocket of his mechanic's jumpsuit and pulled out a small, grease-stained brass torque wrench he had smuggled from his grandfather's workshop. "If the weld is old, the structural integrity of the surrounding iron might be brittle. If we hit the secondary pivot point instead of the main arm..."
"Get out of the way, Chan," Arkan growled, his right hand catching the smaller boy by the shoulder and shoving him backward before he could touch the iron.
Arkan's face remained an unreadable, frozen mask, but beneath his coat, his teeth were locked together so hard his jaw ached. The moment Chan had pulled out that brass tool, the orange code behind his retinas had given a sudden, violent twitch, a single string of parameters flashing through his peripheral vision before disappearing into the grey noise.
[NODE COUPLING: OPTICAL DETECTED]
[ALERT: SOURCE FREQUENCY WITHIN LIMITS]
"We don't have time to play with wrenches," Arkan muttered, his voice sharp and dismissive to cover the cold sweat breaking across his brow. He looked at Bhas, his eyes narrowing. "Use the pipe against the lower brickwork. The stone is older than the iron. If we crack the mortar at the base, the entire frame will lose its leverage."
Bhas didn't question the logic. He shifted his stance, his utility boots locking into the damp soil as he raised the iron pipe, aiming the dented tip directly at the crumbling grey mortar beneath the rusted frame.
Before he could swing, a low, wet thump sounded from the other side of the concrete wall—directly beneath the floorboards where they were standing.
It wasn't the mechanical click of a deadbolt or the high-frequency hiss of the purge gas. It sounded like something immense and soft being dropped onto a wet concrete floor from a significant height.
Chan froze, his brass wrench slipping from his fingers to land silently in the mud. "Tell me that was just a pipe bursting," he whispered, his voice dropping into a thin, terrified thread. "Please. Just a regular, non-pulsing water pipe."
"It's not a pipe," Ela whispered, his dual-layered voice breaking as his silver form suddenly flickered violently, the pixels around his shoulders spinning like a miniature storm. He backed away from the iron hatch, his small hands clamping over his ears as he stared straight through the solid stone foundation. "Arkan... the manifest downstairs... it wasn't a list of things they threw away. It was a list of things they... they couldn't control."
Beneath their feet, the damp soil of the old garden gave a slow, rhythmic shudder, and a single drop of thick, dark fluid began to seep out from the rim of the rusted iron hatch, smelling faintly of burnt wire and copper.
[SYS_ERR: AREA OVERRIDE]
[LOCAL CONFIGURATION: UNSTABLE]
[OBJECT VECTOR: INCOMING]
Arkan's right hand tightened into an absolute vice inside his pocket, his tsundere walls rising up like iron plates as he forced himself to stand directly between the hatch and his friends. "Bhas," he growled, his voice dropping into a flat, deadly calm. "Hit the stone. Now."