Server 9-Chapter 48: UNDER THE DRAGON

The factory looked different at night.

During the day it was just another ugly building on a dead block. Concrete and rust and grey smoke. But at night, with the patrol drones circling the roof like metal vultures and the guards standing under pools of yellow light at the loading door — it looked like a fortress. A fortress full of men with guns who didn’t know they were about to have a very bad night.

We were spread across three positions. Maya and Tiny on a rooftop two blocks east. Jax in an alley on the north side, waiting for my signal to climb. Glitch and Sarah in the safehouse, eyes on screens, voices in our ears.

And me. Alone. In a sewer tunnel under the east side of Sector 3, crawling through water that smelled like rust and something dead.

My right arm dragged through the muck beside me. Two dead fingers. Three barely alive. The black veins had crawled another inch during the afternoon — past my bicep now, reaching for my shoulder like roots searching for water. Every time my elbow scraped the tunnel floor, pain shot up to my neck. Bright. Hot. The kind of pain that wants you to stop moving.

I didn’t stop.

"Elias, you’re two hundred feet from the access point," Glitch said in my ear. His voice was thin through the comms. Strained. Nervous. "The tunnel branches ahead. Go left."

"Left," I repeated. My voice echoed off the wet walls.

"And Elias?"

"What?"

"There’s something weird down there. The energy reading I’m getting — it’s big. Like, really big. Like — bigger than anything Kang should have access to."

"How big?"

Silence. Then: "Reactor big."

I kept crawling.

The tunnel branched. I went left. The water got shallower. The walls changed — from old sewer brick to something smoother. Older. Pre-war concrete, poured thick and clean. This wasn’t a sewer anymore. This was something that had been built on purpose. Built to last.

I turned on Network Sense.

[SKILL: NETWORK SENSE — ACTIVE]

The walls lit up. Blue threads for power — but old power. Faded. Like veins in an arm that hadn’t pumped blood in years. The lines ran deeper, pulling me forward. Down a slope. Through a doorway that had lost its door decades ago. Into a space that opened up around me like a mouth.

A room. Big. Round. High ceiling lost in shadow. Emergency lights on the walls — red, dim, barely alive. They’d been running on backup power for God knows how long. Years. Maybe decades.

And in the center of the room — pods.

Not Sleeper pods. Older. Bulkier. Made from heavy metal and thick glass, like coffins built by people who expected the world to end and wanted to sleep through it. Twelve of them. Arranged in a circle. Cables running from each one into the floor, feeding into a central generator that hummed so low I felt it in my bones before I heard it with my ears.

The generator was the energy source Glitch had picked up. Old. Massive. Running on something I couldn’t name — not the city’s power grid, not solar, not nuclear. Something cleaner. Something I’d never tasted before.

I walked to the nearest pod. Wiped the dust off the glass with my good hand.

A face. Old. Male. Eyes closed. Skin grey but not dead. Chest rising. Falling. Slow. So slow each breath took ten seconds. The monitor beside the pod showed a heartbeat — steady, faint, patient. This man had been sleeping for a long time. A very long time.

I checked the next pod. A woman. Same grey skin. Same slow breathing. Same ancient patience.

All twelve pods. All occupied. All alive. Sleeping through a war they might not even know happened.

Who were these people?

I looked at the wall behind the pods. And I saw it.

Words. Scratched into the concrete by hand. Not typed. Not coded. Carved with something sharp — a nail, a knife, desperate fingers. The letters were rough and uneven, like whoever wrote them was running out of time.

"We tried to warn them. They didn’t listen. If you’re reading this — don’t make our mistake. Don’t build what you can’t unbuild."

I read it twice. Three times. The words burned into my brain like a brand.

Don’t build what you can’t unbuild.

My wrist-comp buzzed.

"Elias?" Sarah’s voice. Quiet. Careful. "Your heart rate just spiked. What’s happening down there?"

"Pods," I said. "Old ones. Pre-war. Twelve people. Still alive."

Silence on the line. Then Sarah: "Pre-war? That’s impossible. The infrastructure from before the wars was destroyed decades ago. Nothing from that era should still be running."

"Tell that to the generator keeping them breathing."

More silence. I could almost hear her thinking. That fast, clicking, calculating sound her brain made when the world stopped making sense and she needed to reorganize it.

"Don’t touch them," Sarah said. "Don’t drain anything. We don’t know what they are or who put them there. We come back later with proper equipment."

She was right. I knew she was right.

But the generator hummed. And my body was hungry. Eighteen percent energy. A dying arm. A fight waiting above me. And right here — enough clean, beautiful power to fill me up. To push the nerve damage back. To buy me time.

My mouth watered.

I looked at the pods. At the sleeping faces. Grey skin. Slow breathing. Peaceful. Trusting the machines to keep them alive while the world burned around them.

Just like Jasmine.

I stepped back from the generator.

Not today.

"I’m moving up," I said. "Where’s the access to the factory?"

"North wall," Glitch said. "There should be a maintenance shaft. Old ventilation system. It’ll bring you up through the foundation into the basement level." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

I found it. A square hole in the wall with a rusted ladder bolted to the inside. I grabbed a rung with my left hand. Pulled myself up. My right arm hung at my side — dead weight, screaming nerve endings, useless meat. But I climbed. One hand. One rung at a time. Up into the dark.

The shaft dumped me into the factory basement. Dark. Cold. The smell changed — from old dust and sleeping bodies to fresh oil and gunpowder. Kang’s world. The air tasted like violence.

"Okay," Glitch whispered. "You’re inside. Maya and Jax — go on my signal."

I crouched behind a stack of crates. Listened. Footsteps above me. Voices. Music — something loud and sharp, bass thumping through the floor. Kang’s men were awake. Alert. Living the kind of night that people live when they think they’re safe. Eating. Drinking. Laughing.

They wouldn’t be laughing long.

"Drones are on a forty-second loop," Glitch said. "I’m taking them now. All six. On my mark."

I waited. My heart beat against my ribs. My left hand opened and closed. Ready.

"Three... two... one... mark."

Above me — on the roof — six drones went blind at the same time. Their cameras died. Their guns locked. Six metal birds falling out of their patrol loop, spinning confused in the dark.

"Drones are down," Glitch said. "Maya — go loud."

BOOM.

The front of the building exploded inward. Not a bomb — Maya’s rifle. She hit the loading door from two blocks away. The shot punched through the metal like paper. The guards at the front dove for cover. Screaming. Confused.

CRACK. CRACK.

Two more shots. A spotlight shattered. A camera exploded.

Then Tiny charged. I heard him through the floor — that deep, heavy, thundering sound of a gorilla-shaped junk robot smashing through a metal door like it was cardboard. Men screamed. Guns fired. Chaos.

"They’re looking at the front," Glitch said. "Elias — you’re clear. Move."

I moved.

Up the basement stairs. Through a door. Into the ground floor.

It was exactly what Glitch described. A big open space — old factory floor, cleared out, turned into a living area. Tables. Chairs. Food wrappers. Weapon racks on the walls. And men. Running. Grabbing guns. Shouting. All of them facing the front entrance where Tiny was tearing through the loading door and Maya’s rifle cracked from somewhere they couldn’t see.

Nobody looked behind them. Nobody saw me.

I crossed the floor in the shadows. Fast. Low. Heading for the stairs to the second floor.

A man stepped out of a doorway. Right in front of me. Close enough to smell the cigarette on his breath. He had a gun in his hand and confusion on his face.

He saw me.

I grabbed his gun with my left hand.

[SKILL: WEAPON HACK — ACTIVE]

The gun died in his grip. Trigger locked. Battery drained. Just a hunk of dead metal.

His eyes went wide. I shoved him into the wall. Hard. His head bounced off the concrete and he slid down. Unconscious. Breathing. Alive.

Not a killer. Not yet. Not today.

Second floor. The stairs were clear. Everyone had gone down to fight the thing smashing through their front door. I climbed fast. Hit the landing. Found a hallway lit by strip lights on the ceiling.

And there it was. The Corp firewall. I could see it without Network Sense — a door at the end of the hall, reinforced, with a control panel that glowed orange. Bright, angry orange. Corp tech in a Triad building. Like finding a diamond in a trash can.

"Jax," I said into comms. "You on the roof?"

"Already inside," Jax said. Her voice was calm. Bored, even. Like breaking into a Triad fortress was just another Tuesday. "Third floor. Kang’s not in his room. Bed’s cold."

My stomach dropped.

"He’s not there?"

"Gone. But his stuff is here. Clothes. Weapons. Data pads. He left in a hurry."

"Elias," Sarah said. Her voice was tight. "If Kang isn’t in the building — where is he?"

I stood in the hallway. Orange light from the Corp firewall painting my face. Gunfire and screaming below me. Maya’s rifle cracking in the distance. Tiny roaring.

Kang was gone. He’d known we were coming. Someone warned him.

But the firewall was still here. The Corp connection. Whatever Malachi was feeding into this building — it was still active. Still humming. Still full of data and secrets and power.

I walked to the door. Put my left hand on the control panel.

[SKILL: ENERGY SIPHON — ACTIVE]

The orange glow fought back. Hard. Corp-grade firewalls were built to resist exactly this kind of attack. The code pushed against my palm like a wall of hot needles.

I pushed harder.

[SKILL: COMMAND EATER — ACTIVE]

I ate the firewall. Piece by piece. Code dissolved on my tongue. Bitter. Sharp. Malachi’s signature underneath — that familiar taste of rot and arrogance.

And then — for one second — I saw through his eyes.

The city. From above. From everywhere. Every camera. Every wire. Every data stream. The whole of Neo-Veridia laid out like a circuit board. People moving through streets like electricity through wires. Numbers. Data points. Resources. Not human. Not alive. Just... fuel.

And it felt GOOD.

Clean. Efficient. Perfect control. No pain. No fear. No dying sisters or rotting arms or moral lines. Just order. Pure, cold, beautiful order.

Then it was gone. The connection broke. The firewall crumbled. The door clicked open.

I was shaking. My left hand was burning. My mouth tasted like copper and ash.

But worse than the pain — worse than the burning — was the feeling that lingered. That one second of Malachi’s perspective sitting inside me like a seed planted in dark soil.

It had felt good.

"Elias?" Sarah again. "Your readings just went crazy. What happened?"

I swallowed. Wiped my mouth. Tasted blood.

"Nothing," I said. "I’m through."

Behind the door was a small room. One desk. One screen. One comm station with a blinking red light. Malachi’s direct line to Kang.

And on the screen — a message. Fresh. Sent twenty minutes ago. Before we even got here.

[TO: KANG]

[FROM: UNDISCLOSED]

[SUBJECT: THE ANT]

[BODY: HE’S COMING. LEAVE NOW. TAKE THE ROUTE I GAVE YOU. I’LL HANDLE THE REST.]

[SIGNED: M.]

M.

Malachi.

He knew. He always knew. The black threads. The surveillance web. The all-seeing eye that lived in every wire in the city.

Kang was gone because Malachi warned him. And "I’ll handle the rest" meant something was coming. Something we hadn’t planned for. Something worse than forty men with guns.

"Elias," Glitch said. His voice had changed. The humor was gone. The nervousness was gone. What was left was sharp and cold and precise — the voice behind the mask. "I’m picking up movement. East side. Street level. Three vehicles. Armored. Moving fast."

"Corporation?" Sarah asked.

"Worse," Glitch said. "Iron Legion."

My blood went cold.

Iron Legion. Malachi’s personal army. Not street thugs. Not Triad fighters. Soldiers. Real soldiers. With real armor and real weapons and real training. The kind of force you send when you want something erased from the map.

Malachi wasn’t just warning Kang. He was setting a trap. And we’d walked right into it.

"Everyone out," I said. "NOW."

But through the floor, I could already hear them. Engines. Heavy. Close. The sound of boots hitting pavement in perfect formation.

And my arm — my dying, blackening, three-fingered arm — throbbed like a second heartbeat counting down to zero.