by denneysmythicquill
Silas Voss did the math. The Gilded Spine's debt-bond is engineered so the average delver dies before breaking even, and he signed it anyway. The payout covers his wife's cancer treatment, and a man who has already accepted being a line item doesn't flinch at the arithmetic. Then the shear zone opened on his efficiency pod. Fifteen debt-bonded recruits. Seven dead in four seconds. Silas should have been number eight. He wasn't. Something in the wreckage bonded to him. Agamemnon, a forty-five-pound tower shield holding the soul of a warrior-king who lost the last war against the Boundless Rift three thousand years ago, and who has opinions about all of it. Silas wakes up as a Kinetic Vanguard. No sword. No spells. He absorbs the punishment he should never have survived, stores it, and gives it back with interest. Every fight is really a question of how much he can hold before the gauge tips past one hundred percent and the overcharge kills him. The Spine noticed inside a week. Marcus Vellum, the Actuary, has never personally fought anything. He doesn't have to; he owns people who do. He has just reclassified Silas from asset to opportunity. Now Silas is running. Downward. Past the crystalline Verge, into layers where the walls rearrange themselves and the oceans burn cold, with a shield that will not stop talking and a guild that prices human lives to two decimal places. He isn't trying to conquer the Rift. He's trying to survive his own balance sheet.Dungeon Crawler Carl meets The Ripple System, with shield combat out of Captain America and the buddy friction of Lethal Weapon.
