“Oh, for the love of… fine,” Jorvan muttered, rolling his eyes. “Can we not do this, please? It’s distracting.” Before the skirmisher could even process the words, Jorvan flicked a lazy hand. One moment, the fiend had fingers clamped over the officer's windpipe, basking in theatrical menace. The next, the garrison man was gone, replaced by a squat, horned vanguard sentry who had been admiring a particularly rusty gargoyle statue twenty paces away. The brute, startled, found his claws locked around the horn-studded neck of his own subordinate, who sputtered in confusion, tongue lolling. Jorvan had simply swapped their positions, a low-level spatial manipulation trick he usually reserved for misplacing car keys. The displaced officer, now standing precisely where the sentry had been, blinked, then inhaled a ragged, gasping draft. He stumbled, clutching his throat, looking utterly bewildered. “What in the…?” the invader began, dropping his terrified soldier. He whirled, snarl bared, but Jorvan was already walking away, heading toward a crumbling archway in the courtyard wall that shimmered faintly with the Echo-Core’s waypoint. “Right, less screaming, more… progress,” Jorvan called over his shoulder, beckoning to Veylin with a casual wave. “You coming, or are you going to stand around admiring the rubble? That password isn’t going to decrypt itself.” Veylin stared, first at Jorvan’s retreating back, then at the stunned vanguard brute, then at her hyperventilating aide. Her mouth dropped open for a fraction of a heartbeat before snapping shut. “You… you just… you can’t just teleport people around like they’re pieces on a game board!” “Technically, I can,” Jorvan replied, not bothering to turn. “And I did. Now, are we moving, or do you want to personally clean up these… whatever they are?” He gestured vaguely at the remaining, now thoroughly demoralized, Ash-Blood Vanguard, who were starting to eye the exits with renewed interest. Veylin let out a frustrated growl that was half-fury, half-exhaustion. “Secure the perimeter! Round up these… these imbeciles! Don’t let them escape!” she barked, then stormed after Jorvan, her armored boots clanking on the paving stones. Crumb, perched on Jorvan’s shoulder, yawned, a tiny puff of embers escaping his mouth. The archway led into a dark, winding passage that sloped steeply downwards beneath the Bastion. The air grew heavy, thick with the scent of damp earth and something metallic, like ozone after a lightning strike. What seemed like weathered, carved stone walls quickly gave way to structures that were too precise, too geometric, to be natural. Vast, obsidian-like slabs formed towering, gridded formations that disappeared into the gloom above. Strange, glowing glyphs pulsed erratically along conduits that snaked across the cavernous space. “These aren’t ruins,” Veylin said, her voice bouncing off the dark stone, curiosity cracking through her usual severity. “This is… what is this place? The deep wards? The under-structure?” Jorvan squinted at a particularly large, hum-emitting slab, covered in what looked suspiciously like corroded cooling fins. “It’s a server farm,” he deadpanned. “A really, *really* old, terribly designed, and spectacularly poorly optimized server farm. Look at this cable management. It’s a disgrace. No wonder the Reset Protocol is so buggy.” He reached out and tapped a glowing conduit. It sparked feebly, then the light dimmed. “A… server farm?” Veylin repeated, utterly baffled. “What are you talking about? These are foundational structures. The primordial defense grid we’ve been struggling to reactivate for cycles. If we could just get even a fraction of it online, it would push back the Blight for a generation. My entire research division spent months attempting to decipher the master terminal.” She gestured toward an immense, crystalline interface embedded in the cavern wall, currently dark and unresponsive. Jorvan just grunted, shaking his head. “Defense grid. Right. More like a monument from the ‘deploy and forget’ school of infrastructure management. Look at these power lines. Daisy-chained. And is that… a *water* cooling system next to exposed data conduits? Who designed this monstrosity? Oh. Right. I did.” He sighed, rubbing his temples. “No wonder it’s falling apart. Probably running on a deprecated OS too.” They descended deeper, the air growing colder, the hum of the primeval machinery more pervasive. Veylin, usually unbending, slumped against a towering rack of what Jorvan identified as archaic, overgrown hard drives. The crystalline array, her desperate hope, mocked her with its silence. “I don’t understand any of what you’re saying,” Veylin admitted, her voice low, the harsh edge gone. “But I understand failure. Every cycle, the Blight pushes closer. Every cycle, more human settlements fall. Bastok-Mora is all that’s left. And this… this was my last hope. To bring even a part of it back online. To protect them. To protect my people.” Her gaze swept over the dormant, monolithic system, a raw glint of vulnerability surfacing. “But I can’t even begin to comprehend it. I’m not enough.” Jorvan paused, looking at her, really looking at her. She wasn’t a rival. She wasn’t an obstacle. She was just… exhausted. Overwhelmed. A tiny, exhausted gear laboring to keep a broken, world-spanning machine running. He saw the faint lines carved around her temples, the slight tremor in her knuckles against her gauntlets. It was a familiar sight. The same weary resignation he’d seen in the mirror countless times after pulling an all-nighter patching a legacy system that should have been decommissioned a decade ago. A forgotten sting of empathy nudged his ribs. She wasn't a fortress warden. She was an overworked sysadmin, just like he used to be. “Yeah,” Jorvan said, his voice softer than usual. “It’s… a lot. Been there.” He reached out, not to touch her, but to tap the interface's dark surface. “This isn’t impossible. Just… poorly documented.” Before he could elaborate, a low, mechanical whirring echoed from the cavern ceiling. A giant, glowing form detached itself from the shadows, dropping with a soft *thump* onto a nearby platform. It was vaguely arachnoid, its multi-jointed legs clicking with unnatural precision, each segment shimmering with lines of pure, jagged code. A single, multifaceted optical sensor, a crimson orb pulsing with an internal light, swiveled slowly, scanning the cavern. It locked onto Jorvan, and a cold, synthetic voice filled the space. [UNAUTHORIZED USER DETECTED. INITIATING DEBUG PROTOCOL. ACCESS DENIED.]

The Abyssal Pits of IT