The impact didn't feel like hitting water. It felt like hitting concrete.

  The Centurion slammed into the Toxic River, and the world instantly went black. The roar of the wind and the clatter of the train were replaced by a chaotic, churning silence. We sank like a stone.

  Gravity pinned me to my seat as the mech plummeted through the dark, icy water. The hull groaned—a deep, terrifying sound of metal compressing under pressure.

  CREAAAAK.

  "Seals!" I shouted, though my voice sounded hollow and distant in the enclosed cockpit. "Check the seals!"

  A jet of freezing, black water sprayed across my boots. "Leak on the port side!" Amelia cried, pulling her legs up onto the seat.

  "I got it!" Rax unbuckled his harness, floating slightly in the zero-gravity of the freefall. He pulled a tube of industrial-grade sealant from his belt—the kind used for hull repairs on airships. He jammed the nozzle into the crack where the water was hissing in. The grey paste expanded instantly on contact with the water, hardening into a rubbery plug. The hissing stopped.

  THUD.

  We hit the bottom. The Centurion rocked violently, kicking up a massive cloud of silt that completely obscured the viewport. We tilted dangerously to the left, then settled.

  We were alive. We were dry-ish. But we were at the bottom of a river.

  "Engine status," I whispered, my eyes scanning the flickering dashboard.

  "Intake valves closed automatically," the computer readout scrolled green text. "Running on closed-loop oxygen reserve. Estimated time to asphyxiation: Twelve minutes."

  "Twelve minutes," I repeated. "Rax, kill the floodlights. We don't want the Guard to see a glow coming from the river."

  I switched to the infrared sensors. The screen turned a grainy black and white. Outside, fish the size of dogs swam lazily past the cockpit glass. Twisted rebar and rusted skeletons of old cars littered the riverbed.

  "Can we swim?" Amelia asked, her voice trembling.

  "We weigh fifty tons," I said, gripping the control levers. "We walk."

  I engaged the transmission. This was the moment of truth. If the wheels—or in our case, feet—spun in the mud, we would dig our own grave. But the new torque converter did its job. I applied power gently. The fluid coupling absorbed the engine's torque, transferring it to the legs with a smooth, viscous force.

  Whirrrrr...

  The Centurion lifted one massive foot out of the sucking mud. It didn't jerk. It didn't slip. It took a step. Then another.

  We began the long, slow march toward the riverbank, fighting against the heavy current that tried to topple us with every stride.

  The silence underwater was suffocating. There was no engine roar, just a low vibration. The only sound was the rhythmic thump... thump... of our footsteps and the occasional creak of the hull.

  Amelia was curled into a ball on her seat, staring at the black water pressing against the glass. She was shivering, but I knew it wasn't just the cold.

  "Those tanks," she whispered. Her voice was barely audible. "The hearts... the eyes..."

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  "Don't think about them," I said softly, keeping my eyes on the sonar display.

  "They were beating, Julian." She turned to me, her eyes wide and haunted in the dim light of the instrument panel. "The Empire... they aren't just using machines to kill. They are turning us into machines."

  I took one hand off the controls and reached out. I covered her cold, trembling hand with my gloved one. "I know."

  "Why?" she asked, a tear tracking through the grime on her cheek. "Why do they need that? Isn't magic enough?"

  "Control," Rax answered from the back, his voice grim. "Magic is wild. It depends on the user's will. It gets tired. Machines? Machines don't get tired. They don't disobey. If you can put a mage's power into a machine's body... you have a soldier that never questions orders and never stops killing."

  Amelia looked down at my hand covering hers. She squeezed it, hard. "We can't just sell this," she said. Her voice hardened. The fear was evaporating, replaced by a cold, sharp anger. "The crystals. The gears. We can't just take the money and run."

  "If we run," I said, looking straight ahead into the murky darkness, "they will keep doing it. They will build an army of those things. And eventually, there will be nowhere left to run."

  "So we fight," Amelia said. It wasn't a question.

  "We fight," I agreed. "But not yet. Right now, we breathe."

  "Oxygen warning," the computer chirped. "Reserve at 5%."

  The air in the cockpit was getting stale, thick with carbon dioxide. My head was starting to throb. The engine was beginning to stutter, starving for air.

  "Slope ahead," I pointed to the sonar. "Thirty degrees. It's steep."

  "Push it," Rax coughed. "I'm getting lightheaded."

  I slammed the throttle forward. The Centurion groaned as it fought gravity and the mud. The engine RPM flared, then dipped. Cough. Sputter. "Come on, big guy," I gritted my teeth. "Don't die on me now."

  The water level on the windshield began to drop. First, black water. Then, the surface tension broke. Moonlight.

  GASP.

  The Centurion burst out of the river, water cascading off its armored shoulders like a surfacing leviathan. I threw the intake valves open. Fresh, cold night air rushed into the engine and the cockpit.

  The V8 roared in triumph, sucking in the oxygen. We scrambled up the muddy bank and crashed into a dense thicket of giant reeds, hidden from the city lights.

  I killed the engine. Silence returned. But this time, it was the silence of life. Crickets. Wind in the reeds. Distant sirens.

  We popped the hatch. The air smelled of wet mud and river weeds, but to us, it smelled like perfume.

  "We're clear," Rax said, checking the perimeter with his pistol drawn. "No drones."

  We climbed down from the mech. It was a mess—covered in slime, leaking oil, and steaming in the cold air. But it was standing.

  I pulled the waterproof satchel from the cockpit. Inside were the crystals, glowing with a soft, pulsing blue light that illuminated our faces. And the leather folder.

  PROJECT CHIMERA: PHASE 4.

  I sat on a drift log and opened it. Amelia and Rax crowded around, their breath forming clouds in the air.

  It wasn't just a soldier. The diagram on the first page showed a creature that defied sanity. It was fifty feet tall. A skeletal structure made of mithril. Muscle fiber grown from dragon tissue. And in the chest, a core. A core designed to hold thousands of high-purity mana crystals.

  "Target: The Arch-Demon of the North," I read the text aloud. "Objective: Create a biological vessel capable of channeling Divine-Tier magic without disintegration."

  "They're trying to build a god," Rax whispered, horrified. "A man-made god."

  I flipped to the last page. The signature at the bottom of the approval form made my blood run cold.

  Authorized by: Headmaster Vane, The Imperial Academy of Arcane Arts.

  I stared at the name. Vane. The man who expelled me. The man who told me that "machines have no soul, and therefore no place in high magic."

  He wasn't rejecting technology because he hated it. He was rejecting it because he wanted to keep it for himself. He didn't want engineers; he wanted mechanics to build his god.

  "He lied," I said, my voice shaking with suppressed rage. "He lied to everyone. He's not protecting the purity of magic. He's harvesting it."

  I looked up at the Centurion. It stood there, ugly, battered, and crude. A machine built of scrap and defiance. It was the exact opposite of the shiny, soulless perfection Vane was trying to build.

  "Rax," I said, standing up and closing the folder. "How much is that transmission worth?"

  "On the black market? Half a million," Rax said.

  "And the crystals?"

  "Double that."

  "Good," I said. "We're not selling them."

  Rax blinked. "What?"

  "We're keeping them," I said, walking over to the mech and patting its cold steel leg. "We're going to install that transmission. We're going to use those crystals to power a shield generator that can tank a lightning bolt."

  I turned back to them. The moonlight caught the hard edge of my jaw. "Vane wants to build a god? Fine."

  I pointed to our scrap-metal giant. "We're going to build a God-Killer."