Chapter 232: Across the Divide

Glitch’s lane was built around foundations, and the first impression through the bond was almost a relief: connected, load-bearing stone, the kind of ground he could read for thirty meters in every direction. The passage ran between reinforced walls beneath a ceiling low enough that he had to keep his head down.

The first armored thing came at him from ahead and died quickly.

The second one arrived and he killed that too, and the ceiling dropped a section of itself forty meters behind him.

Jin sat up.

That’s not damage from the fight. That’s above where the fight was.

He watched the third one and paid attention to what Glitch was reporting through his feet rather than what was happening in front of him, and by the middle of that fight he had it.

Every heavy impact in the lane travelled through the connected foundation and into whatever was above it, and whatever was above it was already failing. Killing something in the wrong place put a load into a structure that could not take it.

"Move first," Jin said. "Take them at the junctions where the walls are thick. Don’t fight in the middle of a span."

Glitch had to walk backward eleven meters to do that and take a hit doing it, and the section held.

Flicker’s lane was worse in a completely different way.

She could not fly. The ruins above were built out of gaps — broken platforms, missing spans, ramps that ended, drops she had to go around rather than over — and behind her were four hunters that could cross most of it at speed.

She could not fight them. Jin established that inside forty seconds, when one caught her against a wall and she got out of it with a strike across her flank that cost her eight points of stamina.

"Don’t stop. Don’t turn and fight. Keep the route."

She kept the route.

What she could do was corner better than they could. The hunters were faster in a straight line and worse at direction changes, and Light Step was doing something Jin had not anticipated: she could take a turn at speed twice in succession without the second one costing her.

He watched her lose two of them entirely on a broken stair.

The first cross-lane mechanism was on her side, and Jin nearly missed what it was.

There was a lever housing set into a wall at the end of a span, marked in a colour the Event used for interactive terrain, and it was not on her route. Taking it meant a detour of maybe fifteen meters with hunters behind her.

Jin looked at Glitch’s panel and saw the tunnel narrowing ahead of him into a section with visible pressure venting from the ceiling.

The housing controlled a vent in Glitch’s lane.

"Flicker — the housing on the left. Take the detour."

She took it. It cost her the distance and one more exchange, and the pressure in Glitch’s lane dropped and a barrier that had been closing across his route stopped closing.

One machine, built across two levels.

He wrote that down while she was still running.

The second one went the other way.

Glitch reached a junction where the foundation ran under a section of Flicker’s ruins, and the load-bearing member there was not sitting properly — Jin could feel it through the bond as a wrongness, a stone that was doing less than it should.

"Brace it. Push it back and hold."

Glitch put his shoulder into it and held, and on the other panel a span that had been sagging out of alignment came up level, and Flicker crossed it.

She crossed it because Jin told her it was coming, three seconds before it happened, and she was already at the edge when it moved.

The cost was on Glitch’s side. He could not hold a foundation and fight at the same time, and something armored came down the lane at him while he was braced, and he had to take the whole of its charge on his side without being able to turn into it.

[Glitch — stamina 38%]

Every piece of cross-lane assistance charged its cost to the avatar providing it.

Jin caught himself becoming the bottleneck about six minutes in.

He was watching both panels and calling both lanes, and Flicker was mid-route asking for a decision he had not made yet because he had been looking at Glitch’s brace, and a hunter got inside her turn and she took a hit she should not have taken.

He stopped and fixed it the way he had fixed it at E-9.

"New rules. Glitch — you report when a brace is failing or a section drops behind you. Nothing else. Kill things at junctions and pick your own junctions."

"Flicker — you keep the route and you report when you reach a mechanism. I’ll tell you which ones to take and you decide how to get there."

Both lanes got quieter and both lanes got faster.

There were four aid mechanisms in total. None sat directly on the route, and the node never told Jin he needed them, but each one had changed the other lane enough to justify the cost. He took all four.

The third was Glitch’s — a redirection, where Jin had him drive an impact deliberately through the structure rather than into an enemy, and the shock knocked an obstruction off a ledge in Flicker’s lane and opened a route she had been going the long way around.

The fourth was hers, thirty meters off her path with three hunters on her.

Jin looked at the distance and the hunters and did the arithmetic.

Optional. And every optional mechanism so far has bought the other one room.

"Take it."

She took it. The detour cost nineteen points of stamina, a strike across the wing she would carry to Wave 30, and about ninety seconds. When she pulled the release, a pressure door beside Glitch lifted and exposed a maintenance bypass. The main tunnel still curved toward the central lock, but the bypass cut away the armored section waiting there. Glitch reached the control through the shorter route and drove his weight into the release.

The barrier between the lanes came down, and Glitch and Flicker emerged into the same space forty meters apart, both of them worn.

[Elite node cleared]

[First-clear reward: 50 Tide Tokens]

[Current Tide Tokens: 275]

[Hidden objective complete: Across the Divide]

[Condition: activate every cross-lane aid mechanism and clear with both avatars alive]

[Reward: 75 Tide Tokens]

[Current Tide Tokens: 350]

Jin read the hidden objective’s condition and let out a breath.

Seventy-five tokens for a detour I almost skipped.

Then the node offered its cache.

[Rare temporary boon — select 1 of 3]

[Ironhide Cadence: Harden costs reduced, duration extended]

[Relay Instinct: when one avatar materially displaces a target or exposes a weak point, the other gains a brief increase to movement speed and precision]

[Sunder: increased damage against structurally weakened targets]

Jin read Relay Instinct three times.

Relay Instinct transferred no strength and did not make Flicker stronger. It gave the avatar who had not created the opening a brief advantage in reaching and using it.

He took it, and then immediately went looking for evidence, because a description was not a rule.

He tested it twice in Wave 21.

The first time, Flicker turned a pursuing hunter across Glitch’s reach — a bait, the thing she had been doing since the Basin — and Glitch took it and Jin saw the window flag on Glitch’s panel for about two seconds afterward.

Her displacement had triggered Glitch’s window.

The second time, Glitch put a Ridgeback’s flank seam open and did not finish it, and Flicker’s movement value spiked and she crossed nine meters and landed the strike much cleaner than her fatigue should have allowed.

And his exposure triggers hers. It’s the chain rule with a speed bonus attached.

He wrote both of them down and moved on, because there were nine waves before the gate and the elite node had cost him more than he had budgeted.

Waves 21 through 29 were unexplored and Jin explored them at speed.

Two encounters were worth expanding and he did. Wave 24 had a mixed pack on sloped terrain that kept trying to pull Flicker downhill, and he solved it by refusing the slope entirely and making them come up to Glitch. Wave 27 was three armored things at once and took nearly five minutes of Glitch bracing and Flicker finishing, with Relay Instinct firing four times.

The rest he compressed and the attrition did not compress with it.

[Wave 29 cleared]

[Glitch — stamina 33% | contusion, left flank]

[Flicker — stamina 39% | wing strain, left]

Then the gate opened.

The arena beyond it was the largest the Event had shown him — connected stone across the lower third, sloped surfaces rising on two sides, broken vertical structures standing in the middle, and enough open space between them for something to move through the air for a short distance.

One thing came out onto it.

[Stormburrow Drake]

It was armored, heavy, and long, and it went into the ground almost immediately and Jin felt Glitch pick it up through the floor within a second.

One boss. Big one.

He set up for a long fight.