Chapter 27: Shard Scar!!
The chain pit tried to close around Kael’s legs. Black links slid from the floor grooves and looped over his boots, not fast enough to surprise him, but smart enough to wait until the retrieval hook was still buried in his side. The first retrieval body pulled. The chains pulled with it. Court marks crawled through metal, wound, and palm brand at the same time.
The shard window opened in Kael’s sight like a wound given numbers. Road dust, corpse pressure, and the weight behind his ribs made one fact plain: the system did not reward calm; it answered hostile force.
RUSTLE!
The ash road held still while the window opened, as if even the route wanted to see what the pressure had purchased.
Kael’s knees bent.
The workers saw it.
Renn’s count faltered on the next breath. Not stopped. Faltered. One small crack in the number, and every frightened body heard it.
That was the dangerous part. Not the pain. Not even the hook. The sight. The moment when frightened people saw the body they had started to believe in bend under a force they already knew too well.
The old woman on the shelf screamed, "Pull the cart! Pull or die stupid!"
Renn shoved Brak’s shoulder and dragged the fever girl behind the cart wheel. Vaela rolled under the third retrieval body’s hook and came up breathing badly, one blade held backward because her ribs would not let her raise the arm properly. Orrek slammed his chain fist into the second retrieval body’s mask.
BANG!
The mask turned. Not cracked. Turned.
Orrek stared at it.
"I hate Court faces."
The body punched him in the stomach with a hook rib.
THUD!
Orrek folded around the impact and dropped to one knee, gagging blood. Kael saw the whole field in one hard breath. Known threat profile: retrieval bodies swallow straight impact through chest mouths, bind marked assets through chain law, ignore fear, and target stolen cargo to force surrender. Known weakness: joints bend.
Seams open. Chest mouths cannot swallow force from every angle if the body is anchored wrong. Chains carry rejection pressure but can be broken if density and resistance rise together.
Known cost of waiting: workers die, Orrek collapses, Vaela gets hooked, Renn loses the fever girl, and Kael becomes cargo with stronger bones. The first sane tactical window had arrived. Kael stopped fighting the hook for one breath and opened the Sovereign Root. Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into Core Mass Density, Cellular Acceleration, Metaphysical Resistance, and Primordial Marrow Layer.
ALLOCATE!
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 28
≫ IMMEDIATE THREAT PROFILE: Hollow Court Retrieval Chain Bind
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≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +10 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 9
- Cellular Acceleration -> 8
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 6
- Metaphysical Resistance -> 9
▶ REMAINING EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 18
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The workers felt the allocation before they understood it.
Kael’s teeth cracked together hard enough for blood to bead at his gums.
CLACK!
The air around Kael thickened. Dust stopped falling for a heartbeat, hanging in place as if it had struck an invisible floor. The chain links around his boots whined. Brak, barely awake in the cart wreckage, pressed both palms over his ears. The fever girl stopped crying because the sound in the pit changed from panic to pressure.
Renn knew enough to be frightened.
"Nobody touch him right now!"
He had seen bodies reject medicine, reject pressure, reject old implants, reject even clean water when the wrong wound met the wrong help. Kael was not healing. He was being altered from inside while still standing in a fight. Vaela backed away half a step, eyes sharp despite the pain in her ribs.
She watched his fingers curl. The skin across his knuckles split, then tightened over denser bone. The wound in his side did not close, but the blood slowed, forced through narrower channels by a body that had decided leaking was inefficient.
Orrek, still on one knee, felt something worse than fear.
Envy.
Not the petty kind. The starving kind. The kind a beaten man felt when he saw another beaten man stand up with enough force to make the world regret asking him to kneel. He swallowed it down because the retrieval body was still in front of him, and envy did not stop hooks.
The change did not feel like healing.
It felt like being forged while awake.
No one told the workers that. They only saw Kael stand inside a change that looked too much like torture to be called power.
His bones compressed first. Not smaller. Denser. The hollow pain inside them packed tight until each limb felt filled with dark iron. His muscles dragged against themselves, tearing little lines, then sealing hotter than before. His marrow kicked once, deep and brutal, sending a thick pulse through his spine.
His marked hand stopped shaking.
The chain around his boots tightened.
Kael looked down.
"Wrong time."
Not away from the hook.
Into it.
The retrieval body expected retreat. Its chest mouth opened wider to swallow another impact. Kael stepped forward, forcing the embedded hook deeper for half a breath, then drove his left palm under the body’s mask and shoved up while his right knee slammed into its hip hinge.
CRACK!
The hinge broke sideways.
The chest mouth swallowed part of the blow, but the angle was wrong. Kael’s new density did not crash straight into the mouth. It drove through the joint and up the spine line.
The retrieval body staggered.
Kael grabbed the hook in his side and ripped it free.
RIP!
Blood poured. A black thread from the hook tried to follow. Metaphysical Resistance caught it like teeth biting wire. The cold pressure snapped apart inside the wound.
SNAP!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: Retrieval Hook Extraction And Chain Law Backlash
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +2
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[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Hostile Ownership Pressure Partially Rejected.
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Kael did not smile.
He stomped.
BANG!
The chain over his left boot shattered into three pieces. He pivoted on the broken links and drove his shoulder into the first retrieval body’s side, not chest.
BOOM!
This time it flew.
It hit the chain rack hard enough to burst two old tax plates.
CRACK! CRACK!
Vaela saw the opening and moved despite her ribs. She cut the low sprinter’s knee seam again, then hooked her blade around a pressure wire along its thigh.
"Left side eats less force!" she shouted.
Kael heard her and changed the whole fight. He stopped trying to overpower the chest mouths. He broke angles. He grabbed wrists and folded elbows. He shoulder checked ribs from the side. He stomped knee hinges and drove palms into masks only when the head was turned away from the mouth line.
The pit changed around him.
Before, he had been the body that would not fall. Now he was the body that made the Court’s design look incomplete.
Orrek saw it from one knee.
A retrieval body raised its hook over him. Kael crossed the pit in three steps and caught the hook with his forearm.
CLANG!
The force should have cracked bone.
It dug into reinforced density and stopped.
Kael drove his forehead into the mask.
THUD!
The mask split down the middle.
Black fluid sprayed over Orrek’s face.
Orrek blinked.
"That was close."
Kael grabbed him by the back of his shirt and threw him toward the rope.
"Then move farther."
"Hate that too."
"Live. Hate later."
Renn and the old woman pulled another freed worker up. The cart creaked forward along the shelf. The boy who had been chained dragged a smaller child behind him with both arms wrapped around the child’s chest. The second retrieval body lunged for them. Kael kicked a broken chain off the floor. The link chunk shot like thrown iron and smashed into the body’s backward knee.
BANG!
It buckled.
Vaela went low and cut the exposed wire.
SPLIT!
The body collapsed into its own hooks. One hook punched through its chest mouth from below, pinning it to the floor. The dead road screamed through the tax plates.
REEEEEE!
The sound hit Kael’s mark and tried to force his hand open again.
He held it closed.
Metaphysical Resistance hummed under his skin. Not a shield. A refusal with structure. The first retrieval body dragged itself from the chain rack, hip broken, mask split, chest mouth still opening and closing.
"Asset escalation," it said.
Kael stepped toward it.
"That is the reading, correct."
Then the tunnel behind the retrieval bodies answered with a deeper sound.
Not a tax plate.
Not a chain.
A throat opening in the road ahead.
GRRROOOON!
Vaela looked past Kael, face tightening.
"The dead road throat is waking."
Renn shouted from above, "Is that worse?"
Vaela wiped black fluid from her blade.
"Nothing called a throat makes this safer."
Kael flexed his marked hand once. The fingers answered cleanly despite the blood. That mattered. If he could trust the hand, he could trust the next grab, the next throw, the next choice between saving a worker and breaking an enemy spine. The shards had not made him safe. They had made his decisions arrive faster.
The pit floor tilted.
Workers screamed. The cart rolled two inches toward the dark tunnel. Orrek caught the wheel with his uninjured hand and nearly lost his footing. Kael looked at the broken retrieval body, the rising chains, the open tunnel, and the workers still climbing.
He had spent.
Good.
The allocation also changed his fear.
It did not remove it. That would have been useless. Fear kept count. Fear told him where the hook was, where Renn was failing, where Vaela’s breathing had gone shallow, where Orrek’s pride was about to get him killed. The new body did not silence fear. It gave fear stronger hands.
Now the road wanted to see if the spending was enough.