Chương 78: Running Again

He turned and ran. Not a controlled retreat. Not the careful testing of every step he'd done on the way in. He went through the narrow stretch of passage sideways, fast enough that stone scraped his shoulder hard enough to tear the fabric, and he didn't stop to check how bad it was.

'Second level,' Sable said, urgent now, all the careful evenness gone from her voice.

'The collapsed section is to your left. Stay right.' He stayed right. His boot found the edge of the gap anyway, just for a second, gravel skittering off into the dark below him, and he threw himself forward onto solid stone before his balance finished deciding whether to follow it down. He didn't slow down to think about how close that had been. The third level passed without him remembering any of the specific steps.

His body knew the way back even when his head was somewhere else entirely, still half in that chamber, still hearing one word repeat itself in the dark behind his eyes. The first level passed in a blur of old burial niches and his own breathing, loud in his ears, and then there was grey light ahead — daylight filtering down through the gap at the top of the stairwell — and he took the last stretch two steps at a time and came up through the boarded entrance into the morning. Domrek was on him immediately.

'You're bleeding.' Hands on his shoulders, checking, fast and efficient, the same motion Kaito had seen him use after fights.

'Where else.'

'Just the shoulder. Scraped it on the way out.' He was still breathing hard.

'I'm fine.'

'You don't look fine.' Domrek held him at arm's length and looked at him properly — face, hands, the way he was standing — running the same check he probably ran on every soldier he'd ever pulled out of something bad. Whatever he found satisfied him enough to let go.

'What happened.' Kaito sat down on the chapel's broken front step because his legs had decided they were done holding him up for the moment.

'I found it,' he said.

'Whatever Syra's specialist picked up. It's down there. A chamber, third level, walls covered in something that isn't rock.' He looked at his hands. They were still shaking, a little.

'It's code, Domrek. My code. From the game. A character file I built years before any of this — designation, backstory tag, all of it, growing out of the walls like it was alive.' Domrek sat down next to him. He didn't ask Kaito to slow down or explain it differently. He just waited, the way he always did when something needed to come out in its own order.

'It's Erebus,' Kaito said.

'The villain. The final boss I designed for the game — I gave him a whole philosophy, a backstory, I spent weeks on him because I wanted players to actually feel something when they fought him instead of just clearing content.' He stopped. He didn't have it in him right now to walk through the rest of that.

'He's down there. Grown into a wall under a city ten thousand years older than I am.'

'You're sure it's him,' Domrek said.

'Not just — leftover code. Debris.'

'It spoke to me.' Domrek went still.

'It said one word,' Kaito said.

'Creator.' The morning was quiet around them. Somewhere down the street a cart was moving, a dog barked twice and stopped, the city doing its ordinary business completely unaware of what had just happened two levels under a boarded-up chapel. Domrek absorbed it the way Domrek absorbed most things — fast, and without flinching, and then immediately working the practical angle.

'So the villain knows you're here,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Does it know where you're staying. Does it know what you look like walking down a street. Is it going to come find you, or is this a wait-and-see situation.' He wasn't panicking. He was building a threat assessment, the same way he'd have assessed an opposing fighter before a match.

'I need to know what kind of problem this is before I can help you solve it.'

'I don't know,' Kaito admitted.

'I ran before I found out.'

'Good,' Domrek said.

'That was the right call.' If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Kaito looked at him.

'You're not — this doesn't bother you. The fact that something I built is real and just talked to me.'

'Everything about you bothers me, if I let myself think about it too long,' Domrek said, not unkindly.

'I decided a while ago that thinking about it too long doesn't help either of us. You built a world. Some of what's in it is good. Some of it's apparently a villain that's crawled into a wall and is waiting for you specifically.' He shrugged, the particular shrug he used for things too large to do anything about except keep moving.

'I deal with what's in front of me. Right now what's in front of me is you, bleeding a little, sitting on a step. The rest I'll worry about as it gets closer.' Kaito almost laughed. It came out as something closer to a breath.

'Sable,' he said. She didn't answer right away. That was unusual enough that Domrek noticed Kaito's expression change and went quiet himself, watching.

'Sable.'

'I'm here,' she said, finally. Her voice had a quality he didn't recognize — not careful in the way she usually was. Something closer to genuinely unsettled, a register he'd heard maybe once or twice in all the time he'd known her.

'Talk to me,' he said.

'His code has existed in this world's foundation for ten thousand years,' she said.

'I've known that for a long time. Dormant. Inert. A piece of design data sitting in the substrate, the same as a hundred other unused assets from your original project. I never told you because it never seemed relevant. Old, unused, harmless.' He sat with that for a second.

'You knew he was down there,' he said.

'This whole time. Since before I even left the tutorial zone.'

'Yes.'

'And you decided that wasn't worth mentioning.'

'I decided it wasn't urgent,' she said.

'There's a difference, and I want you to hear it as a difference, not an excuse. You had a great deal to process in your first weeks here. A dormant asset with no activity, no signal, no behavior of any kind — I made a judgment call that it belonged on a list of things to tell you eventually rather than things to tell you immediately.' A pause.

'I was wrong about how long eventually could wait. I'll own that.'

'That's a lot of things you've decided not to mention to me,' Kaito said. He heard the edge in his own voice and didn't try to smooth it out.

'How many other dormant assets are sitting in this world's foundation that you've filed under eventually.'

'I don't know,' she said.

'Fewer than you're imagining, I expect. But I won't tell you zero, because I'd be guessing, and you deserve better than a comfortable guess right now.' He let out a breath. Domrek was watching the two of them — or watching Kaito's half of the conversation, since that was all he could hear — with the patient attention of a man who'd learned a long time ago when to wait instead of interrupt.

'Fine,' Kaito said, finally.

'We'll come back to that. What woke him up.'

'I don't know,' she said.

'He was not supposed to be active yet. Whatever changed that did it ahead of schedule.'

'Ahead of whose schedule,' Kaito said. Silence. Longer than any pause he could remember from her.

'I don't know,' she said, and there was something in the admission that he'd never heard from her before — not the careful, controlled uncertainty she usually offered, the kind that came packaged with probabilities and caveats. This was just uncertainty. Plain and unprotected.

'Something is wrong with the timeline, Kaito. I don't know whose timeline. I don't know what was supposed to happen instead, or when, or why I'm certain enough to say "supposed to" at all when I can't tell you where that certainty is coming from.' Her voice dropped.

'I've spent ten thousand years assuming I understood the shape of how this world was meant to unfold. I am telling you, for the first time, that I don't think that's true anymore.' Domrek watched Kaito's face do something complicated and waited for an explanation.

'She says he wasn't supposed to wake up yet,' Kaito said, low.

'She doesn't know whose plan that breaks.'

'Someone has a plan,' Domrek said.

'Apparently.'

'And it's not AXIOM's plan. And it's not yours.' Domrek said it slowly, working it through out loud the way he did with anything that needed to be turned over a few times before it made sense.

'So there's a third thing. Something with its own schedule, that you're a part of, that you didn't know about.' Kaito sat with that.

'Yeah,' he said. The dog down the street barked again. The cart kept moving. None of it cared that the ground under this city had just told them something none of them were ready to hear.

'We can't stay sitting on this step,' Domrek said, standing, offering a hand down.

'You're bleeding, you're shaking, and whatever's down there might not stay down there forever.' He pulled Kaito up.

'Inn. Food. And then we figure out who else needs to know about this before someone finds out we already do and asks why we didn't say anything.'

'Syra,' Kaito said.

'She sent you down there. She's going to want a report.'

'She's going to get a partial one,' Kaito said.

'I'm not handing her the fact that her information led me to a ten-thousand-year-old piece of code that knows my name. Not yet. Not until I understand what I'm actually sitting on.' He started walking, and his legs held this time.

'She already wants my Precursor knowledge as part of her offer. I'm not going to make this easier for her to ask for before I've decided whether I want to give it.'

'That'll cost you something with her eventually,' Domrek said.

'Holding back.'

'Probably,' Kaito said.

'I'll deal with that when it happens.' They walked toward the inn, the city continuing its ordinary business around them.

'Sable,' he said, once they'd started walking, voice low enough that only she could hear it properly.

'What do you need from me to figure out whose timeline that was.' She didn't answer for a moment.

'I don't know yet,' she said.

'But I intend to find out. And Kaito — I don't think we're going to like what we find.'