Glass splintered under an iron heel. In the lower tier's central cistern, three men from Waclaw’s crew were already face-down in the sour grey sludge, their ribs caved inward by blunt maces.
"Empty pockets don't buy silence," a voice rumbled, heavy as tumbling masonry.
The enforcer, a scarred brute standing two heads above any common migrant, planted his boot into the nape of an older scout’s neck. Bogdan wore the slate-grey lacquered pauldrons of the Ironwood Clan. Across the cistern walkway, a dozen refugees huddled against the petrified wood, clutching their rags, too terrified to blink.
Two hours earlier, in the high canopy pavilions where the wealthy drank fermented sap and breathed scrubbed air, a woman had peeled an orange with a thin bone knife. Her skin carried the faint sheen of high-tier constitution buffs, smooth and unblemished by the soot below.
"Three vials of clean draught appeared in the lower hollows this morning," Zyta had murmured to the enforcer, slicing cleanly through the citrus rind without breaking the curl. "Real draught. Not boiled swamp moss. Not cut vinegar. Full purity. Waclaw's beggars are trading it for dried meat."
She hadn't looked up from her fruit.
"Find the source," she had instructed, tossing a pale segment into her mouth. "And bring me their hands. Intact. I want the fingers unbroken so they can still mix when I cage them."
Now, the trail had ended in the cistern. And Waclaw was kneeling before him.
"I found them in a hollowed trunk out near the brier line," Waclaw spat, crimson flecking his grey mustache. "Dead scavenger. His pack rotted off his ribs. That’s all of it. We sold what we took to buy flour, you greedy bastard."
Bogdan didn't raise his voice. He drew a heavy, rectangular trench-iron from his belt and brought it down across Waclaw’s collarbone.
A sickening crack echoed across the hollow timber of the square. Waclaw gasped, collapsing onto his forearms, coughing grey phlegm onto the muck.
"You're lying, old dog," Bogdan said. He raised the iron bar again, aiming for the back of the elder's skull. "Tell me who brewed it, or I'll peel your shins like birch bark."
Ten paces away, squeezed between two massive fossilized roots that supported an overhanging market stall, Tadek adjusted the hem of his oversized tunic. A giddy, nervous grin tugged at the corners of his mouth—the involuntary mask that always arrived whenever terror climbed up his throat.
"Oh dear," Tadek muttered softly under his breath, his thumbs drumming against his thighs in a frantic, erratic tempo. "That looks terribly painful. He really shouldn't hit people with metal. Tetanus alone is an absolute nightmare without proper antiseptics."
Near his elbow, an urchin stared at him like he was insane.
Tadek ignored the boy. His right hand dipped into his pockets. Two objects rested there: an uncut, dormant lumic stone—worth maybe five copper chips, meant to provide dim light for reading—and a tiny, empty bronze casing from a spent signaling flare he had scavenged two nights ago.
He focused his vision on the mineral.
[Item: Dormant Lumic Seed]
[Quality: Poor]
[Internal Energy: 12 Lumens (Latent)]
[Structural Integrity: 14/14]
His mind reached out, testing the boundaries of the skill that had saved his sister's breath. Conceptual duplication didn't just reproduce matter; it copied the physical state. But what happened if he duplicated an object at the exact microsecond of its violent release?
He jammed the mineral into the narrow bronze cylinder. With his fingernail, he struck the flint primer attached to the shell’s base. It sparked. The charge flared violently inside the metal tube, building tremendous thermal pressure, trapped with nowhere to vent.
[Warning: Volatile Reaction in Progress.]
*One thousandth of a second before rupture,* Tadek thought, his grin stretching wider, wild and unhinged.
*Duplicate.*
[Skill Activated: Conceptual Echo.]
[Target: Overcharged Lumic Shell.]
[Stamina Consumed: 35.]
The air near his palm warped. A second shell materialized—not dormant, but birthed at the exact apex of its combustion. It possessed no fuse time. It existed only as an active detonation.
Tadek whipped his arm forward, throwing the twin constructs with an awkward, lanky overhand pitch straight toward Bogdan's feet.
"Excuse me!" Tadek called out in a cheery, singsong register. "I believe you dropped your change!"
Bogdan glanced sideways, his brow furrowing as the two tiny metallic cylinders rolled to a stop between his iron-shod boots.
Then the world turned white.
A roar like tearing sheet-metal blasted through the enclosed cistern. It was not fire—it was pure, unfiltered luminance, thousands of lumens compressed into an instantaneous shockwave of blinding radiation. The concussive crack knocked the onlookers off their stools.
Bogdan bellowed, a sound of raw agony. Both his hands flew to his face, blood weeping from his ruptured tear ducts. His high-rank perception skills, attuned to track micro-movements in the dark underbelly, turned against him, amplifying the searing brilliance tenfold.
"My eyes! Burn the square! Kill them all!" the enforcer roared, swinging his trench-iron blindly into empty air, smashing through a wooden awning.
Tadek sprinted through the blinding white fog. His own eyes watered, but he had ducked behind the root an instant before detonation.
He skidded on the greasy boards near Waclaw, grabbed the older man by the uninjured shoulder, and hauled him upward with surprising leverage. Mortuary work taught a man how to haul dead weight without throwing out his lumbar.
"Up we go, Uncle!" Tadek chirped loudly over the ringing in their ears. "Wonderful weather for a jog, isn't it? Just lovely!"
"You... idiot..." Waclaw wheezed, his face white from shock, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side. "Where did you..."
"Run now, complain later! That's rule number two in the funeral trade!"
Tadek hauled the older man into the darkness of an outflow drain before the Ironwood thugs could blink away the burning purple afterimages burned into their retinas. They splashed into the foul knee-deep slurry of the Perch's underbelly, descending deep beneath the living quarters, down where the petrified bark gave way to rotting, subterranean fungi and forgotten water conduits.
They didn't stop until the shouts faded into distant echoes.
Tadek dragged Waclaw into a dry crevice behind a rusted water intake grate. He let the leader slide down against the calcified wood, then dropped beside him, panting heavily. The ditzy smile remained plastered on Tadek's lips, twitching slightly as he inspected the older man’s shattered collarbone.
"Well," Tadek said brightly, pulling a clean cloth from his coat. "The good news is, the bone hasn't pierced the subclavian artery! That means we won't have to mop up three liters of blood in the dark. Isn't that fantastic?"
Waclaw grabbed Tadek’s wrist with his good hand. His grip was surprisingly tight, trembling with cold rage and exhaustion.
"Shut up," Waclaw rasped. "Stop that damned grinning, boy. Wipe it off your face."
Tadek's mouth snapped closed, but his posture remained hunched, hands hovering awkwardly.
"You shouldn't have brought that out," Waclaw whispered, coughing softly. "The flash. The draughts. You think this is about three bottles of medicine? You think Zyta sends her top dog to break bones over twenty silver marks?"
"People kill for medicine every day in the lower ring," Tadek offered mildly.
"Not Zyta." Waclaw leaned his head back against the cold petrified wall, staring up into the gloom where ancient roots twisted like strangling serpents. "She’s not after elixirs. She's hunting for a rumored System Core fragment, and she thinks you have it."