Chapter 18: Presshounds!!
The first pressure hound came out of the pipe crawl on six legs. It had no fur. Only black hide stretched tight over corded muscle, iron ribs visible beneath the skin like cage bars, and a head too narrow for the mouth it carried. Its jaw split down both sides when it opened, showing three rows of short square teeth built for crushing bone rather than tearing meat.
The pipe crawl coughed before the hound charged. Metal spat rust, old hair, and a smell like wet iron chewed too long. KHHK! The sound snapped Renn’s shoulders up before Vaela shoved him back.
The hound was not human enough for pity, but it was built from human fear: shoulders too tight, breath too loud, the need to run punished into muscle.
GULP!
Pressure hounds did not stalk like beasts. They collected distance in jerks and lunges, punishing every worker who forgot the pit owned the floor too.
A brass collar sat deep in its neck.
The collar hummed.
VRRRM!
The sound made the hungry workers behind the broken panel press flat to the wall. Even people who wanted Kael’s dropped food understood a leash hum meant a master nearby.
The hound’s weight changed the crawl before it moved. Pipes sagged. Loose bolts trembled. Pressure thickened around its paws.
Renn forgot how to breathe.
Vaela pulled him behind her without looking away from the animal.
"Do not run straight. They love straight."
Orrek lifted one furnace bone like a club.
"What do they hate?"
"Being dead."
"That explains the teeth."
The hound lunged.
Not fast like a knife. Fast like a dropped wall. Kael met it because there was no room to dodge. The impact drove him backward into a hot pipe.
Skin on his shoulder blistered through cloth. The hound’s foreclaws hooked into the floor grating and its split jaw snapped for his throat. Kael jammed his left forearm across the mouth.
CRUNCH!
Teeth sank in.
Not through bone. Deep enough.
The hound shook its head. Meat tore. Kael’s back struck the pipe again.
HISS!
Steam burned across his neck.
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: Pressure Hound Bite And Pipe Collision
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +2
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[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Beast Collar Gravity Compression Recognized.
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Kael drove his knee into the hound’s chest.
Once.
THUD!
Twice.
THUD!
The third strike landed under the collar where the ribs met. The hound’s breath burst out hot and rotten. It released his arm for half a heartbeat.
Vaela used that half heartbeat.
She slid under Kael’s elbow and cut across the hound’s front left tendon. The blade did not go deep enough to sever the limb. It opened the line that let weight transfer. The hound stumbled. Orrek smashed the furnace bone down on its skull.
BANG!
The bone cracked.
The hound did not.
Orrek stared.
"I dislike this dog."
The second hound hit him from the side.
Orrek slammed into the wall hard enough to dent the pipe casing. His bad shoulder struck first. The scream that ripped from him had no humor in it.
AAAAAGH!
The sound changed the crawl. Hungry witnesses stopped being hungry for one breath. Renn shouted his name.
The second hound pinned Orrek with both front legs and opened its jaw over his face. Kael grabbed the first hound’s collar with both hands. The brass burned cold. The gravity hum tried to drag his wrists apart. He pulled anyway, planted one foot against the wall, and twisted with his hips and spine.
The collar bent.
The hound thrashed.
Vaela stabbed into the hinge under its jaw.
Kael drove his forehead into its snout.
CRACK!
Cartilage gave. The hound’s mouth snapped sideways. Kael tore the collar half loose and slammed the exposed brass node into the pipe.
BANG!
The collar discharged into the metal wall. The hound convulsed. Its ribs compressed inward under its own tool. The chest caved just enough for lungs to fail. It dropped with black foam pouring from its mouth. Cause. Damaged collar. Conductive pipe. Gravity backlash. Broken breathing frame.
Kael turned.
Orrek had both hands inside the second hound’s mouth. The teeth were in his palms. Blood ran down his wrists. He held the jaws apart by pure stubbornness while the beast pushed down. His bad shoulder shook so hard the bandage turned red-black.
"Knife girl!" he roared.
"Busy!"
She was. A third hound had come over the first, crawling along the side pipe like a spider built from hunger. Vaela danced backward, cutting at the eyes, but the hound’s pressure field shoved her steps wrong. One paw clipped her thigh. She hit the wall and barely rolled before the mouth struck where her ribs had been.
Renn grabbed a loose bolt and threw it.
It bounced off the hound’s collar.
TIK!
The hound turned its head toward him.
Renn froze.
Kael moved through pain.
He did not sprint. The crawl was too tight. He drove himself forward shoulder first, using the walls, the pipes, the floor. Every part of him became leverage. Foot against grate. Elbow off pipe. Knee through steam. Head low.
The third hound lunged for Renn.
Kael struck it from the side with his whole body.
BOOM!
They crashed into a pipe junction. The hound’s ribs held. The pipe did not. Hot water burst across both of them.
HISS!
The hound screamed. Kael screamed too, but his hands found the collar. He shoved the beast’s head down and drove his knee into the side of its neck.
THUD!
The collar warped. Vaela came in low and buried both crescents behind the hound’s front knees. Orrek, still pinned by the second hound, laughed through blood because he was insane or brave or both.
"Break the shiny leash!"
Kael did.
He hooked both thumbs under the collar’s bent edge and ripped upward.
RIP!
Metal tore through black hide. The hound’s throat opened with it. Blood sprayed over Kael’s chest and the pipe wall. The beast kicked twice, then collapsed.
The second hound still had Orrek.
Its jaw was closing.
Orrek’s arms shook. His hands would fail first. Then face. Then skull.
Kael stepped toward them.
The map bone pulsed in Vaela’s hand, which had fallen from her grip during the roll. It lay on the floor between them, glowing brighter with every hound collar hum. The Hollow Court mark on Kael’s hand answered.
Not now.
He kicked the bone away from the hounds and slammed both palms against the second hound’s side. Not a punch. A shove. He drove all his mass into the beast and pinned it against the wall. Orrek pulled his hands free as the jaws snapped shut on empty air.
SNAP!
Vaela slid under the beast, placed one crescent against the soft line behind the collar, and looked at Kael.
"Lift."
Kael hooked his arms under the hound’s torso and lifted.
His back nearly blacked him out.
The hound’s paws left the floor by a finger’s width, and Vaela cut.
Orrek drove the cracked furnace bone into the exposed collar node like a stake.
BANG!
The collar imploded.
The hound’s body compressed around the blast. Its lungs burst inward, black blood punching from its mouth in a thick spray. It died folded around its own pressure. The crawl went quiet except for steam and breathing. Then clapping came from behind the broken wall panel.
Slow.
Calm.
A Black Ledger captain stood beyond the gap with six catchers and a man in gray Warden cloth. The gray man held a speaking tube of polished bone. Malrec’s voice came through it.
"Do not kill him. Bleed the others if needed. Drive them to the intake. The Court wants to taste him. I want what remains."
Vaela’s face hardened.
"They are not chasing us away from the Court."
Kael wiped hound blood from his eyes.
"They are driving us to it."
The map bone slid across the floor by itself and stopped at his feet.
The lines on it bent into one road.
Behind them, Black Ledger catchers raised nets. Ahead, the crawl opened into violet pressure light. Orrek staggered up beside Kael, hands ruined, shoulder worse, grin gone.
"I am not kneeling to a door."
Vaela retrieved one crescent from hound meat.
"No one asked you to."
"Good. I was answering early."
Kael stepped toward the violet light.
The hounds had been the hammer.
The intake was the anvil.
And Malrec had just proved he knew how to swing both. The gray Warden man did not chase immediately after delivering Malrec’s voice.
He watched the dead hounds first.
That was what made Vaela uneasy.
Men who rushed were simple. Men who counted losses before giving orders were dangerous. The gray man knelt beside the first hound, touched the bent collar, then looked at Kael through the steam.
"He breaks the leash points," the man said into the speaking tube.
Malrec’s answer came low and pleased.
"Then the leash points matter. Drive him where there are more."
The gray man rose.
"You heard the Warden. No hero lunges. No pride work. Push them. Let the Court do the holding."
Kael understood then.
Malrec was not offended that the hounds had died.
He was learning.
Orrek spat blood onto the floor.
"I hate men who learn."
Vaela picked up the map bone with shaking fingers.
"Then move. Because he is learning faster than we are healing."
Renn looked at Kael’s bitten arm and Orrek’s mangled hands.
"Are we winning?"
Kael stared at the violet light ahead.
"No."
The boy swallowed.
"Then what are we doing?"
Kael stepped over the dead hound.
"Refusing the version where they win clean."
Behind them, the hungry workers who had followed for scraps stopped at the first dead hound.
No one reached for meat.
Even starving people knew when a thing had died carrying someone else’s command inside its bones.
That fear spread faster than the smell.
One starving man reached toward a brass collar fragment, then saw the way it still twitched toward the dead hound’s throat.
TIK! TIK!
He pulled his hand back and crossed himself in a prayer the pit had not earned. Kael saw it. Good. Let the witnesses carry the right lesson: some tools stayed owned after the body failed.