Chapter 47 - 46 — Five Returned I
**POV: Jace**
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The other side was enormous.
Our lights went up and did not find a ceiling. They found roots instead, thick as a man’s leg, hanging down through cracks in the rock forty metres above us and dripping steadily onto the stone.
Below that, black water.
It filled every low part of the cavern in wide flat sheets, and the stone came up out of it in shelves and ledges, so the whole grotto ran in levels rather than in a floor.
A dirty green haze lay on the surface of the water. Not fog. It sat *on* it, four or five centimetres deep, moving when the water moved.
The rock nearest the waterline had gone green-black in bands, and the bands went up higher than the current level, which meant the water had been higher and had come down again more than once.
Even through the filter they issued at the barrier, I got a taste at the back of my throat. Bitter, metallic, like sucking a coin.
Water beaded on my gauntlets within thirty seconds and did not evaporate.
"Count."
Renard was already doing it himself, down the line, out loud, touching nobody.
"Twenty. Everyone crossed."
He went to the monitoring rig one of his people had already unpacked and read it for about eight seconds.
"Filters are holding. Nobody removes one for any reason, including if you are sick inside it, and if you feel your throat closing you say it immediately rather than being brave."
He looked up.
"They are consumables. So are the antidotes. We are not living down here. Every hour we spend is coming out of the equipment, and when the equipment is gone the Gate wins whether or not we ever see the boss."
Nobody argued. Several of the Meridian people had gone quite still, and I worked out why about a second later.
Some of them had been here before, and the last time they came, people they knew did not walk back out.
---
The formation closed without being told twice.
Frontliners took the edges of the stone path, shields angled outward toward the water rather than forward. Healers came to the middle. The ranged Players stopped looking at the path entirely and started working the ledges and the dark above us.
Gideon came up on my right. Not beside me. About four metres off, where he could reach me in one movement and where he was not standing on me.
And the outsiders started looking at me again.
It was worse inside than it had been in the yard, because now there was nothing else to do.
One of the eight who had actually earned his place looked at me, then at Gideon, then at Renard, and his jaw did something that had nothing to do with the air quality.
Another one ran his eyes over my armour and my gauntlets and then over my face, doing the arithmetic on how old I was, and did not bother hiding what he concluded.
A third stopped talking when I came within hearing distance.
I did not say anything to any of them.
They were right, and I had decided a week ago that I was not going to spend this raid apologising for a phone call I asked my father to make.
What I did instead was count.
Nineteen other people on that stone path. In the life I remember, twenty went into Eastwick and five came out, and every one of the fifteen who did not is standing somewhere in this cavern right now, checking a strap.
I went along the faces.
The man with the heavy blade. The woman fitting a filter cartridge. The Meridian healer with the shaved head. A ranged fighter about my father’s age.
One of them caught something. A half-second pull, the kind you get in a corridor when you have passed somebody before and cannot place where.
I held on it too long, and he noticed, and I looked away first.
Then it was gone completely, and I could not even remember which of the two things had produced it, the face or the way he was standing.
Six years of not caring. That is what I have instead of information.
Then something moved under the water.
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They came up out of the shallows on both sides at once.
Centipedes, if you can call something that long a centipede. Four metres of segmented body in wet dark plating, running on dozens of legs, with the front pair ended in hooks that went into bare rock and held.
> **[Vermis Toxicara — Level 18]**
>
> **[HP: 1,400/1,400.]**
Three came straight down the path at the front line.
Two more went up the wall.
And that was the first thing that told me these were not ordinary dungeon animals, because the two on the wall did not attack the nearest person.
They crossed above the front line entirely and started for the middle of the formation, where the healers were.
"Wall, left, above you!" Renard did not shout it so much as project it. "Kessler, Ide, up. Ranged, take the ceiling, forget the path."
And then the raid did something I had never seen in my life.
It worked.
The front Tank took the lead creature’s bite on the face of her shield rather than her arm, turned with it, and drove it down onto the stone where two others could reach it.
A Meridian fighter pinned a second against the rock wall with the flat of a polearm, held it there without trying to kill it, and a Mage put something through its head at four metres.
One of the outsiders went down under a hooked claw. Two people had him out of the line by the shoulders inside three seconds, and only then did a healer touch him.
Nobody chased anything into the water.
I have been in exactly one raid before this and it was five terrified eighteen-year-olds in a mine. This was a machine.
I stayed where Renard put me.
That was harder than it sounds. There were four separate places I could have gone in the first twenty seconds, and going to any of them would have opened the gap I was standing in.
Then one of the frontliners took a hook to the ankle and lost his footing, and one of the wall creatures came through the space he opened, and it went straight at the healers.
That one was mine.
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 210/210 → 208/210.]**
I let it commit.
It had chosen a target and turned its whole body toward her, which meant it had stopped being able to see me, and I put a short burn through my heel and closed four metres before the second leg came down.
Its left hook came around at me. I knocked it wide with the outside of my gauntlet, stepped inside where the head could not fold back to reach me, and put my right fist into the seam under the head plate.
> **[HP: 1,400/1,400 → 902/1,400.]**
Not enough.
It folded around me the way they do, whole body coming in like a closing hand, and got its mandibles up toward my shoulder.
I did not stay to argue with it.
Another burst, sideways, out of the bite line entirely, and as it turned to follow me I caught one of the rear legs and pulled, and the pull rolled it enough to show the pale underside of the third and fourth segments.
The second punch went in there.
> **[HP: 902/1,400 → 0/1,400.]**
>
> **[Experience acquired: 90.]**
>
> **[EXP: 220/700 → 310/700.]**
I shut Aten down and went back to my position before anybody had to tell me to.
---
Two of them saw it.
One was the outsider who had been watching me since the yard, and what he did was stop watching me. Not approvingly. He simply moved his attention elsewhere, the way you do when the thing you were braced for has not happened.
The other looked at my gauntlets for a second longer than he needed to. I think it was the fact that the fire had stayed on my fists. People expect an SSS solar Ability to fill a cavern.
That was the whole of it. One clean exchange does not buy back a week of everybody knowing my father made a telephone call, and I did not expect it to.
Gideon noticed too, and did not say anything, and did not come over.
What he did do was stop drifting toward my quarter every time I moved, and I noticed that more than I would have noticed a compliment.
---
The outsiders were good. I kept going back over it
One of them caught a Meridian ranged fighter by the harness when a hook took her legs out three feet from the water, and held her there at an angle that must have hurt him until somebody else got a hand on her.
Another shoved a wounded man behind the shield line and took a claw across the back of his own arm doing it.
And a third called the second wall movement before either of the ranged team saw it, loudly, immediately, and exactly the way Renard had asked for outside.
That was Cormac Keane.