The descent down the southern face of Piston Gorge demanded four unbroken hours of hard labor with nylon ropes and steel carabiners.
The air at the canyon floor carried the oppressive density of an industrial sauna. Steam hissing from pipe joints surged in erratic plumes, glazing the iron deck below with a slick slurry of muddy runoff and spent motor oil.
The first day was given over entirely to structural survival.
The hollow boiler hull Dante had singled out was lodged two hundred and fifty feet above the canyon floor, wedged between two structural iron crossbeams fifteen feet thick. The steel cylinder boasted an interior diameter of thirty feet, with four-inch cast-iron walls that warded off the brunt of the ambient heat.
Maria rigged one of the manual chain hoists to a girder to haul their nine hundred pounds of steel cable, rigging, and hardware up into the cavity.
She masked the circular hatch with double layers of vulcanized heavy-duty tarp, anchoring the margins with thirty screw-down pipe clamps driven directly onto the iron corners. Along the curving belly of the hull, they laid down forty square feet of pine pallets to keep their packs and air mattresses clear of the corrosive deck condensation.
The greatest ordeal proved to be the noise.
Every twenty-eight seconds, piston number four, a fifteen-foot drive hammer three hundred feet from their redoubt, plunged with the momentum of a freefalling piledriver.
THUM.
The impact sent the four-inch steel plates of their shelter ringing like a discordant gong.
Maria crammed waxed cotton plugs into both ears just to swallow dried beef and manioc meal without her jaw vibrating on every stroke of the machine.
Dante spent their first three hours etching concentric chalk circles mixed with conductive copper powder across the curved walls, laying down an acoustic dampening array that slashed the internal resonance by half.
Toward dusk on that first day, two spindle-legged horrors with frosted glass lenses, each the size of a wolfhound, crawled up the boiler's exhaust flue, catching the scent of living human meat.
[Oil Stalker (Level 18).]
Maria didn't even need to unstrap the greatsword from her back.
Grabbing the solid steel bar she kept as a reserve sidearm, she waited for the lead beast to push its snout past the tarp seam, then drove a downward thrust straight into the breach. The bar's blunt tip smashed the creature's copper ribcage against the iron frame, snapping internal conduits in a spray of black grease. The second wheeler-dealer turned tail and vanished into the chasm of gears below.
Day one yielded forty experience points and a fortified forward base.
Day two nearly ended in ruin before noon.
They descended to the floor of the gorge to run their initial sweep for isolated targets. The bed of the primary drainage sluice was as broad as a four-lane highway, scored by deep channels where viscous mineral oil flowed toward the lowermost turbines.
The monstrosity that scrambled down from a scrap conveyor bore little resemblance to the standard automata roaming the rim.
It stood ten feet high, supported by six jointed legs like an iron spider, with two massive forward limbs mounting pneumatic continuous-core jackhammer lances.
[Hydraulic Piercer (Level 21 - Greater Tier 2).]
[Health Points: 280/280.]
"Scatter!" Dante yelled, channeling Mana into his left hand.
Their blunder lay in the footing.
The drainage sluice was coated in fresh, unoxidized grease. When the Piercer lunged forward, its six conical-tipped limbs bit into the iron with flawless traction, whereas Maria, bracing her stance to swing the forty-pound greatsword, felt her leather soles slip in the oily sludge.
Her [Unshakable Stance] required baseline ground friction to lock her center of mass. On the slick grease, the momentum of her two-hundred-pound frame slid nearly two feet sideways.
The monster's right pneumatic lance drove straight forward.
Its hardened steel point rammed the lower lip of Maria's brigandine cuirass.
CRASH.
The riveted iron plate caved inward, driving lizard hide hard against her floating rib. The impact yielded a muffled crunch of yielding cartilage, hurling Maria sideways into a wall of steam pipes as the breath was driven from her lungs in a strangled gasp.
[-55 HP to Maria.]
[Maria's Health Points: 60/115.]
The monster's secondary lance was already cocked to punch through her stomach against the iron pipe.
Dante didn't bother slinging a standard dart. With thirty Intelligence, he calculated the machine's movement vector in a tenth of a second.
Horizontal Runic Barrier!
He dumped sixty Mana into the floor directly beneath the construct's stride.
The shimmering barrier didn't rise vertically as a wall, it manifested flat, eight inches off the deck, interposing a dry, grease-free plane of force between the slippery floor and the machine's lead left leg.
When the mechanical spider's spike struck solid ether, the radical change in traction tripped its stride cold.
The three-ton Piercer lurched sideways for half a beat, its second lance missing Maria's hip by two inches to bury itself deep into the steam pipe behind her.
A jet of scalding vapor hissed from the breach, blinding the construct's sensors.
Maria didn't wait for the pain in her ribs to settle.
Bracing her boot against the pipe, she gripped the greatsword with both grease-caked hands and flared [Lead Impact] with the last five Mana points remaining in her reserve.
The broad blade surged in an inverted vertical arc, rising from the floor and cleaving the cloud of steam with a concussive roar.
The edge caught the brass knuckle-joint of the machine's front right leg dead-on.
Charged with leaden force, the forty-pound blade sheared the joint clean through. The monster collapsed under the dead weight of its chassis, and Maria brought the sword down a second time, plunging the chisel point through the hydraulic manifold seated between the beast's glass lenses.
High-pressure fluid erupted from the shattered skull, drenching Maria's trousers and breastplate before the construct's drive train went totally slack.
[-160 HP to target.]
[Target Eliminated: Hydraulic Piercer (Level 21).]
[Experience: +410 shared EXP.]
Maria sank to her knees in the grease, resting her forehead against the iron flat of her blade, breathing in short, ragged gasps.
"I hate... machine grease," she spat a thread of soot-streaked saliva.
Dante ran to her side with a vial of healing sap in his left hand, ignoring his own exhaustion.
"Did it break your ribs?"
"Still in one piece," she ran a hand over the buckled cuirass, groaning as her fingers grazed the warped plate. "Just cracked the outer shell. But we aren't hunting in this shit canal again. Next descent happens on dry gear beds."
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Dante helped her to her feet, slinging her arm over his shoulders to take her weight as they hauled themselves back up the ropes into the boiler hull.
The lesson of day two was seared into both their minds: the canyon's terrain hazards were every bit as lethal as the beasts roaming it.
Day three was a day of silence and tools.
They did not venture down to hunt. Dante spent the entire morning using a heavy hammer and a hardwood block to beat out the dents in Maria's iron brigandine, hammering the plate until the curvature once again rested comfortably over her bruised ribs.
Maria passed the afternoon seated on the wooden pallets, restitching torn leather harness straps and honing the greatsword's edge with fine wet-dry sandpaper.
Food was rationed strictly: two tins of sardines split over manioc flour and two liters of water treated with chlorine tablets.
[Experience Status:]
[Dante: Level 15 (435/1500 EXP)]
[Maria: Level 17 (1410/2400 EXP)]
Dante spent the remainder of the afternoon sketching fresh runic blueprints on greaseproof sheets. He had realized that using [Runic Barrier] horizontally to fabricate dry traction points neutralized the terrain edge multi-legged constructs held over them.
"We need to lure them into narrow bottlenecks," Dante explained, tapping his pencil on his Sector Four sketch. "If a construct can't splay its outriggers, your greatsword outranges their lances every time."
"You lock down the deck with that blue light, and I'll carve the drive core out of anything that moves," she replied, tying a tight square knot into her greave strap.
On day four, the strategy ran with the precision of a railway chronometer.
They uncovered a nest of Plate Cutter Automata in a secondary conduit between two dead cylinders. They were Level 19 constructs armed with twin twenty-inch circular sawblades spinning on drive arms.
Dante didn't wait for melee to engage.
He laid down three runic containment rings across the mouth of the corridor using his copper-doped chalk. When the lead Cutter charged, its whining saws spinning at peak revolutions, its lead limb stepped directly onto the ether circle.
The rune dumped fifty Mana in a single burst, erecting a cage of sapphire force that jammed the blade drive rotor in a fraction of a second.
The machine's drive engine seized in an explosion of white sparks.
Maria dropped from an overhead inspection gantry ten feet up.
She channeled her two hundred pounds, bolstered by twenty-six pounds of plate and forty pounds of greatsword, into a descending cleave straight through the spine of the construct.
[Lead Impact] shattered the automaton's dorsal plating like plywood.
The blade sheared the drive shaft in half, peppering the iron walls with broken gear teeth.
The construct fell apart without spinning its saws a single turn.
[-180 HP to target.]
[Target Eliminated: Plate Cutter Automaton (Level 19).]
Over the next thirty minutes, they repeated the drill four more times down the same corridor, using Dante's geometry to funnel the machines and Maria's heavy edge to execute each kill with a single stroke.
Neither took a scratch.
By dusk on day four, they returned to their boiler hull carrying forty-five pounds of clean copper salvaged from the automata cores and a thick wad of gray scrip retrieved from the maintenance locker of a deceased forge hand.
Day five brought their first level threshold inside the gorge.
The skirmish erupted along the rim of a boiling condensation reservoir. A pack of seven Level 18 Cog Hounds attempted to encircle their flank while Dante was siphoning refined mineral oil from an open relief valve.
The engagement spanned twelve minutes of running battle over scrap mounds.
Dante maintained range, using [Concentrated Aether Dart] to blind optical lenses and proximity arrays, while Maria swept her blade in wide horizontal arcs, snapping the legs off the mechanical hounds whenever they sprang from the rocks.
When the last hound plunged into the scalding runoff channel with its skull split by the sword tip, Dante's interface chimed in bold golden lettering.
[Level Maturation Threshold reached!]
[Dante Miller has reached Level 16.]
[Attribute Adjustments:]
[Intelligence: 30 -> 31]
[Wisdom: 23 -> 24]
[Constitution: 09 -> 10]
[Total Mana Reserve: 380 -> 420 MP.]
Dante sat hard onto a warm iron beam, drawing deep, steady drafts of the muggy air.
Reaching ten Constitution finally yielded a tangible physical shift: his lungs no longer wheezed after ten minutes of sprinting across scrap, and his chest tolerated the ambient steam without that dry, suffocating stitch that had dogged him since childhood.
"Level up?" Maria asked, resting her grease-slick blade on the floor and wiping sweat from her neck with her grimy shirt.
"Sixteen," Dante replied, downing half a canteen of lukewarm water. "Four hundred and twenty Mana now. And my Constitution hit double digits for the first time ever."
"Still less than half of mine," she grunted with a smirk, booting a hound carcass into the boiling runoff. "At least you don't look like you're about to pass out every time we scramble up an iron ladder."
Day six proved the most brutal ordeal of all, despite seeing neither drawn steel nor cast ether.
At three in the morning, the primary superheated steam trunk line in the central sector ruptured under three thousand pounds of pressure.
The entire gorge was swallowed in a blinding white fog baking at one hundred and sixty degrees.
They remained barricaded inside the hollow boiler for fourteen consecutive hours, the tarps sealed shut and constantly doused with water buckets to keep the edges from melting away. The metal hull grew so scorching that brushing bare skin against the walls meant an instant blister.
Maria stripped off her iron cuirass and shirt, sitting in just her sports bra and denim shorts, sweat cascading down her broad back and corded arms.
Dante, whose system still struggled with thermoregulation even at ten Constitution, sat stranded on the wooden pallet flanked by three Mana stones inscribed with cooling glyphs to ward off heat stroke.
They drained four liters of water in six hours, nursing every drop through dry lips.
"If I make it out of this alive..." Maria grumbled, lying flat on the planks with a wet rag across her eyes, "...I'm never bitching about high noon at the beach ever again."
"The steam is flushing the grease out of the drainage sluices," Dante replied weakly, fighting to hold his focus on the refrigeration runes. "Tomorrow the deck will be scrubbed clean. Our footing will be solid."
"Shut up with your engineer optimism, Dante," she muttered from beneath the cloth. "Just hand me another swig of that warm water before my brains boil."
By day seven, the steam fog finally settled, leaving the gorge draped in a warm sheen of condensation and fresh rust.
The prize that capped their first week was a forty-foot-long Welding Centipede, a heavy-plated horror that fed along the power mains running beneath the central tracks.
[Welding Centipede (Level 22 - Tier 2 Elite).]
[Health Points: 360/360.]
The battle ground on for twenty minutes of pure physical punishment.
The monstrosity vented incandescent arcs of electric welding sparks from its mandibles, slagging the iron deck with every lunge.
Dante pinned the beast along the main channel, chaining six successive [Runic Barriers] to halt the advance of its front segments while pelting its softer underbelly with three back-to-back [Concentrated Aether Darts], burning through one hundred and twenty Mana in two minutes of sustained fire.
The killing blow fell to Maria.
Sprinting along the upper retaining wall, she vaulted from thirteen feet up, bringing her greatsword down two-handed straight into the neck collar between the centipede's head and its first armor ring.
The forty-pound blade bit to the hilt, severing the monster's copper conduit spine in a burst of azure static that spat sparks against the canyon walls.
[-240 HP to target.]
[Target Eliminated: Welding Centipede (Level 22).]
The centipede thrashed through long, dying spasms before collapsing slack across the metal rails.
Maria wrenched the blade free with both hands, steadying her shaking body against the dead carapace. Her chest heaved in ragged gasps, arms stung by electrical burns, iron greaves dented from tail whips.
Her silver screen flared through the thinning smoke.
[Congratulations. Maria has reached Level 18.]
[Updated Attributes:]
[Strength: 27 (+1)]
[Constitution: 29 (+1)]
[Total Health Points: 125/125.]
She stared at the glowing script, dragged a bloody hand across her grease-streaked face, and let out a raspy, booming laugh that echoed along the gorge walls, answering the rhythmic thunder of the distant pistons.
Dante picked his way down the stone bank, empty chalk tin in hand and pack slung across his shoulders. He stopped beside the carcass, looking from Maria's stats to his own interface.
[Dante Miller - Level 16 (820/1800 EXP).]
[Maria - Level 18 (40/2800 EXP).]
One full week inside the clockwork hell.
Their clothes were shredded, reeking of coal soot and burnt motor oil, arms crisscrossed with small lacerations from hunting while surviving on cold canned fish. Yet the distance to their goal had narrowed.
Two levels remained for Maria, and four for Dante.
Maria sheathed the greatsword into the leather sling across her back with a dull clack, looked down at the five-foot-eight youth dusting chalk off his trousers, and bumped his shoulder with a gloved fist.
"One level down, bighead," she said, her voice steady and steel-plated with unbroken resolve. "Now let's get back to the boiler before that thing's boiled runoff goes cold. I've earned two whole tins of sardines tonight."
Dante nodded, hitching his pack straps.
Their campaign in Piston Gorge was only halfway through, but both knew down to the ounce the weight they had to carry to reach that railway line.