Acquisition by Immorality
Cassian held his breath and flipped the switch.
The rift-device surged.
The portal flared again; coin-sized, then dinner-plate wide. It held for three seconds. Four.
Then it screamed.
The sound was not sonic, it was dimensional. A twisting, teeth-grinding shriek of space trying to exist where it shouldn't.
The portal warped, split inward and collapsed.
BOOM.
The entire back wall of the workshop blew out in a wave of displaced air, splinters of brass and steam-rock hissing outward like shrapnel. Cassian flew back against the far wall, smashing into a rack of broken coils.
His vision doubled. The lamp burst.
He coughed once. Metal in his mouth. Blood.
The room stank of ionized aether and burning insulation.
The rift was gone.
His gateway dead.
Cassian lay still, brain spinning—not from injury, but from calculation. He wasn't shocked. He wasn't grieving. He was debugging.
The machine had worked.
The theory had worked.
But something was missing.
Something alive.
He sat up, fingers trembling, and began rewiring with one hand while drawing diagrams in soot with the other. The anchor stabilized. The door opened. The glyph lattice accepted the input.
What failed was the continuity weave.
The rift couldn't hold itself open without a living link.
It needed something not just magical but bound. Blooded. Tied to a living pattern of noble aether.
He stood slowly, heart hammering.
He knew exactly what it needed.
He just hadn't wanted to admit it.
Aether core.
A living one.
Someone else's.
A noble's.
Or at least… the part of them that could be stolen.
He stood in the middle of the wreckage, letting the soot settle.
So this was the line.
This was the moment every great mind arrived at; when a righteous man turns inward and sees the truth:
Righteousness is for people who can afford to lose.
Cassian couldn't.
He reached for the drawer beneath the table and pulled out a dark bundle. A folded mask of matte brass and black weave cloth. His voice filter. His rebreather. His second face.
The Shadow Engineer.
He placed it on the table beside the shock blade, the lockpick bracer, and the injector vial of mind-muffling extract.
Then, softly:
"All right, then," he murmured. "Let's go steal something sacred."
Two hours later, he was crouched on a rooftop above a private House Tayne transport tower—one of the old minor noble lines, rich enough to hoard relics, small enough to be sloppy.
Below him: a personal vault inside the central column, powered by a live aether-spine wired to the blood of the Tayne heir.
Cassian watched the guards through a cracked spell glass scope. Lazy rotations. Poor coverage. No mage on duty—only residual glyph wards.
Pathetic.
He tapped the side of the scope, watching how the aether shimmered around the vault core.
Perfect.
A bound heart. Stable. Sealed in a pulse chamber. Just enough to keep a rift open.
Not a theft.
A correction.
Cassian pulled the mask over his face.
The mask sealed with a hiss, the rebreather locking against his mouth. A single rune on the inside of the brass lit up—red, hungry, like a warning.
His breath went cold.
His heartbeat slowed.
His name vanished.
Cassian Vale died in that moment—not by blade, but by choice.
What rose in his place was something else. Something made of edge and fury, calculation and black metal.
The Shadow Engineer.
He reached down and gripped the hilt of the shock blade. No elegance. No poetry. This wasn't a duel.
This was surgery.
He stood, cloak catching the wind as if it, too, knew what was coming. Below, the Tayne Tower pulsed with quiet confidence, a noble vault humming with safety and self-importance.
Cassian stepped off the rooftop and dropped.
A blur of brass and cloth and vengeance.
He hit the balcony glass with a thunderclap of force and voltage. The shatter was deafening a bang that split the night.
Guards screamed.
Alarms flared red.
Too late.
He was already inside.
Glass exploded inward like a shrapnel storm.
Cassian rolled through the breach, one knee down, cloak flaring behind him. The first guard reached for his blade too slow. Cassian was already on him.
He surged forward, the shock blade humming to life in his hand with a banshee shriek.
One arc across the chest-nonlethal voltage. The man dropped, twitching.
Cassian didn't stop.
He vaulted a marble planter, ducked under a volley of aether bolts from a second guard, and pivoted—his cloak catching the blast instead, redirecting the energy across a layer of insulated rune-thread.
Another guard charged. This one was brave.
Brave was easy to punish.
Cassian sidestepped and jammed his blade between armor plates. The man spasmed once and crumpled.
Still breathing.
Cassian never killed unless he had to.
Dead men didn't talk but unconscious ones made better witnesses.
The corridor ahead lit up as the tower's automated wards activated arcane cannons snapping out from the walls like turreted snakes. Glyphs spun to life on the marble. The floor pulsed red.
Cassian skidded to a halt, eyes darting. He didn't panic. He calculated.
Two cannons.
Seven second cooldown.
Quarter-meter trigger field.
Pattern: alternating crossfire.
Left, low, right, high-left, high, right, low.
He ran straight in.
The first bolt sliced past his shoulder, burning away a chunk of cloak. The second clipped his gauntlet.
The third? He caught it.
Redirected it with a polarized sigil bracer straight into the ceiling emitter.
Boom.
The left turret exploded in a flash of violet sparks.
He vaulted the wreckage as the right-side cannon tried to retarget; too slow.
He was already through.
Ahead: the vault door.
Ten feet tall. Circular. Aether-spined. Marked with the crest of House Tayne.
He slapped a shaped charge rune to the center seam, ignited it—FWOOM—
And the door cracked open with a groan of pressured air and seared metal.
The vault.
At the center: the prize.
A living aether core suspended in a translucent pod. It floated in green-blue fluid, pulsing like a heartbeat. Housed in sigil-laced containment rings and guarded by an archaic blood-glyph lock.
Cassian approached slowly.
The chamber felt different.
Too quiet. Too still.
He adjusted his mask lenses and activated pulse vision. A flash of light swept the room in waves, revealing-Motion glyphs.
Invisible. Patterned in circles around the vault. Not defensive.
Reactive.
He paused.
They weren't designed to keep him out.
They were designed to keep something in.
He stepped back.
A whisper of movement behind him.
A steel door slammed shut at the far end of the chamber.
From the shadows, something stepped forward.
Not a guard.
A construct.
Man-sized. Steel-bodied. Head like a crow's skull. Arms ending in needle-thin scythes, humming with residual magic.
Cassian didn't flinch.
He smiled behind the mask.
"Finally," he said. "Something worth testing it on."
The construct lunged.
Cassian moved.
Blade met blade.
Sparks lit the chamber as two engineered minds collided—one built for protection, one for precision.
Cassian ducked under the first slash, slammed a shock pellet into the automaton's side, then jumped—catching a hanging chain, swinging sideways, twisting in midair to land behind the construct.
He plunged the blade into its spine.
Nothing.
No vital core.
Just whirring metal.
Cassian scowled. "Cheap bastard."
The construct rotated, drove a blade toward his chest. Cassian caught it in his gauntlet, sparks flying.
Then he grinned.
He reached into his belt and pulled the vial of his mother's stabilizing blood.
Uncorked it with one hand.
And threw it straight at the aether core's containment ring.
The blood struck the glyphs and everything stopped.
The construct froze.
The room pulsed once, like holding a breath.
Then the lock disengaged with a soft, compliant chime.
Cassian stepped forward.
Tore the pod from its cradle.
The core dimmed. Accepted him.
It knew him.
Not as an intruder.
As successor.
He turned as the construct collapsed into rust behind him.
"Thanks for playing," he said.
Then walked out, aether core in hand, and vanished into the smoke—leaving chaos in his wake, and the air still crackling with fear.
He didn't just escape.
He announced himself.
The Shadow Engineer had arrived.