The tunnel from the leg was a throat of corrugated metal that climbed at a steep angle, forcing them to use their hands as much as their feet. The residual dampness from the Lower Body clung to them—Vivian's hair still dripping, Richie's clothes sodden and heavy, everyone's shoes squelching with each step. The air changed as they ascended, growing warmer, drier, taking on a quality that reminded Elijah of standing too close to industrial machinery. There was a taste to it, metallic and sharp, like licking a battery.
The tunnel spat them out onto a gantry, and the world opened up into something that defied the rational mind's ability to categorize it as architecture.
They had entered the giant's torso, and it was a cathedral to some mechanized god of suffering.
The chamber was cylindrical, vast enough that Elijah couldn't immediately gauge its true dimensions. The curved walls stretched up into darkness above and plunged into shadow below, creating the sensation of standing inside a massive vertical shaft—which, he supposed with grim amusement, was exactly what they were doing. The giant's ribcage, literalized into engineering.
But it was the contents of this space that stole breath and replaced it with vertigo.
Huge piston-like pillars thrust up from the unfathomable depths below, each one easily twenty feet in diameter. They were constructed of some dark metal that had been polished to a sheen that caught and reflected the ambient light in shifting patterns. Brass accents ran along their lengths in decorative bands that served no purpose except to remind the viewer that someone had designed this nightmare with an eye toward aesthetics.
The pistons moved—not quickly, but with the inexorable authority of continental drift. They rose and fell in an asynchronous rhythm, each on its own timeline, creating a hypnotic pattern of mechanical breathing. The sound they made was profound, a deep pneumatic hiss and thud that you felt in your chest cavity more than heard with your ears.
Between these massive pillars, spanning the terrifying void, was a madness of pathways that looked like they'd been designed by an engineer who'd had a psychotic break while studying M.C. Escher prints.
Rotating beams no wider than balance beams extended from wall to wall, spinning slowly on central axes. Interlocking cog-platforms—some circular, some hexagonal, some irregular polygons that hurt to look at—meshed and ground together in patterns that seemed to follow no mathematical law Elijah could identify. The walls themselves were constructed of thousands of hexagonal plates, each one capable of independent movement, shifting in and out to create a constantly changing landscape of protrusions and recesses. The overall effect was like watching a kaleidoscope made of industrial components, beautiful and nauseating in equal measure.
The air here carried the heat of friction, the mechanical strain of great forces in constant opposition. Somewhere in the depths below, something massive turned, grinding against itself with the patience of geological time. The sound was a low, subliminal hum that set teeth on edge and made concentration difficult.
The countdown clock was carved directly into the curved far wall of the chamber, its numbers glowing with a relentless red intensity that seemed brighter here, more urgent: **38:17**.
Elijah forced his gaze downward, past the gantry's railing, into the pit below. There was no river here. No water to carry failed contestants back to some theoretical starting point. There was only machinery—a seething mass of gears the size of subway cars, their teeth interlocking and separating with mechanical precision. They churned ceaselessly, rotating on multiple axes, creating a three-dimensional meat grinder that would reduce anything unfortunate enough to fall into it to component atoms.
A fall here wouldn't send you back for another attempt. It would erase you from existence in the most literal, visceral way possible.
"Jesus Christ," Marcus breathed, the first words anyone had spoken since entering the chamber. He was leaning against the gantry's railing, his knuckles white where they gripped the metal. "This is... this is fucking insane."
Vivian made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been the beginning of a scream she was swallowing. Her eyes were too wide, pupils dilated in shock. Chloe had an arm around her shoulders, holding her steady, but Chloe's own face had gone pale beneath the grime.
Richie just stared into the pit with the blank, thousand-yard gaze of someone who'd stopped processing new horrors because his psychological filing system was full.
A new line of text appeared on the nearest piston as it rose past them, the letters glowing that same sickly green as the bioluminescent moss from the leg chamber. The words seemed to pulse with each syllable, as if the structure itself were speaking:
**CHOOSE: THE QUICK PATH, OR THE SLOW PATH. THE PATH CHOOSES YOU.**
"More fucking riddles," Marcus muttered, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. The gesture was automatic, agitated. He pushed away from the railing and moved to the gantry's edge, peering over with the aggressive assessment of someone evaluating an opponent. "Cryptic bullshit. Just tell us what you want."
But Elijah was already studying the chamber, his analytical mind parsing the challenge even as his body screamed at him to rest. To the left, a series of cog-platforms formed a discontinuous, stuttering path across the chamber's breadth. They moved fast—snapping into alignment with sharp, metallic clangs that echoed through the space, holding position for perhaps a second, two at most, before retracting or rotating away. The gaps between platforms varied wildly, from three feet to eight or more. It would require perfect timing, split-second decisions, and absolute commitment. Hesitation would be fatal. It was, Elijah estimated, maybe a five-minute crossing if executed flawlessly. Ten minutes if you were careful but competent.
To the right, a single, wide beam—perhaps four feet across—curved in a long, gradual arc around the chamber's perimeter. It was solid, stable, clearly anchored to the wall at multiple points. No moving parts. No apparent traps. But it was also significantly longer, wrapping nearly three-quarters of the way around the cylindrical space before reaching the far platform. Twenty minutes, minimum. Maybe thirty if you had to move slowly, if someone was injured or panicking.
"The quick path is obvious," Marcus said, pointing left at the cog-gauntlet. His voice carried the sharp confidence of someone who'd made a decision and needed everyone else to agree with it. "It's a test of timing and nerve. Physical skill. We take it together, in sequence. I'll go first, establish the rhythm, you all follow. We can be across in under ten minutes."
"It's a test of something else," Elijah said quietly. He was still staring at the glowing text, his mind working through implications. **The path chooses you.** Not *choose your path.* The phrasing was deliberate, inverted, important. He looked from the frenetic cogs to the slow beam, then at each member of their group in turn.
Vivian, still trembling against Chloe, her eyes glazed with shell-shock. The woman who'd frozen at the sight of Cael, whose terror had nearly killed her.
Richie, standing slightly apart, his massive frame hunched with pain and impotent rage, his hands curling and uncurling as he muttered something inaudible.
Chloe, meeting his gaze with exhausted determination, her shoulders squared despite the fatigue written in every line of her body.
Marcus, already shifting his weight, ready to move, impatient with deliberation.
And himself. Elijah Carter, the man who'd hesitated when it mattered most, who'd frozen in front of a corpse while his friend burned.
The profiles from the control room flashed through his memory with perfect clarity. He could see them as clearly as if they were still displayed on those monitors: **Hesitation. Overthinking. Aggression. Panic. Control.**
This wasn't a choice of speed versus safety. It was a diagnosis. The House was sorting them, categorizing them by their fundamental flaws, and offering each a path that would either reinforce or remediate that flaw.
"We split up," Elijah said.
"Are you insane?" Marcus snapped, spinning to face him. His expression was incredulous, angry. "That's the worst possible strategy. We stay together, we watch each other's backs. That's how we've survived this far."
"The quick path is for you, Marcus," Elijah said, holding his gaze without blinking. "It rewards decisiveness. Aggression. Speed over thought. It's your flaw, so it's your test." He turned to Chloe before Marcus could argue. "The slow path. It's patient. It requires careful planning, not gut reaction. Observation over instinct. It's for you."
Chloe looked at the long, winding beam, then back at the furious dance of the cog-platforms. She could see Elijah's logic immediately—cold, ruthless, and perfectly aligned with the sadistic psychology they'd been experiencing since the moment they'd awakened in this place. The House didn't just want to kill them. It wanted to *understand* them first. To catalogue their failures. To make them confront their own worst qualities before it consumed them.
She hated the idea of splitting up. Hated it with every tactical bone in her body. But the alternative was forcing everyone onto paths that were fundamentally mismatched to their psychological profiles, and that seemed even more dangerous.
"He's right," she said, her voice hollow with acceptance. The words tasted like ash. "Vivian, Richie... you're with me on the slow path."
Richie just nodded, too exhausted and pain-addled to argue. His left arm hung at an awkward angle where he'd injured it in the lower body, and his face had the grey pallor of someone running on fumes.
Vivian clutched Chloe's arm tighter, her fingernails digging in through the fabric. "I don't... I can't..." Her voice was a broken whisper.
"You can," Chloe said firmly, covering Vivian's hand with her own. "You're going to walk with me. Slow and steady. We're not going to rush. We're not going to panic. We're just going to walk."
Elijah looked at the cog-path, really studied it. It was a gauntlet of pure, punishing reaction time. Each jump would need to be committed to instantly, executed without second-guessing, without the paralysis of overthinking. It was designed to strip away conscious thought and force pure instinct to the surface.
It was his own test, he knew with absolute certainty. The flaw it was designed to expose and exploit was his own cursed hesitation, the freeze response that had gripped him outside that warehouse seven years ago, watching Cael burn. The moment when his body had betrayed him, when analysis had paralyzed action, when thinking had prevented moving.
To cross the quick path, he would have to become the opposite of everything his trauma had made him. He would have to silence the voice in his head that calculated odds and considered consequences. He would have to act without thought, move without planning, jump without measuring.
He would have to stop being Elijah Carter, careful archivist, and become something else entirely. Something he'd been before Cael died. Something he wasn't sure still existed inside him.
"I'll take the quick path," he said, surprised by how steady his voice sounded. "With Marcus."
Marcus was already moving toward the edge of the gantry, but he paused long enough to give Elijah a look that might have been respect or might have been reassessment. "Try to keep up," was all he said.
Without ceremony, without further discussion, they split. Chloe led Vivian and Richie toward the right, where a narrow walkway connected to the wide beam. Elijah and Marcus approached the left edge, where the first cog-platform waited, its surface scored with deep grooves that had been worn by God knew what.
Elijah stepped to the very edge of the gantry. Below, the first cog rotated slowly, its massive bulk turning with mechanical indifference. It would align with the platform he stood on for perhaps two seconds. Then it would rotate away, and the gap would become a twenty-foot fall into grinding death.
He didn't let himself think about it. That was the point, wasn't it? The moment he started calculating, started planning, the hesitation would return. The freeze.
Marcus looked at him once. "Ready?"
Elijah nodded.
The cog aligned with a metallic clang.
Elijah jumped.
It was like stepping off a curb and discovering the street had dropped away beneath you. His stomach lurched as he left the security of the gantry. For a fraction of a second he was weightless, suspended between safety and annihilation.
Then his feet hit the cog's surface and the world became motion. The platform was already rotating as he landed, the momentum trying to sweep his legs out from under him. It wasn't stable ground—it was a moving vehicle, a mechanical bronco designed to throw its rider. The metal was slick, worn smooth by whatever arcane purposes these machines served. Elijah didn't fight it. Some instinct he'd forgotten he possessed took over, and he moved with the rotation instead of against it, his body low, his center of gravity shifted, his eyes already tracking ahead.
The next platform was five feet away, sliding into alignment. The window was closing—four seconds, three seconds—
He jumped again. Landed hard, the impact jarring up through his knees. This cog immediately tilted, its angle shifting as it meshed with an adjacent gear. Elijah slid, his boots losing purchase on the angled surface. His hand shot out, grabbing one of the raised teeth that ringed the platform's edge. The metal was hot, almost burning, but he held on, using the anchor point to arrest his slide. He hauled himself up as the next platform in the sequence meshed into place with a deafening CLANG that rang through his bones.
He was a speck in the giant machinery, a human insect crawling across surfaces designed for purposes that had nothing to do with him. Moving with a desperate, fluid grace he didn't know he still possessed.
Somewhere behind him, Marcus had started his own crossing. Elijah could hear the impacts, the grunts of effort, but he didn't look back. Couldn't afford to. Every ounce of attention was focused forward, tracking patterns, measuring distances, timing jumps.
In the livestream chat, the reactions were instantaneous:
**User 'ParkourKing'**: *Okay, the quiet guy can MOVE. Did you see that recovery??*
**User 'Gambler'**: *Bet he doesn't make it. Hesitation's gonna get him. Watch.*
**User 'MotherOfChaos'**: *$50 says he falls in the next minute*
**User 'NightShift'**: *This is better than the Olympics*
On the slow path, Chloe led Vivian and Richie onto the wide beam. The surface was solid beneath their feet—thank whatever sadistic god ruled this place—textured for grip, stable as bedrock. But it was deceiving in its simplicity.
They'd barely taken ten steps when the test revealed itself.
The beam itself was stable, yes. But the environment around it was emphatically not. A section of the shifting hexagonal wall to their right suddenly extruded outward with a hydraulic hiss, a cluster of plates extending three feet into their space. Chloe barely had time to throw up an arm, pushing Vivian down, forcing all three of them to duck beneath the protrusion. The metal passed inches above their heads, close enough that Chloe could feel the heat radiating from its surface.
"Keep moving," she said, her voice tight. "Don't stop. Don't panic. Just keep moving."
They straightened and continued. Ten more steps. Then from above, bundles of thick, fibrous cables—the kind used for heavy industrial suspension—lashed down like whips. They didn't strike them; that wasn't the point. They created barriers, forcing the group to stop, to wait, to time their passage through the momentary gaps. Each cable fell in a different rhythm, creating a pattern that had to be observed and memorized before it could be safely navigated.
It was a trial of patience and observation, and every second spent navigating its subtle traps felt like a lifetime under the pitiless gaze of the descending clock.
**31:44**
Back on the quick path, Elijah had found something like a rhythm. Not quite flow state—that implied a meditative quality this certainly didn't have—but a kind of combat trance where conscious thought receded and muscle memory took over. Jump, land, pivot, roll under a descending piston-arm that would have crushed his skull if he'd been a half-second slower, spring up onto a rising platform before it completed its ascent. His body knew what to do in a way his mind had forgotten it could, operating on instincts that predated his seven years of carefully cultivated caution.
The memory of Cael's corpse-hand reaching for him was still there, always there, but it had become fuel now. Burned in the furnace of this physical necessity. Fear converted to energy. Trauma weaponized into motivation. He didn't hesitate because he couldn't afford to, and in the not affording, he discovered he didn't need to.
He was perhaps halfway across the chamber, his lungs burning, his hands scraped raw from catching himself on metal edges, when he saw Marcus ahead of him.
Marcus had chosen the quick path as well—of course he had, it was perfect for him—and he was fast. Athletic and aggressive, attacking each platform like it was a personal insult that needed to be dominated. But aggression without discipline was just recklessness wearing a different mask.
Elijah watched it happen in slow motion, his enhanced perceptual speed courtesy of adrenaline making every detail crystalline. Marcus misjudged a jump—not by much, perhaps an inch, but in this environment an inch was the difference between life and annihilation.
He landed on the absolute edge of a cog, his weight distributed wrong, his momentum carrying him forward when he needed to be moving laterally. The platform spun beneath him, responding to the unbalanced load. Instead of riding the momentum, going with the rotation and using it to slingshot himself to the next position, Marcus fought it. Tried to plant his feet like he was standing on solid ground. Tried to impose his will on the machinery through sheer force.
The cog tilted violently in response, the mechanism compensating for the irregular weight distribution. Physics and engineering conspired against human stubbornness.
Marcus's arms windmilled, his body tipping backward. For a heart-stopping second, he teetered on the brink, suspended over the seething mass of gears below. His face went through a rapid evolution of expressions—surprise, recognition, terror.
Elijah was on an adjacent platform, his own cog rotating into alignment with Marcus's position. He didn't shout—sound would waste time, would require Marcus to process it cognitively, would add seconds they didn't have. He acted instead. Dropped to his knees as his platform meshed closer, his hand shooting out across the gap. The distance was too great to grab Marcus—four feet, maybe five—but that wasn't what Elijah intended.
He slapped his palm hard against the metal tooth next to Marcus's flailing foot, the impact producing a sharp, percussive CLANG that cut through the ambient machinery noise.
The sudden sound, the vibration through the metal, broke Marcus's panic spiral. His eyes snapped to Elijah's, saw the hand, followed the direction it was pointing. Down. Not up, not forward. Down.
Instinct took over where conscious thought had failed. Marcus stopped fighting the tilt, stopped trying to regain balance that was already lost. He dropped, controlling the fall, turning it into a slide down the sloping surface of the cog.
A smaller platform—perhaps three feet in diameter, barely large enough for one person—had just clicked into place below, part of some secondary mechanism Elijah had noticed but Marcus had been too focused on the main path to see.
Marcus landed on it hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs with an audible whoof. But he was alive. Safe, at least for the moment.
He looked up, chest heaving, and Elijah was already gone. Already leaping to the next sequence, already three platforms ahead, not waiting for thanks or acknowledgment.
They didn't speak. Couldn't speak over the mechanical din. The rescue was as wordless and mechanical as the environment that had necessitated it, two components in a larger system briefly interacting before separating again.
24:19
On the slow path, the attrition was psychological rather than physical. The beam remained stable, but the obstacles increased in frequency and complexity. Panels jutting from the walls.
Cables lashing from above and below. At one point, a section of the floor plates ahead of them began to retract in sequence, creating gaps that they had to time their steps to avoid. Not large gaps—six inches, maybe eight—but over a drop that promised death, six inches was a canyon.
Chloe navigated each obstacle with methodical precision, calling out warnings, physically guiding Vivian when necessary. Richie followed in their wake, a massive, shambling presence, his usual aggressive energy dampened to a sullen endurance.
Then Vivian's control snapped.
A cable lashed down directly in front of her face with a whistling hiss, missing her nose by perhaps two inches.
It was one obstacle too many, one shock layered onto a system already overloaded. She screamed—not words, just raw fear vocalized—and stumbled backward. The beam was four feet wide, plenty of room to recover, but panic doesn't calculate dimensions. Her foot came down on empty air behind her, her weight shifted in the wrong direction, physics beginning its inexorable work.
Chloe, walking behind her, was ready. She didn't try to catch her—there was no angle for it, no leverage. She shoved instead. A hard, two-handed push to Vivian's back, propelling her forward, past the lashing cable, onto safe ground ahead. It was ruthless. It was necessary. It was the kind of tactical decision that saved lives but felt like violence.
Vivian stumbled, her forward momentum uncontrolled, and fell to her knees on the beam. She sobbed—great, heaving gasps that shook her whole body—but she was safe.
"Up," Chloe said, not unkindly but without room for argument. "We keep moving. Up."
Richie shuffled past them both without comment, a storm cloud in human form, his lips moving in a constant, muttered monologue about "gears in the sky" and "the masked freak" and graphic descriptions of what he'd do to the Architect if he ever got his hands on him.
18:03
Elijah reached the far side of the chamber first, launching himself from the final platform onto solid ground with a thud that reverberated through his entire skeletal system. He landed hard, rolled, came up in a crouch.
His clothes were torn in a dozen places, his hands scraped raw and bleeding from catching himself on metal edges, his chest burning with each breath. His legs trembled with exhaustion, threatening to give out now that the adrenaline-fueled motion had stopped.
He turned, looking back across the mechanical nightmare he'd just traversed, and experienced a moment of profound dissociation. Had he really just done that? His careful, analytical brain catalogued all the ways he should have died, all the jumps that had been inches from disaster, and couldn't quite reconcile those near-misses with his current continued existence.
Marcus made it across a minute later, vaulting the final gap with more force than necessary, his landing heavy and aggressive. His face was slick with sweat and contorted with something that might have been fury or might have been exhilaration or might have been both. He bent over, hands on his knees, gasping.
After a moment, he straightened and looked at Elijah. There was a question in his eyes, but he didn't voice it. The moment of near-death on the cogs hung between them, unacknowledged but present.
"Don't mention it," Elijah said quietly.
Marcus gave a short nod. "Wasn't going to."
They stood as silent sentries, watching as the slow path finally delivered its charges. Chloe emerged first, helping a limping Vivian the last few steps. Vivian's face was blotchy and tear-streaked, her movements mechanical, shock setting in now that the immediate threat had passed. Richie dragged himself across moments later, his breathing labored, his injured arm cradled against his chest.
They regrouped on the far platform, a shattered, breathless crew held together by necessity and proximity rather than any real unity. The Mid-Section was behind them. Ahead, the structure continued upward into the giant's chest. A final, vertical shaft beckoned, its walls slick and featureless, disappearing up into darkness. Somewhere above, barely visible, was a glow—the emblem they'd seen from the control room, the heart of this mechanical titan.
The Ascent Trial awaited.
No one spoke. There were no words adequate to the moment. They simply looked up at what remained, calculating in their individual ways whether they had anything left to give.
The countdown clock, visible through a gap in the machinery, read 12:47.
Twelve minutes to reach the heart. To stop whatever this was. To escape or die trying.
Chloe was the first to move toward the shaft. The others followed, because the only alternative was to stop, and stopping in this place meant death.