'Gray Planet.'
Ash read the words again, then looked up: at the fog, at the ruins, at the hundreds of faceless stone figures standing in every direction, at the bones half-buried in the ground, at the enormous looming shape in the distance he still couldn't make sense of.
He looked back down.
'Gray Planet.'
A different planet. Ash stood on a completely different planet. He had questions. Many, serious, urgent questions. And Paul was already walking away, gesturing toward Ash's pickaxe and then at the ground beside him. Ash watched him go, then looked at the ground. Black-veined patches threaded through the earth in irregular clusters. Still, Ash didn't understand what this mining for.
He shook his head, lifting his pickaxe.
'Don't.'
He drove it into the ground.
'You have one goal. That's it. Don't go following every strange thing you see. This planet is full of them and none of them are your concern.'
He moved to the next patch.
'Stick to the plan.'
***
More than an hour passed. Ash stopped counting sections and kept moving, finding the black stone, breaking it, moving on. He was sweating through his work shirt when someone appeared at his side.
It was Eren. Unlike Ash, Eren carried no pickaxe. instead, he pushed a stone wheelbarrow ahead of him.
He drew close and gave Ash two thumbs up, with the earnest energy of someone who had decided they were sharing a genuinely fine moment and wanted Ash to appreciate it.
Ash looked at him.
Eren crouched and began gathering the broken fragments, loading them into the barrow with cheerful, unhurried efficiency.
Ash watched Eren's hands, then his own pickaxe, then the clear and obvious division of labor arranged before him. And found it deeply, personally offensive. Why Eren got to merely collect while he was expected to break was a question of labor ethics Ash chose not to pursue.
Eren stood, gave Ash another thumbs up, then produced a stick from somewhere in his clothing and crouched toward the ground with it.
Ash let this go and turned to find the next section.
A solid patch of black-veined earth at a reasonable remove from Eren. A stone horror stood beside it, motionless, drawing its slow cavern-breath. Ash gave it a wide berth, positioned himself, and raised his pickaxe.
He had not brought it down when he caught movement at the edge of his vision.
Ash lowered his pickaxe.
Across the field, a cluster of miners had stopped working and drawn into a tight knot around something. At the center: one man sitting in the dirt with a bloody leg, pointing furiously at another man standing over him, holding a pickaxe with a rather telling red smear along one of its points. The shape of what had occurred wasn't difficult to reconstruct.
Footsteps sounded behind him. He turned to see Paul arriving quickly, then stopping when a young man stepped directly into his path and pointed at the badge on his own chest. The number there: 86. The same as the two men at the center of the dispute.
The man held Paul's gaze with the precise posture of someone enforcing jurisdiction.
Paul studied him for a long, deliberate moment, then nodded once, stepped back, and placed both hands in his pockets. The expression of a man storing something for later.
The young man, evidently the team 86 leader, turned back to the argument. Without the capacity for speech, everything had to be communicated through pointing, gesture, and increasingly emphatic mime — at the wound, at the pickaxe, at the ground, at each other — back and forth, over and over, with agonizing slowness. The exchange stretched on, each side jabbing at the air before the other, arriving nowhere. Until the injured man's patience gave out entirely and he shoved the other man hard on the chest.
The sound landed in the gray air like a stone in still water.
Everything ceased.
Pickaxes stopped. Drilling stopped. Every miner went rigid. The fog seemed to thicken as silence pressed down from every direction.
And then, worst of all, even the breathing of the gray planet stopped.
The slow, grinding cavern-breath of the stone horrors simply ceased. All of them, simultaneously.
No one moved. No one looked at anything except the nearest stone figure.
Then a small, clean cracking sound, sounded very close to Ash.
The stone horror beside Ash had moved. Its smooth, featureless face, which had always been turned toward nothing in particular, now directed precisely at him.
They considered each other.
Ash took one step back.
As he did, the stone horror came apart into motion, not quickly and gradually, but simply and suddenly: its hand already raised, already resolving into a single tapered blade angled directly toward his face.
To Ash, who was Tier 5 and had spent years refining every reaction until they operated ahead of conscious thought, it moved slowly. Everything slowed. Other cracks spread outward: stone groaning, footsteps scattering, the field coming apart around him.
The blade closed the distance.
His eyes went wide.
'Oh.'
He nearly laughed. The mask stopped him. He held his ground and watched the blade approach with the strange, particular calm of a man who has just located the exit.
He could evade this. He could evade it and put the horror through the earth in the same motion without breaking his stride. Resolve the entire situation in roughly four seconds.
But this was perfect.
Ash had wanted one thing longer than he had wanted almost anything else, longer than his designs on Apex, longer than most of the ambitions he still carried. And that was to be finished. Death had never seemed especially interested in him, regardless of how many times the circumstances should have made it unavoidable.
And here it was. Coming directly at his face.
Ash closed his eyes. His hands trembled. Even wanting something didn't make it less terrifying. He made a fist. Held it.
'Well. Fate. It seems you have finally—'
Something struck him from the side with considerable force.
Ash hit the ground. The blade passed through the space his head had occupied. He lay still for a half second, then turned.
Eren stood between him and the stone horror.
His shoulder bled. A red line descending his arm, darkening his sleeve where the blade had caught him on the way through when he'd knocked Ash clear. His other hand closed his wounded arm, face drawn tight with pain. He turned back at Ash with an expression that, even through it, managed to convey something annoyingly close to: you all right?
The stone horror's head rotated. Not in the manner a head rotates. further than that, past every reasonable limit, until its smooth pale face had turned toward something behind its own body. Then its torso pivoted to follow.
Then, with a sound like a geological event, the front of it divided vertically, from the crown of its head down through its chest, and the fracture opened sideways in a direction that had no business existing in three dimensions. The sound it produced was not precisely a roar, but it moved through the chest the way a roar does.
It lunged.
Eren threw his arm forward.
Wind arrived in a single decisive burst, lifting the stone horror off the ground and driving it backward through the air. It rolled, tumbled, and vanished into the gray fog before coming to rest some thirty feet away. It clawed upright, released a resonant groan across the entire field, and hurled itself toward the nearest miner instead.
Ash sat in the dirt and looked at Eren.
Eren looked back, bleeding, visibly pained. His expression nonetheless engaged in an unmistakable attempt at a grin.
Ash closed his eyes.
'I despise people like him. I genuinely, thoroughly despise people like him.'
He stood.
The field had become a catastrophe. Miners were down. Others ran. Stone horrors moved through the fog in every direction, their sounds converging until they ceased to be individual noises and became something more like weather. A man thirty feet away took a blade through the shoulder and went down. Another swung his pickaxe two-handed at a horror that declined to acknowledge him. Two more simply ran, and the horror behind them didn't trouble itself to hurry.
Ash looked at his pickaxe, still lying in the gray dirt.
He crouched and picked it up.
'Obviously fate was going to intervene. It always intervenes. Every single time without exception. Why did I even trouble myself.'
He watched another man fall, and his expression tightened.
'Why do any of them get to die while I am made to continue. The fundamental injustice of this is remarkable.'
With that, Ash moved forward into the chaos, leaving Eren behind him.