The maintenance compartments beneath the Upper District are a damp and eerie place.
We slipped through a rusted iron grate hidden behind a pile of discarded lumber at the edge of the third ring, leaving the sounds of the city behind. The air inside instantly changed. It was heavy, damp, and thick with the suffocating smells of ancient dust, oxidized copper, and rancid machine grease.
As we moved deeper into the subterranean path, the sheer, impossible scale of the Empire’s engineering revealed itself. The architecture was brutal, a marriage of raw nature and industrial madness. The walls and floors were carved directly out of the jagged, living bedrock, but erupting from the stone were massive iron and brass gears. Some of these cogs were small, grinding rapidly near our ankles, while others were the size of modest houses, turning with a slow, agonising groan that vibrated through the soles of my boots.
Supporting the cavernous, uneven ceiling were enormous wooden pillars. The timber was black with age and rot, groaning under the unimaginable weight of the elevating stones operating hundreds of feet above us. The only light came from a few sparse, sputtering torches bolted to the stone walls at long intervals. They cast long, erratic shadows that danced maliciously between the moving teeth of the gears, leaving vast stretches of the path in absolute, terrifying penumbra.
"Stay close," I whispered, drawing my Veriti knife. The sound of the grinding metal above us was deafening, forcing me to raise my voice just to be heard over the industrial roar. "Check your corners. The shadows here are deep enough to hide a small army."
Elara drew her steel shortsword, her face pale but set in a mask of rigid determination. She took the left flank, her eyes darting toward every dark crevice. Myra stayed right behind me, holding a short thrusting spear tightly in her trembling hands. We moved in a tight triangle, my past-life military instincts helping me ease the strange atmosphere in this place.
We navigated a narrow walkway of slick stone, flanked on our right by a bottomless chasm where a colossal vertical gear endlessly churned, and on our left by a wall of weeping rock.
That was when I noticed the smell.
It wasn’t just machine grease anymore. It was the sharp, acidic sting of ammonia mixed with wet fur and fresh rot.
A high-pitched, chittering sound began to bleed through the groans of the machinery. It wasn’t just one sound. It was a multitude of scratching claws, thousands of them, clicking against the stone floor in the darkness ahead.
"Form up," I ordered sharply, halting our advance. "Shield wall formation. Shoulders together. Now!"
Myra whimpered but instantly pressed her shoulder against my back, aiming her spear outward. Elara stepped to my side, raising her blade.
From the deep penumbra beyond the next flickering torch, the darkness seemed to detach itself from the floor. A pair of beady, crimson eyes reflected the firelight. Then another. Then ten. Then fifty.
They weren’t normal rats. The Empire’s underbelly had bred them large, aggressive, and desperate. They were the size of small terriers, their fur matted with filth and dried blood, their teeth long and yellowed. They poured out from the cracks in the stone, from behind the wooden pillars, and crawled over the rusted iron pipes. It wasn’t a pack; it was a living, undulating carpet.
"Jute preserve us..." Myra breathed, her spear shaking violently.
"Aim for the eyes and throats! Do not let them pull you down!" I yelled over the deafening squeals. "If you fall, you die!"
The swarm hit us like a tidal wave.
I slashed horizontally with my knife, feeling the heavy, sickening resistance of flesh and bone as the enchanted blade easily cleaved through the first three rats that leapt at my chest. Hot, foul-smelling blood sprayed across my face, blinding me for a fraction of a second. I kicked a massive rat out of the air, my heavy leather boot crushing its ribs, before driving my knife down into the skull of another biting at my ankle.
Beside me, Elara was screaming a battle cry born of pure adrenaline. She swung her steel sword in wide, brutal arcs, hacking the creatures out of the air. But she was fighting with anger, not technique. She was leaving herself exposed.
A rat lunged from the shadows, sinking its teeth into her leather forearm guard. Elara shrieked, trying to shake it off, but two more leapt at her waist, their claws tearing through her thick tunic.
"Elara, tighten your guard!" I roared.
Before I could reach her, a silver flash shot past my shoulder. Myra thrust her spear with everything she had, skewering the rat on Elara’s arm right through the stomach and pinning it to a wooden pillar. Elara didn’t hesitate; she reversed her grip and sliced the heads off the other two, nodding a frantic, breathless thanks to the younger girl.
But for every rat we killed, five more scrambled over the twitching corpses of their kin. The sheer volume of bodies was overwhelming. I could feel their tiny claws scratching at my shins, their teeth snapping inches from my fingers. The air grew thick with the metallic stench of blood and the suffocating smell of their filthy bodies.
We can’t fight them in the open, my mind calculated. We are going to be completely surrounded in less than a minute.
"Fall back!" I commanded, driving my knife through the eye of a leaping beast. "Back to the gears! We need a bottleneck!"
"Are you insane?!" Elara yelled over the chittering roar, kicking a rat into the deep chasm on our right. "The gears will crush us!"
"Do it!"
We moved backward, inch by agonizing inch, fighting for every single step. My arms felt like they were made of lead. The Ember inside my chest—the Dormant Bud we had painstakingly awakened—flared to life. It didn’t shoot fire from my hands, but I felt a sudden, intense heat radiating through my veins. It forcefully flushed the lactic acid from my screaming muscles, pumping unnatural strength into my shoulders.
I saw the same realization in Elara and Myra’s eyes. Their strikes, which had been slowing down, suddenly became explosive again. The magic was keeping our vessels from collapsing.
We backed into a narrow alcove formed by a massive, groaning wooden pillar and the grinding teeth of a colossal brass gear. The space was only wide enough for two of us to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, with Myra behind us thrusting her spear through the gap between our bodies.
The rats could no longer flank us; they had to come at us from the front.
But the slaughter was far from over. The swarm threw themselves into the narrow gap with suicidal frenzy. Some of them misjudged their jumps and were caught in the teeth of the giant brass gear beside us, their bodies crushed into a grotesque paste with a sickening crunch that mingled with the mechanical grinding.
I lost track of time. The world narrowed down to the flickering light of a single torch, the glint of my knife, and the endless sea of teeth. My breath tore through my throat like broken glass. I was covered in scratches. A rat managed to bite deep into my calf, its fangs piercing the leather, before I crushed its spine with the pommel of my knife. The pain was searing, but the Ember instantly flooded the area with heat, keeping me standing.
Elara was a machine of pure, bloody destruction. Her face was spattered with gore, her eyes wide and wild, swinging her sword in relentless, rhythmic chops. Myra was crying, tears mixing with the blood on her face, but she never stopped thrusting her spear, keeping the creatures at bay whenever they managed to slip past our blades.
The stone floor was so slick with blood and guts that it was almost impossible to keep our footing. We were fighting in an ankle-deep swamp of carcasses.
Just keep moving, I chanted in my mind. Keep the rhythm. Slash. Kick. Stab. Slash. Kick. Stab.
Slowly, agonizingly, the tide began to turn.
The chittering wave thinned. The mountain of dead rats formed a physical barricade in front of us, making it harder for the survivors to reach us. I drove my knife into the skull of a particularly large, scarred rat, twisting the blade to sever its brainstem.
As I pulled my blade free, I braced for the next impact.
But it didn’t come.
I stood there, panting heavily, my knife raised, my chest heaving so violently my ribs ached.
The darkness ahead was still. The chittering had stopped. Only the heavy, oppressive groans of the colossal gears and the ragged, desperate breathing of the three of us echoed in the damp air.
"Is... is it over?" Myra sobbed quietly, leaning all her weight on her spear, her legs finally giving out as she slid down the wooden pillar to sit on the blood-soaked stone.
Elara dropped to one knee, coughing violently, her sword tip resting on the ground. "By the gods," she gasped. "I thought... I thought we were dead."
I didn’t relax my stance. I wiped a mixture of sweat and rat blood from my eyes, my gaze locked on the deep shadows beyond the pile of carcasses. The Ember in my chest was still burning hot, warning me that the danger hadn’t passed. My instincts were screaming.
Rats, no matter how hungry, rarely attacked armed humans in such massive, suicidal numbers unless they were driven by something. Or someone.
From the thick penumbra, just beyond the reach of the flickering torchlight, the sound of slow, deliberate clapping began to echo over the noise of the machinery.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Two figures stepped out of the darkness, their expensive, finely tailored cloaks dragging across the bloody stone floor. Their faces were pale, their features sharp and aristocratic, but their eyes had changed. The whites of their eyes were faintly bruised, spider-webbed with thin, dark veins—the unmistakable, physical toll of using forbidden blood magic.
Valerius stopped a few feet away from the mountain of dead rats, a twisted, arrogant smirk playing on his lips. Livia stood beside him, her cold gaze scanning our exhausted, bleeding bodies with absolute disdain.
"Well, well," Valerius purred, his voice dripping with condescension. "I must say, I am impressed. We thought the swarm would leave nothing but bones. But it seems the Commander’s new little pets actually have some bite to them."