Chapter 138: The Second Voice
He took the near one first.
Glitch scraped across a spill of loose rubble on the western side, hard and obvious, and the nearest mantis snapped toward the sound and came.
At the same time Jin sent Glitch’s tail down on a flat plate twelve meters off, one heavy strike, and the second mantis turned toward that instead.
They arrived from angles that did not agree with each other.
The near one came in high with both blades. The second one crossed its line at the last instant, and for one moment the pair of them were a tangle of overlapping limbs, each blocking the other’s swing.
Glitch went low.
He took the edge of the near mantis’s strike across his hardened back and let it skid, and while the thing was still committed with its forelimbs up he was already underneath it, at the pale seam where the forelimb met the thorax, the one soft place on an armored digger.
[Acid Breath — Active]
The seam smoked. The mantis shrieked, a thin metallic sound, and tried to fold its limb down to protect the gap, which was exactly the wrong shape to be in.
Glitch caught the damaged joint in his jaws and turned his whole body.
Snap.
[Fragment Acquired.]
[Tremor Sense: 6/10]
Jin exhaled and lay back down. His arm was still numb. He switched hands.
The two survivors reacted differently, and that was the second thing he learned.
One of them kept hunting. It circled wide along the eastern wall, picking its own route, checking angles it chose for itself. Dangerous, competent, alone.
The other one stopped moving and struck the floor.
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
Jin’s thumb paused over the screen.
It was the commander’s rhythm. Not well. It was like listening to somebody hum a song they had heard once, all the notes in roughly the right places and none of them in the right size.
But the hunter answered it.
It changed its route. It shifted its angle four meters north and settled into a position that closed off the rubble slope, and it did it because the other mantis had told it to.
Oh, Jin thought. That’s annoying.
He put the phone down on his chest for a second and looked at the ceiling of his dormitory room, where somebody two floors up was dragging furniture.
So the network did not depend on one voice. Cut the commander out and the colony did not go deaf. It just got quieter, because any mantis close enough to see the problem could pick up the rhythm and pass it along at a fraction of the strength.
A relay.
He could have spent another six runs studying that. He had that instinct, and he knew exactly where it came from, because in his last life he had once spent nine hours mapping a spawn table for a cosmetic item.
He did not have nine hours. He had two more mantises and an avatar with a cracked plate on its left flank.
So he found the relay instead of understanding it.
It was not hard once he knew to look. The relay stayed farther back. It struck the floor between movements instead of during them. And it was not adjusting its own position at all. Every correction it sent moved the other one.
Jin marked it.
Then he told Glitch to ignore the mantis that was currently trying to kill him.
The refusal came back immediately and with feeling. The near enemy was near. The far enemy was far. Glitch had opinions about which one deserved attention, and none of them were subtle.
The loud one is the problem, Jin sent. Trust me.
A pause. A grudging shift in the link, like a shoulder being turned.
Glitch broke west, away from both of them, low and fast toward the collapsed junction.
The hunter followed hard, closing the angle, and the relay struck the floor twice to redirect it.
Then Glitch reversed.
He cut back across the shattered plates at full speed, and the relay’s correction went into the floor and came out late and wrong, arriving after Glitch had already crossed the line it was meant to close. The hunter turned toward a position Glitch had left two seconds ago.
The relay saw him coming and did not run.
That surprised Jin. It should not have. A thing that gives orders knows what happens to the thing that gives orders.
It tucked its joints in tight and made short, defensive strikes, never extending, never chasing, keeping its seams covered and its back to the wall. Glitch went at it twice and got nothing but ringing shell both times, and picked up a new gash along the muzzle for the effort.
[Avatar Condition: 61%]
So Jin stopped attacking it and threatened the route instead.
He walked Glitch two steps toward the gap between the relay and the collapsed passage, the only direction that led back toward the rest of the colony, and the relay moved to protect it.
It had to. It was a relay. Cut off from that direction it was just a mantis.
The moment it stepped out of the corner, Glitch dragged a foot through the loose stone in front of him, scattering grit across the floor in a hissing wash that buried the timing of his own approach in a hundred small false impacts.
The relay struck out early, at where it thought he was.
He was lower than that.
[Acid Breath — Active]
He came up under the blade and put the spray into the lower seam, then followed his own head in.
Crack.
[Fragment Acquired.]
[Tremor Sense: 7/10]
The last mantis lost its second voice in the middle of a step.
It did not fold. It came at Glitch alone and it very nearly won, because an Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis on its own is still a thing that has been killing in the dark since before the shelter had a name. It opened the avatar’s shoulder to the muscle and got a blade tip past the plating on the ribs.
But it could not hold the escape route and attack at the same time. There was nobody left to stand in the gap.
Glitch let it drive him toward the southern crack, took the hit that came with it, and pivoted at the wall so the mantis’s momentum carried it past.
He killed it from behind, through the same seam, because there was only ever one.
[Fragment Acquired.] [Tremor Sense: 8/10] [Avatar Condition: 34%]
Jin looked at the number.
Then he heard the other thing.
BOOM.
Not a signal. A blow. Something very heavy was hitting the blocked junction from the far side, in a slow, patient, measured rhythm, and dust was sifting down from the ceiling of the chamber in thin grey ropes.
BOOM.
The rubble shifted. A fist of stone rolled off the top of the fall and cracked on the floor.
Two fragments left. The chamber was empty, but the commander was already dismantling that advantage one blow at a time.
Jin tapped the southern exit.
The objection that came back through the link was the loudest thing he had felt from Glitch since the commander first destroyed the avatar. Not fear. The opposite. The scarred one was there, finally close, finally on the other side of a wall instead of somewhere out in the dark rearranging the world, and Glitch wanted to be waiting when it came through.
Jin thought about it for exactly as long as it took to look at the avatar’s condition bar.
Last time we fought it without knowing what it was, he sent, we lasted about as long as it takes to regret something.
Glitch went out through the crack.
He complained the entire way.