Chapter 70: Gatefall!!
The Dead Song Gate began to close.
It did not rush. Slow danger gave the body no clean excuse to panic. Every person had to watch the shape of their own death arriving with patience.
Sound did not fill the chamber. It folded under the ribs.
Each black arch breathed at a different speed. Dead marks clicked along the plates. The floor rose beneath the survivors’ feet and dropped beneath Kael’s. The left wall crowded in. Dust lifted from fresh blood before it lifted from stone. Tavin’s bait scent, Orrek’s old hook scar, Renn’s bruised neck, and every cut the group had gathered below the bowl pulled at separate pieces of the gate.
Renn screamed, "Now!"
Kael moved.
The first rib slammed toward him like a black door. He stepped inside the closing angle, let the edge scrape his shoulder, and drove his knee into the hinge seam Vaela had exposed two breaths earlier.
CRACK!
The rib shuddered.
A second rib came low for his legs, trying to fold him to the floor where the upper mouths could reach his spine. Kael jumped half an inch. His heel landed on the rib’s inner joint.
THUD!
Pain shot up his calf. The old wound opened again. Blood hit the floor.
DRIP! DRIP!
A pressure mouth opened beneath the drops and bit upward.
Kael slammed his palm over it.
The bite punched through the meat between his fingers. The gate’s pull came straight into bone and nerve. Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into Core Mass Density, Gravity Vector Impact, Velocity Movement Authority, Regenerative Dominion, and Primordial Marrow Layer.
ALLOCATE!
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[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
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≫ HOSTILE GATE CLOSURE PRESSURE DETECTED
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +6
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≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +6 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Core Mass Density -> 22
- Gravity Vector Impact -> 20
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 18
- Regenerative Dominion -> 18
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 16
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Gate pressure converted into immediate reinforcement.
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Power slammed through Kael like a furnace door kicked open inside his bones. Fresh skin closed over the worst of the bite. Marrow heat braced his frame. Gravity gathered behind his next movement, a brutal weight waiting for the gate to meet it.
The upgrade did not clean him. Blood still ran between his fingers. The old calf wound still burned. His shoulder still dragged when he breathed too deep. It only made the broken places refuse to widen as easily. Enough for the next impact, and the next impact was all the gate had given him time to own.
Kael ripped his hand free.
RIP!
Two black teeth came with it.
The gate convulsed.
Vaela caught Jaro by the back of his ragged shirt before the boy pitched into a floor seam.
"Use your feet!"
"I am trying!"
"Try harder with your feet!"
Orrek drove his uninjured shoulder into a closing side rib and held it long enough for three workers to crawl under. His ruined shoulder hung useless and bleeding, but his uninjured arm worked the torn black strip like a hook rope.
"Move! If you die here, I am telling everybody you got eaten by singing furniture!"
A worker sobbed and laughed while crawling.
Renn stood near the center of the touch chain. His knees knocked together, but he counted breaths instead of numbers.
"In! Out! Hold! Move!"
Every word scraped his injured neck. Every word kept the line from breaking apart.
The survivors obeyed because the words had become rhythm instead of comfort. Sella moved on "In." Dorran dragged the splinted leg on "Out." Noll pushed the twins on "Hold." Tavin shoved the smaller furnace boy forward on "Move" and nearly collapsed when the shoulder scar pulled again. Della caught him under the ribs and hissed into his ear.
"Later. Fall later."
Tavin nodded with tears in his eyes and kept crawling.
The gate vented bait through the marks again.
A mouth near Kael’s elbow exhaled Tavin’s name.
A lower plate clicked in the rhythm of Orrek’s old chain.
A rib above Renn shaped the false count that had almost broken him.
A side mouth rasped Vaela’s name through a ruined bowl-song.
Kael did not need to untangle every sound. Each one came from a seam, a plate, a mouth, or a cord he could break.
Elbow into the name mouth.
CRUNCH!
Knee into the chain plate.
THUD!
Palm into the count mark.
BANG!
Shoulder through the rib that carried Vaela’s bait.
CRACK!
Vaela shouted from behind him. "Low center! The knot sits under the sealed four!"
Jaro yelled, "The upper ribs feed the lower teeth! Stay away from the top!"
Orrek bellowed, "Hit the mean part!"
Vaela snapped, "That does not help!"
"It helps me!"
Kael heard all of it and used the part that mattered.
Low center.
He dropped beneath a closing rib, planted both feet, and drove his right fist into the black knot beneath four sealed dead marks.
BOOM!
The first strike did not break it.
The knot pulsed and shoved force back through his arm. Skin tore. Bone groaned. The gate tried to crush his hand against the wall.
Kael struck again.
His left palm braced the stone. His right elbow followed the fist. His shoulder drove behind the elbow, his spine behind the shoulder, and his legs behind all of it. Gravity came down with him.
BOOM!
The four sealed marks cracked.
The gate screamed without sound.
Every worker dropped with hands over ears. Renn lost the count for one breath.
Vaela slapped him across the face.
SMACK!
His eyes snapped open.
"Still here," she said.
He nodded, dazed. "Still here."
The chamber held one tiny human beat before the gate made its last move.
Tavin crawled to Della’s smaller boy and pulled him flat beneath his own body. The woman with the ash cough covered both of their heads with her arms. Jaro shoved his shoulder under Renn’s elbow so the count keeper would not fall.
They were frightened. They moved anyway.
That movement was not clean. Dorran slipped and almost lost the splint on his ankle. Sella caught it with both hands and cried out through her teeth. Noll shoved one twin under his own chest while the other crawled over his back. The ash-cough woman coughed hard enough to spit black into her palm, then wiped it on her wrap and kept pushing the child beneath her forward. Nobody looked like a formation. They looked like a heap refusing to become bodies for the gate.
Then every rib pulled inward.
Floor. Wall. Ceiling.
The black arches drove toward the cluster of survivors. Hooks snapped from the seams. Mouths opened around every fresh wound. The torn bait thread lashed toward Tavin’s shoulder. The count cord around Renn’s wrist pulled taut.
Kael saw the true opening in the attack.
A gate that struck him hurt him. A gate that reached past him exposed the center holding all the ribs together.
He stepped into the closing crush and drove his forehead against the cracked sealed four. His fist pinned the black knot to the wall.
Then he pushed.
There was no clean punch in it. His legs, spine, shoulder, neck, skull, fist, and every hard-earned ounce of weight went forward together.
The black knot collapsed.
SHATTER!
The Dead Song Gate broke from the center outward. Ribs snapped away from the wall. Dead marks burst and spilled black dust. The soup bait vanished. The false count stopped scratching at Renn. The blood-scent thread ripped in half.
The release threw bodies in every direction. Orrek hit the wall shoulder-first and made a sound that was half curse, half swallowed scream. Vaela landed on one knee with her blade still out. Renn dropped both hands to the floor and counted without voice, touching ash once for every body he could still see.
One. Two. Three.
He reached fourteen and nearly folded over the number.
Della slapped dust from the smaller furnace boy’s face until he coughed. Tavin pushed himself upright with one arm and then immediately checked the boy beneath him before checking his own shoulder. Jaro crawled in a crooked circle, touching wall, floor, broken rib, and ash, trying to understand whether anything still moved.
Nothing chased them for three breaths.
That silence had weight. It made every survivor listen to the broken ribs instead of their own panic. When no second pull came, Sella started breathing again. Orrek spat blood at the dead gate and missed by a foot.
"Still counts," he muttered.
RIP!
------
Far above, Pell Tarrow’s baited scent slate split down the middle.
CLACK!
The pipe cutter beside him looked at the broken bone tab.
Pell said nothing.
------
Far away in the chained dark, Ivara Thane felt the gate fail through the pressure in her wrists. One link loosened by the width of a fingernail.
She smiled.
Something behind her stepped back.
------
Kael fell to one knee in the ruined gate.
Renn whispered through his ruined neck, "Fourteen."
Orrek coughed blood and laughed.
"Ugly count. Best count."
Vaela looked from the broken ribs to Kael. Suspicion stayed in her face. Something beside it stood straighter.
Jaro crawled to the opening beyond the shattered plates and peered through.
His face went slack.
"What?" Vaela asked.
The boy swallowed.
GULP!
"This does not go back to the bowl passages."
Kael lifted his head.
Beyond the broken gate, a vertical shaft dropped into red darkness. Chains hung across it like old veins. Far below, something beat once, slow and enormous.
BOOM!
Jaro whispered, "The pipe-lung runs down there. Pell’s buried extractor."
Kael rose with zero shards and blood on both hands.
"Then we keep moving."