They didn't run so much as fall upward through the earth.
Ethan's lamp juddered wild light over resin walls as the tunnel behind them boiled with sound—the hiss-scrape of countless soft bodies rubbing against stone, the wet slap of gel, the collective whisper of a thing made of thousands finding a direction and choosing up. Maria's guns threw white pulses back into the dark, lighting shapes that were not shapes so much as tide: pale cylinders, translucent, all mouth and muscle, writhing and climbing over one another until the tunnel itself seemed alive.
"Don't fight—move!" Ethan shouted, throat raw.
Kira slid along the wall where the resin's seam gave her shadow; Sofia ran with breath timed to her steps, bow in her fist because there was no room to draw. Ellie's bear filled the passage behind Maria, metal plates scraping resin, forcing the tide back every time it surged close. The air got thicker as if someone had decided they should breathe through cloth. Under it, a steady drumbeat—Ethan's heart, yes, but also a deeper one, as if the earth had a pulse and it was spiking.
The tunnel steepened. Light opened. The last run was blind and graceless and fast.
They burst into Haven like corks from a bottle.
For a heartbeat they were children stumbling into sudden daylight—blinking, gasping—then the world snapped into lines and geometry. The yard had become a wall of bodies and metal. Marcus stood center with his shield line: three ranks of Titan Bloods and Speed fighters braced shoulder to shoulder with scavenged plate and riot doors turned into shields. Darren and a spear line locked behind them, points angled low, ready to lift. Ravi barked positions with a voice that didn't crack anymore. Keith waited on the flanks with his beasts—lion prowling, serpent looped like a living cable, the crocodile a dark log in the shallows. Turrets hummed along the parapet. The spider crouched over the tunnel mouth, strands already drawn. The Array towers along the hall glowed like coals waiting for breath.
There were maybe a hundred fighters. No more.
Ethan skidded to a stop in front of Marcus. "Eggs," he said, and that was all. The word carried everything: the chamber, the pop, the scream, the thousands.
Marcus didn't flinch. "Shield," he said, and it wasn't a suggestion. Ethan stepped into the gap beside him. Leather, iron, resin, flesh—one line. Behind them, the town held its breath.
The tunnel exhaled.
At first it didn't look like anything at all—just a grey-white shimmer running along the floor like spilled milk. Then the shimmer climbed over itself and grew teeth. Larvae, newborn and furious, poured from the mouth of the earth in a boiling sheet that turned the ground into a moving skin. They were each no longer than a forearm, finger-thick, translucent enough to see the pale rope of their guts, mouths ringed with soft rasping plates that chattered as they tested the air. They moved without coordination and with perfect purpose, one mass, one direction.
Someone in the back said, "Oh, hell," and then there was no more talking.
The flood hit the line.
And splat.
The first rank of larvae slapped into shields and simply ceased to be—bursts of grey-white pulp that painted the metal and the men behind it. The sound was obscene: wet fruit dropped from a height, bags of meat popped between palms, rain on a canvas roof made of intestines. It was so immediate and so total that for a single dislocated second nobody understood they weren't dying.
Then the next rank hit, and the next, and the next.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
The wall held. The larvae didn't.
They came too soft, too soon, white sacks still learning their own bones. The line was a grinder and the flood was a handful of grapes. Men flinched out of habit, bodies braced for pain that didn't arrive, and in the absence of pain there was sensation: mess. Warm, slick, impossible to get out of your nose no matter how hard you blew.
Kira had a blade up, ready to take an eye, and stared in disbelief as three of the things hit her chest, made small wet fireworks, and slid off her armor like oatmeal. "You've got to be kidding," she said, flat.
Sofia lifted her bow, paused, then lowered it, her mouth open in a silent laugh. She picked a target just to be mean and loosed; the arrow turned ten of them into a sloppy star.
Ravi barked an order that turned into coughing that turned into giggling. "Hold— hold— hold the line—" He doubled over, choking on his own laugh. "Oh, my god."
The System chimed in Ethan's field of view, small and insistent.
> +1 EXP
+1 EXP
+1 EXP
+1 EXP
+1 EXP
+1 EXP
The notifications stacked until they became a column, then a curtain, then a wall. He blinked them away and they came back, relentless, like the larvae themselves.
"Don't move," Marcus said, voice very even, very calm. Larvae hit his shield and slipped away like eggs cracked on a skillet. He snorted. "We hold. We stand. We don't even try."
Another wave hit and made a sound like a boot pulled out of deep mud. Someone gagged. Someone else cackled. The laugh moved like a breeze, contagious and shameful and necessary. It tore through the line and became a roar. Men bent at the waist, holding their stomachs because the laughter hurt, because the world had been a blade for too long and suddenly it wasn't, not this second. Even the spider seemed confused, legs flexing as its web collected a gently undulating carpet of worm debris.
"Keep your mouths closed," Keith shouted, but he was smiling, and then he was not because the serpent flicked and came back with a face full of goo, insulted and wet. The lion made a sound like a cat that had been sneezed on and shook himself; a dozen fighters swore as they got an extra coat.
Maria stood with her arms bent up like a broken doll, Wrath and Reason dripping. "If I vomit in my gauntlets," she said, perfectly level, "I'm quitting the apocalypse."
"Permission denied," Kira said, deadpan, and flicked a larva off Maria's shoulder with a knife tip.
The flood slowed. It didn't stop so much as lose heart, the way water trickles after a dam has taken the violence out of it. The last of the larvae hit exhausted and slid down the pile of their own, a tide meeting a shore made of themselves. Steam rose where the husky's breath had glazed a ridge of pulp into something like ceramic. The Alsatian padded along the line with mouth open, little tongues of orange light gusting, welding the worst drifts into harmless crust.
Silence fell, then was immediately broken by a single enormous snort from someone who'd been holding a laugh too long. That set them all off again because the line was a human thing and humans laugh when they survive by accident.
Ethan took a breath, wiped his mouth with the back of his gauntlet, and discovered that made it worse, not better. He turned to Marcus, blinking slime out of his eyelashes. "Well," he said, "that could've gone worse."
Marcus looked like a statue in a food fight. He bared his teeth. "Could've smelled better."
The cheer that followed wasn't planned, but it wasn't quiet either. People raised their weapons because that was what you did; someone banged a shield with a spear butt and the sound was something you could live to hear again. Darren clapped Sofia on the back; Sofia flinched and swore because her hand came away glued to his pauldron and they both had to peel it off while choking on laughter.
"Status?" Ethan called, because somebody had to be the adult.
Ravi had his slate and his pencil and a face that said he was making sense of nonsense. "Population unperforated. Morale—" He glanced up and around, pushing his glasses up with one slimy knuckle. "—stupidly high. Array at idle. No new readings below ten meters."
Maria flicked her wrists; her gauntlets hissed as a wash cycle she'd improvised sluiced the worst of the gore into a trench. She checked her palm sensor. The rim light turned steady and calm. "No mass. No motion. The hatch chamber's… empty." She looked up, eyebrows knitting. "We flushed the nursery. All of it."
Keith waded into the shallows up to his knees and rinsed his arms, then spat theatrically. "I've fought kings for less meat than this," he said, disgusted and delighted. "If anyone tells me I'm not a provider today, I'll drown them."
Aria arrived at a run, cheeks flushed, hair stuck to her forehead. Her eyes went wide at the yard and wider at the people. "You're alive," she said, like a discovery.
Ethan grinned at her, unable to help himself. "We are."
"And very disgusting," Kira added.
Aria pressed fingers to the resin near the tunnel. She went still, that listening look settling over her face. When she spoke, the rhythm shifted: not the Queen's voice exactly, but close to it. "The deep song is… quieter," she said. "Smaller. The places that think are thinking about nothing for a while."
"Nap time," someone muttered.
"Let them sleep forever," another said.
The System chimed again. Not the neutral note. Something lower. Amused.
The light in the yard bent without dimming—colors bleaching a shade; shadows collapsing to a single plane. Every interface shimmered. Gold text wrote itself across the air where the beacon struck the mist.
> [System Advisory]
You amuse us, small ones.
Even accidents have purpose.
By forcing the hatch before bone and bite, you averted a greater calamity.
Be grateful. Had they grown their teeth, your haven would be gone.
But beware—
the parent still stirs below.
And he has noticed.
The letters hung a heartbeat longer than usual, then broke apart into thin, laughing static that traced the air like starlings before vanishing.
No one laughed after that.
Ethan let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding and felt it shiver in his ribs. He looked toward the river, toward the cliff, toward the tunnel they had sealed a dozen times and would seal a dozen more. He saw the place where the centipede had split and remembered the way its halves had thrashed like two horrors trying to remember if they had been one.
"The adult," he said softly.
Keith's mouth flattened. "The father."
Marcus rolled his shoulders, sending a sheet of pulp sliding to the ground with a sound like a wet page turned. "Then we get ready to kill a father," he said. "He won't find us funny."
"First," Ravi said, practical as rain, "we wash."
That broke the spell enough. Men and women began to move in the slow, grateful way of people given a reprieve they didn't expect. Hoses unspooled. Buckets passed. The spider sheeted the worst of the piles and dragged them toward the trench with patience that made something in the back of the human brain relax. The husky and Alsatian trotted side by side, frosting a wall here, sealing a drain there, tails beating time. Sofia wiped her bowstring with an oiled cloth while Darren, god help him, tried to flick a gob of larva from the Reaver's Arc with exactly the same delicacy he used to trim his beard.
Maria stood still until the last of the wash ran clear off her gauntlets. Then she flexed her hands and checked the Array towers, listening to their hum like a doctor at a patient's chest. "I can push the resonance deeper if we need it," she said without preamble. "But I'll need anchors in the tunnels. Conduits. We'll have to send a team."
Kira tilted her head. "We just got very clean."
Maria's mouth ticked. "Then we go while we smell better."
Aria's gaze stayed on the resin. "She says he's listening now," she said. "Not moving. Listening."
Ethan nodded once. The laughter was gone, but the echo of it was still in the bones of the yard, in the loosened shoulders, in the way people spoke to one another without snapping. Relief had weight, and so did fear. He could hold both. For a while.
He climbed the short stairs to the parapet and looked out at Haven, which looked back, dirty and stubborn and very alive. The memorial wall stood darker than the stones around it, names given a new day. The beacon cut the mist like a pole star. The ants kept stitching. The serpent blinked water out of its good eye. The line wiped their shields and found they didn't mind the work.
He checked his essence out of habit. It flowed steady. The new strength of the town—credit, bodies, food, will—beat with it.
"Good job," he said to no one and to everyone, and the yard seemed to answer.
Then he looked down at the sealed black mouth of the tunnel and said, almost gently, "Come, then."
If the thing below heard, it didn't answer. But the ground held like a breath not yet taken.
They would breathe first.