The Barrier
AI’s scream was still ringing inside my head.
My body tipped again.
Only then did Noise come into view.
He was a little below me—falling with nothing to grab, nothing to break the drop. The gear clipped at his waist tore free first, and shards of his shattered terminal scattered into the dark.
“Boss!”
My body moved before thought did.
Between collapsing steel frames and a plate of iron settling at an angle, I caught the current of the empty space yawning open below. I stretched a thin thread of spiritual force ahead and hooked it into the gap; the far-off stretch of open air folded inward in a single instant and locked into place.
The sensation of free fall twisted. My vision cut out for a heartbeat, then stitched itself back together.
Chukji.
Noise’s belt and protective gear were right in front of me.
I curled around him and locked him in.
“Hhk—!”
Noise sucked in a sharp breath.
I didn’t stop. I hooked spiritual force again, this time toward a collapsed support strut. A footing that had been out of reach slid straight under my feet.
Thud!
Noise’s body rolled across the steel beam. I coiled up beside him and stopped as well.
Black Beak was clinging to a girder with one hand amid the ruined structure. The two wolf-types were hanging on too, claws driven deep into the metal. One of them had lowered its body toward the side where Noise had fallen; the other stood as if barring the way in front of Black Beak.
Noise looked from me to the darkness below, then turned his head toward Black Beak.
“Boss.”
“Just now, that was…”
Black Beak glanced at Noise, then jerked his chin toward me.
“Injuries?”
“None.”
“Then move.”
“Yes, sir.”
Noise bowed his head at once.
— What the hell.
— What was that just now. Magic? No—some kind of technique?
I didn’t bother opening my mouth.
I’d used Chukji twice, and yet my insides didn’t hollow out the way they used to. The Ouroboros had already rewound the space it had vacated; under my scales, only a dry heat brushed past for a moment.
The efficiency had clearly improved—but it wasn’t free.
Burn power carelessly inside The City and hunger would come for you eventually. And to fill that hunger, you needed living energy.
I moved my body downward.
The slope was almost completely blocked.
Debris fallen from the upper waste-compactor yard, steel frames, and the remains of black masses had tangled together and choked the path. Severed cables swayed in open air, and a few twisted support struts still held heat.
Noise pulled out his remaining auxiliary terminal. The screen was half-cracked; only a few living lines flickered faintly across it.
“The original route is blocked.”
Black Beak asked, “Can we force it?”
Noise swept his gaze over the clogged passage.
“The moment we try to punch through, the chance of a total collapse is high. And without our gear in this state, it’s impossible.”
“Detour?”
Noise flicked rapidly through the terminal again.
“Some of the underground signals are still alive. But the path that connects from here is sealed under the rubble. We’ll have to go around. The map for that side cuts off halfway through, too.”
Black Beak’s mouth tightened.
“I’ll reacquire our position.”
Then something slid out of the debris.
At first I took it for a severed cable. A single black tentacle slipped free between the bent girders. It glistened like wet flesh, black grit and points of blue ember-like light clotted across its surface.
One of the wolf-types reacted first.
A low growl.
The black tentacle lashed upward.
Snap!
The wolf-type threw itself forward. The tentacle coiled around its shoulder, and tiny barbs drove into the flesh. The wolf-type let out a low, pained sound.
Noise scrambled backward, clutching his terminal.
“Boss—that’s not a nest signal.”
Black Beak’s fingers flicked once, short and sharp.
Click.
The other wolf-type split off at once and planted itself in front of Noise. The first one closed on its entangled companion and bit down on the nape of its neck—but the tentacle didn’t stop.
“No ring response either. It doesn’t move like a normal Pollution Beast.”
— Ah. This. It’s because of the Wave.
AI said.
— It’s an Infected. Prolonged contact with the Wave does that. Pollution Beasts, humans, other races—doesn’t matter. They break down from the inside. The nervous system twists first, the mind clouds, and eventually only a husk is left. They might look like they’re moving independently on the outside, but what’s holding them from within is ultimately one thing.
Two more black tentacles burst from the wreckage. One clung toward the ceiling; the other slid along the floor.
— If body fluid or those barbs breach a wound and reach the nerves, infection sets in. That wolf-type unit won’t last long.
Light turned in my golden pupils.
Eye Arts.
The tentacles’ movements split apart in my sight. The ones that struck first and the ones that lagged behind, the places where force surged and the places where it rewound—all of it locked into place at once.
Beneath the debris, buried between shattered girders, lay the main body.
I spread Spirit Sense in a thin sheet.
The Infected’s inner current laid itself bare. The tentacles were branches; the power rose from the core. Deep in the mass of flesh, a nucleus pulsed slowly, and the joint where fibers gathered between that nucleus and the outer shell ran like a drawn line.
What had been points connected into lines.
The pattern behind my eyes turned.
The Infected’s tentacles trailed after a beat too late. The one coiled around the wolf-type’s shoulder loosened and wound back toward its own root; the tentacle climbing the ceiling and the one crawling the floor lost their bearings as well.
I bound the flow first.
The main body under the rubble writhed. I drove force into its center.
Crunch.
Under the steel, the black mass of flesh compressed. The tentacles shuddered as one, then went slack, and the barbs digging into the wolf-type’s shoulder popped free one after another.
Black fluid spread across the floor.
Noise couldn’t close his mouth.
Above us, another reaction registered.
Thud.
The wreckage along the ceiling shook. Dust poured down, and between the collapsed girders several black hunks of flesh shoved through all at once.
Boom. Boom-boom.
The tentacles unfurled first. From among the sagging masses of flesh, wet branch-like things stretched in every direction. Black Beak’s fingers flicked again, and the two wolf-types split to bar Noise and the passage.
— Four of them. There’s one more up top!
I know.
I opened Eye Arts and Spirit Sense together.
Flow overlaid form. The roots of the tentacles, the pulsing nuclei, the weak points strung between them—all of it stood out at once.
I dealt with the nearest one first.
I skimmed past its flank and pierced that line.
Thuk.
Black fluid burst from inside the flesh, and the tentacles convulsed in unison.
A tentacle dropped from the ceiling. The nucleus buried deep in its back and the branch point where three tentacles split ran in a single connected line. I rode a collapsed support strut upward, skimmed over its back, and cut that line with the tip of my tail.
Crack.
All three tentacles lost direction at once, and its body dropped from the ceiling.
Thud!
Before the thing that hit the floor could writhe, I drove into its head.
The nucleus burst.
One of the wolf-types was being dragged away, a leg snared.
I considered using Chukji, then dropped the idea. The efficiency would tank.
Instead I layered yao energy over my scales in a double coat, kicked off a support strut, and dropped. My small body rode the full weight of the fall and drove down onto the Infected’s back.
Crunch.
The shell of its back split open. I skewered the exposed nucleus with the tip of my tail.
Thuk.
The tentacle wound around the wolf-type’s leg went slack.
The last one to push free was different.
It didn’t lead with tentacles. The entire mass of flesh shoved out of the wreckage. It was easily twice the size of the first three. What hung from it weren’t tentacles so much as four arm-like limbs, and its shell was thick. Spirit Sense couldn’t get a clean fix on the nucleus.
— Snake, this one’s different. The nucleus is deep. You might not be able to stab it clean from the outside like before.
I narrowed the Eye Arts further.
Cast wide, and everything blurred. I locked only onto the nucleus’s pulse.
Three shell-layers in, amid a tangle of flesh and metal scrap, a slow, heavy beat was turning.
The weak point wasn’t at the front. Lower abdomen. Where flesh and shell overlapped, a single remaining joint showed itself as a barely visible line.
One of its arms came down.
Boom!
The floor sank and the iron plating split. I slipped through the shock and drove in under its body. The tip of my head, triple-coated in yao energy, stabbed that line.
Thuk.
Its hard, tough shell held.
I twisted my body and put force into it again.
Thuk.
This time the inner flesh opened, and my scales met the nucleus’s pulse directly. I shoved power into that contact.
Crrrack.
All four of its arms flailed through empty air at once. They thrashed without direction, then went limp.
As the mass of flesh collapsed, black fluid spread in every direction.
I let out a breath.
Heat rose under my scales. The circulation hadn’t broken, but the turn of the Ouroboros pattern had grown a little heavier.
Punching through that last one had drained a fair amount of power.
And yet, inside the collapsed mass of flesh, a remnant of energy snagged on my Spirit Sense.
It was power left in the black fluid. My inner circulation reacted first. I hadn’t even meant to swallow it.
The Ouroboros pattern turned in quiet silence.
The Infected’s crushed energy was drawn inward.
It didn’t bounce away like a poison, and it didn’t scrape the inside either. The mixed force climbed onto the circulation and dissolved. The rotation that had grown heavy smoothed out again.
The hunger died down and power filled me—but a sense of wrongness rose instead.
— Hold on.
— You. Did you just swallow that?
— You’re not supposed to touch that stuff. It should twist you up from the inside on contact. That’s the normal reaction.
The black fluid was cooling on the floor, its force spent.
— So why the hell are you fine?
A short silence settled.
Noise stood frozen, half-broken terminal still in his grip. He looked from the Infected remains strewn across the floor to me, then swallowed belatedly.
Black Beak checked the places where black fluid had spread and the traces of split shell one by one before he finally stopped in front of me.
“Huh.”
The corner of Black Beak’s mouth twisted.
“Thought the road was blocked.”
“Looks like we’ve got another way.”
“Boss?”
Black Beak swept a look over the clogged slope, then over the black shadows seeping through the gaps in the upper structure, and turned back to me.
“We punch through toward the Barrier.”
Noise’s face went rigid.
“…That route, sir?”
Black Beak gave a slight nod.
“That’s too wasteful. We spent years planting a seat inside the corporate zone. If we open it now, all of it—”
Black Beak let out a breath that was almost a snort.
“It’ll get blown. Yeah, that’s a damn shame, no argument.”
He cast a look over the collapsed passage and the structure above.
“But is this really the time to be counting that?”
Noise shut his mouth.
“If we all die buried here, what good are those years? You’ve got to be alive for the leftover chances to mean anything.”
“There’s a disguised work tunnel under the Barrier. On the surface, it’s a route the corporate-zone purification-filter subcontractors use.”
Noise’s expression crumpled further.
Black Beak ignored it and kept going.
“You’re going to have to open the way up front for us.”
I turned my body without a word.
Black Beak’s mouth twisted.
“Good.”
— Whoa, this is actually insane. Best case it’s an emergency exit. Worst case you’re just crawling into a death trap.
If the work tunnel under the Barrier was still intact, it beat wandering around below. That didn’t mean there was any guarantee of making it to the entrance in one piece.
— And the problem after that. You’ll have to keep opening the path up front the whole way, yeah?
Noise tapped his terminal once. The screen shuddered, then a few living lines rose again.
“To reach the work tunnel under the Barrier, we have to cross the waste rail. With the gear in this state, markers won’t hold long. We’ll have to match the remaining signals against my memory as we go.”
Black Beak nodded.
“Good. You watch the road.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You two take the flanks.”
The two wolf-types rumbled low. The wounded one shook its shoulder once. Black fluid scattered across the floor, but it still looked able to move.
Black Beak looked at me.
“The front is your job.”
From above, another scatter of sound came down—patter, patter.
Black masses dropped between the structures. One struck a girder and burst on impact, black tentacles whipping out in every direction.
I turned at once.
I shoved the first leaping tentacle aside with my scales and sheared through the two that followed. When I crushed the central mass and burst it, the trailing tentacles lost their strength and went slack.
Beyond that, the presence from the Barrier’s direction came rolling in.
Black smoke blanketed the sky, and beneath it Infected were pouring down like rain.
Spirit Sense caught it first.
This wasn’t a simple swarm. The entire space under the Barrier was thrashing under crushing pressure. Tangled energy writhed in a single mass, and the screams of beasts and the screech of twisting steel rode the floor all the way up under my scales.
Even AI fell silent.
If anything living still had a direction left to turn its back on—
We headed into that vibration.