The tunnel narrowed, then stopped. It did not end with a door or a cave-in; it simply surrendered to open space. The glow in the rock intensified ahead, shifting from a sickly pulse to something denser, as if the stone itself had begun to sweat light. The air changed, too. It took on that familiar wrongness, a chemical bite that clung to the tongue. Emulsion sat close. Emulsion sat everywhere.
I stepped to the edge and looked down.
A chasm split the earth like an old wound that never learned to close. Far below, a river moved with slow aggression, black and luminous in streaks, as if oil had learned to imitate lightning. Islands of rock broke the surface in irregular lumps. Some were wide enough to stand on; some looked like they would crumble if I stared at them too hard.
The sensible thing would have been to find another route. The cave did not offer one. The tunnel behind me angled back toward the corpse pile and the ice chamber, and my instincts rejected that direction with immediate, stubborn clarity.
The river called to the part of me that had already started making compromises.
I backed up two steps, then ran and jumped.
The fall felt long enough for thought to catch up with physics. Wind climbed my throat. The chasm walls rushed past, striated with mineral veins and patches of glassy growth. I caught glimpses of shapes embedded in the stone, half-fossilized bones, and something that might have been metal. Old scaffolding, maybe. Mount Kadar carried a lot of history, and it did not bother separating the tragic from the useful.
The river surged toward me.
Impact came hard, cold, and thick.
Emulsion swallowed me whole. It did not behave like water. It gripped, it clung, it resisted every movement, like swimming through a solid river of stone. My eyes snapped shut on reflex, but it did not matter. The stuff burned without heat. It invaded every scratch and pore with an intimate insistence.
Fear arrived late, which annoyed me. Fear usually shows up early and takes up space. This time, it waited until my lungs screamed.
I kicked. My legs drove through the emulsion with ridiculous force, and that helped. It also terrified me, because it meant I could move faster than my panic. That is a dangerous combination. It turns mistakes into commitment.
As I thrashed upward, my mind flashed through images I did not want. Hollowed creatures in the deep. Lambent things that used the emulsion the way fish use water. The monsters that lived here in the lore, and the monsters that would live here even if the lore got it wrong.
Something brushed my calf.
Not a wave. Not current. A deliberate contact that slid along my skin and withdrew.
I kicked harder, aiming for empty space, and my foot hit nothing. The sensation of being touched again, lighter this time, came with a faint tug. A testing pull. A question asked by something that had never needed permission.
I fought for the surface with a kind of anger that felt borrowed. My arms dug, my legs piston-kicked, and finally I broke through.
Air hit me like a gift someone threw at my face.
I gulped it and coughed up emulsion, thick black strands that stuck to my lips and chin. It slid down my chest in slow threads. The river's glow lit it from within, making it look alive.
I spun in the emulsion, trying to orient myself. The chasm stretched in both directions, a long gash with no easy exits. The walls rose steep and slick, carved by time and chemical runoff. Rock islands dotted the river like broken teeth.
Something moved beneath me.
I did not look down. I did not need proof. I already had the sensation of it, and that was enough. I swam toward the nearest island with short, violent strokes, hauling my body through the emulsion's resistance. My hands slapped onto rock, and I pulled myself up with a single heave.
I lay there for a moment, chest expanding, then forced myself to my feet.
The island was uneven and cold, its surface pitted by corrosive seepage. Emulsion dripped off me in slow lines and pooled in the stone's little hollows. The smell clung to me. So did the sensation; a low-grade itch in the bones, like my skeleton wanted to scratch itself from the inside.
I scanned the chasm. No bridges. No platforms. Just the river, the islands, and the walls.
If I wanted to follow the river, I needed to move the way the river wanted me to move: carefully, quickly, and without falling back in.
I set my back against the wall, testing the stone with my shoulder. It held. I crouched, feeling the coil in my legs, that dense, unnerving power that made my body feel less like flesh and more like a mechanism designed for impact.
I jumped.
My feet left the island with a clean, sudden force. For a fraction of a second, I floated over the emulsion like the rules had paused to watch. Then gravity remembered its job, and I landed on the next island with a heavy thud that did not even jar my knees.
I stared at my feet as if they had betrayed me.
A second ago, I would have hesitated to hop a puddle in trainers with questionable grip. Now I crossed a river of toxic nightmare on stone stepping-stones with the casual physics of a thrown boulder.
I jumped again.
Then again.
Island to island, each landing precise, each takeoff stronger than the one before. My body learned the rhythm quickly, and that worried me too. It meant the body had done this sort of thing. It meant Varmund, the original Varmund, had been shaped for places like this.
Between jumps, I listened. The river did not splash. It lapped with thick sounds, as if it disliked being disturbed. Somewhere below the surface, something shifted. Sometimes I caught the faintest rise in the glow, a pulse that moved against the current.
I kept my eyes forward.
After a while, the islands widened, and the chasm opened into a broader basin. The river spilled into a massive lake, its surface smoother, calmer, and somehow more ominous for the restraint. The glow intensified, not evenly but in streaks that radiated outward from a central source.
A fissure split the far wall from floor to ceiling.
Light poured from it in a vertical sheet, pale and harsh, like daylight that had been filtered through stone and resentment. It illuminated the lake and turned the emulsion's surface into a slow-moving map of veins.
I stood on the last island and stared up at that gash in the rock.
The surface. Maybe. Or at least a place where something breathed.
My thoughts had just started to line up into a plan when the system chimed again.
The text appeared in front of me, the same flat, clean interface that did not care where it was projecting itself from.
EMULSION EXPOSURE EVENT RECORDED
ABSORPTION INCREASE: +200 ESSENCE
TOTAL ESSENCE: 212
NEW OPTION AVAILABLE: EQUIPMENT PURCHASE UNLOCKED (TIER 1)
I blinked. The text stayed. My skin tingled in response, and I realized the emulsion coating me had thinned. Not evaporated. Not fallen off. It had been absorbed. It had gone somewhere, and that somewhere was me.
A part of my brain, the part trained by video game logic and late-night wiki spirals, felt a sharp spike of satisfaction. It was a stupid reaction. It also felt unavoidable. The system had given me numbers, and numbers demanded decisions.
I focused, and a menu unfolded.
RESEARCH
ARMOR
WEAPONS
I selected ARMOR, mostly because the cave had already introduced me to the concept of being attacked without notice.
A list appeared, brief and blunt. Most entries were locked. One sat at the top as if it had been waiting for me.
SPI ARMOR SET (TIER 1)
COST: 200 ESSENCE
STATUS: AVAILABLE
I stared at it. My mind supplied the acronym like it had been itching to be relevant. Semi-Powered Infiltration. Spartan gear, older generation; lighter than MJOLNIR; built for stealth, not for being dropped into a subterranean hell lake.
Still, armor was armor. Also, I did not have any better ideas, and my shredded clothing did not count as a defensive strategy.
PURCHASE?
I hesitated just long enough to feel ridiculous, then selected YES.
A yellow field snapped into existence around me.
It was not light, exactly. It behaved like a membrane, thin and shimmering, wrapping my limbs, mapping my outline, tightening around my shoulders and chest. The sensation felt like being measured by invisible hands that had no interest in consent. Plates formed in the field's wake, locking into place with silent clicks I felt more than heard.
The field vanished.
I stood in armor.
It fit perfectly. No gaps. No pinches. No looseness. The chest plate sat solid against my sternum. The underlayer flexed with my breathing. The forearm guards accommodated my massive hands without complaint. It was a clean design, compact for what it was, and it made my body feel more real. That was not comfort; it was confirmation.
Then the absence hit me.
No hum. No shield flicker. No AI voice in my ear. No familiar electronic presence.
For a moment, disappointment arrived with embarrassing speed. I hated that. I had just crawled out of a river of emulsion after killing a tentacled nightmare with my hands, and my brain still found time to sulk about missing features like a child noticing a toy lacks batteries.
The system chimed again, as if it had anticipated my sulk.
SPI ARMOR SET ACQUIRED
POWER CORE: NONE
AI INTEGRATION: NONE
PASSIVE BUFFS APPLIED:
STRENGTH OUTPUT: +10 PERCENT
DAMAGE RESISTANCE: +15 PERCENT
MOBILITY EFFICIENCY: +8 PERCENT
I exhaled.
Fine. It was not a miracle suit. It was still a meaningful edge, and I needed edges.
I looked up at the fissure again. The light from it looked higher now, or maybe I just understood the distance better.
The wall between me and that light rose nearly sheer from the lake's edge. The stone looked jagged and hostile, carved with grooves that might have been old erosion lines, or claw marks, or both.
I crouched.
The armor moved with me, no scraping, no restriction. My legs coiled tighter than before. I felt the strength boost in a subtle way, not as a new sensation but as a reduction in effort.
I jumped.
The world dropped away. The lake shrank beneath me. For a second, I experienced something that felt unearned: flight. Not powered, not controlled; just raw momentum carrying a body that should not have been able to do this.
The wall rushed toward me. I slammed into it shoulder-first, not gently. Stone cracked. My armor took the impact with a dull shock through the plates.
I clung there anyway.
My hands found purchase, and if they did not, I made it. I drove my fingers into the rock and felt it yield, not like brittle stone, but like compacted clay. The material crumbled around my knuckles. I pulled myself up, one brutal motion at a time.
Climb. Jam fingers. Pull. Repeat.
The higher I got, the more the air changed. The emulsion smell thinned. Cool air flowed down from above, carrying traces of damp soil and something green. That scent hit me harder than it should have. It was the smell of a world that still remembered sunlight.
Halfway up, I stopped and looked down.
The lake of emulsion glowed like a sick mirror. Islands dotted its surface like scattered teeth. Somewhere beneath the glow, shadows moved, slow and patient. I could not see what they were. That felt like the point.
I resumed climbing.
The last stretch steepened near the fissure. Rock gave way to a lip, and above it, the light was no longer filtered. It was simply there, pale and honest.
I hauled myself up and rolled onto level ground.
Dirt. Loose stone. Roots.
I pushed to my feet and looked around.
A forest spread out in front of me, dense and dark, the trees thick-trunked and unfamiliar. The canopy tangled overhead, blocking most of the sky. The light that reached the ground came in broken beams, and the air felt wet, alive, and cold enough to raise gooseflesh under the armor.
For a moment, I just stood there, listening.
No dripping water. No subterranean hum. Instead, wind in leaves. A distant call from something that sounded like a bird. The faint rustle of small creatures moving through the undergrowth.
It was not safe. It was merely above ground.
I turned my head back toward the fissure. The opening in the earth gaped behind me, a reminder that I had not escaped anything. I had only changed locations.
The system stayed quiet.
My armor sat heavy and real around my body. Emulsion residue no longer dripped from me, but I could still feel it in my bones, a faint internal glow that was not visible, only sensed.
I faced the forest again.
If the story I thought I knew still applied, then somewhere out here were humans who would shoot first, ask questions later, and feel justified about it. Somewhere down there, in the dark, were Locust who would kill me for existing in the wrong shape. And somewhere in between was me, an eighteen-year-old student who had become a giant with a system.
My head moved, eyes looking ahead into the growths, before I took my first step into the trees.