Chapter 360: Cutting Through the Uncertainties

Drifter Mode holds the hall open in front of my eyes in a way my normal senses could never follow. Weight, pressure, friction, and OXI overlap in lines that run through stone, air, and flesh.

The Heart’s chaotic beats are still moving through the golem, each one following a different configuration from the last. One pulse splits across the torso, another runs down the legs, the next comes back through the Core at a completely different frequency. There’s no sequence I could memorize, and no pattern Zhang or Rhayne could even organize.

But there’s one line that never changes.

It’s much thinner than the others and nearly disappears in the middle of that mess. It leaves the blue gem exposed in the guardian’s chest, runs down through the mass of stone, and enters the floor. I follow the flow under the slabs until it reappears several yards ahead, climbing the base of the great six-armed statue.

It ends at a small black pearl.

Without Drifter Mode I probably would have walked past it without seeing any connection. It’s small next to the statue, set between the reliefs of the base and half hidden by the mist. Now I can see the whole circuit. The blue gem works as the guardian’s immediate Core. That pearl is part of the structure holding the test together, taking in OXI and sending it back while the impossible beats cross the hall. That’s where the commands for the giant stone puppet come from.

Chaos Theory rewrote the answer I knew, but Thirstfall still left a way out.

Two, actually.

I could try to destroy the blue Core directly. For that I’d have to reach the chest of a creature floating several yards above the floor that just pulverized Veric’s arm with a single shot. The second possibility is to break the circuit at the black pearl, a much smaller target, but one connected to every stable line Drifter Mode can identify.

For three Rank C and two Rank D, there’s no real choice.

Veric’s scream cuts through my thinking. Zhang Xi is kneeling beside him, Suzanoo’s Love concentrated on the destroyed shoulder while she tries to dull the pain and stabilize what’s left. Veric is shaking all over, unable to find a position for a limb that no longer exists, and every spasm pulls a new sound of pain out of him.

The guardian turns its eyes on them.

The red energy starts gathering again.

There’s no time to explain anything.

I gather OXI in my calves and let Drifter Mode do the rest. The floor in front of me splits into possibilities: one slab tilted a few degrees in the right direction, another compacted by the golem’s own weight, a third where the friction offers a better transfer into the next push.

Now I can see how much of every stride normally disappears into small corrections the body makes without noticing. The inefficiency is obvious.

I form the first Pressure Step and land exactly where the force line indicates.

The whole push goes in.

By the time my weight leaves the burst, the second one is already on the natural path of the next step. I don’t have to correct hip, shoulder, or direction. All the previous speed carries into the new point and grows. On the third Pressure Step, I dump OXI into my legs at the same instant the burst forms.

The result doesn’t look like running.

My body is fired across the hall like a slingshot.

The mist opens behind me while the wind presses the Horizon against my back. The floor slabs lose definition and turn into one continuous sequence under my feet.

There’s no miraculous jump in my attributes. I’m still locked inside a Rank C body. Drifter Mode simply removes waste I would never have noticed under normal conditions.

I hear Freya behind me, surprised enough to forget the rest of the situation.

"That speed... that isn’t a Rank C..."

She’s only half right.

If a Rank B could see what I’m seeing and put their own OXI into the same points, that difference in attributes would turn my sprint into child’s play.

I pass the guardian.

The red eyes leave Veric and Zhang immediately.

I knew that would happen. The rule of this room existed before Chaos Theory scrambled the last test. Anyone who advances toward the statue without completing the puzzle becomes the guardian’s priority.

I’m not trying to escape its attention.

I want to steal it.

The charge being prepared against Veric starts repositioning while I keep moving toward the base of the statue. When the Pressure Steps end, my boots find the stone at a speed that slides me almost a yard before I can turn the movement into a rotation.

I stop facing the golem.

The black pearl is behind me.

Eventide appears in my hand and drops down near my hip while I take a low guard, body slightly turned, the blade ready to cross a single trajectory. Drifter Mode burns inside my eyes, showing the OXI leaving the blue Core, climbing the neck, and compressing behind the guardian’s red hollows.

It shows me something else too.

It’s avoiding the statue.

When I line up directly with it, the golem’s head makes a small correction. The eyes look for an angle that would hit my body without putting the six-armed figure in the path. I run another test, shifting my shoulder a few inches and watching the response.

The aim follows.

The pearl seems to be protected by the same restriction.

’Interesting.’

I take half a step to the side until I’m offering a firing line that looks safe to the guardian. From its perspective, the beam would pass through me and continue far from the base of the statue.

From mine, all that’s left is to change that line after the shot becomes irreversible.

The memory of the Oathring comes back the instant the red lines in its eyes reach something close to their limit. Rhayne and Veric tried to explain what they saw when I used Hope against Cassio. According to both of them, the cut seemed to pass through something beyond the target’s matter, as though the technique had cut the space along the way.

I never knew whether that was exaggeration from people watching from outside or a property of the Codex art I still don’t understand.

Now I have to find out.

The pressure behind the golem’s eyes reaches the point where Drifter Mode stops showing possibility and starts showing consequence. The energy is already committed to that direction. The creature’s body might still try to correct its aim afterward, but the first instant of the shot won’t change.

’Acting sooner would be early...’

’Acting later would be late...

"Codex Art Number One..."

Eventide lights up hard enough that the purple glow runs up my arm.

"Hope."

The laser is born in the same instant I move.

I come off the line by a few inches and execute the oblique cut before the beam finishes occupying the space where my chest was. Eventide meets that red column of energy from the side, never offering a perpendicular surface that would have to absorb the whole force.

Even so, the impact runs through my entire arm and reaches my shoulder with violence.

The blade loses definition at the point of contact. There’s no metal to melt, the way there was with Undertow. Eventide fails a different way, unmaking its own OXI structure every time the laser crosses its edges. To keep it whole, I have to rebuild the energy as fast as the shot tries to tear it out of my hand.

’Come on, old friend... hang in there.’

My HUD stats start to plummet.

[OXI: 4,742/5,000]

Drifter Mode shows the first adjustment.

I turn Eventide a few degrees.

Almost nothing changes visually, but the line of the laser past the blade leaves its original trajectory. That’s enough to prove the idea works.

The problem will be paying for it.

The beam presses Eventide back, folding my elbow and forcing my shoulder to the limit of the joint. I set my foot on a line Drifter Mode marks on the floor and transfer part of that pressure through my hip, using the stone itself as support to keep my arm from collapsing entirely.

[OXI: 3,861/5,000]

Hope is still active.

Near the edge of the blade, the air seems to lose consistency. The distortion is thin and short, like an image seen through moving water, but it’s there. Maybe that’s exactly what Rhayne and Veric saw against Cassio.

I don’t have the mental room to find out.

The laser keeps coming.

Eventide keeps being destroyed and remade inside my hand.

[OXI: 3,014/5,000]

I turn my wrist further.

The red line gives a little more.

Now the deflection can be seen even without Drifter Mode, but it’s still far from the pearl. The distance between the current trajectory and the target looks small from outside. Holding that beam, a few degrees means moving a force that’s trying to take my arm apart.

The energy starts crossing the muscles of my back and shoulder. My fingers burn around the grip, and Eventide flickers between solid and translucent as I pour OXI into it.

[OXI: 2,176/5,000]

The guardian keeps feeding the attack through the blue Core. The first attack was fast. Maybe because of my proximity to the statue, the guardian insists on keeping the laser active.

I follow the projected trajectory to the base of the statue while I look for the next angle. It isn’t far, though my body is starting to disagree with that assessment.

Drifter Mode pulses again.

Another fifty OXI disappear with the update to that impossible map.

My right knee threatens to fold.

I force the leg back and set my hip behind the blade, using Hope to push the cut a little further into the trajectory.

[OXI: 1,387/5,000]

The force wins one of my legs.

My knee touches the floor.

Eventide stays up.

The laser passes near the side of my head now and heats the skin without having to touch it. Drifter Mode draws its continuation to the base of the statue, every correction bringing the line closer to that small black point.

It’s still a few degrees short.

My arm is shaking continuously now.

I can’t solve this with force anymore.

I need perfect geometry.

I adjust the foot still on the floor first, then the hip, the shoulder, and finally the wrist, letting each part take a minimal fraction of the load instead of forcing the arm to hold all of it.

The trajectory answers.

[OXI: 824/5,000]

Eventide nearly disappears.

For an instant I can see the laser through the blade. I pour in more OXI before the structure collapses and the sword recovers its outline, though much thinner than before.

The projected line touches the pearl.

Not all of it.

Only the edge.

"Come on..."

Another small adjustment.

[OXI: 612/5,000]

The laser scrapes the black surface.

A red spark jumps at the point of contact.

The pearl holds.

That means I hit the target.

Now I have to keep it there.

I tilt Eventide one last time and feel the whole load pass through my shoulder into my spine. Hope holds the cut exactly where it needs to be while the deflection grows another few inches.

The beam enters the center of the pearl.

The surface turns red and starts brightening from the inside out, moving toward an intense orange. Smoke rises along the base of the statue, and part of the black material starts running off in small incandescent lines around the point of impact.

My OXI keeps disappearing.

[OXI: 483/5,000]

’I can’t hold this any longer.’

I release Hope.

Eventide almost goes out with it, but the work is done.

The laser goes through the pearl.

A smoking hole appears at its center, ringed by melted material that looks like lava running over black glass. Drifter Mode shows the circuit lines stretching for a fraction of a second as they try to hold the connection.

Then all of them break at once.

The blue gem in the guardian’s chest loses its light.

The red eyes go out.

And all that mass suspended above the floor goes back to obeying nothing but gravity.

The golem drops.

The torso hits the stone first, sending a shock across the hall that raises a cloud of dust as high as the pillars. One of the arms comes free at the joint and falls sideways like a toppled column, while the legs slam into the floor and break into large blocks. The head is torn off by the weight of the body, hits the ground once, and rolls through the wreckage until it stops with Eventide’s cut still marked on its side.

In a few seconds, the guardian that nearly killed us becomes a mountain of rock.

I try to stand.

My body only makes it to one knee before giving up.

Drifter Mode closes and takes all those lines with it. The air goes back to being invisible, weight stops having direction in front of my eyes, and the hall goes back to the plain shape I’d forgotten it had.

I stay there breathing in front of the statue while the dust comes down slowly.

Behind me, Veric is still groaning while Zhang works on the destroyed shoulder. Rhayne is on the floor, pale and stained with blood, while Freya looks back and forth between the guardian’s remains and me.

Nobody celebrates.

The sound from the ceiling breaks that silence.

I lift my head.

Large circular plates start drawing apart above the statue. A sliver of white light appears at the center and grows as the mechanism opens, until it forms a wide opening over the six-armed figure.

The light comes down.

There’s no violence in it.

The white column finds the statue and reveals details the mist had hidden: the wings folded behind the body, the ears of that race, the six arms in their posture of redemption, and the serene face that now bothers me for completely different reasons.

Chronia.

Duvilin.

That same anatomy.

The destroyed black pearl is still smoking at the figure’s feet, but the light doesn’t waver. I destroyed the guardian’s circuit, not the mechanism standing behind it.

A window opens in front of my vision.

[FERRYMAN’S TOLL]

[Trial completed.]

The dust is still falling over the golem’s remains when a second message appears.

[The Guardian has acknowledged your passage.]

Right below it:

[The Offering Chamber is now open.]

My eyes climb slowly up the lit statue.

Then another line comes.

[Approach the Goddess.]

I go still.

The word weighs far more than it should.

’Goddess...’

Ocean’s Law stopped Duvilin from even pronouncing the name his people gave this planet, and this dungeon just used a title for a figure with the same anatomy as his and Chronia’s.

Before I can follow that thought, one last instruction appears in front of my eyes.

[Reveal your name before the Goddess.]