The hall beyond the hold plate breathed through coins cut from worker ribs and strung along the walls with red thread. Each one clicked when a survivor behind Kael inhaled.
CLICK!
Renn flinched. The sound repeated from every side.
CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!
Red purse organs sagged from the ceiling between lung-shaped bones. Pale humanoids hung among them by nail-stacked calves, and a slit across one mouth opened when an older worker coughed.
A strip of skin slid from the mouth, and hooks appeared across it in time with the worker’s breath. He clutched his chest when matching burns opened beneath his shirt.
Kael saw the worker’s hand rise and moved before the next hook formed.
Vaela studied the side organs without letting their threads brush her hair. "The hanging bodies release the marks, but the purse-lungs feed them through the walls. Break a mouth if it reaches us, although cutting the red threads will free more breath."
Orrek gathered his chain below the injured shoulder. "I will keep the hanging ones off Renn while you find the threads we need."
Jaro raised the cracked bowl. "I may need this again, but I will warn you before it leaves my hand."
The boy tightened his grip on the rim. "Tell me where you are throwing it, and bring it back when the mouth stops moving."
Renn did not laugh. His eyes kept moving from worker to worker, lips forming the number before fear could interrupt it.
"All twenty-one are alive, and every breath still belongs to the person taking it," he said.
The nearest clerk turned its face toward him, and the slit across its mouth widened when Renn refused to lose anyone.
The red strip slid toward the count cloth, but Kael caught it between two fingers. Warm little teeth worked along its damp edge, searching for Renn’s hands, so Kael tore it in half.
The purse organs swelled, bone coins rattled, and the clerks dropped lower until clear fluid pulsed beneath their skin. They had failed to stop the rescue, but the room could still punish its survivors.
Kael stepped forward, and every coin in the wall clicked before his heel landed. Red hooks rose from the floor where his weight should have fallen, while older hooks tightened inside the workers he had already freed.
Kael could see every source of the attack now, which meant he could reach them.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ HOSTILE PRESSURE DETECTED: result-bite clerks with nail-stacked calves and clear-fluid veins
≫ SECONDARY HOSTILE PRESSURE: saved breath charge and broken organ levy
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +5
≫ UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 5
--------------------------------------------------------------------
▶ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +5 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Gravity Vector Impact -> 52
- Velocity Movement Authority -> 50
- Regenerative Dominion -> 44
- Primordial Marrow Layer -> 36
- Metaphysical Resistance -> 57
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 0
====================================================================
Gravity settled more firmly through Kael’s shoulders, speed gathered in his feet, and his marrow resisted the hooks trying to command it. His wounds remained open, although they stole less strength from his movement.
The first clerk dropped at him with both legs extended. The nail-stacks in its calves opened into rows of black hooks. Kael did not dodge back. He stepped forward.
The hooks caught his shoulder and carved red marks into the meat. Pain flared, and new coins rang inside the walls.
CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!
Kael closed one hand around the clerk’s ankle and drove it into the wall of purse lungs.
THUD!
The organs burst in wet red puffs, and bone coins spilled across the floor like chattering teeth. The clerk screamed through its torn mouth while a ribbon of skin unrolled from between its jaws. A picture formed across it: the broken white room, Kael’s face, and a hook driven through both.
Kael stuffed the ribbon back into its mouth with his thumb, closed his hand around the lower jaw, and crushed it against the upper until the slit tore sideways.
CRACK!
Vaela moved through the opening and cut three red threads behind the purse lungs. Stolen breaths returned as shudders through the workers’ chests, and one woman sobbed when air reached her without hooks tearing at her ribs.
The freed breaths did not return gently. One worker coughed until he bent double, while another woman clutched her throat and cried out when her lungs opened on their own.
COUGH!
The purse lungs knew how to choke a person, but they faltered when a throat took air back without feeding them. Kael felt the pause travel through every thread.
Renn kept his eyes on the coughing workers. "She has her breath again, and all twenty-one are still with us. Vaela has cut two of the thick threads, but more are tightening near the wall."
The clear count made the purse lungs recoil. A second clerk lunged at Renn, but Orrek caught it first.
The clerk’s nail-stacked calf punched through Orrek’s forearm. He planted both heels and bent the leg until its plate snapped open, spilling wet strips marked with living faces.
Orrek fought the leg with both hands. "I can bend it, but the hooks keep sliding deeper whenever I pull. Where does this thing come apart?"
Vaela ducked beneath another strip and pointed with her blade. "Strike the dark joint behind its knee, because the stacked nails cannot turn far enough to protect it."
Orrek drove his forehead into the joint.
BANG!
The leg broke and the clerk dropped. Jaro hit its exposed mouth with the cracked bowl before another skin ribbon could crawl free.
CLANG!
The bowl rang, and the clerk’s mouth folded inward. Jaro studied the new bend in the rim. "I hoped this might hold soup again, but apparently it prefers hitting ugly things."
The boy grabbed a bone coin skittering toward Renn’s boot and threw it into an open drain. It screamed all the way down. Kael saw how the boy’s hand shook afterward, but fear had not stopped him from protecting Renn.
The hall changed its attack. Every freed inhale drew a red thread from the floor, and those threads looped around ankles, wrists, and throats. The room could not steal the breaths Vaela had released, so it tried to strangle the people who had received them.
Kael closed one hand around six threads, and they cut into his palm. The Sovereign Root had already counted the danger, so no further panel appeared while he chose how to answer it.
He wrapped the threads around his fist and pulled until purse organs tore from the leaning wall. Clerks dropped through clear fluid and snapping nail-stacks, but Kael met them barehanded. His palm crushed one face against bone, his elbow folded another around its lung-bag, and his knee burst a hanging chamber.
The remaining red threads pulled toward a final purse organ above the passage door. It swelled until it filled the arch, and its stretched tissue split into a mouth lined with hooks. Kael remembered Furnace Sink Nine, fungus rind, and every overseer who had punished workers for needing air. He jumped before the mouth could close around the survivors.
His fist struck the hooked mouth before the organ finished pulsing.
BOOM!
The organ burst against the ceiling, scattering red wax and bone coins. Vaela cut the last thread before it found a throat, while Orrek tore the clerk from his arm. Renn kept counting, Jaro recovered his bowl, and the old worker inhaled again. No coin clicked.
Kael listened until the last coin stopped clicking, but he had taken only two steps toward the next passage when something moved beneath a split bone ledge. A smaller clerk had survived there.
It had no legs, but bone beads moved inside its open ribs as it dragged itself toward the old worker. The frightened man lifted both hands while a red hook reached from the clerk’s mouth.
Kael put his foot on the clerk’s back before the hook reached the worker. Bone beads clicked inside its ribs, and a new one brightened for every person who had resisted the room: the worker, Vaela, Orrek, Renn, the boy, and Jaro. Jaro saw his reflection flash across the final bead and crouched beside the creature.
"I hit you because you tried to bite a child," he said. "You do not get to carve my face onto anything afterward."
The boy still shook, although his hands opened when Jaro spoke. Renn held the count cloth against his chest. "Those people chose to help each other, and none belongs inside your ribs."
The clerk’s beads clicked faster until Kael pressed down and broke the hooks joining them. The creature still had enough life to twist beneath his boot, so he leaned closer.
"You will not put another hook into someone we saved," he said.
He drove his heel through the rib abacus.
CRUNCH!
The old worker dragged air back into his chest.
GASP!
No coin clicked after it. Several survivors heard the silence together, while Vaela’s knife slipped under the final red thread on the worker’s sleeve.
SLICE!
The thread parted. Orrek kicked the broken beads into the drain.
CLATTER!
Jaro lifted the cracked bowl and looked around the ruined hall. "Nobody has tried to bite me for several breaths, so I am choosing to enjoy the improvement."
COUGH!
The dust made him cough before he finished, but the purse organs remained dead and the freed workers kept breathing.
Several survivors still watched the corpse, expecting another punishment after relief. Renn counted slowly: the creature was dead, the worker was breathing, and the walls were silent. Nothing interrupted him, so shoulders loosened across the group.
Iron fingers unfolded from the dark beyond the dead bite hall.
TICK! TICK!
Each finger carried a dent, a drop of blood, or a strip of skin torn from a screaming mouth. They reached toward Orrek’s wounded arm first.
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