CHAPTER 18: UNDER THE SKIN OF THE EARTH [1]

DING!

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[Improvised Gear: Lumen Veil]

Thumb-sized biolume filament. Attaches to collar/strap and sheds low, steady light tuned to minimal predator attraction.

~----~

Ethan clicked it under his pack strap.

Then, a soft ghost light spread just far enough to read the wall without advertising their souls to the dark.

"Move," Reid said.

Ethan felt the Wheel’s edges shimmer in his vision, the same way it had before the Night Breach. It wasn’t warning him, it was anticipating.

He looked back once. The gully was a shallow mouth swallowing its own teeth, carcasses, resin, and churned mud scattered on the ground.

Ethan thought of the broadcast he’d seen days ago... people throwing fire and lifting trucks, then of the forest that breathes, the bridge of bones, the handlers’ marks gouged into trees.

Humanity wasn’t alone in adapting. The world itself had woken up mean.

With a sigh, he moved.

The hum deepened, forming a bass note in the marrow. Somewhere below, something big shifted its weight... and the earth exhaled heat.

Whatever was in that tunnel wasn’t just another fight.

It was the next escalation.

The tunnel swallowed the morning.

Ethan’s new Lumen Veil painted a soft crescent of ghost-light ahead of their boots, just enough to keep the walls from feeling like a throat closing.

The air was warm, damp, and faintly sweet, like rotting fruit in a greenhouse. Every five steps the floor gave, slick as cartilage, then firmed underfoot again as if remembering how to be ground.

Reid went first, his blade low, shoulders narrow.

Ethan shadowed him a pace back, Whisper Pulse Detector riding his palm, its arcs sweeping in subdued green. Kara and Jonas followed in step, one at spearpoint, the other a battering ram.

Holt and Mira brought up the rear at the mouth, counting seconds, and then slipped in once the front pair had cleared thirty meters, sealing the team inside the hum.

The hum had rules. It rose and fell on a rhythm that didn’t match breath or heartbeat. It felt like walking through the space between a drum hit and the echo, stretched for miles.

"Keep your spacing," Reid said softly.

Sound seemed to smear in here, voices sliding along the walls. "Tight turns. No chatter". He instructed.

The passage narrowed around them.

Filamentous growths draped from the ceiling, beaded with clear droplets that burned tiny marks in the floor where they fell. Holt touched one with the butt of his rifle and the droplet hissed, leaving a pinhole in the wood.

"No splatter," he murmured. "Keep visors down".

Ethan’s visor was just the scratched lens of a scavenged facemask; it fogged with each anxious breath. The Wheel nagged at the edge of his vision like a coin fussing to be flipped.

He ignored it, until the air changed.

The Detector pinged once, confused. Then it pinged again, muted, as if something had leaned against the signal.

"Hold," Ethan whispered.

They stopped, tense as the hum dipped. A wave passed through the film on the walls like a ripple over a pond when something large swims under.

"Left junction ahead," Reid said. "Holt?"

Holt squinted past them, a tracker’s squint that drank light. "Left smells wrong. Sweetest there, freshest there. That means the right is older, safer".

Jonas grunted. "I like safer".

Kara’s smile was a knife. "Fresh means food. Means what we came to kill".

Reid weighed both options, as he always did. "We’re not bleeding for bravado. Right".

They took the right throat. It bent once, twice, then widened into a low chamber where the floor softened to spongy mats.

Something had nested here. Bones lay arranged in arcs; animal, human, and things with too many joints, curved like ribs around a central hollow.

"Markers," Reid said.

Jonas knelt and drove a bent rebar stake into the wall.

Holt took a red cloth from his pocket and tied it in a knot so complicated Ethan couldn’t follow it. At the far side of the chamber, Mira pressed her palm to the air and coaxed the draft.

It came from deep ahead, faint as a secret.

"Ventilation," she said. "Meaning there’s a larger space ahead. It also means fire would kill us here". She added somberly.

"Noted," Reid said. "Step light".

They moved again. The tunnel dropped, the grade steeper as the hum grew teeth.

The Wheel tugged harder. He let it spin.

DING!

~----~

[Improvisation Draw Activated!]

[Improvised Gear: Spore – Screen Mask!]

Tight-seal respirator tuned to filter acid aerosols and hive particulates. Integrated micro-buffer reduces hallucinatory effects from resonance pulses. Duration: 40 minutes.

~----~

The mask materialized snug around his mouth and nose, lenses replacing his scratched visor with clean panes edged in dull metal.

The exhale valve made his breath a private thunder. As the seal engaged, the sweet stink faded to a manageable background rot, and with it, the fuzz in his head receded.

Ethan wordlessly handed the old visor back to Kara.

She eyed the new mask. "Lucky toy".

"Adaptive toy," he murmured. "And it can share feed".

He flicked the setting to relay as low chimes pulsed in his teammates’ earpieces, synching their breathing cadence against the tunnel’s hum. Reid glanced back once, giving approval with a fractional dip of his head.

Then they reached the first drop.

The tunnel cut clean, a vertical shaft ribbed with the same pulsing film. Heat rose like breath from a furnace.

"Rope," Reid said.

"No rope," Kara countered, testing a spearpoint against the ribs. "Ribs hold".

"I can give you a wind," Mira offered, fingers lacing.

"Save it," Reid said. "We don’t know how this place likes wind".

Jonas grinned at the shaft like it had insulted his mother and swung in first, boots on ribs, sliding half with control and half by religion. He vanished into the glow.

"Clear," his voice echoed up. "It’s hot and smells like eggs".

Ethan swallowed. Eggs meant nursery, and nursery meant numbers.

They followed. Ethan’s Grapple grabbed a rib and his descent was graceful. At the bottom, the shaft vomited them into a chamber that made the gully feel like a warm-up.

The nursery spread like an inverted cathedral.

Columns of fibrous tissue rose from the floor to the ceiling, hollow and lit from within by bruised amber. Beteween them, sacs hung heavy with shadowy things curled inside, twitching in dreams.

The hum here was language.

It vibrated the straps on Ethan’s pack, and set his teeth clicking. A lattice of thin, translucent membranes webbed the upper half of the room, and something skittered across it with the soft sound of spilled rice.

Holt breathed one syllable. "Tracks".

The floor was full of prints. Small, many-legged ones like spilled handwriting. And larger ones with that hateful tri-jawed oval.

Over all of it, there was a heavier print; narrow heel, and a wide splay toe. They were hoof-like; the handlers Reid had called out.

"Eyes up," Reid murmured. "No targets yet. We don’t wake the nursery if we can help it".

They didn’t get the choice though because from the far left, a pulse hit. It was soundless but thick, like the pressure drop before a storm.

Ethan staggered.

His Lumen Veil flickered, then rebalanced. The sacs trembled, their shadows turning restless. The membranes overhead thrummed like drumheads plucked by invisible fingers.

"Down!" Reid snapped.

Something sprayed the chamber; fine as mist, but invisible until it hit the light. It was the same clear acid the ceiling droplets had wept, atomized.

Ethan’s mask tingled with captured poison as Kara and Reid pulled their collars over nose and mouth and squinted through tears.

DING!

~----~

[Improvisation Draw Activated!]

[Improvised Gear: Quick Foam Sealant!]

...

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