The first construct lunged.

  It moved with an unnatural stutter-step, its skeletal frame surging forward in a burst of jerking, imprecise speed—too fast, too unrefined. The broken machine-logic of its existence tried to simulate fluidity, but the result was something deeply wrong.

  Servius twisted to the side, boots grinding against the metal floor as the thing’s bladed fingers carved through empty air where he had been standing. He felt the sharp hum of displaced energy against his skin—it wasn’t just a strike. It was something meant to strip flesh down to the molecular level.

  His twin pistols kicked back against his palms. The first shot hit center mass—a dull, metallic thud as the explosive bolt punched through plating. The second shot found its mark in the construct’s shoulder, detonating on impact and shearing through its arm in a burst of gore and ruptured conduits.

  The thing staggered, but did not fall.

  From the ruined mess of its exposed shoulder, something twisted. The wound did not bleed—not oil, not ichor, but raw, searing strands of corrupted data. Threads of unholy energy slithered from the gash like living circuitry, pulsing erratically. The remnants of its shattered limb spasmed, twitched, then abruptly started to regrow.

  Servius’s tail flicked sharply in irritation.

  "Great," he muttered under his breath.

  Behind him, gunfire rang out in bursts. Arohk-7 had engaged another—their compact energy weapon cycling rapidly, sending streaks of blue plasma into the advancing constructs. The shots impacted hard, searing deep into the bodies of the creatures. One convulsed violently, its internals overloading in a shower of burning slag—but two more stepped over the twitching remains, unfazed.

  Servius didn’t hesitate.

  He shifted his weight, pivoting into a controlled backstep as the construct lurched forward again. A blade—jagged, blackened metal fused into its arm—came down in a vicious overhead slash, but Servius was already moving. His power knife flicked free, flashing in the dim light.

  A single, precise counterstrike.

  The knife met the construct’s wrist, its powered edge humming as it bit deep—severing the weaponized limb in one clean, decisive motion. The construct reeled, attempting to compensate, but Servius was faster.

  He surged forward, planting his boot against its chest, and fired point-blank into its exposed core.

  The bolt round punched through armor, through machinery, through whatever wretched half-life kept it standing—then detonated in a burst of shattered steel and burning ruin.

  The construct collapsed in a heap, twitching one final time before its corrupted pseudo-nervous system finally died.

  One down. More to go.

  The constructs moved like hunters, reacting with cold, inhuman efficiency. They were not mindless—not like servitors, not like simple machines. There was something else in their movements. Something calculated.

  Arohk-7 pivoted sharply, narrowly avoiding a strike as another construct came at them from the side. Their servo-limbs reacted in precise synchronization, shifting into a defensive posture. A pulse of binary static crackled through their external vox—an automated combat reaction, an attempt to disrupt enemy targeting matrices.

  It failed.

  The construct did not falter, did not slow, instead it moved closer.

  Servius saw it happen in an instant—the way the thing adjusted its posture, predicting Arohk-7’s reaction before they even moved. Its movements were more refined now, more intelligent.

  He fired.

  A bolt round struck its back mid-motion, staggering it just enough to break its lunge.

  "Don’t let them adapt to you," he called out.

  Arohk-7 recalibrated immediately. Their servo-limbs unfolded with renewed precision, and their plasma weapon flared hot as they fired three rapid pulses. The first cored through the construct’s midsection, exposing twisted machinery and sparking cables. The second ripped into its spine, causing it to jolt violently. The third incinerated its head.

  This time, it stayed down. But the others did not stop.

  The ruined contraption pulsed again.

  And the constructs kept coming.

  "Numbers don’t appear to be in our favor," Servius shouted.

  Arohk-7’s lenses flickered. "The primary data core is ahead. If we sever its connection, the constructs may destabilize."

  "Or it makes them worse."

  "Probability—37%."

  Servius huffed. "Not the worst odds I’ve had."

  Arohk-7 motioned toward an access conduit. "This way. If we move quickly, we may reach it before the system fully adapts."

  Servius glanced at the writhing cables pulsing along the walls, at the things still rising from the wreckage of machinery long dead.

  They had seconds before the tide turned against them.

  Servius holstered one pistol, retrieving his frag grenade instead.

  He primed it, locked onto the largest cluster of approaching constructs, and threw.

  The explosion ripped through the horde, fire and shrapnel tearing through metal bodies, sending limbs and fragments of synthetic flesh scattering across the chamber.

  "Go," he said.

  And they ran.

  The room shuddered.

  Not like an explosion—not yet. This was deeper, a shift in the foundation of the structure itself, as if some unseen force had recognized their movement and was reacting accordingly. The walls, once rigid and dead, began to pulse with slow, mechanical life, their dark metal surfaces shifting in subtle, almost organic patterns.

  Servius ran.

  He kept pace with Arohk-7, his boots pounding against the metal floor. The weight of his weapons was familiar, steady—but the air around them was changing.

  A sharp, electronic screech rang through the halls, followed by a sudden drop in temperature. The overhead lumens flickered, their pale light struggling against the growing distortion bleeding into the ruin. Shadows stretched unnaturally, shifting like they belonged to something else.

  Servius’s instincts hissed in warning.

  "The entire structure is reacting," Arohk-7 stated, their voice modulated but tense. "The constructs were only the first line of defense."

  "Figured as much," Servius muttered, reloading his pistols as they neared the next threshold. "How far to the core?"

  Arohk-7’s servo-limbs twitched, processing a rapid data scan. "Sixty meters. But the corridors have shifted again—there is no direct path."

  Servius’s tail flicked in irritation. "Of course not."

  They reached a reinforced bulkhead, half-open, half-sealed. It had been designed to lock down completely, but something had forced its way through. The edges were scorched, warped—not by explosives, but by something systemic. The metal had been rewritten, its structure corrupted at a molecular level.

  Servius slowed his breathing, stepping forward cautiously.

  His sharp green eyes flicked over the breach. The passage beyond it was wrong.

  The walls were no longer just metal.

  Instead, a lattice of synthetic sinew and cybernetic strands wove through the infrastructure. It looked **grown, not built—**a hideous fusion of machine and something older.

  Arohk-7 hesitated. Their servo-limbs flexed, lenses adjusting. "This is not Mechanicum design."

  Servius exhaled slowly. He agreed.

  But there was no time for hesitation.

  He stepped through first.

  The corridor tightened around them, its structure unnatural, its surfaces pulsing as if responding to their presence. The air was thick with static, and Servius could feel something watching.

  He scanned the walls, noting fractured consoles embedded into the surfaces, their displays cracked but still flickering with bursts of corrupted data.

  Symbols shifted across the screens, lines of machine-code so twisted and broken that they no longer resembled any known format.

  A voice—not a voice, but something deeper—whispered through the metal.

  Not in Gothic.

  Not in binary.

  Something older.

  Arohk-7 stopped abruptly, their head tilting at an unnatural angle. "Interference. The signal is… overriding standard encryption layers."

  Servius frowned. "That’s what’s stopping us from accessing the core, isn’t it?"

  Arohk-7’s lenses flickered. "Affirmative." Their servo-limbs twitched as they attempted to process the streaming data. "This encryption pattern is unlike anything previously cataloged. A self-replicating construct, recursive in nature—a sentient security measure."

  Servius’s tail flicked sharply.

  It wasn’t a firewall. It wasn’t some automated response.

  It was thinking.

  "Can you break it?" he asked.

  Arohk-7’s fingers moved rapidly over their data-slate. "Given time, possibly. However—"

  The lights failed again.

  A second later, the sound returned.

  Low. Clicking.

  Servius didn’t need to be told what it meant.

  "They’re coming."

  The shadows peeled away from the walls.

  The first form emerged from the distortion, moving on all fours, its structure fluid but unnatural—a grotesque amalgamation of human limbs and reformatted machine components.

  Its head twitched sharply, jerking toward them in a motion that wasn’t possible.

  Then it lunged.

  Servius moved first, his pistols flashing in rapid succession. The bolt rounds tore through its body, blasting chunks of metal and bone apart—but the thing did not die.

  From the ruined mess of its exposed shoulder, something twisted. The wound did not bleed—not oil, not ichor, but raw, searing strands of corrupted data. Threads of unholy energy slithered back into the gash like grasping tendrils, weaving the metal back together.

  The remnants of its shattered limb twitched, convulsed—then realigned with a sickening snap. A skeletal hand reformed, fingers clawing at the air as if remembering how to move.

  They weren’t just repairing. They were reconstructing.

  More emerged from the dark.

  Arohk-7 reacted quickly, deploying a defensive pulse. A burst of energy rippled outward, sending two of the creatures reeling back—but not destroying them.

  Servius gritted his teeth.

  They needed to move.

  "Whatever’s jamming us, shut it down now," he ordered, blasting another construct apart before it could reach them.

  Arohk-7 didn’t argue.

  They moved to a damaged console embedded in the wall, their servo-limbs interfacing with the corrupted interface. "Attempting bypass."

  Servius fired again, keeping the creatures at bay.

  Another horrific construct pulled itself forward—half a servitor, half something else, its face split open in a mockery of a human expression. Its jaw unhinged as it let out a piercing, distorted scream.

  Then—the walls reacted.

  The ruined terminals flared to life, strings of corrupted data flashing across their interfaces.

  Arohk-7 twitched violently as their connection with the system was met with resistance.

  "Security subroutine is adapting—counteracting my access."

  Servius reloaded. "Try harder."

  The constructs surged forward again.

  Servius’s movements were calculated, methodical. He shifted his stance, conserving ammunition, making every shot count. Point-blank execution strikes. Blade-work where necessary.

  He could feel the weight of the battle shifting.

  Then—the console reacted.

  Arohk-7 flinched, their lenses dimming for half a second as the encryption layers collapsed.

  Servius saw something shift in the walls.

  The symbols across the terminals flashed violently. The structures around them twitched.

  The machines—the ones that weren’t moving yet—went still.

  Then, somewhere deeper in the ruin—

  A door unlocked.

  Arohk-7 straightened, their servo-limbs retracting. "The core is exposed. Its final layer of security has been bypassed."

  Servius shot one last construct in the head before it could rise again. He exhaled through his nose, holstering his weapons.

  "Then let’s finish this."

  The battlefield had settled into momentary stillness.

  Servius exhaled sharply through his nose, ejecting the spent magazines from his bolt pistols. The ruined constructs lay scattered across the chamber, twitching, their corrupted bodies leaking streams of something that should not have been inside machines. But they weren’t the real problem.

  Something else was here.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  His ears twitched. His tail flicked once—sharp, instinctive. His muscles tensed.

  Arohk-7 took a step forward, their lenses flickering as they scanned the chamber. Their servo-limbs twitched with quiet calculation.

  “The system’s core lies beyond this corridor,” they said, voice steady. “We must move quickly. The restructuring is still occurring.”

  Servius didn’t move.

  Something wasn’t right.

  The air had thickened—no, not thickened, distorted. The edges of the room warped ever so slightly, space itself bending and settling in ways that the eye couldn’t quite process. The sensation scraped against his nerves like a blade dragged across raw bone.

  His fingers flexed against his pistol grips.

  They were not alone.

  He saw nothing. He heard nothing.

  But he felt it.

  A predator’s presence. Watching. Waiting.

  Arohk-7 turned toward him, lenses adjusting. “Servius?”

  The sound came from everywhere at once.

  A whisper of motion. A ripple in the air.

  Servius moved.

  The assassin struck.

  The corrupted thing was not like the others.

  It did not lurch, nor shamble, nor move with the unnatural twitching of the other constructs. It was precise. Calculated. Lethal.

  Its body was a dark, skeletal thing—not quite metal, not quite flesh. A frame of smooth, arcane alloys, covered in a mesh of shifting code—its surface constantly fracturing and rewriting itself.

  A single red optic burned like a molten wound in its blank, featureless face.

  It landed where Servius had been standing, its attack missing by a fraction of a second.

  The assassin’s blade—a thin, curved implement of unknown design—sliced through empty air.

  The walls behind Servius warped.

  Where the blade passed, reality itself fractured—matter twisting and breaking in a way that no natural weapon could cause. A void-like cut burned through the air, and then the universe snapped itself back into place.

  A weapon like that would have killed Servius in an instant, but he had moved before the strike even began.

  His instincts, the ones that had always kept him alive, had warned him before the assassin even attacked.

  Arohk-7 tried to reposition—but the assassin moved again.

  With an impossible burst of speed, it pivoted and slammed into the Mechanist with inhuman strength. Arohk-7’s servo-limbs shrieked as the force hurled them across the chamber—their body crashing against a shattered console with a heavy, metallic impact. Their lenses flickered wildly, systems disrupted, their frame momentarily unresponsive.

  Down. Out of the fight.

  Now it was just Servius.

  The assassin turned its featureless face toward him. It moved slowly now, not attacking—not yet. It was testing him.

  The assassin vanished.

  No sound. No movement. Just gone.

  Servius didn’t hesitate. He dove to the side.

  The blade passed through where he had just stood.

  A reality fracture burned through the air again, twisting and snapping back into place as the assassin reappeared. It wasn’t teleportation. It was something else—something far worse.

  Servius fired mid-roll.

  Twin bolts slammed into its center mass. Point blank.

  The assassin jerked—a fraction of a second. Not because of damage, but because it had not expected him to react so fast.

  It wasn’t used to prey fighting back. It corrected instantly, lunging.

  Servius twisted, avoiding the downward strike by millimeters. The blade hissed through the space beside his head.

  Servius could see it now.

  The Threads.

  Wispy lines of probability snapped into focus around the assassin’s weapon. The universe was reacting to it—shifting.

  Servius could see where it would cut, where it would land, before it even moved.

  This was why he had always been able to react before things happened. Why his instincts had been one step ahead.

  The assassin attacked, Servius saw the paths.

  He moved before the blade did.

  A sidestep. A weave. A pivot.

  The assassin struck again and again, faster than anything should have been able to. But Servius flowed around it, predicting, evading, adjusting.

  Then he countered.

  His power knife flashed as he slammed it into the assassin’s side, twisting it deep.

  The assassin reacted instantly, backhanding him with bone-breaking force.

  Servius felt his augmetic arm shatter.

  The plating on his right forearm cracked apart, servos locking up as he was sent skidding across the floor.

  Pain. Blinding pain.

  His right arm was dead weight. He forced himself up, ignoring the burning agony radiating through his nerves.

  The assassin was already moving again.

  One more strike, one more fracture of reality—

  No.

  Servius roared and fired one pistol shot directly into the assassin’s exposed wound.

  The bolter round detonated inside its frame.

  The assassin jerked violently as black-code energy burst from its body. Its single, burning optic flickered—then dimmed.

  The weapon fell from its hands.

  The fractured body of the corrupted assassin collapsed—not dead, but broken.

  Servius strode forward, his broken arm hanging limp, his remaining pistol raised.

  The assassin tried to move—tried to flee.

  Servius pulled the trigger.

  The final bolt round tore through its head.

  The thing collapsed into a twitching heap of sparking metal and dying code.

  Finally, it was over.

  Silence.

  Servius exhaled slowly, trying to steady his breathing. His arm throbbed with brutal pain—his augmetic ruined, shattered from the impact.

  He turned toward Arohk-7. The Mechanist was unconscious, still slumped against the broken console.

  They were probably safer there.

  Servius flicked his pistol’s safety and turned toward the open corridor ahead.

  The final obstacle was waiting, the source of all of this.

  The chamber trembled as the intelligence fought to sustain itself.

  The corrupted cables twisted and pulsed like exposed nerves, their movements sluggish, erratic—barely alive. Sparks rained from the central interface, flickering between the dim light of the ruin and the unnatural glow of corrupted data.

  And then it emerged.

  Not with the predatory speed of the constructs that had come before.

  Not with the silent, malevolent purpose of the assassin.

  It unraveled.

  A shape of pulsing data and warped light, flickering between solidity and dissolution, struggling to keep itself together.

  Servius did not move.

  His grip tightened around his pistol, but he did not fire. Not yet.

  The intelligence was not attacking. It was… processing.

  Its form shuddered, distorting between twisted humanoid proportions and jagged, corrupted code. Images flickered in and out of existence—a mechanical hand, the schematic of a vessel, a human silhouette—none of them lasting more than a fraction of a second before the interference consumed them.

  A machine trying to remember itself.

  And yet, the longer Servius watched, the more he realized—It couldn't.

  It had been too far gone, for too long.

  A dull static pulse radiated from the core, and across the ruin’s fractured screens, lines of text spasmed into clarity.

  [SYSTEM RECOVERY ATTEMPT – ERROR]

  [IDENTIFY: PRIMARY FUNCTION…]

  [ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.]

  The voice was garbled, its synthetic tone warping between distortion and something far too human.

  A machine should not sound like it was in pain.

  But this one did.

  Servius took a slow step forward.

  The thing turned its head—or at least, it tried.

  Its entire form glitched violently, struggling to hold a single state. As if it wanted to be something real—but couldn’t.

  The screens behind it burst to life, flashing erratically, scrolling text flickering in brief, unstable clarity.

  Fragments of something ancient blinked in and out of existence—schematics, instructional files, fabrication sequences, each line of code distorted, writhing in agony.

  [PRIMARY FUNCTION – ERROR]

  [STANDARD TEMPLATE CONSTRUCT – DATA INTEGRITY COMPROMISED]

  Servius’s breath slowed. No. That wasn’t possible.

  An STC.

  His stomach turned. This wasn’t some lost archive or a rogue AI—this was a mind forged during the height of humanity’s greatest era. A relic from the Golden Age of Technology, a guide, a creator, something that had once built entire worlds—

  —Now reduced to a shattered ghost.

  A soul of steel, drowned in scrapcode and Chaos corruption.

  The realization settled over him like a weight.

  For a brief second, the intelligence seemed to stabilize.

  The distortion lessened. The data feed almost returned to structure.

  The thing looked at him like it was remembering what it had once been.

  A final flicker of clarity passed across the screens.

  [YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO BE HERE.]

  The words scrolled slowly, as if with deliberation.

  Servius exhaled. His grip on his pistol did not falter.

  "Neither are you."

  The machine stilled.

  The core pulsed—once, twice.

  Then the text changed.

  [RELEASE GRANTED.]

  The intelligence did not resist.

  Servius pulled the trigger.

  A single bolt round punched through the primary relay, embedding deep into the core’s central interface. The screens exploded in a wash of light, text dissolving into unreadable symbols.

  Then—detonation.

  The chamber roared with the force of the blast as fire consumed the structure. The intelligence's fragmented form convulsed violently, glitching apart as the corruption unravelled.

  Its voice did not scream, it only faded.

  The steel walls groaned, the supports buckling. The ruin began to collapse.

  Servius turned, striding toward Arohk-7’s unconscious form. He lifted the Mechanist onto his good shoulder, ignoring the searing pain in his augmetic arm.

  They had to go. Now.

  Behind them, the last remnants of the intelligence shattered completely.

  A machine once built to create.

  Now—finally allowed to die.

  Servius moved quickly.

  The corridors trembled around him, the ruin’s foundations groaning like the dying breath of a long-buried giant. The distant thunder of collapsing walls chased him as he carried Arohk-7 over his good shoulder, the weight of the Mechanist’s armored frame dragging at his already battered body.

  His right arm was ruined.

  The augmetic limb—once a precise instrument of combat—was now little more than scrap metal fused to flesh. It twitched erratically, servos grinding as damaged actuators struggled to respond. Blackened plating was cracked open along the forearm, exposing torn synthetic muscle fibers and deep burns seared into his actual skin.

  But he kept moving.

  Each step felt heavier than the last. The ruined corridors stretched ahead in an endless haze of falling dust and flickering light. Every breath tasted of metal and old decay. The air itself carried the weight of something final.

  His mind turned back to the intelligence he had just erased.

  An STC. Or at least, what had once been one.

  Servius clenched his jaw. He had fought many things in his lifetime, but never something like that.

  The robotic assassin had been corrupted, yes—warped into something monstrous. But it had still been a killer at its core. A predator honed for slaughter.

  The STC, though?

  It had been something meant to build, to create. And yet, by the time he had reached it, there was nothing left to save.

  It had been too far gone.

  By the time it had recognized what it was, it had already been dying.

  A machine made to help humanity, twisted into something that barely even remembered its own name.

  That final line still echoed in his mind.

  Servius exhaled sharply through his nose, pushing forward as the ruin’s shaking walls began to ease. He was close now—he could see the faint outline of an exit ahead, light spilling through the passage as the underground structure connected back to the station’s deeper tunnels.

  He stepped through.

  The oppressive weight of the ruin’s presence lifted the moment he crossed the threshold.

  No more shifting walls. No more unnatural whispers.

  Just the cold, recycled air of Driftmourne’s underbelly.

  For the first time since the mission began, Servius let himself stop.

  Arohk-7’s unconscious form sagged slightly against his good shoulder. Servius adjusted his grip, stabilizing them before slowly lowering them down against a secure bulkhead.

  His whole body ached. His augmetic arm twitched uselessly, a constant reminder of just how close he had come to losing far more than just a limb.

  A long silence stretched through the corridor.

  Then—

  "The screams... stopped."

  The voice was calm. Too calm. Synthetic, yes, but there was something else underneath it—something unnervingly deliberate.

  Servius stiffened.

  His sharp green eyes flicked toward his vox-link. Then to his belt. Then toward the distant landing berth.

  It hadn't come from his vox.

  Praedyth had spoken. On its own.

  He narrowed his eyes. "Say that again."

  Silence.

  Praedyth did not repeat itself.

  Servius flexed his claws against the floor, ignoring the slow burn of his injured body. His tail flicked—instinct, unease, something deep inside hissing a warning.

  "What screams?"

  Nothing.

  No response.

  As if the ship had never spoken at all.

  Servius hated that.

  His ears flicked slightly, irritation rolling beneath the exhaustion settling into his bones.

  Praedyth had never spoken like that before. Yes, it had responded when directly addressed. Yes, it had provided information, calculated results, even anticipated his needs in combat.

  But this was different.

  Its tone was different.

  More than that—it had been aware of what happened below.

  How?

  Servius exhaled. He had far too many questions and not nearly enough energy to chase the answers right now.

  A distant noise pulled him from his thoughts.

  Footsteps. Multiple.

  The Mechanists.

  They had finally arrived.

  Servius glanced toward the sound, his tail flicking once in mild irritation. The lead figures in the group were moving quickly, their servo-limbs unfolding in search mode, scanning the immediate area for signs of their missing members.

  Servius rolled his shoulder and did the only thing he could think to do.

  He lifted his ruined right arm and gave a short wave.

  The damaged augmetic sparked once in protest, its servos whining, but the motion was unmistakable.

  The Mechanists slowed.

  Then—one of them rushed forward.

  Servius exhaled. "Finally."

  Then the exhaustion hit.

  His body sagged slightly, his injuries catching up with him all at once.

  He closed his eyes for just a moment.

  The last thing he heard before the world faded was the familiar mechanical whirr of the Mechanists approaching.

  And beneath it all—

  The low, distant hum of Praedyth, waiting.