Chương 279: 57. Dire News 2

By the time we reached the southeast worksite, at least half of Three Rivers Fortress had arrived before us. That wasn't an exaggeration. The worksite perimeter had a warning cordon, but today the space outside that cordon was nearly solid with people. Local garrison troops, combat engineers, clerks, archers, artillery corps soldiers, dragoons both idle and not-so-idle from the outer camp — even a few warehouse administrators who almost never left the storage district had apparently decided this was worth the trip.

The reason was simple. Everyone wanted to see. Wanted to see whether this gate — the one they'd spent two weeks arguing over, felling trees for, measuring, carving, and nearly burying several mage-engineers alive beneath — was actually going to open. At the center of the worksite, the outer ring was fully erected. Not the kind of smooth, luminous, miracle-descending circular arch I'd vaguely imagined. Quite the opposite. It was thick. Heavy. Even a little ugly.

Planed timber, rune-inlaid stone foundations, metal reinforcement rings, fixing channels, and layer upon layer of interlocking phase-conducting runes, all forced together into something that looked like the offspring of a bridge, a gate, a sacrificial altar, and a siege engine. But precisely because it was that heavy and that ungainly, it felt like something that actually had the right to swallow and disgorge armies.

Randall stood at the front, looking more like a worksite supervisor on the verge of spontaneous combustion than he usually did.

"Southwest reinforcement ring — confirm it one more time!"

"Don't step on the phase-channel chalk lines!"

"Where's the test iron ring? I said the test iron ring, not whatever that lunch bowl is you're holding!"

"Who used the record board as a stake prop!? Put it down right now!" Standing at the outer edge, watching them all scramble like they were racing time with their lives on the line, I had the distinct feeling this looked a lot like an extremely high-budget residential construction site. The key difference being: if a normal house goes up crooked, you've only endangered yourself. If this thing opened crooked, it might deliver an entire column of soldiers directly into the interior of a mountain.

Ignicia stood beside me, arms crossed, saying nothing. Olivia had taken half a step back, her gaze moving between the worksite, the record ledger, and the crowd around her in steady rotation — simultaneously confirming three things: whether the gate would open, who was most likely to be in danger, and which side to contain first if something went wrong. I was just about to ask the two of them what they actually thought the odds were, when the worksite center began. The outer ring lit first.

The runes carved into the timber and stone foundations began to glow in sequence — not the kind of clean, beautiful light that says behold, a miracle. More like the pulse of something being forcibly woken up, section by section, threading through materials that had been cold and inert and were now being made to remember they had a function.

The metal reinforcement rings began to heat as well, the fine carvings pressed into the joint lines gradually brightening, thin silver rivers beginning to run along the gate frame. The murmur of conversation in the crowd around us went silent. Even I held my breath without deciding to. Then: the interior runes. The most intricate part of the whole structure — and, in a way that was hard to name, the most unsettling.

Several members of the construction squad took up positions at different points and pressed their hands to the node stones simultaneously. Someone called out readings in a low voice; someone else watched the advancing line of light in the carved ground channels with unblinking eyes; a third person held a record board and seemed to have forgotten how to blink entirely.

"First layer — connected."

"Second layer — stable."

"Third layer — phase conduction nominal—" Hmmm. The sound wasn't loud. But it sent a cold prickle up the back of my neck. The empty space at the center of the gate — which had been nothing a moment before — opened like a horizontal cut through the surface of still water. The air began to distort. Gently at first, then with increasing clarity. It was difficult to describe. Not simply seeing light — more like watching the shape of that space itself being forcibly rewritten.

A surface, nearly transparent but somehow more unsettling than transparency, was slowly forming at the center of the outer ring. Oval. Thin as a membrane. And deeply, quietly wrong in the way that things which shouldn't exist tend to be. I heard someone nearby draw a sharp breath. Someone else took half a step forward on instinct. And then—"Wait—!" Someone in the center of the worksite bellowed.

"Southwest corner—" The next instant, the entire gate surface twisted. Not shattered. Not exploded. Twisted. Like a soap-thin film of water stretched taut, suddenly wrenched from the inside. The oval surface that had been holding its shape lurched — contracting and bulging at once — its edges shedding wild arcs of light. The phase-conducting runes flared to blinding brightness in a single surge, and the carved ground channels below let out a series of sounds that were deeply, specifically bad.

Before I could react, the iron test ring at the center of the worksite — the one used to calibrate positioning — was yanked off its wooden mount. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Not by wind. By something pulling from the wrong direction, all at once, snapping the ring free with its attached length of fixing chain and sending it directly toward the gate surface.

"Get down!" Randall's voice was more of a roar. The worksite erupted. People dropped, people backed away, people lunged for record boards they hadn't managed to clear yet. The young assistant closest to the southwest node must have gone blank from shock — he was still standing there, frozen, before the veteran engineer beside him kicked him sideways. Both of them rolled into a pile of wood shavings together. When the iron ring hit the gate surface, there was no metallic collision sound. It was half-swallowed first.

Then the entire gate surface lurched violently, the distortion worsening — and a streak of wild light shot along the outer reinforcement runes all the way to the top of the frame, burning a blackened hole clean through a section of windbreak cloth that had just been secured. The crowd outside the cordon broke apart instantly. Local garrison troops fell back. Artillery corps soldiers covered their heads and crouched with their record cases.

Several dragoons moved forward almost by reflex — and if Lei Lian's people hadn't called them back in time, I was fairly certain at least one of them would have been pulled directly into the still-unstable gate.

"Cut it! Cut it!"

"Node two — stop the feed!"

"Southwest ring can't hold — pull the secondary chain!"

"Don't touch the gate surface! Nobody touch the gate surface!" In the span of about three seconds, the worksite had transformed from "mysterious, awe-inspiring magical wonder" into "everyone is using their body to prevent this thing from sending someone to another dimension." Cold sweat had broken out across my back. Not because I'm faint-hearted. Because this scene looked exactly like the moment before something goes catastrophically wrong. If that assistant hadn't been kicked clear in time.

If the iron ring had gone in straight instead of glancing — if it had gone through with the entire fixing mount still attached— The thought alone made my scalp crawl. And then, just as the gate surface lurched again and seemed on the verge of losing all coherence— Something moved faster than everyone else. A streak of deep red. Ignicia. She didn't shift into dragon form. But she was already past the worksite warning cordon in one stride, right hand thrusting forward.

The fire that came wasn't fed into the gate — it swept along the outermost timber ring and metal fittings in a short, precise, controlled blade of heat, burning through exactly half of the topmost runaway rune-line before it could propagate further.

"Now!" she snapped. Randall had apparently been waiting for exactly that opening. His hammer came down on the supply-cutoff pin beside the southwest node. The resonant hum dropped hard. The gate surface, which had been on the verge of tearing itself apart, jolted twice — like something with a hand suddenly clamped around its throat — and then began collapsing inward. The displaced membrane shrank to the size of a fist, and then, with a sound like a soap bubble popping, vanished cleanly. Complete silence. Not quiet.

The specific silence of a group of people whose brains have not yet fully returned to their bodies after passing within arm's reach of something very bad. It took me two full seconds to realize I'd been holding my breath the entire time. When I looked up, the center of the worksite was a scene of comprehensive destruction.

Wood shavings, overturned tools, a section of windbreak cloth with a scorched black hole in it, a torn record board, and the iron ring that had very nearly been sent somewhere unspecified — now hanging at a broken angle from half a length of secondary chain, looking for all the world like something that had tried very hard to die and was mildly disappointed to still be here. Jessi had squeezed in beside me at some point, staring at the wreckage, and said, flatly:"...

I'm starting to genuinely believe this thing really could send someone into the side of a mountain."

"That did nothing to make me feel better," I said.

"I wasn't trying to." Good. Her soul had clearly made a full recovery. The truly remarkable part was this: the accident had barely stopped, and the Mages' Guild was already moving again. No one stood around wailing. No one wasted time performing "gods, we nearly died." Randall wiped a streak of ash off his face and immediately barked:"Southwest corner — recalculate the load!" Someone shot back at once: "It's not the calculation — the stake swelled from night damp!"

"Rubbish, the secondary channel was pushing too fast!"

"Shut up and measure!" Someone dropped to their knees to check the temperature of the phase-channel grooves by hand. Someone else was already redrawing marks with a charcoal stick. Another was measuring the load-bearing stake's deviation. Yet another came sprinting past with a fresh reinforcement ring under one arm, still cursing whoever hadn't laid in the second layer to begin with. The scene was chaos. It was also completely professional. Because none of them had the spare capacity to panic.

Something broke — you recalibrated. The gate didn't hold — you adjusted it again. Standing there, watching this group of people who had nearly fed a batch of their own colleagues to the very thing they'd built, dive straight back into fixing it without taking more than a couple of extra breaths, I felt an odd, quiet respect surface. These people really are staking their lives to build a road. Ignicia had stepped back to my side.

A faint residual warmth still clung to her fingertips, but her expression was exactly what it always was — nothing in it betrayed how close that had actually just been. I looked at her on instinct.

"You saw that coming?"

"No," she said, without hesitation.

"Then how did you move that fast—""Because the moment that thing twisted, I knew if I didn't burn out the runaway rune-line at the top, someone was about to get pulled through."... Right. Brutally reasonable. And not an image I particularly wanted to keep replaying. Olivia finally stepped forward, glanced once at the worksite still frantically recalibrating, then looked to Randall.

"Can it be repaired?" Randall didn't look up. His charcoal stick kept flying, but his voice stayed steady.

"Yes."

"How long?"

"If it's just timber-swell and insufficient reinforcement layering, we can attempt another short-range link before the day is out." My eye twitched.

"You're testing it again today?" Randall finally looked up. His face was streaked black and grey, like a man who'd just fought a war inside a woodpile and lost on points.

"What else would we do?" He said it like the most obvious thing in the world.

"The gate isn't going to finish growing up just because you're scared of it." Unpleasant to hear. Also completely correct. I was about to reply when fast footsteps cut in from behind — not the busy scurrying of the worksite, but footsteps with a destination, driving straight for us. I turned. A dispatch rider was cutting through the crowd, face drawn tight, both hands raising a small bamboo tube. Behind him, another man cradled a carrier pigeon, its leg-band freshly removed, still catching his breath.

The mood shifted at once. The tension a moment ago had been the tension of an accident — a gate nearly swallowing someone whole. This was something else. This was news. Something that had crossed the distance from front line to rear, pressing all the way down to Three Rivers Fortress. The rider dropped to one knee before us and raised the tube.

"Urgent dispatch!" The whole site seemed to pull taut at those two words. Even the shouting at the worksite's center dropped a notch. I looked at the tube and felt something settle, heavy, in my chest. I took the slender bamboo tube — still carrying road-dust and the warmth of feathers — and my fingertips went strangely heavy. I couldn't say whether it was instinct or something else. Only that a single, deeply unpromising thought had already surfaced in the back of my mind. Damn it. I knew it.

I broke the seal and pulled out the tightly rolled slip. One glance, and my expression fell. The Guild members nearby must have read something in my face. Randall, crouched at the southwest node with a wooden rule between his teeth, actually paused mid-curse. I closed my fist around the slip and turned to the worksite.

"Get back to the gate. Now." Randall blinked, spat out the rule, and frowned up at me.

"We're already—""I know." I cut him off.

"I mean: no excuses, no delay. Stabilize the short-range link first. I need to know whether you can test again today, and whether we'll have a usable line before dawn." He held my gaze for two seconds. My face apparently didn't look like the usual version of me getting dragged around by camp errands, because for once he didn't offer any of his standard worksite proverbs about things not growing faster just because you push them. He just set his jaw and wiped his face.

"Understood." I nodded, then turned to Ignicia and Olivia.

"With me." They both looked at me. Not an ordinary look. Olivia's eyes narrowed slightly, as if she'd already weighed the gravity of the situation from my tone alone. Ignicia tilted her head, red eyes catching the worksite's residual glow and drifting dust — looking exactly like a dragon that had been watching a sideshow and had just caught the scent of blood. And then, inexplicably, the two of them exchanged a glance. Not hostile. Not polite.

More like two gamblers at different tables who'd just watched the dealer's card land squarely inside the range they'd each separately calculated. The corners of both their mouths moved, just slightly. My temple throbbed. Wonderful. I am not, personally, in the mood to laugh right now.