Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 125: The Final Moments

The ceiling came down.

A massive slab, floor to ceiling, twenty meters ahead. Several tons of black stone blocking the only path between them and daylight.

They stopped.

The gap around the slab’s edges was visible. So was the daylight beyond it. Both were real. Neither was large enough.

"I can’t," Tank said. He looked at his burned hands. At the slab. Back at his hands. "Can’t lift it."

Nobody argued. Nobody had a better option. The daylight was right there, visible around the edges of several tons of stone that had not consulted anyone about its destination before arriving there, and visible was not the same as reachable.

The bee lifted from Zeph’s shoulder.

It rose to the slab’s height and hovered before it, compound eyes oriented toward the stone with the same purposeful clarity they had brought to the Harvester. The wings vibrated at the Dimensional Anchor frequency.

The slab locked in place—momentum arrested, physics settled, several tons of fallen stone held exactly where it was.

Then the wings shifted frequency.

Chronostasis—but aimed at the motion itself, not a target. The falling reversed. The slab rose slowly, ten-percent speed, back toward the ceiling it had separated from.

Not all the way. Enough.

The gap at the bottom widened. Fifty centimeters. Seventy.

"Go," Zeph said.

Tank looked at the gap. Then at the shield in his hands.

The shield had connected with the Harvester when the bee first locked the space. It had been a weapon and a wall and the thing between the group and everything that had tried to reach them since the convergence chamber. Tank set it down on the corridor floor without ceremony and went through.

"The shield," Seris said.

"Leave it," Tank said from the other side.

Whisper went second. The cracked ribs had been overruled since the side corridor and were overruled one final time. They went through without making a sound, which was not new, and emerged on the other side, which was everything.

"Whisper?" Zeph called.

A hand appeared around the slab’s edge. Thumbs up.

"Good enough," Zeph said.

Kael went third—One arm, new sword, the gap navigated with the economy of someone who had learned to move through every physical constraint with one fewer resource than the constraint had been designed to accommodate. The economy was practiced. The gap was not the hardest thing his rebuilt methodology had navigated and he treated it accordingly.

Seris went fourth, elixirs secured, focused entirely on keeping the vials intact through a gap that was not designed for people carrying fragile things. She made it. The vials made it. She stood on the other side and exhaled.

"All good?" Zeph called.

"The elixirs are fine," Seris said. "I’m also fine, since you asked."

"I was about to ask."

"You asked about the elixirs first" Seris said. "I can hear it in your voice"

Marcus went fifth. The information broker’s economy of motion applied to a problem that was entirely physical and not negotiable. He was through before anyone thought to offer assistance, which was Marcus’s preferred relationship with assistance.

Zeph went last.

The bee settled back on his shoulder as he crawled through—blade-edged legs, deliberate weight, compound eyes forward. He emerged into the final twenty meters of corridor. The outdoor air reached him before the light did. Real air. Outside air. Air that had not been inside a facility for any portion of its existence.

"Twenty meters," he said.

"Run," Tank said.

"I’m aware."

"Then run faster," Tank said.

[30 SECONDS]

They ran.

Not fast by any standard that the word fast was designed to describe—six injured people producing whatever remained after several hours of a facility that had been comprehensively hostile to their continued existence. Burned hands and cracked ribs and one arm and depleted reserves and twelve hours of everything, running toward twenty meters of corridor that ended in daylight.

"Are we far enough?" Seris asked, as they cleared the entrance into the Wildlands.

"Keep running," Marcus said.

"How far is far enough?"

"Further than this," Marcus said.

"That’s not a measurement," Seris said.

"It’s a direction," Marcus said. "Follow the direction."

Fifty meters from the entrance. The Wildlands extended ahead. They kept running with everything that remained, which was not much and was enough, and the two facts coexisted the way facts coexisted when the alternative to enough was not an available option.

[10 SECONDS]

They ran.

[DETONATION]

The facility imploded.

Not outward—inward, the entire structure collapsing into itself, dimensional energy withdrawing simultaneously from every surface it had been modifying for several years. The sound it made was not an explosion. It was the sound of a space ceasing to be a space—something subtracted from the world rather than added to it, a removal that produced its own category of noise with no prior reference in any of their experience.

The pillar came next.

Purple-black, dimensional energy at visible concentration, rising from the crater to a height the sky received without comment. It arrived in the chest before the ears caught up. It was not loud in the way that things were loud. It was present in the way that very large things were present.

Then the shockwave.

It hit all six of them simultaneously and put all six of them on the ground. The Wildlands received them with the indifference of ground that was not a facility and had no agenda regarding their continued presence on it.

Zeph landed face-first in the grass with the bee on his shoulder. He breathed. The grass was real. The air was real. The facility was behind him and behind him no longer applied to it in any meaningful sense.

They six survivors groaned in pain from the impact of landing on the ground.

"Everyone alive?" Tank’s voice, somewhere to his left.

"Yes," Kael said.

"Yes," Seris said.

"Define alive," Marcus said, from slightly further away.

Whisper held up a hand from the grass. Thumbs up.

"Zeph," Tank said.

"Alive," Zeph said, into the grass. "Very much alive."

"Good," Tank said. "Stay that way."

"That’s the plan," Zeph said.

Silence followed the shockwave. Real silence—outdoor silence, the Wildlands’ own quiet settling over the crater and the six people lying in the grass around it. The pillar faded. The sky returned to being the sky.

Where the facility had been: a crater. Two hundred meters deep, perfectly circular, nothing remaining. No ruins, no debris, no architectural remnant of twelve hours of modified physics and a creature that had defined this space for several years.

Just the crater and the fading light above it and six people breathing grass-scented Wildlands air and finding it to be the best air any of them had encountered in hours.

Six people out of one thousand.

Zeph lay on his back and the bee sat on his chest and they both looked at the sky. The bee’s compound eyes took in the outdoor light with the quality of something encountering a sky for the first time.

"First sky," Zeph said to it. "Good one to start with."

The bee did not respond. The bee was looking at the sky with the focused attention it applied to everything, and the sky was apparently worth the attention.

"Hey!" The voice came from the tree line. "OVER HERE! WE HAVE SURVIVORS!"

Authority rescue teams emerged at a run—medical personnel, equipment, the organized efficiency of people who had been maintaining a perimeter and were now converting the waiting into action.

A medic reached Zeph first. "Can you stand?"

"Yes," Zeph said. He didn’t move.

The medic waited. "Are you going to?"

"In a moment," Zeph said. "I’m looking at the sky."

The medic looked up briefly, made a notation, and moved to Tank.

From the crater’s rim—three different sections, three different approaches—figures emerged. Crawling first, then standing, then moving with the specific quality of people who had survived something they had not expected to survive and were still in the process of understanding that the surviving was real. Six of them.

Different paths, different encounters, different previous hours in the same facility with the same result: outside, alive, on the ground of the Wildlands.

"Twelve," Kael said, watching them come across the grass.

"Twelve," Tank confirmed, from his position on the ground.

"Out of a thousand," Seris said quietly.

Nobody added anything to this. The number was what it was and it didn’t require supplementation.

The medical teams distributed themselves across all twelve with the efficient attention of people doing what they had trained to do. The crater reflected the afternoon sky. The pillar was completely gone. The Wildlands were the Wildlands—unchanged, indifferent, exactly as they had been before the facility existed and exactly as they would be after the crater filled with rainwater and the grass grew back over the edges.

Zeph stayed on the ground a moment longer than necessary. The bee sat on his chest. Above them both, the sky was just the sky.

It was the best sky he had ever seen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​