Chapter 41: Bloodrift!!
The path opened by the Old Root Bearer did not feel like mercy. It felt like walking through the split throat of something that had decided not to swallow yet. Red sap dripped from the ceiling in slow strings. Furnace bone showed through the walls in pale ribs. Every few steps, the tunnel tightened around the survivors as if the wildland still measured their shoulders, their wounds, their heat, their fear.
Blood passage narrowed around them in wet red bands, each ribbed wall breathing like it had learned lungs from the dead.
THUD!
Blood passage named itself through smell first: iron, rot, old breath, and the copper heat of wounds the road still wanted to reopen.
Kael walked first.
He did not limp.
That would have been too honest.
His left shoulder hung lower from the Bearer bite. The skin around it had darkened into a bruised slab of black red meat. Root tears crossed both arms, some sealed by his Regenerative Dominion, others still wet where the wild sap kept fighting his flesh. His ribs grated when he breathed. His right palm had not fully closed since the root spear punctured it in the dry chute.
He kept moving.
Behind him, fourteen survivors followed in broken pairs.
Renn counted under his breath.
"Miro. Sair. Jessa. Old Noll. Tavin. Brek. Halra. Two furnace boys. Three press women. The twins. Me."
Vaela walked close enough to hear him.
"That is fifteen names."
"I counted myself because if I fall down, you people will step on me and call it terrain."
Orrek snorted despite the grey pain on his face.
"You are too bony for terrain. Bad footing."
Renn’s mouth twitched once.
The laugh did not spread.
Not yet.
Everyone was too busy looking at Kael’s back. They had seen men survive beatings before. Pit workers knew what survival looked like. Survival was crawling away after a chain gang finished with your teeth. Survival was hiding fever under ash so overseers did not throw you into the corpse chute. It was eating fungus that moved in your hand because the alternative was chewing leather straps.
What Kael had done was not that.
He had broken a den heart while the land tried to eat them. He had fought an old predator whose voice made the roots listen. Then he had turned around and counted them with his eyes before he accepted passage. Sair wiped a clot of sap off her cheek. Her hand trembled.
"He could have gone alone."
Nobody answered.
Kael heard it anyway.
He stopped near a bend where the tunnel widened around a dead furnace pipe. The pipe had fused with root meat, black iron swallowed by red fiber. Heat pulsed inside it like a diseased vein.
"Sit," he said.
The survivors obeyed too fast.
That irritated him more than disobedience would have.
"Not because I said it like a warden," Kael added. "Because your legs are failing. Sit before the tunnel takes the slow ones."
Miro dropped first. His injured wrist shook against his chest. Old Noll sank with a breath that sounded like gravel dragged through blood. Two of the press women helped Halra down before her knees folded.
Renn knelt and began checking wounds.
"We need cloth. Water. Anything clean."
Vaela looked at the walls.
"Clean is not a thing down here. Choose less filthy."
She cut strips from a dead worker’s outer wrap, then hesitated and looked at Kael.
"Shoulder."
"Others first."
"That shoulder is half open."
"Others first."
Orrek stepped between them, chains looped across his forearms. His ruined shoulder had swollen under the skin until the joint looked packed with stone.
"Let the sharp woman bind you before she starts carving pieces off to make you agree."
Vaela’s eyes narrowed. "I considered it."
Kael looked at the fourteen survivors.
Some stared at him with fear. Some with hunger. Some with something worse.
Hope.
Hope was dangerous in the pit. It made people lift their heads where blades could find the throat.
He turned his damaged palm upward.
The black intake scar rested there under black pressure veins. It was quieter after the den heart, but not asleep.
It watched.
Everything watched now.
The Sovereign Root stirred behind his eyes, not with a full register, only with a cold pressure of awareness.
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ ACTIVE RESERVE CONFIRMED: 5 EXISTENTIAL SHARDS
≫ RESERVE DOCTRINE STATUS: FLEXIBLE
--------------------------------------------------------------------
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Emergency reserve is not a sacred minimum.
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Complete expenditure remains authorized under immediate lethal pressure.
====================================================================
Kael closed his fist.
No new power came, and that was enough. He had not earned new pressure yet. He had only survived the old one.
Vaela saw his expression change. "System?"
"Reminder."
"A warning?"
"Honest."
"That is rare."
Orrek lowered himself beside the furnace pipe with a grunt.
"If it tells you to sleep, obey it."
"It did not."
"Stupid system."
A few workers gave brittle laughs.
Small. Ugly. Alive.
The sound moved through the tunnel and came back wrong. Not echoed by stone, but tasted by roots. The wall flexed once near the bend. Everyone went silent.
Kael stepped toward the movement.
His ribs protested.
The root stopped flexing.
It knew him now.
That did not make it afraid enough.
A thin strand slid from the ceiling toward Sair’s neck. Kael moved before anyone shouted. His left foot anchored into the wet floor. His right hand snapped up, caught the strand, wrapped once, and pulled.
RIP!
The root tore free in a wet line. Red sap sprayed across his forearm. The ceiling clenched, but did not attack. Kael held the twitching root strand until it stopped moving.
"The passage has a price," Vaela said.
Kael dropped the strand.
"Then it learns we pay in broken teeth."
GULP!
Renn swallowed.
"The wildland gave passage. Why still strike?"
Vaela crouched beside the severed strand. "Because passage is not safety. It means the Bearer allowed us through its wound. The wound has nerves. Teeth. Old hunger."
Orrek grunted. "So the forest is petty."
"The forest is alive," Vaela said. "Petty comes after that."
Kael looked down the tunnel.
The route sloped away from the den heart, but not toward freedom. The air ahead smelled of old smoke, dead sap, and human ash. Somewhere deeper, metal clicked in an uneven rhythm.
Not wildland.
Not root.
People.
Renn finished binding Miro’s wrist and looked up.
"Can we move?"
"Soon," Kael said.
Sair stared at him. "Where?"
Kael did not answer quickly.
Survival had been simple when it only meant refusing death. Now fourteen bodies waited for his direction. Vaela watched him like she expected a calculation. Orrek watched him like he wanted a nod before he broke the next wall. Renn watched him like the count had become a responsibility he hated and would still keep..
Kael had no crown.
No banner.
No territory.
Only blood on his hands and people who had not died because he refused to leave them.
That was only the beginning of a heavier thing.
"Away from Malrec’s rim," Kael said. "Away from his service routes. Toward whatever he does not want us to reach."
Vaela’s mouth tightened.
"That is not a destination."
"No."
Kael looked at the trembling survivors, then at the red tunnel that had tried to take one more life even after granting passage.
"It is a direction."
Above and behind them, beyond the wounded wildland, a pressure horn sounded from the rim.
Low.
Long.
Human made.
The survivors flinched.
Kael did not.
Malrec was still there.
The wild had bled, but the pit had not finished speaking. The horn rolled again before they moved. This time it came with three shorter notes under it. Vaela’s face tightened.
"Worker split call," she said. "He is telling anyone nearby that escaped bodies are being sorted. One long note for main pursuit. Three short for reward routes."
Renn looked at the fourteen survivors. "Reward routes?"
"Places hungry people wait with ropes."
Della pulled Tavin closer. "So every tunnel ahead can sell us."
"Every tunnel behind already did," Vaela said.
Kael took the salvage bundle from Renn and handed it to Sair instead.
The woman blinked. "Me?"
"You have steady hands."
"I worked press levers."
"Then you know how not to jerk when something screams."
Sair swallowed, then wrapped both arms around the bundle like it was a sleeping child with teeth.
Kael turned to the furnace boys.
"You two watch the ceiling. Not the floor. Fear makes people stare where their feet go. Roots like that."
The boys nodded too fast.
"Slow nod," Kael said.
They tried again.
Orrek laughed under his breath. "You are teaching them how to nod now?"
"If panic owns the neck, it owns the body."
That shut Orrek up for half a breath.
Renn noticed. So did Vaela.
Kael was not only dragging people anymore. He was arranging them. Giving fear a shape it could work inside. Making the weak less easy to harvest.
The realization unsettled him more than the horn. A man who arranged bodies became responsible when they fell. He had already chosen that, whether he liked the word or not.
He stepped back to the front of the passage and listened until the horn faded into root wet silence.
"Move in clusters," he said. "No one walks alone. No one answers a voice that knows your name. If the wall offers water, let Orrek taste it first."
"Why me?" Orrek demanded.
Vaela answered before Kael could. "Because if it kills you, we will hear you complain from the grave and know not to drink."
The laugh that followed was still scared.
But it was louder.
That mattered.