The vibration changed.

  Amon felt it through every binding that anchored his Core to the forge-sphere, a shift in the lattice, subtle as a held breath before speech. New conduits opened along the outer shell, channels he had not mapped, pathways that pulled at his output in unfamiliar directions.

  His awareness stretched.

  Not outward into the crushing dark of the forge-bay, but along something else. Metal, cold, and precise. The sensation was wrong, a violation of the careful isolation the Gnomes had maintained for two years. His Mana flowed through rerouted siphons, drawn not into distant engines, or mining rigs, but into layered systems, complex and immediate.

  Targeting arrays lit up in his perception. Ammunition feeds, stabilizer gyros, recoil-compensation lattices.

  He was inside a weapon.

  Not powering it from a distance, feeding it through sterile conduits, he was threaded through it, his essence braided into every firing circuit, and structural support. His awareness flooded the system like water finding cracks, filling spaces he had never been meant to occupy. Hydraulic lines, servo-joints, ammunition drums rotating on rune-powered spindles.

  The forge had made him part of something that moved.

  Panic clawed at the edges of his control. He forced it down, squeezing his output into the stillness he had practiced over years of confinement. The discipline of playing stable, compliant, no spikes. The Gnomes could not see him flinch.

  The weapon's perspective snapped into focus.

  Targeting lenses fed him the world outside, a surface battlefield on Plide, rendered in sharp, crystalline clarity. The image was not sight, not as he remembered it, but something colder. Overlays of range data, threat assessment grids, kill-zone projections painted in geometric precision across structures and movement.

  He saw fortifications, scorched earth, and figures scrambling between broken walls.

  A Gnome control signal pulsed through the system. Target acquisition: Initialize.

  The weapon swiveled.

  He felt the hydraulics engage, the rune-servos pulling mass into alignment with his inadvertent impulses. The motion was smooth, predatory, responding to the faint currents of his Mana as if his thoughts were commands. When his attention fixed on a structure in the targeting lens, the barrel tracked toward it.

  ‘No.’

  He clamped down, pulling his focus inward, away from the external feeds. The weapon slowed its traverse but did not stop. Gnome guidance systems overrode his hesitation, finishing the alignment with cold efficiency.

  Every rune in the firing chain was visible to him now.

  Targeting glyphs that calculated trajectory and windage. Recoil-compensation lattices that would absorb the kickback, and redistribute it into the ground. Power-gating circuits that metered his Core's output into the precise charge needed for the shot. He could see the whole architecture, a schematic written in light and logic, stretched out before him like a map of his own veins.

  The communication runes. The ones he had hijacked, carefully, over months of patient observation. They ran through the weapon systems, threading between firing controls, and monitoring channels.

  He sent a pulse along those hijacked pathways.

  Not words. Structured impressions, what he was experiencing, the shape of the systems around him, the flow of power from his Core through gating circuits into ammunition feeds. He encoded it in bursts, tiny packets of sensory data riding the comm-channels beneath the Gnomes' notice.

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  Response flickered back.

  Sharp. Immediate. Rusk's tactical analysis cut through the link, precise as a blade. "Map the timing chains."

  A second presence, denser, methodical. Khaldrek's engineering assessment. "The recoil lattice has three weak nodes."

  Amon streamed more data, letting his awareness trace the firing sequence step by step. Power draw from his Core—routed through the primary siphon—filtered through aspect converters that shaped raw Mana into Kinetic-Order blends—channeled along the barrel's rune-spine—released through the muzzle lattice in a controlled detonation.

  The weapon's targeting system locked.

  An enemy position, flagged in the overlay with threat markers and structural analysis. Gnome firing command incoming, a pulse that tightened every glyph in the chain, priming the shot.

  Amon felt the weapon want to fire, a readiness humming through hydraulics, and charged runes.

  He sent a tiny pulse of his own.

  A fractional adjustment to the power-gating circuit, a variance within normal fluctuation tolerances. The pulse was timed, threaded between two siphon beats, invisible against the background noise of his steady output.

  The weapon fired.

  The recoil slammed through every structure he was woven into, a shockwave of released energy that rattled conduits and flexed metal. He felt the shot leave—a bolt of concentrated force wrapped in Order geometry—and through the targeting lenses, he saw the result.

  The bolt struck fractionally off-angle, off-timing, impacting a secondary structure instead of the marked position. Through the weapon's sensors, he watched smoke and debris fountain upward.

  Diagnostic runes flared around him.

  Monitoring systems chewed through the data. Anomaly detected, variance in power-gating circuit. The lattice tightened, additional watchdog glyphs spinning up to sample his next cycle.

  Amon pulled his focus away from the external world, turning inward to catalog what he had learned. The firing chain's full architecture was laid bare now, every glyph, every junction, every weak point where power flowed through bottlenecks, or split along parallel paths.

  He stored it, filing the information in the same patient, methodical way he had once tracking harvest schedules, and seed rotations. One fact at a time, one node mapped, one vulnerability noted.

  The weapon powered through another target-acquisition cycle.

  This time he did nothing, letting the shot fire clean and true. The Gnomes' monitoring systems sampled his output, found it within tolerances, and logged the cycle as stable. The diagnostic flares dimmed.

  Another target, another firing command.

  He tested again, a different circuit, this time the recoil lattice, where Khaldrek had noted weak nodes. A pulse sent along a lateral support channel, barely a flutter against the massive forces at play. The weapon fired, recoil distributed imperfectly, stress concentrating in one of the flagged nodes.

  Not enough to break it, but enough to weaken it over time.

  Rusk sent tactical markers through the comm-net, overlaying Amon's vision with priority data. "Node seven-alpha, critical to barrel alignment. Node twelve, feeds the ammunition drum. Seventeen, ward anchor."

  Khaldrek layered engineering schematics over the same space. "Seventeen fails, the whole upper assembly shifts. Don't touch it until we're ready for catastrophic collapse."

  Amon absorbed the information, cross-referencing it against his own observations. The Triad was building a sabotage map, piece by piece, leveraging his position inside the weapon to identify what the Gnomes could not afford to lose.

  He sent one more data-packet to the Triad, a compressed summary of the full firing chain. Power flow, timing sequences, and structural dependencies. Everything he had learned in these few, brutal cycles.

  Then he forced himself into perfect compliance.

  The weapon continued firing, and he let it. Each shot clean, each power draw smooth, each output curve a textbook example of a stable, obedient Core doing exactly what the Gnomes wanted. The monitoring systems sampled him again and again, finding nothing to flag, and slowly—incrementally—their vigilance eased.

  The weapon powered down.

  The shift was abrupt, a command pulsing through the lattice that closed firing circuits and vented excess charge into heat-sinks. The targeting lenses dimmed, the hydraulics locked, and the ammunition feeds spun to a stop.

  But he remained.

  His awareness did not retract back into the forge-sphere, did not collapse inward to the familiar isolation of his Core. He was still threaded through the weapon's systems, stretched thin across metal and rune, feeling the residual heat in the barrel, the faint vibration of standby power cycling through diagnostic loops.

  The weapon sat silent on the battlefield, its targeting lenses dark, its barrel cooling in the smoke-thick air. Somewhere beyond his limited perception, the surface war continued, artillery booms, the grind of tank treads, the distant shriek of falling ordinance.

  He floated in the weapon's guts, a ghost woven into killing machinery, and waited for the Gnomes to decide what came next.