He took his hands off both surfaces, and the overlay shuddered hard, not the incremental degradation of the previous absorptions but the total structural response of a system whose load-bearing support had just been removed entirely, and he ran.
Hollow Step was active before he'd consciously engaged it.
That was the first thing he understood about it, that it wasn't a skill he activated the way he activated Heat Veil or Residual Absorption; it was a condition, a state of his movement, his body operating in the overlay's space with the complete awareness of dimensional layering that the synthesis had produced. Every step placed with a precision that bypassed calculation entirely, the ground and the failing overlay architecture and the real-world surfaces reasserting beneath it all read si
