The trickle of deserters soon threatened to become a flood. As the "Voice of the Stone" continued its rhythmic broadcast, the psychological fatigue of the Imperial camp reached a breaking point. Within a week, the population count rose from 597 to 620. Kael realized that bringing sixty or seventy starving, potentially diseased, and psychologically broken soldiers directly into the heart of a closed-loop subterranean environment was a biological risk he could not ignore. He initiated the Steam Triage—a standardized, industrial-scale processing system designed to decontaminate, evaluate, and integrate the newcomers.
The technical core of the triage was the Decontamination Corridor. This was a thirty-foot stretch of the intake tunnel, sealed by iron airlocks at both ends. Kael utilized the geothermal steam surplus to fill this corridor with a fine, pressurized mist of water and a diluted solution of sulfur-acid byproduct. This "Steam Scrub" served two purposes: it killed external parasites and pathogens common in the Imperial trenches, and it provided the first experience of the barony's technological superiority.
"This isn't just a bath, Mara," Kael explained to the Healer as they calibrated the nozzle pressure. "It's a transition. When they step out of that mist, they leave the Imperial dirt behind. We need them to feel the heat of the mountain before they ever see its face."
The grit of the operation was the scale. Each group of ten deserters had to be stripped of their rags, scrubbed, and issued standardized Aspirant tunics made of durable, dyed flax. Their old gear was not discarded; it was fed into the "Scrap Reclaimer"—a steam-powered vat of boiling lye that stripped the fabric for fiber and the leather for grease-rendering. Nothing in Ashfall was wasted.
Socially, the Steam Triage became a place of profound vulnerability. The Imperial soldiers, many of whom had spent years in the rigid, armored hierarchy of the Ordnance Corps, found themselves naked and shivering in a white-walled room of stone and steam. Kael ensured the "Information Citizens" were present during the process, documenting the skills of each man. They weren't looking for combat prowess; they were looking for smiths, farriers, carters, and surveyors.
The technical failure occurred during a "Mass Intake" of twenty men on the tenth night. The sudden demand for high-pressure steam in the triage corridor caused a localized drop in the primary heating line for the Tier 2 residential vaults. For two hours, the temperature in the family quarters dropped ten degrees, causing a wave of resentment among the original citizens.
"You're freezing your own people to wash the enemy," Hektor grumbled, his breath visible in the cooling forge. "The mountain's heart is only so big, Kael."
Kael didn't argue. He implemented the Exhaust Heat Recovery system. He redesigned the triage corridor to capture the spent steam after the scrub, piping it through a secondary heat-exchanger that pre-heated the water for the aquaculture vats. By utilizing the "Waste Heat," he was able to keep the triage running without stripping energy from the residential tiers. It was an exercise in thermal efficiency that proved the barony could scale its population without compromising its comfort.
The breakthrough in recruitment came from a man named Varus, a former Imperial sergeant-at-arms who had arrived with a group of twelve men. After the steam scrub, while standing in his new tunic, he looked at the iron piping of the ceiling and the rhythmic, silent operation of the airlocks.
"I spent twenty years maintaining the Emperor's catapults," Varus told the intake clerk. "I've never seen a valve that didn't leak. If the Baron can make a mountain breathe, I'll build whatever he tells me to."
The "Observation Tier" was nearly at capacity, and the first of the new Aspirants were already being assigned to the "Expansion Brigades"—the crews responsible for digging the foundations of Tier 4.
"The count is 680, Elms," Kael said, watching the Seismic Mirror. The Imperial camp was visibly smaller now, their formation ragged and thin. "We've taken their skill and their labor. Vane knows he's losing his grip. He'll make one final, desperate push before the spring thaw. We need to move the expansion teams into the 'False-Face' mines."
Kael began sketching a trap: a series of purposefully unstable tunnels designed to lure the remaining Imperial forces into a localized collapse.