Chapter 10: Yardfall!!!
The yard listened.
The yard listened like a machine pretending to be ground. Under the mud, old plates shifted, deciding which feet deserved to keep balance.
The yard guards kept their faces uncovered. Kael understood the insult: the overseers wanted the workers to know people could choose to become machinery.
GULP!
Yardfall put a useful cruelty in Orrek’s eyes; his anger always looked for something solid to ruin. His fingers found the cold handle before anyone named it useful.
The pressure horn made the Chain Yard smaller.
BOOOM!
Its sound pushed through the gate bars and into the workers’ bones. Men who had been watching the fight from corners dropped their eyes. Women pulled children behind troughs. Debt hands who had been bleeding on the floor tried to crawl away from Kael before higher authority arrived and blamed everyone within reach.
Vaela hated the sound immediately.
Kael saw it in the angle of her shoulders.
"Warden horn?" he asked.
"No," she said. "Warden property horn. It means whatever happens next belongs to someone bigger than the fools already bleeding."
Orrek rolled his ruined shoulder and failed to hide the way pain washed his face gray.
"Then we should leave before property gets counted."
The ledger man stood behind the locked gate with two fresh collectors and a pressure slate. He no longer tried to look brave. He looked employed, which was worse. Fearful men made mistakes. Employed men followed procedures.
"Kael Vorr," he called. "By emergency debt authority, you are seized as living irregular property of Furnace Sink Nine. Route girl Vaela Korr is marked for accessory violation. Orrek Sain is marked for debt rebellion. The boy is held as witness material."
Renn whispered, "Witness material?" Vaela said, "It means they have not decided which part of you is useful."
The boy went very quiet.
Kael looked at the gate.
Old iron. Pressure screws. Crossbar held by two locking teeth. Not meant to stop beasts or armies. Meant to stop workers who believed gates were final.
His body was not ready.
That was obvious.
His palms bled through the cracked scabs. His ribs burned. His arm remained bound in dead Garron’s cloth. His thigh wound made one leg slower than the other. Fourteen unallocated shards sat inside him like black stones waiting for a smarter man.
He was not smarter yet, just cornered.
Orrek limped beside him, chain dragging.
"You really planning to hit that?"
"Yes."
"With what?"
Kael lifted his right hand.
Orrek stared, then laughed so hard he coughed blood.
"I take it back. You are exactly as stupid as you look."
Vaela stepped to Kael’s other side. "If you break your hand, I am not carrying you. If you break the gate, I am still not carrying you. Clear?"
"Clear."
The collectors outside raised rods through the bars.
Kael did not wait for the shots.
He stepped forward and drove his palm into the crossbar.
BANG!
Pain tore up his arm.
The gate did not break.
The rods fired.
Vaela yanked Renn down. Orrek swung his chain into one rod, knocking its aim aside. The other bolt struck Kael in the shoulder.
BANG!
He slammed into the gate instead of falling away.
The Root woke.
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: PRESSURE ROD IMPACT AND GATE COLLISION
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: 2
--------------------------------------------------------------------
▶ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND: NONE GIVEN
▶ UPDATE COMPLETE: UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS → 16
====================================================================
Kael’s vision shook.
The gate hummed under his hand.
Pressure screws. Old iron. Weak at the teeth. He felt the flaw because the impact had shown it to his bones.
"Again," he said.
Orrek’s grin faded into something more serious.
"Collectors coming from back lane."
"Hold them."
"With this shoulder?"
Kael looked at him.
Orrek spat blood to the side and wrapped chain around his forearm.
"Good. I was bored."
Vaela cut a glance toward the rear lane. Six collectors were climbing over a side rail, clubs and hooks ready. She shoved Renn under a trough.
"Stay under there unless you want to be sold by weight."
Renn nodded so fast his chin hit his chest.
The fight split.
Kael faced the gate.
Vaela and Orrek faced the rear.
The first rear collector lunged at Vaela with a hook. She ducked, spun inside, and opened his forearm from wrist to elbow.
RIP!
Orrek caught another around the waist with chain and drove him into a trough hard enough to burst rotten paste across the yard.
SPLAT!
Kael struck the gate again.
BANG!
The crossbar shifted.
The ledger man shouted, "Do not let him build rhythm!" A collector outside jabbed a rod through the bars toward Kael’s face.
Kael caught the rod with both hands.
His palms screamed around the metal.
The collector tried to pull back.
Kael pulled first.
The man’s face slammed into the bars.
CLANG!
Kael drove his knee through the gap between the bars, used the iron as a brace, and smashed it into the man’s lower jaw.
CRACK!
The collector dropped outside the gate, choking on teeth.
Kael kept the rod.
He looked at it for half a breath, then threw it aside.
Not his path.
He slammed his elbow into the locking tooth.
CRACK!
Iron chipped.
His elbow split open.
The Root did not chime.
Chosen damage. Not enough hostile force.
Good. The rule held.
Behind him, Orrek roared as a hook tore his already ruined shoulder wider. He did not fall. He wrapped his chain around the hook shaft and the attacker’s wrist together, then twisted until the man’s forearm folded the wrong way.
CRUNCH!
Vaela moved past him and cut the man’s throat before he could scream properly. For one breath, she and Orrek fought back to back.
They were not allies or family.
Two cornered survivors with compatible violence.
Kael felt it again.
That pressure in Orrek’s refusal. The strange pull toward Vaela’s cold precision. The Sovereign Root was not opening yet, but it was noticing them like the dark notices fire. A faint line of black pressure crawled across Kael’s inner sight and vanished before it became words.
The timing was wrong.
The ledger man saw the gate tooth crack and panicked.
"Full yield authorization! Break the yard if needed!"
The pressure slate in his hand lit gray.
The gate screws tightened by themselves.
The crossbar grew heavier. The air around it thickened. Kael felt the weight press against his chest like the first touch of the gravity press.
His body remembered the slab.
So did the Root.
Kael stepped closer.
Vaela shouted, "Kael!"
He heard the warning.
He ignored the fear inside it.
The gate had become hostile pressure.
That meant it could feed him.
Kael set both palms on the crossbar, bent his knees, and drove his whole body forward. Feet into mud. Hips. Spine. Shoulders. Elbows locked. Head low. Every injured part screaming into the same direction.
The pressure slate howled.
The gate pushed back.
The old world said stay.
Kael answered with his body.
CRUSH!
The first locking tooth snapped.
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: HOSTILE PRESSURE GATE RESISTANCE
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: 3
--------------------------------------------------------------------
▶ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND: NONE GIVEN
▶ UPDATE COMPLETE: UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS → 19
====================================================================
The second tooth held.
Kael’s vision blackened. Orrek saw him failing and hurled his chain across the yard. The chain wrapped around the crossbar beside Kael’s arms.
"Pull, press ghost!"
Vaela drove both crescents into the pressure screw housing and twisted.
RIP!
Metal peeled. Gray light spat from the slate link.
Kael pulled.
Orrek pulled.
Vaela tore the housing wider.
The gate screamed.
CRAAAK!
Then it broke.
The crossbar ripped free and smashed outward into the ledger man. It hit him across the chest and folded him around the iron.
BOOM!
His body flew into the outside mud and did not rise. The yard went silent except for breath, dripping blood, and the dying whine of the pressure slate.
Kael staggered through the broken gate.
He could have run.
The side lane was open.
Vaela saw it too. "Move. Now."
Kael looked back.
Workers still crouched inside the Chain Yard. Haulers. Children. A woman clutching a paste bucket like it could save her. Men with debt collars frozen between fear of the collectors and fear of the thing that had broken their gate.
More horns sounded far above.
Orrek limped beside him. "We leaving?" Kael’s whole body wanted yes. His mouth said, "Not alone."
Vaela cursed softly. "That is how people die in groups."
Kael turned toward the workers.
"If you stay, they count you. If you move, they chase you. Choose fast."
No speech.
No promise.
No crown.
Only a broken gate and a bleeding man still standing.
The first hauler moved.
Then another.
Then the woman with the paste bucket grabbed a child and ran. Furnace Sink Nine shifted by one small, ugly inch.
The movement made sound before it made courage. Bare feet slapped mud. A paste bucket hit stone. Someone sobbed once and swallowed the rest. The broken gate lay across the ledger man’s chest like proof that procedure could bleed. Kael did not look heroic to them. He looked impossible and unfinished, which was more useful.
------
Far above, in a pressure office carved into black stone, a sealed message tube slammed into a brass receiver. Sink Warden Malrec watched the tube roll into his palm.
He broke the seal.
Read once.
Read again.
His face did not change.
"Garron dead. Press anomaly alive. Chain Yard gate breached. Multiple workers moving."
A lesser officer waited near the door, sweating through his collar.
"Orders, Warden?"
Malrec closed his fist around the message until the brass tube bent.
"Alive," he said. "Bring me Kael Vorr alive. If the pit protects him, crush the pit around him."
Below, the purge horns answered.
BOOOOOOM!
A thin vibration climbed the wall and broke before it reached the ceiling. The break mattered more than the vibration. The marrow stain spread along the wall in a thin crescent, marking where the vibration had broken.