Chapter 151: The Least Relevant Number
The chamber was the widest space they had seen since entering the fracture, thirty meters across, with a broken floor that had been at least two floors once.
The good air came from a fissure on the far side, high up in the rock, and Tally would not stop pointing at it.
Between them and it was a surface Jin distrusted immediately.
It was not one floor. It was a lattice of collapsed slabs resting on each other over a lower level, with gaps you could see through in places, and one long slab in the middle that formed the only continuous line across.
He did a check, and did not like it.
"The whole floor’s loose. It’s a stack of things leaning on each other. And there’s a void underneath, and it’s not empty."
"Where?"
"Under. All of it. It’s been through here."
Then the far lower wall gave them a look at it, and after that nobody needed Jin’s checks to know anything.
There was a break in the rock at the base of the chamber’s north side, three meters wide, opening onto the lower level.
Something went past it.
Jin’s first impression was that a wall had started moving. A plated back, dark and segmented, each plate crusted over with pale crystalline growth in knots and spurs, sliding through packed earth and broken stone the way a boat goes through water. It did not tunnel so much as *displace*. Rock cracked ahead of it and closed behind it.
It went past the gap for four full seconds.
Then it was gone and the chamber was still shaking.
Ren made a small noise and put his hand on Anvil’s back and kept it there.
Jin brought up his phone, because it was the one thing he could do.
The perception filter did what it always did — a boring grey utility interface to anyone glancing over, a public appraisal query for a Fifth Class support student — and he ran the query against the Association’s open beast register with the visual he had.
[Public Register — Probable Match]
[Veinback Burrower]
[Quality: Bronze — Ordinary]
[Combat Rank: 1 — Novice (upper)]
[Subterranean. Mineral-feeding. Locates deposits by vibration through connected strata.]
[Note: Non-territorial. Displacement damage incidental.]
That was all of it. No weakness list, no behavior chart, no map of what it had dug. Public register entries were written by people who had seen one from a distance and lived.
Jin read the last line twice.
*Displacement damage incidental.* Somebody had written that about a creature that had brought down forty meters of ceiling on four students without ever knowing they were there.
"It’s a Veinback Burrower," he said. "Bronze, Rank 1, upper. It’s a mineral feeder. That’s confirmed."
"Rank 1?" said Dolan. "It’s Rank *1*?"
"Bronze quality, upper Rank 1, in a tunnel it dug, in the dark, while we’re standing on a floor it undermined." Jin put the phone away. "The rank is the least relevant number in this chamber."
"Can we fight it?" Ren asked, in the tone of someone who wanted a specific answer.
"No," said Wren, before Jin could.
---
The crossing took nineteen minutes and Jin aged more in them than he had in the tournament.
The pattern was there, and it was not a nice one, but it was a pattern. The Burrower moved in long pushes and then stopped, and while it moved, the whole chamber worked and settled and dropped grit from the ceiling. While it stopped, the stone came to rest.
You crossed during the resting.
"How long are the gaps?" Wren asked.
"Between forty seconds and two and a half minutes," Jin said. "That’s from four samples. It’s not a schedule. It’s a rough range and it might be completely different in ten minutes."
"Understood. Call it anyway."
"I’ll call it. I’m telling you now that I’m going to be wrong at least once."
"Everyone gets to be wrong once," Wren said. "Order — Tally, then Colby and Anvil, then Reyes, then Astor and Glitch, then me."
"You go last?"
"I go last."
The long middle slab was the problem. It was three meters wide and eleven meters long and it rested on rubble at both ends, and when Tally crossed it, which took her about two seconds, one end dropped four centimeters.
"That’s not going to hold four people," Dolan said.
"It’ll hold four people," said Wren. "It’s not going to hold four people *and stay still.*"
Which is how Anvil ended up not crossing.
Ren worked it out about a second before Wren said it, and Jin watched him understand what he was about to be asked to do, and watched him decide to do it anyway, all in the space of one breath.
Anvil went onto the low end of the slab and planted, front feet braced against the rubble shoulder, his whole considerable weight pinning the end that wanted to lift.
He was not holding up the ceiling. He was holding down one end of one rock.
It was still the worst job in the chamber, because it meant standing on the loose floor for nineteen minutes while everything else crossed, in the dark, over a thing that dug.
Ren stood beside him the entire time with one hand on his shoulder.
"Colby," Jin said, on his way past. "You good?"
"No," said Ren. His voice was wrecked. He did not move. "Keep going."
The crawlers came twice.
They had been displaced out of the lower level and they came up through the gaps in the lattice floor, and both times Dolan and Ash killed them fast and quietly with claws and nothing else, in a chamber where one blast of fire would have ended everything.
The second time, Ash killed one about a meter from Ren’s leg and Ren did not flinch off the slab.
Jin called the fourth gap wrong.
He had it at ninety seconds and it was fifty-one, and the push came while he and Glitch were still five meters from the far side, and the slab moved under his boots in a way that he would be feeling in his knees for a week.
Anvil held. Ren screamed something at him that was not words.
Jin got across.
Wren came last, at a run, on Jin’s next call, and by then the intervals were shortening because the Burrower was closer, and the last thing across the slab was a Bristleback Boar hauled bodily off the low end by two students while the entire chamber ground its teeth.
The far side was rock. Actual, solid, connected rock, and they stood on it and breathed.
The Burrower went past the lower gap again forty seconds later, and did not stop, and did not know they existed.
---
The beacon reconnected in the fissure at 1912, six meters up a cold slope with real air moving over it.
Wren’s readout went from a flat error to something with words in it, and she stopped walking and put her hand on the wall.
"Handshake."
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Ren sat down on the rock and put his face in his hands, and this time Dolan sat down next to him and did not say anything at all.
The channel opened four minutes later, thin and full of gaps.
"—alloway. Marr. Confirm all four."
"All four," Wren said. "All four beasts. No serious injuries. One beast with sensory fatigue, one with a bruised foreleg."
"Say your position."
"I can’t give you a grid. We’re in an unrecorded system off the fracture at marker five. We followed airflow northeast for approximately —" she checked, "— two point four kilometers of travelled distance, less in a straight line. We’re in a fissure with strong airflow, stable rock, defensible."
There was a pause on the channel that was not transmission delay.
"We have your locator and your note," Marr said. "We’ve been coming at you through the eastern service cut since 1503. We’re about two hundred meters below you and we’ve had to shore three sections."
Jin did the arithmetic. The note had gone on the wall at 1447.
They had started sixteen minutes later.
"We considered blasting the main route," Marr went on. "Association survey said it would drop the marker five chamber. So we didn’t."
"That was correct," Wren said. "The marker five chamber has structural stress under it. My support member detected it before we left. That’s why we left."
Another pause.
"Noted. Halloway."
"Instructor."
"You stay exactly where you are. You do not improve your position. You do not investigate the airflow. If it takes us four hours, you sit in that fissure for four hours."
"Understood."
It took two hours and ten minutes.
They heard the instructors before they saw them, which Jin found funny in a way he did not have the energy to express: two hours of holding still in the dark, and the rescue arrived making an enormous amount of noise.
The last obstruction was a plug of fallen rock at the bottom of the fissure, and Marr’s beast did not touch it for eleven minutes while two Association technicians went over the surrounding rock with instruments and argued.
Only when they stopped arguing did the big shape behind Marr move up, and Jin finally got a look at it, and immediately decided he had not needed to.
It took the plug apart in three pieces and set each piece down.