The rhythmic hum of the Pillar of Industry—a sound that had been their only constant for the last two hours—suddenly hitched. It was followed by a deep, metallic thud that resonated through the soles of their boots, a vibration that felt less like a mechanical shift and more like a heart stopping.
"Jin," Mei whispered, her voice tightening as she stared at the glowing status lights on the support beams. The lights had flickered from a steady blue to a frantic, strobing amber. "The central AI didn't send a security squad. It just cut the localized power grid."
Before Jin could respond, the world shifted. It wasn't a fall; it was a sudden, sickening loss of weight. The gravity stabilizers, the massive electromagnetic plates that kept the atmosphere and the inhabitants pinned to the vertical surface of the Pillar, had been deactivated.
Instantly, the three of them were lifted off the catwalk. The heavy, rusted iron pipe Jin had been carrying drifted away into the void, spinning slowly. Seraphina's long silver hair fanned out around her head like a halo of silk.
"Grab the railing!" Jin roared, his voice sounding thin in the sudden silence of the vacuum-sealed shaft.
He lunged through the air, his ivory arm acting on instinct. He didn't use its hidden power to blast anything; he used the raw physical speed of his awakened reflexes to snatch Mei's hand before she drifted too far into the open abyss. With his other hand, he hooked his elbow around a jagged piece of reinforced rebar protruding from the Pillar's skin.
The realism of zero-gravity was not the graceful dance portrayed in old-world media. It was a chaotic, disorienting nightmare. Without a floor or a ceiling, the inner ear revolted. Seraphina had managed to catch a maintenance cable, her body tethered to the wall, but she was spinning, her mana-depleted system unable to stabilize her orientation.
"Mei, can you reach the mag-locks?" Jin gasped, the strain of holding his sister's weight and his own against the centrifugal force of the Pillar's slight rotation making his shoulder joint pop.
"I'm... I'm trying," Mei grunted. She was floating horizontally, her legs—newly awakened but still uncoordinated—kicking uselessly in the air. She reached out toward a localized control panel near the hatch, her fingers glowing with a faint violet static. "The AI has locked the physical interface. I have to go into the sub-routines, but without gravity, my blood pressure is spiking. I can't focus!"
It was a slow, agonizing struggle. In the silence of the zero-G environment, every sound was amplified through the metal they were touching. From above, they heard a new sound: the clack-clack-clack of magnetic boots.
A squad of automated Security Spiders—sleeker and more lethal than the maintenance drones—was walking down the Pillar toward them. These units didn't need gravity; their legs were tipped with powerful electromagnets that allowed them to sprint across the vertical surface at terrifying speeds.
"They're coming," Seraphina said, her voice a cold rasp. She pulled herself along the cable, moving toward Jin. Her silver eyes were fixed on the approaching shadows. "Jin, I can give you one strike. One. But after that, my neural link will shut down for safety."
"Save it," Jin commanded. He looked at the ivory skin of his forearm, hidden under his sleeve. He couldn't reveal his bloodline to the sensors of the Pillar, but he could "tweak" the physics of their situation.
He didn't aim at the spiders. He looked at the catwalk they had just left. The metal was held in place by massive, high-tension bolts. In a zero-G environment, those bolts were the only things keeping the tons of steel from becoming lethal projectiles.
"Mei, forget the locks! Hack the tension-calibrators on the catwalk supports!" Jin shouted.
Mei understood immediately. Her mind dived into the Pillar's local network. She didn't try to fight the AI for control of the door; she simply "nudged" the settings of the catwalk's structural integrity.
[Warning: Structural Tension at 150%] [Safety Override: Disabled]
With a sound like a gunshot, the massive bolts holding the catwalk snapped. In the weightless environment, the ton of steel didn't fall; it recoiled. The catwalk whipped upward, acting like a giant, metallic flyswatter.
The Security Spiders, mid-sprint, had no time to react. The massive slab of steel smashed into them, crushing the machines against the Pillar's hull. Sparks flew as the magnetic boots were sheared off, and the destroyed drones were sent tumbling into the dark void below.
The recoil of the catwalk, however, sent a massive vibration through the rebar Jin was holding. His grip slipped.
For a terrifying second, Jin, Mei, and Seraphina were drifting away from the Pillar, moving toward the empty air of the five-hundred-meter drop.
"The cable!" Seraphina screamed.
She threw her tether toward Jin. He caught it with his ivory hand, the force of the snap-back nearly dislocating his arm. He didn't let go. He pulled them back toward the Pillar, his muscles bulging under the duster.
As they slammed back against the cold metal hull, the lights flickered again. A deep, resonant hum returned.
[Gravity Stabilization: Restored]
Weight returned with a brutal, bone-jarring force. They fell the two feet back onto the remaining stub of the maintenance platform, landing in a heap of tangled limbs and gasping breath. The realism of the impact left Jin's knees bruised and Seraphina coughing from the sudden rush of blood back to her lower extremities.
They lay there for a long minute, the slow-paced reality of their escape sinking in. They hadn't reached the Sky-Docks yet, and they were already broken and bleeding.
"We're close," Mei whispered, pointing upward. Just fifty meters above them, the silhouette of a jagged, black-winged ship sat on a private landing pad, tucked away from the main corporate docks. It was the Obsidian Wing.
But standing on the pad, silhouetted against the rising orange sun, was a woman with a long, mechanical coat fluttering in the wind. She wasn't looking at the sky; she was looking directly down at them.