Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 105: Protect The Egg

Tank said, "How long until it hatches?"

The chamber received the question in its characteristic way—the bioluminescent pools shifting, the ceiling breathing, the cold in the walls doing the thing it had been doing since the Harvester withdrew where it sat at a temperature that wasn’t quite threatening and wasn’t quite not threatening, occupying the specific register of ’I am still here and I want you to know that I am still here’ with the patience of something that had been practicing this particular form of communication for decades.

"Unknown," Marcus said. "The process isn’t predictable. Hours. Possibly days. As I said it depends on certain conditions."

"What conditions?" Seris asked. Her voice had the quality it got when she was building a picture—precise, targeted, pulling information in the order that would let her construct something useful from it.

She had the expression of a healer who had accepted that the medical portion of the evening was largely concluded and was now operating in whatever category came after medicine when medicine had done everything it could and the problem had moved into a different domain entirely.

"Mana saturation. Environmental stability. Temperature." Marcus paused with the deliberate weight of someone selecting what to include and what to leave until asked. "Stress responses in the host organism can accelerate or delay the process. The egg is sensitive to the emotional state of its carrier."

Everyone looked at Zeph.

Zeph looked at the egg.

The egg pulsed at one hundred and eighty beats per minute with the blazing urgency of something that had strong feelings about its current situation and was expressing them continuously and had been expressing them continuously and was going to keep expressing them because the situation had not changed and the feelings had not diminished and one hundred and eighty beats per minute was apparently the frequency at which it had chosen to communicate the totality of its position on events.

"So it can feel that I’m terrified," Zeph said.

"Almost certainly."

"And that might slow the hatching."

"It’s a variable."

"So the solution," Zeph said, with the careful deliberateness of someone assembling a sentence they already knew the shape of and were going to finish anyway because finishing it felt necessary, "is for me to be calm. While standing in a room that contains two hundred and ninety-four bodies, a ceiling that breathes, pools that glow with what I have been informed is toxic bioluminescence, and walls that a twelve-foot crystalline predator can move through at will as though the basic physical principle that two objects cannot occupy the same space is merely a guideline it finds ideologically inconvenient."

He turned the egg over in his hands. "I’ll get right on that."

Nobody had a response to this that improved the situation, so nobody offered one.

Whisper had been examining the egg since Marcus began speaking, their attention moving between his words and the object in Zeph’s hands with the focused intensity of someone processing multiple information streams simultaneously. There was something in the way they looked at it that was different from the way the others looked at it—less object of desperate hope and more text to be read.

They stepped forward and held out their hand.

Zeph passed the egg with the care of someone handing over something simultaneously very important and very fragile, which was exactly what he was doing. The transfer felt significant in the way that moving important fragile things always felt significant—the brief window of shared custody, both people’s hands present, the moment between possession states where the object was at maximum vulnerability and everyone in the vicinity understood this and held themselves slightly differently without discussing it or deciding to.

Whisper turned it over. Studied the shell, the patterns, the rhythm of the internal light. Studied it with their whole attention—the kind of attention that Zeph had watched them give to wall inscriptions and carved warnings and the accumulated written record of everyone who had ever understood this facility well enough to leave something behind for whoever came after.

Their brow furrowed with the expression they got when the information they were receiving was being compared against a larger dataset and arriving at a conclusion that the dataset had something to say about.

They tilted the egg. Ran one finger along the pattern lines without quite touching the shell, tracing the shapes at a distance of a few millimeters, reading the geometry of it. Their eyes moved across the surface in the specific way they moved across text—not looking at the object but looking at what the object was saying, the distinction between the two being, for Whisper, apparently navigable.

The rest of the group watched this in silence. The chamber breathed. The pools glowed. Somewhere in the stone, deep and directional, the temperature shifted by a fraction of a degree and everyone felt the fraction and nobody mentioned it because mentioning it was not going to produce a useful outcome and not mentioning it cost nothing except the ongoing internal exercise of not mentioning it, which had its own cost but a manageable one.

Whisper passed the egg back. Wrote quickly—the pen moving with the urgency of someone whose hand was the only instrument available for the speed at which the information needed to travel. Held the notepad up with both hands so every living occupant of the chamber could read it simultaneously:

HATCHING SOON

MAYBE 2-3 HOURS

KEEP IT WARM

KEEP IT SAFE

The group looked at the words. Then at the egg. Then at the chamber around them—three hundred meters of open floor, bioluminescent pools, two hundred and ninety-three bodies, a ceiling that breathed, a central device that hummed with ancient purposeless power, and walls that a twelve-foot crystalline predator could phase through at will and had demonstrated this capability recently and thoroughly and with an audience.

Two to three hours.

The number occupied the space between them and was examined from every available angle. Two to three hours was not a long time by most available metrics. It was a long dinner, a moderate journey, a meeting that had extended past its scheduled end without producing proportionate value.

In the current context, two to three hours was an engineering problem—a structure that needed to be built in real time, in a room with compromised materials, while something with several years of undefeated operational history waited in the stone and considered its timing. The math of it was not comfortable math.

The math of it was the kind that required you to look at it directly and then make decisions anyway, which was a different skill from the math itself and harder to teach.

"Two to three hours," Aria Chen said. She said it the way people repeated numbers when the numbers needed to be heard out loud before they became real. Her voice was steady. It was the steadiness of someone who had exceeded their capacity for surprise and had come out the other side into something that was not calm exactly but functioned like calm in all the ways that mattered.

"Two to three hours," Zeph confirmed. Then, because the situation seemed to call for honesty about the full picture: "Give or take. Depending on Mana saturation. Environmental stability." A pause. "My emotional state, apparently."

"You’re doing very well," she said,

"You’re upright and functional and the egg is still intact."

"That’s a very low bar."

"It’s the bar we have."

Tank had been performing his own assessment throughout this exchange—the spatial analysis of someone who had spent a significant portion of their life turning bad rooms into defensible ones and had developed specific and non-negotiable opinions about which features mattered and which were optimistic decoration.

He looked at the chamber. The floor. The entrances. The walls, each of which had demonstrated its willingness to function as an entrance regardless of what walls were conventionally supposed to do.

He looked at the narrow passage leading away from the convergence chamber in the direction they hadn’t come from—a structural constriction, stone closing in on both sides, the geometry forcing anything that moved through it to commit to a single axis. One direction in. One direction out. Not good. Better.

"We cannot hold this chamber," he said. "Too open. Too many angles. Every wall is a potential entrance. The floor is a potential entrance. Standing here for two hours is not surviving—it’s waiting." He looked at the passage. "There. We get into that corridor, we reduce the angles. We set what we have across both approaches and we manage what we can manage."

He looked at each of them in turn. The weight of the look was distributed evenly and meant to be—not the look of a man assigning roles so much as a man confirming that the people he was looking at were still present and functional and operating on the same understanding of what the next two to three hours actually required.

"We use the construct cores we collected—set what traps we can. Delay tactics. When it appears, we don’t try to kill it. We already know that doesn’t work." A beat, short and final, that closed the door on that particular avenue completely. "We survive. We buy two hours. We protect the egg and we protect the carrier and we let the egg do what the walls say it does." He paused. "And then we hope whatever hatches is what the walls say it is."

The silence that followed was the silence of people receiving a plan and performing the calculation of whether they had anything better to offer. Everyone present conducted the search thoroughly and in good faith. Everyone present found the same thing at the end of it.

"That’s a shit plan," Kael said. Flat. Factual. The specific delivery of someone naming a true thing because the situation had moved past the point where managing how true things sounded was worth the energy it cost. One arm. Blade in hand. The bearing of someone who had updated their relationship with good options several hours ago and had arrived at a working arrangement with the alternatives.

"You have a better one?" Tank said.

Kael considered this with the expression of a man conducting a thorough internal search. The search was real and visible and produced nothing.

"No," he said.

"Then it’s the plan we have."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​