Chapter 137: The Quiet Room
The avatar stood at the mouth of the excavation chamber, and Jin lay on his bunk with the phone held above his face, one arm going numb.
He shifted the arm. Not the plan.
[Shattered Iron Quarry—Incomplete]
[Avatar Condition: 100%]
[Tremor Sense Fragments: 5/10]
Five. Four had come during the earlier runs. The fifth had cost him more effort than the first four combined.
He looked at the chamber again.
Two approaches. The wide one came in from the main junction, past the rusted hauling rail that ran along the eastern wall and disappeared into the passage beyond. The other was a crack in the southern face, barely tall enough for Glitch to squeeze through on his belly.
The floor was the important part. Old blasting had shattered it into loose plates that sat on each other without touching properly. Vibration went into that stone and came out somewhere else, late, or not at all.
And the passage above the junction was held up by a single support column. Corroded. Cracked at the base. Something a mining crew had abandoned in a hurry and never come back to fix.
Jin had walked the avatar through this chamber several times across his recent runs without fighting anything inside it.
He was not going to trick the colony. He had tried that. He had spent several attempts trying to imitate the commander’s rhythm, and the commander had answered by rearranging every hunter in the sector inside forty seconds, which was how Jin learned that the scarred mantis could tell the difference between an order and an impression of one.
So he had stopped trying to talk to the colony.
He was going to hang up on it instead.
He only needed three of them. Three ordinary Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantises, in this room, temporarily unable to hear their commander.
Glitch stretched his neck out and made a low, interested sound in the back of the link, the one he made when Jin opened a ration tin.
Not yet, Jin thought. Slow this time.
The interest did not go away. It just settled, the way a cat settles.
He tapped the movement command.
The first mantis found them ninety seconds later, which was about right.
Glitch had been walking the eastern gallery with his weight forward, letting his claws scrape instead of setting them down clean. Not loud. Just careless. The kind of careless a thing makes when it does not know the floor is listening.
The mantis came up through a side shaft and froze at the top of it, forelimbs folded, the long segmented head swiveling.
Then it struck the floor once with a bladed limb.
Crack.
Reporting in. Jin had learned to hate that sound in a very specific way.
He pulled Glitch back toward the chamber. Not fast. He had made that mistake in an earlier run and the commander had simply refused to send anyone, because nothing in a quarry runs from a single hunter unless it wants to be followed.
So Glitch retreated badly. He clipped a rail post with his shoulder. He put a foot wrong on a slope of gravel and slid a body length, which cost him real seconds and looked exactly like a beast that had misjudged the terrain, because it was.
The mantis followed.
Behind it, deeper in the quarry, the heavier rhythm started.
Boom. Boom-boom.
Jin’s jaw tightened.
The commander was not sending the colony. Jin could hear that much in the spacing. When he had first entered the quarry, he would have read those impacts as an alarm. Now he watched what happened after each one.
Thin ridges rose beneath the mineral dust in separate passages. Gravel trembled at two junction mouths. Another patch of loose stone shifted, then went still.
At least four more hunters were moving into positions around the chamber.
Not chasing.
Waiting.
The commander knew Glitch was bait. It was setting the same trap that had killed the avatar during the previous failed run, when Jin had entered a corridor that looked open and discovered it was only the inside of a mouth.
He had expected this. That was why the ore was already in place.
Glitch swept his tail through a heap of loose slag on the way past. A fist-sized chunk of ore shot across the flat stone toward the northern passage, bouncing, rolling, and tapping.
The mantis behind them checked. Its head snapped toward the north.
Meanwhile, Glitch crossed south over the broken plates with his weight low and spread. The shattered floor swallowed most of what his body was doing.
Boom.
A single correcting impact came from somewhere deep.
Two separate lines beneath the dust changed direction almost at once. The commander had recognized the false trail.
Almost at once was not the same as immediately.
By the time the correction reached them, the first mantis was already through the junction, and two more had entered behind it while repositioning toward the northern route.
Three.
Inside the room, or close enough.
Jin breathed out through his nose and started the actual work.
It went wrong in the first four seconds.
The third mantis did not come through the junction. It came through the southern crack, which Jin had marked as a Glitch-sized gap and had therefore filed as an exit rather than an entrance.
An Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis is not built like a mantis on Earth. It is built like a tool for getting through places, and it got through.
It was in the room and folding open before Glitch had crossed half the distance to the support column.
Shk.
The blade came in from behind and to the left, at the angle Glitch could not turn into.
[Harden — Active]
The obsidian plating along Glitch’s flank flushed grey and thickened, and the blade skated off it with a sound like a shovel on concrete instead of going through him.
It still hurt. Jin felt the flat spike of it through the link, the way he always did, muffled and secondhand and enough to make his shoulder twitch on the bunk.
Move, he sent.
Glitch moved.
He did not turn to fight it. He took the hit, let the impact carry him sideways, and used the momentum to close the last four meters to the base of the support.
[Acid Breath — Active]
The spray hit the corroded steel where it met the floor plate and the metal started to go soft and dark, sagging like wax.
Glitch did not wait for it to finish. He put his shoulder into the column and swung his tail into the same spot at the same time, and the softened base folded.
Crack.
Then a sound with no letters in it, a long grinding collapse as the passage above the junction let go.
Stone came down across the main route in a wall. The hauling rail buckled, snapped at a joint, and half of it vanished under the fall with a scream of tearing metal. Dust swallowed the chamber and erased every visible clue beneath the floor.
Jin sat up on the bunk.
There was no reason to sit up. It simply happened, and then he was in the dark of his dormitory room with the phone in both hands and his heart doing something undignified.
The dust thinned.
The main junction was buried. The rail ended inside the collapse. Broken plates had shifted apart, leaving gaps where there had been a continuous path before.
Then another heavy pulse reached the chamber.
Glitch felt the vibration through his claws, but it reached him unevenly—strong beneath one foot, faint beneath another, and nearly gone at the shattered edge. The rubble had broken up the signal instead of carrying it cleanly through the floor.
It wasn’t cut off. Just distorted.
Bad reception, not silence.
That was enough.
Before the collapse, the three mantises had been working like a squad.
Jin had watched them do it in every failed run. One took the front, one held an angle, one waited on the escape route, and if Glitch broke toward a gap the third was already standing in it. They covered each other’s blind sides. They never both committed at once.
Nine seconds after the collapse, two of them ran into each other.
An ore fragment settled somewhere in the rubble and both mantises turned toward it, and both of them started moving toward it, and their forelimbs tangled at the shoulder joint for half a second before they separated and pivoted apart with the offended jerk of two people in a narrow corridor.
The third had not moved at all. It stood at the eastern wall with its blades half-raised, head tilting, waiting.
Jin watched it wait.
It was waiting for an instruction that was not going to arrive in a usable state.
So it’s orders, he thought. Not puppetry.
That was the answer he had come down here for. The scarred commander was not driving their bodies. It was talking to them, constantly, through the quarry floor, telling them where to stand and when to close and which angle to cover, and they were following the way a good soldier follows.
Cut the line and you did not get three empty shells. You got three lethal animals with excellent instincts and no plan.
Which was still bad. But it was bad in a way Jin could work with.
Glitch’s opinion arrived through the link as a warm, smug swell.
Jin translated it without effort. He had been reading Glitch’s feelings long enough that the meaning arrived whole: They are much better like this. Somebody should tell them.
"They’re not better," Jin said out loud, to a phone, in an empty room. "They’re worse. That’s the point."
The smugness did not change at all.