18. Rhykor
RHYKOR
Ileave Cassia at the clinic with her hands still scrubbed raw with antiseptic and her sharp eyes still drilling holes through my skull. Every step I take away from her tightens the connection between us. The bond coils tightly, demanding I plant myself between her and whatever comes next.
Varrik meets me at the sector boundary with three crew members and two portable thermal scanners. The look on his face tells me he already knows where I'm headed.
"The tunnel access points Junia mapped," I state, pulling my comm from my belt and loading the schematic she shared with Cassia's data-pad.
I observe three routes in red, descending from surface access hatches across the district into the older infrastructure sealed by the city's foundation.
"We need eyes on at least one of those entry corridors before Junia puts together her full run.
If Legion is expanding the network from a centralized core, I want to know what we're sending people into. "
"How deep are we talking?" Varrik leans on his cane as studies the schematic, tracing one of the red routes with a finger.
"Deep enough that Junia flagged four sub-levels between the surface hatches and the core." I flex my hands. The warmth pooling in my palms flares, and I bank it before it reaches my fingertips. "Whoever goes down there deserves to know what's waiting."
"Right." Tucking the cane into his arm, he jerks his chin at the crew members behind him.
The group consists of Dessik along with a young Kraaj enforcer named Trakis, whose indigo skin and razor-thin horns mark him as eastern-born.
A stocky human scavenger called Maddis completes the team, holding a modified shotgun as she curses continuously.
"Dessik and Trakis are solid underground.
Maddis knows the old service routes from her salvage days. Best team we'll get on short notice."
The nearest access point sits obscured by a ruined water processing station on the eastern edge of Sector Twelve, a different grid entirely from the Sector Nine tunnels Cassia and Junia explored earlier.
Rubble buries the corroded hatch, but Trakis severs the locking mechanism with a plasma torch while Dessik and Maddis clear debris.
The metal groans open, releasing a gust of air that carries the familiar chemical undertone I've learned to associate with corrupted Legion infrastructure.
The metallic scent is laced with ozone and biological rot that clings to my sinuses.
I drop through first.
The vertical shaft descends into a maintenance corridor built during the original occupation-era construction.
The walls are reinforced concrete, cracked and stained with mineral deposits; the overhead conduit runs dark and gutted of its original wiring.
My wings pin tight against my spine in the narrow space, and I activate the thermal scanner on my wrist, sweeping the corridor ahead in overlapping arcs.
The readout paints everything in shades of blue and black, depicting cold infrastructure, dormant systems, and dead air.
The quiet changes when the screen flares red.
A hundred yards ahead, the thermal signature spikes. The scanner lights up with a surge—a dense, throbbing knot of mechanical activity that registers as a literal swarm, heat source compounding heat source until the entire reading glows white-hot.
"Contact ahead," I murmur into the squad comm. "I'm tracking a dense thermal cluster bearing northeast at approximately one hundred yards, so keep your weapons ready."
We advance in formation with me on point while Dessik and Trakis flank our sides.
Varrik and Maddis cover our six. The corridor widens as we push deeper, transitioning from standard maintenance tunnels into the older infrastructure that Junia described.
Cavernous chambers hold shadows high above while massive cable runs snake overhead like the exposed nervous system of an ancient beast. Deactivated machinery sits from a generation of construction that predates the occupation itself.
The first chamber stops us all.
Machines fill the space from floor to ceiling, actively building.
Gone are the grotesque fused hybrids Cassia and Junia described from the tunnels—these units have evolved beyond that crude stage.
Construction bots and maintenance drones were hollowed out of their original programming and repurposed into a coordinated assembly line producing machinery I've never seen before.
Deformed wiring threads between the machines like tendons, resounding with faint blue-white light that illuminates the chamber in a cold, rhythmless strobe.
The units work in eerie silence with their standard operational sounds dampened to a whisper.
The machines weld and install components into a growing lattice of metal and circuitry that extends from the chamber walls into corridors branching off in all directions.
"They're building infrastructure," Varrik breathes beside me, his eyes tracking the closest assembly line.
A construction bot welds a relay node into the wall—the same type of virulent relay we found in the Sector Six vault weeks ago, except this one is new and freshly assembled.
These clean components are slotted into a framework that pulses with active Legion code.
"This is expansion, Rhykor. They're extending the network outward from the core. "
"How far?"
Dessik pulls up the thermal scanner's wide-field display.
The readout blooms red all over, with tendrils of activity radiating from the chamber into tunnel systems that stretch throughout the entire district like capillaries feeding a hidden organ.
"Miles," he mutters, teal-green skin gone ashy under the scanner's light.
"The network extends everywhere. We're standing inside a single node, and there are dozens more active across the sub-levels. "
I photograph the chamber with the scanner's imaging function.
I record the relay assemblies with the scanner's imaging function to prove the outbreaks are symptoms of a larger intelligence than a few rogue droids glitching on malignant code. This is organized and calculated. A machine intelligence is rebuilding itself through the district’s forgotten infrastructure with engineer-level patience and precision, constructing a fortress.
"Move deeper," I order. "I want eyes on the next sub-level."
Downward the corridor dips, spiraling into a deeper chill.
A chemical tang hangs heavy in the air, thickening into a toxic film that coats my throat and burns with every swallow.
Nearby, assembly operations intensify; machines and relay nodes weave pulsing blue-white luminescence through the walls like veins carrying tainted blood.
At the junction where the corridor splits into three branching passages, Varrik grabs my arm.
"Rhykor, the scanners."
I look at my wrist display. The thermal readout has changed. All heat signatures in the surrounding network—dozens of machines operating on independent assembly protocols—cease to move.
They're all facing us.
The attack comes from all over simultaneously.
A construction bot launches from the wall on my left, its welding arm reconfigured into a cutting torch that swings at my neck.
Catching it mid-arc, I pour heat through my palms. The arm joint melts into slag before my fist drives through the machine's central housing.
Behind me, Trakis fires his pulse rifle into a cluster of cargo drones that drop from the ceiling in a coordinated swarm, their chassis bristling with improvised blades fashioned from scavenged metal.
Maddis opens up with the modified shotgun.
The concussive blast shreds two drones, sending a third spinning into the wall to spark and twitch.
More machines pour from the branching corridors, drawn toward our position with a focused aggression that goes beyond standard defensive protocols. They're converging, coordinating, adapting their approach patterns in real time as they probe for weaknesses in our formation.
And they're targeting me.
The first wave ignores Dessik entirely. Three drones bypass Varrik's position to fly straight at me.
Their sensor arrays lock on my thermal signature with a specificity that makes my skin crawl.
I destroy them by melting their chassis and ripping their limbs, but each wave adjusts.
They have begun probing the cooling intervals between my energy outputs and flanking from angles my peripheral vision struggles to track, demonstrating a terrifying capacity to learn.
"They're focusing on you!" Varrik bellows from behind the cover of a toppled support beam, his sidearm cracking into a maintenance drone that's trying to circle behind him. "The waves are targeting your position! The rest of us are afterthoughts!"
I already know. My thermal readout confirms it; the heat signatures are reorganizing around my location, forming a tightening ring that pulses inward with mechanical precision.
Whatever controls these machines identifies me specifically, and it's throwing everything in this sector at the task of containing me.
Fighting harder, I grip the surfaces until my hands burn white, pouring enough energy into the corridor to fill it with the stench of molten metal and superheated air.
A security unit tries to pin my wings to the wall before I rip through its frame.
In the next moment, a construction bot then gets crushed against the ceiling by my hands.
A final thermal blast sent down the eastern corridor turns the air into a shimmering wall of distortion.
The machines retreat before coming again.
"Falling back!" I roar. "Trakis, cover the junction! Dessik, get Maddis moving—we're going up!"