They melted into the shadows beneath the catwalk as the blast door at the far end of the cavernous chamber ground fully open. Two figures stepped through, silhouetted against the harsh white light behind them. They were not standard Enforcers. They were smaller, more slender, their armor a stark, sterile white.
They were Tech-Priests of Kali's order, bio-engineers and systems auditors given tactical authority. They carried diagnostic tools, not heavy weapons, but their presence was in some ways more threatening than a squad of soldiers.
"Aquatic sentinels 7 and 8 are offline," one of them said, his voice a crisp, clinical mono-tone, filtered through his helmet. "Complete system failure. No preceding error logs. It's anomalous."
"Scan the area," the second commanded. "Log all energy signatures, Prana and technological. I want to know what caused this."
A device on the second Tech-Priest's wrist began to emit a low hum. A faint, 3D grid of blue light expanded from it, sweeping across the chamber, through the water, and over the disabled serpent-drones. Kalpit and Anasuya held their breath. They were hidden from sight, but an energy scan would find them instantly.
Kalpit braced himself for a fight.
But the moment passed.
"Scan complete," the first Priest reported. "Residual EM signatures from a localized pulse device, minor. No active Prana signatures detected. At all. The water is… clean."
"Impossible," the second one retorted. "Two primary sentinels are not disabled by a minor pulse. Rerun the scan. There must be an echo, a trace..."
Anasuya's trap had worked perfectly. The Tamas pouch was hiding the Mantra-shila, their most potent source of active Prana, leaving the investigators with a puzzle that defied their logic. The two Tech-Priests were now locked in a debate, their belief in their perfect system warring with the impossible data before them.
That was their opening.
<"Now's your chance,">> Atri's voice whispered in Kalpit's ear. <"The primary access corridor is directly above them. See the maintenance shaft? It leads right to it. Move while they're distracted.">>
While the Tech-Priests were focused on the pool of water, Kalpit and Anasuya slipped from their hiding place, moving with absolute silence along the far wall. They reached a vertical maintenance shaft—little more than a ladder in a metal tube—and began to climb.
It was a slow, grueling ascent. The shaft was slick with condensation. Every movement threatened to send a clang echoing through the chamber. Below, the Priests were still arguing, their confusion mounting. They were calling in for secondary diagnostic protocols, buying Kalpit and Anasuya precious seconds.
They emerged onto a new level, a brightly lit, sterile white corridor that hummed with immense, contained power. Massive, cryo-cooled cables, as thick as a man's body, lined the walls, pulsing with a faint blue light. This was the spire's circulatory system.
"Sublevel four. The primary power distribution node," Anasuya whispered, her technical knowledge surfacing. "Atri's schematics say the central server core is one level below us, directly beneath this corridor."
"How do we get there?" Kalpit asked, looking at the seamless, featureless walls.
"We don't," she replied grimly. "The server core is a magnetically sealed, vacuum-protected sphere. There is only one physical entrance, and it's on the other side of the sublevel, guarded by an elite garrison. We'd never make it."
It was a dead end. The sewer grate had led them into a sealed box.
Kalpit placed a hand on one of the massive power cables. The hum vibrated through his bones. It was not just electricity; it was a river of pure, processed data. The lifeblood of the SamsaraNet. The thoughts and dreams of a billion souls, packaged and quantified.
His Anahata chakra resonated with the faint, stolen Prana contained within the stream. He could feel the ghost-emotions of the city. He looked at the cable, then at the floor.
"If we can't get through the door..." he said, a wild idea forming in his mind, "we'll have to find another way."
He focused his Muladhara-sight on the floor. It was a thick slab of reinforced plasteel. Impenetrable.
He knelt down, pressing his palm flat against the cold surface. He didn't try to find a weakness in the floor. He tried to find the heart of the machine it was protecting.
Listen. Connect.
He reached down with his senses, through the plasteel, through meters of shielding. He found it. The server core. It was not just a machine. It was alive. Its 'Prana' was a swirling, contained galaxy of pure information, silent and sleeping. It was the mind of the spire.
He could feel it. But how could he reach it?
"Kali's systems are perfect," he murmured to himself, an echo of Parashurama's lesson resonating in his thoughts. "Logic-based. It doesn't account for chaos. It doesn't account for... glitches."
His gaze went from the floor to the massive cable, then back to the floor. A plan, so audacious it bordered on insane, clicked into place. He looked at Anasuya.
"I need a diversion. A loud one. And I need you to trust me."
Her soldier's eyes searched his for a moment. She saw not the frightened scavenger, but the focused warrior from the canyon, and she nodded once. "What do you need?"
"One of those," he said, pointing to a cryo-junction where a smaller cable split off from the main conduit. "If you rupture it, what happens?"
"A catastrophic energy discharge," she answered immediately. "It would blow this entire corridor, trigger every alarm in the spire, and probably vaporize us."
"Good," Kalpit said, a grim smile on his face. "Do that. But not here. Do it at the far end of the corridor, as far away from here as you can get. Give me exactly thirty seconds."
She stared at him, understanding dawning. It was a suicide mission. "And what will you be doing?"
"Arguing with the floor," he said.
She hesitated, then her face hardened with resolve. "Thirty seconds," she said, and began to run silently down the long corridor, her vibro-knife humming to life.
Kalpit was alone. He placed both hands on the floor directly above the server core. He closed his eyes.
Twenty-nine seconds.
He didn't have the raw power to shatter the plasteel. Not like Parashurama. But he had learned a different technique. Transformation. Resonance.
Twenty seconds.
He poured his Prana, not into the floor, but through it. He sent a single, resonant pulse from his Manipura, a 'ping' of golden energy, directed at the heart of the server core below. He wasn't attacking it. He was waking it up.
Fifteen seconds.
Down below, deep within the vacuum-sealed sphere, the central server, an AI of immense but limited sentience, registered the ping. It was an anomaly. A system query from a non-existent source. It ran a diagnostic. All physical entry points were secure. All networks were firewalled. The query was, by its logic, impossible.
Ten seconds.
The machine's confusion was a silent storm of conflicting protocols. To resolve the paradox, it needed more data. It did the only logical thing it could. It sent a 'ping' back, a tiny thread of diagnostic energy, trying to identify the source of the query.
Five seconds.
Kalpit felt the response. A faint pulse of energy from below, pushing up against the floor, against his hands. It was the key. He had goaded the machine into opening a door, a microscopic crack in its own perfect defense.
He gripped that thread of energy with his will.
"Now!" he yelled.
At the far end of the corridor, Anasuya plunged her vibro-knife into the cryo-junction.
KRA-KTHOOOOOM!
The world turned white. The energy discharge was a contained sun, erupting down the hall. A wall of plasma and incinerating force roared towards him. Alarms, loud enough to tear the air apart, blared through the spire.
As the wave of destruction hit, Kalpit did not run or shield. He did the opposite. He opened the floodgates of his own power. He poured every last drop of Prana he possessed into the connection, forcing it down the diagnostic thread the machine had extended.
He wasn't breaking through the floor. He was digitizing his own consciousness.
Using the energy of the spire's own self-destructing power grid as a carrier wave, he converted his Prana, his will, his very being, into a stream of pure data. A glitch. A ghost. An impossible virus born of flesh and spirit.
The plasma wave washed over the spot where he knelt. Anasuya, who had ducked behind a fortified bulkhead, saw the empty space where he had been. He was gone. Vaporized.
But Kalpit was not dead.
He had entered the machine.
His senses exploded. He was no longer in a corridor. He was in an infinite, silent, and orderly universe of pure information. A sea of data, cool and blue. He was a single, golden spark of chaos in a world of perfect, sterile logic.
He was inside the server core. And somewhere in this endless ocean was the program for the Loyalty Patch. All he had to do was find it.
And delete it.