My eyes were locked onto the glaring, blood-red numbers ticking down in the upper right corner of my retina. The countdown advanced with a suffocating, millisecond-perfect rhythm:

  Countdown: 87 Days

  Time was running out. The Dragon King’s heartbeat was accelerating.

  I immediately rallied Zayla, Brad, Jasta, and Mykra.

  “We can't just sit on top of a live volcano and wait to die.”

  Cutting straight to the chase, I slammed my finger onto the heavily shadowed western sector of the map.

  “We are pushing west to the Old Capital ruins. If it actually has stable tectonic plates and an ancient armory like Jasta claims, then we sink a new foundation there and rebuild Skyreach. If we can secure a replacement processing chip to suppress the dragon, even better.”

  I looked up, meeting Zayla’s eyes. “Zayla, you hold the fort. Brad, Mykra, Jasta, and I are making the run.”

  Zayla frowned. Just as she opened her mouth to argue against being left behind, Jasta smoothly cut her off.

  “Mayor, speaking frankly, four operatives are insufficient.”

  The old fox stroked his chin, his gaze drifting toward the window.

  “The route to the Old Capital isn't some romantic ballad sung by a bard. The entire path is a dead zone saturated with severe mana radiation. We require a guide who has actually seen the wreckage of that era, someone who understands how those ancient arrays operate.”

  He paused, dropping the payload: “I strongly advise we take Selena.”

  “Selena?!”

  Zayla slammed her palm onto the solid wood table so hard it cracked. Her amber slit-pupils instantly shrank to pinpricks.

  “Are your circuits completely fried, fox? She was the most lethal threat to this city! She nearly slaughtered us all! And now you’re proposing we lock her and Alex inside a five-man airship? You aren't worried she’ll snap mid-flight, crash the ship, and drag everyone down with her?”

  “She lacks the capability, my Queen.”

  Mykra stepped out of the shadows, his tactical gloves glowing faintly with suppressed shadow runes.

  “The second she attempts to channel mana or initiate any physical sabotage, the Mana-Inhibitor bolted to her neck will instantly discharge high-voltage current, severing her cervical nerves in under zero point five seconds. Right now... she poses less of a threat than a declawed kitten.”

  Zayla kept her eyes locked on Jasta, then slowly turned to me.

  “She’s survived for centuries.”

  I met Zayla’s gaze, my voice completely flat and devoid of emotion.

  “I guarantee she understands the ancient topography and lethal magical fallout of this continent better than anyone in this room. We need her eyes just as much as we need radar.”

  Finally, after a long, tense standoff, Zayla ground her teeth and nodded.

  “If you die by that woman's hand...”

  She closed the distance between us. Her voice dropped into a low, terrifying threat, but deep in her eyes, I saw profound, heavy anxiety. “I swear I will hang her corpse from the highest flagpole in Skyreach and let it rot in the wind.”

  “Relax. I’m built to last.”

  I gave her a brief smile before my expression turned dead serious.

  “Log this: All deep-level foundation operations are to be suspended immediately. That dragon is too sensitive to seismic vibrations.”

  “And if Sarak tries to overload the blast furnaces to speed up production, you shut her down. Tie her to a pipe if you have to. Keep a tight lid on the Lower City Forge.”

  Taking a deep breath, I laid out the absolute worst-case protocol:

  “If I am not back by day eighty-nine... You evacuate the entire population to the northern ice fields. When the dragon wakes up, physical defenses are mathematically useless. Don't waste lives on a meaningless last stand.”

  “Understood.”

  Zayla responded with the cold, hardened resilience required to rule the wasteland.

  ...

  The morning of the launch.

  On the Skyreach landing pad, our newly commissioned flagship—the Skyreach Fury—idled, its massive ducted fans emitting a deep, powerful hum.

  The homogenous black armor plating gleamed with a freezing, industrial lethality under the early morning sun.

  Stripped to the waist, Brad was currently hauling the last crate of heavy tungsten-steel armor-piercing shells into the cargo bay.

  Mykra crouched at the navigation console, running diagnostics on the shadow-frequency anti-jamming radar.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Jasta was meticulously auditing a full crate of gas masks.

  And Selena, zipped into a rough, gray canvas prison jumpsuit with the heavy black inhibitor bolted to her neck, stood emotionlessly by the airlock.

  Zayla walked up to me.

  Without a word, she unclasped the collar of her leather armor. Reaching inside, she drew out the fractured, faintly glowing blue crystal key. It was still warm with her body heat.

  Pressing the key into my palm, Zayla closed my fingers tightly around it.

  “Without this, your interface is blind. If you hit any of those ancient electronic locks, you won't be able to bypass them.”

  Zayla looked at me, a highly suppressed tremor hiding deep in her amber eyes.

  “Eighty-nine days. If you don't return with a patch by the final day...”

  “I will order Sarak to preemptively detonate every blast furnace in Skyreach, and I will initiate a mass exodus to the far North. Or I will simply dissolve the city and let every species scatter into the wasteland to find their own survival zones. I absolutely will not leave them here to wait for death.”

  Feeling the residual warmth of the crystal against my skin, I solemnly looped the cord around my neck, tucking it securely against my chest plate.

  “Don't stress, Queen.” I gave her a confident, engineer's grin. “I’m a Builder. I don't just draft the blueprints; I survive to run the final inspection.”

  Turning around, I boarded the airship.

  The Skyreach Fury lifted off the pad, leaving the massive, hybrid city of steel and rock behind, accelerating at full throttle into the uncharted Northwest.

  ...

  Pushing West.

  The further we flew from Skyreach’s operational grid, the more brutally desolate the terrain became. The vegetation transitioned from dead yellow to absolute, scorched ash.

  By the second day of the flight, the sky was completely suffocated by a bizarre, gray fog emitting a faint, sickly green luminescence. The sun was entirely blocked out. The world below looked trapped in a state of eternal twilight.

  “Masks on.”

  Standing by the viewport, Selena stared down at the dead earth. Her voice, muffled through the heavy respirator, carried a cold, grim familiarity.

  “This is the ‘Wasteland of Sighs.’ Two thousand years ago, the Old Empire completely abused the core-extraction magic here, rotting the ley lines to the bedrock. The atmosphere is saturated with lethal concentrations of mana radiation. A standard human exposed to this fog for a few days will either suffer total psychological collapse or aggressive, malignant mutations.”

  “The only way to reach the Old Capital alive is to navigate through specific monsoon corridors.”

  As the airship pushed deeper into the fog, the UI on my retinas started throwing aggressive yellow warning lights. Massive clusters of static snow bled into the edges of my navigation map, looking like a retro TV losing its signal feed.

  We had completely entered a radar dead zone.

  Now, we were entirely dependent on Selena running highly lethal, visual-only navigation.

  After two days of agonizingly tense, blind flying through the radioactive mist...

  “Boss!”

  Mykra suddenly snapped his head up from the radar screen. Through his mask, his voice shook with a mix of adrenaline and total disbelief.

  “I’m painting a massive metallic reflection signature dead ahead! It’s not a natural ore vein... the geometric structure is perfectly symmetrical!”

  As the Skyreach Fury punched through the final, dense layer of gray fog...

  The visual field suddenly cleared.

  Every single person on the bridge, including the usually unflappable Jasta, sucked in a sharp breath of cold air.

  What lay before us wasn't some ruined magical temple. It wasn't an ancient city built from stacked stone blocks.

  It was the decaying corpse of a modern, reinforced-concrete metropolis, a concrete jungle being slowly digested by yellow sand and thick, irradiated black vines.

  Thousands of rusted rebar columns thrust into the sky like the shattered ribcages of dead leviathans. Collapsed concrete overpasses jutted violently across dry, cracked riverbeds.

  And sitting dead center in the heart of the city was a colossal, inverted-pyramid metal structure. Even heavily scarred by millennia of erosion, it still radiated a suffocating, heavy-industrial oppression.

  This was “Base One”—the initial drop zone of the Earth colonists two thousand years ago.

  It was also Patient Zero—the epicenter that caused the foundational physical laws of this world to crash.

  It sat there like a dead cyberpunk ruin buried in endless sand, silently broadcasting the sheer arrogance and ultimate annihilation of a highly advanced civilization.

  “...By the Creator.”

  Brad ripped off his mask and swore out loud, staring down at the impossible sight.

  “What the hell kind of fantasy world is this? It looks like someone dropped three nukes on Detroit!”

  Staring at the decaying, rusted remnants of modern industrial aesthetics, my heart started hammering against my ribs.

  I was absolutely certain now.

  This wasn't the ruin of a magical civilization. This was a city built on the future tech of Earth!

  Buried down there were blueprints infinitely more advanced than anything Skyreach had, lethally superior weapons, and highly likely... a backup mainframe capable of replacing the Main Processing Chip!

  The airship slowly touched down on a relatively flat, abandoned landing pad.

  Hiss—

  The airlock depressurized.

  The surrounding area was dead silent, save for the wind howling through the rusted steel skeletons like wailing ghosts.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  Mykra stared at the wildly spiking shadow-scanner in his hand, his voice shaking slightly.

  “Boss, this city... is ‘alive’.”

  He pointed straight down at the concrete. “There is an incredibly massive micro-fission reactor buried deep underground. It’s still running on absolute minimum standby power. And... something is closing in on our position.”

  Before he even finished the sentence.

  From the seemingly dead shadows of the ruins surrounding the landing pad, dozens of cold, blue optical sensors suddenly flared to life.

  They weren't the eyes of a wolf pack. They weren't the bioluminescence of magical beasts.

  Accompanied by the heavy, perfectly synchronized grind of metallic servo motors, a swarm of heavily rusted, two-meter-tall, multi-legged mechanical sentries crawled out of the darkness like giant metallic arthropods.

  The core optical sensors on their heads flared an aggressive, hostile red, instantly achieving target lock on our crew.

  Selena’s muffled voice carried a heavy, grim weight.

  “Ancient Slaughter Sentries... The Golden Kingdom uses these exact units in the South to violently suppress any uprisings. Their physical armor is incredibly dense, and... they completely lack a pain-reception protocol.”

  The UI on my retinas rapidly threw up cold blue targeting boxes, painting every single machine red.

  “Looks like the ancestors of the Old Empire aren't exactly rolling out the welcome mat.”