The rock skin around Jiujiu wouldn’t hold long. Rather than tangle with the woman, she kept lava pouring, backing to the door, spine pressed to steel, buying time to melt it.

The lava burned like a river of suns, but that custom metal door was no soft target. It had heatproof alloys baked in. Even Jiujiu’s heat needed time to bite that deep.

The woman outclassed her. In a straight fight, Jiujiu would lose. And the woman’s partner had Xun Xun in his grip. If he joined, Jiujiu would already be on the floor.

“Go if you can! Don’t worry about me!” Despair hollowed Xun Xun’s chest before the coughs came. He figured he’d die here today. She’d saved him from that lab coat, but the exit kept slipping away.

The air went desert-dry. Lava spilled from Jiujiu’s soles. The white lab coat draped over her burned clean away. Pale skin flashed for a breath, then Crimson magma cloaked her like living armor.

The rock on her surface had been carved off in slabs by the woman’s Mana Blade. Jiujiu rebuilt with fresh lava, but the woman refused to give her room. She walked through the heat, miao dao humming with pure metallic Mana.

Mana pooled along the blade. Jiujiu’s gaze went hard and bright. She drowned herself in fistfuls of lava, letting it creep toward the woman like a slow tide. The spread was slow. The miao dao thrust and sank into that Crimson body.

The Blade bit like it was punching through stone. Past the rock, it slid into something strange—half-soft, half-stubborn, neither flesh nor ore.

Something felt wrong. The woman tried to pull free. A rock-crusted arm burst from the lava and clamped her. Lava, not yet sloughed from the stone, smeared onto her Magic Layer—melting it, searing skin beneath.

Pain stung her, but her speed held. She kicked Jiujiu’s arm away, stepped back with a flare of anger, and glanced at the molten burns crawling her thigh. She hoped the cell proliferation serum would fix it later.

“Aren’t you going to help her?” Xun Xun looked at the man holding him. The man watched, silent, not lifting a finger, as if the duel were a gallery piece.

“No. She’ll handle her own work. She won’t let her art become someone else’s hunt. Unless this ‘art piece’ does something she can’t forgive. I won’t tell you what that is.”

His voice was flat, all edges and emptiness, like a machine repeating a line. He was metal from neck to heel, parts bolted together. Xun Xun wondered if his skull was metal too. If so, how was he different from a robot?

“Your partner’s smart,” the man added. “She’s kept her back to the door, almost melted it clean. She wants out. Looks like she’ll ditch you, kid.”

He moved to help, got scolded back. He didn’t argue. If she wanted to finish alone, he’d let her. Better that than getting stuck with two lunatics next mission. He tossed a warning and wasn’t sure she heard.

The woman stopped pressing Jiujiu head-on. Stalemate settled like ash. Jiujiu’s progress, though, was fast—one last shove and the gate would fail. But holding that molten flood drained her Abyssal Aura to dust. In a place with almost no Abyssal Aura, lasting this long was brutal.

The woman must’ve listened. She angled Jiujiu to the sides, forcing her off the spot, forcing her to stop melting the door.

Jiujiu didn’t play by script. She had to leave, true, but she slipped straight through the melted metal, then sealed the hole with heavy lava. The woman couldn’t see inside.

She felt the shift. Hobby and mission had stopped weighing the same. She called the man.

He sighed, knew the job mattered, and whipped out another heatproof Mechanical Arm—one of his few. It speared through the lava and sank into the rock behind it.

That huge grip tore stone like dry bread, though not fast. The quickest way was the woman’s Mana Blade. But Mana and Abyssal Aura clash. Lava steeped in Abyssal Aura would blunt the Blade’s bite.

Doing it would drain most of her Mana, but they had no choice. Her stubborn rhythm had cost them time. If they’d gone in together from the start, Jiujiu would’ve been down already.

The Mana Blade sliced rock. The mechanical claw hammered. They finally punched a hole through Jiujiu’s freshly cast wall.

The Mechanical Arm’s grip locked around Jiujiu’s forearm. Her rock limb, forged from pure molten lava, cracked like overfired clay.

Xun Xun saw white steam bleeding off the man’s chassis. Steam-powered machinery, head to heel. Hard to imagine a bulk like that running this long on steam.

He realized the man had avoided fighting. Maybe steam burned fuel too fast. Full-body conversion meant brutal costs. Xun Xun thought he could still struggle. He swung the moment the man seemed to be refilling power.

He failed. The man’s frame stood mountain-steady, not weakened while topping up.

“It’s normal you don’t know,” the man said. “A standard steam cyborg? You’d have broken free. Good idea, but…”

He paused, gaze flat, as cold as a lathe. “My whole body’s steam machinery. Energy is a problem. With this many systems, walking a few steps would be hard. I demanded a compressed energy reactor installed in my core.”

Xun Xun scanned him, couldn’t find it. The man’s chest had a strange raised plate. That had to be the reactor.

“It compresses fossil energy. Stores it. Burns when needed, refilling power.”

“What a pity. You ran into me—an expert in steam prosthetics who doesn’t lose to the new models. They won’t understand steam’s charm. You won’t either…”

He loved steam the way some love their favorite class in a game, even if its strength lags. So he modified it, added bite, made it competitive against the new. He was that kind.

Xun Xun respected the grit, but they weren’t on the same side. He grit his teeth, struggling in the iron grip, and it did nothing.

Boom.

A blast thumped from within the lava. Congealed magma peeled. They finally saw inside—

A metal corridor, baked red and softened by heat, ran forward. Three thick doors were near-melted through. Jiujiu had blasted down the last patch of wall with everything she had.

At the end, a small figure sprinted to a round platform—an elevator to the world above. The figure looked back, deep and fierce, at Xun Xun pinned under the Mechanical Arm, then stepped onto the disk.

“I’ll come back for you! Don’t die!”

Her voice hadn’t finished crossing the air when the woman’s shout drowned it. “Stop the elevator!”

The man moved before she finished. He ran inside, found the console, and halted the lift after it rose barely a handspan.

Jiujiu’s way out vanished. The shaft was narrower than the corridor—a canyon turned into a throat. There was nowhere to dodge, only the woman’s Mana Blade to endure.

The man followed, eager to seize Jiujiu. He held Xun Xun forward like a shield. Jiujiu didn’t dare harm him. If she hurt her half-savior, she’d be no different from the scum who hurt her sister.

The man stepped onto the elevator, raising Xun Xun out front. His other Mechanical Arm reached for Jiujiu. Xun Xun threw a full-force punch—not at the man, but at the outer glass they said was unbreakable. With external defenses withdrawn, only brittle glass remained.

His strike traced a watery crack. The man stopped him. Jiujiu did not.

She understood. She swung, wringing her last drop of Abyssal Aura. Scalding lava armored thick rock around her fist. She hammered, punching through the glass shell.

Water pressure found a throat and screamed through. They were dozens of meters deep under the lake. The pressure was brutal. The gap tore wider, and the lake flooded the glass column.