Hollow System Ascension

Dead weight

The wall caught him without sympathy, without any structural interest in the softness of the thing hitting it, and he felt every inch of it.

He slid down it and stayed down for a moment, not because he'd decided to but because his body was running its own assessment and hadn't cleared him for standing yet.

His back reported something serious that turned out, on further inspection, to be serious bruising rather than serious damage, which was a distinction that mattered enormously right now. His pack had taken the primary impact again, the frame cracking along one side, the load distribution doing its job one more time.

‘I've got to stop using this thing as a shield,' he thought. 'It's going to run out before I run out of problems.'

He got up anyway.

The figure hadn't moved from the centre of the chamber. It stood in the same posture as before ,that patient absolute stillness ,watching him through the visor with whatever was behind it. The pressure it radiated hadn't diminished. If anything it was more concentrated now, focused.

Directly at him.

It raised the gauntleted hand again.

'Move,' he thought, and did, throwing himself sideways along the wall as the second concussive shape released and took a section of carved Record-text out of the wall where he'd been standing.

Fragments of the dark material scattered across the floor, the impressions of centuries of careful inscription reduced to debris in a single casual gesture.

He kept moving, using the wall as a reference, putting distance between himself and the impact point while he thought.

'It's not trying to kill you,' he thought, and then revised immediately because that was an optimistic reading. 'Or it's not trying to kill you efficiently. It could have hit you with the first one if it wanted to. It hit the wall.'

He wasn't sure if that was reassuring or more frightening. A thing that hit walls instead of people because it was calibrating ,because it was deciding how much force was appropriate ,was in some ways worse than a thing that simply attacked. It implied patience. It implied judgment. It implied something with a mind.

The third strike came from a different angle.

He felt it before he saw it ,the Hollow Hound's senses registering the pressure build-up a half-second before his own did, giving him just enough time to drop beneath it rather than take it in the chest. It passed over him close enough that his hair moved and hit the far wall with a c***k that resonated through the chamber floor and into his palms.

He came up in a low crouch and put one of the alcoves between himself and the figure. The sword in its mount was at eye level. He looked at it for a moment.

'Don't,' he thought. 'You don't know what that is or what taking it means. Don't pick up objects in places you don't understand.'

He kept his hands to himself and moved to the next alcove.

The problem was simple and total.

He had nothing that worked against this. The rope trick, the thermal blanket misdirection, the terrain manipulation ,all of it operated on the assumption that his opponent was working with limited information, limited senses, predictable behavior patterns he could map and exploit.

The figure in the centre of the chamber had detected him the moment he walked in and had been patient enough to wait for him to see it first, which was not the behavior of something with limited information. It had hit a wall instead of his body with its first strike, which was not limited accuracy.

It had changed angles on the third strike, which was not a predictable pattern.

He was not going to outmaneuver this the way he'd outmaneuvered the Hollow Hound. That had worked because the Hound was fast and committed and could be fed a false prediction.

This thing was operating with a margin so wide that feeding it false predictions was like showing card tricks to someone who was a master conjurer.

'So what do you have,' he thought, moving between alcoves, keeping the figure in his peripheral vision. 'Honestly. What do you actually have?'

A utility knife. Rope. A cracked pack. A medkit. The Hollow Hound's senses, which had given him the half-second warning on the third strike that had kept him alive.

He thought about that. The half-second.

The strikes weren't instant. There was a build-up phase ,brief, but present.

The pressure gathered before it was released, the way all system-based abilities gathered because that was the physics of how soul energy converted to kinetic output. He'd read the papers on it. Conversion had a minimum cycle time regardless of rank ,it decreased as rank increased but it never reached zero. Even SS-ranks had a tell if you were calibrated to read it.

He wasn't calibrated to read A-rank tells. His own senses weren't fast enough, and his experience with high-rank combat was exactly what it had always been, which was none.

But the Hollow Hound's were.

'Can you read it?' he thought, directing the question inward, feeling slightly absurd doing it. 'The build-up. Can you feel it before it releases?'

The presence behind his sternum shifted. That quality of focused attention, turning toward the figure in the chamber the way it had turned toward the air current earlier. Reading it. Assessing.

A response came ,not words, nothing as clean as words, more a quality of yes that arrived as certainty rather than language.

'How early,' he thought.

The response was less clear. A duration he couldn't translate into seconds, an instinctive unit of measurement that didn't map to anything he used. Long enough, maybe. Maybe not.

'Okay,' he thought. 'That's what we have. Let's find out what it's worth.'

He stepped out from behind the alcove.

The figure's visor found him immediately. He walked toward it, not fast, not slow, straight across the chamber floor, his hands visible, the knife still on his belt. His heart was doing something he was choosing not to focus on.

'You want its attention,' he thought. 'You have its attention. Now think.'

The chamber was circular. The alcoves ran around the perimeter at regular intervals ,twelve of them, he counted, evenly spaced, each one a recess roughly a metre deep.

The figure stood in the exact centre, which meant the distance to any alcove from where it stood was identical in every direction. No positional advantage to be gained from the layout. The floor was flat and unobstructed. The ceiling was too high to use.

He stopped fifteen feet from the figure and looked at it directly.

Up close the pressure was worse. Not unbearable ,he was still standing, still thinking, which he took as a minor victory ,but present in a constant physical way, like standing at the base of something tall with the wind coming off it. The armour was more detailed than he'd seen from a distance.

The surface of it had marks, the same columnar Record-text as the walls, but these ran along the joins of the armour plates, following the edges the way circuits followed paths. Whatever the figure was, it had been inscribed. Deliberately. Someone had taken time with it.

'You're not just an apparition,' he thought. 'Are you. You're a Record. Someone put you here on purpose.'

The visor gave him nothing.

He took another step forward.

The pressure built ,not a strike, just an increase in the ambient weight of the figure's presence, a warning with the economy of something that didn't need to make warnings explicit. He stopped. Held position.

'You attack when I move past a certain point,' he thought. 'The alcoves are behind that threshold. You're guarding the alcoves. Or guarding something past them. Or you're guarding the whole chamber and anything inside it and I crossed the threshold the moment I walked through the gate.'

He took a step back.

The pressure didn't decrease but it stopped increasing.

'Or you're testing me,' he thought. 'Like everything else here seems to be testing me.'

He looked at the visor, the dark material that revealed nothing, and thought about a carved handprint at the base of a structure outside, human-sized, pressed deep enough to be deliberate, left by someone who had walked through this same space before him. Someone who had been here first and had left marks behind and whose marks were everywhere in this space if he was reading it correctly.

'What did they do,' he thought. 'When they stood here. What did they figure out that I haven't yet?'

The figure raised its hand.

The Hollow Hound's presence spiked ,the pressure build-up, the conversion cycle beginning, that half-second window opening ,and Cael moved, not away from the strike but perpendicular to it, along the circumference of the chamber, keeping the distance from the figure constant rather than increasing it.

The strike released and he was already outside its vector, the concussive force passing through the space he'd been occupying and continuing until it hit the far wall.

He kept moving, circling, watching the figure track him.

'It adjusts,' he thought. 'But not instantly. There's a recalibration between strikes, same minimum cycle time as the build-up. It can't chain them without a gap.'

He filled the gap. He needed to know how wide it was.

He moved faster.