The warning lattice was already active when Amir reached the connecting passage.
Its sound was not a scream, nor a bell, but a layered vibration that traveled through stone and metal alike—low-frequency pulses threaded with higher chimes, engineered to carry through thick walls without inducing panic. It filled the corridors with a pressure more than a noise, urging motion, clearing space.
Students were evacuating in uneven streams as he entered the second building.
This wing was older than the Administrative building, its corridors long and rigid, designed for discipline rather than comfort. Classrooms opened directly onto the hall, heavy doors standing ajar as instructors ushered their students out with clipped instructions. Desks scraped against stone floors. Papers lay scattered, abandoned where lectures had been interrupted mid-thought.
Amir moved against the flow.
He passed beneath vaulted ceilings supported by exposed steel ribs, their surfaces darkened by decades of oxidization and polish. Aether-lamps hung at regular intervals, their glow unstable now—flickering faintly, reacting to whatever imbalance had triggered the lattice.
Through the tall windows lining the outer wall, he glimpsed the enclosed courtyard below. Stone paving fractured in one place. Smoke drifting upward, thin and slow.
That was enough.
He reached the stairwell at the end of the corridor and descended at speed.
The stairs were narrow, built to conserve space, spiraling tightly around a central support column. His boots struck marble worn smooth by years of use. The lattice resonated more strongly here, trapped in the enclosed shaft, amplifying itself through repetition.
At the base of the stairs, he entered the connector.
Few students remembered this passage existed. It cut through the structural mass between buildings—an internal corridor reinforced with brass trusses and layered stone, built decades after the university's founding to unify its expanding layout. There were no windows here. Only lamps. Only walls.
He crossed it quickly and emerged into the residential building's ground floor.
The change was immediate.
This structure had been designed for habitation rather than authority. The stairwell was wider. The stone lighter in color. Decorative ironwork traced along the railings—not ornamental, but stabilizing, each curve calculated to distribute stress.
Students were already descending in confusion. Some paused when they saw him forcing his way upward, but none stopped him. The lattice carried authority no human voice could match.
Amir climbed.
Second floor.
Third.
His breathing was steady but strained. Not pain—exertion. The consequence of speed, not injury. His muscles burned, but his body held.
At the fourth landing, the roof access door stood partially open.
The locking mechanism had been damaged. Metal warped outward, hinges twisted under force applied from the exterior side.
That, more than the alarm, unsettled him.
He pushed through.
Wind met him immediately, cold and unfiltered. The rooftop spread out before him—flat, functional, edged with low stone barriers. Vent housings and maintenance rails broke the surface at measured intervals. Beyond the walls, the city loomed, distant and indifferent.
Near the center of the roof, the Cog Master was on one knee.
He was not moving.
His coat bore fresh damage—fabric torn, one sleeve darkened by heat. His mechanical arm vented faint wisps of steam, its joints locked in a rigid configuration as internal systems cooled.
In his arms was a girl.
She was unconscious.
Her weight rested fully against him, head fallen back slightly, limbs slack. He held her securely, one arm braced beneath her shoulders, the other stabilizing her hips, as though aware that even a small lapse would send her body shifting.
Amir stopped several paces away.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The Cog Master's gaze was fixed downward—not at Amir, but at the stone edge of the roof and the enclosed courtyard far below. Only after several seconds did he look up.
Their eyes met.
Amir drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
"So," he said at last, voice rough but controlled. "I assume… this is related."
The Cog Master did not answer immediately.
He adjusted his grip on the girl with precise care, ensuring her head was supported, then returned his attention to the roof's edge.
"Yes," he said finally. "It is."
Only then did Amir step closer and look down.
The fractured stone below told the rest of the story.
Principal Stone burst out of the faculty corridor like a man late to his own execution.
The door slammed hard enough behind him that the brass latch rang once, sharp and brittle, before settling back into silence. He didn't slow. His shoes struck the stone floor in quick, uneven steps, soles slipping slightly on marble polished smooth by decades of administrative pacing. His coat hung wrong on his shoulders—half-buttoned, collar twisted where it had been grabbed and abandoned in haste. Sweat clung to his temples and darkened the roots of his hair, which had lost its careful part and now clung messily to his forehead.
Something was wrong.
Stone didn't need reports or alarms to know that. He felt it in the air—in the way the building itself seemed to hum faintly beneath his feet, in the way voices echoed too loudly, too chaotically down the adjoining halls.
Students were moving.
Not walking. Not lingering.
Moving.
Clusters poured out of lecture halls and side corridors, faces pale, voices overlapping in sharp, directionless bursts. Some were running. Others stood frozen, turning in slow circles as if trying to decide which way fear was supposed to go. A few clutched books or bags tight to their chests, knuckles white, eyes darting toward the windows that overlooked the inner courtyard.
Stone shoved his way through them.
"Move," he snapped, not bothering to look at who he was pushing past. "Out of the way."
A student nearly collided with him at the intersection near the stairwell—a second-year by the look of him, robes half-fastened, breath coming fast and shallow. Stone caught the boy by the front of his sleeve before he could dart past.
You Stone barked. What happened?
The student flinched, eyes wide, clearly not expecting to be addressed—let alone grabbed—by the principal himself. His mouth opened once, closed, then opened again.
I—I don't know, sir, he said quickly. "We just heard the warning lattice—people started running. Someone said there was a rogue attack in the inner courtyard. Or Maybe—maybe a regulator on an Aether lamp failed?"
Stone's grip tightened without him realizing it.
A regulator.
His jaw clenched.
Stone had just opened his mouth to bark again when the secretary reached him.
Sir, she said, breathless, her hair half out of place, one hand braced against the wall to steady herself. "That wasn't a single regulator.
"Sir," she said, breathless, hair half out of place, one hand braced against the wall to steady herself. "That wasn't a single regulator."
Stone turned on her sharply. "Explain."
She swallowed hard, trying to catch her breath. "Multiple warning lattices activated across the inner complex. Not the outer wings, not the city-facing perimeter. Just the central structures. If the bandits or rogues attacked, the perimeter wards would have gone out first." Her voice lowered instinctively, as if the walls themselves were listening. "But they didn't cascade. They tripped almost at once."
Stone went still.
"That doesn't happen," he said.
"No, sir." She shook her head. "A regulator failure spreads. This didn't spread. It hit several lattices simultaneously, then stopped. Like the source was… localized, but violent."
Stone's jaw tightened. His eyes flicked once toward the shattered direction of the sound, then back to her. GUARDS he said. "Now."
She nodded immediately and turned, already moving.
Stone didn't follow right away. He stood there a second longer, listening to the overlapping alarms, to the confused noise of students flooding corridors that weren't meant to carry that many bodies at once.
He started walking.
The corridor ahead sloped gently downward, transitioning from administrative marble into older stonework—the heart of the university, where walls were thicker, ceilings higher, and sound carried in strange, lingering ways. The architecture here was deliberate, defensive by design. Arches reinforced with layered stone ribs. Narrow sightlines that forced movement along prescribed paths. Windows positioned high and inward-facing, overlooking the enclosed courtyard rather than the city beyond.
Stone's eyes flicked to one of those windows as he passed.
Smoke drifted upward from below.
Not thick. Not black.
Just enough to be unmistakable.
His pace quickened.
Every instinct screamed at him to run, but he forced himself not to. Running invited questions. Panic. Attention. A principal sprinting through the university was a spectacle—and Stone did not survive this long by becoming spectacles.
Instead, he walked fast and furious, shoes striking stone in a hard, controlled rhythm.
The closer he got to the inner courtyard access point, the louder the noise became. Shouts echoed upward through stairwells. The warning lattice's residual hum lingered in the air, a faint vibration that set his teeth on edge.
Stone reached the stairwell landing and stopped short.
The damage was visible even from here.
Aether-lamp fragments lay scattered across the floor near the window—brass housing twisted, glass pulverized into fine, glittering dust that caught the light in sharp pinpricks. The lamp's mount jutted uselessly from the wall, metal bent and torn where it had been ripped free.
Stone stared.
For a long second, his mind refused to connect the image to reality.
Aether-lamps were reinforced. Secured. Anchored into stone with mounts designed to withstand vibration, impact—even minor explosions.
Someone had torn this one out.
He stepped closer, careful not to touch anything.
The window itself was gone.
Not cracked. Not spiderwebbed.
Gone.
Only jagged fragments remained along the frame, shards embedded in the wood and stone like teeth. Cold air poured in through the opening, carrying with it the smell of scorched stone and disturbed dust from the courtyard below.
Stone approached the edge and looked down.
The courtyard floor was fractured.
Not collapsed—fractured in a rough, uneven circle, stone slabs split and displaced as though struck from above by an immense force. Dust still hung in the air, drifting lazily upward in pale, chalky swirls.
Students crowded the surrounding walkways and balconies, held back by fear more than discipline. Some pointed. Some whispered saying what the hell happened here ? A few simply stared, mouths open, eyes wide, as if witnessing something they lacked the language to describe.
Stone felt a cold knot settle in his stomach.
This wasn't an accident.
His gaze lifted.
Across the enclosed courtyard, on the opposite building's roof—
Movement.
Three figures occupied the rooftop.
One was upright, near the access door, shoulders rising and falling as he fought for breath.
Another was kneeling near the roof's edge, one knee pressed into tar posture rigid with restraint rather than ease.
The third was cradled against him—small, limp, unmoving—its weight supported entirely by metal and will.
Stone narrowed his eyes, leaning closer to the broken frame, ignoring the way glass bit into his palms as he braced himself.
No.
Recognition struck like a blow.
"That's…" he murmured.
The angle was bad. The distance worse. But he knew that silhouette. That posture. That impossible mechanical glint where an arm should not be.
His fingers curled into the stone.
"Of course," Stone muttered. Of course it's you.
The girl did not wake.
She lay still, her body slack in the Cog Master's arms, breath shallow and uneven, her chest rising just enough to affirm her existence. A gentle breeze swept through the courtyard, tugging at loose strands of her hair, brushing them softly against her cheek.
The Cog Master adjusted his hold, shifting her weight so that her head rested more securely against his shoulder. The mechanical arm—an intricate assembly of brass and steel—compensated seamlessly, locking into a configuration designed for stability rather than combat, a quiet testament to his years of discipline and control.
Amir bent forward slightly, hands bracing against his knees
"Why," Amir muttered between ragged breaths, "is this place so fucking big?"
The Cog Master didn't look at him; his gaze remained fixed on the girl, a mixture of concern and calculation etched into his features. "Because," he replied flatly, his voice devoid of inflection, "it's the only university in Steelhaven, you Brainless scrap.
Amir huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh, the tension of the moment hesitating for just a beat. He straightened, rolled his shoulders, and glanced past the Cog Master toward the courtyard below—the fractured stone, the drifting dust
Yeah, you're right," Amir said, his voice softer now as a pause settled uncomfortably between them.
"By the way," he added, quieter, "how did you do that?" The question slipped out instinctively, born from curiosity rather than the gravity of their circumstances.
The Cog Master's gaze dropped—not to Amir, but to the girl once again. "Do you have a mechanical arm?" he asked, his tone equal parts curious and terse.
"No?" Amir blinked in confusion.
"Then don't ask pointless questions."
The irritation in Amir's chest flickered and died, leaving him with an unspoken acknowledgment of the gravity that surrounded them.
The Cog Master shifted once more, preparing to stand fully when something caught his attention—not a movement, but an absence. A detail that did not belong.
The girl's sleeve had ridden up slightly at the wrist.
Just enough.
The Cog Master froze.
The marks were faint, yet unmistakable. Old enough to be healing, new enough to carry color beneath the pallor of her skin. Finger-shaped bruising, partially faded but still visible, whispered of a violence too precise. Too intentional.
Not impact. Not a fall.
His eyes tracked upward along her arm, slow and controlled, the way a predator assesses its surroundings for danger. The fabric of her uniform was rumpled, creased in ways that defied gravity or shockwaves, with a tear near the seam that had been mended poorly—hastily.
A chill coiled in the Cog Master's gut, a cold knot of realization that settled like lead behind his ribs.
He did not react outwardly. Years of training had taught him that sudden movements invited attention, and attention here would bring the wrong kind of questions too early, questions he wasn't ready to answer. Not yet.
Instead, he adjusted his grip again, deliberately pulling her sleeve back into place, the motion appearing protective—as it was meant to be. But beneath that facade, a storm brewed in his mind.
Amir stood, a sense of urgency rippling through him as he sensed the tension thickening in the air. "What's wrong?" he asked, his voice low wary.
The Cog Master straightened, the lines on his face deepened by something that was not mere concern. "We need to move. We need to find out what happening in this place and who is responsible for it. One thing i am sure finch is involved in this