All Chapters of ESSENCE: Desire Without Permission — My Rivals, My Red Flags: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The marine fog didn’t just roll in; it ignited. One moment, Anji was crouched by the bunker’s seaward air-vent, the salt-slicked iron biting into his palms. The next, the entire sky, the churning charcoal waves, and the jagged teeth of the port’s skyline were bathed in an impossible, radioactive flicker. It wasn’t lightning. It was a microwave spike, a concentrated lance of invisible energy slamming into the coast from a coordinates grid centered miles out at sea.His interface—the synthetic neural architecture buried behind his brow—screamed. Anji pitched forward, his head slamming into the bulkhead as his *Phantom Loom* shattered into a million agonizing, polychromatic fragments. He couldn’t scream; his diaphragm had seized, locked into a paralyzed state by the sudden spike in ambient electromagnetic potential. The taste of ozone was so thick he gagged on his own breath."Anji! Status!" 

The tunnel’s damp concrete screamed in rhythmic, bone-chilling pulses, a vibration so low it didn’t just tickle the ear—it gnawed at the teeth. Anji navigated by the dim, flickering orange light emanating from his palms, his eyes scanning the pipe’s architecture through the agonizing, shifting geometry of the *Phantom Loom*. He halted. His left hand—the one cursed by the M-ESSENCE core—slammed into his ribcage, a sudden seizure of nerve-endings making him drop to one knee. "Damn it," he hissed, bile rising in his throat. The signal density had skyrocketed. They weren't in a standard sewage conduit anymore; the air here tasted like brine and pressurized mercury.Arga shoved past him, the scavenger-master’s bulky prosthetic frame scraping against the conduit walls with the sound of a dull hacksaw. "Keep your eyes on the bulkhead, boss. We’re being pinged. Not by a drone, but by something closer. Look."He pointed to a recessed maintenance panel. Inside, attached to the primary logic g

The pressure plate under Anji’s boot hummed with a subsonic vibration—the deep, rhythmic throbbing of a hundred turbines grinding seawater into cooling fluid. They were inside the pressurized throat of the Nautilus facility, standing on a translucent walkway that spanned a mile of dark, oceanic abyss."Movement ahead. Dead ahead," Arga muttered. His voice was brittle, amplified by the heavy suit of scavenged insulation he wore. He pointed toward a junction fifty meters down the glass tunnel. A shadow moved within the murk of the ocean beyond the glass—a shifting, segmented silhouette that eclipsed the soft violet lighting of the walkway. It was an extraction droid, a monolith of reinforced carbon fiber and articulating limbs, designed by Sora-Genetics. It wasn’t on patrol. It was standing guard, its sensory stalk tilted downward, tracking the rhythmic tremor of Anji’s heavy breathing."It’s not blind," Anji hissed, press

The rusted ventilation hatch gave way with a sound like a guillotine dropping, sending Anji, Sarah, and Arga tumbling into a corridor of glass and ice. The sudden temperature drop was instantaneous, pulling the heat from their sweat-soaked clothes and replacing it with the brutal, sharp chill of a high-pressure maritime environment."Check your boots!" Anji roared, finding his footing on a grating that vibrated with a low-frequency hum. "This whole deck is insulated against the sea-pressure. One leak, and the entire pipeline ruptures inward. Move fast, but keep your center of gravity low."Arga wiped the condensation from his ocular sensor. "Anji, look at the plumbing. This isn't municipal piping. These are wide-bore high-pressure conduits. The size of these cables—they aren't carrying information anymore; they’re carrying a direct uplink to the main rig grid."They were standing in what had previously been marked on city maps as a deep-water gas div

The mag-lev’s screeching descent was over, leaving them in the stagnant, hum-filled silence of the Nautilus’s primary docking bay. Arga stumbled off the platform, his prosthetic limb grinding against the grated floor as he raised his shock-club. The facility wasn't just metal and light; it was breathing, a low, wet mechanical rhythm that rattled in Anji’s very molars."Clear," Arga hissed, though he looked anything but confident. He held his good arm toward the bulkhead, his internal thermal sensors likely reporting an array of movement that Anji couldn't see. "But it's cold. Too quiet. Like the machine is holding its breath."Anji didn't respond immediately. He gently set Sarah down on a heavy shipping crate. Her skin was a terrifying, chalky white, but she was still breathing—if you could call the thin, mechanical rasps that escaped her lips "breathing." He wiped the blood from her cheek, his own blackened arm twitching uncontrollably as he tr