Chapter 133: The Quarry Had Learned to Lie
The vibration rolled up through the quarry floor like a hand pressed flat against the world.
Glitch froze mid-step on the ledge. Below him, in the dark, every nearby trace of mantis movement stopped at almost the same moment. Dust settled over one shifting groove, loose stones ceased trembling along another, and for a beat the quarry seemed to be holding itself perfectly still.
Then the disturbances moved apart.
Jin sat up in bed.
He didn’t do that often. It was, in his personal ranking of physical effort, somewhere between walking to the kitchen and a scam. But he sat up because the entire quarry had just changed behaviour in one beat, like a room of soldiers coming to attention.
Something was climbing through the passages beneath Glitch.
"Okay," Jin murmured. "Out."
Glitch’s tail struck the stone once. Through the bond, the objection arrived immediately and without words—a hot, bristling demand for a reason from a small black lizard who had been having a perfectly good evening murdering bugs.
"Because I don’t know what it is, where it is, or what it does," Jin said. "Three unknowns. That’s not a fight. That’s a coin flip with extra steps. Move."
Glitch moved.
He didn’t like it. He went anyway, which was the part that mattered.
The quarry told Jin what was coming before it showed him.
He’d spent enough runs down here to know the rhythm of the place. Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantises hunted alone. Each one carved its own patrol through the broken stone, felt for footsteps, and mostly ignored its neighbours.
Now they stopped behaving like separate hunters.
On his screen, three telltale grooves in the mineral dust changed direction at once. Not toward Glitch, but toward positions that closed around his likely routes. A junction that had been open all evening vanished beneath a fresh ridge of disturbed rubble, while two other passages emptied.
Tk. Tk-tk.
Controlled impacts travelled up the old hauling rails—the rusted iron tracks the mining crews had left behind, running through the tunnels like a nervous system nobody had bothered to remove. Loose rubble shifted in several places, none of them near each other, all of them at the same time, until the overlapping disturbances turned the floor into noise.
Jin watched that noise and felt his stomach sink.
Whatever was coming wasn’t simply hiding. It was hiding inside the colony, using other bodies to smear its position across the entire quarry.
"Huh," Jin said. "Rude."
The emptied passage sat there in the dark, wide and clear and beautifully convenient, running straight back toward the dungeon entrance.
Jin looked at it for a long moment. Yesterday, he had lost a tournament match to Elian Voss, who had left him exactly one open route through a web. Jin had walked into it knowing it was bait because every other option was worse.
He was not in a hurry to do that twice in two days.
But he also wasn’t going to reject the passage merely because it looked good. Paranoia was just as manipulable as trust. That was the actual lesson, and he was still chewing on it.
"Test it."
Glitch nosed a fist-sized stone to the lip of the passage and rolled it in. It clattered thirty metres down the slope and came to rest.
Nothing surfaced. Nothing struck. No visible disturbance followed it.
Jin frowned and tried the other side of the question. "Rail. Left one. Hit it once."
Glitch’s tail slapped the iron.
Tang.
Two patches of disturbed dust reacted immediately. One trail near the north wall pivoted toward the sound, while loose grit lifted somewhere farther east as another buried hunter changed direction.
Neither reaction entered the open passage.
Neither even turned toward it.
Jin’s mouth went thin. An empty corridor was suspicious. An empty corridor the colony was carefully declining to notice was a signed confession.
"Yeah, no," he said. "We’re not doing the polite door."
He picked the ugly route instead: a cracked stone shelf running along the eastern wall, split by old subsidence into separated slabs. He’d crossed it before and remembered it specifically because it had carried Glitch’s footsteps badly. Broken stone transmitted vibration poorly, and every gap in that shelf was a gap in the colony’s hearing.
Glitch got four steps onto it.
Thoom.
A heavy pulse came up through the floor from somewhere below and behind, low and even, nothing like the scattered movements of ordinary mantises. Fresh grooves formed in the grit on either side of the cracked shelf.
The hunters didn’t charge or surface. They slid into place beneath the stone at both ends of the crossing and stopped, closing Jin’s one bad-transmission route like a pair of hands.
"...Okay," he said slowly. "So it talks."
He changed direction.
Quietly, he also stopped thinking of this as a retreat and started thinking of it as a match.
He tried four things on the way out.
First, he sent ore down a channel. Glitch tipped a scatter of loose iron chunks into a sloped side passage, and they rattled away in a long, convincing spill of footsteps-that-weren’t. Several disturbances broke toward it.
Then the deep pulse came again from below, two beats, and every one of them stopped and turned back before travelling far.
Recalled. Jin had seen guild handlers whistle dogs off a scent with less obedience than that.
Second, he had Glitch strike a rubble pile hard enough to fill an entire gallery with broad, directionless noise—the trick that had bought him clean escapes in earlier runs.
The mantises did not search the noise.
Instead, they spread around its edges. Jin saw dust and loose stones shift at several exits before everything settled again, leaving the openings watched.
They were waiting for something to walk out.
Jin stared at that for a second. "That’s learned behaviour. You’re not supposed to be able to learn that."
Third, he used the hauling rail. Glitch struck it twice at one end so the impact would carry the length of the track and place his false position somewhere else.
The rail answered him.
Three heavy strikes came back down the same iron, spaced unevenly, each one strong enough to drown his signal completely. Whatever had hit that rail possessed a limb built for breaking stone.
His pattern didn’t merely lose.
It got erased.
Fourth, he returned to the broken-shelf idea and found another separated slab farther north, where the gaps were wider and vibrations should have died almost completely.
The ordinary mantises began striking the surrounding surfaces.
They weren’t attacking. They were simply hitting stone, a steady, scattered percussion that filled the area with enough interference that Jin could no longer read the visible disturbances clearly.
They were laying down cover.
Under that cover, something large was moving, and Jin could not tell where.
He sat in the dark of his bedroom with the phone light on his face and finally admitted the shape of the problem. The thing down there had not simply heard Glitch’s false signals. It had watched him use them.
Noise to misdirect. Rails to displace. Broken ground to go quiet.
Now it was turning all three methods back on him, only better, because it had something Jin was never going to have.
The colony obeyed it.
Jin could make vibrations. He could not make orders. He didn’t speak whatever this thing spoke, so all he could do was watch the physical responses afterward and guess backwards from them.
He was playing a control game against an opponent with an entire unit roster.
"All right," he said. "Straight line. Entrance. We go home and think about it."
Through the bond, Glitch pushed back hard—a bright, ugly spike of wounded pride, followed by a vivid impression of turning around, finding the hidden creature, and striking it at least once.
"You’ll get to hit it," Jin said. "Later. When I know what it is."
Glitch’s tail lashed, but he ran.
Two hundred metres from the entrance ramp, the passage closed.
An Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis punched up through the floor and unfolded into the corridor, mineral carapace grinding as it filled the gap from wall to wall. Bladed forelimbs. Head low. The same ordinary species that had killed Glitch during his first quarry run.
It hadn’t found him.
It had been put there.
Jin could see that in the way it held the corridor. It wasn’t hunting. It was blocking, planted across the only clean route out while the rest of the colony repositioned somewhere behind him.
A delay.
Which meant he had a clock.
"Fast," Jin said. "Seam under the left forelimb. Same as always."
The mantis’s head twitched.
Jin caught it—a small, sharp turn back down the corridor toward an arriving vibration. For half a second, its attention wasn’t on Glitch at all.
It was listening to instructions.
There.
"Wall—right side—now."
Glitch’s tail cracked into the right-hand wall.
Crack!
The mantis pivoted toward the stronger impact.
Glitch came from the left.
The blade came down anyway, reflex-fast, and Jin was already talking.
"Harden!"
Black scales tightened, dulling to matte grey a half-beat before the edge landed. It skidded off Glitch’s shoulder instead of opening it, tore a shallow line, and Glitch was inside its reach with his weight low.
He drove it into the narrow wall. Stone dust burst around them as the mantis’s body struck hard enough to rattle the passage.
The forelimb came up to reset and exposed the seam beneath—that soft, unarmoured joint every one of these creatures possessed and protected poorly.
Glitch breathed.
The acid went in.
Hsssss.
The mantis spasmed once, folded, and went down hard enough to shake grit from the ceiling.
[Iron-Shell Tunnel Mantis Defeated]
[Stored Growth Acquired: Minor]
[Skill Fragment Acquired: Tremor Sense Fragment ×1]
[Fragment Completion: 5/10]
Halfway.
Glitch got approximately one second to feel good about that. The bond went warm and smug and insufferable, all wounded pride temporarily replaced by the satisfaction of having killed the thing in front of him.
Then the dying mantis’s limbs began hammering the floor in a chaotic death signal that rolled out through the stone in every direction at once.
Jin braced for the noise to draw the other hunters.
They didn’t come.
Something else used it as cover.