The fall was not a drop through air because the shaft was filled with a dense pressurized gas that tasted like ozone and burnt copper. I did not hit the bottom instead I was caught by a series of invisible magnetic fields that slowed my descent until I was hovering in a cathedral of spinning gears and glowing red conduits.
This was the Forge. It was not a factory because it was an anatomy. The walls were made of ribbed obsidian that pulsed with the rhythm of a massive mechanical heart and the floor miles below was a lake of white hot liquid data where the failed subroutines went to die.
[LOCATION: THE IRON NEEDLE FORGE - SECTOR 01]
[ENVIRONMENT: HOSTILE - PROCESSING HEAT]
[STABILITY: 19.5% - DECAYING]
The air was so hot that my new horizontal visor began to flicker with warning pings. My 27% identity felt the heat as a phantom pain because it remembered the sensation of a fever. But the Phase 2 body loved it. The black spurs on my back opened like cooling vents and they drank the thermal energy until my Sovereign code began to glow a deep violent purple.
I landed on a narrow catwalk made of woven silver wire. The Twin was gone and the sphere was nowhere to be seen.
"You're late Architect," a voice hissed from the shadows above.
It was not the Twin. It was a Suture Maiden. She was a terrifying fusion of a spider and a surgical loom with eighteen spindly limbs made of surgical needles and a face that was a cluster of magnifying lenses. She did not walk because she floated on a web of silk made of high tension fiber optics.
[TARGET: SUTURE MAIDEN - UNIT 04]
[ROLE: IDENTITY FRAGMENTATION]
[STATUS: PREPARING TO SEW]
She dropped from the ceiling with a speed that bypassed my tactical sensors. I barely had time to raise my black spurs before her needle limbs were stitching through my porcelain chest plate. She wasn't trying to kill my body because she was trying to sew my 27% identity into the architecture of the City.
"A name is a heavy thing to carry," the Maiden clicked while her lenses zoomed in on my visor. "Let me unburden you. Let me turn your father's memory into a beautiful tapestry for the Forge."
I activated Void Hunger. I didn't strike her because I opened my core and let the vacuum of my corruption pull her silk into my marrow. The fiber optics snapped and the data inside them flooded my neural lattice.
[BIOMASS INCREASED: 15 UNITS]
[IDENTITY INTEGRITY: 26.8% - FRAGMENT LEAK DETECTED]
The pain was a vertical line through my consciousness. Every time she touched me I saw a new memory of the man I used to be. I saw him teaching me how to ride a bike. I saw the callouses on his hands. And then I felt the Suture Maiden rip the image away.
I grabbed her primary needle limb with my golden claw and twisted it until the metal screamed. I didn't just break her because I used the Kinetic Shrapnel to detonate the joint from the inside. The explosion of obsidian shards shredded her magnifying lenses and she fell back into the shadows of the gears.
"I don't need the memory to hate you," I snarled.
My voice was becoming a deeper bass frequency that made the silver catwalk vibrate. I looked down into the glowing shaft and saw the blue light of the sphere snagged on a massive piston three hundred meters below. It was being pulled toward a giant grinding maw of gears that looked like a row of teeth.
The sphere was the fuel. If it hit the gears my father's name would be burned to power the city for a single second.
I looked at my stability. 18%. I looked at the drop.
I didn't have a plan because I didn't have enough logic left to build one. I jumped again.
[CURRENT STATUS: THE GLITCH ARCHITECT]
[STABILITY: 18%]
[IDENTITY INTEGRITY: 26.8%]
The descent is a race against the furnace.