Chapter 53: The Seven Day Deadline
Belida pulled the thick linen bandages tight. Kanos gritted his teeth, feeling a sharp, stabbing pain explode across his chest. His right shoulder joint screamed in absolute agony as it was forcefully locked into place against his collarbone.
"Do not move, Illustrator," Belida warned quietly. The giant knight tied a heavy, incredibly tight knot just below Kanos’s neck. "Your shoulder was completely popped out of its socket. Papuyu snapped it back into place while you were unconscious. I tied it down so you would not accidentally ruin her handiwork."
Kanos let out a harsh, raspy breath. He was lying flat on the cold iron table inside their concrete workshop. He tilted his head slightly to look around. Belida looked terrible. The knight’s thick armor was heavily dented, and his face was covered in dark purple bruises from taking the Grand Inquisitor’s kinetic punches head on.
Papuyu was leaning against the far concrete wall with her eyes closed. She looked deathly pale. The female hitman was clutching her ribs tightly, clearly still suffering from the internal damage caused by Vane’s crushing gravity lock.
Over by the broken steel gate, Sili was pacing back and forth like a trapped rat. The skinny broker was biting his fingernails frantically, occasionally peeking outside into the underground city with a look of pure terror on his face.
"How long was I out?" Kanos asked. His voice was incredibly dry, sounding exactly like he had just swallowed a handful of coarse sand.
"Almost two full days, boss," Sili stopped pacing and walked quickly to the iron table. The broker looked like he had not slept a single minute since the fight. His eyes were heavily bloodshot behind his cracked glasses. "We forced three high tier health potions down your throat, but your body just refused to absorb them quickly. Your mana network was completely fried from drawing that giant carbon spike."
Kanos focused his tired mind and called up his system panel. The blue transparent screen flickered wildly, letting out a faint buzzing sound before finally stabilizing in front of his eyes.
[ NAME: KANOS ]
[ LEVEL: 38 ]
[ HP: 145/850 ]
[ MANA: 12/1600 ]
[ PHYSICAL STATUS: SEVERE TISSUE DAMAGE, MANA BURNOUT, RIGHT ARM INCAPACITATED ]
Kanos sighed heavily. He had leveled up twice just from killing Vane, but his health was recovering at an agonizingly slow pace. Drawing that solid carbon steel spike using his pure life force had pushed his physical body right to the absolute breaking point. He was alive, but the system notification was crystal clear. His right hand was completely incapacitated for the foreseeable future.
"Give me a piece of charcoal," Kanos said softly.
Belida frowned. "You need to rest."
"Give it to me," Kanos repeated, his tone leaving absolutely zero room for argument.
Belida reached into Kanos’s torn cargo pocket, pulled out a small chunk of black wood charcoal, and placed it gently onto Kanos’s right palm. Kanos stared at the small black object. He commanded his brain to close his fingers. He ordered his muscles to grip the charcoal tightly.
Nothing happened. His fingers twitched pathetically, but they completely refused to close. A second later, the chunk of charcoal rolled off his palm and dropped onto the stone floor with a highly depressing clack.
The vast concrete workshop went completely silent. Kanos stared at his useless, heavily bandaged arm. The terrified realization finally hit him hard. He was an illustrator. His right hand was his absolute lifeline. Without it, he could not draw a weapon. He could not summon a shadow wolf. He was just a weak, incredibly fragile human stuck in a world full of deadly monsters.
"The sky outside," Kanos muttered, quickly shifting his focus to hide the rising panic in his chest. He remembered the terrifying red barrier he saw before passing out. "What exactly is that Quarantine Protocol?"
Sili let out a miserable, panicky laugh. The broker aggressively pushed his glasses up. "It is a localized deletion program, boss. The Sensor Bureau does not want to send any more high tier executioners down here to die. They decided to just highlight the entire lower district and hit the delete key."
Belida crossed his massive arms. "Sili scouted the edge of the barrier yesterday afternoon. He said the red wall is slowly moving downward from the upper ceiling."
"It is not just a wall," Sili corrected quickly, his voice trembling violently. "It is a highly concentrated sphere of raw erasure code. Anything that touches it gets formatted instantly. I watched a mutant sewer rat run into the red barrier yesterday. It did not burn. It did not bleed. It just turned into glowing white pixels and completely vanished from reality. The barrier is slowly contracting. It is shrinking the cage."
Sili grabbed the edge of the iron table, leaning closer to Kanos. "In exactly five days, that red sky will reach the floor of this Dead Zone. Every single thing inside Sector Four, including the slum residents and us, will be completely erased from existence."
The sheer scale of the Sensor Bureau’s retaliation was terrifying. They were perfectly willing to sacrifice an entire district, along with thousands of innocent people, just to guarantee that Kanos was permanently removed from their system.
Papuyu opened her dead eyes. She looked at Kanos with a completely flat, highly calculating expression. "You promised an army. But right now, you cannot even hold a piece of charcoal. If we stay in this workshop, we get erased. If we try to break through the red barrier, we get erased. Our survival rate is currently sitting at zero percent."
Kanos slowly pushed himself up to a sitting position using only his left arm. The sudden movement made his shoulder throb dizzily, but he forced his brain to completely ignore the pain. He looked at his tightly bound right arm again. His dominant hand. The hand he used to draw every single masterpiece he had ever created.
He could try to draw with his non dominant left hand. But Kanos immediately killed that stupid idea. Drawing a complex Null Hound required insane anatomical precision. The lines had to be absolutely perfect to contain the chaotic void energy. If he drew with his left hand, the lines would be messy. In Illustramancy, a flawed line meant a failed structural frame. A failed frame meant the dark violet ink would instantly explode right in their faces.
"Sili," Kanos spoke quietly, completely ignoring Papuyu’s pessimistic calculation. "You brought all the ancient blueprints from Chitala’s library, right?"
"Yeah," Sili pointed at a massive pile of leather bound books scattered on the corner desk. "I grabbed everything about ancient mechanics and ruined weapons. But what good are they now? We are trapped in a collapsing box."
Kanos slid his legs off the iron table. His boots hit the stone floor heavily. His knees wobbled for a second, but he locked his joints and forced himself to stay upright. He walked slowly toward the desk filled with the ancient books. His left hand picked up a rough sketch of a heavy mechanical gear system.
"I cannot draw an army by hand," Kanos said coldly. He turned around to look at his three teammates. "My right arm is completely broken. Drawing one single complex hound takes ten minutes and heavily fries my brain. We have five days left, and we need hundreds of void beasts to rip a giant hole through that red barrier."
Belida frowned deeply. The knight walked closer, looking at the mechanical blueprints in Kanos’s left hand. "Then what is the plan, Kanos? We only have three hounds and one golem standing in the corner right now. That is not an army. That is barely a hunting pack."
Kanos looked past Belida. He stared at the giant black void golem standing silently in the shadows of the workshop. The creature was a massive block of anti magic stone, capable of immense, absolutely tireless physical force. Kanos shifted his gaze toward a large, incredibly flat stone slab lying near the broken steel gate.
His eyes narrowed. His brain, heavily conditioned by years of working in commercial art and digital design, instantly found the ultimate cheat code to bypass his physical limitations.
He did not need to draw every single creature manually. That was the old way. That was how traditional artists worked, wasting hours on a single canvas. Kanos was a digital illustrator. He understood the concept of mass production perfectly. If his hands were broken, he just needed to build a machine to do the drawing for him.
"We are not going to draw the army," Kanos smiled. A cold, highly dangerous smile that made Sili take a step back instinctively. "We are going to print them."
Kanos walked over to the black golem. He placed his left hand on the cold stone chest of his creation.
"Sili, dig through those books and find me the blueprint for a heavy industrial stamping press," Kanos ordered sharply, his voice echoing with absolute authority. "Belida, I need you to hunt down the largest, thickest mutant animal hides you can find in the outer ruins. Papuyu, empty all the remaining mana sucking crystals and bat cores onto my table."
Kanos turned to look at the terrified broker and the confused knight. His tired eyes were practically burning with pure, unfiltered artistic ambition.
"We are going to build a printing machine right here in this room," Kanos declared flatly. "And we are going to flood this entire city with pure nightmare ink."
