Chapter 5: Crescent Owed!!
The corpse lift climbed like it hated them. Every pull of Vaela’s arm dragged the cage one ugly notch upward. The old chain shrieked. Rust dust rained over their heads. Below, the thin thing from Black Seven unfolded across the shaft wall and followed on hooked limbs.
The local economy had no shame; it counted hunger, fear, bone, and silence as currency. That resemblance did not save anyone; it only made the bruises, split lips, and shaking hands easier to read. The old crews kept curses for Veyrath, for the sink chain, and for every clean-handed master who had never stood under pressure rain. Down here, scale was not learned from maps.
THUD!
Workers with cracked lips and wrists rubbed raw by old labor bands shifted closer without asking permission. That was how terror became useful: not by vanishing, but by learning where to stand.
CLANG!
Kael’s answer stayed simple. If the pit guards wanted a body, they would have to reach close enough for his hands to matter.
It did not hurry.
That made it worse.
Renn pressed himself into the corner of the cage, broken hand tucked against his chest, eyes fixed on the thing below.
"What is it?"
Vaela pulled the chain again.
CLANK!
"A reason not to sleep in open drains."
"That is not a name."
"Names make children curious. Stay afraid."
Kael gripped the cage rail and looked down. The creature had skin like boiled leather stretched over sticks. No eyes. A slit ran across its head where a mouth should have been, sealed shut until it breathed. When it breathed, the slit opened sideways and showed rows of black cartilage teeth.
Its front limbs stabbed into the shaft wall.
TIK!
Each sound landed in Kael’s skull like a countdown. His body wanted to collapse. His ribs had become a nest of hot wire. Blood from the leech bite glued his wrap to his side. His shoulder throbbed under Garron’s red coat strip.
The Sovereign Root waited.
Fourteen shards sat unused inside him.
He could feel them now, not as numbers, but as pressure points. Small black weights lodged behind his sternum, asking where to go.
Core Mass Density.
Gravity Vector Impact.
Cellular Acceleration.
Primordial Marrow Layer.
Metaphysical Resistance.
The names did not arrive as lessons. They arrived as places inside his ruined body. Core Mass Density felt like weight, stance, collision, and the refusal to be moved. Gravity Vector Impact felt like force direction, footing, downward pressure, and the way a strike could travel through him instead of scattering. Cellular Acceleration was damaged flesh accepting change fast enough not to tear itself apart. Primordial Marrow Layer sat deeper, in bone and marrow, the foundation that decided whether survival still had something to stand on. Metaphysical Resistance was colder, stranger, the part of him that pushed back against claims, marks, ownership, and pressure that touched more than meat.
The choices meant nothing and everything.
"You are doing that staring thing again," Vaela said.
Kael blinked.
"I need time."
"Then buy it with something."
The creature leapt.
Its body snapped upward faster than its slow climb had promised. One hook limb speared through the cage floor between Renn’s feet.
CRACK!
Renn screamed.
Kael stomped down on the limb.
The bone under its skin did not break.
Pain ripped up through his foot.
The creature pulled. The cage tilted. Vaela slammed her shoulder into the opposite rail to balance it.
"Cut it!" Kael shouted.
Vaela dropped the chain, reversed one crescent blade, and drove it down along the hooked limb. The edge scraped hide and bit into a softer line near the joint.
RIP!
Black fluid spurted up through the floor. The creature opened its side mouth and made no sound. That silence crawled under Kael’s skin.
It pulled again.
The cage dropped one notch.
CLANG!
The old chain slipped.
Vaela lunged for it. Kael caught her belt before she overbalanced. For half a breath, her back hit his chest, and both of them strained against the tilt. She smelled like drain rot, blade oil, and old smoke.
"Do not grab me unless I am falling," she snapped.
"You were falling."
"I was negotiating with gravity."
"You were losing."
Renn made a strangled laugh, then clapped his good hand over his mouth like laughter itself might attract worse things. The creature jammed a second limb through the cage. Vaela cut low, then stepped on the first limb and vaulted her body around the rail. For one terrifying moment she was outside the lift, one hand on the cage, both feet against the shaft wall. The creature reached for her with its sealed head.
Her crescent blades crossed.
Then opened.
RIP!
The mouth slit split before it could bite. Black fluid sprayed across her face. She did not blink. She drove one knee into the creature’s head and used the impact to swing back into the cage.
Kael saw it then.
She was not only quick; she was cruel with distance.
Every inch around her had a price.
The creature dropped, caught the wall lower, and climbed again, damaged but not gone. Vaela wiped black fluid from her cheek with the back of her wrist.
"If you have another press ghost trick, use it before that thing climbs through."
Kael closed his eyes for one heartbeat.
Not prayer.
Command.
No one answered from above. Nothing outside him reached down with mercy. The command came from the ruined place in him that still knew what needed to survive.
Two shards into Core Mass Density.
One into Cellular Acceleration.
He did not know if thought was enough.
The root answered.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into CORE MASS DENSITY and CELLULAR ACCELERATION.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +3 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 6
- Cellular Acceleration -> 5
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Core Biological Geometry Alteration In Progress.
====================================================================
Pain changed shape.
It did not vanish. It tightened. His bones felt as if invisible hands were winding wire around them. His muscles cramped hard enough to make him bite his tongue. The cage floor groaned under him as his body gained a fraction of density that the old metal did not appreciate.
For a breath, Kael thought he had made a mistake. His heart kicked too hard. The torn muscles around his ribs clenched until black spots crowded his sight. The Sovereign Root did not soothe him. It did not comfort him. It altered what pressure had already broken and demanded that the rest of his body survive the update.
Then his feet settled heavier on the cage floor.
Barely enough to matter, but enough for Kael to exhale through blood.
"That looked unpleasant," Vaela said.
"It was."
"Do it again later. Far from my lift."
The creature leapt a second time.
Kael met it.
He dropped to one knee and drove his palm down as its head cleared the cage edge.
Not a slap.
A falling weight through his arm.
BOOM!
The creature’s head smashed against the cage frame. The metal bent. The sealed mouth split wider. Teeth scattered into the shaft like black seeds.
It tried to pull back.
Kael caught the edge of its mouth with both hands.
Hooks tore his palms.
He pulled anyway.
His shoulders screamed. His ribs shifted. The three spent shards burned through his bones, not enough to make him strong, just enough to make the next impossible thing slightly less impossible.
Vaela understood without being told.
She drove both crescents into the creature’s neck line and ripped outward as Kael forced the head open.
RIP!
The neck came apart in layers.
Black fluid burst across the cage. The creature thrashed, limbs hammering the walls. One hook scraped Kael’s thigh open. Another almost took Renn through the stomach. Kael planted his foot against the rail and twisted the head down.
Vaela cut again.
SNAP!
The creature fell.
It struck the shaft wall twice on the way down, then vanished into grinder water below.
SPLASH!
For a few seconds, no one spoke.
The lift kept swinging.
Renn slid down the cage wall until he sat in a puddle of black fluid and old rainwater. Vaela looked at Kael’s hands.
They were shredded across the palms.
Then she looked at the bent cage frame where his strike had crushed the creature’s head.
"You were weak ten breaths ago."
Kael flexed his bleeding fingers.
"Still am."
"Not the same weak."
That was true.
He hated that she had seen it.
The lift reached a side landing and jammed hard enough to throw all three of them forward.
CLANG!
The sound carried too far.
Below, something in the grinder water answered with a slow splash. Above, a metal hatch rattled as if another route had heard them arrive. Furnace Sink Nine was not a place with empty spaces. Every gap belonged to hunger, trade, hiding, or teeth.
Vaela caught herself. Kael caught Renn. Renn groaned into Kael’s ribs and immediately regretted it when Kael hissed. They stepped out into a dry maintenance gallery overlooking three lower drain roads. Furnace light bled through cracks in the far wall. Voices echoed from above and behind.
The purge had not stopped.
It had spread.
Vaela crouched near the edge and studied the roads.
"Black Ledger scouts," she said.
Kael followed her gaze.
Four figures moved along the left road with hooded lamps and long hooks. Not enforcement. Their coats were patched with bone tags. Corpse market people.
One held a strip of red cloth.
Garron’s coat cloth. Kael looked at his own arm, where the stolen strip still bound the break.
Vaela noticed.
"You left a loud trail."
"I was busy being crushed."
"Excuses are for people with options."
Renn whispered, "Will they sell us?"
The question was small enough for one boy and large enough to fill the gallery. Kael felt his shredded palms close before he decided to make fists.
Vaela watched the scouts bend over a smear of blood near the road mouth.
"You, maybe. Him, definitely. Me, only if they are feeling brave and stupid."
One scout lifted his hook and pointed toward the gallery. Another raised a whistle made from finger bone. Vaela grabbed Kael’s wrist before the sound came.
"Run."
The whistle shrieked through the drains.
BZZZZ!
Far away, other whistles answered. Kael, Vaela, and Renn ran into the dry gallery while Black Ledger scouts climbed after them with hooks, lamps, and the first corpse price of the night. Somewhere above, the purge bells kept ringing, teaching every hungry listener that Kael Vorr was now worth chasing, bleeding for, selling, or killing before dawn. The night had chosen its new meat, and the drains were already passing the scent along.