The cyclops lay sprawled across the chamber floor, one arm crushed beneath its weight, club wedged in shattered stone.
Smoke curled from the ruined eye socket.
The stench was immediate: burnt flesh, scorched minerals, and sharp ozone, and it wasn't fading.
Caelum's right hand throbbed where he'd grabbed the blade.
Glove fused to his palm in one blackened patch.
Each heartbeat made it worse.
He flexed his fingers; they worked, but the pain shot past his wrist, and he stopped.
Still alive. Barely.
The RMA node kept glowing behind the corpse.
Blue and steady, like nothing had happened.
"Status," Dawson said.
His voice was rougher than before, quieter.
Less command, more just checking.
Caelum noticed but didn't comment.
Blancard shoved himself upright against the wall. "Arm's not great."
"Helpful," Éloise said, already crouching beside him.
Blood dried along one side of her face, but her hands were steady as she worked his shoulder.
He hissed when she found the joint.
Kifah was still on her knees, one hand clamped over her nose.
Blood had soaked through her knuckle bandages and run down her chin.
Caelum crouched next to her.
"You with us?"
"Depends. Are we fighting anything in the next ten seconds?"
"Preferably not."
"Then yeah."
Éloise gave her verdict on Blancard.
Not broken, lost range and strength, can fight if he has to.
She moved to Kifah next, washed the blood off her face with water gathered in her palm, tore a strip from her own undersleeve and pressed it into Kifah's hand without ceremony.
Caelum turned to the node.
Up close, it looked bad.
The glow pulsed erratically along the pillar, stuttering and surging.
Cables ripped free, one whole section of housing dented inward where the cyclops had dragged its club through.
"Node's unstable," Caelum said.
Dawson came up beside him. "Can we fix it?"
That caught him off guard.
Not do it, Ward. An actual question.
"The node itself is wrecked. But the data slate should still be inside the housing."
"That's what the research team was logging: rift composition, atmospheric samples, resonance density maps, and fauna classifications."
"Months of environmental data. The RMA wants the slate back more than the hardware."
Blancard shuffled over. "So we pull it and go?"
"Not that simple." Caelum pressed his good hand to the pillar.
The metal was way too cold, and beneath the shell, he could feel current running through it, a broken, stuttering rhythm like a machine with a gear knocked loose.
"Node's feeding resonance back into the housing instead of grounding it. If I just rip the slate out while the field's active, the surge fries every data sector on it. We came down here for nothing."
Dawson looked at Kifah.
She caught it immediately.
The sound she made was almost a laugh. "Right. Me again."
"Tight Blank around just the housing," Caelum said. "Dampen the bleed long enough for me to pull the slate clean."
"How long?"
"Thirty seconds."
She stared at him. "That means a minute, doesn't it?"
"Probably."
Blancard stepped to the node despite whatever his shoulder was doing to him.
Éloise circled to the far side, water coiling around her wrist.
"I'll cool the casing. Resonance feedback generates heat and warps storage. Two problems."
Dawson rested his sword on the stone.
Whatever had shifted behind his face during the cyclops fight hadn't settled yet.
"Fine. Say it once. We do it right."
"Kifah dampens the bleed. Éloise keeps it cool. Blancard braces the housing when it opens; it's going to kick. Dawson, if something comes through that tunnel while we're doing this, kill it."
Short nod. "Done."
Kifah went in first, jaw clenched, the muscle jumping in her cheek.
The Blank field unfolded tightly around the node's centre, and the blue pulses softened immediately.
Not gone, but manageable.
"There," she said through her teeth. "Move."
Caelum pushed current into the latch seam.
Gentle, just enough to coax the mechanism through its damaged cycle.
The metal resisted, fought him for a few seconds, then clicked.
Light split down the housing, and the whole node lurched.
Heat surged up the casing, Caelum yanked his hand back, and Éloise was already pouring water over the metal, steam hissing everywhere.
Blancard caught the panel as it kicked outward, good arm locked, bad arm hanging uselessly.
Caelum reached inside.
The data slate sat in its mounting cradle.
Thicker than a standard datapad, reinforced shell, RMA markings along the edge.
Status lights blinking amber and erratic as the slate's systems fought the resonance flooding through the node.
All that environmental data the research team spent months collecting, sitting in a broken machine in a cave with a dead cyclops behind them.
"Hurry," Kifah said. Nose bleeding again.
He grabbed the release catches. Fused.
Of course.
"Dawson. Heat on these catches. Precise, if you overshoot, you cook the slate, and we did all of this for nothing."
Dawson was beside him before the sentence finished.
Two fingers on the bracket, a thin razor of violet plasma into the fused metal.
Controlled.
The most precise work Caelum had seen from him.
Metal glowed red. Caelum squeezed.
The catches gave, and the slate came free in his hands, warm but intact.
Status lights flickered from amber to green one by one as it stabilised outside the feedback loop.
A pulse of blue resonance kicked through the chamber.
Kifah cried out, the field collapsed, and the node went dead.
Every light on it is gone at once.
Silence. Breathing. Dripping water somewhere.
Then his ARC flashed.
LOCAL FIELD COLLAPSE — MULTIPLE MOVING CONTACTS DETECTED
Éloise snapped her head toward the tunnel. "Movement. Multiple. Coming fast."
"How many?" Blancard said.
The ARC wasn't giving a number. Just a mess of overlapping returns.
"A lot."
Scraping started in the dark beyond the tunnel mouth.
Several sets of something fast and eager, climbing over each other.
Drawn by the bleed or the fight or the corpse.
Didn't matter.
Dawson brought his sword up. "Then we leave."
Caelum sealed the slate into the extraction case on his harness, status lights visible through the clear panel.
All green. Data intact.
The latch clicked and the weight settled against his spine.
They had the objective.
Now they just needed to not die.
The first creatures hit the tunnel mouth.
Much smaller than the cyclops, lean pale things with too many joints, pouring through in a rush of claws and blind hunger.
Dawson cut the first apart before it cleared the opening.
"Move!"
What they fell into wasn't exactly a formation, but it was better than an hour ago.
Blancard took point, Éloise worked centre-left with short hard bursts of water, Kifah stayed near Caelum, and the case with her Blank flickering in tight pulses.
Dawson covered the rear, not chasing kills, just cutting whatever tried to close around them.
And Caelum was calling it. Spear in one hand, slate on his back, shouting threats before he'd consciously decided to.
"Left!" Éloise's water cracked across.
"Rear high!" Dawson turned and cut.
"Kifah, now!" Her pulse dropped a scavenger mid-leap.
They crashed into the first chamber and stopped dead.
The passage back was gone.
The ceiling had come down during the fight, tonnes of rock filling the tunnel mouth.
The way home was sealed.
Blancard stared at it. "You have got to be kidding."
Behind them, the scraping was getting louder.
Dawson looked at the collapse for one second, then at the only other route out.
A narrow maintenance passage, half-hidden behind dead equipment.
The other branch from the fork.
The one he'd wanted to take the first time.
"We go that way," he said.
Caelum looked at it.
Tighter, sloping down, no signal marker, no map data.
Just dark rock and bad options.
He could feel the slate's weight on his back and the thought of losing it down here after everything tightened something in his chest.
He adjusted his grip on the spear and looked at Dawson.
Dawson looked back. Held it half a second longer than necessary.
Caelum nodded.
Behind them, the scavengers spilt into the chamber.
Unit 7 turned and went into the dark.