Chapter 1058: Chapter 1058 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 4
The first ten meters were silent as the darkness gave ground when the light from Hikari’s beast was pushing it downward as they went.
The walls of the widened opening carried the marks of the bit that old transit Ren had read from above: not the marks of deliberate excavation but of many bodies passing through the same space, compressing and displacing rather than cutting or digging.
The number of mutants must have been insanely high.
The entrance to the first chamber was below them.
The presences Ren had read from the surface were clearer now. The first ones seemed weak, the kind of mutant left in the rear when the main movement had already passed through, different from the kind that came in an active incursion: they were just there without the urgency of something in motion, with the diffuse presence of something occupying the space simply because the space was available.
The first chamber was more a logistics problem than a combat problem.
The golden sprouts that had made the external descent require carefulness and sustained attention couldn’t penetrate the ruin walls. That was one of the specific properties of the material composing ancient structures: a resistance that didn’t correspond to any mineral in conventional classification, which produced the practical effect that what happened inside the ruins and what happened outside operated as two systems that didn’t communicate through the walls.
Whatever grew and moved and consumed in the surface world stopped at the stone boundary.
The enormous Gold 3 growths didn’t fit through the first door in any case; it was the narrowest opening in the sequence, like designed for something else entirely.
What was inside were the mutants, large but not that large to be unable to pass.
Low Silver, the great majority. In numbers that made the first chamber dense in a way that left almost no empty space in the underground area, the concentration of presences building up from things that had been in the same place for long enough without having any reason to move.
Yet they were active despite this.
The group saw them before the mutants fully processed that the group had arrived.
"Are they hugging each other?" Mayo asked, with the tone of someone who had noticed something strange and was trying to make it entertaining.
They did look strange; more active than the situation required, like they were trying to be on top of each other, and they had damage marks.
Not the marks of combat against human defenders, the kind they normally accumulated at the wall. These were the marks of something that had attacked to eat, with the specific shape of bites that only another member of the same species produced, and with absences of tissue that corresponded to parts that had been consumed rather than simply damaged.
Consumed because they were nowhere to be seen.
"They’re eating each other," Liora said.
"And they appear to be doing it systematically," Ren said. "Not out of desperation; as if something ordered them to eat without fleeing or defending themselves."
The distinction mattered. Animals that ate each other out of desperation did so when the environment left no other option, but they defended themselves and reacted to pain. What he was seeing here had no defensive reaction, and the organization of it suggested something that had occurred with enough frequency for the survivors to carry multiple layers of marks, which meant the process wasn’t recent and wasn’t an event but a state. An ongoing selection, not a crisis response.
"We can’t understand everything in the first chamber," Lin said, from the air before touching down. "We better clear and advance."
It wasn’t an instruction that needed additional motivation.
The Mantis activated the wind element with the efficiency of her new rank, the improvement perceptible in the first movement: greater range, greater precision, lower cost per unit of result than Silver 3 had allowed in ways Ren had been noting from his wall defense position for weeks.
The wind blades she produced weren’t the most visually impressive output available, but they were exactly correct for a space where the chamber width made area coverage more relevant than individual power, and the Mantis at Gold knew the difference.
Liora’s spirit fire came from the other axis.
Not the ordinary fire that consumed oxygen, but the spiritual kind, which had that quality of purification that made mutants with unstable internal corruption respond to it differently from conventional flame. The ones that came into contact with it didn’t simply receive damage; something in their corruption system responded to the contact and accelerated the collapse of whatever was holding them together.
The internal structure failed faster than the external structure.
The combined result of the two techniques reduced what would have been twenty minutes of close-range clearing to something considerably shorter, the kind of efficiency that came from two outputs that were each effective individually and happened to amplify each other in the overlap.
The guards and Lin covered the flanks with the coordination of a group that didn’t need additional instructions to know what their function was in a formation they had already discussed.
The first chamber cleared.
♢♢♢♢
The second chamber was the same situation with one variable changed.
Silver mid-rank. The same cannibalizing marks, the same kind of concentration that mutants produced when they had been in the same space long enough following the same order. Still not a challenge in the sense of requiring anything different from the group.
But the base level was different, and that difference showed not only in the resistance they offered but in how they responded to being attacked. The low Silver had reacted with the simple reactivity of something operating on basic instinct. These had something slightly more organized, the kind of response that indicated something in the system was providing minimal coordination rather than each individual operating independently.
Not enough to make them difficult... Enough for Ren to take note of it.
"Someone or something is giving them structure," he said, while the second chamber cleared with the same efficient process as the first but took marginally longer. "What they have isn’t instinct."
"Selthia?" Liora asked.
"It fits," Ren said. "The ruin as a controlled space. The mutants as test material."
Nobody in the group found that comforting. It also didn’t change what they had come to do, so the group continued.
Third chamber: high Silver.
