Lux heard it first, the crackling give of stone under feet. Within all their minds, her heart rate spiked, hormones surged, her pupils dilating in a futile attempt to gain a little more imagery of the world as she spun, Samina’s grip on her arm pulling free as she too spun, searching for
something
that would have set her friend off.
Everyone else looked as well, each falling unthinkingly into the formations that had been forced into them by years of war against one another—those positions that would allow the best vantage points when pranks rained down on them—and their long hours fighting in mixed teams through their classes and training with the clones. The strongest fell into their positions at the front, prepped as could be to shred the world with perfectly synchronized defensive skills and junk. So much experience, fighting shoulder to shoulder. It didn’t matter that some of them had been enemies in the most forced of senses until just hours before, nor that a few of them were still eyeing up Halen with suspicion and animosity—in this, they would be united.
Skills that Halen and Emilia had haphazardly collaborated on for class vibrated through each of them, priming their defensive skills to line up perfectly so they would leave neither any spots open for assault nor overlap and cause skills to flitter out as their use of the aether crossed and battled.
The weaker members of their group stepped back, prepared to support those who would protect them. In their group, no one was so weak they wouldn’t be capable of taking the spot of any frontline member against most opponents, of course. Even Janie could manage, and she knew perfectly well that she was by far the weakest member of their group. Really, out of all the people here, she was probably the one most people had questioned coming. Mikhail was more suited for this than she was. Yet, the only one most of their group thought really shouldn’t be there was Leerin, and that was more personality and motivation based than anything else.
Still, Janie stood strong behind Simeon, himself filling something of a pivot role, able to take another’s place with nary a thought, able to surge forward and strike out with brutality if needed, able to cut off blood flow and hold an ally down as they screamed through a necessary and impromptu medical treatment without flinching under the strain of their pain—not that their odd motley of people with medical training were likely to make doing such a thing necessary.
It all amounted to the fact that he was one of the most powerful members of their group, his Dyadism pushing his awareness of the world far beyond that of anyone else in their group, save perhaps Coral who in a situation like this would have instantly been able to tell whether Lux was hearing things or not, whether whatever was sneaking up on them had the benefit of human thought lingering in their mind and movements. It was impossible to sneak up on Coral, who would be able to feel the emotions of anyone who stepped within range. There were rumours, of course, of people who could push their emotions so empty that even people with Excess Empathy Levels couldn’t detect them, but those were just rumours, and while Simeon knew never to not expect the worst, it would still shock him to stumble across a living myth here.
Simeon would have liked Coral there now, his own awareness of the foreboding dark not coming back with the presence of people, but certainly coming back that there were
things
lingering in the black. Small and skittering up walls, sliding into holes so small that his eyes couldn’t even make them out with {Starlit Eyes}. Larger things scurried through thin passages in the walls, weaving their way through thousands of tunnels that he didn’t really know what to think of. They’d all been given the results of Valor and Taelor’s recon skills, combining with his own awareness and everything Samina could see and each small detail members of their group focused on. Different people saw different things, and together, their map was coming along to betray each small detail of the cave system.
The exoskeletons lingering over the ground, cracking with each tentative step—Simeon might hate sound, but he wasn’t stupid enough to keep his sense of it muted for more than his friends’ voices under the current circumstances. The excrement caked beneath bone. The holes—so many holes and so many things crawling in and out of them, dragging corpses and live victims into their tiny cave systems to snack on.
It was odd, however. Simeon loved caving, and while few of his friends enjoyed it enough to go with him into more than the local caves they’d grown up exploring, he knew how they shifted with life. Insects and other small animals dug and burrowed, while cave ins shifted the land, closing up holes while forming new ones. There was always some evidence to be seen of the shifting of dirt and rock from more than passing feet, but here… there didn’t seem to be any. Even the dripping water they occasionally came across seemed to simply… be. There was no erosion from the constant drip from streams above—thank you to those in their group who had microsparked around mapping the land above, so they’d have a better idea of what lay above their heads. Instead, it seemed as though the water were just dripping, causing no shift in the stone that wrapped around them, almost as though the cave—the stone that supported the overwhelming weight of the world above—were trapped in time.
It was… disturbing, and throwing off his sense of the world. Something about the cave system was wrong—off. His best guess was that the myths were correct: these caverns and the cities below them had been created by the Lowdouran or some other irregular deviation, their abilities leaving
something
behind in the rock that was messing with his senses—possibly, it was what had caused the aethernet to cut off so decisively as well.
Samina was the first to break the silence of their position, as they waited for something—anything—to jump out of the dark and attack them.
“I don’t see anything.”
There was no bite of condemnation in her the shift of her hands, although the speed at which everyone relaxed betrayed what they were all thinking: that Lux was already on edge, so of course, she would jump at nothing.
That was the unfortunate thing about this situation, Simeon would think later, a thought most likely shared by everyone else in their group but none would never give voice to. Lux was on edge, and it was easy to brush aside what she heard as nothing. While she might have been the last to relax out of her defensive stance—relax back into the ball of tension she had already been as they worked through the cave system—even she laughed about it.
Her muttered sorrys were followed by everyone telling her it was fine.
“Better to be wary than not,”
Janie signed, everyone defaulting into signing for the moment, even when Simeon wouldn’t fault them for speaking their conversations. It were as though some part of them knew Lux was right: something was lingering in the dark, sending crackles of sound surging towards them, tiny tumbling pebbles breaking over their brains because the small creatures living blind in these caverns were definitely big enough to cause noise, but it was suddenly too much sound, their everything too focused—or not focused enough—and picking up ever small sprinkle of sound.
Their silence didn’t help the echo of sound that worked itself way around them. Still, whenever Simeon’s senses or Samina’s eyes caught the source, it was always something normal—as normal as eyeless bugs the size of forearms could be, anyways. Through mutual agreement, those of them who could locate things like that didn’t mention them, didn’t include them in their maps and intel. Lux hated bugs on good days, and if she found out insects that big were living within these caves…
“I’ve never seen anything like some of these creatures before,”
BJ noted, squatting down to glare into a pool of silvery water that sent the light of the small skill he’d activated scattering over the walls to create a beautiful mosaic of light and stone and sticky trails of insect goop.
“I downloaded a bunch of information on Lüshan’s ecosystems and shit before we left, and there’s nothing like these things in any of it. I know this place is kinda isolated… but we’re not that far down, right? So, how is it this isolated?”
“It’s possible we went down an unused tunnel…”
Valor signed, jaw clenching with the reality that they might have gone down the wrong tunnel—one that would never lead to Emilia.
“If these things are trapped down here, and see little interaction with anything that isn’t native to the caves, its possible nothing gets close enough to disrupt it or move it to other locations.”
“That water also isn’t water,”
Samina added, hands moving with the stutter of amusement.
“I think it’s toxic, so don’t touch it… unless you want one of our other medical personnel trying to save a limb.”
“Please don’t touch it,”
several people signed in unison, resulting in the translation via Halen’s function blowing up bigger and bigger until it popped.
On the edge of their group, Sorvell—who they had run into at the SlideLine Transfer Station and somehow ended up dragged along with them—jumped. As he had virtually no knowledge of their sign language, his Censor had been hooked into BJ’s, the two of them having met a few times in passing when they were both bothering Doctor Vickers—BJ because he was interested in medicine and always had a million questions or had somehow ended up accompanying an injured person to the clinic; Sorvell because he didn’t seem to like his brother and if he had to be home, he had to be bothering his older brother. With little knowledge of their sign language or the way people in their group created functions, he hadn’t known what to expect of it when so many people’s signs overlapped.
“Why does it do that?”
he asked through their group relay.
“Emmie would have made it that way,”
Halen told him, explaining that because he was treading into her domain—not to mention a domain she had previously refused to step into herself—he had added a few things to the function that just
seemed like her. “They can be disabled,”
he added.
“We take safety seriously, and while that sort of thing is funny when nothing dangerous is happening, we wouldn’t want someone to get hurt because of some silly gimmick. It can be manually disabled; otherwise, it hooks into your Censor’s danger monitor, and will auto-disable if the level gets too high.”
“Most of our skills and functions do things like that,”
Darrian added, having finally gone to manhandle BJ away from the potentially deadly pool of liquid. It was pretty, but falling in while they waited for Taelor and Valor to map out this newest crossroads would be rather terrible.
“A bunch of Emmie’s skills say or do random things when activated, but only if the situation isn’t serious.”
“That’s… responsible?”
Sorvell messaged, his gaze focused somewhere far off down the tunnel they’d just come from.
Simeon followed his gaze, stepping closer to try and see what the older man was looking at. None of them knew Sorvell well, as he had been grown by the time they had begun to wander the city with either no chaperone—usually Malcolm or an older clone—trailing after them as they made a nuisance of themselves. A man without a place in the world, Sorvell had spent the last few decades living an extended gap decade, wandering from place to place. His father didn’t seem to care in anything more than a
I’m concerned my child isn’t happy
way, while Doctor Vickers seemed to actively hate his brother and the empty life he seemed to always be accusing the younger Vickers son of living.
Still, he knew that Sorvell had a knack for getting into trouble. Nothing as much as their friend group was capable of, but enough that the way he was glaring into the darkness put Simeon on alert. His own senses sharpening, sharpening, until he was sure his nose might burst into a bloody mess from the strain. Still, he pushed harder, searching for whatever had pulled Sorvell’s attention enough that he didn’t even flinch when Taelor called them to get moving again.
Something
was down there—Simeon knew that, but he couldn’t make it out any better now than he could before. Go back and look, or go forward and wait for it to catch up?
Unbidden, Simeon’s Censor pulled up the other creatures that had been found lingering in the cave system, unmatched to anything in BJ’s records of Lüshanian fauna. What other sorts of things might be lingering down here, stalking them through the darkness? Monsters existed in their world, rarely seen, as they tended to be.
How easy it would be, for a monster to be lurking in these forgotten walls, just waiting for prey to find it.
.
!
Arc 9 | Chapter 421: paranoia snaps, like bones beneath our feet
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