Chapter 132: The Floor Could Be Lied To
The avatar took shape at the quarry entrance, whole and uninjured, while the real Glitch slept safely outside the Engine.
[Shattered Iron Quarry—Incomplete]
[Tremor Sense Fragment: 2/10]
[Fragments Required: 8]
Glitch arrived still nursing a grudge. In his opinion, webs were architecture pretending to be combat—a coward’s substitute for standing in the open and hitting something. The tunnel mantises had inherited the full weight of that resentment.
Jin did not send him charging in.
Their old method had worked against individual mantises, right up until one dying mantis hammered the floor and brought three more running. Throwing another rock and hoping every hunter reacted the same way would only recreate the problem with worse timing.
Elian had already shown Jin a better approach. The Chainweb Spider had controlled its arena by reading disturbances through connected threads, while the mantises read the quarry through vibrations in the ground. They did not truly see through stone; they interpreted the information the stone carried.
Which meant the floor could be lied to.
Jin began with small tests. Glitch tapped a solid stone shelf with one claw, and a buried trail beneath a dust-covered stretch turned smoothly toward the impact.
Next, he struck a patch of loose rubble. The stones shifted against one another and scattered the vibration, enough that the hidden trail wandered toward the general area instead of fixing on a single point.
Then Glitch hit one end of a rusted hauling rail embedded in the floor.
A faint groove moved beneath the dust farther down its length. The metal had carried the vibration much farther in one direction than the surrounding stone.
Jin kept testing until the quarry started to make sense. Solid stone gave a clear location, while rubble produced broad, confused noise. The hauling rails carried movement along predictable routes, and a rolling piece of ore could imitate something continuing to move after Glitch had already left it behind. Cracks and loose debris between stone shelves weakened whatever vibration crossed them.
He still could not see through the ground. All he had were shifting dust, moving grooves, delayed reactions, and the Engine’s warnings when several sources drew near, but that gave him enough information to work with.
At an excavation junction where three old hauling routes met, Jin found signs of at least three mantises buried somewhere around it.
Glitch rolled a heavy chunk of ore down the central channel. It struck the rail at regular intervals, sending a steady trail of impacts deeper into the passage, while several lighter stones followed a side groove and skittered like smaller prey in flight.
Glitch struck a solid shelf once, then crossed the loose rubble between the routes as the false signals competed around him. One buried trail committed to the rolling ore. Another followed the lighter impacts. The third remained near the original strike, searching the shelf instead of rushing after either distraction.
Jin watched their choices and adjusted. He wasn’t controlling them; he was giving each hunter believable information and letting instinct decide what mattered.
The result separated one mantis from the others and drew it beneath a solid stone shelf, away from the loose dust it normally used to disappear. Glitch closed in under the noise of the rolling ore, keeping his movement inside the mess of competing impacts.
The mantis detected something before he reached it. It surfaced cautiously, bladed forelimbs raised to control the narrow shelf.
Jin sent one quick scrape across the stone near its exposed side.
The mantis turned and extended one blade toward the false movement. For an instant, the softer joint beneath the limb opened.
"In. Under the blade. Harden!"
Glitch’s scales darkened as he drove beneath the extended forelimb. The descending blade chipped several scales from his back, but it failed to stop him.
"Acid Breath—the joint!"
Acid splashed into the exposed seam. The mantis convulsed and tried to retreat toward the loose ground, but Glitch cut off the route and slammed it against the solid shelf.
His jaws closed over the weakened seam at its neck.
[Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis Defeated]
[Stored Growth Acquired: Minor]
[Skill Fragment Acquired: Tremor Sense Fragment ×1]
[Fragment Completion: 3/10]
Glitch regarded the victory as definitive proof that he had defeated both webs and floors as concepts.
"You still lost to the web," Jin reminded him.
Glitch dismissed this as irrelevant historical revisionism and would not be entertaining it further.
Then the dying mantis hammered the stone.
Its final spasms rang through the quarry, and several distant trails turned toward the corpse. Jin sent the rolling ore farther down one route and knocked a pile of rubble into another, spreading competing vibrations through the junction. Most of the approaching hunters changed direction.
One did not.
It stopped beneath the floor and, instead of approaching, struck the stone from below in a deliberate rhythm.
A second mantis answered from a distant passage. Then a third responded from deeper within the quarry.
Jin went still.
The mantises weren’t using vibrations only to find prey. They were exchanging signals through the ground.
He had no way to know whether the rhythm meant danger, caution, or something else, but the response mattered more than the translation. The nearby trails slowed and repositioned instead of rushing toward the corpse.
The quarry did not contain a collection of isolated hunters. It contained a colony connected by the floor beneath them.
Jin studied the rhythm and decided to answer.
It was a dangerous test. A poor imitation could expose Glitch’s position or summon every mantis within range, but the pattern had already changed the behavior of the colony.
Glitch struck the stone in the same sequence.
Several distant trails hesitated.
The nearest mantis turned toward Glitch and began closing in.
Something in the imitation had failed. Jin replayed the impacts in his head and found one pause that had lasted too long, while the final strike lacked the weight of a blow delivered from beneath the floor.
The timing could be corrected. The missing weight was harder.
Glitch repeated the adjusted rhythm against the metal rail. It still could not reproduce the force of a subterranean strike, but the rail carried the pattern farther and blurred its exact origin.
One distant trail changed direction as though it had accepted the signal. The nearest mantis slowed, then surfaced beside the rail with its blades tucked close to its body while it tested the ground around the false source.
Suspicious, but out of position.
Jin would take it.
The mantis refused to chase the first stone Glitch sent past it. It stayed close to loose dust, ready to burrow, and kept its bladed limbs from fully extending.
Jin had Glitch strike the hauling rail again while circling across a cracked section of stone. The broken shelf carried his steps poorly, but not poorly enough.
The mantis detected him before he reached its flank and wheeled around.
"Harden!"
One blade glanced across Glitch’s darkened scales. Jin released the skill as soon as the strike passed, and Glitch immediately swept his tail through a pile of loose rubble.
Stones clattered across the mantis’s escape route, drowning the area in chaotic vibration while the ground beneath it shifted loose and unstable. The mantis tried to dive into the dust.
Its footing slipped.
Half a second. That was all Jin got.
"Now!"
Glitch lunged and breathed acid into the nearest gap in its shell. The mantis thrashed hard enough to open a gash along his flank before he forced it down and tore through the damaged seam.
It stopped moving.
The avatar stood over it with chipped scales and blood running down one side. Outside the Engine, Glitch’s sleeping physical body remained untouched.
[Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis Defeated]
[Stored Growth Acquired: Minor]
[Skill Fragment Acquired: Tremor Sense Fragment ×1]
[Fragment Completion: 4/10]
Four fragments. Nearly halfway.
Jin barely had time to register the progress before the quarry changed.
The second mantis’s death sent another alarm through the stone. Jin readied the ore and rubble, prepared to scatter the approaching hunters long enough for Glitch to withdraw.
Nothing approached.
Every visible trail stopped. No dust shifted toward the corpse, and the floor, which had not stopped whispering since Glitch entered the quarry, fell completely still.
Then a slow vibration rose from somewhere beyond the explored tunnels.
It repeated the rhythm Jin had tried to imitate.
This version was deeper and perfectly controlled. It travelled through the stone, entered the hauling rails, and rolled along distant passages with enough force for Glitch to feel it beneath his claws.
Every nearby mantis responded at once.
They did not gather around Glitch. The buried trails pulled back from the connected passages, moving aside as though clearing a route.
Jin stared at the emptying paths. Whatever the signal meant, the colony obeyed it.
Something deeper in the quarry had heard Glitch’s imitation and answered with a pattern none of the other mantises had dared ignore.
Jin had wanted to lie to the floor.
Something beneath it had noticed the lie.
One more controlled pulse rolled through the quarry, and then the presence began, unhurriedly, to move upward.