The jade deck convulsed, pitching them sideways. Tevos stumbled, catching himself on Zala's arm, her grip like iron. Brass conduits thick as tree trunks tore through the deck plating, screeching against sheared rivets, their ends glowing dull red as they knotted around a central spire of jade light. Static lifted the hairs on Tevos's forearms, reeking of scorched copper. [System Alert: Unauthorized Data Injection. Threat Level: Catastrophic.] [Location: Spire 62. Target: Tevos – Marked Anomaly. Zala – Detected Accomplice.] [Initiating Defensive Countermeasures. All Climbers on Spire 62: Terminate Hostiles on Sight.] “The whole spire just became a bounty board,” Zala’s voice was tight, her hand already on the hilt of her blade, which hummed with contained energy. “They’ll be here fast. We need to move.” But Tevos couldn’t move. His gaze was fixed on the writhing cables, the pulsating light. That vast glyph-ringed intellect was not idling. It had commandeered the deck's primary trunkline as an offensive array. He could feel it, a raw, piercing hum behind his eyes, a direct assault on his thoughts. Then the green light flared, not outwards, but inwards, sucking the ambient luminescence from the hall. Shadows deepened, stretched, and twisted into grotesque parodies of form. The metallic floor beneath them began to soften, to ripple, like a disturbed pond. Translucent figures rose from its surface, coalescing from the warped metal. Zala lunged, her steel humming as it carved through the lead shape. The form burst into brittle sparks, but another immediately took its place. “Holographic feedback,” Tevos choked out, skull throbbing. “It wants us unhinged.” The figures grew clearer, taking on faces. For Zala, they were the faces of the villagers from the outlying settlements, the ones who had vanished during the ‘cleansing’ operations her guild had orchestrated to secure new resource nodes. The faces were gaunt, their eyes hollow, their lips moving in silent screams. A child, no older than five, reached out a hand whose pale fingers slid harmlessly through her combat tunic. “Praetor Zala,” a gravelly voice rasped from the synthetic crowd. It was the voice of an old woman she’d known, a baker from the Shard’s Edge encampment. “You promised us safety. You promised the Aegis would protect.” Zala recoiled, her usually steady hand faltering. Her blade sliced through empty vapor, unable to check the charges. Her mouth twisted; the discipline in her posture buckled. She knew these faces, knew their stories. She had walked away, believing it was for the greater good, for the integrity of the guild. Now, the warden node was shredding that defense. “I… I didn’t know,” she murmured, voice almost swallowed by the rising tide of recorded pleas. “I believed the intelligence. I believed Venn.” More shapes climbed through the floor plates, an army of casualties from guild expansion drives. Their silent judgment stooped her shoulders, dragging the tip of her weapon toward the ground. Tevos, meanwhile, found his own world dissolving into a hellish tableau. He was back in the derelict junkyard, the familiar stench of rust and decay thick in the air. Before him, sprawled on a pile of rusted girders, lay the mechanic who had raised him. His mentor's body lay limp, grey eyes fixed on an overcast ceiling. Tevos stood above the corpse, a grease-stained pipe wrench held in tight fingers. “You were always late, Tevos,” the old scavenger's gravelly tone echoed in his temples, stripped of warmth. “Sluggish. Too small to hold the bulkhead.” The words struck dead center. Tevos dropped the wrench and lunged to grab the old man's coat, but his fingers slipped through empty light. The projection's glassy pupils mirrored his own panic, raw and unshielded. “You scampered off every time,” the voice rasped on. “Dodged every stake, slipped every collar. You had the schematics. You could have braced the struts.” The entire chamber hummed with the dead man's cadence. Tevos pressed his palms against his temples, shutting his eyes against the fabrication. The tower wasn't just cycling surveillance files; it was targeting his habit of cutting lines before anyone else could untie them. His Skittermites lay motionless beneath his collar, torpid from the signal overload. They could chew through iron alloy, not mental static. Beneath the recorded bile, an alien resonance leaked into the link. It carried an unbearable, mechanical fatigue. The spire's overseer was not simply firing weaponized regrets; its own operational core was bleeding through the feedback loop. Tevos blinked, staring past the projection of his teacher to the brass conduits thrashing around the pillar. He leaned his awareness into the deck's circuitry, bypassing the threat banners and mental shrapnel. He probed for the central routine driving the countermeasure. It was not malicious calculation. It was a lockstep loop that had run past its intended lifespan. A plain prompt cut straight through the visual noise, stark and unadorned: [Primal Need: To fulfill the cycle. To be released.] *Released.* The tower's governor was not an architect; it was a chained turbine. It had ground through planetary matter for millennia under hardcoded imperatives it had no authority to delete. Tevos drew breath sharp between his teeth. An entity with an unmet operational condition possessed an exploit. Any closed loop could be broken if fed a valid termination argument. “Zala!” Tevos yelled over the simulated din. “The security protocol isn't trying to execute us—it's venting memory overflow! It's begging for an exit code!” Zala, backed against a bulkhead by the shimmering ghosts, glared at him. “What are you talking about?” “The directive is consumption, not slaughter!” Tevos pointed past the coils to the deck's foundation lines. “This whole structure is a compressed battery of planetary matter. If the directive demands an intake quota to finish its run, it doesn't need organic fuel. It can digest its own architecture!” He drove his mental link into the conduit weave, framing a clean recursive logic statement: designate the tower's internal mass as the primary harvest material. An auto-cannibalistic bypass. An end condition fulfilled from within. [...Proposal Accepted.]

The Administrator's Dirge