Chapter 19-The Lock(1)

Chapter 19: 19-The Lock(1)

They stepped over the glittering blue shards of the dead Captain and approached the vault.

The door was an eight-foot circle of seamless, pale silver-wood, set directly into the foundation stone.

At its center was a complex geometric dial, the lock. Even to Sol’s new Mid-Stage eyes, the lock was a blinding knot of freezing purple lines, connected to a network of hair-trigger kinetic plates inside the wall.

"Don’t touch the dial," Valera said, stepping up beside him. She placed both of her bare hands flat against the outer ring of the silver-wood door, right over the hinges. "The moment you apply heat to the center, the expansion of the metal will trip the kinetic hammers inside the door and shatter the inventory. I have to freeze the internal hammers in place first."

"But your arm..Val"

"My arm is fine, you healed some of the damage," she cut him off sharply, though she didn’t look at him. "Wait for my mark. When the frost hits the center ring, drive your blade straight into the keyhole. Don’t slash. Just the tip. Just like the sewer."

Sol nodded once, shifting his feet into the duelist’s stance she had taught him. Right foot forward, left foot back.

Valera closed her eyes and exhaled.

She didn’t use the violent, instant freeze of her new Ice Sculpture skill, she didn’t need to lose another arm tonight.

Instead, she pushed a steady, surgical stream of pure frost straight through the conductive grain of the silver lock.

Through his upgraded thermal vision, Sol actually watched it happen.

He saw her brilliant white-blue energy snake into the thick door, bypassing the outer armor and wrapping around twelve distinct, spring-loaded pins buried deep inside the mechanism.

Click. Click. Click.

The moisture inside the lock froze solid, jamming the kinetic triggers with blocks of unyielding ice.

"Now!" Valera hissed, sweat breaking out on her forehead from the sheer concentration of holding twelve separate triggers at once.

Sol didn’t need to wind up. With his Mid-Stage core, the fire answered his will instantly.

He pulled a massive surge of thermal energy down his right arm, past the wrapped hilt, and forced it down the length of the silver straight-blade. With his doubled capacity and refined control, the energy didn’t stop at heating the whole blade.

He squeezed it tighter. Further.

The orange glow raced up the fuller of the sword and condensed entirely into the final three inches of the point. The tip of the blade turned a blinding, searing white-hot, humming like an angry hornet.

Sol pivoted and thrust.

The white-hot tip slid directly into the geometric center of the Frost Lock.

There was no metallic resistance.

The superheated silver point melted the central locking core into liquid slag in less than two seconds, severing the connection to the outer bolts before the heat could even reach the frozen kinetic hammers Valera was holding.

A heavy, hollow THUNK echoed from inside the door as the main locking bar dropped.

Sol pulled his blade back, cutting the heat, and kicked the heavy door. It swung inward on silent, oiled hinges.

Even with no normal sight, the sheer radiation pouring out of the open vault nearly blinded Sol.

The room wasn’t big, maybe twenty feet across, but it was lined floor-to-ceiling with iron racks. On the left were dozens of heavy burlap sacks stuffed with raw, unrefined Low and Mid-Stage crystals harvested from the slums.

On the right, resting in velvet-lined iron Lockboxes, were the unregistered inner-city crystals the House of Vane had been skimming from the Moon’s tithe.

Thirty of them. All refined, pure, and glowing with a dense, stable energy that didn’t carry a single ounce of beast taint.

And in the center of the room stood a weapon rack.

Valera stumbled into the vault, ignoring the crystals entirely.

She walked straight to the rack and picked up a pair of long, slender gauntlets forged from dark, matte-black alloy, along with a matching short-spear that could be broken down into two batons.

"Night-iron," Valera breathed, slipping the gauntlets over her hands. The metal instantly drank in her frost without freezing her skin. "It’s an insulator for cryo-cultivators. It channels the cold outward so the user doesn’t take the backlash." She looked up at Sol, her white-blue eyes gleaming. "With these, I can use my bloodline without losing my fingers."

Sol didn’t look at the armor. He walked over to the burlap sacks, dumped the raw, tainted shards onto the floor to use the bags, and began shoveling the pure, refined inner-city crystals into a single heavy sack.

"How many are we leaving for Voss?" Valera asked, strapping the broken-down spear to her waist and grabbing a second sack.

"Forty percent of the pure ones, like we agreed," Sol said, counting out twelve of the refined crystals and tossing them into her bag, alongside all the raw, tainted shards from the floor.

He grabbed the four Mid-Stage shards they had taken from Kael’s guards outside and threw them into his own sack. "A butcher keeps his ledger clean. If we cheat him now, we fight two wars at once."

A sudden, deafening horn blasted from directly above them, not the distant city horn, but the local Harvest House alarm.

The rhythmic, heavy thudding of dozens of Enforcer boots began to echo down the main stairwell. The inner-city reinforcements had arrived.

"Time’s up," Sol said, tying off his heavy sack of eighteen pure crystals and slinging it over his scarred shoulder.

They ran out of the vault, sprinting back across the blood-stained antechamber toward the open hole in the ceiling where the rusted drainage pipe waited.

Sol grabbed the lip of the pipe with one hand, hoisting himself up into the rotting sludge effortlessly with his new Mid-Stage strength, and reached down to haul Valera up behind him.

As they crawled back down into the dark belly of Purgatory, listening to the furious shouts of the Vane reinforcements discovering the shattered remains of Captain Kael below, Sol felt the heavy sack of pure crystals thumping against his back.