Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

Marrowlace dies from its edges.

Pell had told me that twice before I went into the flooded zone, in the flat voice he saved for facts he expected people to ignore. A clean block in mineral solution could hold for days. A torn block started dying the moment the root network opened, and it kept dying at whatever rate the solution failed to slow, and nobody could look at a sealed case and tell you how much of that had already happened.

So I didn’t go home first.

Home was nine kilometres west of Greyhaven and had a bed in it, a water tank, two gates I trusted, and a workshop where I could have peeled off clothes that had been wet since before midnight. Every part of me wanted that. My palms were the worst of it — both opened when I went over the corroded walkway rail, shallow cuts that had stopped bleeding hours ago and reopened whenever I flexed my fingers, which was constantly, because I kept checking the ring.

Not that checking helped. Spatial storage doesn’t have a window.

The guards at Greyhaven’s east checkpoint looked at me the way you look at something that has crawled out of a drainage ditch, which was fair. Silt to the knee. Left sleeve stiff where the forearm cut had soaked through and dried. A bruise I could feel from right shoulder to hip on every step, which after four hours had stopped being pain and become an ongoing administrative fact about my body. One of them checked my badge and waved me through. C-grade Shadow Scout. In Greyhaven that meant filthy is normal for this one, and I had never been more grateful for a lie.

❖ ❖ ❖

Oren Pell’s premises sat at the low end of Tanner’s Row: a stone-floored front room with drying racks along one wall and a locked door to the back that he had never once let me through. He was at the counter when I came in, sleeves rolled, weighing something grey into a paper cone. He looked at me for about a second and a half.

"Stop dripping on my floor."

"Good morning."

"Boots off. Stand on the mat." He put the cone down and was already moving. "Cases."

I got the boots off, which was worse than it sounds with cut palms, and set both field cases on the counter while he cleared it with one sweep of his forearm. Then he stopped being a man who was annoyed with me and became something else entirely.

He checked the seals first, both of them, running a thumbnail around each rim before he touched a latch. Then the solution — he tilted the first case under the window light and watched the liquid move, looking for cloud, for the fine grey suspension that means the block has started shedding. Then temperature, the back of his hand flat against the case wall for a slow count.

Only then did he open the intact one, and for about fifteen seconds he said nothing at all.

"Whole," he said. "Crown intact. Filament run’s unbroken to the third node." He closed it. "That’s a complete success. Don’t let it go to your head."

"Wouldn’t dream of it."

He opened the second case. That took longer, and he didn’t narrate it. He turned the case under the light, tipped it ten degrees, held it, brought it back. The darkening along the torn faces was worse than when I’d sealed it — brown creeping in from every ragged edge like water into paper.

"Half," he said at last. "Maybe a little more, if I put it in the first stage before I do anything else today. The fractures went with the grain on two of them, which is luck, not skill."

"I’ll take luck."

"You’ll take what survives." He was already carrying the second case toward the back door, and he talked over his shoulder without slowing. "Eleven days. Four stages. Stabilise, separate, reduce, bind. Nothing gets rushed and nothing gets checked early, because opening a reduction vessel to satisfy a client’s curiosity ruins the reduction vessel."

"How much do I get?"

He stopped with his hand on the door.

"My third comes out of usable refined yield, not the raw. Which means I carry the processing loss with you, not on top of you." He said it like he’d said it a hundred times and had stopped expecting anyone to hear it correctly. "After my share and after loss — one complete controlled course. Not a course and a bit. Not a course you can sell the tail of. One."

Two cases. A guardian I hadn’t killed, an egg clutch I hadn’t touched, a walkway I’d dropped into black water to buy myself twenty minutes. Both palms. All of it for exactly one course of something that was not a cure.

"Understood," I said.

"You don’t, but you will." He shouldered the door open. "One-third of my estimated first dose, under my eye. You report sleep, appetite, nausea, pain, and any change in your urine. All five, every time, including the ones you find embarrassing. And you never increase it on your own, because the men who increase it on their own present with organ pain about nine days later, and by then there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing."

"I know."

"You knew last time." He paused in the doorway. "The harvest work was correct. The way you sealed the fractured one bought me my half."

Then the door shut, and that was the entire congratulations I was getting, and it was more than I’d expected.

❖ ❖ ❖

I was forty paces up Tanner’s Row when it happened.

[Blind Call natural recovery complete.]

[Blind Call Charges: 1/1.]

I stopped walking. A woman with a handcart went around me and said something unkind about people who stop in the middle of the street, and she was right.

Seventy-two hours, finished, in a market lane in a city where I was pretending to have an ordinary class. When I first gained Blind Call, I’d have found a quiet corner immediately, just to see. Back then I had also been Level 3 and had once tried to fight a Pale Crawler with a curtain rod.

Not here. I could picture it too clearly: an armed adult from another world arriving between the stalls, at whatever grade the roll gave me, while I stood there with two ruined hands and no ground I controlled.

No runner came looking for me. No message waited at the hall, which meant nothing had gone wrong anywhere I was responsible for, and lately that had started to feel like a resource.

I paid for a bath and a bed, cleaned both palms with the water still steaming, packed the forearm and rewrapped everything in fresh linen. The woman running the pot charged me for two bowls when I’d eaten three and told me I looked like something that had drowned and changed its mind. Then I slept four hours, woke up furious about it, and walked the nine kilometres home in the last of the light.

Both gates were as I’d left them. The wire on the north approach was undisturbed, the pebble I balance on the pedestrian latch was still balanced, nothing in the yard had moved. I cleaned the rifle before I cleaned myself, because Liora had once explained the order of operations to me in language I have never forgotten, and then I slept properly for the first time in four days.

❖ ❖ ❖

In the morning the bruise had gone the colour of a bad sunset and my palms had scabbed into two lines that split whenever I made a fist, but my head was clear, and that was what mattered.

I set up the workshop the way I always did now. Both roller doors up, which meant two exits and a lot of daylight. Medical kit open on the bench where anyone could see it. Water in a covered jug beside three days of food and a folded blanket. Rifle across the far bench, knives beside it, all of them visible and none of them in my hands.

It’s a small piece of theatre and it took me nine Calls to work out that I needed it. Someone arrives torn out of the worst minute of her life into a concrete room with a stranger in it, and what she can see in the first two seconds decides most of the next twenty.

I stood on the swept concrete, breathed out, and activated it.

[Blind Call activated.]

[Eligible Grade: S.]

I read it twice.

Twelve Calls before this one. Six D. Four B. One A. One SS, which had been so far outside the curve that I’d stopped using it as evidence for anything. S had never come up. Not once. I’d looked at that line in the grade table often enough to know it sat under one percent, and I had quietly filed it in the same drawer as win a lottery and live to thirty.

Below one percent, I thought, and the number did not feel like luck. It felt like a door opening somewhere I had not been standing.

Above the cleared concrete, the air began to bend.

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