Chapter 148: Down

Helen got up first.

She pushed herself off the moss with one hand on Daniel’s shoulder, and then she turned and held that hand out to him. He took it and let her pull him to his feet. His forearm had closed under her second heel, leaving only a pink ridge where the mandibles had bitten.

The blood on his torn sleeve was already drying to a dull brown.

---

The shelf was larger than Logan had first realized.

It jutted out from the wall of the Abyss like a stone tongue, perhaps forty paces deep and twice that across. The stair came down the wall and met it at its left end, where the rock was bare and broken. The front and right edges simply stopped, and beyond them there was nothing but the drop.

The pale stalks covered everything else. They grew thickest at the back, where the shelf joined the wall, and there they stood close enough to hide a crouching man.

Each stalk rose about as tall as Vina and ended in a soft round cap that gave off a faint green glow. There was no sun in the Abyss that Logan could find. The only light came from the grey haze far overhead and from these caps, so the whole shelf was lit from below like a room full of lanterns set on the floor.

The air was cool and damp. It smelled of wet stone and of something faintly sweet, like bruised mushrooms, which Logan guessed was the caps.

---

The family and the units stood in a loose half-circle near the foot of the stair.

Rishin had Vina beside him, with Solveig close at her back. Garen had taken the right side of the shelf and Isolde the left, both of them near enough to reach anything that came out of the growth. Logan and Alice stood a few steps in front of Rishin.

Across the drop, the far wall of the Abyss rose and fell away into haze. It was honeycombed with thousands of small dark holes, and in every hole a hookwing sat and watched.

---

The clicking grew louder, and three crawlers pushed out of the stalks at the back of the shelf.

They came in a loose line with a few meters between each one. The glowing crust on their backs matched the caps around them so closely that for a few steps they looked like three patches of the shelf that had come loose and started walking.

They stopped at the edge of the growth. Their mandibles opened and closed, and the dry clicks overlapped until the sound was almost continuous.

"Three," Daniel said.

"Three," Rishin agreed from the foot of the stair. "You cannot fight three. So what do you do?"

---

Daniel looked down at his healed arm. Helen looked at the crawlers.

Logan watched his mother work through it. Her eyes moved from one crawler to the next and back again, and her lips moved slightly without making a sound.

He knew that look. She used to wear it in the grocery store, adding up the basket in her head before they reached the counter so that nobody would have to put anything back.

"We don’t fight three," Helen said slowly. "We fight one of them, three times."

"And the other two?"

Helen turned around. Her eyes went along the line of units standing at the foot of the stair. They passed over Billy’s great wheel and over Solveig’s burning blade, and they stopped on Terry.

---

Terry was covered from head to foot in overlapping plates of armor. Every plate was scored and dented from old fights. He stood the way he always stood, with his weight settled and his arms at his sides, as though the ground under him had been built to hold him up.

"Terry," Helen said. "Would you hold two of them for us?"

Terry turned his faceplate toward Alice. He had fought at her side since the Warlord match, and he looked to her before he took an order from anyone else.

Alice nodded once.

"Hold," Terry said. His voice was deep and very even. "Not kill?"

"Please," Helen said.

"Yes, ma’am."

---

Terry walked into the stalks.

He did not charge, and he did not hurry. He simply walked between the two crawlers on the left, pushing the glowing caps aside with his forearms as he went. When the crawlers turned toward him, he stopped and let them come.

Both of them struck at once. One clamped its mandibles onto his thigh and the other onto his shin, and the sound of it was like heavy shears biting into sheet metal.

Terry did not move.

Logan watched the plates along Terry’s leg shift. They slid over one another like the scales of a fish and sealed tight around every point where the mandibles had dug in. The crawlers were left biting down on solid armor with nothing soft beneath it.

’Living Armor,’ Logan thought. ’Every time a plate gives, the others close the gap. He could stand there for as long as they liked.’

"Held," Terry said. There was no strain in his voice at all.

---

That left the third crawler, and it came for Daniel.

It did not charge the way the first one had. It came in low, with its belly nearly brushing the moss and its six legs tucked close to its body. It began to circle him slowly, feelers flicking in and out of the growth as it tasted the air.

"Feet," Daniel muttered under his breath, before Rishin could say it.

He planted his boots shoulder-width apart. Thin brown lines crept down from his ankles and threaded into the moss, and the stalks nearest him bent outward a little as though something heavy had settled into the ground.

```

[ Rooted Stance (Lv1) ]

[ While standing still, cannot be knocked back. Damage taken reduced by 20%. ]

```

Helen’s palms were already glowing green-blue.

She did not wait for the crawler to hurt him this time. She stepped up behind Daniel and pressed one glowing hand flat between his shoulder blades.

Mending Spring did not heal all at once. It poured health back into its target steadily over ten seconds. Helen had worked out that if she started it early, the heal would already be running when the damage arrived.

At the foot of the stair, Rishin saw it. He said nothing, but his chin dipped a fraction of an inch.

The crawler lunged at Daniel’s shin and closed its mandibles on his boot.

```

[ Daniel Wolf: HP 97% → 93% → 97% ]

```

The bite took four percent off him, and the heal put all four back before the crawler had even let go.

---

"It won’t lift," Daniel said through his teeth. "It’s staying low. I can’t see its feet."

He was right. The crawler kept its legs folded beneath it and its weight spread evenly across all six. Its whole underside stayed pressed against the moss, and there was nothing to trip and no gap anywhere in the shell.

A few steps in front of Rishin, Alice felt the answer rise in her throat and bit down on it.

’Sting it in the face,’ she thought. ’The first one reared up at Solveig because it wanted to look bigger than him. Make this one angry enough to want to look big.’

She kept her mouth shut. Rishin had said they were there to stop anything that went wrong. He had never said they were there to solve it.

Helen had stopped looking at the crawler’s shell. She was looking at its head, at the two short feelers flicking in and out of the moss.

She lifted her free hand.

```

[ Spring Lance (Lv1) ]

```

A jet of water no thicker than a finger lashed across both feelers.

The crawler shrieked, a thin high rattle from somewhere inside its shell. It let go of Daniel’s boot and reared back, lifting its front legs high and spreading its mandibles wide to threaten her.

’She saw it,’ Alice thought, and her chest went warm. ’She saw it on her own.’

---

Daniel did not wait to be told.

```

[ Snaring Roots (Lv1) ]

```

The moss under the crawler split. Brown roots shot up out of the stone and wrapped around its back legs, and Daniel yanked them toward him with a grunt.

With its front legs already in the air, the crawler had nothing to catch itself on. It tipped over backward and landed on its shell, and its six legs thrashed at the haze above.

Its pale underside lay exposed and soft.

The roots would only hold for three seconds, but that no longer mattered. A crawler on its back could not turn itself over, and this one was rocking helplessly on the curve of its shell.

Daniel looked around for something to hit it with.

He did not have a weapon. He had already learned that his fist did nothing against that shell, and Helen had gone pale from the effort of the jet. She was bent over with one hand braced on her knee.

At the left end of the shelf, where the stair met the rock, there was a scatter of broken stone that had fallen from the wall above. Daniel crossed to it in four long strides. He chose a slab about the size of a loaf of bread and lifted it in both hands.

He carried it back to the crawler and brought it down on the soft underside with his whole weight behind it.

```

[ Lanternback Crawler slain. ]

[ Daniel Wolf: +10 Tower Points ]

[ Daniel Wolf: Level 1 → 2 ]

```

---

Daniel stood over the dead crawler, breathing hard, and looked at the rock in his hands.

Logan looked at his father’s hands too. He had watched those hands come home cracked and raw all through his childhood. They had carried and lifted and hauled for other people for as long as he could remember, and nobody had ever put anything better into them than whatever happened to be lying around.

’He never had a weapon,’ Logan thought. ’He never had anything. So he always used what he could pick up.’

Daniel set the rock down beside the crawler, carefully, as if he might need it again.

"Well," he said. "That works."

Helen started to laugh. It came out shaky and a little too high, but it was a real laugh. After a few seconds Daniel was laughing with her, and the sound bounced off the wall of the Abyss and came back to them.

---

"Terry," Helen called, once she could speak again. "One more, please."

Terry reached down and took hold of the crawler on his thigh with one gauntleted hand. He pried its mandibles apart the way a man opens a stiff gate, lifted it clear, and set it down on the moss facing her.

It went faster this time.

Helen stung its feelers before it had covered half the distance. It reared up in fury, and Daniel’s roots had its back legs before its front feet touched the ground again.

This time Helen did not wait for the rock. She drew a second jet and put it straight through the crawler’s pale belly while it was still rocking on its back.

```

[ Lanternback Crawler slain. ]

[ Helen Wolf: +10 Tower Points ]

[ Helen Wolf: Level 2 → 3 ]

```

"Last one," Daniel said.

Terry pried the final crawler off his shin and put it down in front of them. Deep scores ran across his leg plating where it had been chewing on him. He looked down at them with mild interest and did not comment.

The last crawler went fastest of all. Helen’s jet made it rear, and Daniel’s roots put it on its back. Then Daniel picked up his rock again and finished it.

```

[ Lanternback Crawler slain. ]

[ Daniel Wolf: +10 Tower Points ]

[ Daniel Wolf: Level 2 → 3 ]

```

---

Helen and Daniel sat down side by side on the moss among the dead crawlers. Daniel’s hand found Helen’s knee and rested there.

Garen walked over from the right side of the shelf and crouched in front of them with his forearms on his knees.

"Four crawlers," he said. "Forty Tower Points between you, and Level 3 each."

"Is that good?" Helen asked.

"No," Garen said cheerfully. "It is terrible. Everyone starts terrible." He reached out and clapped Daniel on the shoulder. "But you started terrible in the right direction, and that is rarer than you would think."

Isolde came over with a flask of water and handed it to Helen. Vina slipped away from Rishin and sat down against her mother’s other shoulder. She studied the four upturned crawlers with an expression of disgust and deep fascination.

"Can I have the shells?" she asked.

"No," said four adults at once.

---

Rishin had not come over with the others.

He had walked to the front edge of the shelf, where the moss stopped and the drop began. He was standing there with his head tilted back.

Logan went to stand beside him. At first he saw nothing but the grey haze overhead and the far wall across the gap, with its thousands of dark holes.

Then he saw them.

High above, out in the open middle of the Abyss, five shapes were coming down fast. They were large and winged, and they were diving almost straight down with their wings folded half shut. Every one of them carried a rider on its back.

’Mounts,’ Logan thought. ’Flying units, with their players riding them. They are going straight down the middle.’

He understood what they were doing before he understood what it meant.

’They are trying to save time.’

Beside him, Rishin’s face had gone the color of old ash.

"No," the old man said, very softly.

---

The far wall moved.

It did not move the way a flock of birds moves, with a leader in front and the rest spreading out behind it. Every hole on that wall emptied in the same instant, as if the whole cliff face had exhaled. The air between the walls turned grey with wings.

The five riders saw it coming. Logan watched their mounts flare their wings and try to pull out of the dive, and he watched them realize there was nowhere left to pull out to.

The hookwings did not chase them, because they did not need to. They had left the wall already aimed at where the riders would be. They closed from above and below and from every side at once, exactly the way Rishin’s fingers had closed on the top step of the house with the open door.

The riders vanished into the grey.

Logan heard the mounts scream. The sound carried across the whole width of the drop, thin and high and terrible. Then it began to stop, one voice at a time.

---

One shape tore free of the cloud.

It was a mount, a long-bodied winged thing with one wing still beating and the other hanging in tatters. A rider lay slumped across its back. It was no longer flying. It was falling sideways toward the wall of the Abyss, and it was falling toward their shelf.

The hookwings poured after it in a long grey streamer.

Logan’s hand closed on Grimlord’s Blade. Behind him, static crackled up Sonic’s arms, and Alice had an arrow drawn halfway to her cheek.

"Down," Rishin said.

His voice cut across the shelf like a blade. "All of you. Units too. Get down and do not move, whatever you hear."

Vina was flat on the moss before the word had finished leaving his mouth.

Logan looked at the falling shape. Then he looked back at his mother and father sitting among the dead crawlers, and he dropped.