Chapter 127: Server squads

BZZZ! A coolness rose from below, a wetness that bloomed through dust and stone. The taproot widened, hollowed, and flowered into a mouth. Water lifted, filtered through living tissue, and spilled into a basin of bark like a lung exhaling. DING! ~----~ [Verdant Well Established!] >Daily Yield: 11,400 L purified water. >Blight Neutralization: 87% baseline. >Domain Tether: Yes (mobile anchor) ~----~ A cheer caught and swelled along the street. Lorn sagged back with a tired smile on her face while Elder Siah laughed; a bright, surprised sound that made Clayton’s chest loosen in a way he didn’t have words for. One weight eased. A hundred more to go. Later, the Lure Thickets went up by night: black-spire growths bristling with thorn glass, their inner sacs swelling with pheromone mist. Clayton walked each one before it activated, laying his palm to the living shell, whispering a precise pattern: fear, stumble, weak flank, veer left. The thicket learned the lie and sang it to the dark. He marched the pattern down southern lanes until Trist’s breath hitched. "They’re coming," the boy said, eyes unfocused, voice thin with the taste of approaching death. "They’re fighting each other to get here". "Good," Clayton said, and meant it. The first pack broke from the brush like a thrown net; males and blade skulls, lithe femals with saw-hipped tails, juveniles with too many teeth and not enough sense. They hit the first thicket with a sound like hail on tin and went sideways into the funnel because the lie said left. Clayton’s roots closed like a collar. He didn’t flay; he didn’t crush. He pressed... he burned just enough. He replaced fear with weight, the heavy comfortable knowing of rank and herd and the silence that lives between pulses of a larger heart. One by one the leaders went still, muscles shaking as a new pattern wrote itself into their spines. DING! ~----~ [Carrion Pride Subordinated!] 9 Adults * 3 Juveniles Role: Perimeter patrols (South-Southwest) Synch: 61% (rising) ~----~ When the last juvenile stopped snapping at shadows and started watching the horizon, Clayton exhaled. Predators became sentries. Pressure became teeth. "Ready?" Torren asked, voice low. The two of them crouched in the lee of a broken overpass, the air ahead trembling with a pulse too regular to be natural. The W-Rook siphon groaned with subterranean hunger; every beat lifted groundwater and pushed it sideways into machine veins that flowed west toward Korrath’s spires. Clayton rolled his shoulders. "Seven minutes". Torren grinned. "I’ll do it in six". They went in like knives. The siphon’s superstructure hunched out of the ground in ridges and blades, metal and root fused into a crown of thorns. Construct tenders in mantis rigs worked the pumps with the bored efficiency of creatures who had never been surprised. They were surprised. Torren landed like a meteor, Pyreaxe detonating into a sheet of pyro-roots that turned mantis rigs into burning cages. Clayton hit the crown and listened... he could hear Genesis signal chimes, machine heartbeat, and the ache of stolen water. He didn’t wrestle the machine; he seduced it. He whispered rot into the right seam, thirst into the wrong valve. He turned the drain inward, then reversed it. The siphon coughed. It stuttered. And then, it began to vomit water back into the fracture it had been strangling. DING! ~----~ [Siphon Node Disruption!] Flow: -100% outbound/ +63% inbound Purge Cycle: 02:11 Alert Status: Local (jammed) ~----~ "Two minutes to guards," Kaelin’s voice slid through the link; hazy, shadow-soft from somewhere unseen. "North and east". "South’s mind," Veyra said, and her arrow sang from a far tower, a drone dropping like a broken moth in its wake. "Pull," Clayton said. Torren put his axe through the main conduit with savage joy. The siphon screamed; a pressure wave of steam and brine, and then the ground shook as water roared back into the bone-dry vein like a river remembering itself. They left with minutes to spare and didn’t look back. Behind them, stolen flow became flood. Pastures miles away darkened as the water returned; the air smelled like rain over old dust. Pressure answered pressure. ... Far away in New Chicago... Korrath watched the tremor march across his grids like a bruise. "Noted," he murmured, still calm. "He has a sense for systems". Serrak’s voice clicked. "He’s adapting faster than projection". "They always do," Korrath said. "Right before something breaks". He narrowed his eyes at the surge repopulating a dying river. "Escalate Theta-Seven along humanitarian corridors. Bleed the placed he won’t let fail, and deploy the Severs to N-Spindle". "If he keeps turning beasts, he can have a taste of silence". Serrak’s tendrils flexed. "The Severs will kill his domain’s song. "That is the point". Korrath said. ... By the next afternoon, the Rootsite felt different. It was less a wound waiting to be pressed, and more a muscle steadying under tension. Children cupped Verdant Well water and giggled at the taste. Symbiotic Gardens knit their shimmering skins over doors and lintels, while cooks began to learn the new textures of leafbread and fruit-mesh. Along the southern fascia, carrion patrols paced with their muzzles to the wind, snarling when the air turned wrong. Mara watched a Garden web itself across a break in the outer wall, mouth open, eyes wet. "I never... I didn’t know plants could do this". "They can," Veyra said, stringing her bow. "When they have a Lord". Mara looked over. "You were never one for titles". Veyra’s smile was brief and real. "I didn’t say I liked the word. I said it was true". The stood in unspoken quiet for a breath too long to be anything but a kind of prayer. Then, suddenly, Trist flinched so hard he dropped the coil of cord he’d been carrying. ZZZT! Clayton felt it through the link even before the boy gasped he words. His Heartseed lurched like a note in a song had been cut with a knife. "North," Trist rasped, both hands at his temples. "They’re... it’s... the sound went out. It went out!" Lorn’s eyes snapped to Clayton. "Domain silence?" Clayton was already moving. "He sent Severs". Veyra fell in beside him, Torren already at his back. Kaelin simply appeared at his left shoulder like he’d been there the whole time. "Explain," Soren said, racing to catch up. "Severs are Null constructs tuned for Verdant fields," Clayton said. "They don’t just suppress Embers, they cut resonance. If they hold, the domain can’t hear itself. Our walls will go dumb, our roots slow, and our beasts will forget their leash". Torren’s jaw worked. "Counter?" Clayton didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The counter was the same as ever; find the pressure point and crush it. They hit the north lanes at a run. They world felt wrong there. Not dark, darkness Clayton could wear like a coat. Not quiet, silence he could weaponized. This was absence. The kind of hollow that swallowed the shape of a thing until even memory became slippery. Four Severs strode the boulevard like surgeons in a dead body; tall, filament-limbed, faces a smooth mirror that reflected nothing. Wherever they walked, vines slackened; the thorns on the fences bent as if suddenly unsure of their purpose. One carrion patrol stood stock-still, eyes glasses, jaws open and wet. "South pair," Clayton said to Veyra without turning her head. "On it," she breathed. Her Kin-mark burned steady, her bow lifted. She drew once, then twice... WHOOSH! Her arrows drew lines in a vacant sky. Verdant Crescendo slipped the string in a whisper; mid-flight, her shot bloomed into a cloud of seeded glass that detonated without a sound. The Sever turned to face nothing in particular and then stopped, its mirror face crackled with hairline fractures. Torren hit the second one like a verdict. Sporeflame took him from man to Verdant meteor; pyro-roots shattering the null shell, flame searing into the negative space until even the absence burned. Clayton took the third. He didn’t swing Regalia. He stepped into the Sever’s field, into the wrongness, and found edge where nothing had a name. He pressed his palm against the mirror and let his Heartseed scream the word the thing hated most... "Grow". For a heartbeat it did nothing. For a second heartbeat, it tried not to be. On the third, hairline cracks spidered through the face; mycelium pulsed through like frost under glass as something like sap bled out that wasn’t liquid but possibly made wet. The Sever collapsed under a weight it could not define. Soren split the fourth from crown to cradle with one clean cut, Emberblade singing an angry, perfect note. The pieces lay there, mirror faces reflecting a sky that suddenly remembered how to hold light. DING! ~----~ [Sever Squad Neutralized!] Domain Resonance: Restoring... 71% ~ 88% ~ 100% Aphid Network Synch: Stable ~----~ The street exhaled. Vines lifted. Thorns bristled. The carrion patrol blinked; one juvenile shook its head and bared its teeth at the right things again. "Pressure answered," Torren panted. "More coming," Trist whispered, staring at whatever future only he could taste. "Smaller. Quicker. Not like those". "Scalpels," Kaelin said, without inflection. "Send me first". Clayton nodded once. "Don’t trade. Cut". Kaelin vanished.