The moment Andronikos's panicked words echoed in the Foundry of the Void, the intellectual calm of Phobos shattered. The Core's stable blue glow, so recently a promise of salvation, now felt like a cruel spotlight, illuminating their failure.
Lysandra, the leader of the Iron Scholars, gripped her distraught colleague's shoulder, her face a study in forced composure. "Phrixus is gone, Andronikos. He knew the Aether-Core was the bait, but he used it as a distraction. He didn't want the city's heart; he wanted ours."
Kalea, the former Psylli flyer, unclasped the Aether-Core from the Temporal Stabilizer Array. "The Core is stable now, but it's the key to the Promachonos Spire's reset. Phrixus knows this. He won't kill Kassandra; he'll hold her in the most heavily fortified, most symbolically perfect place he can find. The Pinnacle of the Strategos, or perhaps the Syndicate's central barracks."
"Then we go after him," Doric rumbled, hefting his salvaged spiked club. His large, muscular frame seemed too loud for the sterile chamber.
Lysandra stepped back, pressing a small, bronze icon carved into the wall. A section of the polished obsidian hissed open, revealing a short passage. "No. Phrixus has trapped us in a logical paradox. If we move the Core, we destabilize Phobos and prove the Syndicate's point: that emotion overrides necessary maintenance. If we stay, Kassandra dies, and Phrixus holds permanent leverage over the very people meant to save the city. We must separate the variables."
She looked at Josh, her eyes calm but resolute. "Kalea, your knowledge of Syndicate codes and the Psylli flight patterns is indispensable. You stay with us. We will work to remotely bypass the Spire's lockdown and initiate the Zeus Protocol without the Core being physically present. It is a long shot, but it is our only option to avoid the paradox."
Then she turned to Josh and Doric. "You two leave. Now. Take a day. Go to the public Tiers. Your 'Kettle Logic,' Josh, has proven to be the only unpredictable element Phrixus didn't account for. You need to use it to find a path outside of my logic, outside of Phobos. And Doric, you are the muscle that keeps him from getting pulverized by the Lower Tiers."
She gestured to the open passage. "The Upper Tiers Market is just beyond that tunnel. Go and observe. Find the unpredictable. Find a way to fly without a Syndicate harness."
Josh nodded, feeling the urgency, yet appreciating the cold logic of the command. He needed to think outside the literal box Phobos had become. Doric clapped Josh's shoulder—a gentler clap this time—and the two of them stepped through the obsidian gateway, leaving Kalea and the Iron Scholars to the grim work of battling the digital siege.-----The contrast between the Scholars' Core and the public Tiers was jarring. The Foundry of the Void was silent, clean, and organized, lit by controlled gas lamps. The public market, however, was a chaotic riot of noise, smell, and motion.
They emerged from a narrow maintenance shaft into a vast, open-air platform known as the Iron Bazaar. Unlike the brass and steam of Olympus Aethelos, this market was a symphony of cold iron, leather, and rough-spun wool. Traders yelled prices in a harsh Aethelosian dialect, selling everything from recycled gear oil and steam-augmented prosthetics to nutrient paste and salvaged clockwork components. The air was thick with the scent of cheap phosphorous flares and frying meat.
Doric, towering over the crowd in his antique bronze armor, drew immediate attention. He moved with a practiced, heavy grace, pushing past vendors who nervously offered him shoddy goods.
"The Scholars live in their own perfect cage," Doric muttered, his eyes constantly watching the surrounding vertical shafts. "They preach the philosophy of Controlled Imperfection from a place of Total Control. They forget the messiness of life."
Josh, dressed in the woolen chlamys of his stolen identity, felt more at home here than in the Scholars' clean lab. It reminded him of a chaotic industrial district, the real world where things broke down and people had to improvise. He watched a vendor jury-rigging a small, sputtering fan using a coil of copper wire and a shard of ruby crystal. Pure chaos engineering, he thought.
"Where do we look for a way to fly?" Josh asked. "We need something fast, discreet, and that can breach the Aethelosian Heights. That's a tall order for the Lower Tiers."
"It is not a matter of 'what,' but 'who'," Doric corrected, pointing with his spiked club towards a peculiar sight at the edge of the market platform.
Tethered to a massive, rusted mooring post, looking utterly out of place among the small industrial cargo cages, was a vehicle that defied the logic of Olympus Aethelos. It was a small, beautifully crafted Airship Skiff, but not one run by Aetheric Steam. It was short, sleek, and held aloft by three massive, rotating brass vanes that beat the air with a soft, powerful thump-thump-thump. Its hull was not brass, but a dark, polished wood, inlaid with silver runes, and it bore a proud, hand-painted name: The Wandering Paradox.
The owner was even more eccentric than his craft. He was a small, wiry man, dressed in an elaborately draped, saffron-colored chiton cinched with a broad, gear-adorned leather belt, and a wide-brimmed petasos hat covered in small, shimmering bronze scales and bird feathers. He was meticulously polishing a massive, silver, trumpet-like funnel mounted on the skiff's bow. A cloud of thick, fragrant pipe smoke perpetually surrounded his head.
"That is Eurus of the Lost Winds," Doric whispered, an unusual note of awe in his voice. "He's a legend among the Lower Tiers. A mercenary pilot, smuggler, and a genius with aerodynamics. He's also mad as a clockwork beetle and will only fly for a price that would bankrupt the Senate."
Josh immediately crossed the chaotic market, heading for the small man. Kettle Logic doesn't need Senators, he thought. It needs money, a plan, and a compelling argument.
"A good polish on that sound emitter, Eurus," Josh said, stopping a respectful distance from the skiff.
Eurus stopped polishing, his pipe held loosely between his teeth. He turned, his eyes—surprisingly sharp and intelligent, despite his wild appearance—examining Josh's woolen chlamys and the desperate look in his modern eyes.
"It's a Resonance Scrimmer, not a sound emitter," Eurus corrected, his voice a reedy tenor, laced with a thousand stories. "It uses focused magnetic resonance to cut through the Aethelosian Heights' wind shear. And only a fool or a Strategos would recognize it. Given your companion's size, you must be a Strategos, boy. What do you want? I don't move Syndicate cargo anymore. Bad for the velvet."
"We need to get to the Pinnacle of the Strategos," Josh stated, bypassing any pleasantries. "My name is Josh, and this is Doric. We need your ship, The Wandering Paradox, for an immediate, high-risk flight through the Aetheric Plasma Fields of the Upper Tiers."
Eurus took a long, slow drag on his pipe, releasing a plume of smoke that smelled of nutmeg and burnt copper. He gestured with his pipe stem to Doric. "That muscle-bound relic of a time gone by, plus a flight into the most heavily fortified sector of the city? That's not a flight, Strategos. That is an invitation to a pressurized bronze coffin. My price is ten thousand talons of pure Aetherium, payable in advance."
Ten thousand talons was an impossible sum, more money than Josh had seen in his entire former life.
"We don't have money," Josh admitted, his mind already racing, sifting through the variables. "We have the Aether-Core."
Eurus's eyes widened slightly, the first sign of genuine interest. He pointed a long, silver finger—with a surprisingly clean, mechanical nail—at the Wandering Paradox. "My ship runs on pure logic, Strategos. No Aetheric Steam, no Syndicate protocols. It is a machine of free will. It needs fuel that is as free as it is. A powerful asset, but a volatile one. It might fund my retirement, but the risk of transporting it is suicide."
Josh took a step closer. "We don't want you to transport the Core. We want you to fly us to the Syndicate's central barracks, where they are holding a young woman named Kassandra. We believe Phrixus, the Iron-Bound, took her to force us into a logical trap."
Eurus scratched his cheek with the mechanical finger. "Ah, Phrixus. He is a genius, that one. He sees the world as a game of chess. And a pawn is far more valuable than a Queen when the Queen is too logical to be threatened. Beautiful logic. But where's my profit?"
Doric stepped forward, his spiked club scraping the metal floor, and his eyes blazing with protective rage. "The profit is your honor, pirate. You hate the Syndicate as much as we do."
Eurus recoiled, shaking his head with an air of profound sadness. "Honor? Honor is a flaw, Strategos. It gets a man shot with a bronze bolt. I am only interested in two things: high-risk challenges and high-value rewards. Since you have no gold, and the Aether-Core is too risky to move, you have nothing to offer but an elaborate suicide. And I do not fly suicide missions for free."
Josh looked from the eccentric pirate to the beautiful, non-Syndicate skiff, and then back to the Core, heavy in his hands. He had the city's heart, the knowledge of a future engineer, and the muscle of an Aethelosian warrior. He had the ability to defeat the Syndicate's technology, but only if he could convince this madman to risk his life and his ship.
Eurus turned back to his ship, polishing the Resonance Scrimmer again.
"Don't waste my time, Strategos," Eurus said, without looking back. "I will not risk my Paradox unless you can offer me something truly irresistible."
Josh knew he had to appeal to something deeper than logic, something beyond a simple transaction. Eurus was eccentric, not mercenary. He was a man who prized the beautiful and the unique.
Josh looked down at the Aether-Core, a crystalline jewel thrumming with raw power, and then at his own two hands—the hands of a twenty-first-century engineer trapped in an ancient body. He had an idea. It was insane, dangerous, and utterly unpredictable. It was pure Kettle Logic.
He took a deep breath, and his gaze fixed on the gleaming brass vanes of The Wandering Paradox.
"Eurus," Josh said, his voice quiet but firm, cutting through the market noise. "I don't have gold. I don't have Aetherium. But I have the knowledge of a fusion reactor engineer. I can give you something you don't have, something that will turn your skiff from a machine of 'free will' into a true Unpredictable Variable. I can re-engineer the very heart of your ship."
Eurus stopped polishing. His pipe dropped from his mouth and clattered harmlessly onto the wooden deck of the Paradox. The wild eyes in the drapped clothing turned to stare at Josh, a mixture of disbelief and consuming curiosity.
"What... what would you propose to change?" Eurus finally whispered.
"The brass vanes are driven by steam and clockwork, correct?" Josh challenged, stepping right up to the skiff. "They are predictable. They operate on a pattern. If I can prove to you, right now, that I can turn your propeller system into something that runs on the Core's resonance frequency—making it not only infinitely faster but completely invisible to the Syndicate's magnetic tracking grids—will you take us to Kassandra?"
The eccentric mercenary stood frozen, eyeing the Aether-Core.
Josh had offered him not payment, but an Unpredictable Upgrade. He was offering to make his machine of 'free will' a machine of 'impossible logic.' It was a dangerous bargain, risking his only way home and the city's future on a madman's vanity.