Zora Kolar’s hands, warm with nascent holy light, pressed against Ignac’s chest. The soft glow pushed back the encroaching shadows, but did little for the raw ache in his ribs. He felt the fractured bone knit with a slow, grinding crawl, hemmed in by the limits of her fledgling skill. Her eyes, the color of a winter sky, were fixed on his, pity clouding their depths. Ignac forced a weak, grateful nod, suppressing the urge to sneer. Pity was a currency he had no use for, especially from a future betrayer whose very essence he planned to repossess. [Interest Credit: Zora Kolar - 50 credits. Service rendered: Minor medical aid. Current balance: 1,350 Interest Credits.] “You saved Milos,” she murmured, a gentle wonder in her tone. “That was incredibly brave.” Brave. He wanted to laugh. It was a calculated investment, nothing more. He felt the ledger's familiar, cold scrutiny, tallying every breath and calculated gesture. “He’s… my friend,” Ignac rasped, the lie tasting like rust in his mouth. He allowed his gaze to drift past Zora, catching Milos Vran’s beaming, self-congratulatory smile as he recounted the Charnel-Mekh incident to a rapt audience of fellow students. The heir was already turning the near-disaster into a heroic tale of his own survival, with Ignac as the loyal, expendable backdrop. This would not do. He had to be more than expendable. Another such 'heroic' act would leave him a broken husk long before the Night of the Red Iron. The thought of his body, battered and broken, being drained for their damnable Sanguine Metallurgy, sent a tremor through his healing frame. He needed an edge, a way to influence events without direct, self-destructive intervention. The answer lay beneath Velkigrad’s grime-caked foundations, in the Rust-Labyrinths, with a ghost from his grim future. Radovan, the outlaw artificer. The man who could bend slag and shadow to his will, constructing marvels that defied the Hegemony’s rigid laws. Radovan, who had, in Ignac’s previous life, unwittingly forged the very components used in his final, gruesome betrayal. As soon as Zora’s magic faded, leaving him stiff but ambulatory, Ignac made his excuses. Milos barely noticed his departure, too engrossed in his own embellished narrative. With a grimace, Ignac navigated the fume-choked backstreets of Velkigrad, the air thick with the metallic tang of smelting furnaces and the stale grease of fermented ash. He ignored the stares of commoners, their faces etched with the same weariness that had once defined his own. His destination: the district known as the Scrapyard Maw, a gaping wound in the city’s underbelly, where abandoned industrial complexes bled into the subterranean tunnels. The descent into the lower ducts was like stepping into the lungs of a dying beast. The air grew heavy, reeking of ozone and decaying metal. Makeshift dwellings clung to the dripping walls of vast, forgotten conduits. Ignac moved with purpose, his future knowledge a guiding lantern in the gloom. He knew where Radovan, then a younger, more reckless outcast, would be today: in the crumbling depths of the ‘Iron Gizzard’—a notorious scrap-tunnel prone to sudden cave-ins. The metallic groans began long before he reached the designated section. The very ground trembled. Ignac pressed forward, the urgency a cold knot in his stomach. He rounded a bend, the passage narrowing, and saw it: a precarious scaffold of corroded girders, beneath which a figure, small and wiry, was frantically attempting to shore up a buckling support beam. Radovan. His face was smudged with grease, wild strands of dark hair plastered to his forehead. Tools were strewn around him like scattered teeth. “Get out!” Ignac yelled, his voice echoing with desperate force. “It’s going!” Radovan, startled, looked up, his eyes wide and intelligent behind thick, grime-caked spectacles. “Who–?” Before he could finish, a sound like a thousand grinding teeth ripped through the air. The scaffold groaned, then shrieked, as a section of the ceiling, a colossal slab of rust-welded slag, tore free. Dust erupted, instantly obscuring everything. Ignac didn’t hesitate. He knew the precise angle of the collapse, the small, hidden alcove where Radovan would attempt to dive, only to be crushed by a secondary cave-in. He launched himself forward, grabbing the artificer by the scruff of his oil-stained tunic, yanking him backward with a strength born of adrenaline and a horrifying memory. They tumbled, Ignac twisting to shield Radovan with his own body, just as the main cave-in devoured the space where the artificer had stood moments before. Dust settled, revealing a newly formed canyon of twisted metal and pulverized rock. Radovan lay gasping beneath Ignac, his spectacles knocked askew. “You… you knew,” he wheezed, pushing himself up, his eyes scrutinizing Ignac’s face. “How in the slag did you know?” [Interest Credit: Radovan - 150 credits. Service rendered: Catastrophic structural failure prevention. Current balance: 1,500 Interest Credits.] “A premonition,” Ignac lied smoothly, though the System’s chime seemed to mock his casual deception. “I saw it. A vision of you buried under that mess.” He sat up, dusting off his clothes, feeling the familiar twinge in his still-healing ribs. “My name is Ignac Moravec. I need your particular talents, Radovan.” Radovan, already picking up scattered tools, eyed him with a mixture of suspicion and profound curiosity. “Talents for what? I don’t build Charnel-Mekhs, if that’s what you think. And I certainly don’t work for the Hegemony.” “Neither do I,” Ignac stated, his gaze meeting Radovan’s. “I need you to build… things that bend rules. Things that create opportunity where none should exist. Specifically, for the Karmic Usury System.” Radovan froze, a spanner halfway to his toolbelt. His head tilted, a strange, calculating glint in his eyes. “The Usury System? That’s not… a machine. It’s an invisible metaphysical chain, a cosmic ledger that the priests and the Hegemony pretend doesn’t exist, but everyone feels the pull of its debts. How do you even know about it?” “I hold a contract with it,” Ignac replied, his voice a low rumble. “And its non-interference clauses are… problematic. I need to influence certain individuals, elevate them, without directly breaking its mandates. To do that, I need to synthesize things that appear to be genuine relics, artifacts that will amplify their inherent abilities, yet are entirely of your making.” Radovan stared, then a slow, almost manic grin spread across his face, revealing a missing tooth. “You want me to forge fate itself? To conjure miracles from scrap and smoke, to trick a cosmic bank clerk into believing these are authentic ‘karmic dividends’?” His laugh was a raspy, delighted cackle. “This isn’t building machines, Moravec. This is… art. This is what the world *should* be. A grand illusion, an apparatus exploited.” He clapped his hands together, then held one out. “I’m in. What’s the first ‘miracle’ we’re fabricating?” Ignac clasped Radovan’s hand, a cold sense of triumph settling in his chest. “We’ll start with something subtle. Something that enhances the properties of Sanguine Metallurgy, for an heir to a munitions fortune.” He knew Radovan’s genius would accelerate Milos Vran’s rise, making his eventual fall all the more satisfying. They began to make their way out of the ruined conduit, Radovan already sketching schematics on a greasy scrap of parchment, muttering excitedly about ‘spiritual resonance’ and ‘etheric conduits.’ As they emerged from the Iron Gizzard and navigated a particularly unstable section of the Warrens, a low, rumbling tremor shook the ground again. This time, it wasn't the scrap-tunnel. Ignac felt the distant vibration, the heavy groan of stressed concrete and rusted steel from above. He knew what it was: a tenement complex, already condemned, finally giving way. The sub-levels were riddled with structural weaknesses, and the city’s constant industrial tremors often had devastating consequences for the common folk who lived in the cheaper, shoddier buildings above. Dozens would be trapped, buried alive. A fleeting thought of intervention, of saving those innocent lives, flickered in Ignac’s mind. A brief, unwelcome surge of the old Ignac, the frontline defender. But it was quickly extinguished by the cold flame of his vengeance. Saving them would gain him nothing for his ultimate goal. It would be a waste of precious time, a diversion from the intricate web he was weaving for his betrayers. His flaw, the obsession with the spectacle of his enemies' downfall, blinded him to the immediate, desperate pleas he knew would soon echo from the rubble. The fall of a nameless tenement was a minor tremor in his grand scheme. He pushed the thought aside, focusing instead on Radovan’s enthusiastic plans. [High-Yield Investment Opportunity detected: Zora Kolar. Current status: Unprepared. Imminent risk: Entering Crucible of Slag without adequate arcane preparation. Potential for significant dividend generation through indirect assistance. Leverage your accumulated knowledge.] The System’s stark message cut through his thoughts, a chilling counterpoint to the distant screams now reaching them from above ground. Zora. The Crucible of Slag. He had completely forgotten. The Skola’s brutal trials, where students delved into subterranean dungeons to harvest marrow from beasts. For an untrained holy mage like Zora, without the brute force of a Sanguine Metallurgist, it would be a death trap. Her holy magic was still nascent, barely a trickle. The System was right. This was an opportunity. One he couldn’t afford to miss.

Compounding Interest