Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 120: The Bee’s Purpose (3)

Its charge, which had been the committed acceleration of a twelve-foot predator moving toward a target it had identified as eliminable, became something else.

The movement continued. The Harvester was still moving, still aimed at the bee, still committed to the objective it had calculated as the only viable path back to the operational configuration that several years of this facility had established as normal.

But the movement was happening at ten percent of the speed it had been happening at outside the cone’s volume, every centimeter of progress requiring the time that a meter would normally require, the committed charge reduced to the agonizing crawl of something moving through a medium that had decided to be substantially more resistant than air and was enforcing that decision completely.

The Harvester was slow.

This was the most significant development in several years of this facility’s operational history and it deserved a moment of acknowledgment.

The thing that had defined every encounter in this building—the thing whose pace had been the pace of certainty, the pace of something that had never needed to account for the time it took to reach an objective—was moving at a speed that a person with moderate injuries could have walked away from.

It was still moving. The commitment was still present in the quality of the movement, the objective unchanged, the intent intact. But the execution had been revised by the cone’s physics into something that the word charge was no longer accurate to describe. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Marcus moved first.

His instincts for identifying advantageous positions had been operating continuously since the convergence chamber—the information broker’s continuous situational assessment, running beneath every other function through the run and the combat and the tablets and the hatching, never fully suspending even when the situation was producing inputs that the professional function was not equipped to handle.

The current position was unambiguously advantageous. He identified this with the speed that continuous assessment produced and was moving before the identification had fully completed itself.

The collapsible spear extended and found the Harvester’s side.

Not the glancing contact that the two-second window had permitted in the side corridor—not the brief, careful thrust of someone working within a narrow interval of vulnerability and needing to withdraw before the interval closed. The spear went in and stayed in, held in the wound for the full duration that the Chronostasis cone permitted, which was considerable.

The bioluminescent blood flowed from the point of contact with the consistency of a wound that had been given time to be a wound rather than a brief moment of technical vulnerability followed by the target’s immediate restoration to untouchability.

Marcus withdrew. Repositioned. Thrust again, finding the same wound and extending it, the information broker’s precision applied to the specific task of making an injury worse in a target that could not move away from the application.

The Harvester turned toward him at ten percent speed.

Which meant the Harvester was not turning toward him in any operational sense.

The turn was happening. At ten percent speed, the turn was a slow rotation that communicated intent and produced no consequence, the twelve-foot frame pivoting through the reduced-time medium with the quality of something performing a movement and arriving at the movement’s completion several seconds after the movement’s initiation.

Marcus repositioned again before the turn had finished a third of its arc. He thrust again from the new angle. The Harvester continued its turn toward the position he had left.

"This," Marcus said, between the second repositioning and the third thrust, in the voice of someone cataloguing an experience for future reference, "is a significant improvement over every prior arrangement."

Kael came from the other side.

One arm, one sword, the rebuilt methodology deployed at full capacity against a target that was moving at a speed the methodology could accommodate with room remaining.

The blade found the Harvester’s crystalline surface and struck.

Kael looked at the blood on his sword for exactly one second.

He confirmed. He cut again. The second cut found the first and extended it.

He repositioned and cut a third time from the angle his one-armed methodology favored for the follow-through, and the third cut produced more bioluminescent blood than the first two combined, and the Harvester turned toward him at ten percent speed, which gave him the same operational relevance that the turn had given Marcus.

Seris hit from the third angle.

It was not a healer’s attack in any sense that healer’s attack was a coherent category. It was a dagger, short and direct.

The dagger found the same quality of solid resistance the shield had found. The same real wound. The same bioluminescent blood that confirmed the wound was real and the target was present.

She withdrew. Struck again. The Chronostasis cone held the Harvester in its reduced-time configuration and the attacks accumulated from three directions and the target moved toward the bee at ten percent speed and the bee watched it come with its compound eyes steady and the cone maintained.

The Harvester was bleeding from several wounds simultaneously.

This was also a development worth acknowledging.

The thing that had operated in this facility for several years without accumulating wounds was now accumulating them at the rate that three people applying sustained attacks to a slow-moving target produced, which was a meaningful rate.

The bioluminescent blood caught the dimensional-energy light of the Core chamber and the Core chamber documented it the way it documented everything—with the impartial thoroughness of a space that had been illuminating this facility’s contents for longer than the current occupants had been alive and had no editorial opinions about what it was currently illuminating.

The Harvester was still moving toward the bee. At ten percent speed, still moving.

This was the part that was, in its own specific way, the most frightening thing the chamber had produced.

Not the Harvester at full speed—that was terrifying in the way of something fast and lethal and incorporeal, the terror of something that could be everywhere and was coming for you.

The Harvester at ten percent speed was terrifying in a different and arguably worse way: the terror of something that was taking catastrophic damage from three sustained attackers and continuing to move anyway, the movement smaller and slower than before but present, the objective unchanged, the commitment intact, the history of several years of being unstoppable apparently not fully revised by the current operational circumstances.

It did not stop.

"It’s still moving," Kael said, between cuts, stating the fact in the tone of someone who had noticed the fact and wanted it confirmed as a shared observation rather than a personal misapprehension.

"Yes," Marcus said.

"Toward the bee."

"Yes."

"At ten percent speed with three people hitting it."

"Also yes." Marcus repositioned and thrust again. "I am choosing to interpret the ten percent speed as the relevant variable rather than the continued movement."

"That seems optimistic."

"I am having an optimistic interval. It may not last."

The bee watched the Harvester come. The compound eyes had not changed their quality since the Chronostasis cone engaged—the steady, purposeful clarity of something that had identified its function and was performing it, the wings maintaining the frequency that the cone required, the locked space of the Dimensional Anchor still present in the sphere around the bee’s hover point, the two effects operating simultaneously with the focused consistency of something that had been built to operate exactly this way.

Then the Harvester did something that none of the prior moments had prepared them for.

Its body split.

Not broke—not the structural failure of something taking more damage than its construction could sustain. Split, deliberately, the single twelve-foot form dividing along lines that the crystal-and-organic-tissue construction apparently accommodated, the unified mass separating into four smaller versions of itself, each one roughly three feet tall, each one carrying a portion of the stolen faces, each one immediately orienting toward a different member of the group with the specific allocation of a predator that had assessed the room and was distributing its remaining resources across the threats it had identified.

Three of the four fragments moved at normal speed.

The Chronostasis cone had been oriented at the Harvester as a unified entity. The division had moved three of the four fragments outside the cone’s current coverage in the first second of their existence.

Outside the cone, the facility’s physics operated at normal rate. The three fragments outside the cone were moving at the speed that three-foot crystalline entities moved when the physics governing their movement were not being reduced to ten percent by a dimensional bee, which was faster than anyone in the chamber would have preferred.

Tank’s shield came up. Kael’s sword came up. Marcus’s spear came up. Seris’s dagger came up. The formation that the group had been operating in—three attackers on the slowed Harvester, three others positioned for support—dissolved in the second of the fragments’ appearance into the formation that four fast-moving threats in different directions produced, which was: everyone managing the threat nearest to them and nobody managing the overall situation.

The bee’s compound eyes tracked all four fragments simultaneously.

This was visible—the multifaceted eyes moving with the processing speed of something that perceived in every direction at once, the inner light shifting quality as the bee assessed the division and its implications and produced its response in the interval between the division’s completion and the fragments’ second step.

The wings shifted. Not the Chronostasis frequency. The Dimensional Anchor frequency—the locking vibration, the one that produced the sphere rather than the cone, the absolute physics rather than the reduced time.

The sphere expanded.

It expanded from the bee’s hover point outward in every direction, the ten-meter radius of locked physics growing to encompass the full volume of the chamber’s relevant space, the dimensional energy going still with the totality of something that had been made absolute rather than merely conditional, the modifications that the fragments were moving through ceasing to be available in the sphere’s volume as the sphere’s boundary reached them.

The Dimensional Anchor caught all of them inside its radius. All four fragments were inside the locked space. All four fragments were solid—fully, completely, inescapably solid, the crystal-and-organic-tissue construction of each one subject to the physics of solid matter in a space where solid matter was the only configuration available.

All four fragments were subject to everything that solid meant in a space where the physics had been locked.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​