Hollow System Ascension

Stroke of genius

It hadn't attacked yet. It was in that animal-assessment phase, the way predators got when they were deciding whether the cost was worth it.

Cael's heart was going at a rate he didn't find helpful.

'Think,' he thought. 'Think first, panic later, let's just think.'

No weapons. Porters weren't permitted to carry anything above a utility knife; it was guild regulation and for liability purposes. He had one on his belt that was good for cutting core casings and rope and precisely nothing else.

No combat skill. No aura. An F-rank physical stat line that meant he was slightly below average human strength and slightly above average human perception, which had always seemed like a cruel joke, good eyes and nothing to do with them.

But he knew the Hollow Hounds. He'd read the papers. He'd watched them on every run where they'd appeared, catalogued their behavior while the Awakened were busy doing other things.

'Warmth and vibration,' he thought. 'That's how they hunt. Poor visual acuity. Thermal sensitivity in the muzzle and the exposed sternum. They commit to a vector of attack based on thermal gradient; they move toward the warmest point in their detection radius.'

He looked at the hound. He looked at the space around it. He looked at the configuration of the columns, the hollow and the exit corridor.

'Okay.'

He unslung his pack.

"Don't move," he said quietly. "Any of you. As still as you can."

"Cael," Jiso started.

"'Still.'"

He pulled the emergency thermal blanket from the front pocket , foil-lined, rated for exterior exposure in collapse scenarios, designed to retain body heat. He rolled it once between his palms, warming it, then crouched down and tucked it around the largest rock he could find at his feet. A chunk of granite the size of his head, rough-edged, fallen from the column.

'Warmth source. Stationary. Right of the exit corridor.'

He looked at the hound. Its muzzle was tracking.

'Come on,' he thought. 'You know you want to.'

He slid the rock across the floor , not throwing it, no vibration spike, just a slow lateral push that sent it scraping across granite with the foil catching the violet ambiance and the trapped warmth bleeding off it in a gradient the hound's muzzle would read like a signal flare.

The hound's head swung right.

Then its whole body swung right.

It moved toward the thermal source in a straight committed line , which took it past the exit mouth, which put its back to the corridor, which gave them roughly four seconds of window before it figured out the rock wasn't a meal.

"Now," Cael said, not loudly. "Single file. Don't run until you're in the corridor.”

Minho had Jiso up before the word was finished. Six years of dungeons, the man knew a window when he saw one. Darae went second, smooth, controlled, her eyes on the hound's back. Cael went last, and as he passed the threshold of the hollow he made the mistake of looking back.

The hound had its nose on the thermal blanket. It would take about two more seconds to decide it had been deceived.

'Move,' he told himself. 'That was actually good, move before you ruin it.'

They moved fast through the closing Nave, Minho setting the pace because Minho's pace was always correct. The columns were closer now. Cael could feel the compression in the air against his eardrums, a constant subtle pressure, and the floor was doing something that wasn't quite shaking , more a slow, periodic shudder, like a heartbeat.

it felt like the space around them was in its death throes.

He could see the threshold light at the end of the corridor , that particular quality of the real world bleeding in through the exit seam, ordinary daylight that he had never in his life been so glad to see.

Two hundred metres. A hundred and fifty.

'We're going to make it,' he thought, and the thought was careful, provisional, not wanting to commit to it. 'We might actually—’

The collapse hit the floor a second before it hit him.

It wasn't like a wave. It was more like a switch , the resonance energy moving

through the dungeon's structural layer and then through him. His legs stopped. Not buckled, not cramped.

'Stopped,'

Mid-stride, the signal between his brain and his body had been interrupted at the source. He hit the floor shoulder-first and lay there in the particular confusion of a body that doesn't understand what just happened to it.

'Get up,' he thought.

His legs didn't respond.

'Get up right now, get,'

Nothing. From the waist down, complete stillness. He could feel the floor against his legs , sensation was there , but the command to move was going somewhere and not arriving.

'Paralytic resonance effect,' said some part of his brain that apparently never stopped filing things away. 'The papers mentioned this. Rare, but documented. Fracture energy interfering with the nervous system's motor pathways in non-Awakened individuals. F-ranks are also susceptible, no aura shielding, no systemic resistance.'

'I read that', he thought. 'I read that and I filed it under unlikely circumstances.'

He would have to change a lot of the things he had filed under unlikely when he got out of here.

If he got out.

He revised his filing system, lying on the floor of a collapsing dungeon.

"Cael." Darae's voice, from somewhere ahead.

"Go," he said. His voice was level, which surprised him slightly.

"What—"

"The exit is a hundred metres. Take Jiso. Minho, take Darae, she'll argue. ‘Go.’

A pause. A short one, which he appreciated.

"Minho," Darae started.

"He's right," Minho said, quiet and final, and then there were footsteps moving away, which was the right thing, which was the correct outcome, which he had wanted.

Cael pressed his palms flat on the floor and tried to drag himself forward. It worked, slowly, at a cost, the granite floor taking whatever skin it could from his forearms.

The ceiling groaned. A section of stone dropped from it twenty metres to his left, hitting the floor with a c***k that he felt through his palms.

'Four minutes,' his system had said.

He didn't know how long ago that had been.

The threshold light was ahead of him. He could still see it. 'Come on,' he thought, dragging. 'Come on, come on, come on.'

The second section of ceiling came down directly above him.

He didn't see it. He heard it , the c***k of the beams above losing their structure and succumbing to gravity, and he had just enough time to understand what the sound meant before the weight of it hit and the light went out and everything became very dark.

'Oh,' he thought.

That was the last coherent thing he thought for a while.