Chapter 7
title: "Rust and Reckoning" wordCount: 2521
The Rust Garden's entrance looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the fabric of reality and left the pieces to rust.
I stepped through the gap in the chain-link fence, my father's work gloves already slick with sweat despite the dawn chill. The air tasted wrong—copper and ozone and something that made my teeth ache. Behind me, the city's ambient noise cut off like someone had thrown a switch. Ahead, twisted metal spires rose from concrete that had cracked and heaved into impossible angles, and every surface crawled with the faint blue shimmer of System energy.
My Creator interface flickered to life without prompting, flooding my vision with tags and classifications and material grades until I had to squeeze my eyes shut and force it back down to a manageable level. When I opened them again, the world had turned into a treasure map written in light.
Tier 2 Steel Composite—87% purity—suitable for structural reinforcement.
Copper Wiring—degraded—salvage for trace elements only.
Unknown Alloy—analysis incomplete—recommend physical sampling.
"Good enough gets you killed," I muttered, adjusting the improvised scanner I'd cobbled together from three different broken devices and a prayer. The strap dug into my shoulder. I'd packed light—just the scanner, basic tools, and two empty reinforced bags that felt optimistic now that I was actually here.
The first corridor between collapsed buildings was narrow enough that I could touch both walls if I stretched. Rust flaked off under my fingers, and something skittered away in the shadows ahead. My interface tagged it as Tier 1 Scrap Rat before it disappeared into a hole I could've fit my fist through.
Not a threat. Everything else here, though—
I pushed deeper, following a vein of high-grade aluminum my scanner had picked up. The path twisted, doubled back, led me through a gap where rebar jutted from concrete like broken ribs. My right arm brushed against a jagged edge and the burn scars pulled tight, phantom pain from an old wound.
The aluminum deposit was real, at least. A whole panel of it, aircraft-grade if my scanner wasn't lying, embedded in what used to be a wall. I pulled out my cutting torch, checked the fuel gauge. Three hours of burn time, maybe four if I was careful.
Here's the thing about working alone: nobody interrupts you, but nobody watches your back either.
I was halfway through the first cut when my interface went haywire.
Warning: Hostile Entity Detected—Tier 3 Scrap Golem—Threat Level: Severe.
The words burned across my vision in red, and I spun around just in time to see something that used to be a forklift pull itself out of the rubble twenty feet away. It moved wrong, joints bending in directions that made my stomach lurch, and its eyes—if you could call them that—were empty sockets filled with the same blue shimmer that coated everything else in this place.
My cutting torch was still in my hand. I raised it like a weapon, which was stupid, because what was I going to do, weld it to death?
The Golem charged.
I threw myself sideways, hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind out of my lungs, rolled. The Golem's fist—a hydraulic ram that weighed more than I did—punched through the wall where I'd been standing. Concrete exploded into dust and shrapnel.
"Okay," I gasped, scrambling backward. "Okay, think, there's got to be—"
It came at me again, faster this time, and I ran. The corridor twisted ahead and I took the turn without thinking, my scanner banging against my ribs, my father's gloves slipping on my sweaty palms. Behind me, metal shrieked against concrete as the Golem tore through obstacles like they were paper.
The thermal dynamics are off, I thought wildly, because that was easier than thinking I'm going to die here, and then the corridor ended in a wall of collapsed rubble and I was out of room to run.
I turned. The Golem filled the corridor, blocking out the light, and my interface was screaming warnings I didn't need.
Critical Threat—Recommend Immediate Evacuation—No Combat Capabilities Detected.
"Yeah," I said. "Thanks for that."
The Golem raised both arms, hydraulic rams primed to turn me into paste, and I did the only thing I could think of: I threw my cutting torch at its head.
It didn't even slow down.
Then something moved in the shadows behind it, fast and low, and the Golem's head separated from its body in a spray of oil and sparking wires.
Kess landed in a crouch as the Golem's body crashed forward, her blade—when had she drawn a blade?—still humming with residual energy. She straightened, flicked the oil off the metal with a casual twist of her wrist, and looked at me.
"So," she said. "How's playing adventurer working out for you?"
I was still pressed against the rubble, my heart trying to punch through my ribs. "What are you—how did you—"
"Follow you? Please." She sheathed the blade in one smooth motion, and I realized I'd never seen her armed before. "You're not exactly subtle, Remy, and you definitely don't know how to move through the Garden without leaving a trail a blind Scrap Rat could follow."
"I didn't ask for your help."
"Yeah, well, you needed it anyway." She stepped over the Golem's corpse, and her expression wasn't sympathetic. It was angry. "What were you thinking, coming here alone? You don't have a combat class, you don't have backup, you don't even have basic defensive skills, and you thought you'd just waltz into one of the most dangerous salvage zones in the city and—what, hope nothing noticed you?"
"I was being careful."
"You were being stupid." She gestured at the destroyed Golem. "That thing was Tier 3, Remy, do you even know what that means? It could've killed you in about three seconds, and your fancy Creator interface wouldn't have done a damn thing to stop it."
Heat crawled up my neck. "I had a plan."
"Oh yeah? What was it, die and hope someone else looted your corpse?" She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "You're good at making things, I'll give you that, but out here? You're a liability."
"And you're so much better?" The words came out sharper than I'd intended. "What, you kill a few monsters and suddenly you're an expert on survival? Try spending a day doing real work, Kess, try building something that actually matters instead of just breaking things and—"
"Real work?" Her voice went flat. "You think sitting in your workshop is real work? You think hiding behind your tools and your interface and your dead father's gloves makes you—"
She stopped. We both did.
The the pause extended longer than comfortable between us, sharp enough to cut.
"I'm sorry," she said finally. "That was—I shouldn't have—"
"Forget it." I pushed off the wall, my legs still shaky. "You're right, anyway. I'm out of my depth here."
"I didn't mean—" She ran a hand through her hair, and for the first time since I'd met her, she looked uncertain. "Look, you're not useless, okay? You're just... you're a Maker, not a fighter, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you can't keep pretending you don't need people who can do what you can't."
"I don't need anyone."
"Yeah." Her smile was sad. "I noticed."
We moved deeper into the Garden in silence, Kess leading because she actually knew where she was going. My scanner picked up deposits as we walked—iron, copper, rare earth elements that made my interface light up with excitement—but I didn't stop to harvest any of them. The bags on my back felt heavier with every step, weighed down by nothing but my own stupidity.
"There," Kess said, pointing ahead to where the corridor opened into what used to be a factory floor. "That's a good harvesting site, lots of exposed nodes, and the Golem density is usually—"
She stopped walking.
I almost ran into her back. "What?"
"Look at the nodes."
I looked. The factory floor was massive, easily a hundred feet across, and dotted with material deposits that should've been glowing with System energy. Instead, they were dark. Dead. Someone had already stripped them clean, and they'd done it recently enough that the cut marks were still fresh.
"Scavengers?" I asked.
"No." Kess moved forward, crouched next to the nearest node. "Scavengers are sloppy, they take what they can carry and leave the rest. This is... this is surgical. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were taking and how to extract it without damaging the surrounding structure."
She touched the metal, and her fingers came away with black residue. "And they left a signature."
I knelt beside her. The mark was small, barely an inch across, but it had been burned into the metal with precision that made my chest tight with something that might've been professional jealousy. A stylized Y inside a circle, the lines so clean they could've been machine-cut.
"Yuki Tran," Kess said.
"Who?"
"Mass-production Artificer, works out of the industrial district, and she's been undercutting everyone's prices for the last six months." Kess stood, wiping her hands on her pants. "She's got a whole operation—teams of harvesters, automated processing, bulk sales to anyone with credits, and she doesn't care who she pisses off doing it."
"She's been here." I looked around the factory floor, counting the stripped nodes. Twelve. Maybe fifteen. "She's been harvesting the Garden."
"Not just harvesting. Claiming territory." Kess pointed to another mark, then another, a trail of burned signatures leading deeper into the ruins. "She's marking her route, telling everyone else to stay out, and if you try to work a node she's claimed—"
"She'll make sure you regret it."
"Yeah." Kess's expression was grim. "And if she's working the Garden this aggressively, that means she's got protection, probably from one of the major factions, and that means—"
"That means I'm competing with someone who has resources I can't match." The words tasted like rust. "Someone who can harvest faster, process more efficiently, and undercut my prices until I'm out of business."
"Or dead." Kess met my eyes. "The Garden doesn't have rules, Remy, and neither does Yuki. If she decides you're a threat—"
"Then I'm already on borrowed time." I stood, my knees protesting. "Great. That's just perfect."
My scanner beeped, a soft alert that meant it had found something worth flagging. I pulled it out, checked the readout, and felt my stomach drop.
High-Grade Titanium Alloy—98% purity—Tier 4 classification—estimated value: 50,000 credits.
The deposit was close, maybe fifty feet ahead, in a section of the factory that had collapsed into itself and created a warren of twisted metal and broken concrete. My interface was already highlighting the optimal extraction path, showing me where to cut, how to stabilize the structure, what tools I'd need.
Fifty thousand credits. That was enough to buy supplies for a month, maybe two if I was careful. Enough to meet the Ironclad deadline and still have room to breathe.
"Don't even think about it," Kess said.
"I need this."
"You need to stay alive more." She grabbed my arm, her grip tight enough to hurt. "That deposit is in a collapse zone, Remy, one wrong move and the whole thing comes down on your head, and even if you make it out, Yuki's probably already tagged it for harvest, which means—"
"Which means I'm out of options." I pulled free, started walking toward the deposit. "I've got three days of supplies left, Kess, maybe four if I ration, and the Ironclad deadline is in two days, and I can't—I won't—sit in my workshop and wait for everything to fall apart."
"So you'd rather die here?"
"I'd rather do something."
She didn't follow me. I heard her curse, low and vicious, but she stayed where she was, and I told myself that was fine. I didn't need her help. I didn't need anyone's help.
The collapse zone was worse up close. Metal beams crisscrossed overhead at angles that made my interface flash structural warnings, and the floor was a maze of rubble and exposed rebar. I picked my way through carefully, my scanner guiding me toward the deposit, and tried not to think about how many ways this could go wrong.
The titanium was embedded in what used to be a support column, the metal so pure it practically glowed in my interface's overlay. I set down my bags, pulled out my cutting torch, checked the fuel gauge again. Two hours left. Enough.
I was lining up the first cut when Kess appeared beside me, silent as a ghost.
"If we're doing this," she said, "we're doing it right. You cut, I'll watch for structural shifts, and if anything starts to collapse, you drop everything and run. Deal?"
"I thought you said this was stupid."
"It is stupid." She drew her blade again, held it ready. "But apparently I'm stupid too, so let's get this over with before we both die."
The extraction took forty minutes and used up the last of my torch fuel. The titanium came free in three pieces, each one heavy enough that I had to drag them instead of carry them, and by the time we'd loaded them into my bags, my arms were shaking and my back felt like someone had taken a hammer to it.
"That's it," Kess said. "We're leaving. Now."
I didn't argue. We retraced our path through the factory, moving faster now, and I kept my eyes on the ground because looking at the stripped nodes made something cold settle in my chest. Yuki had been here. Yuki was claiming territory. Yuki was building an operation that would crush me before I even knew I was in a fight.
We were almost back to the entrance when my Creator interface flickered, a new tag appearing in my vision without warning.
I stopped walking.
"Remy?" Kess turned back, frowning. "What's wrong?"
The tag was hovering over her chest, right where her armor's breastplate sat beneath her jacket. I'd never seen this classification before, never even knew my interface could detect it, but the words were clear enough to make my blood run cold.
Ironclad Collective Standard Issue—Tracking Enabled—Active Signal Detected.
"Remy?" Kess took a step toward me, her hand moving toward her blade. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could speak, my interface lit up with a new alert, and this one made the titanium deposit look like pocket change.
Warning: Multiple Hostile Entities Detected—Estimated Count: 15+—Threat Level: Critical—Ironclad Collective Combat Units Inbound.
Kess's expression changed, something flickering across her face too fast to read, and her hand closed around her blade's hilt.
"I can explain," she said.
The first explosion hit somewhere behind us, close enough that I felt the shockwave through the ground, and then the screaming started—metal on metal, hydraulics firing, voices shouting coordinates in clipped military cadence—and I realized with perfect, terrible clarity that we weren't leaving the Garden.
We were already surrounded.