Chapter 4: The Mechanic Is In (And Your Warranty Just Expired)

　　SCREEE-CLACK!

　　The sound of my tungsten-carbide flathead screwdriver prying open the outer casing of a priceless imperial relic echoed through the hall like a dentist's drill hitting a raw nerve.

　　For a full second, nobody breathed.

　　A shower of pressurized golden sparks spat out of the Mother-Engine Sub-Node, bouncing harmlessly off my leather shop apron. Beneath High Inquisitor Vist's white silk boot, my brother Julian stopped coughing up blood long enough to stare at me with one wide, golden draconic eye. Across the room, Father's fangs were still bared against the flagstones, and Mother's thirty vipers were frozen mid-writhe under the crushing weight of the golden suppression chains.

　　"What... what are you doing?" Vist's silky, polite voice cracked by an entire octave.

　　He stared down at me crouching by his shins, his porcelain face twitching as if a cockroach had just pulled out a set of lockpicks. "That casing is forged from sanctified marrow-brass! Even a Fourth-Tier Runelord requires three days of chanting to bypass the outer ward! Step away from the pillar, you filthy Zero-Mark! The recoil will vaporize your unblessed flesh!"

　　"Sanctified marrow-brass?" I snorted, giving the screwdriver handle a firm tap with the heel of my palm. Pop. Four rusted retention pins shot out of the pillar's base and rolled across the floorboards. "Your Grace, this is stamped sheet-copper from the First Academy's student boiler room, and whoever welded the seam used lead solder. Frankly, as an Artificer, I'm offended."

　　Peb's rings spun, bathing the exposed interior of the pillar in a crisp, sapphire-blue diagnostic grid that only my pure-human eyes could see:

　　[Artificer Inspection Complete: Sub-Node Internal Casing Breached.]

　　[Runescribe Overlay Active: Displaying Modified Imperial Control Array.]

　　[Lawbreaker Analysis: The Court of Sacred Inquest has crudely bolted a parasitic 'Blood-Tax' circuit onto an ancient First Academy climate-control core.]

　　[Estimated time to strip their jurisdiction with current tools: 14.2 seconds.]

　　"Kill him!" Vist shrieked, his composure shattering as he yanked his boot off Julian's horn and stumbled back a step. He pointed a trembling, porcelain-white finger at the surviving Inquest knights hugging the walls. "Forget the array! The machine can't see him! Use your blades! Cut his hands off with cold steel!"

　　"Right away, Your Grace!"

　　Three armored veterans lunged off the wall—their Tier-3 marks too thin for the dome to bother crushing, so it only leaned on them, and they came with blood already seeping out from under their breastplates. Without relying on magic, they raised heavy, serrated inquisitorial broadswords and charged straight at my crouching back from three different angles.

　　"Milo, behind you!" Father roared, tearing his own wrists open against the golden chains as he tried to lunge forward, only for the array to slam him back down with ten thousand volts of crimson backlash. "Duck, boy!"

　　"Close your eyes, darling, I'll force my head up—!" Mother cried out, blood trickling from her nose as she fought the gravity lock on her neck.

　　"Everybody stay down and stop tearing your stitches," I called out over my shoulder, not even taking my left hand off the exposed copper wiring. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to scrub blood out of limestone grout?"

　　The three knights closed the ten-foot gap in a heartbeat. Three hundred pounds of cold steel whistled down toward my unarmored neck, my spine, and my right shoulder.

　　To them, I was a zero-magic carpenter kneeling on the floor.

　　They had no idea what my mornings looked like.

　　[Scout Protocol Engaged: Environmental Mapping & Micro-Trajectory Prediction.]

　　Peb's blueprint had nothing to do with this part. For the last three years, every single time I walked down the upstairs hallway carrying a tray of Grandma's porcelain teacups, I had to navigate Julian's twelve-foot dragon tail swinging blindly around corners at forty miles an hour. For ten years, I had practiced tracking Father's silent, vampire-speed footsteps across creaky floorboards so I could hand him his spectacles before he bumped into the sunlit curtains. And every morning at breakfast, Mother made me play a "focus game" where I had to track thirty independently moving green hair-ribbons without blinking.

　　Compared to surviving Tuesday breakfast in the Ashbourne household, these three knights were moving underwater.

　　I never looked back. I listened to the displacement of air and the creak of their leather cuirasses.

　　At the exact millisecond the three blades converged on my skull, I shifted my center of gravity three inches to the left—using the exact weight-distribution pivot Julian had drilled into me when I was twelve—and dropped flat into a low mechanic's slide right between the lead knight's boots!

　　CLANG-SCREEECH!

　　The two flanking knights couldn't check their momentum. Their heavy broadswords collided directly over my head in a shower of sparks, shearing the plume right off the lead knight's helmet.

　　"What the—?!" the lead knight gasped, twisting his torso to stab downward between his feet.

　　He forgot where he was standing.

　　As I slid past his ankle, I hooked the curved claw of my brass wrench around his heel and gave a sharp, practiced tug—the exact leverage trick I used to unjam rusted waterwheels.

　　The knight's boot slipped out from under him on the rainwater-slicked stone. He pitched forward, arms flailing, and slammed chest-first directly into one of the exposed, high-voltage golden ley-lines radiating from the base of Vist's Sub-Node!

　　ZZZZZT-BOOM!

　　The Mother-Engine Sub-Node didn't care who was wearing an Inquest uniform when physical contact was made with an uninsulated capacitor. The knight's Third-Tier Iron-Boar Godmark lit up like an overloaded lightbulb through his breastplate. With a muffled shriek, he was blasted twenty feet backward across the foyer, crashing straight into Lother's pile of shivering guards like a flaming cannonball, his armor fused solid.

　　"One short-circuit," I muttered, spinning smoothly on my knee to face the remaining two knights before they could untangle their locked swords.

　　With my left hand, I flicked one of the four contraband vials out of my breast pocket—specifically, the glass dropper of concentrated gorgon-ivy extract Mother had slipped me twenty minutes ago—and tossed it straight between their faces.

　　Instinctively, the second knight batted the glass vial out of the air with his gauntlet.

　　Smash.

　　The pale green vapor puffed across their visors. It wasn't strong enough to turn them to stone like Mother's actual gaze, but within half a second, every muscle in their arms and necks seized up with acute calcified cramping. Both men toppled over onto the rug like felled timber, groaning through locked jaws as they twitched helplessly on the floor.

　　Total time elapsed: four seconds. I hadn't even dropped my wire-strippers.

　　Across the hall, Lother—still sitting in a puddle of his own making beside the half-petrified statue of Lady Evelina—made a choking sound like a strangled goose. "He... he didn't even use a spark of mana! What kind of freak moves like that without a Godmark?!"

　　On the floor, Father's crimson eyes were wide with a bizarre mixture of paternal pride and utter bewilderment. "Wait... was that my shadow-step footwork? When did he learn the third stance?!"

　　"That was my tail-dodge pivot!" Julian wheezed through a mouthful of blood, his tail thumping weakly against the stone. "He told me he was just stretching his calves!"

　　"Quiet down back there, I'm at the delicate part," I said, sliding right back up to the open panel of the copper-and-bone pillar.

　　Inside the buzzing core of the Sub-Node, a web of glowing crimson runes spun around a central crystal spindle. To anyone born in the last four centuries, this was the untouchable, sacred handwriting of the Gods. Touching it meant instant soul-incineration.

　　To me—and to the First Academy's Runescribe and Lawbreaker overlays burning in my eyes—it looked like a sloppy junction box wired by a drunk apprentice.

　　[Lawbreaker Target Acquired: Restriction Clause #04 ('Suppress All Non-Imperial Signatures').]

　　[Structural Flaw Identified: The Court of Sacred Inquest used a basic Boolean 'NOT' gate anchored to Node C.]

　　[Instruction: Scratch out the third stroke of the 'Exemption' rune, and cross-wire the output lead to the Inquisitorial Crest frequency.]

　　"No! Stop him!" High Inquisitor Vist's voice finally lost every trace of its aristocratic polish.

　　His glossy white porcelain face twisted in sheer, unmasked panic. He didn't wait for his remaining guards. Lifting his white silk robes, Vist lunged forward himself, raising a ceremonial dagger of solid, humming sun-gold to drive it straight through the top of my skull.

　　Inside Vist's chest, that unnatural, rhythmic whir-click, whir-click accelerated into a deafening turbine whine. A wave of artificial, stolen Seventh-Tier Divine Authority radiated from his body, scorching the air as his blade plunged down toward my crown!

　　"MILO!" Mother and Father screamed together, tearing their flesh against the golden chains in a desperate, futile bid to reach me.

　　This time there was no dodging. My hands were elbow-deep inside the live core, my breath held steady to keep my fingers from trembling by a tenth of a millimeter.

　　With my right hand, I drew the tungsten-carbide tip of my runescribe's scalpel across the glowing central crystal spindle, slicing cleanly through the third stroke of the Imperial Exemption rune.

　　With my left hand, I clamped my insulated wire-strippers onto the main red power conduit—the one carrying the full, crushing weight of the God-Slayer Suppression matrix—and yanked it out of the Ashbourne family socket.

　　Vist's golden dagger was two inches from my hair. I could smell the ozone leaking from beneath his porcelain collar.

　　"Sorry, Your Grace," I whispered, looking up through my eyelashes as I jammed the live red power conduit directly into the Inquisitorial IFF (Identification Friend-or-Foe) terminal. "I don't think your artificial heart is rated for this voltage."

　　SPARK.

　　[Lawbreaker Override Complete: Target Registry Inverted.]

　　[New Suppression Target: All entities bearing the 'Court of Sacred Inquest' Seal.]

　　[Secondary Protocol Unlocked: Overclocking 'Ashbourne Household' Signatures by +400%.]

　　I still had one tool left on the floor beside my knee—not a wrench, not a scalpel, but the bone-china teacup I had taken from Grandma Irma before the fight started.

　　Remembering how much the High Inquisitor hated the sound of fracturing porcelain, I picked up the teacup with my free hand, looked straight into Vist's plunging eyes, and crushed the china cup into jagged shards right against the side of the metal pillar.

　　CRACK-SHATTER!