Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 112: Abandoning Position
They left the side corridor at Tank’s instruction and did not look back.
"We move," Tank said. "Keep moving. Make it hard to pin us down."
He said it with the flat certainty of someone who had run the available options against the available facts and arrived at the only viable output. The side corridor had been a position.
Positions required the enemy to come to you through a defined approach, and that logic held against enemies that used defined approaches.
The Harvester had come through the wall. It had come through the floor. It had demonstrated, in the side corridor and in the convergence chamber before that, that walls and corridors and carefully considered defensive geometry were not categories of obstacle it engaged with in any meaningful sense. A position was useful if the enemy had to respect the position. The Harvester did not respect positions. The Harvester did not respect solid matter as a general principle.
So they moved.
The formation assembled itself without instruction, which was either evidence of how well seven people could function after several hours of shared near-death experience or evidence of how thoroughly the situation had stripped away the deliberation that formal instruction required. Both, probably.
Tank took the front. His burned hands were wrapped in strips torn from Marcus’s coat—Marcus had contributed them with the specific wordlessness of someone who had assessed the situation and identified the action with the highest immediate utility and had executed it before anyone had asked.
The cloth was doing what cloth could do against thermal burns sustained by contact with something that drained body heat faster than biology was designed to lose it, which was less than what was needed and more than nothing, which was the category that most of their available resources had been operating in for the past 12 hours.
Tank held the shield with the grip of someone who had made a decision about pain as a variable and had excluded it from the calculation entirely. The hands were not given the opportunity to vote on the pace. The pace was set by the situation and Tank implemented it and the hands came along.
Kael moved second. The accumulated cost of twelve hours on the path—the arm, the shockwave, the collision, the continued expenditure of functioning as a combat-capable person with a parameter set that most combat methodologies hadn’t been designed for—was visible now in ways it hadn’t been earlier in the facility.
A fractional unevenness in the footwork. A slight compensatory lean that his rebuilt one-armed approach hadn’t fully integrated. He compensated for it. He compensated the way Kael compensated for everything—without acknowledgment, without modification to whatever internal accounting he was keeping, with the specific refusal that had been carrying him through situations that the arithmetic said should have stopped him well before they did. The compensation cost him something. He did not indicate that it was costing him anything, which told Zeph everything he needed to know about how much it was actually costing him.
Marcus and Seris supported Whisper between them, one on each side, Whisper’s arms across their shoulders and their feet finding the floor in the irregular rhythm of someone whose cracked ribs had filed a formal objection to weight-bearing and were enforcing that objection with the humorless consistency of an injury that did not care about the current operational requirements.
Whisper moved anyway, because Whisper had a twelve-hour track record of moving through things that should have stopped movement, and also because the alternative was being left behind, and Whisper’s expression communicated clearly that being left behind was not a configuration they were willing to accept.
Aria Chen moved alongside them, her hands working constantly—healing magic applied in motion, which was not the context healing magic had been designed for and which was producing approximately sixty percent of what the same effort would have produced with both parties stationary.
Aria Chen did not mention the gap. She applied the sixty percent with the focused economy of someone who had decided that the available resource was what it was and spending cognitive resources on the shortfall was a worse allocation than spending them on maximizing what remained.
Zeph ran at the rear with the egg and tried not to think about his CP counter.
He failed at the not thinking about it.
The counter sat at zero in the corner of his awareness with the specific presence of something that was both true and unhelpful, the kind of true thing that the mind returned to regardless of instruction because the mind had its own opinions about which information required ongoing attention.
Zero. Rebuilding at the passive rate, which was steady and reliable and completely insufficient for the timeline that the current situation was imposing. He was running through a facility with something lethal in its walls, holding an egg that was advertising his location to everything in the building, with no CP, no special ability, no decisive option available to him until the counter rebuilt to a level that made the option viable again.
He had a goblin axe. He had cloth-wrapped hands. He had the egg.
Two out of three of those things were going to be useful if the Harvester appeared in the next twenty minutes.
The egg, at least, was doing its part. It had changed since the side corridor—the crack that had split across its upper surface had propagated in the way of structural compromise that had found its direction and committed to it, additional fracture lines extending from the original and branching across.
Light poured through all of them. Warm, white, steady—not the frantic pulsing of earlier hours but the consistent output of something that had moved past urgency into process, the glow of something that was no longer communicating and was instead becoming.
Small fragments of the outer shell had begun to separate at the fracture intersections, falling in the corridor behind them as they ran, a trail of shell pieces documenting their path through the facility in glowing breadcrumbs.
Through the largest crack, when the corridor lighting was right, he could see movement. Purposeful movement.
Not the exploratory pressure of something testing limits but the deliberate committed work of something that had identified its direction and was applying everything it had toward it. He felt the consciousness inside more clearly than he had in the side corridor—the alien awareness that had been curious about him now oriented toward the situation with a focus that the curiosity had sharpened into something more urgent.
It knew what was happening. It was trying to accelerate a process that did not, as Marcus had noted, permit acceleration. The trying was visible in the pulse, which had climbed past ninety beats per minute and was still climbing.
"I think it’s getting impatient," Zeph said, between breaths.
"The egg," Marcus said, not quite a question.
"It knows we’re running. It’s trying to hatch faster."
"It can’t hatch faster," Marcus said.
"I’m aware it can’t hatch faster. I’m reporting that it’s trying anyway."
A pause in which Marcus processed this and arrived somewhere between concerned and reluctantly impressed. "It’s aware of the threat."
"It’s aware of everything," Zeph said. "It has opinions about everything. It’s sharing the opinions through the medium of pulse rate and heat output and I am receiving them whether I want to or not."
Nobody had a useful response to this so nobody offered one, which was the correct response and the only available one.
The facility breathed faster now.
Zeph noticed it in the fourth minute of running, which meant it had probably been happening for longer than four minutes and he had been too occupied with the immediate demands of running through a lethal facility to register it earlier.
The walls of the corridor were expanding and contracting. Not structurally—not the thermal expansion of stone responding to temperature change or the mechanical vibration of old infrastructure settling.
This was rhythmic. Deliberate.
The surfaces pressing fractionally outward and drawing fractionally back in a cycle that was consistent and measured and was exactly matching, with a precision that was not coincidental and could not be coincidental, the pulse of the egg in his hands.
Whisper had noticed it too. He knew because Whisper, even supported between Marcus and Seris, even with cracked ribs expressing their position on every movement the carrying required in terms that left nothing unclear, was reading the walls.
Their head moved as they were transported through the corridors, eyes tracking the inscriptions with the continuous absorption of someone for whom the facility’s script had become, over hours of immersion under survival pressure, something that could be processed at running pace.
They were receiving a message. The message was being delivered in real time and Whisper was reading it in real time and what Whisper did with information received in real time was write it down immediately for everyone else.
The notepad appeared on Marcus’s shoulder. The pen moved in the abbreviated strokes of someone performing fine motor work while being carried through a corridor at speed, the letters forming with the compressed economy of communication that had learned to operate under every variety of adverse condition the facility had been able to produce and had not yet been defeated by any of them. Whisper tore the page free. Held it up.
FACILITY RECOGNIZES WARDEN. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦
A second page, already prepared while the first was still being read.
OPENING PATHS FOR US. MAZE HELPING NOW.
