Chapter 60: First Intake!!
The first old mouth did not wait for Kael to reach it.
It pulled the chamber toward him.
The floor flexed. The black furnace bone buckled in a slow inward wave, dragging water, ash, broken teeth, and survivor shadows toward the red slit at the far wall. The mouth sang through all its smaller mouths at once, turning the chamber into a closing intake tunnel.
RUMBLE!
Vaela grabbed Jaro by the collar and slammed him behind a rib pillar.
"Route?"
"Through it!" Jaro shouted.
"I hate you."
"I hate me too. Move!"
Orrek planted both feet and hooked his chain around a pipe spur. His ruined shoulder shook as the pull hit him.
"Workers to me!"
No oath, no formal command; just a big stubborn man becoming a post because people needed one. Della shoved Tavin toward him. Old Noll dragged Miro. Sella took the twins by their collars. Renn tried to count and nearly choked on the song.
The old mouth sang in his voice.
"One gone. Two gone. Three gone."
Renn spat blood into the water.
SPIT!
"One holding. Two holding. Three holding."
The mouth laughed with Pell’s polished cadence.
"Warm bodies enter the red slit. Pell’s pipe hands broke. Leave one body and the water opens."
The chamber had rules.
Kael felt them through the floor before he understood them. The mouth pulled hardest when someone spoke useful truth. It relaxed when noise carried no clean handle. It watched the weak first but struck the rear when the rear became the anchor. It did not think like a beast, not exactly. It thought like a buried machine that had been fed too many names and learned hunger from captors.’ voices.
That made it worse than an animal.
Animals killed to eat.
This thing ate because it had been taught to wait for the weak.
Kael walked forward.
Every step fought the floor.
He had zero unallocated shards.
No reserve waited for the first mistake. No extra correction hid under the ribs. The old mouth’s pull dug into his wounds, opened the hook cuts across his back, and dragged blood down his spine. The song pressed at his mind, trying to make the protected bodies behind him feel heavier than his own bones.
He let them be heavy.
Then he moved anyway.
A mouth opened under his left foot.
CHOMP!
Its teeth closed around his boot and calf. Kael dropped his weight through that leg.
CRACK!
The teeth broke against Core Mass Density already earned, already set in his bones. He ripped his foot free and kept walking.
Three wall mouths spat bone hooks.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
Vaela moved before they reached the line. Her crescents flashed low, not pretty, not wide. She cut the hook cords at the soft points where wet nerve met pipe bone.
SNAP! SNAP!
One hook still slipped past and caught Jaro’s sleeve.
Jaro screamed.
Orrek yanked the boy back by the belt.
RIP!
The sleeve tore away, leaving skin but taking cloth.
"You owe me a sleeve," Jaro gasped.
Orrek stared at him. "We are being eaten by architecture."
"I liked that sleeve."
"I respect the priorities."
The old mouth changed songs.
It used Kael’s voice now.
"Leave one. Save many."
The chamber stilled for half a breath.
The cruelest song yet came because it sounded almost reasonable. Kael stopped three body lengths from the red slit. Behind him, fourteen survivors clung to Orrek’s chain line. Jaro shook under Vaela’s grip. Renn held the count with both hands pressed against his own skull, as if numbers might leak out through his ears.
The mouth spoke again in Kael’s voice.
"One body buys passage."
Kael answered for the first time.
"No."
Every small mouth smiled.
Jaro made a strangled sound. "You answered."
"I know."
The old mouth lunged through the floor.
The whole chamber snapped shut around Kael.
BOOM!
Furnace bone ribs slammed into his shoulders, thighs, back, and chest. The pressure was direct, total, and hungry. It tried to fold him into a shape that could fit through the red slit. His ribs ground. His shoulder wound burst open. The black intake scar in his palm burned as if a buried chain-lung had turned toward the violence.
For a moment, the survivors saw the pressure take him. Not as a legend. Not as the impossible man who broke frames and roads. They saw his knees bend. Saw his shoulder wound open and pour blood. Saw his mouth tighten around pain that would have made any of them scream.
That mattered.
If Kael never bent, they could call him something else and stop measuring themselves against him. If he bent and still moved, the sight became harder to escape. It meant refusal was not the absence of pain. It was what a body did after pain had already entered.
Renn saw it and kept counting.
Vaela saw it and cut faster.
Orrek saw it and pulled the chain line until his ruined shoulder nearly came apart.
The Sovereign Root roared awake.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into GRAVITY VECTOR IMPACT, CORE MASS DENSITY, VELOCITY MOVEMENT AUTHORITY, REGENERATIVE DOMINION, and PRIMORDIAL MARROW LAYER.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: FIRST OLD MOUTH TOTAL ROUTE CONSUMPTION PRESSURE
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +5
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +5 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 20
- Gravity Vector Impact -> 18
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 16
- Regenerative Dominion -> 15
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 14
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Immediate allocation completed. Unallocated Existential Shards: 0.
====================================================================
The new strength did not make the old mouth weaker.
It made Kael more expensive to swallow.
The old mouth closed around him with enough weight to make skin, teeth, and old injuries answer at once.
CRACK!
The rib split.
He jammed his elbow into the fracture and twisted his whole torso.
CRUNCH!
The chamber screamed.
One mouth would have been a mercy.
All of them.
SCREECH!
Vaela shouted without looking away from the hook cords. "Soft anatomy is behind the red slit! It is not wall. It is the hinge tissue!"
Kael saw it.
Threat Perception Instinct marked the rhythm between pulses. The red slit opened wide each time the old mouth sang a full phrase. Narrowed when it listened. Opened when it swallowed sound. Renn understood too, somehow, through terror.
"Make it sing wrong!"
Orrek grinned like pain had made him young.
"Finally. My talent."
He sucked in air and bellowed from the chain line.
"PELL TARROW’S BLOOD SMELLS SWEET!"
Every old mouth snapped toward him.
The song stumbled.
Jaro, shaking, joined in with the route cadence.
"Clean robe spoiled! Pipe hands taste soft! Third Bell blood drips!"
Vaela barked, "Everyone who can speak, say nothing useful!" Sella shouted, "Orrek smells like old soup!" Orrek looked wounded. "Why was that ready?" Tavin screamed, "I hate bowls!"
Old Noll rasped, "My knees are older than this pipe!"
The chamber filled with useless truth and ugly noise. Not answers. Not names. Not surrender. Noise with no handle. The noise was ridiculous.
That saved them.
The old mouth had spent too many years hearing bargains, pleas, confessions, route calls, and captors’ names. Useless noise confused it because it carried no scent to follow. A terrified child’s hatred of bowls, an old man’s complaint about knees, Orrek being accused of soup rot: none of it gave the mouth a body to hunt. For once, being messy was survival.
Vaela laughed once under her breath, shocked by herself.
"This is the stupidest tactic I have ever respected."
Orrek shouted, "Put that on my grave!"
"Keep moving and I won’t need to."
The first old mouth struggled to follow the noise.
Its red slit opened too wide.
Kael moved.
Velocity Movement Authority drove him through the collapsing ribs. A hook ripped across his back. A floor mouth bit his thigh and lost teeth. He slammed one palm into the red slit and forced it wider.
SIZZLE!
The hinge tissue burned his hand.
He stepped in close instead of pulling away.
Full body. No weapon. No distance.
His shoulder smashed the left hinge.
THUD!
His knee drove into the lower hinge.
CRACK!
His head snapped sideways, temple striking a pulsing bone node inside the slit.
BANG!
The node burst black fluid.
SPLAT!
The old mouth convulsed. The chamber tried to throw him back. Kael hooked both hands into the torn hinge meat and pulled.
RIP!
The red slit split from floor to ceiling. For one heartbeat, everyone saw inside the old mouth: layers of swallowed route signs, name chips, broken child’s teeth, bowl seals, rusted spoons, old hair, and a beating pressure knot shaped like a tongue without a mouth. Kael drove his knee into the pressure knot.
BOOM!
The knot burst. The blast did not only break the mouth. It broke the pipe’s confidence. All around them, smaller mouths snapped shut.
Seals hardened. Tar stitches smoked. The chamber’s hum collapsed into wet choking pulses as if the route had forgotten how to sing and breathe at the same time. Jaro stared at the torn pressure knot with his mouth open.
Vaela slapped the back of his head lightly.
"Do not answer the dead road with your face."
He shut his mouth.
"Right. Enough. Smart. I was being smart."
"You were being open. Different thing."
The first old mouth screamed all the names it had stolen. Not clearly. Not kindly. A storm of half remembered people ripped through the chamber and blew out through the lower pipe. Renn fell to one knee, sobbing without knowing whose grief had struck him. Jaro covered his missing ear scar and laughed once, broken and scared.
The floor stopped pulling.
The old mouth sagged open.
Hot black water poured from the split intake channel and rushed down a hidden channel behind it.
FOOOOSH!
A passage appeared through the wound.
Beyond it waited a downward road lined with dead singing marks, all silent now. Kael stood inside the ruined mouth, blood running from his back, calf, palm, and scalp.
The Sovereign Root was silent again.
Zero shards.
But the silence no longer belonged to the pipe. Behind him, Renn dragged air through his ruined throat.
"Fifteen moving," he said. "Fourteen survivors. Jaro alive. Kael rear. Old mouth broken."
Orrek leaned on the chain, shoulder shaking.
"Add heroic blockage."
Renn looked at him.
"Heroic blockage still loud."
"Fair."
Vaela stared at the open wound in the route.
"Lower Ash will hear this."
The pipe answered from far behind, carrying panic upward through broken mouths and witness tunnels.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Bowl bells began screaming.
------
Far above, Pell Tarrow’s black bowl cracked down the middle. Far deeper, somewhere behind chain-glass, Ivara Thane lifted her head as a pressure echo touched her chains.
She smiled once.
Softness had no place in it.
Hungry.
------
Back at the split intake channel, Kael stepped out last. The ruined machine had learned a new name.
It did not sing it.
The moment had not arrived yet.