CHAPTER 4: THE SALVAGE OPERATION
Location: Zone Null (Out of Bounds)
Time: 11:45 AM (Local?)
The silence was the worst part.
No pipes humming.
No mites skittering.
No Tony noise filling the gaps.
Just heat — thick, oppressive, pressing against them like wet wool. The air smelled of roasting vegetation and copper, as if the jungle itself were overheating.
Cameron sat on a moss?slick root, staring up at a fractured sky. A dead?pixel sun dragged itself across clipped leaves that flickered in and out of existence, like a corrupted render struggling to load.
“Tropical,” Arthur announced, holding a digital thermometer at arm’s length as though afraid it might bite. “Thirty?five degrees. Ninety percent humidity. Prime pathogen conditions. I recommend immediate evacuation.”
“Where are we?” Kenny asked, poking a fern with a stick.
The fern beeped.
“Out of Bounds,” Cameron said quietly. “Zone Null. Where the Stack dumps assets it can’t render properly.”
He looked over at Tony.
Tony sat hunched on a flat stone, head in his hands. His gauntlets were gone. His wrists were blistered raw, wrapped in makeshift bandages already turning pink with seep-through.
“My build is cooked,” Tony whispered into his palms. “Six months of grinding. Zero DPS. I’m dead weight.”
“You’re on cooldown,” Cameron said, pushing himself upright. His knees cracked like old code.
“I can’t punch,” Tony muttered. “My hands are wrecked. If I hit anything hard, I’ll break my fingers.”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Cameron crossed the clearing and knelt beside him. “Arthur. Trauma kit.”
“I have burn gel,” Arthur said, rummaging through his satchel with the weary precision of a man filing taxes during a fire drill. “Logging this as equipment failure for insurance purposes.”
He applied the gel and wrapped Tony’s hands in clean white gauze.
Around them, the jungle stretched like a museum of misplaced assets. A red telephone box lay half?buried near the treeline, vines strangling the glass. A Roman pillar jutted out of a palm tree at an impossible angle, as if history had been shuffled and dealt wrong.
“We need a weapon,” Cameron said, scanning the debris. “Heavy. No finesse required.”
“A club,” he decided, heading toward a mound of tangled metal fused into the roots of a banyan tree.
It was a Spitfire. Or half of one. The WWII fighter’s fuselage was crushed and half?absorbed into the trunk, as though the tree had grown around it in seconds. The metal was green with oxidation, but the engine block was exposed like a fossil.
“Rolls?Royce Merlin engine,” Cameron murmured, running a hand over the cold metal. “Aluminium alloy block. Steel pistons.”
He twisted the dial on his staff.
Click. [W — TUNGSTEN]
He didn’t strike. He inserted the tip into a stress fracture and applied slow, deliberate pressure.
Creak.
The fuselage groaned as he worked it open, peeling back layers of history like an autopsy.
“What are you doing?” Kenny asked, drifting closer.
“Salvage,” Cameron said. “Metal is metal.”
He found it — a piston rod. Thick, solid steel, the piston head still attached. Two feet long. Brutal. Honest.
He pulled it free and held it up.
“It needs a grip.”
Click. [Pb — LEAD]
He touched the jagged steel. Lead flowed from the staff, soft and malleable, wrapping the shaft. He pressed his fingers into it, shaping grooves — a custom grip molded to a human hand.
“Arthur, gauze.”
“This is medical equipment, not crafting supplies.”
“Tony is the emergency.”
Arthur sighed the sigh of a man who had accepted his fate long ago and handed over the roll.
Cameron wrapped the lead grip in white gauze. The result looked primitive — something a caveman might forge if given access to an industrial lathe.
He brought it to Tony.
“Spitfire piston. Solid steel head. Lead?weighted grip to absorb shock. You don’t need to punch. You just swing.”
Tony took it. The weight dragged his arm down, but he adjusted, testing the balance.
“Swing,” Cameron said.
Whoosh.
The weapon cut the air with a low, heavy hum.
“Strength scaling?” Tony asked, a spark flickering back into his eyes.
“Pure Strength. No dexterity required.”
Tony swung harder.
CRUNCH.
A rotten log detonated into splinters.
“Yeah,” Tony breathed, staring at the destruction. “I can work with this.”
“Atmospheric warning,” Arthur said sharply, looking up.
The fractured sun had vanished. The sky had turned a bruised, sickly purple. Clouds rolled in with unnatural speed, like a time?lapse glitch.
“Pressure drop,” Arthur said, tapping his thermometer. “Barometric pressure plummeting. That cloud color indicates high sulfur content.”
“Corrosive storm,” Cameron said, catching the faint vinegar sting on the wind. “We need cover. Move.”
The first drop hit his shoulder.
It didn’t feel like water.
It stung like a wasp.
A hole burned through his jacket.
“The plane!” Tony pointed with his new club. “Fuselage is hollow!”
“It’s full of spiders,” Kenny noted.
“I don’t care,” Cameron said. “Everyone inside. Now.”
They scrambled into the crushed Spitfire’s belly as the sky opened up.
The rain didn’t patter — it hissed. It struck the jungle canopy with the sound of a million frying pans, melting leaves, turning mud to steam, dissolving the world in sheets.
They huddled in the dark metal tube, cramped and sweating, listening to the storm eat the landscape outside.
In the darkness, Kenny whispered:
“So we’re lost. Out of Bounds. And we’re cooked.”
Cameron leaned his head back against rusted metal and closed his eyes.
“Standard difficulty,” he said. “We wait it out.”
---
