The mountain air was a blade, sharp and cold. I drew it into my lungs, and for the first time since the manacles clicked shut, I felt something other than suppression. I felt focused.
The quarry complex sprawled before me, a geometric scar on the mountain's face. Lights dotted the guard towers. Figures moved along high walkways. An anthill, waiting for a boot. My boot.
Two primary patrol routes. Ten-minute intervals. The central crusher structure is the heart. The control room is on the third level, western face.
The analysis was automatic, a ghost in the machine of my mind. Arthur Glass would have felt fear. The Penance only saw a diagram. A series of problems to be solved.
I moved. Not with speed, but with a silence that drank the sound of the wind. The loose shale should have crunched underfoot, but I placed each step where the earth was packed firm, my weight distributed, my body a whisper against the rock.
I was a shadow flowing uphill.
The first patrol, two men in thick furs, rounded a corner of the access road twenty paces ahead. I melted into the deep, moon-cast shadow of an ore cart, my dark clothes becoming one with the gloom.
My breathing slowed to nothing. The suppression cuff on my left wrist felt like an anchor, but my right hand rested on the cold ground, fingers splayed, feeling the vibrations of their footsteps.
"…freezing our asses off for Zero's scrap," one grumbled.
"Quiet. You want the Foreman to hear you?"
They passed, close enough that I could smell the ale on their breath. I remained still until their voices faded. Then I was moving again, a phantom ascending the skeletal framework of the crusher itself.
The metal was ice-cold and slick with condensation. One-handed, it should have been impossible. But my Cultivated Body, even muted, gave my fingers the grip of a vice. I found seams, bolts, rivets—imperfections in the steel that served as a ladder.
I climbed up, like a spider against the iron wall, the hundred-foot drop a triviality beneath me.
An armed guard stood on a gantry above, his back to me, looking out at the night. The hum of the massive machinery below masked all sound. I reached the lip of the gantry and paused, timing his bored, rhythmic pacing. One. Two. Three. Turn.
On the third turn, as his back was fully to me, I flowed over the railing. In two silent strides, I was behind him. My free right arm reached for his dagger pouch and slit his throat, cutting off his windpipe and the blood to his brain.
He struggled for a moment, a frantic, weakening spasm, before falling. I caught and lowered him silently to the deck, propping him against the railing in a semblance of rest.
The door to the control room was ahead, reinforced steel. Locked and reinforced, of course. I could try to break them open. A waste of time.
Instead, I looked up. A network of steam pipes and thick, insulated power conduits ran along the ceiling, disappearing into the control room wall.
The main conduit was pulsing with a faint magical glow, feeding the room's systems. I jumped, catching a steam pipe with my right hand, my legs swinging up to brace against another. I moved, hand-over-hand, into the narrow, hot, and dark crawlspace above the ceiling.
"HISS!" The pipe was hotter than anything I remembered, a searing metal that would have melted flesh without the qi fortifying my body.
Below, through a vent, I could see the control room. Two men monitored glowing rune displays. A single, armored enforcer stood by the door, armed with a mag-rifle. The heart of the beast.
Going in would cause the whole complex to go on lockdown. Something I definitely didn't need.
I looked around and found the main power conduit where it pierced the wall. The insulation was thick, designed to contain immense energy. The knife was gone, a pointless sacrifice to the persona. A direct strike would alert the whole complex. I needed a key, not a battering ram.
Staying in the steam pipe for too long could kill me. I had to do something, quick.
Directly over a junction node, I pressed my palm against the conduit, focusing not on the river of my qi, but on the few drops the suppression manacles allowed me. I concentrated it into a single pinpoint of force in my palm.
A vibration, tuned to a frequency the insulation couldn't handle.
A low hum built in the air. The men below looked up, confused. A spark jumped from a console.
Then, the conduit under my hand shattered with a deafening CRACK of released energy. The magical discharge flashed through the room below, overloading every rune-screen in a shower of sparks. The lights died, plunging the room into emergency red gloom. Alarms blared through the entire facility.
Chaos.
I dropped through the ceiling vent as they were staggering, blinded by the sudden darkness and sparks. The enforcer was shouting into a dead comms unit. He saw me land, a silhouette in the flashing red light, and brought his rifle up.
He was too slow. I was already inside his guard. My right hand chopped down on his wrist; the bone snapped and the rifle clattered away. My elbow drove into his throat, crushing his larynx. I was already turning as he fell.
The mission was the control panel. I drove my fingers into the main console, ripping out fistfuls of wiring and crystalline circuitry.
I found the central control rod for the magma vents—a large, glowing crystal—and slammed the heel of my palm into it. It fractured with a sound like a dying star.
The deep, industrial hum of the crushers ground down into a death rattle. The entire facility was shutting down. The demonstration was complete.
I turned to leave through the now-unlocked door. As I did, one of the men, brave or foolish, lunged at me with a wrench.
I didn't even break stride. My hand shot out, caught his swinging arm, and used his momentum to spin him around. I drove his face into the sparking console. He slumped, unconscious.
I was a step from the door, the alarms a symphony to my success, when a voice cut through the din, cold and familiar.
"Hello, Arthur."
I froze. The voice was a splash of ice water on the embers of my focus.
"Or can I call you Penance now?" Kestrel continued.
She stood in the doorway, resting against the flashing red lights of the corridor. She held a small, elegant crossbow, a wisp of smoke curling from its barrel.
Her eyes were not on me, but on the enforcer I'd taken down, the bolt now buried neatly in the man's temple. She had stolen my kill.
"I see you've chosen to be Corvus's lapdog after all," she said, her gaze finally lifting to meet mine. The contempt in her voice was a physical blow. "Tell me, was it the chain or the cage that made you roll over?"
The cold, efficient shell of the Penance cracked. In that moment, I wasn't a barkeep or a deadly assassin. I was just a man, standing in the wreckage he had made, being judged by the one person who knew what it cost.
The numbness receded, and the weight of what I had just done came crashing down, leaving only a hollow, chilling shame.
"This is your last chance, Arthur," she said, her voice cutting through the din. "Come with me. We can still burn them all down."
I looked at her; a ghost from a war I'd quit, offering me a throne in its hell. To go with her was to choose a different master, to trade one leash for another wrapped in the pretty lie of partnership.
"No," I said, the word simple and final. I walked toward her, not with aggression, but with a grim purpose. I saw the flash of fury in her winter-sky eyes before I brushed past her, out the door and into the chaotic hallway.
Slade and his team were waiting outside, weapons drawn, their formation tight and professional. They rounded up all the workers who ran out. I raised my single free hand.
"The objective is complete," I stated, my voice flat. "The facility is neutralized."
Slade's cold eyes assessed me, the wreckage, and the lack of a weapon in my hand. He gave a curt nod. Two of his people stepped forward, and the familiar, cold iron of the second suppression manacle was clamped back onto my right wrist, the lock clicking shut with finality.
The last trickle of my power vanished, leaving me utterly hollow.
All the workers from the Quarry were loaded on the train, so was I.
Back on the train, Slade regarded me from his seat. "The Ledger has confirmed the quarry's operational status. It has dropped to zero. The demonstration was… effective."
I said nothing. I was an asset who had performed to specification.
The train began to move, its hum deepening as it picked up speed. Then, the world outside the window dissolved and warped. The rocky hillsides twisted like wet paint, the stars smearing into neon streaks of light and shadow.
There was no sense of motion, only a nauseating, silent reconfiguration of reality itself. My stomach lurched. This was raw, spatial manipulation on a colossal scale.
As suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The train was now perfectly still, parked inside a cavern so vast its ceiling was lost in darkness. Directly ahead, nestled in its heart, a structure of stunning, minimalist design.
A warehouse of pale stone and glowing crystal, its lines clean and severe. It was a vault. A sanctum.
The door to our carriage slid open. Slade stood.
"Come," he said. "He is expecting you."
He led me out onto the smooth stone floor. The air was dead still and cool. There were no guards. The only sound was the soft, rhythmic click of something from within the warehouse. As we approached the vast, open entrance, I saw the source.
Dozens of them. Perhaps hundreds. Sleek, black ravens lined the high rafters of the warehouse, perched on stacks of crates, their heads tilting in unnerving unison as we entered. Every single one of their glittering, intelligent eyes was fixed on me.
And at the center of it all, standing before a massive, real-time map of the city that glowed with a thousand points of light, was CorvusSharpe. He held out a hand, and one of the ravens glided down to land on his wrist.
He didn't look at it; his gaze, calm and impossibly knowing, was already on me.
He smiled, a small, mercantile gesture.
"Welcome, Penance," he said, his voice echoing softly in the immense space. "I've been watching your progress with great interest."