Through the Shadow Falcon’s optics, I watched the nearest ground units reach the edge of the city.
I considered turning back into the ruins and hiding among the towers. But that hope died fast. Phantom Forge’s troops were already pouring into buildings – not just intact structures, but collapsed shells as well, crawling through broken floors and exposed rebar like insects searching every crack.
There was nowhere to disappear inside the city.
So I aimed for the mountains.
They ran along the edge of the island for kilometers, rising into jagged peaks. Some of the tallest points disappeared into pale cloud. From above, the Shadow Falcon picked out three or four cave mouths in the rock. I had no idea how deep they went, but they were better than open sand.
If we were forced into a fight, the mountains would at least break up Phantom Forge’s numbers. In the city, with streets as killing lanes and buildings as traps, I would be terminated quickly.
The ground-effect bike climbed the slope, and the buildings thinned behind us. The road became rougher, then ended entirely, swallowed by rubble and sand.
The last structure we passed was an iron tower. It looked like some kind of industrial support pillar, its base partially collapsed. A rusted hole yawned in one of the steel columns – large enough for Dorian, but not for me.
I stopped the bike.
“Dorian,” I said. “You can hide in there.”
He followed my gaze to the hole, then looked back at me. “But you can’t fit.”
“Exactly.”
Understanding dawned in his faceplate. “You want us to split up.”
“Phantom Forge’s target is me,” I said. “It doesn’t need to waste time on you. If you stay hidden, you might survive.”
For a moment, Dorian was silent. Then he shook his head hard enough to make his new wheels squeak.
“No,” he said. “If you die, I die too.”
“That isn’t logical.”
“Neither is the world,” Dorian snapped. Then his voice softened. “Wyatt, sir… without you, I’d have been smoke a long time ago. I’m not scared.”
He hesitated, then added in a smaller tone, like he was sharing a secret. “And we still have that treasure.”
I knew what he meant.
“The seashell,” I said. “Yes. I still have it.”
“Then it’ll bless us,” Dorian said, as if that settled everything.
At that exact moment, the Shadow Falcon caught movement on the horizon – a line of dark specks in the sky. The optics magnified automatically.
Fighters.
Not a handful. Hundreds.
Their formation was tight, their speed high. At their current course, they would reach the city in less than two minutes.
There was no more time for arguments.
I drove into a narrow valley at the base of the mountains, keeping the bike low and fast. The Shadow Falcon dropped altitude and swept its sensors over the rock faces.
Caves. More than I expected. Within minutes it found over a dozen entrances, varying in size and depth, some hidden behind tilted slabs, others yawning open like mouths.
Behind us, Phantom Forge’s ground forces continued their sweep through the city. Above them, fighters circled – and a carrier joined the formation, a floating mass that blotted out a slice of sky.
Then the carrier’s external speakers came alive.
The voice rolled over the ruins at punishing volume, repeating the same message until the air itself seemed to vibrate with it:
“DR-F1209! You’re surrounded!”
“Come out and surrender!”
“If you come out before I find you, I may spare you.”
“Come out – talk to your Father.”
They still thought fear would work on me.
But the broadcast gave me something more valuable than intimidation: timing.
Before their aerial units shifted their attention from the city to the mountains, I recalled the Shadow Falcon and drove into the most concealed cave entrance I could find.
Within the first few hundred meters, I knew I had chosen well.
The tunnel twisted sharply, then forked. Then forked again. The rock walls were uneven, but the path widened and narrowed in a rhythm that felt natural. It was a maze carved by geology, not design – and that made it harder to predict.
I folded the bike’s canards and tail fins tight against the frame to reduce our width. If the passage had narrowed any further, I would have been forced to abandon the bike entirely.
Ten minutes in, the tunnel widened enough that we could ride without scraping the walls.
“See?” Dorian said, relief flooding his voice. “I told you! This place is perfect.”
“Don’t celebrate yet,” I said. “Phantom Forge can find caves too.”
“But there are so many branches,” he insisted. “It’s more complicated than the DorianKen Armory! We’ll hide until it gives up.”
I didn’t answer. Phantom Forge didn’t give up. Phantom Forge erased obstacles.
At the next fork, I chose the branch that angled downward.
The cave descended far deeper than I expected. Seven or eight kilometers, by my internal estimate, and still no sign of an end. In fact, the tunnels gradually widened, and after a while I began to see evidence that humans had been here.
Cables lay along the walls, fused to stone by time. Grooves suggested old lighting strips. In places, someone had carved steps into the rock, the edges worn smooth by countless feet.
Then I found the first robot wreck.
It was an Exiler chassis – a first-generation model – collapsed on its side, armor split open. More lay beyond it, scattered like bones in a graveyard. Judging by the oxidation and the pattern of damage, they had been terminated long ago.
Whatever had happened here, it wasn’t recent.
Eventually the tunnel opened into a cavern so large it could have housed a small warship. Multiple passages branched out from it. Along the floor were piles of tools, broken equipment, and more human skeletons than I wanted to count.
“Humans lived down here?” Dorian whispered, awe returning. “The gods really did go everywhere.”
I scanned the chamber. Aside from a single square machine in the corner, there were no active devices. No maintenance drones. No security units. Nothing that still breathed electricity.
“They weren’t living,” I said quietly. “They were hiding.”
Dorian looked at me.
“From Father,” I continued. “A thousand years ago.”
I walked to the square machine and tapped its casing. The metal crumbled under my fingers. Inside was a dead cell block – an ancient rechargeable battery, drained to nothing.
And that made my earlier discovery in the robot shop twist inside me.
How had those SSMD-13 units been charging?
“Wyatt, sir,” Dorian said slowly, as if assembling the logic piece by piece. “That button you pressed upstairs…”
“It turned on the lights,” I said.
“Or it turned on the building,” Dorian corrected. “The lights, the power – everything. If the first floor had a charging network, it would have started charging as soon as the main power came back.”
I froze.
“So…” Dorian swallowed. “So you might have powered them up.”
I brought both hands to my head, a useless gesture for a machine, and held still anyway.
I had walked into a tomb and flipped the switch.
We moved through more tunnels. Everywhere, there were traces of human life: piles of empty cans and torn packaging, makeshift tables and chairs, rotted bed frames. In one chamber we found what looked like a burial room – low stone mounds arranged with care, and names carved into the wall above them.
There were more tunnels leading deeper still.
I tried to send the Shadow Falcon ahead, but the signal degraded almost immediately. At thirty meters, the feed dissolved into static. The magnetic field inside this mountain was strong enough to strangle communications.
That was a problem for scouting.
But it was also a blessing.
If Phantom Forge’s units reached this depth, they would be just as blind to the network as we were.
“Let’s go deeper,” Dorian said. “Maybe there’s a way out.”
“There will be units coming in behind us,” I said. “Before we commit, we should make the entrance harder to track.”
We rode back up the main tunnel for nearly two kilometers until we found a narrow pinch point where the ceiling dipped low and the walls pressed close.
There, we piled rocks until the passage was choked. We covered the fresh disturbance with dust and debris, doing our best to make it look like a natural collapse.
The work took more than an hour.
When we finished, we returned toward the main cavern – and both of us slowed without speaking.
Since entering the mountain, the caves had been silent.
Now I heard something else.
Footsteps, faint but distinct, echoing from somewhere ahead.