Metal on stone filled the mining area, but this was not the regular industry of excavation, but the sound of pickaxes striking stone abominations. Screams and roars tore through the gray fog from every quarter. The place had always been kept in austere silence. Now it was the loudest thing on the planet.
Ash drove his pickaxe into the skull of a stone horror. It convulsed. Stilled. Then its hand rose and buried itself into Ash shoulder. Ash released the pickaxe with a grunt, fingers suddenly useless from the shock.
The horror regarded him. Pickaxe still lodged in its skull. Entirely unmoved by it.
'I knew a pickaxe wasn't a great weapon. I knew that before I started.'
Ash shifted his weight back, gathering for a single clean blow. And as the thought was forming, a gust of wind arrived from nowhere and drove the horror sideways. It collapsed six feet away.
Ash turned.
And there, as before, was Eren... thumbs raised, shoulder still bleeding.
With his jaw set, Ash held the young man's gaze for a moment, then turned back as the horror launched itself at him again. He sidestepped, wrenched the pickaxe free mid-lunge, and brought it down into the creature's back with everything he had.
The stone back gave way, releasing a spray of something white and viscous that had no right existing inside anything shaped like a person. Especially something constituted entirely of stone.
The horror dropped.
Ash watched the body, waiting... waiting for the only confirmation that mattered. A voice resembling his own rose in his mind, flat and toneless:
[Vanquished]
[You killed a tier 3.0 Cell of Chaos]
Ash exhaled. Confirmation enough, knowing that these things could be killed was going to be a relief to him and would make things easier. He moved to the next one. Eren fell in behind him without being summoned, something Ash had thoughts about and no time to voice.
[Vanquished]
[Vanquished]
[Vanquished]
They worked through the field that way. Ash caving in chests, Eren covering blind sides... until a shout cut through the chaos from the left.
"Everyone! Portal! Now! Move! Move!"
Ash turned toward the voice. It was the first human voice he'd heard since stepping through the portal, and something in its cadence was familiar even through the din. Ash looked over.
Far off, crouched near the portal, was Paul... one bare hand pressed flat against the gray ground, his face arranged in the focused expression that preceded something violent happening to the earth.
It did. The ground lurched and rose beneath Ash's feet.
He felt himself ascending — not falling, but lifted — as a column of stone thrust upward beneath his feet. Ash looked around. Across the entire field, pillars erupted everywhere, dozens of them, raising miners beyond the reach of the stone horrors below.
The gray landscape, for one strange moment, looked almost peaceful. Stone columns standing in the fog like remnants of something ancient.
Ash looked at the surrounding pillars. Some people weren't moving. Some stared at their own hands, breathing hard. A few were missing pieces of themselves.
On the pillar beside him, Eren looked down at the ground. Then his gaze came up and found Ash, and even through the blood saturating his sleeve, his expression belonged to someone genuinely grateful to find another person still alive.
Eren waved. Ash simply ignored him and looked down.
Below, the stone horrors were already climbing. Fast... faster than anything their weight and shape should permit. One was nearly at his feet when a concentrated gust knocked it from the pillar entirely. Eren blasted another from a neighboring pillar, then gestured toward Paul's position.
Through the fog, Paul and a cluster of miners held a tight perimeter around the portal. Paul drove one bare foot against the ground; a stone wall erupted in a ring around them, catching several horrors mid-climb and dragging them down as it rose.
Then a deep, sonorous roar came from the horizon.
Ash turned immediately. Far out in the gray, shapes moved through the fog. Many of them. Some of the expected scale. Some considerably larger, far taller than the humanoid horrors here. And between them, threaded through, something else. Something disfigured. Something wrong, moving differently from the rest.
'Are those people?'
His eyes widened as one came into clear view.
'Those are people running with them.'
Then his mind snagged on something else. The soul space had named them 'cells of chaos', not stone horrors. Everyone here used the second name. But cells of chaos...
'Why do I know that phrase?'
The roar came again, closer.
Ash set his jaw. The portal was right there. He could drop from the pillar, cross the perimeter, and be through in thirty seconds. He also understood, with the weary certainty of someone who had tested this particular theory too many times, that fate would not permit him to die in a fall among a crowd of stone horrors. Fate had a pattern. He had learned it, and he was tired of it.
'There is always another day.'
Having made his decision, Ash crouched on the pillar and jumped.
The drop was long enough that the entire siege spread itself out below him…
Paul's wall cracking in two places, miners swinging pickaxes at climbers, the sound of stone on stone unrelenting and overwhelming.
Ash landed between the horrors and the wall with an impact that sent fractures through the gray earth, both knees driving toward the ground before he straightened.
Then he worked. Horror after horror, driving the pick into chests. Hitting the chest worked, the skull didn't, confirmed twice now. They struck back. One caught him in the side. Another at his leg. He went to one knee, felt the ground beneath him, and saw the arm already descending to finish it... until a stone projectile struck the horror from the side and sent it sprawling.
"Hey. Still with me, kid?"
Ash looked up. Paul, a few feet away, his body marked with the same strikes as Ash's.
Ash nodded and got to his feet. Paul's arms were bloody, his jaw tight. He hadn't been standing behind walls the entire time.
Paul drove his foot against the ground. The earth shifted, drawing them both back toward the portal as a fresh wall erupted behind them. The horrors hammered it immediately.
Paul looked Ash over and shook his head.
"I know you're Tier Five. But that isn't reason to throw yourself off a pillar into the middle of..."
He gestured at the devastation.
"…all of that. Deliberately."
Ash pointed at his mouth.
"Oh... right, right."
Paul reached over and pulled the half-mask free.
The moment it came away, Ash said quickly:
"There are more coming from the far end. Many more. And some of them are large... larger than these. Much larger."
Paul's expression changed.
"How large."
As though in answer, the roar came again. louder, and closer. The wall shuddered.
Paul turned back and pressed his palm to the stone to reinforce it, then looked at Ash.
"I have a plan to get everyone out, but I can't leave this position. If my focus breaks, the whole thing collapses and everyone near it dies."
Ash looked at the wall. At Paul. At his pickaxe, slick with whatever passed for fluid in those things.
He stepped forward.
"I'll hold the outside. Buy you the time you need."
Paul looked at him.
"No. You're in no condition for it. Go through the portal, we need people through already—"
"No!"
The word came out harder than he had intended. Ash paused, then said more quietly:
"This started because of me. I'm not going through while people out there are dying for it."
'And besides... if there are larger ones coming, ones I haven't faced yet, then today might still prove interesting after all.' That part he kept to himself.
Paul studied him for a long moment.
"Because of you?"
He didn't follow. Then he exhaled through his nose.
"Alright. Fine. A few minutes... just a few minutes, that's all I need. Keep them off the wall."
"Understood."
"And kid—"
Paul caught his arm.
"Stop striking at the head. It doesn't work."
Ash said nothing. He turned and climbed over the wall.
The far side was worse than it had looked from within. He went straight to work, swinging, dodging, using the pickaxe's momentum rather than fighting it, every strike aimed at the chest. The horrors struck back and he absorbed it; each blow left its mark, but he kept moving.
Through the wall, the ground shook in deep, rhythmic pulses. Paul was doing something serious.
Then three horrors broke around his flank and drove toward the wall. From above, a concentrated burst of wind hammered all three flat.
Ash looked up. The stone pillars had been drawn in close around the perimeter, and above him, Eren crouched on one with one arm extended, expression locked in absolute concentration as he watched the ground below.
Their eyes met briefly, as Ash immediately turned back to the field.
The pillars moved, slowly. Wrenched through the gray earth toward the portal. Each arrived and descended. Miners climbed down and fed through in groups.
Behind them, The wall kept cracking. Ash kept moving. Eren kept clearing whatever slipped through. For a time, the whole arrangement held together in the fragile way that things hold together just before they cease to.
Then the last pillar arrived, the last miners went through, and someone above shouted:
"That's everyone! Go!"
Ash stopped. Stone horrors everywhere, the wall had fallen, the roar in the distance growing louder and nearer.
He turned and lifted Paul from the ground where he had collapsed. The old man was conscious but emptied out, all his soul essence spent.
They moved toward the portal.
Eren dropped from his pillar beside them, landing in a controlled descent.
"Ready?"
Ash looked at him. At the blood still running down his shoulder. At the wholly unreasonable expression on his face.
"Stop smiling."
Ash said, his tone dark.
Eren was caught off guard by that.
"But... I'm not smiling."
And with that, they stepped through the portal together.