Chapter 42: Spoils That Fight!
Vaela found the first piece of den heart wedged between two ribs of furnace bone. It was the size of a clenched fist, dark red at the edges, gold black in the center, and still beating.
It was alive in the wrong way.
Worse.
It remembered being alive.
The fragment pulsed once when her knife touched it, and every root in the tunnel twitched toward the sound.
"Do not cut that," Renn said.
Vaela did not look back. "I was going to poke it gently and ask for its life story."
"That is worse."
"Probably."
Kael crouched beside her. The movement pulled at his shoulder bite until wet heat ran down his ribs. He ignored it and studied the fragment. The den heart shard sat inside a web of pale root fiber.
Thin black veins ran from it into the furnace bone, then vanished into the tunnel wall. No treasure lay loose here; the shard was a tooth still connected to the jaw.
Orrek leaned over them.
"Can we eat it?"
Renn stared at him. "Why is that your first question?"
"Because I am hungry and it looks expensive."
Vaela tapped the fragment with the flat of her knife.
The shard pulsed.
THUD!
Everyone felt it in their teeth.
Miro whimpered. Old Noll pressed both hands over his ears. One of the furnace boys gagged and spat black saliva into the mud. Kael caught the pressure moving through the floor.
The attack had not begun.
Warning.
"It is tied to the wild," he said.
Vaela nodded. "And to the dead furnace lines. Den heart kept the Bearer fed. It also pulled heat from old pipes, marrow from bones, fear from anything stupid enough to bleed nearby."
"Can we use it?"
"If we remove it wrong, it will use us."
Orrek smiled without humor. "So a normal pit object."
Renn sat back on his heels and checked the survivors again. "We need supplies more than trophies. Cloth is low. Food is nearly gone. Water skins are half mud. If that thing brings more roots on us, leave it."
Vaela pointed deeper into the ribbed wall.
"Not just the heart. Look."
Kael followed her gesture.
Between the bone ribs, strips of amber fiber hung like muscle torn from a giant. Below them, black nodules bulged out of the wall, hard as knuckles. At the base of the furnace pipe, pressure sap had cooled into dark violet beads with gold threads inside.
Resources.
Dangerous ones.
The kind desperate kingdoms would murder for and pit workers would die touching without knowing why.
"Root marrow," Vaela said. "Furnace bone fragments. Pulse fiber. Pressure sap. If we carry the right pieces, we can trade, seal wounds, make traps, maybe keep the mark quiet for a while."
Kael looked at her. "And the wrong pieces?"
"They scream."
The wall screamed.
The thing left no room for metaphor.
A thin, high pressure shriek burst from a black nodule near Orrek’s knee. The nodule split open, showing a wet white eye buried inside the root meat.
The eye looked at Kael.
Then it looked at the fourteen survivors.
Its pupil spread into a feeding ring.
CRACK!
Three root hooks punched out of the wall. Kael moved first, but his body was not whole enough for grace. He slammed his shoulder into Orrek and threw the larger man back as the hooks cut through the space where Orrek’s ruined arm had been. One hook grazed Kael’s side and tore open an old wound.
Blood hit the floor.
The tunnel woke harder.
"Back!" Vaela snapped.
Renn dragged Miro by the collar. Sair and Halra pulled the twins away from the wall. The furnace boys scrambled, one slipping in sap and nearly falling under the third hook. Orrek caught him by the back of his wrap with his uninjured arm.
"Move, little bone!"
The root hook curved toward Orrek’s face.
Kael planted his foot.
His right knee drove up into the hook joint.
CRACK!
The joint folded wrong. He caught the broken hook with both hands, ignored the pain in his palm, and ripped it sideways until the wall membrane tore.
RIP!
Sap sprayed. The white eye rolled toward him.
The Sovereign Root stirred.
Kael gave the order inward, cold and exact, sending the shards into Regenerative Dominion while the threat still pressed for a place to break him.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE PRESSURE DETECTED: Den Heart Salvage Backlash
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +1 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Regenerative Dominion -> 11
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Active wound closure accelerated under hostile root contamination.
====================================================================
The shard did not sit idle.
Kael shoved it into healing before the sap could keep the old wounds open. Heat flooded his torn side. Flesh clenched. The bleeding slowed from a sheet to a hard drip.
Healing had not reached him.
Its feeder fibers still kept it killing.
Vaela saw the eye tracking the workers and lunged. Her crescent knives flashed low. She did not cut the heart fragment. She cut the pale feeder fibers around the eye, one after another, fast enough that the wall spasmed without finding a rhythm.
SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!
The eye shrank.
Orrek smashed a furnace bone fragment into the third hook. The blow should have shattered only the bone. Instead the fragment rang like iron and caved the hook joint inward.
Orrek looked at the bone in his hand.
"I like this."
"Do not name it," Vaela said.
"Too late."
"Do not."
The wall convulsed.
Kael grabbed the eye with his wounded hand. The thing tried to bite his palm from the inside. Tiny root teeth opened beneath the membrane and scraped against his skin.
He squeezed.
His Core Mass Density pressed through the hand. Gravity Vector Impact followed, not as a punch, but as a closing weight.
PLOP!
The eye burst into red white pulp.
The tunnel shook once.
Then stilled.
Everyone waited for the wildland to answer.
It did not.
Only partly.
The Old Root Bearer had allowed passage. The wound still defended itself, but it was injured enough to hesitate. Vaela exhaled and cut the den heart fragment free with three careful slices. This time, the shard did not scream.
It pulsed weakly in her palm.
"Wrap it in old cloth," she said. "Do not let it touch bare skin. Do not let the children stare at it. Do not put it near Kael’s mark."
Orrek held up the furnace bone fragment. "What about this?"
"That is less likely to eat you."
"So I keep it."
"Until it changes."
Renn crawled toward the black violet sap beads and sniffed them from a distance.
"Can this seal wounds?"
Vaela nodded. "If mixed with ash and not applied too deep. Too much and the wound grows root hair."
Renn stared at her.
"You were going to mention that before I used it, yes?"
"Probably."
A tired laugh moved through the group again.
Stronger this time.
Kael watched it. Not soft. Not safe. But present.
They gathered what they could carry: three strips of pulse fiber, six furnace bone shards, a thumb sized den heart fragment, a small wrap of pressure sap, and root marrow scraped into a broken ration tin. Every item had to be earned slowly. Each cut brought a twitch. Each scrape made the walls breathe.
Twice, Kael stood between the tunnel and the survivors until the roots decided the cost was too high. By the time they finished, his legs felt packed with stone.
Renn tied the salvage bundle shut.
"We have trade goods. Maybe medicine. Maybe poison. Maybe all three."
Vaela took the bundle from him and strapped it under her torn wrap.
"That means we have enemies who would kill us faster if they knew."
Orrek hefted his furnace bone shard like a club.
"Wonderful. I was worried we were becoming boring."
Kael looked down the path ahead.
The human clicking had stopped.
That bothered him.
People did not stop making noise in the pit unless they were hiding, dead, or listening. Behind them, the severed eye pulp steamed on the floor. Ahead, deeper in the furnace route, a small bronze token rolled out of the darkness and stopped at Kael’s foot. It bore Malrec’s pressure mark.
Fresh.
Someone had already passed this way.
Someone had waited long enough to hear the wildland scream. Nobody touched the token. That restraint saved Tavin’s fingers. A thread of pressure uncurled from the bronze mark and felt along the mud where hands should have been. It moved like a blind worm, slow and searching, then withdrew when it found only water and crushed root pulp.
Vaela’s mouth flattened.
"Contact snare. Malrec wanted to know who picked it up."
Renn looked at Kael’s hand. "You crushed the last one."
"The last one spoke first."
"That is not comforting."
Kael crouched beside the token and studied it without touching. The Sovereign Root gave no alert. No hostile impact. No shard. Not every danger deserved reward. Some dangers were only traps waiting for stupidity.
"Can we use it?" Orrek asked.
Vaela stared at him. "You want to carry the Warden’s listening coin?"
"I want to throw it into someone’s soup."
"Later," Kael said.
He took one of the furnace bone fragments and pressed the edge against the token until the metal tilted into the mud. Then he used the bone to drag it into a crack under the dead pipe. The pressure thread lashed once at the fragment. The furnace bone smoked but did not break.
Orrek’s eyebrows lifted.
"I really like that bone."
"It resisted a contact snare," Vaela said. "That means it is valuable. Also cursed, hungry, or both."
"You ruin joy."
"I keep joy alive by insulting its decisions."
Renn finished packing the pressure sap with ash. He marked each wrap with three scratches so nobody confused medicine with trade goods or poison.
"We need rules for these things," he said. "Before someone eats the wrong miracle."
Kael nodded. "Renn tracks supplies. Vaela names danger. Orrek carries what bites less than he does."
Orrek considered that.
"Fair."
Kael looked at Sair and Tavin. "No salvage opens unless two people watch and one person is ready to drop it. Anything that whispers gets wrapped twice or left behind."
The survivors listened because the tunnel had just proven ignorance could kill as fast as hunger. Behind the pipe, the buried token clicked once.
Then went silent.
Malrec had reached ahead.
The next hand would be attached to something worse than bronze.