Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 123: The Escape (2)

"Don’t look up," Marcus said, which was the advice of someone who had looked up and had determined that looking up was not improving the quality of the running.

"Why not," Kael said.

"Because what’s up there is coming down regardless of whether you look at it and looking at it will only slow you down."

Kael did not look up. This was the correct decision and he had made it before Marcus had finished the sentence.

The corridor they were running through had been one of the sealed passages during the Harvester’s herding phase—a corridor that the facility had closed behind them during the approach to the Core, that had been opened by the evacuation route protocol when the Warden’s recognition triggered it.

It was a wide corridor, wider than the side passage that had housed the trap formation, wide enough for six people to run abreast if six people had wanted to run abreast, which they did not because the ceiling was developing opinions about its structural responsibilities and was expressing those opinions in the form of dust and debris that fell from the fracture lines in continuous thin streams.

The debris was small. For now. The small debris was the facility’s way of communicating that larger debris was a direction the situation was moving in rather than a destination it had reached, and the communication was useful in the way that warnings were useful when the thing being warned about was still avoidable.

The fracture lines spread as they ran.

This was visible from below—the cracks moving through the ceiling stone the way fractures moved through things when the force that had been maintaining their integrity was no longer present and the load that had been managed by that force was now being managed by nothing.

The fractures found each other. Connected. Extended. The ceiling was mapping its own failure in real time directly above six people who were attempting to no longer be below it.

Seris ran with the healing elixirs in her carrying capacity and her depleted mana reserves and the specific posture of a healer who was performing continuous triage assessment on five other people while running through a collapsing corridor and had been doing this for long enough that the triage and the running had become a single integrated function.

Her assessment produced the same result it had been producing since the Core chamber: everyone needed more than she currently had to give and the elixirs were going to address that deficit when there was a moment to open them, which was not this moment.

She filed this and ran.

[40 MINUTES REMAINING]

The floor cracked.

These cracks opened in the way of something that had lost the tensile strength holding it together, the stone separating along fault lines that the facility’s modified physics had been suppressing and were no longer suppressing.

The suppression had been the Harvester’s presence. The Harvester’s presence was gone. The fault lines were expressing opinions that had been deferred for several years and were now expressing them all at once.

Through the cracks, visible in the failing bioluminescent light, was more light.

Bioluminescent light—everywhere below the floor, the facility’s lifeblood revealed in the spaces between the failing stone.

The glowing fluid that had lit the pools and the floors and the corridor surfaces for the entirety of their time in this building, visible now not as ambient illumination but as what it actually was: the substance the facility ran on, present beneath every surface they had walked across, below the floor where the Harvester had phased through on its way to and from attacks, below the stone that was now separating along its fault lines and revealing the depth of what the facility had been built over.

The cracks threw blue-white light upward through the gaps. The corridor became strange in it—the failing bioluminescence from the walls and ceiling going dark in sections while the floor cracks blazed with the undiluted output of the fluid below, the light coming from below rather than from around them, shadows falling upward in ways that shadows did not normally fall.

The bee lifted from Zeph’s shoulder.

Not in alarm. Not in the combat orientation that had preceded the Harvester’s appearance in the Core chamber.

An assessment—the compound eyes reading the corridor floor ahead with the same focused clarity they had applied to the Harvester, the spatial awareness of something that had been bonded to the Warden’s Badge and had the facility’s layout in its understanding in the way that things understood the spaces they had been built for. The bee hovered for two seconds, reading the floor’s fracture network ahead, processing the path. Then it resettled on Zeph’s shoulder with the deliberate contact of something that had completed its assessment and had a conclusion.

The path was fine. For now.

They ran.

"It’s navigating for us," Zeph said.

"The bee," Marcus said.

"Yes."

"The bee is navigating."

"It has been bonded to the Warden’s Badge since it hatched. It knows the facility’s layout."

"I am going to write a very comprehensive account of everything that has happened in this facility," he said, with the tone of someone filing a professional commitment for future execution. "When we are outside it."

"Assuming we get outside it," Kael said.

"I am choosing to treat that as a given."

"That seems optimistic."

[25 MINUTES REMAINING]

The Silence Zone was not silent.

They passed through it at full run—the zone that had swallowed sound for the entire duration of their time in it.

The characteristic was gone. In its place was the sound of the facility’s structural failure operating in a space that had been accumulating silence for several years and was releasing it all at once in the form of noise.

The groaning of metal components the stone had been built around. The crumbling of stone that the metal had been reinforcing. The recursive failure of interdependent systems losing their interdependence—the metal needed the stone, the stone needed the physics the Harvester had maintained, the physics were gone, the sequence was completing itself in the specific order that sequences completed when the first element was removed. The sound was loud in the way that sounds were loud when they occurred in spaces that had been silent for a long time and had an enormous acoustic debt accumulated.

It arrived in the sternum as much as the ears. Whisper, who had been running in their characteristic silence for the entirety of the facility, looked at the sound with an expression that communicated something about experiencing the Silence Zone without its defining characteristic—the specific quality of someone returning to a place and finding it fundamentally changed from what it had been and processing that change without having time to process it.

They ran through it and out the other side and the sound followed them for longer than the zone’s physical boundaries explained, the facility’s collapse communicating itself through the stone in every direction simultaneously.

[15 MINUTES REMAINING]

The massacre site.

They ran through it because the evacuation route ran through it and the evacuation route was the only route that the facility had opened.

The bodies were being absorbed.

The walls were dissolving—the facility’s architectural material losing its structural coherence, returning to the dimensional-energy substrate it had been derived from and taking with it everything that had been in contact with that material for long enough.

The process of absorption was not complete. It was not going to be complete by the time they passed through. They ran through the fifteen minutes remaining and a ceiling that was fracturing above them and a floor that was cracking below them and walls that were doing something that none of them were looking directly at because looking directly at it was not going to help the running.

Then Marcus said the thing nobody wanted to hear.

"We’re not going to make it." 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

He said it the way he said things that his continuous situational assessment had confirmed were true and that not saying would constitute a professional failure worse than the discomfort of saying them—flatly, without softening, with the specific quality of information delivered because the information was load-bearing and the people receiving it needed it regardless of how it landed.

"The evacuation route is longer than fifteen minutes at our current pace. We are not moving at full capacity."

He said this without specifying whose capacity was the constraint, because specifying whose capacity was the constraint was not going to change the calculation and was going to add something to the running that the running could not currently afford.

"The ceiling is slowing us. The floor cracks require navigation. We are not going to reach the entrance before detonation."

The corridor received this.

The fracture lines continued their work in the ceiling above. The floor blazed blue-white through the gaps below.

The countdown had fifteen minutes on it and the entrance had more than fifteen minutes of distance at their current pace and the arithmetic that connected those two facts had only one conclusion and the conclusion did not require elaboration.

Nobody argued.

Nobody argued because the arithmetic was available to everyone and the arithmetic agreed with Marcus.​​​​​​​​​​​

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