Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

I went first, because the floor was the problem.

Eight metres of loading bay lay between the supply-room door and the narrow stone throat where Aria had planted herself. Loose rock covered all of it ankle-deep. Marek could not cross that on a splinted leg, and Teo would go down with him if he tried to carry half the man’s weight over shifting rubble.

So I crossed ahead of them and cleared a track with my boots. Short steps under my hips, weight carried instead of thrown, each change of direction coming through a controlled pivot. It was the human translation of what Feline Grace kept trying to teach me. I pushed broken stone aside with the edges of my soles until there was a strip of mostly reliable ground about forty centimetres wide.

Behind me, the fight had already started.

"Track’s clear! Follow the line and don’t step wide."

Wren came first with Marek secured against her right side, the shield strap wrapped around his chest exactly as Aria had ordered. Her tower shield covered the left. Teo followed with one hand on Marek’s belt and the other ready to catch the splinted leg.

Marek’s crossbow hung across his back. One bolt remained in the quiver, but he had called the shot in the supply room his last useful one. Firing the other while two people held him upright would have been a persuasive argument for keeping the colony away from whichever wall he hit.

"Left foot," Teo said. "Left. Good."

Halfway across, Marek’s boot landed outside my track and the stones rolled under him.

Wren dropped her hip and took his weight through the strap. Teo caught the back of his belt. The three of them staggered four steps without stopping, while Marek made a sound through his teeth that was not a word.

"Sorry," he said once they reached solid ground. "Floor’s rubbish."

"Floor’s rubbish," Wren agreed.

Aria held the throat where solid rock narrowed the route to a little over a metre. Nothing could bring numbers through it, and she made sure nothing could make the opening wider.

The colony tried low first. Two scouts came flat along the floor. Aria killed the first with a short downward thrust that never lifted her blade above her waist, then drove her boot through the second’s head against the stone.

A heavy followed and tried to force width. She did not meet its mass. She let one shoulder plate enter, stepped inside its momentum, and drove her sword into the joint above its front leg. Then she dragged the dying weight around before pulling the blade free, leaving its bulk jammed across half the passage.

She’s not killing them. She’s furnishing the doorway.

By the time Marek was clear, two chitin bodies lay wedged into the throat at different angles. The colony had to come through a space shaped by the woman waiting on the other side.

Then it adapted.

A squat caste pushed behind the front rank, its forward limbs slick with resin. It spat a rope of grey material at Aria’s boots. She moved before it landed, and the resin hardened over the stone where she had been standing. The next strand went higher, aimed at her sword arm as she recovered from a cut.

She changed her footing to avoid it. That gave the scouts a wider line.

They’re reading her and passing the answer back.

I raised the rifle.

A ranged caste had climbed over the heavy’s body in the third rank. Its long abdomen curled under itself, aligning a spine through the gap beside Aria’s left shoulder. It was not aiming at her. It was aiming at Teo.

I settled the sights, fired once, and put the round low through its thorax. The creature went sideways into the resin caste. Its spine struck stone instead of Teo.

I did not fire again. There were dozens of targets in the bay and no idea when I would next see a trader with ammunition.

One shot, one reason. Anything else is noise until the rifle is empty.

"Everyone’s across!"

Aria did not answer or turn. She let another heavy push far enough through the bodies to believe it had room, crippled its front leg, and dropped it exactly where its weight would foul the opening. Only then did she retreat, moving backwards over the track I had cleared with her sword held between herself and the throat.

Something scraped behind the wall to her left.

Feline Senses gave me the direction before it gave me anything else: small repeated cuts moving through rock, three metres out and closing.

"Aria—left wall. Burrower coming through behind the plate."

The Coordination Link carried the warning cleanly.

She shifted right without breaking her retreat. The wall bulged a moment later, split, and released a black burrower into the space she had just left. Aria took its head off as she passed.

She glanced at me for less than a second. No praise. No comment. There was no time for either, and I would have found both embarrassing.

We crossed the pump station in a line: me on point because I had walked this section four hours earlier, Marek and Wren in the middle, Teo supporting from behind, and Aria guarding the rear.

The room held two dead motors and a mezzanine. Wren pointed up before I had finished checking it.

"There’s a run above us."

"Dead ledge," I said. "No ladder at the far end. Anything that climbs up can’t get ahead of us."

"It can drop on us."

"Fair."

We watched the mezzanine until it was behind us. Nothing dropped.

Teo called a halt behind the second motor housing. I gave him thirty seconds because Marek’s colour had gone bad. Teo crouched, pressed two fingers to the man’s throat, and counted.

"Vial?" Wren asked.

"No."

"Teo—"

"He’s in pain and he’s exhausted. He isn’t dying." Teo’s voice had gone completely flat, which I was learning meant he was frightened. "I have one vial left. If somebody opens an artery, it may be the difference. If I spend it making Marek comfortable, I’ve spent it on nothing."

"Correct," Marek said without opening his eyes. "Listen to the miserable man."

That was where Aria and I got four sentences.

She came beside me with her sword lowered, breathing hard. Insect fluid covered her right forearm to the elbow.

"Your route. How far?"

"Northern crosscut, then the intact ladderway by the flooded-level loop. Eighty minutes at this pace."

"Good." She checked the passage behind us. "They crossed. The civilians at my gate. All of them were through before the fortress fell."

The repaired armour had already told me that time had passed in her world. I had carried the question since she appeared without finding a safe moment to ask it.

"You held it."

"I held it. They are a refugee column now, moving north. I stand between them and what follows." She nodded toward Marek. "We both still have people to move."

The northern crosscut lay two hundred metres farther on. I knew it had been open four hours earlier. I had stood at its mouth, shone my light toward the old ladder alcove, and turned back because I had been searching for Ashmark rather than an exit.

It was sealed now.

Fresh resin filled the opening from floor to roof in a slab at least two metres thick. Six or seven layers showed along its surface, each laid before the one beneath it had finished hardening.

"That was open," I said.

"How long ago?" Wren asked.

"Four hours."

Something scraped in the darkness behind us, slow and unhurried.

It didn’t need to know where I planned to go. It knew where I had been, and it closed that road.

I drew my knife but stopped short of touching the resin.

"It’s thick, but it isn’t stone. The ladder alcove is directly behind it. If we cut along the edge—"

"Don’t cut it."

The voice came through the wall on our right.

Wren turned so fast her shield struck the rock.

"Don’t cut it," the voice said again, hoarse and close, separated from us by less than two metres of stone. "Whoever you are, do not put a blade in that resin. Please."

Wren was already at the wall with both palms against it.

"Sela?"

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