Chapter 19 - 18 — The Five Who Returned [I]
POV: Jace
"You five cleared an Orange Gate?"
I did not get to answer him.
A medic had my good arm before the question finished and was already walking me backward toward the treatment line, while somebody behind her called for a stretcher that I was fairly sure was meant for me.
I let her move me, because two levels had kept me upright and had not done one thing about the hand strapped across my chest or the blood drying stiff down my side.
Behind the officer, the Orange-response team had not moved at all.
They were still standing beside their equipment in sealed armour with their weapons up, kitted and briefed and waiting on a reading that would let them go in after us.
One of them lowered his rifle very slowly, as though putting it down too fast would make the situation more real.
Another kept looking past the five of us at the Gate itself, and then back at us, and then at the Gate again, waiting for the people who had actually done this to come out behind the children.
The Bureau already knew what had happened in there. Their instruments had watched a Green Gate turn Orange in real time, and command had been told there were five newly awakened Players sealed behind it.
None of that was the part they were struggling with.
The part they were struggling with was that the response team never entered, and the Gate had been cleared anyway.
Off to the side of the containment area, the other five were standing together in a loose group, still in the scraped-up armour they had come out in.
Their Gate had stayed Green from entry to clear, exactly as it was supposed to. They had ordinary Green-grade stones in a Bureau tray and nothing worse than bruises between them.
Nobody in that group said anything. They had been inside a dungeon for the first time today too, and they knew what that had felt like with everything going correctly.
"We’re fine," Tomas announced to nobody in particular. "Genuinely. I want that on record."
"Sir, can you walk to the station on your own?"
"Obviously."
He put weight on his right leg and it went out from under him.
The medic caught his arm before he hit the ground, and Tomas hung there looking deeply offended by his own body while the adrenaline that had been holding him together for the last twenty minutes finished draining out of him.
"I was doing better before everyone started asking."
Then the medics got between us and the officer, and they took the five of us in five different directions.
They had a treatment room set up inside the secured part of the compound, all folding partitions and equipment that had been unpacked in a hurry.
Through the gap in the partition I could see officers carrying our materials past in sealed examination containers, and I could hear a lot of voices out there that had not been at this compound an hour ago.
The PSB healer cut the ruined glove off first, then worked the gauntlet away from my hand a piece at a time instead of pulling it.
He had good reason. My fingers had swollen so far into the metal that the plating had stopped being equipment and started being a splint, and when the last section came free the skin underneath was burned in long streaks that followed the conductive channels.
Aten had gone through that gauntlet faster than my hand could survive carrying it.
He took each finger in turn and moved it.
I kept my face still through the first three, and when he reached the fourth and pressed along the joint, my other hand closed on the edge of the bed hard enough to make the frame complain.
"That one," he said.
"Yes."
"It will heal. Follow the treatment and you will get the hand back."
He turned it over under the light and looked at the burn lines rather than the break.
"This was not done by punching a monster. Your equipment held perfectly, and it conducted exactly what you asked it to conduct. Your bones and your tendons are what failed underneath."
"I know."
"The equipment held. Your hand didn’t." He set it down on the padded rest. "Do that again before your body catches up to your Ability and you will keep the win and lose the hand permanently. That is not a warning I give often."
I looked at my own fingers while he started binding them.
That was the actual shape of Aten. It was not a question of whether the Ability could produce enough power, because the Ability could clearly produce far more than anything I had asked for so far.
The question was how much of it a Level 5 body could carry before the body came apart, and today the answer had been a fractured hand for one attack.
Every time I met something stronger and answered by pushing the output higher, I would be racing the monster to see which of us destroyed me first.
Six unassigned points sat in my Status the entire time he worked.
I left them there. Endurance clearly mattered now, and six points were not going to replace technique, conditioning, output control, or equipment actually built for this, and I was not going to spend them because I was sitting still and frustrated.
He closed the laceration along my side, checked it twice, and told me not to use the fingers for anything until the regional facility had properly assessed them.
Then the voices outside the partition changed.
"So you’re keeping it," Idris was saying.
"That is not what I said."
"It sounded like it."
I was off the bed before the healer finished telling me to stay on it.
The stone was sitting in a transparent containment case on the field table, and it lit the whole case from the inside.
Instruments were clipped along the outside taking readings off it, and the orange threads inside were still moving slowly, and beside it were three sealed tubes holding the stinger and the spines Tomas had cut loose.
"Nobody is confiscating anything," the field officer said, and he said it to the room rather than to Idris. "The materials came out of a Gate Failure. That means they get tested before they go anywhere."
"Tested for what?" Bria said.
"Instability, contamination, and anything biological that might explain why a Level 24 boss was sitting inside a dungeon that scanned Green twice."
He tapped the case. "This came out of a creature we should have detected and did not. It goes to a lab before it goes to a buyer."
"And after that?"
"After the examination and the appraisal, ownership goes back to the registered clearing party. That is the five of you."
"You can sell through the Bureau, take it to a licensed auction house, accept a private offer, or keep the lot and have it made into equipment."
He picked up his tablet.
"Which brings me to the part I need on the form. How is the clearing party dividing it?"
The room went quiet, and I understood exactly why.
Everyone standing there had watched me come out last with the stone in my hand, and everyone had seen the rank printed on my licence, and the last attack had come off my fists.
"Five shares," I said.
The officer looked up. "You’re certain? The Bureau records contribution, and I’ve read the preliminary summaries."
"We needed five people to kill it."
Nobody thanked me, which I preferred.
Bria looked down at what was left of her shield instead, and Idris stopped running his thumb along the notches in his blade.
Nia’s shoulders came down about an inch, and Tomas opened his mouth with something already loaded behind it and then closed it again without using it.
"One more thing," I said. "Nothing gets sold until all five of us have seen the appraisal and agreed on the buyer."
"That is a sensible condition." He typed it in. "Equal division, five names, no disposal without unanimous agreement. The Bureau will contact all of you after the inspection."
They put us in separate rooms for the interviews.
Mine had a table, two chairs, a camera in the corner, and my gauntlets sealed in an evidence bag on the floor beside the investigator’s foot.
He was not hostile. He had the look of a man doing arithmetic that kept coming out wrong.
"Before you say it," he said, "yes, I am aware the five of you have been standing around a loot table together for the past hour, and I am aware I put you in separate rooms afterwards."
"It did occur to me."
"Separation was never going to stop you agreeing on a story. If you wanted one, you have had two hours and nobody watching your mouths."
He set his tablet down.
"What it stops is the four of them correcting each other while they answer. People who rehearse agree about the big things and fall apart on the small ones, and small ones are all I am collecting today."
"Let’s start with the scan," he said. "You asked the field officer to run both Gates again before entry. Why?"
"You were sending ten newly awakened Players into two dungeons. Checking again was worth the delay."
"Nobody else asked."
"No."
"You were the only person at that compound who requested it, and you requested it before anyone had any reason to be concerned."
"I had never been inside a Gate in my life. I wanted the numbers confirmed before I walked into one." I met his eyes. "That is unusual caution. It is not anything else."
He turned his tablet around.
[Gate One Classification: Green.]
[Gate Two Classification: Green.]
[No abnormal Mana activity detected.]
[No structural instability detected.]
"Both readings were genuinely Green," he said. "Yours and the one before it. The second team went into the other Gate and had an entirely ordinary afternoon. Only your dungeon changed, and it changed after you were inside."
"I know."
"Then help me with the rest of it."
He put the tablet down.
"Your team reports that you called the position of three Goblins before any of them appeared. That you warned them about crossbowmen on a ledge before anybody had line of sight to the ledge. That you told them the Hobgoblin was blind on its left."
He paused.
"And that you told four people to watch a tail before the wall had opened."
"The Goblins moved," I said. "There was timber above us and a cart behind us, and both of them made noise before anything came out."
"And the Hobgoblin?"
"It had scarring across one side of its face and it kept turning that side away from us. You can see that from across a chamber if you are looking at it."
"The tail."
I let that sit for a moment, because this was the one where a good lie would have been worse than nothing.
"My Ability does more than create flame," I said. "I’m not placing all of its conditions and weaknesses in an interview record."
He did not react the way I expected. He simply wrote it down.
He could not open my Status, and there was no test in that building that would tell him whether the sensory part belonged to Aten or to something else.
A Resonance Sphere reports the highest grade and nothing more, without names or effects or conditions or weaknesses.
"Do you have more than one Ability?"