Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 99: Two of Five (2)

Every stone examined before stepping. Every shadow suspect. Every surface potentially lethal.

Her eyes scanned constantly. Looking for the telltale signs of mechanisms. Slight depressions. Different textures. Anything that might indicate danger before it activated.

Kael followed three steps behind. Close enough to react if something happened. Far enough to avoid triggering traps simultaneously. His shoulder throbbed with every heartbeat but he kept moving.

The second trap was poison gas. No warning. No pressure plate this time. Just vents opening in the walls with mechanical precision.

Panels sliding back in the stone to reveal openings they’d never noticed. Never suspected. Hidden completely until the moment of activation.

Green vapor poured into the corridor like fog rolling uphill. Defying gravity. Moving with purpose that suggested more than simple gas diffusion.

Like it was hunting them. Like it had intelligence. Like it wanted them specifically.

The color was wrong. Not the pale green of natural mist. Vivid, almost fluorescent. The kind of green that screamed artificial. Chemical. Designed by something that understood toxicology better than any human.

The smell hit them first. Before the gas reached them physically. Sweet and chemical and fundamentally wrong. Like fruit rotting in industrial cleaner.

Like flowers dying in battery acid. Burned their throats just breathing it. Made their eyes water instantly. Made their sinuses feel like they were dissolving.

"Run!" Seris grabbed Kael’s good arm and pulled. No time for planning. No time for tactical assessment. Just immediate flight from danger they couldn’t fight.

They ran down the corridor with gas chasing them. Pursuing with terrible patience. Not fast but relentless. Filling the space behind them completely. Cutting off retreat with toxic certainty.

Lungs burning from the poison they’d already inhaled. Just the smell was enough to do damage. Vision blurring at the edges like their eyes were watering or failing or both simultaneously.

Kael’s injured shoulder screamed protest with every pumping motion of his arms. Every stride jarring the healing tissue. Seris’s grip on his arm the only thing keeping him oriented as the world started spinning.

They burst into a junction where the air was clean. The difference was immediate and shocking. Like breaking the surface after drowning. Like the first breath after nearly suffocating.

Collapsed against opposite walls. Coughing so hard it felt like their lungs would tear themselves apart from the inside. Like their bodies were trying to expel organs through their throats.

Kael doubled over, hands on knees, coughing up something that tasted like copper and chemicals. Seris pressed her back against stone, sliding down until she was sitting, chest heaving with coughs that sounded wet and wrong.

"What was that?" Kael gasped between coughs. Each word requiring effort. Each breath burning like inhaling fire. "What the fuck was that?"

"Poison," Seris managed. Her medical knowledge had limits and they’d just hit them. "Neurotoxin maybe. Could be respiratory irritant. Could be something worse. I don’t know."

She wasn’t a toxicologist. Hadn’t studied exotic poisons. Her training covered healing, not identifying chemical weapons deployed by alien security systems. "We got out fast enough. Should be okay."

"Should be?" Kael’s voice climbed higher. "That’s your professional medical opinion? Should be?"

"We’re not dead. We’re not seizing. We’re not hallucinating. We’re just coughing." She wiped tears from her eyes. Tears from the gas, not emotion. Though emotion was close. "That’s my professional diagnosis."

They rested. Ten minutes this time. Until their breathing normalized from desperate gasping to merely labored. Until the coughing stopped being constant and became occasional.

Until standing didn’t require concentrating on balance. Until the world stopped spinning in nauseating circles. Until their vision cleared from blurred to merely watery.

Kael checked his shoulder. Still hurt but the healing was holding. The spike wound hadn’t reopened despite the running. Small mercy in a situation devoid of them.

"Two traps in thirty minutes," he said. Voice hoarse from coughing. "The maze is definitely targeting us harder."

"Agreed. It recalculated threat levels. Decided we’re acceptable losses." Seris’s voice carried bitter understanding. "The full group got tested. We’re getting eliminated."

"Fantastic. Love being expendable."

"We’re not dead yet."

"’Yet’ is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

They continued forward. More careful now. Watching everything. Floor, walls, ceiling. Expecting attack from any direction. Every surface a potential threat. Every panel a possible trap waiting to activate.

The corridors felt different here. Older somehow. The construction more worn. The glowing script dimmer, like power was failing. Or like this section hadn’t been maintained in longer than the areas above.

"This part feels abandoned," Seris observed. Her senses picking up on wrongness. "Like the facility stopped caring about this level."

"Maybe we’re getting close to something important. Something it didn’t want people reaching." Kael’s paranoia working overtime. "Maybe that’s why the traps are more aggressive."

"Or maybe this is just the murder level. Every facility needs one."

Then suddenly a construct appeared. Ambush from a side passage they’d already cleared and deemed safe.

The maze had opened a path behind them while they were recovering from the gas. Quietly. Without the usual grinding sound. Sent a guardian through with instructions to kill.

Similar design to the ones the full group had fought. Bio-mechanical hybrid of metal and something that might have been flesh once. Seven feet tall with proportions that violated human anatomy.

Sensor head tracking them with cold precision. Limbs already reconfiguring for combat. Moving with the terrible certainty of something that knew exactly what it was designed to do.

"Oh come on," Kael said. Exhaustion making him reckless. "We literally just survived poison gas. Can we get a break? Five minutes? Is that too much to ask?"

The construct didn’t respond. Just advanced with mechanical patience.

"I’ll buff you," Seris said. Her hands already glowing with golden light. "Give you everything I have."

She didn’t wait for confirmation. Just started pouring healing magic into Kael. Not closing wounds this time but enhancing capability. Strengthening muscle beyond normal limits. Sharpening reflexes to supernatural levels.

Dulling pain receptors so injuries wouldn’t slow him. Flooding his system with magical adrenaline that made everything sharper, faster, more intense.

He felt the change immediately. Like electricity in his veins. His injured shoulder stopped aching entirely. Went from painful to functional to enhanced.

His movements felt faster, smoother, more controlled. The sword in his hand seemed lighter. Like it was made of wood instead of steel. His vision sharpened until he could see individual scratches on the construct’s armor.

"Go," Seris said. Exhaustion already showing in her voice. This kind of buff drained her completely. "I’ll support from here. Don’t get killed."

Kael charged. Because running wasn’t an option and freezing meant dying. The construct met him halfway. Limbs that reconfigured mid-strike into configurations that shouldn’t be possible.

The fight was desperate from the first exchange. Kael wasn’t skilled like Whisper with years of rogue training. Wasn’t strong like Tank with military discipline and experience.

Currently operating on magical enhancement and pure terror. Fighting for his life against something designed to kill humans efficiently.

He blocked with more luck than technique. His blade meeting construct limbs at angles that deflected rather than absorbed impacts. Struck when openings appeared. Aiming for joints and sensors and anything that looked vulnerable.

Dodged attacks that would have killed him by inches. By centimeters. By margins so thin that wind pressure from missed strikes moved his hair.

The construct adapted in real-time. Learning his patterns with machine efficiency. Closing the skill gap with superior processing. Each exchange teaching it more about how he moved, how he thought, how he fought.

Kael felt himself losing ground. The buff was incredible but it didn’t make him actually skilled. The construct was optimizing. He was surviving through luck.

Then mid-strike, it malfunctioned. One limb seized at the wrong angle. Locked up completely mid-motion. Movements stuttered like a machine with corrupted code.

Random mechanical failure. The kind that happened to any system eventually. Bad timing for the construct. Perfect timing for Kael.

He didn’t question it. Didn’t analyze his good fortune. Just drove his sword through the sensor dome with both hands. Used his weight and the buff’s strength. Felt the blade punch through whatever material composed its skull into whatever served as its brain.

The construct collapsed. Limbs going slack all at once. Kael collapsed beside it as the magical buff faded. The comedown was immediate and brutal.

All the enhanced capability draining away at once. Leaving him exhausted. Shaking. His shoulder suddenly screaming again as pain receptors came back online.

"You did it," Seris said. Kneeling beside him with visible effort. The buff had drained her too. "You actually did it."

"It broke," Kael panted. Gasping for air. "I didn’t win. I got lucky. It malfunctioned."

"You’re alive. In this place, that’s winning." She pulled out water from her pack. Made him drink. "Survival is victory."

"Survival by malfunction. Great. That’s going in my autobiography."

"Better than death by competence."

They rested again. Twenty minutes this time. Dangerous to stay in one place but necessary. Kael’s entire body shook with adrenaline comedown. The combination of injury, poison gas, and magical buff exhaustion hitting him all at once.

Seris monitored his vitals. Checking pulse, breathing, pupil response. Making sure the gas hadn’t done permanent damage. Making sure the buff hadn’t burned out his system. Making sure he was actually okay and not just functioning on willpower.

That’s when they noticed his shoulder wound. The one from the spike trap. The one Seris had healed thirty minutes ago.

The healing had closed it. Sealed the puncture wounds front and back. No more bleeding. No more open flesh. Just pink scar tissue that should have been the end of it.

But the flesh around the puncture marks was changing. The color shifting from healthy pink to something else. Something wrong. Faint blue spreading outward from the wound site.

Glowing slightly in the dim light. Like bioluminescence. Like infection that wasn’t infection. Like transformation.

"Seris," Kael said. His voice very carefully controlled. The kind of control that came from noticing something terrible and trying not to panic. "My shoulder feels weird."

"Weird how?" She moved closer. Professional assessment mode engaging.

"Like... tingly. Like something’s moving under my skin. Like it’s not quite mine anymore."

She examined it. Really examined it. Touching the affected area with gentle fingers. Watching how the blue glow pulsed. How it spread visibly even as she watched.

Her face went pale. "No. No no no."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​