Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 124: The Escape (3)

Tank said nothing.

Kael said nothing.

Seris said nothing.

Whisper reached for the notepad and stopped, because the notepad communicated information and information required a recipient who could use it and the current recipient was a calculation that Marcus had already completed and that no amount of written words was going to revise.

Six people ran through the massacre site in the silence of people who had just received a calculation they could not argue with.

The dissolution continued in the walls on either side of them.

The ceiling continued its fracture work above. The floor cracked below.

The countdown had fifteen minutes on it and the entrance had more than fifteen minutes of distance in it and the six people running through the massacre site understood all of these facts simultaneously and ran anyway because running was the only available response to facts you could not revise.

Then the bee lifted from Zeph’s shoulder.

Not the navigation hover.

Not the combat orientation.

Something else. Something that none of the prior moments had produced because none of the prior moments had required it.

The compound eyes oriented not toward the floor or the walls or any specific threat but toward the space itself—the dimensional-energy field of the corridor, the fabric of the space they were moving through, the modified physics that had been the facility’s operational substrate since before any of them had entered it and that was now failing the way the facility was failing.

The bee oriented toward the space the way it had oriented toward the Harvester in the Core chamber—with the quality of something that had identified a problem and had a function that addressed the problem and was preparing to perform the function.

The wings began to vibrate.

The frequency was different from the Dimensional Anchor—different from the locking vibration that had stopped the phase and made the Harvester solid and expanded to catch all four fragments inside its radius.

Different from the Chronostasis cone that had slowed the charge to a crawl and reduced the recombination to ten percent speed.

This was a third frequency, lower and more sustained than either of the others, a vibration that arrived in the body not as the effect of a change but as the change itself—the quality of the surrounding space shifting around the vibration the way the space had shifted when the Anchor locked it and the cone slowed it, but differently. Not locked. Not slowed in the targeted sense.

Something broader. Something that was not aimed at a target within the space but at the space itself.

The corridor slowed.

Not them. Not Zeph, not Tank, not any of the six people running through the massacre site with the knowledge that the arithmetic said they were not going to reach the entrance before detonation.

The facility’s time began operating at a reduced rate while their time continued at normal rate—the ceiling pieces that had been falling at intervals falling slower, the fracture lines extending through the floor stone extending slower, the structural failure that had been proceeding at the pace of a facility with fifteen minutes remaining proceeding at the pace of a facility that had considerably more than fifteen minutes remaining because the space the facility occupied was now experiencing time at a fraction of the rate that the people moving through it were experiencing time.

The ceiling piece that had been mid-fall when the bee activated the frequency continued its descent. At a tenth of the speed it had been descending at. It passed through the slowed air with the specific quality of things moving through a medium that had decided to offer more resistance than air normally offered, the fall continuing but the fall taking longer, the stone arriving at the floor well after the six people had passed the point where it landed.

"The bee just bought us time," Zeph said.

"Literally," Marcus said.

He was looking at the slowed ceiling pieces, at the fracture lines extending through the floor stone at a quarter of their prior rate, at the walls continuing their dissolution at the reduced pace of something operating in time that had been stretched to provide six people with the interval they needed.

The information broker’s assessment was running—

"It has applied the Chronostasis effect to the facility itself rather than to a target within it," he said.

"The time-slow field is not targeting the falling stone or the fracture propagation. It is targeting the facility’s time as a distinct system from our time. We are moving at normal speed through a facility that is moving at a fraction of normal speed." He paused. "The detonation countdown is also in the facility’s time."

This last piece of information distributed itself through the six people running through the massacre site with the specific quality of information that changed the calculation it had been added to.

"How long can it maintain this?" Kael asked.

"Long enough," Zeph said.

He did not know this with certainty. The bee had been alive for not quite long.

Its capacities had been demonstrated across a single combat encounter and a navigation function and now a third ability that none of the tablets’ descriptions had fully specified. He did not know the bee’s limits.

He said long enough anyway because the bee had been accurate about everything it had done since emergence and because the alternative to long enough was a calculation that Marcus had already completed and that nobody in the corridor was interested in returning to.

They ran through the slowed corridor with the quality of people who had been given back something they had not expected to get back.

The massacre site passed around them at the facility’s reduced pace—the walls continuing their dissolution slowly, the absorbed surfaces reclaiming what they had in contact with slowly, the horror of it present but moving at a speed that the running could stay ahead of.

The ceiling above them continued to fracture slowly. The floor continued to crack slowly. The facility was failing at the pace of something that was going to finish failing on a timeline that had been extended by a fist-sized bee vibrating its wings at a frequency that had not previously existed in the documentation of any awakened ability that any of them had encountered.

[5 MINUTES REMAINING]

Then light.

It appeared at the corridor’s end and it was everything that several hours of this facility had been accumulating toward—not the dimensional-energy light of the Core sphere, not the bioluminescent blue of the corridor pools, not the failing output of systems losing their power source in patches as the facility’s infrastructure withdrew into its substrate.

Real daylight.

The light of a sun that had been present and unchanged for the entire duration of everything that had happened inside this building, arriving through the entrance with the indifference of something that had not been inside and did not know about any of it and was simply there because it was always there.

One hundred meters. The entrance they had come through several hours ago.

"There," Tank said.

They ran toward it with everything six people had left after several hours of running and fighting and surviving a facility that had been comprehensively hostile to their continued existence since the moment they entered it.

The body found capacity that the previous hours of expenditure had indicated was unavailable—the sight of daylight performing a function on exhausted physiology that exhaustion alone could not perform, the specific reserve that the presence of a visible exit unlocked in people who had been inside a lethal space for so long and could now see the outside.

The burned hands found their grip.

The cracked ribs bore the weight without the ongoing consultation they had been conducting about the weight since the side corridor.

The one arm did the work of two because the daylight was one hundred meters away and the one arm understood what one hundred meters between it and outside meant.

The depleted mana and the empty CP counter and the several hours of everything ran toward the entrance at whatever speed all of that could produce when the entrance was visible and real and one hundred meters ahead.

Sixty meters. The ceiling fractures in the slowed corridor were still spreading—slowly, at the bee’s imposed pace, the network extending through the stone with the reduced urgency of something operating in compressed time. The pieces that fell from the fracture lines fell slowly enough that the navigation around them was navigation rather than reaction.

Fifty meters. The floor blazed blue-white through the cracks below them, the facility’s lifeblood pressing against the failing stone from below, the light from beneath their feet brighter than anything remaining in the walls or ceiling.

Forty meters. The Wildlands filled the entrance—specific, detailed, real. The trees were individual trees. The sky was the sky. The quality of outside resolved from concept into place with the completeness of forty meters between them and it.

Then at that very moment, the ceiling came down.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​