The undercity of Hollow's End wasn't built. It was cultivated.
The tunnel walls weren't stone but ossified sludge, ribbed like a throat that had swallowed the earth whole. The cyan symbols pulsed with each breath we took—our exhalations feeding their light, our heartbeats syncing to their rhythm. The Architect's code wasn't decorative. It was digestive.
My overlay mapped the symbols as they appeared: [NUTRIENT FEEDBACK LOOP: ACTIVE]. We were walking through an organism that ate information. Every calculation I made, every parallel future I mapped, was being harvested.
[WARNING: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY THEFT IN PROGRESS]
"Drek," I whispered. "Stop thinking."
The dwarf grunted. "How the hell—"
"Your brainwaves are a power source." I pointed to the walls. "These run on cognitive friction. The more we plan, the brighter they get."
Mira's hand went to her temple. "That's why my head feels full. It's not my thoughts. It's echoes."
[SANITY CHECK: ROLLING...]
[ROLL: 3 + 8 = 11]
[TARGET: 15]
[FAILURE: COGNITIVE OVERLOAD (MINOR)]
The debuff hit like a hangover. My INT 30 brain was a liability here. I needed to underthink.
"Follow me," I said. "Exactly. Don't anticipate. Don't react. Just step where I step."
I moved, not by calculation, but by rhythm. The symbols pulsed in a 3.4-second cycle. I stepped on the dark patches, the null-points between pulses. Drek and Mira mirrored me, their trust absolute.
The tunnel sloped downward, the angle gentle but consistent. A 2% grade, maintained for exactly 847 feet. [ENGINEERING ANALYSIS: DESIGNED FOR LIQUID FLOW] . We were in a vein, not a hallway. And veins led to organs.
The first organ was a chamber, spherical, its walls lined with pods. Not mechanical. Biological. Each pod was a translucent sac, large enough for a human, filled with sludge and a suspended figure.
[OBSERVATION: CULTIVATION TANKS x47]
[STATUS: 37 OCCUPIED, 10 VACANT]
[INHABITANTS: HUMAN (WORLDLOST)]
They were Worldlost. But wrong. Their Unique Skills had been extracted, the cyan light drained from their eyes, leaving empty sockets. The sludge in their tanks was spent essence, the byproduct of skill-farming.
[QUEST UPDATE: THE HANDLER]
[NEW OBJECTIVE: LIBERATE NODE #6 → RESCUE SURVIVORS]
"The Architect isn't building a network," I whispered. "He's mining it."
Drek's knuckles were white on his hatchets. "Can we save them?"
My overlay ran diagnostics on the nearest tank. [LIFE SIGNS: NEGATIVE] . The occupants weren't alive. They were zombies, kept animated by sludge infusion to preserve the skill matrices. The extraction process killed them weeks ago.
"No," I said. "They're dead. But their skills aren't."
The tanks were storage. The Architect harvested Unique Skills like crops, then stored them in phase-space for later implantation. The Handler was his reaper.
"Node #6," Mira breathed, pointing.
At the chamber's far end, a tank was different. Larger. Isolated. Its sludge was silver, not black. And the figure inside was whole. Not drained.
[ANALYSIS: NODE #6 - CALLUM'S PRISON]
[STATUS: EXTRACTION IN PROGRESS (73%)]
[LIFE SIGNS: PRESENT BUT PHASING]
Callum wasn't dead. He was being slowly erased, his Unique Skill siphoned off one echo at a time. His physical body was here. His consciousness was scattered across the Ravine's loops.
"Can we break the tank?" Drek asked.
"No," a new voice said. Triple-echoed. The Handler.
She phased into existence on top of a tank, mask glowing. Not porcelain now—a display, cycling through faces. Mine. Drek's. Mira's. All the Worldlost she'd harvested.
"You broke my garden." She gestured to the tanks. "These took years to cultivate. And you three walked in like pests."
"Callum's ours," I said flatly.
"Was ." She smiled, the mask showing my own face, contorted in pain. "His skill is nearly extracted. Once it's mine, I'll have infinite phase-space. You can't calculate around that."
She was wrong. I could calculate anything.
[ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN: TANK SUPPORT STRUCTURE]
[WEAKNESS: CENTRAL NUTRIENT SLUDGE PUMP]
[DAMAGE TO PUMP = TANK SHUTDOWN = CALLUM FREED]
The pump was at the chamber's heart, a throbbing mass of veins and metal. It had 1,200 HP. My sword was a joke.
But Drek's Unbreakable Digestion wasn't.
"Drek," I said. "The pump. Can you eat industrial sludge?"
He followed my gaze. Grinned. "Ate worse in the Deep Mines."
"Mira," I continued. "Cover him."
She nocked an arrow, her eyes hard. "And you?"
"I'll talk." I stepped forward. "The Architect's code has a bug."
The Handler's mask flickered. "Explain."
"The phase-space extraction." My overlay displayed the equations I'd reverse-engineered. "It's lossy. You're storing compressed skills, not raw matrices. Every extraction loses 12.7% of the data. Callum's skill is already corrupted."
A lie. The math was accurate, but the corruption was reversible. I was betting she didn't know that.
"Lie," she said, but her mask flickered to Callum's face, his expression worried.
She didn't know. My parallel analysis had found her blind spot.
"Test it," I said. "Extract the last 27%. See if the skill stabilizes. It won't."
She hesitated. 0.8 seconds. Enough.
"NOW!"
Drek charged, hatchets abandoned. He opened his maw and bit the nutrient pump. His Unique Skill wasn't just digestion—it was molecular disassembly . The pump screamed, sludge flooding his stomach. [HP: DREK -50/SEC] . But the pump's HP plummeted .
[TANK SHUTDOWN: 3... 2... 1...]
Callum's tank cracked. The silver sludge poured out, and his body collapsed onto the floor. His eyes snapped open— not cyan. Grey. Human.
The Handler's mask shattered, revealing a face I recognized: Mira's mother. The lost Warden.
"Mom?" Mira's bow dropped.
"No, child." The woman smiled, her voice still triple-echoed. "I'm what she became. The Architect's garden needs a tender."
She wasn't Mira's mother. She was an echo of her, harvested and repurposed. A zombie with admin rights.
Callum stood, shaky but aware. His hand phased through his own chest, pulling out a cyan thread. The last of the Handler's control.
"Node #6 is liberated, Architect," he said, his voice raw. "And I brought company."
The chamber's walls screamed. The Architect's code, seeing one of his nodes compromised, triggered purge protocol.
The tanks detonated. Not explosions. Implosions. Harvested skills, released all at once, a storm of cyan light.
The Handler's body unraveled into data streams, her final words a whisper: "Test 3 passed. But Test 4 is live fire."
We ran. Callum leading, his phase-walk blinking us through walls. Drek vomiting sludge. Mira crying silent tears.
The undercity was purging. Killing everything inside.
We emerged into Hollow's End proper, the city above, as the ground beneath us collapsed. A sinkhole swallowed the Architect's garden.
We stood in an alley, covered in ichor and crystal dust, as the earth roared.
[QUEST COMPLETE: THE HANDLER]
[CALLUM STATUS: RESCUED (BROKEN BUT FUNCTIONAL)]
[ARCHITECT STATUS: ALERTED] ⚠️
[NEXT QUEST: SURVIVE THE PURGE]
Callum looked at me, his grey eyes clear for the first time. "You're the one who calculated the ceiling collapse. At the grotto."
"Probability of survival: 0.03%," I said.
"You made it 100%," he corrected. "The Architect's scared of you."