The fall through the gap was longer than it looked from above.
He had expected the tower to be close below the island's floor based on how it had appeared through the opening, large enough that the scale suggested proximity. The scale was not proximity. It was size. He fell for approximately eight seconds before the tower's surface became something he could read as a destination rather than a distant object, and in those eight seconds the void currents that Current Reading could partially map in the island chain's between-spaces were absent here, the space below the islands operating on different physics than the space between them, the air denser and the light wrong in a different way from the island chain's wrong, as if this space and the space above had borrowed their wrongness from different sources.
She appeared beside him midway through the fall, the teleport depositing her in freefall rather than on a surface, and she angled her body in a way that was not aerodynamic in any standard sense but which she held with complete composure, the amber eyes forward, reading whatever she was reading about the space below.
He used Current Reading to find the air currents nearest the tower's surface and angled toward the densest one, the deceleration partial rather than complete, the landing on a narrow ledge approximately four metres wide running along the tower's exterior still hard enough that he had to absorb it through bent knees and braced arms rather than a clean step.
She landed beside him without apparent effort.
He checked the ledge in both directions. The tower's exterior surface was not featureless. It had geometry, recesses and protrusions running along the dark material in patterns that were not decorative, too regular for ornament and too irregular for structural necessity, something between the two. The open arch entrance was twenty metres to his left, visible from the ledge as a gap in the tower's exterior that the wrong-light of this subspace read as darker than the surrounding material.
He moved to it carefully.
The ledge was wide enough for single-file movement with reasonable margin and he used the wall surface as a reference point, Pressure Sense mapping the exterior's immediate geometry and Air Sense reading the currents coming through the arch from inside the tower. The air from inside was warmer than the subspace air, the deliberate temperature maintenance he had read from above producing an outflow through the arch that the Null Field's passive absorption began converting to Void Pool charge as he got within 50 metres.
He stopped at the arch entrance and looked inside.
The first floor was large. The ceiling height he could not determine at distance. The walls produced their own low light, the bioluminescent quality he would come to recognise across the tower's floors but was encountering for the first time, a light that came from the material itself rather than any fixed source, consistent and directionless. In the centre of the floor, the creature the Record would assign a classification to that he had no current frame for.
It was not moving.
He stood at the arch for forty seconds watching it not move and mapping everything the combined skill suite could read. Thermal Mapping through the Null Field's interference gave him a partial profile. Air Sense gave him the pressure displacement of something that was breathing, the rhythmic air movement confirming biological function. Pressure Sense gave him mass, significant, more than the outer ring creatures but less than the Ashen Regent.
The creature was not moving because it was asleep.
He looked at her. She was already past the arch, three steps into the floor, moving toward the left wall in a path that kept the maximum possible distance between her and the creature's position while also angling toward the far end of the floor where Thermal Mapping showed a heat differential that suggested a transition point, stairs or an equivalent, going upward.
He followed her in.
The floor took eleven minutes to cross. He moved along the left wall at a pace calibrated to produce minimum pressure displacement, Air Sense monitoring the creature's breathing rhythm, the pauses between breaths giving him the windows where movement was safest, the shorter exhalation phases giving him the windows where the ambient air pressure in the floor was lowest and his own movement through it least likely to produce a detectable disturbance.
The creature woke on the eighth minute.
Not because of him. The warp point above apparently produced a periodic pressure change in the space below, the physics of the transit mechanism affecting the subspace atmosphere on a cycle he had not known to account for, and the pressure shift landed in the middle of the floor's crossing like a signal he had not sent.
The creature's breathing pattern changed immediately.
He stopped moving. She stopped moving. They were sixty metres from the far end of the floor and forty metres from the sleeping position, which was no longer a sleeping position, the creature shifting its weight in the preparatory way of something that had registered an environmental change and was deciding what to do about it.
He looked at Air Sense.
The creature's breathing had changed from the slow rhythmic pattern of sleep to something faster and shallower, the air displacement of something that was alert and processing. It had not committed to a direction yet. The shift was recent enough that it was still orienting.
He had forty metres of open floor between his current position and the creature's position and no cover except the left wall which was not cover in any meaningful sense because anything at the creature's apparent sensory capability would not be fooled by lateral distance from a flat surface.
He looked at her.
She was looking at him.
He had two options and approximately four seconds before the creature finished orienting. Move forward and hope the remaining sixty metres could be covered before it located them, or use the arch behind them and exit back to the ledge and reconsider.
She made the directional alert sound, the one from the Waystone tree, directed forward.
He moved forward.
Not at the evasion pace he had been using. At a pace calibrated to speed rather than silence, the Galeforce Surge's 30% Wind skill movement enhancement active from the first step, Slipstream adding 18% on top of that, the combined speed enhancement producing a crossing pace that covered forty of the remaining sixty metres before the creature completed its orientation and turned.
He saw it turn through Thermal Mapping.
It was fast. Faster than the Regent had been, faster than anything in the sixth zone, the speed of something that had been built for the speed of this environment where everything he relied on for detection operated at partial capacity. It covered twelve metres in the time it took him to cover eight and the gap between them was closing at a rate that the remaining twenty metres of floor was not going to be enough to absorb.
She teleported him.
Not both of them. Him specifically, his body relocating ten metres forward toward the far end of the floor while she remained in her position, the selectivity of her teleport demonstrating a precision he had not known it had, and the ten metres made the difference, his momentum carrying him through the transition point at the floor's far end, hands finding the first step of the stairs going up, body following before the creature's next stride landed.
He hit the stairs hard. His left knee took the edge of a step at a bad angle and his HP dropped 340 points from the impact, which was not the creature's doing and which he processed as embarrassing rather than alarming, and he was up the first eight steps before he had finished processing it.
She appeared beside him at step nine.
He did not stop moving until they were thirty steps up and the sound of the creature below had stopped reaching them through Air Sense's range. Then he pressed his back against the stairwell wall and checked his HP.
[HP: 28,060/28,400]
340 from hitting a step wrong. He looked at the number and thought about the creature's closing speed and what 340 HP would have looked like if the impact had been from the creature rather than the stairs.
He looked at her.
She was looking at the stairs below them, Air Sense confirming the creature had not followed, and then she looked at him with the amber eyes and made the low resonant sound.
He counted. That was the seventh instance.
"I know," he said.
He checked the Void Pool. The Null Field's passive absorption of the tower's ambient thermal output had charged it substantially during the eleven-minute floor crossing.
[Void Pool: 287/500]
He filed that as a resource that would accumulate whether he was doing anything useful or not and turned toward the stairs going up.