Chapter 76: Everyone But Her
Kei checked the VDU .
The count sat where the slaughter had left it — twenty-five thrill points , banked , level-ready , the small clinical notation of advancement deferred sitting beside the number where Epoch had placed it and where Kei had told her to leave it . Twenty-five was enough . Twenty-five was more than enough . Five points made a level , and he had five levels’ worth waiting in the dark of his own accumulation , unspent .
He asked Epoch the question in his mind without sound , the way he asked her everything in the fissure where any sound at all was the wrong sound .
How long to level .
*[ APPROXIMATELY ONE HOUR , ]* Epoch said . *[ THE PROCESS IS NOT INSTANTANEOUS . LEVELING INITIATES A MORPHOSIS — THE BONE STRUCTURE AND THE INTERNAL BIOLOGY REVISED TO HOLD THE NEW ATTRIBUTE INCREMENTS THE LEVEL PRODUCES . THE BODY MUST BE REBUILT TO CARRY WHAT THE LEVEL ADDS TO IT . ONE HOUR , MINIMUM , DURING WHICH THE BODY IS OCCUPIED WITH ITS OWN REVISION AND IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR OTHER USE . ]*
A pause in the VDU , the specific pause Epoch took before she said a thing she considered obvious .
*[ NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR IT . ]*
" I know , " Kei thought .
An hour spent rebuilding his own skeleton inside a tree surrounded by a feeding apex and nineteen apparitions still forming was not a plan . It was a way to die mid-revision , a body halfway between what it had been and what it was becoming when the thing outside finally turned its pale eyes toward the bleeding tree . He left the level where it was .
But the points did not all have to wait on the level .
" Assign four , " he told Epoch . " Deftness and muscle . Both to twenty . "
---
Epoch did it .
The allocation was not the morphosis — no rebuild , no hour , no body taken offline for its own revision . Only the increments , distributed into attributes that already existed , the difference small enough that the architecture absorbed it without ceremony . Deftness from eighteen to twenty . Muscle from eighteen to twenty . The two combat attributes maxed , the points spent into the parts of him that the next hour might actually require him to use .
Kei felt it as lightness .
Not visible — the Umbral Carapace held his body the same as it had a moment before , the Tier-4 plate unchanged on the outside — but beneath it , the sinews of his muscles tightening , strengthening , settling into a new baseline the way a drawn cord settled when it found its correct tension . The deftness arriving as a quieter thing , a sense of his own joints and tendons having become incrementally more willing , the body fractionally faster than it had been at the start of the thought .
*[ SPEND SOME POINTS IN APPEAL ALSO , ]* Epoch said .
Kei ignored it .
Appeal was not deftness . Appeal did not drive a blade into the base of a neck or carry him across a forest floor faster than a frightened beast could run . Appeal was a number that did nothing the next hour would ask of him , and he had a feast forming outside and a body to keep useful , and he turned his attention back to the VDU and the things in it that mattered .
*[ YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO STAND BESIDE HER IF YOU COULD NOT CATCH UP , ]* Epoch said .
Kei went still .
Not a large stillness . Nothing that would have shown to the watchers along the seam , nothing the fissure’s dark did not already hold . Only the specific internal stillness of a man whose attention had been caught by exactly the thing it had been built not to be caught by — the poker face holding , the thought behind it not holding at all .
He did not answer her .
He thought of a number .
Three .
Epoch made a sound .
It came through the neural architecture and not the air , and it was almost a sound a thing made when it had won a small private thing and was declining , out of mercy or strategy , to say so — the suppressed almost-laugh of an intelligence that did not have a body to laugh with and had produced the nearest available equivalent anyway . And then she allocated three thrill points to the appeal attribute , and the number moved from twelve to fifteen .
Kei felt nothing of it except a slight movement in his cheekbones .
The faint structural adjustment of an attribute that expressed itself in the face , the bones of it resettling by some increment too small to see and too small to matter — and he ignored that too , the way he had ignored her , and asked her about the skills .
---
*[ FOUR MANUALS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE AT YOUR CURRENT LEVEL , ]* Epoch said , the register returning to the clinical , the won thing set aside . *[ INFILTRATION ARTS . DISGUISE ARTS . ANGAM ARTS . DISSECTION ARTS . NEW MANUALS WILL BECOME AVAILABLE WHEN YOU LEVEL . ]*
Kei spent four points .
All four manuals . The infiltration and the disguise and the angam and the dissection , bought together in a single allocation , the assassin’s toolkit completing itself another four pieces at once — the thrill points draining out of the bank into the acquisition the way capital drained when a man had decided that the thing he was buying was worth more held than hoarded .
*[ NOTED , ]* Epoch said . *[ A QUALIFICATION . PURCHASE IS NOT PROFICIENCY . YOU HAVE ACQUIRED THE MANUALS . YOU HAVE NOT LEARNED THEM . THAT REQUIRES THE MIND PALACE — I CAN GENERATE THE PROPER SIMULATION ONLY THERE , THE TRAINING ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH THE SKILL IS DRILLED INTO THE BODY UNTIL THE BODY OWNS IT . UNTIL THEN YOU CARRY FOUR MANUALS YOU CANNOT YET USE . ]*
" I will do it , " Kei thought . " Once we are out of this . "
*[ AGREED , ]* Epoch said .
The VDU resolved the accounting .
*[ THRILL POINTS : 14 — LEVEL-READY ×2 — ADVANCEMENT DEFERRED .*
*FIEND POINTS : 24 . ]*
Fourteen left . Two more levels’ worth still banked even after the spending , and the twenty-four fiend points sitting beside them in the count where the night’s kills had placed them .
" The fiend points , " Kei thought . " Can I buy anything with those . "
*[ NONE THAT I CAN CHECK AGAINST MY DATA MODULE , ]* Epoch said . *[ THE FIEND POINTS REGISTER . THEY ACCUMULATE . BUT MY CURRENT MODULE HAS NO PURCHASE FRAMEWORK FOR THEM — NO EXPENDITURE I CAN RESOLVE . THE MODULE WOULD REQUIRE AN UPGRADE BEFORE ANYTHING IS PURCHASABLE WITH THIS CURRENCY . AND THE UPGRADE REQUIRES THE DATA PACK FROM THE COMPLETION OF THE TRIAD MISSION . IF YOU REMEMBER . ]*
" I remember , " Kei thought .
*[ GOOD , ]* Epoch said . *[ YOU BETTER . OR YOU KNOW THE CONSEQUENCE . THE MISSION UNCOMPLETED BY THE DEADLINE AND MY PARASITIC PROGRAMME ACTIVATES AUTOMATICALLY — MERGES WITH YOUR BRAIN , PRESERVES ITSELF AT THE COST OF WHAT YOU ARE . I WOULD PREFER THE MUTUALISTIC ARRANGEMENT . I AM TELLING YOU SO THAT YOU CONTINUE TO PREFER IT ALSO . ]*
Kei heard it .
He did not reply .
He looked outside instead .
---
The starter had been consumed .
The five apparitions that had finished forming first — the five-course opening of the feast Kei had set — were gone , drawn into the circular mouth one after another with nothing left of any of them , not a thinning shape , not a residue . And the Choir-Eater that had eaten them was not the creature it had been when it dropped from the canopy . It had been twenty meters then , a full continuous length pouring down through the gaps in the bleed bark . It was roughly seventeen now . The six segments it had shed to chase the fleeing four had not come back — the molting’s cost present in the body’s reduced length , the apex predator three meters shorter than it had been an hour ago , slower for it , and apparently indifferent to the trade .
Its autonomous segments ran the kill-ground .
The shed sections wriggling between the sites where the nineteen unformed apparitions were still manifesting — patrolling , tracking , keeping the parent body apprised of the darkness as it gathered itself into new derived shapes across the forest floor . A distributed hunt . The slowed parent at the center and its discarded pieces ranging outward , and between them a coverage of the kill-ground more complete than the whole creature could have managed alone .
One apparition manifested .
A little distance from the joined tree — closer to the Team Noctis hideout than any had yet formed , the volatile darkness pulling itself upright at a kill-site near enough that Kei marked the distance with the part of his mind that always marked distances . The Choir-Eater noticed it . Not by turning the forward eyes — the noticing came through one of the shed segments near the new apparition , the telepathic thread between the parent and its discarded pieces carrying the location back , and the parent body responding to information its own eyes had not gathered .
Its middle segments arched .
The long body bending upward into a semicircle , a coiled tension , the specific predatory pose of a thing about to leap — the seventeen meters of it loading itself toward the apparition near the tree , the maxillipeds orienting , the pale eyes along the arched segments fixing the new course .
And then the forest changed .
---
A huge rustling of canopy leaves .
It came from the northwest — the sound of many bodies moving fast through the upper canopy at once , the Hemoth Pine and the bleed bark crowns thrashing with the passage of things moving through them , and beneath the rustling a cacophony rose : hisses , chitters , the layered acoustic disorder of a great many creatures making a great many sounds at the same time , all of it from the northwest , all of it growing closer by the minute .
Team Noctis took notice .
Along the seam , the watchers turned a portion of their attention toward the sound — keeping the buffet in one eye and the northwest in the other , the discipline of concealment holding , the bodies in the fissures not moving even as the new threat announced itself from a second direction . Something was coming . Something loud , and biological , and not alone .
The Choir-Eater remained indifferent .
The sound was not shadow . The hisses and the chitters and the thrashing canopy belonged to flesh , and the Choir-Eater did not hunt flesh , and so the rising cacophony from the northwest was to it no more than weather — a thing occurring in the forest that had no bearing on the feast in front of it . Its arched body completed the motion it had begun . It leaped .
Seventeen meters of segmented chitin crossing the distance to the newly formed apparition and landing on it — the black trunk pinning the volatile darkness to the forest floor beneath its weight , the head lowering , the circular mouth opening into its pout , the drawing beginning . Another course taken . The buffet indifferent to the noise , continuing.
Doctor saw them first .
The positional advantage of a fissure he had chosen higher than the others — higher than the ground, the vantage of a man who selected his observation points the way he selected everything , for what they let him see — and his eyes finding the northwest source before any of the others’ did .
" Ah , " Doctor said .
The warmth in it changed . Not gone . Sharpened .
Coming from the northwest , running — running toward the hideout , running ahead of the cacophony that was their pursuit and not their company — was Team Umbra .
Kei’s perception caught them a breath behind Doctor .
The twenty at perception placing the moving figures against the bloodglow-lit dark before his eyes had finished resolving them , and he peeked from the fissure , and he saw them — the team that had taken the north path at the division and gone where Noctis had not , arriving now out of the wrong direction at the wrong hour , driven off whatever plan they had held by whatever was chittering through the canopy behind them .
Rapax . The High Cleric of their team . The Rite Cleric . Asp .
Kei’s eyes moved across them once , the operational count running before the recognition finished — and the count came up wrong .
Everyone was present .
Everyone but her , Rada .
