The chasm swallowed the two of them whole, and the world narrowed to air, wind, rustlight, and dark.
Unfortunately, Maeve didn’t scream. It wasn’t like her to ever scream, but Gael would’ve liked to hear her panicking just this once, because he was screaming—his slight fear of heights was a bit more than just ‘slight’, he learned—and he didn’t want to be embarrassed alone.
Thankfully, his scream was short and clipped as Maeve yanked her umbrella open just enough to catch a shred of air. The bloom flared with a strained flutter. It was barely enough drag to slow a human, let alone two.
Gael, without ceremony, grabbed her leg.
“Get your damn claws off !” she snapped through the wind.
“I will once I stop falling to my death, thank you!” Gael shouted back. His lenses glowed faint green in the gloom, filtering the dark through insect-eye vision. Not that it helped much. The abyss was too deep, and the air was too thick with mist and particles. Still, he squinted hard and hung on, his boots catching drafts, his coat flapping like a flag with no pole.
Maeve’s umbrella groaned. It wasn’t fully open, and that was deliberately so. Too much drag, and they’d flip. Too little, and they’d be pancakes. So, instead, they opted for option C: long, controlled plumt into probable sewage.
“This sucks,” he muttered. “You know what? I should make gliders. Like, actual gliders. Foldable wings, deploy-on-fall, maybe sothing beetle-shaped—”
“You’re not making gliders!” Maeve yelled back.
“Says the lady I’m currently clinging to!”
“We’ll get wing mutations eventually! It’ll just be a waste of ti!”
“I don’t have wings now, do I?!”
“You’re making this heavier! Stop wriggling!”
“You’re lucky I didn’t grab your belt this ti—”
She kicked at his shoulder halfheartedly, but that didn’t shake him off.
Even if their fall was ‘controlled’, now, they were still falling faster than any sane person should ever fall. The rushing wind was a monster’s scream. The walls of the shaft flickered past—tal supports, ancient rusted ducts, and occasional pipes that protruded like ribs from the chasm walls—and down below, he was just barely able to see the bottom now.
It was a black, rippling surface surrounded by tangles of scaffoldwork and corroded bridges, like a drowned iron cathedral.
A sewage pond. Maybe chemical runoff. Maybe industrial waste. Maybe all three blended into a deliciously septic drink waiting to kiss their bones.
“Oh, please tell dear old sis landed in the sewage,” he murmured aloud.
Cara had always been good at surviving. She was too stubborn not to do it this ti.
So just hold on, bitch.
We’re on our way.
He tightened his grip on Maeve’s leg and angled his feet toward a slow spiral. The umbrella shifted again. A sudden updraft made it tremble.
Maeve gritted her teeth.
“Little more wind and we might start spinning,” she snapped. “Stop that.”
“I’ll vomit in your boots.”
“You vomit and I’ll throw you off myself.”
Charming as ever. But before he could offer her sothing creative in return, a sudden whistling roar passed them by. Fast. Heavy. Loud enough to rattle the umbrella ribs. Gael’s head snapped to the side—and then to the other side—as six shapes thundered down past them like teorites on iron sleds.
Each one rode a slab of bridge scrap, rigged and rusted. Their weight was shifting the wind patterns below, creating strange whirlpools of draft and pressure. One even had the gall to crouch low like a surfer, so his mouth went slack for a beat as the first blur passed them.
The first man who thundered past Gael had six arms.
So Gael blinked.
Then blinked again.
“Oh,” he breathed. “Oh, that bastard.”
He adjusted his weight and clenched his legs tighter around Maeve’s ankle, making her swear under her breath again.
The two of them were still falling. They had maybe another two minutes to go before they could reach the bottom safely, but those six would reach the bottom in ten seconds.
… Fine, he thought, grinning as wide as fear could let him. I’ll let you be cool for a little bit first.
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The wind had long since gone silent. Now, there was only the long scream of gravity and the roar of her own blood in her ears.
Cara didn’t panic.
She didn’t close her eyes, or pray, or scream for help. What good would that do? Nobody was falling beside her except for a few smushed up Repossessors. The command chamber was a speck above, and if she hit solid ground, she'd die whether she scread or not.
So she thought instead.
Streamline your body. Arms in. Legs close. Tilt the shoulders forward. Make yourself a knife. Make yourself sharp. Piercing is better than splatting.
Gods, she really hoped there was water down there.
And thankfully, there was. Barely.
A beat later, she plunged into a thick body of murky liquid with a dull, teeth-rattling splash that felt more like being slamd into pavent wrapped in wet cloth. The shock rattled her bones. She imdiately clenched her jaw and kicked upwards, breaking the surface with a gasp and a glare, one hand swiping the sewage out of her eyes.
It stank, and her first breath tasted like mildew and rust.
Her bioarcanic lantern, still latched to her belt, sputtered faint green light around the shadow-choked pond. Crisscrossing bridges and scaffoldwork hung overhead in a twisted tal web. The air was thick and acrid—like sothing was burning in a far-off pipe—and she could barely see more than five ters ahead.
“Saintess,” she hissed, already feeling the sludge soak into her boots. “My hair. Not my hair—”
Then sothing massive fell from above and hit the sewage behind her with an echoing crash, kicking up a fat wave that slapped into her face.
Cara whipped around.
A Rustwight.
The humanoid bulk of stitched-together tal rose from the muck, dripping thick strands of sewer sludge like it was peeling itself from the belly of a monster.
Then five more Rustwights crashed down around it. Debris rained after them, tal plates and chains clanging like broken bells.
Her eyes twitched.
So so of them got knocked down with .
Great.
As one Rustwight snapped its blank head toward her, she didn’t wait for it to lurch forward. She threw herself through the water, dragging her soaked coat behind her as she grabbed onto a nearby platform. Her fingers slapped against rusted tal and she clawed herself up with sheer determination, coughing, slipping, and finally flopping onto her back like a drowned rat.
She turned the dial on her lantern and the radius of light blood wider.
More bridges. More pipes. More tangled catwalks and ancient valves. Everything stank. Everything was awful, but she was alive.
Then a thundering sound behind her made her roll over in ti to see the Rustwight lift its arm, slamming it down towards her platform.
She rolled to the side.
The platform cracked and dented under the impact, but she was already sprinting across it, boots squelching, teeth clenched. She leapt onto one of the thicker pipes above the pond and straddled it, her body still trembling with cold, adrenaline, and disgust.
She read the faded markings. So rusted. So scratched. Her eyes scanned the numbers.
They were old pipeline codes indicating pressure release valve five, so she snapped her eyes up to see the Rustwight slogging through the water after her, determining its position.
She turned the third valve on the right.
A scream of steam burst from the underwater vent directly below the Rustwight, slamming into its body like a furnace breath. The Rustwight reared back and let out a warped, grinding wail as its chest plates hissed and bubbled.
She grinned, teeth bared, and then she ran again.
Pipe to pipe. Platform to platform. Each valve she twisted and each trap she triggered was one more thing she rembered from her map. Her month of exploration down here wasn’t wasted, but… the one Rustwight pursuing her didn’t stop.
It chased her.
So when she reached the far edge of the sewage pond, she found herself backed up against a tal wall with nowhere else to go. The nearest bridge had collapsed. Her lantern flickered. The Rustwight had cornered her completely, and she definitely couldn’t swim as fast as it could lumber through the water.
She narrowed her eyes.
Her Mortifera Enforcer training might’ve let her punch through armor, but that thing had armor bigger than she was. Would her techniques even work on it?
… Fuck it.
I have to try either way.
She dropped her center of gravity. Flexed her fingers. This was gonna suck, but—
Six more debris dropped from the sky.
They were slabs of broken bridges and cable-reinforced steel. They hit the sewage with massive splashes, kicking up waves in every direction—and then the shadows riding the six of them jumped, leaping through the splash and directly onto the Rustwight's shoulders, back, arms, and skull like spiders dropping from thread.
Morphing weapons flashed. Spider limbs clamped onto armor. Gauntlets gripped gaps in the plating.
Cara’s eyes widened.
The five goons.
And on the Rustwight’s head—Fergal.
Sparks flickered as he tore through the rusted plating, digging in with ruthless precision. The sludge roared—or at least, it tried to. It had no mouth, so only that grinding noise of limbs scraping tal and sludge ca. Its limbs flailed wildly, staggering through the pond as the other five goons clung to it like shadows in a storm, hacking and tearing at joints and vents.
While Fergal crawled around its head to reposition himself, he turned his head, peering back through the steam and sewage mist.
“Miss Cara!” he barked, voice cutting through the chaos. “Are you alright?”
Cara, standing on the platform just a few ters away, wiped sludge from her brow and shouted back, “Still breathing!”
“Good!”
He didn’t wait for more. He and his goons launched themselves off the thrashing Rustwight in tandem, landing with hard slaps on the platform around her.
Fergal alone didn’t stop moving.
He surged forward, boots slamming into rusted iron as he leaped at the staggering Rustwight. No flourish. No hesitation. He pulled one fist back like a loaded piston, and then he drove it straight into the monster’s chest.
The impact landed with a thundercrack. The plated armor didn’t shatter, but it bent deep. It was enough to knock the breath out of the thing if it had any. The Rustwight reeled from the blow, legs slipping in the muck beneath it, and then it crashed backwards into the pond with a heavy splash.
Waves rippled out in thick, noxious rolls.
Fergal landed back in front of Cara, breaths steady, shoulders squared. He cracked his knuckles slowly, one hand after the other.
“... I made a promise, Miss Cara,” he said sternly. “I intend to keep it.”
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