From Moving Crates to Killing Gods-Chapter 113: Small Chasm

The walk to the third outpost was quiet in the way that walks are quiet when everyone has things they want to say but are waiting for the right moment. The right moment arrived when Kira fell into step beside me and dropped her voice low enough that the sound would not carry to where Jim and Coll were walking ahead. "Can I ask you something?" She said, her tone careful.

"Sure, what happened?." I said, glancing at her.

"When we were finishing the corridor and reached the closest point to the fight you had." She paused, like she was choosing her words. "The smell, Allaran."

"Ah." I said, exhaling lightly.

"We thought they were exaggerating." She glanced at Finn on my other side, who nodded with the expression of someone confirming a traumatic experience. "We genuinely thought Coll and Jim were being dramatic when they described it. But the actual location..."

"There were a lot of serpents." I said, as if that was the problem.

"Were you actually entirely covered in blood?" Finn asked quietly. "Like, all of you?"

"There was a moment where one of them passed overhead while it was cut in half." I said, recalling it with uncomfortable clarity. "So yes... briefly."

Kira stared at me.

"Some of it was red, some of it was darker." I added, aware that it was not helping.

Phinyx, who had been walking two steps behind us in his usual state of serene awareness, spoke without looking up. "I believe him." He said simply. "He still has some on his collar. He probably could not reach that section when he washed."

Kira and Finn both looked at my collar simultaneously.

"I thought those were food stains." Coco said from behind Phinyx, cheerfully and without embarrassment. "Like from paste, or meat."

"I also thought it came from food." Finn admitted.

"It was not food." I said, flatly. "I wouldn’t like to know what those snakes taste like."

"Wip." Said Wip, from the top of my head, with the tone of someone who had known all along and chose not to mention it.

We reached the third outpost without incident and did not stay long. The structure was intact, the silver Finn had laid on our first pass still holding. We checked the route ahead on the map, and kept moving.

The next section was different terrain. The flat wasteland gave way to a series of low canyon cuts, places where the ground had dropped away over what might have been centuries, leaving gaps in the rock that ranged from inconvenient to impassable on foot.

Finn was aware of this, and he mentioned it wouldn’t be a problem to cross these sections with a silver bridge, with the tentative optimism of someone who had never built a bridge.

Neither had any of us.

The canyon section was maybe two hours further. We set camp in a natural alcove near the first chasm, where the rock walls provided some cover and the ground was flat enough to work from.

As we unpacked, my mind kept drifting ahead.

The sixth outpost was the lab. The power plant. The voidstone reactor that Damian had not known about until I told him. And somewhere inside it, if the layout held, the reserves that powered the thing. My cube had gone dark during the serpent fight, its battery depleted after everything I had asked of it.

Voidstone powered cubes with a similar function, so there was reasonable logic in thinking voidstone could charge my cube too.

Also, the abandoned city between the sixth outpost and the exile point had a ward inside the mall, the glowing green hue that the bloops had been sheltering in. If the city had more of them, and if getting the sixth outpost’s power plant running again could activate them remotely, the final stretch of corridor might not need to be built at all.

It was a theory. But it was a good one.

I was still thinking about it when Finn stood up from his crouch near the chasm edge and turned around. "This one is actually not that wide." He said, sounding faintly relieved. "The silver I need is close too. There are some ruins to the left, I can feel the silver at a short distance."

I looked left. Nothing visible, but I had Sense.

I knelt, extended my awareness outward, and found the small ruins almost immediately, a cluster of dense material sitting a couple of minutes away. One wall in particular had a good concentration.

Wip made a sound from my head.

"Wip. Wip wip."

She wanted the rock I had just picked up.

I redirected my attention inward for half a second. Not the time.

She went quiet with the dignified patience of someone putting a request on hold.

I held the rock up, found the wall section clearly in Sense, and created the mental box around its edges.

Switch.

A section of silver wall arrived beside me with a familiar displacement crack. Dust settled around it. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Finn looked at it. Then at me. Then nodded. "That is enough." He said, with quiet satisfaction. "More than enough for this one."

"If I had that ability." Coll said, from where he was leaning against the far canyon wall. "I would eat so much better. Just pull a whole cooked meal from somewhere."

"You need to have something to switch it with." I said, lifting the rock slightly as an example.

"I would carry a rock everywhere." He said immediately, without hesitation.

"I would just have juice all the time." Coco said. "Every flavor. I would switch in the good kind, not the kind I can make."

"You make very good juice." Finn said earnestly.

"Thank you Finn." Coco said. "But I cannot make the expensive stuff yet."

Finn started working the silver, shaping it with the focused efficiency he had developed across all the outpost builds and the corridor. The chasm was narrow enough that his initial assessment was right. No structural foundation needed from Kira and her vines, no complex engineering. He shaped the silver into a flat span, smoothed the edges where it would meet the canyon rock on each side, and stepped back.

It looked like a sheet of metal placed across a gap.

Everyone looked at it.

"It is a bridge." Finn said, with firm confidence.

"It looks like a floor." Kira said.

"Floors are flat. Bridges are also flat." Finn said. "The principle is similar."

"Will it hold weight?" Jim asked from his hovering position above the chasm, which I noted was not on the bridge.

"Yes." Finn said, without a trace of doubt.

No one moved.

Finn looked around at the group. Then at the bridge. Then back at the group with the expression of someone who had just realized that confidence without evidence was not going to be sufficient here.

"I built it." He said, a touch more insistently. "I know about this stuff."

"Then you should be the first to test it." Coll said pleasantly.

Finn straightened up, visibly insulted, in the particular way people get insulted when their competence is questioned. He turned toward the bridge with the energy of someone proving a point.

He stepped on it.

The silver held perfectly for the first two steps, solid and stable, not even a flex.

Then his weight shifted toward the center.

The span bent.

Finn’s foot slipped as the surface dipped under him, balance gone before he could correct it.

The bridge gave further, folding into a slope.

He slid.

There was nothing to grab.

And then there was no bridge under him.