Archive Alarm +02 min 18 sec
Every bronze gantry in the Silent Archive lit crimson. Static sleeted across the air as iron shutters clanged over side corridors. The Herald of Resumption spider-drone burrowed deeper into the crystalline monolith, siphoning data streams so fast they looked like molten glass.
Maya (shouting): "It's rewriting the master index—twenty percent corrupted!"Aiden: "We cut its uplink. Nephis, line-of-sight?"Nephis: "Legs too entrenched; need a higher angle."
Elevation Gambit
Lin Xi, swaying on his feet, raised the Spiral Stone. "One more lift rune." He slammed the talisman to the floor. A hexagon dais of Qi sprang up under Aiden, catapulting him toward the monolith's apex.
Half-way up, two Archive Sentinels—ancient librarian constructs—lunged out, blade-fingers spinning. Cassie's lantern flared; a cone of dawn-light seared their optics, forcing them to recoil. Nephis vaulted their shoulders, shadow-tether whipping Aiden the final metres.
Aiden landed beside the spider, Dawn-Core pulsing in his harness like caged lightning. He drove a boot into one leg joint; the metal gave but auto-replicated alloy sealed the crack.
The drone's voice rasped: "Adaptive morphology active—countermeasure ineffective."
Mirror-Gauntlet Override
Maya accessed a maintenance console below, jacking her cracked Mirror-Shard fragment into an ancient data port. She rerouted a reflection loop—every packet of code the drone tried to steal bounced back as corrupted gibberish.
Stream counts dropped—27 %… 25 %…
The drone flicked a limb downward and spat a cluster of kill-scripts. They spider-crawled across the floor toward Maya's boots. Lin Xi slashed the air with a palm; ink runes unfurled, freezing the scripts mid-stride, but he collapsed, consciousness wavering.
Cassie (to Lin): "Stay with us!"Lin (hoarse): "Qi… depleted. Just finish…"
Dawn-Core Surge
Aiden braced the drone's thorax with both hands. "Borrowing light," he muttered, channelling a fragment of Dawn-Core into the spider's casing. White-gold current flooded its circuits; for a breath its carapace glowed translucent—revealing a black index-key crystal at the centre.
But the surge back-fired; Dawn-Core cracks spidered up Aiden's gauntlet, burning skin. He gritted teeth, yelled: "Maya—tag the key!"
She rerouted power, fired an anti-code lance from her gauntlet. The crystal pinged, icon turning bright teal—ownership contested.
The drone shrieked. Its legs withdrew from the monolith, lashing at Aiden. One talon pierced his shoulder; pain flashed red. Yet the thread-siphon stopped: data corruption stalled at 23 %.
Lantern Resonance
Cassie shoved past Sentinel wreckage, lantern flaring brighter than ever since its rebirth. She slammed its aperture against Aiden's wounded shoulder; dawn-light poured in, cauterizing flesh and back-flushing Weaver nano-shards out of the wound.
The same beam swept across the drone's legs, fusing joints solid. Nephis arrived, shadow-blade honed. With a single cleave he severed all four limbs at once.
The drone toppled; Aiden ripped the index-key crystal free. Instantly a choir of Archive sigils flared from floor to ceiling—access returning to Loom-native control.
Maya's console readout blinked green: Corruption reversed… 11 %… 6 %… stable.
But victory jolted short. The bronze doors behind them boomed—something colossal pounded from the outside.
Maya: "Residual Council beacon… it called reinforcements. Power signature ten times the Weft Cannons."Nephis: "Whatever's coming, we can't fight it here."
Emergency Extraction
Lin Xi, barely conscious, whispered a route. "Hidden scriptorium shaft… east mezzanine." Maya plotted—200 m through still-hostile aisles.
Aiden pocketed the index key, heart hammering. Dawn-Core in harness, Lantern at Cassie's flank, Spiral Stone limp in Lin's grasp—they had what they came for.
Another boom—bronze doors buckled, molten edges spraying. A silhouette of a Council Dread-Archivist—three-storey mech of shelves and blades—pressed through.
Aiden pointed to the mezzanine arch. "Run!"
They sprinted as scroll canisters exploded around them. Cassie's lantern cast a shield; Nephis's cloak deflected shrapnel; Maya dropped data mines that slowed the mech's advance. The mezzanine floor yawned—a circular iris opening into a shaft of pale water-light.
One by one they leapt, tumbling into slipstream back toward the surface world—Aiden last, Dawn-Core and index key hugged tight. Above, the Dread-Archivist roared, but the hatch sealed, runes resetting to silent cyan.
Surface – 19:46 UTC
They erupted onto Ishtar's deck in geysers of seawater, gasping under a sky aflame with night-aurora. Alarms blared: the cutter's crew reporting unknown seismic readings below.
Maya clutched the key crystal, eyes shining. "Archive secure—for now—and we have the Index."
Aiden winced, shoulder bleeding anew. "One node reclaimed… two to go."
Cassie collapsed against the rail, lantern dimming to normal glow. Lin Xi slid into a healing trance. Nephis gazed toward the horizon where the aurora folded into distant constellations. "Council's shadow thickens. But so does dawn."
Aiden exhaled, feeling the Dawn-Core pulse in answer. Threads of new stories awaited at the Iron Menagerie and Fractal Chapel—but for one stolen moment, hope rode the waves.