As I rummaged through the old, broken things in this mining camp it became more and more clear. This stuff was useless! The wood was as brittle as a clump of sand, just falling apart in between my fingers. The tent canvas material just fell to pieces upon trying to remove it. I tried to loot the bodies of the psycho-chickens but to no avail.

  I wish I would've paid more attention as I was moving an old cart with squeaky wheels. Maybe I would've noticed the glub of sticky that I had thrown on the floor "eating" the chickens blood. And maybe, just maybe, I would've seen the slight glow it was giving off while feeding. But no. Here I am trying to salvage some lag bolts from a hundred year old cart.

  "Ouch, you shit!" I cried as my finger got pinched in between the wheel and seat. "I swear, can't catch a fuckin' break down here. What's next? Never finding food and starving to death?" Only then did it hit me that I was starving. There was psycho-chicken meat pieces laying around in the dirt, but the smell was putrid. I could maybe cook that but no without a fire. Then it dawned on me, three chickens. I killed three chickens. I could see the body, or at least body parts, of two of them. Where the hell is the third?

  I replayed the fight over and over in my head, and finally figured it out. It was the psycho-chicken that I popped off its head. It was gone. Hmm...

  I walked over to approximately where I killed it and yep, it was gone. Not just gone as if something grabbed it and walked off. It was gone like it....slithered?...away.

  "Great. Just fucking great. It looks like a pile of snakes grabbed a hold of that thing. Eh...fucking gross." I said sagging my shoulders a bit in defeat. "It's time to just move onto the next room, nothin' left for me here." I made my way back to the foyer and took a deep breath. The floor was nice and cool beneath my feet, it helped with the aching. Door number two was staring me in the face.

  "Not too worry, I'm sure there is a full buffet, a shiny clean bathroom, and a nice cozy bed waiting for me on the other side." I chuckled and cautiously pushed open the door.

  Instantly, I heard some things run away from the sound of the door. The room was here, no tunnel leading to it, and it was dark. My torchlight spell was working overtime to stay what we would call, dim.

  Although it was dark, as my eyes adjusted, I could start making out the shapes in the room. There were broken computer monitors, old robotic pieces, and frayed electronic wiring scattered everywhere. As a Scrapper, this was kind of nice. I began digging around in different piles but everything was so outdated. I happened upon a broken plasma lighter.

  "Now, this little beauty... What are you doing down here?" I asked aloud, almost mesmerized by a basic tool I had started with in the tutorial. A glimmer of hope sparked in my chest. "If system tech was down here mixed in with this old junk, then that means we aren't completely cutoff. I just gotta find a way to fix whatever the hell happened to me." I pocketed the broken lighter and began to search the piles more thoroughly.

  I ended up finding a: Pipe (medium-length), Furnace door (broken), a half-melted power cell, and—this one surprised me—a cracked maintenance droid chassis. Looked like someone tried to turn it into a chicken coop at one point. Poor bastard still had feathers stuck in its exhaust vent. "You’ve seen better days, buddy," I muttered, knocking on its dented head. The droid’s one remaining eye flickered for a half-second before going dark again. That... wasn’t creepy at all. As I shoved the junk aside, my hand brushed against something cold and smooth. I pulled out a silvery cube about the size of a soda can. No markings. No seams. But it hummed faintly in my palm.

  [Item Identified: Unknown Core Fragment] Item Status: Inert / Requires System Link / Warning: Prolonged Exposure May Attract Hostiles

  “Well that’s just peachy.” I tucked it into my pack. If nothing else, maybe I could throw it at something and run.

  The shelf groaned as I shoved it aside, and a gust of stale air hit me in the face—thick with dust and something metallic, like dried blood and battery acid. Behind it, the debris opened into a slightly sunken section of the chamber. Piles of rusted metal slumped around a shallow pit, and the shadows pooled unnaturally in the corners.

  Then I heard the click-click-click.

  A skittering swarm burst out from beneath the trash.

  “OH SHIT—!”

  Dozens of rat-sized things, part wire, part bone, part rusted scrap, surged toward me. Their eyes blinked like LEDs on low battery, and their tiny teeth weren’t teeth—they were bits of shredded gear and twisted screws.

  [Rattlegrit Swarm Detected] Threat Level: Low, Swarm Type Recommendation: Environmental Weapons

  The System pinged that message just as I grabbed the pipe I'd pocketed earlier and swung wildly. The first one splattered against the wall in a puff of dust and screws—but the rest didn’t care. They swarmed like ants, moving as one.

  I backed up, yanked the busted furnace door into my grip, and turned it into a makeshift shield. One of the little bastards latched onto my arm and started chewing through my sleeve.

  “OFF! OFF! What are you?!”

  Another leapt at my face. I caught it mid-air with the pipe and slammed it into the floor. Its insides sparked once and went still. Then I saw the wires twitching again. Not dead. Rebooting.

  I started stomping.

  Feet, shield, pipe—anything that crushed metal and bone. I fought like a man trying to kill a blender with a crowbar.

  After what felt like forever, the last of the swarm jittered in place, sparked violently, and collapsed in a smoking pile of tiny parts. I stood in the silence that followed, panting hard. My hands were shaking. Not from fear. From adrenaline. I hadn’t felt that rush in a long time.

  [Combat Complete: Improvised Victory - +Minor XP]

  “Damn right, improvised.” Then I saw it—at the far end of the pit. A shape embedded in the metal-veined wall. Faint, flickering... almost pulsing. I climbed over the wreckage and approached. It was a symbol—circular, etched into a fused stone panel. Jagged shapes surrounded a gear-like sigil in the center. A faint orange light pulsed within its lines.

  Without thinking, I reached out.

  [Glyph of Adaptation Detected] System Status: Boosting... 44% Permission Required: Class Signature Not Found / Fragment Detected: Matching Residual Data

  “Wait, what fragment??”

  Then I noticed one of the swarm corpses near the glyph. Lodged in its rusted chest plate was something familiar: a broken piece of a sword hilt. My sword! I pulled it free. It tingled in my hand—like static clinging to my skin. The glyph glowed brighter, reacting to the piece. For a second, my vision flickered—text I couldn’t read flashed across my HUD, then vanished. "That's some system bullshit if I've even seen it." I muttered. I had found the hilt to one of my lovely swords-Salvage! Salvage and Scavenge were my junk sword set I was planning to take on the raid. How the hell were pieces "buried" down here?

  "Definitely system bullshit." I said shaking my head, examining the glyph more closely. You're not unlocked or turning into a staircase. It said it was boosting, boosting what? Signal? Something had shifted... I had gotten a few system pings being in this room. I slid the fragment of my old sword into my inventory pouch—still amazed it was even intact after all this. The System didn’t fully recognize me yet, but it wanted to. The pieces were here. Just buried.

  With the swarm dealt with and the glyph pulsing low and slow like a heartbeat, I finally had a chance to breathe. I scavenged what I could from the room. The Rattlegrits left behind a trail of busted components—tiny motors, rusted springs, old circuit fragments. Not exactly top-shelf loot, but I wasn’t picky. I dug deeper into the mounds of junk and started to find the good stuff: a spool of decent copper wire, a cracked solar battery with partial charge, and a chunk of carbon-fiber plating that might work as chest armor if I could strap it right.

  [Salvaged: Copper Wire x14, Scrap Battery (25%), Plating Fragment, Rattlegrit Cores x3]

  I laid it all out in a cleaner corner of the room and started sorting by type, weight, and potential use. Funny how fast the old instincts came back. My hands moved before I even thought—twisting, weighing, checking flexibility.

  That’s when I noticed it.

  A part of the trash pile near the far wall had shifted during the fight. At first I thought it was just debris collapse, but there was a shape behind it. A narrow tunnel, half-covered by discarded parts and a heavy tarp. It wasn’t marked. Wasn’t part of the chamber layout. Hidden. On purpose. I pulled the tarp aside and crouched at the edge. It was barely wide enough to crawl through, but a low hum echoed out of it. Not mechanical—systemic. The same kind of frequency I felt from the glyph. Almost... magnetic. Not yet. I wasn’t ready. Not without better gear. I marked the entrance with a piece of chalky stone and stood up, brushing metal shavings off my pants. As I looked around the wrecked room, I finally said aloud what I’d been thinking for a while now.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “This isn’t just a mine. It’s a junkyard. A graveyard.”

  Everything down here—tech, corpses, even the monsters—it was all discarded. Broken. Forgotten.

  Just like me... I still had one more door to check out, no time for sad-saddy-sadness to be creeping in.

  Door number three loomed at the end of the hallway like a forgotten vault. It wasn’t like the others—this one breathed. Not literally, but the metal was warm under my hand, and every few seconds I could hear the faint hiss of pressure bleeding out from somewhere behind it.

  I pressed my ear to the surface.

  Thump… hiss… thump…

  Something was alive on the other side.

  I gripped my pipe, checked my footing, and muttered, “Alright, mystery door. Be cool.”

  It wasn’t cool.

  The moment I pushed it open, a wave of heat rolled out and slapped me in the face. Not fire-hot, more like the inside of a dead engine after a long haul—radiating dry, electric warmth from somewhere deep below. The air smelled like scorched oil and burning insulation. My eyes watered. The room stretched wide, its ceiling arched with steel beams that looked like they were half-melted. Massive chunks of machinery were stacked like forgotten gods along the walls—furnaces, gear presses, overhead rails with hooks and chains still dangling. The floor was cracked concrete, coated in black soot and threaded with glowing lines of circuitry that pulsed faintly beneath my boots. A low mechanical hum filled the chamber.

  “Whoa…” I whispered, stepping inside.

  The door behind me sealed with a hydraulic hiss. Of course it did.

  A raised platform ringed the center of the room, with a wide furnace built into the back wall. It looked like someone had tried to tear the heart out of a star and cram it into an industrial oven. Half its casing was caved in, and molten slag had long since cooled into misshapen puddles along the ground. Scattered tools and spare parts littered the floor—metal clamps, hammers the size of my forearm, chunks of glowing ceramic, and shattered tongs. In a more intact corner, I saw a workbench lined with welding arms and a half-fused robotic limb still clamped in place.

  But what made me stop breathing was the figure slumped beside the forge.

  He was massive. Eight feet easy. Built like a walking junkyard—a humanoid frame of gears, chainmail cabling, and armor plating welded to what might’ve once been a mining exosuit. His chest cavity was wide open, revealing a dormant furnace core still glowing faintly inside, like dying coals trying to stay lit. A massive gear embedded in his back turned once. Just once. Then stopped.

  “Okay…” I whispered, crouching low behind a crate. “So you’re either dead, sleeping, or in low-power ‘murder-anything-that-moves’ mode.”

  My torchlight spell flickered nervously in the heat. I didn’t move. Not for a long moment. I just watched.

  The golem didn’t react.

  I shifted slightly, inching toward the workbench in hopes of scavenging something I could throw if things went south. A piece of scrap maybe. Or a—

  Click.

  The noise echoed like a gunshot.

  I had stepped on a spring coil.

  The golem's head snapped toward me. His eyes—two recessed optic lenses behind cracked plating—flared to life, burning amber with automated purpose.

  [Gearbound Mauler – Construct Type: Forge Guardian] Status: Core Activation – Stability at 13% Combat Protocols Initializing...

  The furnace in his chest roared back to life, the whole room began to shake. The Gearbound Mauler took its first step—and the entire room answered. Metal groaned. Chains swung. Dust dropped from the ceiling in slow motion. Every movement the thing made felt wrong. Not because it was sloppy. No—because it was too precise. Like it wasn’t just walking—it was measuring, calculating. Every gear in its body shifted with a hiss and a click, steam rising from its joints as it squared its shoulders and began to advance. I backed up, eyes locked on the glowing furnace in its chest.

  “Look, big guy,” I muttered, raising my pipe. “Let’s not do this. You stay dormant, I stay alive—win-win.”

  He charged.

  Wham.

  I barely dodged. His fist smashed a crater into the ground where I’d just been standing. The shockwave blew out the nearest wall panel, sending sparks and shrapnel flying. One chunk sliced across my arm, shallow but bloody. I rolled behind a stack of scrap, but the Mauler was already adjusting. His upper torso rotated independently from his legs, tracking me with mechanical calm. The Mauler raised both arms—then slammed them down in unison, launching a shockwave of force across the floor. It rippled toward me like a bulldozer of air and metal. I dove, tucked, and rolled behind an old pressure tank just in time.

  It exploded behind me. I hit the ground hard, coughing through smoke and heat.

  “Alright fuckface. You wanna dance? Let’s dance.”

  I ran low and fast, grabbing whatever I could from the floor as I moved—a gear, a broken wrench, a length of chain. I threw the gear—pinged off his head. No reaction. The wrench? Bounced. Nothing.

  The chain, though... I looped it around one of the forge pulleys and yanked hard, causing a shower of rust and sparks to rain down directly in front of him. He paused—just long enough for me to slam the pipe into the side of his leg joint. It rang like a bell. He reacted—barely. Turned, backhanded me into a pile of scrap so hard I saw stars. I coughed, spat blood, and stood. Slowly. Unsteadily.

  [System Ping: Combat Memory Accessed – Rebooting Subroutine...]

  My legs moved on their own. Left foot wide. Right foot back. Pipe raised at a diagonal. Center low. It wasn’t a move I’d learned. It was one I’d remembered.

  My HUD flickered to life again.

  [Combat Stance Detected: Junkyard Scrapper – Partial Sync] +8% Evasion | +6% Improvised Weapon Efficiency

  The Mauler came in for a grab. I sidestepped. Slammed the pipe up into his elbow joint. This time I felt it give. He staggered. Not much. But enough.

  I darted under his reach and drove the tip of my pipe into the exposed grate beneath his furnace. Sparks burst out, and he jerked back, smoke coughing from his vents.

  He pivoted with a whirring hiss, exposing a partially open hatch in his back—left side. I saw wires. Faint glow. Damage from the earlier explosion had knocked it loose.

  [Weak Point Identified: Power Core Conduit]

  I ran. Not away. Toward.

  I scrambled up a pile of wreckage, leapt onto a gantry rail, and used the dangling chain to swing onto his back like a rabid jungle monkey. The second I landed, I jabbed the broken plasma igniter into the exposed hatch. The thing screamed. Not with a voice—its whole body screamed. The furnace flared, gears spun out of sync, and blue fire arced across its limbs like lightning dancing across rusted steel.

  I jumped off just before it exploded. The Mauler staggered, turned, tried to take one last swing—and collapsed. A mountain of gears and groaning metal, still twitching. Smoke filled the room. The heat softened. And slowly, the chamber fell silent again.

  [Combat Victory: Gearbound Mauler Defeated] Junker Instinct: Recovered +EXP | +Partial System Sync – 67% Boot Complete / Glyph Detected: Echoed Purpose

  I limped over to the glowing symbol near the forge—etched into the wall behind where the Mauler had stood. It pulsed a deep red-gold, almost like embers waiting for breath.

  I placed my hand on it.

  [Glyph of Echoed Purpose Activated] Booting… 41% Permission Needed: Equipment Link – Pending Recovery

  My HUD blinked again.

  [Class: Junkyard Scrapper] – [Status: Incomplete Loadout] Equipment Set: Salvage & Scavenge (Missing) / Skill Tree: Locked – Unlock with Gear Fragments

  I smiled. Bruised. Bleeding. Alive.

  “Welcome back, System.” I muttered, a grin slowly growing on my face. The glow from the glyph faded, settling into a slow, steady pulse like a heartbeat in sleep mode. The room was still hot, but no longer hostile. The air tasted like melted copper and old ambition. I stood there a moment longer, pipe dragging low in my hand, like it was finally starting to feel like mine. Then I looked around at the destruction. The melted forge. The wrecked gantries. The dead gear-beast slumped in a heap like a scrap-metal god toppled from its altar.

  And I thought: I could live here. Not long. Not comfortably. But it was safer than the halls. Safer than chickens with murder eyes and rats made of barbed wire. I moved fast, before the adrenaline wore off and the pain settled in. First, I cleared out a corner near the forge—far enough from the heat, but close enough to bask in the leftover warmth. I kicked broken clamps and shattered tongs aside, stacked some carbon plating like walls, and dragged a tarpaulin scrap I’d scavenged earlier into a lumpy, semi-comfortable bedroll.

  [Area Marked: Temporary Shelter - “The Pit Stop”]

  “Yeah,” I said, slumping onto it with a sigh. “The Pit Stop. Home sweet home.” Next, I got to work making a workstation. There was a broken machining table near the side wall, half-melted on one end but still bolted down. I cleared it off, laid down my collected parts—copper wire, plating fragments, rattlegrit cores—and started sorting. No crafting prompts. No recipes. But my hands remembered what to do, even if the System didn’t. I bolted a few plates together, fashioned a crude hook out of a wrench, and lashed a makeshift clamp rig from some old gears and twine. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine.

  [Workbench Constructed: Functionality Limited – Manual Use Only]

  I grinned like a kid who just found his favorite wrench again. Then came the real prize: fire. I sat down cross-legged beside a pile of oily rags, twisted wires, and furnace flakes. Pulled out the broken plasma igniter. One spark. That’s all I needed. Just one. It took seven tries, a whispered threat, and a blood sacrifice from my thumb—but finally, the rag caught. The flame danced like it was as surprised to be here as I was. I leaned back, shoulders sagging. The room flickered in orange and shadow. My gear was drying near the heat. My wounds were throbbing but not deadly. My inventory was still trash, but hey—I had one hilt of my old weapon set. A pipe that now felt like an old friend. A System that was limping back online. And a corner of hell I could call my own.

  Doug: 1

  Dungeon: ...also 1, if we're being honest. I thought to myself as I propped my feet up on a chunk of melted slag and stared into the little fire. Tomorrow, I’d try to train. Practice strikes with the pipe. Maybe even try rigging something resembling armor. Get the HUD to show me a damn map. Dig deeper into the forge for buried tech.

  And that tunnel in Room Two?

  Yeah. I wasn’t done with it.

  Not by a long shot.

  [System Update: Core Sync 67% – Class Path Rebooting] Skill Tree Access Locked – Fragments Required / Equipment Link: Incomplete – Loadout Status: Salvage & Scavenge (Pending)

  I stared into the flames, fingers absently tracing the dented hilt fragment in my lap. My sword. My damn sword was down here. Pieces of me were scattered in this place like forgotten junk.

  So I’d do what I always did.

  I’d pick them up.

  Piece by piece.

  But for now, I had gotten myself a little breathing room.