Two chambers remained, and as Daven had warned, proximity to the Source made every extraction harder.
The seventh hunter — a mage Aryan didn't recognize, her robes scorched black along one sleeve — took nearly thirty minutes to free, the dark veins around her fighting his careful stillness with a persistence the earlier extractions hadn't shown. By the time she came loose, gasping, disoriented, Aryan's own hands had begun trembling faintly from the sustained effort of holding perfect, patient calm against something that wanted, with growing desperation, to provoke him into resistance.
"It's learning," Yuki said quietly, watching from beside the growing cluster of freed hunters. She'd recovered enough strength to stand, to help steady the newly freed mage, her A-Rank training reasserting itself now that the immediate crisis of her own survival had passed. "Each time you free someone, it adjusts. Tries harder."
"I noticed," Aryan said, flexing fingers that didn't want to stop shaking.
"You should rest before the eighth," Daven said, not quite a suggestion. "You've been at this for over an hour straight."
Aryan considered that, weighing the genuine exhaustion building in his limbs against the unsettling glow of the crystal overhead, which had grown visibly brighter — more agitated — with every successful rescue. Whatever patience the Source possessed, it was clearly running thinner than it had at the chamber's threshold.
"Five minutes," Aryan conceded, sinking down against the cavern wall, careful to keep distance from any of the black stone veins. "Then I finish the last one and we figure out the actual Source problem before it figures out a counter to mine."
The five minutes passed in tense, watchful silence, the freed hunters clustered together, several of them finally allowing themselves visible relief now that immediate danger had receded enough to feel. Aryan used the time to check his own status, more out of habit than genuine need.
[HOST STATUS]
Level: 17
Stamina: Moderate (Recovering)
Active Effects: None
No corruption. No lingering hazard markers. Whatever the Source had tried to find purchase on, his careful, attentionless approach had denied it every opening. Small comfort, against the much larger problem still pulsing patiently overhead.
The eighth and final trapped hunter — a young scout, barely older than Aryan himself, judging by the unweathered look of him beneath days of exhaustion — took the longest of all, nearly forty-five minutes of careful, contested stillness before the stone finally, reluctantly released him. By the time it was done, Aryan's hands weren't just trembling; his whole body felt scraped hollow, the particular exhaustion of sustained mental discipline rather than physical strain.
[Ding! All trapped hunters freed.]
[Hunter's Ledger: +200 EXP — Mass Hazard Resolution (Cumulative Bonus).]
[Level Up! Host has reached Level 19.]
Eight rescued hunters watched him with expressions caught somewhere between awe and disbelief — people who'd spent days, in some cases, slowly fusing into a cavern wall, finally standing on their own legs again, alive in a way none of them had expected to be by the time anyone found them.
"Now what?" Daven asked, voice low, eyes fixed on the still-pulsing crystal overhead, brighter now than it had been at any point during the rescue, agitated in a way that felt less like patience running out and more like something gathering itself for a different kind of response.
Aryan studied the Source for a long moment, turning the day's hard-won lesson over carefully. Eight extractions. Eight small, contained defeats inflicted purely through the absence of struggle. The principle had held at small scale, consistently, predictably.
The Source itself, though — the actual structure feeding the entire Gate — was an entirely different order of magnitude. He had no real evidence the same trick would work against something that size, only a hopeful extrapolation built from eight successful trials against far smaller fragments of whatever this thing actually was.
"I think," Aryan said slowly, "we get everyone clear first. All of you, back through the valley, back to the threshold, back to Reyes's perimeter. I'll stay and test the theory properly."
"Alone," Yuki said flatly.
"It worked better when there was less to feed on," Aryan said. "Eight extra people standing here, scared, exhausted, however hard you're all trying to stay calm — that's eight more sources of exactly what this thing wants. I have a better chance with less noise, not more."
Daven's jaw tightened, clearly unhappy with the math even as he visibly recognized its logic. "You get one of us out of that wall with patience and theory, and now you want to walk straight at the thing that built the wall, with the same plan, scaled up by however much that crystal actually weighs."
"I'm open to better ideas," Aryan said honestly. "I don't have one. I have this one, and eight people who need to not be standing here while I test it."
A long silence stretched through the chamber, broken only by the Source's slow, deepening pulse.
Finally, Yuki nodded once, sharp and decisive, the gesture of someone reverting to rank discipline because the alternative was wasting time arguing with a plan that, however reckless, was also the only one on the table.
"We'll get everyone to the threshold," she said. "If you're not out in two hours, I'm coming back in. Alone, if I have to."
"Make it three," Aryan said. "I have a feeling this is going to take patience I haven't fully tested yet."
Daven studied him a long moment, something unreadable passing behind his exhausted eyes — the particular respect of someone who'd just been saved by methods he didn't fully understand, offered now to someone about to attempt something far larger on the strength of the same fragile theory.
"Three hours," Daven agreed finally. "Don't make us regret trusting the math."
The freed hunters began the slow, careful procession back toward the passage, supporting each other, moving with the cautious deliberation of people who'd learned, very recently, exactly how dangerous carelessness in this place could be.
Aryan watched them go, then turned back to face the Source alone, its pulse now a steady, brightening rhythm that felt, unmistakably, like something settling in to wait for him specifically.
"Alright," he said quietly, to no one but the dark and the patient, hungry light overhead. "Let's see how bored I can actually make you."