Sparks danced off the edge of a grinding wheel, dying on the cold floor like angry fireflies. Karl Heisenberg stood hunched over a mangled gear housing, its teeth shredded, the steel casing warped like some half-assed attempt at sabotage. He squinted through the smoke curling from the acetylene torch, jaw clenched, every inch of him twitching with irritation.

“Fucking amateurs,” he muttered, jerking the torch away and letting it hiss back to silence. “If I wanted to waste my time fixing piss-poor welding jobs, I’d go back to babysitting Sturm.”

His gloved hand flexed at his side. He didn’t move otherwise. His eyes slid to the far corner of the shop, where a rust-stained wrench lay forgotten atop a broken lathe, surrounded by bolts and grime and half a sandwich he didn’t remember abandoning last week. The air vibrated subtly; the wrench groaned like a corpse roused too early from the grave and lurched off the table, spinning with slow gravity as it hovered toward him.

He caught it without looking.

“About time,” he growled, adjusting the grip in his palm and turning back to the gear. His knuckles popped as he worked the wrench, mechanical parts creaking under the sudden precision of actual craftsmanship—not whatever limp-handed nonsense the last idiot attempted.

The workshop hummed around him, alive with wires and unfinished things. Motors twitched, chains clinked where they hung like butcher hooks.

He inhaled deep, felt it in his ribs, the way the air thickened with static the longer he stood still. His power buzzed beneath his skin, a constant presence, like nails just under the flesh. He liked the feeling of control crawling through his veins, whispering in his ears.

He slammed the gear housing closed and yanked the clamp tight. Metal squealed under the force. Across the room, a row of mechanical limbs flinched on their chains. One even twitched like it remembered what pain felt like.

“This whole fucking operation is held together by dumb luck and my goodwill. Which is a miracle, considering how much I hate every single one of these inbred freaks.”

His eyes flicked toward the double doors leading to the hallway and pulled the cigar from between his teeth. Smoke curled out of his nostrils as he leaned back, wrench dangling from one hand, watching the steam rise off the repaired gear like it was daring him to be impressed.

“Still shit,” he muttered around the cigarette. “But at least it’s functional shit. Which is more than I can say for half the experiments Mother Miranda’s got rotting in her basement.”

The wrench floated back to its resting place without ceremony. Clanked onto the table. Heisenberg exhaled another breath of smoke, boots crunching through metal shavings as he turned toward the workbench.

Something was coming. He didn’t know what, but he could feel it, like the way animals feel earthquakes before they hit. That low pressure behind the eyes. That taste of metal in the mouth.

He welcomed it.