The world was a tilting, screaming carousel. The bone-reef rolled, and with it, the sky of scarlet mist and the ground of calcified plates swapped places in a dizzying lurch. The Wind-Shadow Niche, his promised shelter, swung from a wall to become a closing ceiling, its star-stapled iris grinding shut. Li Tian was falling, not down, but across, into the newly opened void between reef and sky.
His mind, a scalpel of focus, discarded panic. His body reacted. A rotating rib vane, now swinging horizontally like a scythe, swept toward him. He didn't fight it. He caught it, his grip burning as the momentum wrenched his shoulder. He used the swing, letting it carry him in a wide arc. A whistle vent on a passing spur emitted its invisible, slicing wire directly into his path. In that lethal instant, with no room to dodge, he opened a pinpoint micro-devour along his forearm.
The backlash was a swarm of hot needles burrowing deep into the muscle. His hand went numb, and the familiar iron taste of blood flooded his tongue. But the deflection worked, the wind-wire dissipating against the devouring energy in a spray of silent force. He spiral-bled immediately, the pain in his arm receding to a deep, electric thrum, even as the centrifugal force of the spinning vane threatened to fling him into the abyss. He released his grip at the apex of the swing, his body launching toward a stable-looking parietal plate.
He landed hard, the impact jarring his already-screaming leg. The gravity was skewed, pulling at a forty-five-degree angle toward what was once a distant rib wall. The colossus's cadence continued—OUTBLAST, wind-hold, IN-DRAW—but now the forces acted along this new, disorienting vector. The OUTBLAST tried to push him off his perch into the 'sky'; the IN-DRAW pulled him toward the 'ground' that was now a vertical cliff face. Match the beat, not the breath.
He recalibrated, his Vein Steps finding purchase on the tilted plates only during the treacherous lulls, his Star Lung breaths so constrained his vision sparkled with the effort. The cost was a vise around his ribs and a throbbing map of pain charting every past injury.
Ahead, the path to the Niche was barred by a singing wire-vent grid. The vents hummed, lashing out with invisible blades not on the outblast, but unpredictably during the wind-hold, creating a deadly, shifting maze. He studied the pattern, the slight change in pitch that preceded each strike. Using his remaining tendon strip, he secured a guy-line to a spur and baited a pleural drain. As it fired early, the rebound gust slung him forward, not in a straight line, but in a calculated arc that passed through the grid during the brief, silent moment between vent cycles. He slid under the final lashing wire, feeling the wind of its passage tear at his robes. No second devour. Only timing and terrain.
"Mind your angle."
The polite observation was a drop of ice down his spine. A talisman detonated high on the reef. The local cycle flipped; the steady wind-hold he was using for cover became a sudden, violent IN-DRAW. The force slammed him against the parietal plate, pressing the air from his lungs. He didn't fight it. He pushed with it, using the suction to scuttle crablike along the bone, adapting his cadence to the sabotage, his movements a study in controlled desperation.
He reached the lee of the colossal parietal bone, the wind suddenly dying into an eerie calm—the wind-shadow. The ring pulsed, a steady, guiding rhythm. Parietal anchor… wind shadow… He looked up. The Niche was there, reoriented by the roll, now a horizontal slit in the bone above him. He held up the star-map shard. The staples glowed, and the Niche irised open once more, a dark promise of shelter. It would stay open for two holds after the next OUTBLAST + one-beat delay.
He counted the beats in his head, his entire being focused on the rhythm. He mapped the final approach—a short, desperate leap from his current perch to a jutting bone ledge, and from there, a final lunge into the Niche. He calculated the angles, the skewed gravity, the cross-currents. The temptation to use Empty Cup for a burst of precision was a physical ache, but the risk of blacking out mid-leap in this chaotic gravity was absolute. He refused.
He committed. As the OUTBLAST finished, he pushed off, his body a projectile aimed at the ledge. His timing was perfect. His foot touched the jutting bone exactly on the one-beat delay.
"After you."
The polite farewell came as he was mid-lunge, his hands reaching for the dark opening of the Niche. A talisman popped.
The colossus shuddered. Not a full roll, but a slight counter-roll, a corrective tremor. The parietal plate shifted minutely. The Niche, instead of being a stable horizontal entry, tilted downward, its lower lip rising. The iris began to grind shut faster, the mechanism screeching.
Li Tian threw himself forward, his torso clearing the threshold. He twisted, trying to drag his legs in. He felt the bone shard in his belt—his last wedge. He slammed it into the closing seam beside his hip. It held for a single, grinding heartbeat.
Then it shattered.
The iris scissored shut with final, crushing force.
Agony exploded in his trailing leg as the star-metal teeth clamped down just above the ankle, pins-and-needles blooming into white-hot fire while the ring pulsed a steady, useless warning against his finger.