Chapter 42
title: "The Inheritance Protocol" wordCount: 2226
The data node burned through my palm like a brand, and suddenly I was sixteen again, watching my father die—except this time, he was fighting back.
The vision slammed into me with the force of a hydraulic press. Not memory. Something sharper, more real than anything I'd lived through. My father's workshop, the smell of ozone and hot metal, but the hydraulic lift wasn't falling. It was standing perfectly still while something else moved in the shadows—something that bent light around itself like heat shimmer off summer asphalt.
"Remy!" Kess's voice came from somewhere distant, muffled by the roar of data flooding my System interface. Quest notifications cascaded across my vision faster than I could read them, each one stamped with a crafting signature I'd recognize anywhere. The same flourish he'd put on every schematic, every blueprint, every goddamn birthday card.
My father wasn't crushed by equipment failure.
He was murdered.
The thing in the shadows resolved into something almost human-shaped. Almost. It wore the approximation of a business suit, carried the suggestion of a briefcase, spoke with a voice that sounded like it had been assembled from customer service recordings.
"Mr. Voss. The integration assessment is complete. Your crafting capabilities exceed baseline parameters by four hundred percent. You have been selected for immediate processing."
My father—younger, stronger, without the gray that had started threading through his hair in my actual memories—stepped between the thing and his workbench. Between the thing and me, I realized. Sixteen-year-old me, visible in the reflection of a polished machine housing, oblivious and alive.
"Here's the thing." His voice. Exactly his voice, down to the way he always paused before delivering bad news. "You're not taking my kid. You're not taking my work. And you sure as hell aren't processing anyone in my shop."
The thing tilted its head with mechanical precision. "Resistance is not a recognized response option. Please comply with integration protocols."
My father's hand moved to his belt, came up holding something I'd never seen before. A device that looked like it had been assembled from three different technologies that shouldn't fit together, wrapped in copper wire and humming with barely contained energy.
"I've got a protocol for you."
The device fired. Reality screamed.
The vision shattered like dropped glass, and I was back in the facility's core chamber, my palm still pressed against the data node, Kess shaking my shoulder hard enough to rattle teeth.
"—me! Remy, we have to move, Thorne's forces are—what's wrong with your eyes?"
I pulled my hand away from the node. The skin of my palm was unmarked, but my System interface had exploded into a cascade of notifications I couldn't dismiss. Quest logs, crafting schematics, encrypted files with my father's signature burned into every line of code.
[LEGACY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED]
[INHERITANCE QUEST UNLOCKED: THE LAST ARTIFICER]
[WARNING: This quest cannot be declined. Acceptance is automatic upon authentication.]
"My father." The words came out wrong, too flat, like I was reading them off a damaged display. "He didn't die in an accident."
Kess's grip on my shoulder tightened. "What are you talking about? Remy, we need to—"
"He was fighting something. A System scout. Pre-Fracture integration assessment." I finally looked at her, saw my reflection in her wide eyes. My pupils had gone silver, the same color as the data node. "They killed him because he was building weapons to fight back."
The chamber shuddered. Somewhere above us, Thorne's corrupted army was tearing through the facility's upper levels, and somewhere below, that massive presence kept pulling at reality like a child picking at a scab.
Kess's face cycled through three different expressions in as many seconds—confusion, comprehension, something that might have been pity. "The quest. What does it say?"
I pulled up the quest log with a thought. The text was dense, technical, written in my father's shorthand that I'd spent years learning to decode from his old notebooks.
"It says he was part of something called the Ironclad Collective. Pre-Fracture crafters who figured out the System was coming before it arrived. They were building countermeasures, weapons that could exploit integration vulnerabilities." My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "He died activating a legacy protocol. When I turned sixteen and got my class, it wasn't random. It was his. Passed down through some kind of genetic authentication."
"So you're not just a Salvage Artificer." Kess's voice had gone quiet, the way it did when she was processing tactical implications. "You're, like, the Salvage Artificer. The one he trained the System to recognize as his successor."
"I didn't want to be anyone's successor." The words came out sharper than I intended. "I wanted him to stay alive."
The chamber shuddered again, harder this time. Cracks spider-webbed across the walls, and through them I could see the corruption spreading like black mold, converting matter into something that hurt to look at directly.
Kess pulled me toward the maintenance tunnel that led deeper into the facility. Away from Thorne's forces, toward whatever was waiting in the depths. "What does the quest require? What do you have to craft?"
I scanned the schematic as we ran. The design was insane, impossible, the kind of thing that should have torn itself apart the moment you tried to assemble it. Three different power sources that contradicted each other, materials that shouldn't exist in the same space, a core component that—
My breath caught.
"It needs a fragment from his original workshop. Something that carries his crafting signature at the molecular level." I looked down at my hands. At the oversized leather work gloves I'd worn every day for the past eight years, even when I wasn't crafting, even when they made me look like a kid playing dress-up in his father's clothes. "It needs these."
The maintenance tunnel was barely wide enough for us to move single-file. Kess led, her System interface casting blue light across walls that had started to breathe with the facility's corruption. Behind us, the sound of Thorne's forces grew closer—not footsteps, but the wet sliding sound of bodies that had forgotten how to walk properly.
"So we craft the weapon." Kess's voice echoed off the tunnel walls. "We use your dad's gloves, we build whatever he was trying to make, and we use it to fight back. Right? That's the plan?"
"There is no plan." I kept my eyes on the gloves, on the worn leather that had molded itself to my father's hands first, then mine. "The schematic is incomplete. He died before he could finish it."
"But the quest activated anyway, which means there's a way to complete it, don't you think? Maybe the System filled in the gaps, or maybe—"
"Maybe nothing." I cut her off, heard the edge in my voice and didn't care. "He kept this from me. All of it. Every time I asked about his work, every time I wanted to learn more than basic repairs, he'd deflect. Change the subject. Tell me I should focus on school, on having a normal life."
Kess stopped walking. Turned to face me in the narrow tunnel, close enough that I could see the silver reflection of my corrupted eyes in hers.
"He was protecting you."
"He was lying to me." The words tasted like copper. "For years. While I thought I'd killed him through negligence, through being a stupid kid who didn't check the hydraulic maintenance logs, he was actually dying to keep me out of some pre-Fracture resistance movement I never asked to join."
"Remy—"
"Don't." I held up one gloved hand. "Don't tell me he did it out of love. Don't tell me he was being noble. He made a choice, and that choice was to die keeping secrets instead of staying alive and telling me the truth."
Kess's expression shifted into something I'd never seen before. Not sympathy. Not understanding. Something harder, colder, that made her look like a different person entirely.
"You know what? You're right. He should have told you. He should have sat his teenage kid down and explained that the System was coming to enslave humanity and he was building illegal weapons in the basement and oh, by the way, if he died you'd inherit his entire resistance legacy whether you wanted it or not." Her voice had lost its usual tumbling cadence, each word precise and cutting. "That definitely would have made your childhood better. Super healthy. No trauma there."
"That's not—"
"No, I think it is, actually." She stepped closer, and I realized I'd never seen her truly angry before. "You've spent eight years hating yourself for something that wasn't your fault, and now you find out the truth and you're mad at him for not telling you sooner? For trying to give you a few more years of normal before dropping this on you?"
The tunnel shuddered. Dust rained down from the ceiling, and somewhere behind us, something roared with a voice that sounded like tearing metal.
"I'm not mad at him." The lie felt obvious even as I said it. "I'm just—"
"You're terrified." Kess's voice softened slightly, but the hard edge remained. "Because if you accept this quest, if you craft whatever weapon he was building, you're admitting that his death meant something. That it was part of something bigger than a workplace accident. And that's scarier than thinking you killed him through negligence, because at least then you could have prevented it."
My hands had curled into fists inside the gloves. The leather creaked.
"Here's the thing—"
The tunnel exploded inward.
Not behind us. Ahead. Where the passage should have led deeper into the facility, the walls simply ceased to exist, replaced by a massive chamber that shouldn't have fit inside the building's physical dimensions. And standing in the center of that impossible space, surrounded by hundreds of corrupted figures that all wore Marcus's face, was Thorne Malchek.
He looked exactly like he had in the chasm. Immaculate suit, perfect posture, that slight smile that suggested he knew something you didn't. But now there were more of him. Twelve identical copies, arranged in a semicircle, each one holding a weapon I recognized because I'd crafted it, sold it, watched it leave my workshop in someone else's hands.
"Remy Voss." All twelve spoke in perfect unison, their voices layering into something that bypassed my ears and resonated directly in my chest. "We have been waiting for you to find your father's legacy. Saves us the trouble of extracting it from your corpse."
Kess moved to put herself between me and the nearest Thorne, but I caught her arm. Pulled her back. Because I'd just noticed what was behind the Thornes, in the shadows at the chamber's far edge.
Marcus. The real Marcus, not the corrupted copies. Strapped to some kind of medical chair, his eyes open but empty, his mouth moving in a silent countdown I could read on his lips.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
"Your father was a problem." The Thornes stepped forward as one, a synchronized movement that made my skin crawl. "The Ironclad Collective was a problem. Legacy crafters who could create items outside System parameters were a problem. We have spent considerable resources eliminating that problem."
"You killed them." My voice came out steady despite the way my pulse hammered against my ribs. "All of them. Every crafter who knew how to build weapons the System couldn't control."
"We integrated them." The Thornes' smiles widened. "Most of them. Your father was... stubborn. He chose termination over integration. A waste of valuable resources."
Seven. Six. Five.
Marcus's lips kept moving, his eyes still empty, and I realized what I was seeing. Not a countdown to an explosion. A countdown to something worse. The Architect was using him as a relay, channeling something through his compromised System interface, and when he reached zero—
"The gloves." Thorne extended twelve identical hands. "Surrender them, and we will allow your companions to live. You have our word."
"Your word." Kess's laugh was sharp enough to cut. "Because that's worth so much coming from someone who's literally twelve different kinds of liar."
"The alternative is that all three of you die here, and we take the gloves anyway." The Thornes' expressions didn't change. "We are offering you a choice. That is more courtesy than your father received."
Four. Three. Two.
I looked down at the gloves. At the worn leather that had protected my father's hands, then mine. At the microscopic data chip I could now sense embedded in the left palm, carrying schematics and protocols and the last fragments of a man who'd died fighting something he knew he couldn't beat.
The quest log pulsed in my vision, insistent, demanding.
[INHERITANCE QUEST: THE LAST ARTIFICER]
[Accept your father's legacy. Craft the weapon he died protecting. Continue the fight he started.]
[Reward: Truth. Understanding. The ability to forge items that can wound the System itself.]
[Failure: Everything he sacrificed becomes meaningless. The Ironclad Collective dies with you.]
Kess's hand found mine, squeezed once. Not comfort. Not reassurance. Just presence. Just the reminder that I wasn't alone in this impossible choice.
Marcus's lips formed the word: One.
I pulled off my father's gloves.
Held them out toward the nearest Thorne, my voice flat and empty.
"Here's the thing—"
Marcus's countdown hit zero, and the entire platform detonated.