Expelled
1041 Words
He didn't even get a full minute to be angry about the map.
The dungeon made a sound he had never heard a dungeon make before, a low resonant groan that came from everywhere simultaneously, from the walls and the floor and the ceiling, as the whole structure had just remembered something important it had forgotten to do. The bioluminescent moss on the walls brightened sharply, two full shades, the blue-grey light going almost white.
He was on his feet before he'd decided to stand.
'What now,' he thought, with the exhausted sincerity of someone who had used up their capacity for surprise approximately three chapters ago.
The floor moved. Not an earthquake, not a structural collapse, something more intentional than either of those things. A pressure building from below, directional, focused, the specific quality of a force that knew where it wanted something to go and was not interested in negotiating.
It wanted him out.
'Okay,' he thought, 'okay, I'm going, where exactly am I supposed to—'
The pressure spiked.
He left the floor entirely.
Cold air.
That was the first thing. Real cold, the kind with wind in it, the kind that came from being outside in the early morning when the temperature had dropped overnight, and nobody had warned you to bring a jacket. He hit the ground on his side and rolled, the pack taking the secondary impact with the cracking sound of the frame giving up another structural argument, and he lay on actual concrete with actual sky above him, going a pale grey-orange at the edges that meant early morning, that meant dawn, that meant he was outside.
He was outside.
He sat up slowly and looked around.
A street. An actual street, empty at this hour, the kind of wide industrial road that existed in the parts of cities that hadn't been fashionable since before he was born. Warehouses on both sides, their facades the particular dirty beige of buildings nobody had found a reason to renovate. Streetlights still on, that pale sodium orange that made everything look vaguely unwell. The river was close; he could smell it, which meant he was in the eastern industrial quarter.
Veldmoor.
He was back in Veldmoor.
Behind him, at the mouth of an alley between two warehouses, the air had the faint residual shimmer of a Fracture that had recently been active. Already fading, the seam pulled itself closed with the quiet efficiency of something that had done what it needed to do and was no longer interested in being a door.
He watched it closely.
'Right,' he thought. 'So that's how that works.'
He sat on the cold concrete of an empty industrial street in the city he'd grown up in and had never left and took a full personal inventory, because it seemed like the appropriate response.
He had a Hollow class. He had Soul Bond, active and functional, the Hound's warmth steady behind his sternum, currently informing him that there was a cat somewhere in the alley to his left and that the wind was coming off the river at roughly northwest. He had Cartographer's Eye, which had already updated to map this street and the immediate surrounding blocks and was doing so with great enthusiasm and zero combat utility. He had Residual Absorption, active but dependent on finding another shell imprint, which was not something he could simply locate on demand. He had Record Sight, still locked, condition still unknown.
He had a utility knife, fifteen metres of usable rope, a cracked pack, one full ration bar, a canteen of water from a dimension that technically shouldn't exist, and an object from the citadel in his jacket pocket whose fractured memory he had been not-thinking about since he found it and was going to continue not-thinking about for as long as that remained a viable strategy.
He also had, somewhere in the documentation of the guild system, an F-rank designation with no class that had just become incorrect.
He thought about that last one for a moment.
'If you go back to the guild with a class,' he thought, 'they're going to have questions. The kind of questions that involve a lot of people in small rooms wanting to know where an F-rank porter got a class that isn't in any database.'
He thought about Yuna Seil. About the run, the collapse, the evacuation. He didn't know how long he'd been in the Record's interior. Long enough that the Fracture had closed behind him, which meant the post-collapse protocol would have run its full course. They would have logged the porters as unrecovered.
They thought he was dead.
He considered how he felt about that and found it was complicated in a way he didn't have the energy to fully process on a concrete street at dawn. On one hand, being dead was inconvenient. On the other hand, dead meant nobody was looking for him, nobody had questions, nobody was running his badge through a system that was going to return a very confusing result.
'Dead buys you time,' he thought. 'Not forever. But for now.'
He stood up, joints reporting their opinions on the last however-many hours, and brushed the concrete dust off his jacket. The street was still empty. The city was making its early morning sounds, the distant movement of the first transit cars, a dog somewhere, the river doing what it always did.
He started walking.
The Cartographer's Eye mapped the route as he went, laying it down in clean, accurate lines in the corner of his vision, marking the Fracture exit point behind him with a small notation.
He looked at the notation.
'At least you're thorough,' he thought, at the map.
The map did not respond. It added a point of interest near the next intersection, which turned out to be a twenty-four-hour convenience store, and he decided that was the first genuinely useful thing the skill had done and went inside and bought something hot with the emergency cash he kept folded in his boot and ate it standing on the street in the cold morning air of a city that thought he was dead.
It tasted like the best thing he'd ever eaten.
- Writer
