Chapter 83: The Ceiling

Chapter 83: Chapter 83: The Ceiling

The guards noticed the change in him at once.

Until now, Jason had fought like a madman, trying desperately to survive.

He had given ground and turned blades and spent his essence in careful, grudging drops. Now he stopped retreating. He lowered his spear until the point aimed at the very center of the enemy line, and he stood perfectly still.

One of the guards narrowed his eyes.

"Break his stance!"

Three of them rushed him together.

Jason waited. He let them come until they were close enough that none of them could pull back without blocking the others. Then he moved.

He stepped into the first attack instead of away from it. The sword came down, and he turned it aside with the flat of his shaft and drove the length of the spear into the man’s ribs. The guard staggered, wheezing.

Jason pivoted. The second blade passed over his shoulder with a hiss, and he thrust into the attacker’s stomach.

The third guard arrived a heartbeat later. Jason swept the man’s weapon wide, spun the spear in his hands, and brought the butt crashing into his face.

It all happened in a few breaths.

None of it was elaborate.

He had forced the guards into a narrow line, bunched beneath a ceiling that was already cracked.

---

He drew on the essence in his Soul Core.

He meant to use Crimson Blaze, the technique that gathered his fire into a single hard point and let the spear punch through guards that ordinary strikes could not touch. He had used it a hundred times. His body knew the shape of it.

The suppression closed around it like a fist.

The flame formed unevenly, flickering along the spearhead in ragged licks. It would not hold a shape. Jason felt the pressure in his Core tighten, and for a terrible instant it was as if an unseen hand were squeezing the very source of his power.

’No.’

He forced more essence through.

Pain flared behind his ribs, white and hot. His vision swam. The Core strained against whatever held it, and something in him seemed to give a small, protesting scream.

The flame brightened.

It burned thin and furious along the spear, and the guards stopped where they stood. For a heartbeat, every one of them hesitated.

Jason thrust.

The attack tore through the narrow space between the men and struck the damaged section of the ceiling.

Stone erupted.

A shower of rubble burst from the impact. The fracture spread outward in a spiderweb of black lines, racing along the overhead supports, and with a groan like a dying animal the first great slab broke free.

The guards looked up.

Jason did not wait to see what came next.

---

He twisted the spear and loosed the rest of the technique.

A second impact hammered the ceiling.

The weakened supports finally gave way.

The corridor began to fall.

A mass of stone came down between Jason and his companions, a roaring wall of rock that severed the passage in two. Dust swallowed the corridor whole. The noise was so enormous that he could not hear the shouts coming from the other side.

For one last instant, through the rolling haze, he saw Skyler.

She was hauling Wen toward the side passage while Reeve dragged Cassius between his shoulders. She had turned her head, and her eyes found his.

"Go!" Jason shouted. "Get out of here!"

"Jason!"

"Now!"

Another slab crashed down.

It hid them from view.

Jason stood on the wrong side of the stone with a wall of rubble at his back and the dust still settling. Some of the guards had been caught beneath the fall. Others had stumbled clear, coughing, shouting in confusion.

He could have tried to dig.

He could have clawed at the debris until he reached the others. But that would have left him trapped on the wrong side of a dying passage, still suppressed, still surrounded, with no way to guarantee they lived.

He had already made his decision.

Everything in the facility had pointed toward one place. The pressure, the way his Core had reached for the residue and the conduits and the chamber beyond the glass. The thing at the center of this place was tied to him in a way he did not understand.

It was the only road he had left.

’And if I live, I will find them afterward.’

He thought of Novaria, waiting in the quiet house with her tea gone cold, and of the promise he had made to come home.

’This is the only road that leads there.’

---

He called on Veil.

His outward essence signature sank, shrinking down to a flicker, the whisper of a First Level cultivator, nothing a guard in a hurry would bother to follow through the dust.

On his side of the collapse, the surviving guards were already turning.

"He is still here!" one of them shouted, pointing into the haze.

Jason did not answer.

He waited until the nearest guard committed to a lunge. Then he slid sideways and let the man run past him, his sword carving empty air.

The guard had expected Jason to retreat toward the others.

Instead, Jason ran the opposite way.

He plunged into the corridor that led deeper into the facility, away from the collapse and the hunters and the sound of falling stone. Voices rose behind him. A blade cut through the dust where his back had been a moment before.

He was already gone.

---

He activated Sun Shift.

Essence surged into his legs.

The suppression caught it immediately. It dragged at the technique like a hand on a rope, and for a moment he felt as if he were trying to sprint through deep water with an anchor chained to his ankle.

He forced the movement anyway.

The world blurred. His boots struck the floor in a rapid, hammering rhythm. He ran through the narrow turns, breaking every line of sight, avoiding the main passages, following the route he remembered from the long walk down. Dust streamed past him in ribbons.

The facility shuddered around him.

Behind him, stone kept falling.

The guards had split their attention. Some were digging at the collapsed corridor, trying to reach the Fourth Level personnel on the other side. Others were pursuing the remaining members of the team, and he could hear them shouting orders, calling for reinforcements, their boots pounding in three different directions.

Jason used the confusion.

He had no intention of fighting his way through the whole facility while suppressed. He did not have the strength, and he did not have the time.

He was going straight to the source of the pressure.

The pill.

---

The passage to the Primary Refinement Chamber loomed ahead.

Two guards stood at its entrance, one on either side of the arch. They were armored in the same dark gray as the rest. Jason’s Perception read them in a single sweep.

Third Level.

Both.

They heard him coming. One of them raised his sword.

"Stop!" the man shouted. "Halt right there!"

Jason did not slow.

He pulled the last of his usable essence into the spear, and Crimson Blaze ignited along its length. The suppression still gnawed at the flame, and it burned lower than it should have. But Sun Shift had given him something he had lacked in the corridor.

Momentum.

He crossed the distance before either guard could set his feet.

The first man began to swing. Jason’s spear slid beneath the sword and struck the center of the man’s chest. The flame erupted. The guard was thrown backward, his armor splitting around the point of the impact like cracked shell.

Jason turned without stopping.

The second guard had managed to bring his sword into line, but Jason was already past it. He stepped inside the arc and struck once.

Crimson Blaze burst against the man’s torso.

The guard fell.

Both were dead almost before they hit the floor.

Jason landed beyond them, breathing hard, his Core burning like a coal in his chest. He wiped sweat from his eyes with the back of his wrist and looked up at the chamber entrance.

The pressure inside him had become almost unbearable.

It crushed. It pulled. It twisted in his chest like something alive.

But beneath it, rising through the pain, there was something else.

A quiet, strange, terrifying feeling.

---

He stepped into the Primary Refinement Chamber.

The room was a ruin. Several of the great conduits had gone dark. The formation beneath the central platform pulsed unevenly, its light stuttering. Sparks fell from broken fixtures overhead, and the vast rings that had turned so smoothly before now wobbled and groaned.

At the center, still suspended in its containment structure, hung the unfinished pill.

Its surface was dark. Veins of gold and crimson crawled beneath it, slow and heavy.

Jason stopped in his tracks.

He had spent hours trying to escape the pressure that had followed him through the Gate. But standing before the pill, he understood that the sensation was not merely similar to the pressure inside his Core.

The two were one and the same

His Core tightened.

The pill pulsed.

For one startling moment, the suppression seemed to loosen, like a knot beginning to untie.

He took a step forward.

Then another.

He did not know why the pill had been made. He did not know why the facility held so much draconic essence, or why the experiment had devoured so many lives. He did not know whether this was a cure or a trap.

He only knew that the pressure inside him had been strangling his cultivation since the beginning.

And that this thing was tied to it.

His hand rose.

The surface of the pill glowed faintly as he drew near, the veins brightening, as if it knew him. He reached out with a hand that was not entirely steady, and his palm came to rest against its skin.