The break lay at the first bend, where the old passage narrowed enough to make the dungeon engineer turn one shoulder sideways.
Her lamp caught the severed ends before the local technician could follow her in. The protective housing had been crushed against the inside of the turn. A length of cable lay beneath it, flattened where the metal had folded, then separated into dark, ragged strands.
She stopped with her weight on the near foot.
“Visible break,” she said. “Housing crushed. Don’t enter farther.”
The technician leaned through the opening far enough to see the lamp’s circle. Beyond the damage, the old line continued into darkness. He could not tell from that view whether the crushing had come from a deliberate strike, a shift in the surrounding stone, or debris driven through the route from outside.
The engineer felt the same uncertainty and named it before anyone asked.
“No cause established.”
The scout at the entrance repeated the location to Sera. The repair engineer passed in a small measuring strip and the equipment needed to record the housing before it was moved. The dungeon engineer photographed the bend from the near side, then the flattened section. She left the broken metal where it lay while the technician compared the visible fault with his test instrument.
