Chapter 40 - Plate Curvature

Morning in the Third District broke to the sound of steam whistles echoing from machine tool plants three blocks from the inn.

Maria woke at six-thirty, rolling off the spring mattress with an energy she hadn't displayed in nearly twenty days. She pulled on her heavy denim jeans, the black sleeveless shirt, and strapped the brigandine cuirass over her torso, snugging the leather belts with sharp tugs that seated the plate firmly across her ribs.

Dante stood before the double-paned window, a grid-ruled notebook open in his left hand and a brass drafting compass twirling between the fingers of his right.

The view from the window showed the district's main thoroughfare coming to life beneath the white glare of arc lamps.

"Are we heading down to see the streets, or are you going to spend all day sketching circles on paper again?" Maria asked, securing the forty-pound greatsword diagonally across her back with the reinforced leather catch.

"We're going down," Dante closed the notebook with a dry snap. "Without weapons drawn, though. Goran said anyone in the Third District walking around with bare steel without a patrol badge catches double-barreled buckshot from transit guards."

They headed down the timber staircase of the Dry Rail Inn, bypassed the front desk where the four-armed clerk was still poring over the same black-bound ledger, and stepped through the double doors out onto the avenue's steel paving.

The morning air in the Capital was cold, yet dry.

Foot traffic along the sidewalk moved in a steady flow, organized into disciplined streams of workers filing toward machine shops and freight depots.

Dante and Maria walked side by side, maintaining a low profile so as not to draw unwanted attention.

The goal for this first day was not to pick fights with guilds or scout heavy bounty contracts. It was to grasp the basic mechanics of this empire: how the districts were partitioned, how Legion patrols covered street corners, and where transit hubs were located.

Their first stop was the terminal for the Three-Line Elevated Tram.

The station sat on a cast-iron platform hoisted twenty-five feet above the street, reached via two spiral staircases of riveted steel.

Dante paid four gray scrip notes at the brass ticket booth by the gate, taking two punched lead tokens that served as transit tokens for the passenger car.

The tram was an elongated metal carriage painted dark charcoal, flanked by glassless window bays screened with heavy wire mesh, pulled by a continuous steel haulage cable riding lubricated sheaves along the elevated roofline.

They stepped aboard from the rear platform and took a seat on a long solid-timber bench.

When the carriage gave its first forward lurch, gliding across suspended rails with a faint electric hiss, the panoramic sprawl of the Central Bastion opened before them.

The city was carved into three concentric rings.

The outer ring, where they had crossed through the North Gate, held the heavy foundries, ore classification yards, and low-tier laborer bunkhouses. It was the loudest, most polluted sector, dominated by smokestacks spewing black exhaust day and night.

The middle ring, through which the tram now traveled, served as the commercial and residential district for free artisans, precision machine shops, and mineral exchange houses. The buildings here featured clean masonry, gray ceramic tile roofs, and broad walkways bathed in continuous electric light.

At the geometric center of the metropolis, walled off behind a second, fifty-foot inner barrier of polished brass plate, rose the Military Citadel.

There lay the grand headquarters of the Iron Legion, the massive judgment matrices for souls, and the palaces of the archdemons governing the plain's districts. Needle-like spires soared over three hundred feet high, crowned by Mana transmission arrays that discharged continuous blue arcs against the continent's dark sky.

Maria gazed at the Military Citadel with her elbows propped on the wooden sill of the tram.

"Miro said the white-jacket labs were tucked into restricted sectors," she noted in an undertone, letting the draft of the moving carriage drown her words from the other passengers. "That core in the middle looks like the perfect place to lock up test bunkers without anyone on the street knowing what's inside."

"That's definitely where they are," Dante replied, his gray eyes committing the inner wall's defensive lines to memory. "The Mana density we felt yesterday radiates straight from that central complex. Getting in there right now without command clearance is impossible, though. There are artillery batteries stationed every fifty yards along that brass breastwork."

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They stepped off at the Third District central station, a broad plaza paved with anti-slip iron tiles, flanked by tool depots and imposing administrative blocks.

Maria stopped before an iron kiosk peddling stone-baked pastries and bought four large turnovers stuffed with minced lizard meat, red onions, and hot rendered fat, handing over forty scrip in pocket change.

They took a seat on a cast-iron bench under the shadow of an arc-lamp post to eat.

Dante spread his notebook across his lap, drew his brass ruler, and rested the needle of a precision protractor against the grid paper.

Over the previous thirty minutes aboard the elevated tram, he had kept the fourth tab of his mental interface active in the background, logging magnetic and gravitational alignment telemetry from his [Planar Transit] skill.

"Figure out where this city maps to back on Earth?" Maria asked around a mouthful, chewing the baked crust with typical gusto. "Are we going to have to learn Spanish to buy that ranch in Colombia?"

Dante paused his pencil on the page, letting out a brief chuckle through his nose.

"No need for Spanish."

Maria arched an eyebrow, swallowing her bite of meat. "What do you mean? You spent all week claiming twenty-six hundred miles northwest landed the rift right in the middle of the South American jungle outside Brazil."

"The initial calculation was off because I relied on a Euclidean flat projection," Dante began tracing a gentle parabola across the page in graphite. "I assumed the terrestrial plane and the First Great Continent were two flat sheets stretched parallel, mapped one-to-one in a straight line."

He tapped the pencil against the curve in the diagram.

"Dimensional physics under this interface doesn't run on flat plates, though. The infernal matrix is compressed relative to Earth's mantle. The Mana density of this continent warps space inward, as though the crust here were an iron bowl and Earth were a larger sphere enveloping it."

Maria looked at the drawing, then back at his face.

"Dante, name the town on the map before I eat this whole turnover myself."

"It lands in Acre," he answered flatly.

Maria nearly choked on her final bite of pastry.

She coughed twice, thumped an open palm against her breastplate to force the food down, and stared at Dante with wide eyes.

"In Acre?!"

"In the far western reaches of Acre," Dante confirmed with his usual calm, displaying the decimal coordinates jotted along the margin. "Near the Peruvian border, around Cruzeiro do Sul or the edge of the Serra do Divisor. It's practically off the map, less than twenty miles from the international boundary, but it remains sovereign Brazilian territory."

Maria let out a booming laugh that drew scowls from two laborers walking past on the pavement.

"Acre..." She shook her head slowly, dusting pastry flakes from her denim shorts. "That patch of jungle everyone on the internet swears doesn't exist?"

"It exists, has a real estate registry, and operates under the Brazilian civil code," Dante explained with the pragmatic logic governing all his decisions. "For us, it's the best possible news."

He ticked off the advantages on the fingers of his left hand:

"First: no need for international passports, residence visas, or foreign consulate permits. We travel on our standard national identity cards and the emancipation certificates we stamped back home."

"Second: we use clean funds from our domestic bank accounts in Brazilian reais, avoiding any foreign wire reporting to the revenue service. We take a million reais sitting in our brokerage accounts, walk into a rural real estate agency in that border town, and buy an isolated hundred-acre homestead off an unpaved road."

"Third: cheap land in the deep woods. Nobody asks questions if we build a double-walled masonry barn out back and string up a barbed-wire gate. Local authorities have better things to do than check whether two legally emancipated youths spend their weekends locked indoors without making noise."

Maria finished off her second turnover, wiping her fingertips on a thin paper napkin.

Dante's reasoning was airtight.

They didn't need convoluted international schemes or human border smugglers. They would purchase legitimate land within their own country, stamped with certified deeds from a local rural registry, and drive their secondary dimensional anchor directly into the soil matching the First Great Continent's capital.

If things went sideways inside the Central Bastion, if the Iron Legion surrounded their inn, or if the white-jacket operatives caught the trail of the [Ash Veil], Dante would only need to will the mental command of Planar Transit to pull both of them off the iron floor and drop them straight into a quiet, humid forest in northern Brazil.

"Buying land there will be a breeze," Maria concluded, stretching her long legs across the steel flagstones. "We can settle it on our next downtime run back home to shower."

"Precisely," Dante packed the notebook and compass into his canvas pack. "We have one hundred and fifty-one days remaining on the interface timer before that quest demands any progress. We have plenty of time to organize our local base, secure the Acre emergency exit, and begin breaking into Tier Three specializations."

He rose from the iron bench, adjusting the pack strap over his shoulder.

The white glare of arc lamps shone steadily over the Third District plaza, where electric trams rumbled along the elevated rails at regular intervals.

They had reached the destination that had seemed impossible when their hunts began in the dry gullies of the Ash Wastes.

The Capital lay open before them, their skill points waited unspent in the interface, and their escape route to Earth's safety was mapped down to the lead pencil line.

Maria stood beside him, tapped the leather grip of her forty-pound greatsword with a clean smack, and looked toward the broad avenue of workshops leading toward the smithing district.

"Let's move, Dante," she called, her voice laced with that heavy drive of someone already geared for the next job. "We've got three new skill points to field-test, and I want to see if this city has any smiths who actually know how to quench steel.”