Chapter 139: The Floor Finally Spoke [Bonus]
Over the next two days, Jin returned to the quarry several times.
He watched every run because the method depended on timing, terrain, and recognizing when a hunter acted for itself or responded to an order. Once the pattern became familiar, though, the fights stopped needing to be written in his head as separate discoveries.
He found a section with bad transmission, drew in two or three hunters, then broke or degraded the clearest path carrying the commander’s rhythm. Anything that began tapping out orders died first, and Glitch left the moment the colony started concentrating around the sector.
That last rule kept the avatar alive more often than anything else. Jin could see the change in the quarry’s visible disturbances: scattered grooves stopped wandering, loose dust shifted into deliberate positions, and separate approaches began closing at the same time.
If he remained after that, the commander was no longer reacting to him.
It was arranging him.
The commander adapted faster than Jin wanted. After a few attempts, it stopped sending groups into enclosed spaces with only one exit, making two prepared collapse sites useless before Glitch ever reached them.
Single mantises began waiting motionless near likely weak supports, doing nothing except watching. Every trap gained a witness that had to be found and removed first.
Later, the commander used distant impacts to lie about numbers. Jin entered one gallery believing two hunters were moving inside it because two clear rhythms kept repeating through separate sections of stone.
There were five.
[Avatar Destroyed.]
[Respawning...]
Jin lay on his bunk in the dark and stared at the timer, thinking with complete sincerity that this was the best-designed enemy he had fought in either life.
He was going to be extremely pleased when it died.
The ninth fragment came from something he did not see.
An old sorting bay had three approaches. Two showed obvious activity, with dust shifting, stone ticking, and movement being almost aggressively detectable, while the third route appeared empty.
It was also the best route in the room: short, sheltered, and straight toward the bay’s only ore shelf. There was no reason for a colony that had spent several runs closing every useful path to leave that one untouched.
Jin considered the empty route, then sent Glitch nowhere near it.
He moved the avatar to the opposite wall and had him hammer the stone until the entire bay filled with overlapping impacts. Thirty seconds later, the empty approach stopped being empty.
A mantis had been standing perfectly still inside it. Glitch’s blows shook the wall beside its head until it surfaced, crossed the distance, and drove a blade into his already damaged flank during the first exchange, nearly ending the run there.
Glitch won by two centimetres and a Harden that activated late enough to make Jin’s jaw lock.
[Fragment Acquired.]
[Tremor Sense: 9/10]
[Avatar Condition: 12%]
The tenth fragment was almost ordinary, which was how Jin knew he had learned something.
He separated one mantis inside a flooded lower gallery, where shallow water, thick silt, and fractured stone blurred the commander’s signals. By repeatedly threatening the route between them, he kept the two nearest hunters away, then forced the isolated mantis into a fight that unfolded almost exactly as he had prepared.
No relay. No correction. No commander.
Only a large predator and a smaller one, alone in the dark, and only one of them had spent the last several runs learning how to create that situation.
[Fragment Acquired.]
[Tremor Sense: 10/10]
Ding.
[Fragment requirement complete.]
[Skill available: Tremor Sense]
[Assign to bound avatar? Y/N]
Jin pressed Y before the panel finished rendering.
[Skill Learned: Tremor Sense]
[Detects movement and impact transmitted through connected solid surfaces. Provides direction and approximate distance. Clarity scales with force of movement.]
[Limitations: Loose rubble, air gaps, fractured strata, water, machinery, and overlapping sources degrade or distort input. Does not identify targets. Does not detect stationary bodies.]
[Status: Digital avatar only. Real-world application requires Sync.]
Jin read the limitation line twice, because he had learned to.
No identification and no vision. It could tell Glitch that something large was moving through connected stone somewhere to the east, but not what the thing was, and the moment it stopped moving, the information disappeared.
That was still more than they had possessed before.
Then Glitch activated the skill, and Jin nearly dropped the phone.
The bond flooded.
It was not sound or sight. It sat beneath both, a rush of pressure, direction, weight, and distance arriving through every claw at once, and Jin flinched on the bunk as the quarry poured through Glitch and reached him secondhand.
Mantises moved through stone the camera could not see. Gravel settled inside an old shaft, a distant impact travelled along the rusted hauling rail like a signal through wire, and water shifted somewhere below while loose plates rubbed against one another.
Under everything else, slow and heavy, the commander’s rhythm travelled through the deeper quarry.
Glitch locked in place and made a high, confused sound Jin had never heard from him before. His head snapped toward several directions in the space of a breath.
"Hey."
Jin sat up. His hands were shaking slightly, which he chose not to acknowledge.
He pushed a steady impression through the bond: the floor beneath Glitch’s claws, harmless and familiar. Nearby movement arrived sharp, distant movement soft; ignore the soft pressure and find one thing close.
It took time for the panic to narrow and the flood to separate into pieces. Glitch finally pressed one claw against a stone plate, focusing on the faint scrape of something moving beyond the next wall.
A direction and a rough distance. One useful answer instead of the entire quarry at once.
The satisfaction that followed was so enormous that Jin had to look away from the screen.
"Yeah," he said. "You’re very good. Stop."
The last thing the quarry gave him was not something he had gone looking for.
Once Glitch could separate nearby motion from background noise, Jin tested the skill deliberately. Glitch struck the floor with his tail, held perfectly still, and listened to the vibration travel through connected stone.
Most of the pulse returned quickly from walls, supports, and broken shelves. Part of it went downward and did not return for much longer.
Glitch struck again, this time against a length of buried rail. The impact ran through several descending passages before spreading into an open space beneath the mapped sectors, and although the returning vibration was too distorted to provide a shape, the delay made one fact clear.
Something large existed below them.
It was not another narrow mining passage, but a chamber or connected hollow wide enough that the far boundaries were difficult to read. When Jin tested the nearby routes, each approach toward that lower space shifted the commander’s heavy rhythm. Ordinary mantises changed position, and routes closed.
Jin reviewed the recent runs with a growing feeling he did not enjoy. The scarred commander had never pursued Glitch toward the surface with the same commitment it showed whenever he moved deeper; again and again, it had placed itself or the colony between him and the descending routes.
Jin had interpreted that as hunting.
It was not hunting him.
It was guarding a doorway.
[Shattered Iron Quarry: Incomplete]
Jin stared at the message for a while, then withdrew the avatar, closed the dungeon, and placed the phone face-down on his chest.
In his last life, he had learned exactly what happened to people who entered one more room after deciding they were done.