The maintenance tunnel was even narrower than East Well.
Angron hunched over as he moved forward, his shoulders still scraping the side walls from time to time.
Loose pipes he jostled hung overhead, swaying with his footsteps and dripping blackened condensate.
Karrus followed behind.
He tucked the half-shattered terminal under his arm, holding his shock spear in his other hand, glancing down at the screen every few moments.
The red dots were still flashing.
Faster and faster.
A few of them suddenly went dark and never lit up again.
Karrus hesitated for a step.
“Three more went out.” Angron didn’t look back.
He heard it.
At the upcoming junction, several scrapped maintenance vehicles were piled high.
A few municipal grid guards had just mounted their guns, but before they could even finish shouting a warning, Angron crashed into them.
He kicked a vehicle chassis through the air.
The guards were slammed against the wall right along with their cover.
None of them were worth stopping for.
On the terminal, the red dots kept winking out.
At the end of the maintenance tunnel stood a circular blast door.
A red light glowed above the door.
[Outer Field Penal Sector 7] [Quarantine Status] [Entry Prohibited] From behind the blast door came muffled thuds.
Bang.
Bang.
It sounded like someone slamming their shoulder against the door.
Cries and screams echoed too, heavily muffled.
Through half a meter of solid alloy, it was impossible to tell who was shouting what; only the increasingly frantic gasping could be heard.
Karrus rushed to the door, searching for a switch.
“Locked tight.” He yanked open the neighboring control box.
The wiring inside was charred black.
“They cut the power from the outside.” Angron raised a hand and pressed it against the blast door.
On the other side of the metal came a heavy thud, the sound of a body collapsing.
Then another.
Karrus looked down at his terminal.
“The dots are still dying.
In a little while, there won’t be anyone left alive inside.” Angron didn’t speak.
He stepped back half a pace.
Karrus immediately scrambled out of the way.
The next instant, Angron’s fist slammed into the center of the blast door.
*BOOM!* The entire maintenance tunnel shuddered.
The door buckled inward.
The banging inside ceased.
The people behind the door likely hadn’t expected someone on the outside to smash such a thing with bare fists.
A second punch.
A fissure ripped open across the alloy surface.
The bolts securing the door snapped out of the wall, spinning through the air and embedding themselves into the piping behind.
When the third punch landed, the entire door blew inward, frame and all.
Dust and smoke billowed into the penal sector.
Angron stooped down and stepped through the mangled frame.
Inside was a vast, enclosed workshop.
Rows of mechanical arms dangled beneath a high vault ceiling, while transport trailers, line-maintenance rigs, and heavy excavation machinery sat idle on the floor.
A thousand people should have been working here.
Now, most of them were huddled in the center of the bay.
Men.
Women.
And children who looked far too young.
All of them wore collars.
Some choked themselves with both hands, their faces turned a deep, bruised purple.
Others knelt on the floor, shoving all ten fingers under their collars; their fingernails had been torn off by the sharp metal edges, blood trickling down their necks.
Still others lay motionless on the ground, their bodies giving an occasional spasm, unknown if they were dead or alive.
When the blast door smashed open, the nearest slaves lifted their heads.
First, they saw the smoke.
Then, they saw the colossal figure emerging from within it.
Nearly five meters tall.
Mottled scars from poison gas corrosion marred his dark-green skin.
His chest rose and fell slowly with each breath, and uncleaned green blood clung to the corners of his eyes.
Nobody cheered.
They even cowered back slightly.
Fear was a thing that, once worn around the neck for long enough, did not vanish just because a door opened.
High up in the workshop, a guard reacted first.
“Fire!” Several automated gun turrets suspended from steel gantries swivelled simultaneously.
Just as their muzzles flared, Angron grabbed the broken door lying nearby.
He hoisted the entire massive plate of metal and hurled it upward.
The heavy door spun into the air and slammed into the gantry.
Two turrets crashed down, taking the guards stationed on them along for the fall.
As the remaining turrets rotated halfway, Karrus burst inside, grabbed his terminal, and smashed it into a floor control box.
The turrets stuttered for a fraction of a second.
That was enough.
Angron seized a transport trailer and flung it toward the upper gantries.
Turrets and steel beams snapped apart together.
Debris rained into the vacant maintenance zone.
The battle ended quickly.
Angron didn’t bother looking at the dead guards.
He walked toward the nearest slave.
It was a man whose hair was half-white.
He was kneeling, the collar cutting deep into his flesh, mouth wide open but barely able to draw breath.
Angron reached out his hand.
The man recoiled by instinct.
But the collar was already on the verge of snapping his neck bone.
Angron pinched the collar’s outer casing between two fingers.
With a gentle tug, the outer armor split open.
The inner metal locking ring was still wedged tightly around the neck, tiny electrical arcs crackling across Angron’s fingers.
Angron frowned.
He pried hard.
The ring snapped.
The old man collapsed onto the floor, gasping desperately for air.
But there were still over a thousand people in the workshop.
Angron looked up.
Dense crowds everywhere.
Face after face turned purple.
Pair after pair of hands clawing at necks.
Collar after collar he had no time to snap manually.
He could save this one before him.
He could save a second.
A third.
And then?
By the time he finished snapping them open one by one, the people at the back would long be dead.
Angron stood up.
The fire in his chest burned with a suffocating fury.
He hated this feeling.
He clearly had power.
A single fist could crush a turret; a single stomp could flatten an armored vehicle.
Yet in the face of a thousand throats, his fists were simply not fast enough.
“Where is the node?” His voice boomed across the workshop.
No one answered.
Not because they didn’t want to.
Many of them simply couldn’t speak anymore.
Karrus glanced at his terminal.
The screen only showed red dots, not the internal wiring of the penal sector.
He grabbed a maintenance slave who was still conscious.
“Where’s the device controlling the collars?” The slave’s lips were blue-purple.
He pointed a trembling hand toward the far end of the workshop.
“Out…
outer wall…” “White tower…” Angron looked in the direction he pointed.
At the far end, beyond several layers of steel scaffolding, stood a white equipment tower less than ten meters tall.
Thick cables crisscrossed around its frame.
At the very top, a red light pulsed.
Every time the red light flashed, someone in the workshop collapsed.
Angron moved.
He smashed through the robotic arms blocking his path.
Maintenance equipment and steel frames yielded before him like a pile of loose bones, shoved aside layer by layer by his shoulders.
A few guards remained around the equipment tower, retreating toward a back door.
One of them held a collar remote controller in his hand, mashing buttons as he ran.
“Increase pressure!” “Lock them all down!” A chorus of stifled screams echoed through the bay.
The green light in Angron’s eyes flared violently.
He picked up a severed mechanical arm and whipped it forward.
The mechanical arm pierced straight through half the workshop.
The guard holding the remote was impaled against the wall along with the controller.
The rest didn’t make it more than a few steps further.
Karrus chased them down with a scavenged stub gun.
The gunfire died down quickly.
Angron arrived before the equipment tower.
There was no door on the tower itself.
Only a ring of sealed armor plate.
All control circuitry was buried deep within.
Angron could feel the vibration humming from inside the tower.
Very faint.
Like a heart of metal.
With every pulse, someone died.
He shoved his fingers into the gap between the base of the equipment tower and the ground.
With his first burst of strength, the tower shuddered.
The anchor piles buried deep beneath remained rock solid.
When this thing had been constructed, it had never been designed to be tampered with by slaves.
Angron let out a low growl.
The muscles across his shoulders and back tightened once more.
Green veins bulged beneath his skin like thick roots.
The ground surrounding the equipment tower cracked first.
One fissure.
Two.
More and more.
The underground anchor bolts let out a sickening screech of grinding metal.
On his third exertion, the entire equipment tower was ripped out by its roots.
*BOOM!* The floor collapsed into a dark crater.
Thick lines snapped beneath the earth, electrical sparks leaping wildly along the frame.
The red beacon atop the tower flickered twice.
Then died.
The screams in the workshop ceased along with it.
Those still standing recovered first.
Grasping their throats, they gulped in air greedily.
Then came those on their knees.
Some coughed lying face down.
Some vomited blood while clawing at the collars embedded in their flesh.
Others sat frozen in place, as if unable to believe that ring of metal had truly stopped tightening.
Angron glanced down at the uprooted equipment tower.
Inside, several backup power cells were still lit.
This had only severed the execution signal right before them.
The collars had not truly been deactivated.
Once the city relay reestablished the feed, they would lock tight once again.
All they had bought was a brief reprieve.
Angron raised his foot.
One stomp.
The top of the tower collapsed inward.
A second stomp smashed the control core.
By the third, the entire tower was reduced to a heap of smoking scrap.
At least this place wouldn’t trigger again.
Sounds slowly returned to the workshop.
First panting.
Then weeping.
A woman embraced a child who had just regained consciousness, her whole body trembling as she sobbed.
Nearby, people pried at the deactivated collars around their necks.
When someone couldn’t force it open, another stepped in to help.
More and more began helping one another strip off the collar casings.
They were still terrified.
Their actions were chaotic.
But at least no one was waiting to die anymore.
Angron watched this unfold.
The suffocating fire in his chest eased slightly.
The relay tower was still outside.
This detour would cost time.
Perhaps in other places, people were already dying.
The thought brought him no regret.
There were too many red dots on the map.
He couldn’t save them all.
But he couldn’t just stand by and let the people right before his eyes die simply because he couldn’t save everyone.
How would that make him any different from the High Riders?
Karrus walked back, tucking the stub gun into his belt.
“Guards are cleared out.” He cast a glance at the wrecked tower on the floor.
“Does this place count as saved?” “For now.” Angron gestured toward the people still wearing collars.
“As long as the city relay stands, the collars haven’t truly stopped.” The relief on Karrus’s face instantly vanished by half.
A heavy scraping of metal sounded from the side of the bay.
Several slaves approached, pushing a large maintenance rig.
Leading them was a very old man.
His back was hunched, his neck collar half-sawn open with a cutter, blood still oozing from his skin.
Yet he didn’t rest.
His eyes remained fixed on the tower Angron had pulled out of the ground.
“Are you heading for the city relay?” Angron turned his head.
The old man didn’t shrink from his gaze like the others.
Perhaps having lived so long, he had little fear left in him.
“You know the way?” “Can’t take the surface.” The old man pointed toward the floor beneath the bay.
“The relay tower needs daily maintenance.
Parts, coolant, replaced hands…
it all goes underground.” Karrus pulled out his terminal.
“The map from East Well shows maintenance lines.” The old man nodded.
“The maintenance lines don’t connect into the tower.
But there’s a car.” “What kind of car?” “A rail maintenance car.” The old man turned, pointing toward a low alloy door deep in the workshop.
It was coated in thick dust, its original designation faded beyond recognition.
“There’s an old line underneath.
Every day at dawn, the maintenance car leaves from here and goes straight into the bottom level of the relay tower.” Karrus looked at Angron.
Angron looked at the door as well.
Above ground lay blockade streets, city guards, and turrets.
Underground, however, was a train that ran directly into the tower every day.
The High Riders had crisscrossed the whole city with pipes and rails to make managing their slaves easier.
Now, those very things were turning into pathways for him, one by one.
Angron walked toward the alloy door.
The old man called out after him, “How many people are you taking?” Angron didn’t stop.
“Enough to drive the car.” He reached the door and sank five fingers into the seam.
“The rest of you, fall back to the Bloody Sand Arena.” “There are weapons there.” “And people to hold the line.” He hauled the alloy door open to both sides.
The stale smell of old engine oil wafted out.
In the darkness, a set of tracks sloped downward.
At the end of the rails sat a dark gray maintenance train.
Angron stared at it.
The city relay tower was still flashing.
But this time, they didn’t need to go through the front door.
“Drive.”