Phrixus stood in the rapidly narrowing doorway, his massive, spiked steam-mace a blur of polished steel and malice. His eyes, glinting behind his goggles, were fixed on Josh's chest, where the Aether-Core was still clutched.
"The Strategos runs from logic," Phrixus's voice was a low growl, barely audible over the increasing structural stress. "And the Strategos will be captured by logic. Kalea, you cannot betray the Syndicate's creed of Synthetic Governance."
"My loyalty is to Olympus Aethelos, not its maintenance protocol," Kalea retorted. She slammed her hand down on a red-plated console. "We have a brief window."
The floor beneath them gave a sickening lurch. The Regulator Chamber, the whole upper section of the Promachonos Spire, was designed to be a containment field, and the tremors Josh and Doric had caused were now being exploited by Phrixus's brute-force attack on the turbine exhaust. The entire platform was beginning to detach from the central axis.
"I can't fight him, Kalea," Josh yelled over the din, instinctively reaching for the empty space where the Aetheric Carbine should be.
"You don't have to," Kalea said, a ferocious, calculated light in her eyes. "You escape by falling. We use the city's logic against itself."
With a final, desperate gesture, Kalea wrenched a lever on her console. A high-pitched, metallic shriek tore through the air. The floor directly beneath them, a massive square of obsidian grating, opened completely, revealing the black, copper-hazed void of the Lower Tiers a thousand feet below.
"The Detachment Ploy," Kalea explained, her voice sharp with adrenaline. "This entire section is a cargo transport dock. It's an unregistered emergency lift leading only to the Stygian Depths. It's the Syndicate's forgotten maintenance route, the path to the only region they refuse to enter."
Phrixus took a step forward, his steam-mace raised, but he hesitated at the sight of the chasm. The assassin was lethal, but he valued certainty.
"You cannot escape the city, Strategos!" Phrixus roared.
"We aren't escaping the city, Phrixus," Josh countered, his mind clicking into place with Kalea's reckless logic. "We are simply relocating the variable!"
Kalea threw a small, black-steel device at Phrixus's feet. It exploded in a cloud of thick, non-conductive soot, blinding the assassin for a critical moment.
"Jump!" Kalea screamed.
Doric, a man of action, grabbed Josh by the armored bracer and launched them both into the black, silent descent. Kalea followed, diving cleanly into the void just as Phrixus's whirring mace smashed the black console, destroying the iris control.
The fall was vertical, a controlled drop along the sheer face of the Spire's base. Kalea, using a small, magnetic field generator in her wrist bracer, slowed their terrifying descent, guiding them through the turbulent air currents. Phrixus, his vision obscured by the soot, was trapped on the detaching platform, the only path of certainty gone.
They fell for what felt like an eternity, finally landing with a jarring thud inside a massive, articulated cargo cage. The cage was bolted to a colossal, upward-moving chain that was slowly, endlessly bringing raw materials from the Stygian Depths.
Kalea coughed, brushing soot from her eyes. "We used an upward lift to go down. The logic of the machine is satisfied. We are now heading to the Superior Border of the Abyss. From there, we enter Phobos."
Doric, already on his feet, looked up at the ceiling of the cage, which was beginning to align with a massive, arched tunnel entrance in the deepest reaches of the Lower Tiers. "Phrixus will still follow, Kalea. The Abyss is just a change of venue."
"No," Kalea said, leaning her head back against the rusted iron bars of the cage, finally allowing a hint of weariness to show. "The city of Phobos is different. It is a city of thought, not steam. It is protected by the very physics the Syndicate rejects. The Syndicate is only comfortable with a visible enemy. In Phobos, we become invisible."
The cargo cage shuddered to a stop.
The colossal, metallic archway was not a gate, but a transition. Where the Stygian Depths of Olympus Aethelos were a chaotic tangle of rusty iron, shrieking steam, and perpetual, copper-hazed darkness, the city of Phobos was an exercise in brutal, organized silence.
As the cargo cage deposited them with a quiet, pneumatic sigh onto a docking platform, the first thing Josh noticed was the quality of the air. It was still thick with the smell of industry, but the overwhelming sulfurous odor was gone, replaced by the clean, sharp scent of ozone and polished steel. The surrounding structures were not bronze and brass—the volatile, ornamental metal of Olympus—but sheer, unbroken walls of magnetic obsidian and iron, forming labyrinthine canyons that seemed to absorb all sound.
"Welcome to Phobos," Kalea whispered, her voice barely cutting the deep quiet. She was already moving, agile and intent, securing the Aether-Core within a heavily shielded compartment on her back. "The city's design philosophy is silence and containment. Logic over spectacle. It's the only place the Chryseos Syndicate refuses to fully occupy."
Doric, his massive frame seeming disproportionately large in the sterile quiet, kept his hand near his spiked club, his Aegean eyes constantly scanning the unbroken walls. "The Syndicate calls this place a necrotic zone, Kalea. Contaminated by 'anti-Aethelosian thought.' They'd rather let it rot than enter its archives."
"Exactly," Kalea confirmed, leading them down a narrow, torch-lit corridor. The torches were steam-jet-powered gas lamps, casting long, clean shadows. "Phobos was the original intellectual core of the Golden Age, before the Senate allowed the Syndicates to commercialize the city. We don't rely on Aetheric Steam for vertical lift; we use magnetic fields and geothermal energy from the core below. It's safe. It's quiet. And the people here… they are scholars, not soldiers."
Josh felt the tension slowly bleeding out of his shoulders, replaced by a deep, intellectual curiosity. The very architecture here was calming. He noticed patterns in the iron walls, faint lines that pulsed with a cold, blue light when he focused. They weren't decorative; they were conduits, circuits. "This whole place… it's a giant Faraday cage. It's shielding itself from the Aether-Core's volatile energy. That's why the Syndicate avoids it—their automatons can't function optimally here."
Kalea stopped and looked at him, a genuine smile breaking the fatigue on her face. "You see the logic, Strategos Ajax. That is what we need. Doric is the muscle; I am the quick-thinking engineer, a Psylli—the bronze-clad flyers who are essentially their shock troopers—who defected. But you… you are the one who understands modern power. The kind that bends the rules of the old engineers."
"My name is Josh," he corrected automatically, though the name felt distant now, a memory from another life. "I was a fusion reactor engineer. The principles of containing a catastrophic power surge are still fresh."
"Josh," Kalea repeated, nodding. "My allies call themselves the Iron Scholars. They are the last bastion of true, non-militarized engineering and philosophy. They were working on a parallel to the Zeus Protocol—a way to stabilize the Promachonos Spire without sacrificing anyone. They believe the Core doesn't need to be installed to reset the system, but regulated by an external, stable anchor. We need to find their laboratory, the Foundry of the Void."