Chapter 59 - Elen's Account

The fine rain falling out in the street drummed against the workshop's corrugated iron roof in a gentle, unbroken rhythm.

Radiator steam held the room at a steady seventy degrees, and the aroma of chamomile and ginger from the brass kettle masked any lingering traces of machine grease or basalt dust in the air.

Nicole cradled the clay mug with both hands rested on the timber workbench.

The huntress had finished the bread and roasted peccary meat, wiping her mouth with the long sleeve of the black shirt Maria had lent her. The sweat from the descent and the sprint had fully dried, yet she kept her legs crossed on the stool rung, bare feet tucked under the loose sweatpants in a guarded posture.

Dante slid the wire brush into his tool kit, nudged the cleaned ferrite core toward the corner of the bench, and took the stool across from her.

Maria leaned against the iron railing beside the stove, arms folded across her chest, a mug of hot tea steaming between her fingers.

Silence hung in the workshop for nearly a full minute before Dante broke through the cadence of rain against the roof.

"You aren't obligated to tell us anything, Nicole," Dante began, his voice calm and direct, stripped of any military interrogation tone. "We fulfilled the contract. The serpent lies dead in the muck, the scales and the core are stacked in that corner, and your brass lockbox is secured inside your pack upstairs. Tomorrow morning we visit the quartermaster, collect the twelve thousand scrip, and you can board whatever streetcar you please without owing either of us a thing."

Maria took a sip of her tea, eyeing the girl with her usual unflinching gaze. "That's right," Maria added. "Nobody here is going to tie you to an iron beam to interrogate you like that crane sniper. But you saw how we fight. You saw Dante do things common casters in this city wouldn't dream of, and you saw that I don't flinch when five tons of monster hits me. If you want to share why you spent four years crawling through sewer mud after that tin box, we're listening. If you want to keep quiet, finish your tea and head upstairs to sleep, because your body still needs a bed."

Nicole looked down at the dark tea in the earthenware mug. Her four amber slit-pupils blinked in slow succession. She traced the edge of a thumbnail along a groove in the oak bench, feeling the solid grain of the wood. In four years of scraping through the discard trenches and drainage canals of this continent, no one had ever asked her a question like that.

Down in the underbelly, an inquiry into someone's past was merely the prelude to a shiv in the ribs or a tip to the Legion guard for a twenty-scrip bounty. Everyone guarded their trail like a lethal secret.

But here, inside this townhouse walled behind thirteen feet of solid stone, seated before two people who had risked their own bones to catch an iron tail in the muck and hadn't laid a single finger on the sealed box upstairs, Nicole's paranoia had nowhere left to anchor itself.

She drew a slow breath through her nose, exhaling in a long draft that set the tea steam wavering. "My mother's name was Elen," her voice came out soft, clear, cutting through the patter of rain on the roof.

Maria didn't stir. Dante kept his eyes on the bench, logging every syllable with the analytical precision of thirty-four Intelligence.

"She was a pureblood demon from the obsidian ranges," Nicole continued, her fingers tightening around the clay mug. "She wasn't a soldier and she didn't know how to hold a blade. She was chief archivist for the Primary Cataloging Bureau inside the Military Citadel. Spent thirty years locked in the granite records halls of the central palace, auditing ore manifests and intake sheets for damned souls rolling in on armored freights."

She paused briefly, taking another sip of the warm brew. "Five years ago, the directorate of the Council of Forges began transferring entire lots of documents into her department. Papers lacking official Legion stamps or the heraldry of the forty-eight noble bloodlines. They arrived in wooden crates sealed with gray wax, stamped with only one sigil, the one Dante named in the conduit: a blind eye set within a silver hexagon."

Dante remained motionless, though his gray pupils narrowed by a fraction. "What was inside those manifests?" Dante asked.

"Intake registries for live cargo," Nicole answered, her gaze glued to the oak bench. "Not standard convicts from Earth sent down to pay debts in iron foundries. Entire families of native demons shipped in from the Second and Third Continents, alongside souls delivered with zero crimes or sins logged in the judgment matrix. People scrubbed from public registries the second their boots hit the classification platforms."

She drew a deep breath, her voice lowering, heavy with bitter memory. "My mother was methodical. She realized that every single one of those transport consignments was dispatched to the same subterranean blind spot: two hundred meters beneath the palace foundations, in a gallery omitted from all municipal water and steam blueprints. Containment Sector Zero. And every week, she received disposal clearances from the quartermaster stating the cargo had been 'liquidated due to biological adaptation failure.'"

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Maria ground her teeth. The memory of Miro's grafted mandibles, the circular surgical scars along his skull, and his frantic words atop Crane Four flooded back with violent clarity.

He was a discard who survived.

His family was one of those shipments.

"Did she try copying the logs?" Maria asked.

"She copied them," Nicole confirmed, lifting her amber eyes to meet theirs for the first time. "For eight months, she used fine mineral parchment and indelible ink to duplicate consignment numbers, family lineages, and the chemical formulas for the compounds the men in white jackets ordered from Second District apothecaries. She stashed everything inside that brass lockbox sitting upstairs."

The girl tugged her shirt sleeves over her knuckles. "One night, she came home without her Citadel uniform. Shivering, pale as paper. She said a staff officer had entered her office escorted by two men in long white dusters whose faces were absent from any garrison payroll. Men carrying passes that made Legion colonels snap salutes without speaking a word."

Nicole swallowed dry, her jaw setting with a faint click of chitin near her pointed ears. "She gave me that obfuscation talisman around my neck. Gave me the bronze key to the aqueduct control vault and the coordinates to the Fourth Division emergency locker in Pipe Seven. Told me to run for the Third District and never set foot in the Citadel plaza again."

"What about her?" Dante asked softly.

"The following morning, her office burned," Nicole answered, her tone as cold as the workbench iron. "The military police report claimed a high-pressure steam main ruptured in the wall, incinerating everyone inside the cataloging hall. But when I went to the soul morgue to find her body, the death registry had been voided. Her name was scrubbed from the civic roll as if she had never drawn breath."

She looked at her calloused palms, hardened from working mechanical crossbow strings. "I was fourteen years old. I didn't know how to shoot, didn't know how to field-dress a beast, and had not one scrip to my name. I took to the runoff trenches along the slag canal because it was the only place the sulfur hounds wouldn't track on account of the acid mud. Learned to shoot silver bolts, learned to distill venom, and spent four years piecing together intelligence just to breach Pipe Seven."

She paused for several seconds, breathing slowly. "I thought she had left an exit pass in that vault to smuggle me off this continent. A travel permit to reach the Fifth or Sixth Ring, far from this metropolis. But when we cracked that safe earlier today and I saw the brass box bearing her gray wax seal, I understood." She looked up at Dante with a clarity stripped of all panic. "She didn't want me to run away. She wanted someone to read what's written inside. She wanted someone to know that brass palace is built atop a slaughterhouse of souls."

Silence weighed upon the workshop once more. Dante sat motionless, his mind processing the account with the clarity of someone watching scattered threads weave into a monstrous tapestry.

Miro in the canyon with grafted mandibles.

The ivory wings that had erupted from his own spine under this continent's Mana pressure.

The interface branded onto his human soul from his first breath on Earth.

The Sentinel class that man in the white jacket had forced onto Maria at nine years old, like installing armor plating onto a field prototype.

Everything converged on that two-hundred-meter void beneath the stone of the Military Citadel.

They were not in this continent by chance.

That man in the white jacket had not handed them a hundred-and-eighty-day clock to reach the Capital merely to grind levels like an ordinary game. He had positioned them at the dead center of the board, mere miles from the complex where the engine of these abominations ran day and night.

Maria brought her tea mug down onto the oak bench with a heavy thud.

The six-foot-three vanguard drew a deep breath, her brown eyes flashing with that same dark, smoldering rim that had surfaced in the Black Smelter and the marsh struggle.

"Now we know," Maria said, her voice carrying a gravity that seemed to vibrate the flagstones beneath their boots. "They killed your mother, Nicole. They tore that crane kid's family apart. And they treat Dante like a lab toy they can track from afar as if they own his life."

She looked at Dante. "Do we open that brass box tomorrow, Dante?"

Dante stood from the stool slowly, adjusting his canvas duster across his shoulders.

"First thing tomorrow we visit the military quartermaster to turn in the tusks and the serpent's core," Dante replied, his voice cold and calculated, mapping out the logistics of an extended campaign. "We collect the twelve thousand scrip in clean bills. We purchase your black-steel greatsword from Korgan's shop. And then we sit at this bench with Nicole and read every line her mother transcribed onto that mineral paper."

Nicole looked between the two of them, feeling the reality of this makeshift alliance settle in her chest with the permanence of a basalt cornerstone.

She was no longer alone in the city's runoff trenches.

She had a Sentinel backed by thirty-three Strength and a Summoner wielding thirty-four Intelligence ready to descend that same abyss by her side.

"Thank you," Nicole said again, this time with her head held high, amber eyes locked onto Dante's.

Dante merely gave a brief nod toward the stairs leading to the upper rooms.

"Get some sleep, Nicole. We have serious work ahead starting tomorrow."

The huntress rose from the stool, padded lightly up the timber stairs, and slipped into the guest room, clicking the latch shut behind her.

Dante and Maria lingered in the ground-floor workshop for ten minutes more, gazing at the bench where the iron tools lay under the yellow glow of the arc lamp, listening to the rain outside tapping against the Capital's stones, with the absolute conviction that from this day forward, their survival had officially shifted into an open hunt against the architects of this world.