The corruption increased as they drew closer, installed gradually across the territory with the ambient pressure of something that was no longer any single source but the combined background of many small ones that had found the same channel.

It had been building without announcement.

Like the difference between hearing a sound and hearing the silence that remained after the sound stopped, but in reverse: a sound you began registering as you approached, which by the time you recognized it you had been hearing long enough not to know exactly when it started.

Ren had caught it at the Gold 3 border because he had the range to read the more marked difference.

But by now, in the open territory approaching the ruins, there was no ambiguity about it.

The group had sharpened. The attention each person was paying to the territory had changed, that particular shift that happened when people who knew what they were doing understood that it was time.

"We can’t engage the eight-part artifact," Ren said, when the perimeter of the clearing he remembered was close enough for its general shape to be visible through the trees.

"If the pieces are separated and fewer than half appear at once, we manage it. If they’re together or the full structure has already formed, we pull back." He paused. "I’m not confident we can handle the full one in our current configuration." 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

Lin processed that with the brevity of someone who had received the information they needed.

The guards nodded with the coordination of a trained group.

"What counts as together?" Mayo asked, in the tone of someone asking a genuine technical question. "Five and six separated is still fight as long as they don’t merge?"

"Yes yes, only if you’re feeling them as one presence instead of several," Ren said. "At that point, regardless of what else is happening, we leave."

Mayo set aside her usual jokes for a moment and nodded.

♢♢♢♢

The clearing became fully visible between the trees.

It was not the clearing Ren remembered.

The clearing he remembered had an opening in the ground, the entrance to the ruins system below, through which the Mantis had barely fit without disturbing the sprouts at the edges.

The corpse of the massive beast that had occupied this area when Zhao and the Mantis first found it still lay at the center of that opening, its scale making the surrounding territory difficult to process correctly.

What was here now was different in every dimension that mattered.

The corpse was still recognizable in its general structure; the distribution of what remained of the exoskeleton provided its original dimensions as a reference. But the center had been destroyed rather than consumed, with the specific kind of edges that were left when something had been forced inward rather than broken down from within, the irregular marks of something to which parts had been torn rather than the clean dissolution of energy departing a system. The difference was legible to anyone who had seen both.

The corruption lines were very visible.

Not in the sense of glowing decoratively... They glowed the way things glowed when they contained active energy and that energy was the kind that produced luminescence as a byproduct of existing, not as a deliberate signal. Lines radiating from the central opening, having advanced into the interior of the corpse over what must have been considerable time.

The corruption’s reach had consumed greedily, working inward from its entry point through the massive body.

The opening in the ground was considerably wider than the one Zhao or the Mantis had found.

Ren read the discrepancy between what he remembered and what he had in front of him.

"Thousands of mutants in transit," he said, more to himself than to the group, though the group heard it. "Enough of them to mechanically expand the entrance. They probably didn’t excavate intentionally; too many bodies passing through the same point for long enough, in numbers that the sprouts couldn’t consume fast enough... The soil displaced rather than dug."

It was the explanation that matched the patterns he’d been reading in the ground since they entered the clearing.

"Is that good or bad?" Shizu asked.

"More convenient for entry now," Ren said. "The golden sprouts are at the edges where the soil wasn’t disturbed as much. The center of the opening is considerably clearer."

Lin was studying the corpse with the attention of someone reading a battlefield after the battle had ended. Something in how the lines of corruption had spread, the direction and density of the damage, was telling her something she was still assembling.

"The presences," she said.

"I’m registering them," Ren said. "First chamber, from what I can read at this distance. Numerous, but nothing at a rank that should concern us. Low Silver, very manageable."

"So, we ready to go swimming in mutants?" Mayo said.

♢♢♢♢

Ren looked at the opening.

In the second before giving the instruction, he thought about Luna. Not in any elaborate way; just the simple fact that Luna didn’t know they were here or why, and that the reason she didn’t know was exactly the reason Ren was here instead of at the wall as Red Pathfinder, covering position seventeen during Garret’s shift.

Sirius had been in the tenth chamber of the underground system for years, in the state he had been in since the decision that had put him there. The kind of decision someone made when something mattered enough that the consequences of not making it were unbearable.

Ren understood that.

He had no intention of failing Luna with the things that were within his control.

"Flying beasts for the descent," he said. "We glide down the center. Slow enough that the perception can update as we go. If anything changes in what I’m reading, we stop."

The group reorganized with the efficiency of people who had already processed the instruction before it arrived, because it was the instruction the context made predictable.

The flying beasts extended their wings above the opening.

The heat rising from below had the specific quality of underground spaces: the constant temperature of stone that didn’t change with seasons.

They descended.