Capítulo 13 La furia del trueno #3

He ran. The tunnel dropped into the deep section.

The resin on the walls here had a different quality.

Older, the decades of accumulation giving it a depth and density that the upper sections didn't have, and the wrongness frequency was at its maximum intensity at this depth, the root note at full presence, the saturation of a frequency at its source.

It did not hit him in the same pathways it hit Elara's trained perception. But at this intensity, at this depth, even divine perception registered it as significant. Not disorienting. Not disabling, just very old.

He felt the command source before he reached the third junction.

Not visually. Not as a physical contact.

As a presence that was something that had been accumulating power for seventy years and had sixty percent of what it needed.

And was in the process of actively using what it had to defend its position.

The relic's amplification signature was fully present now, not the low intensity preactivation.

A reading that Heimdall had reported at the surface.

Full activation. The relic running at the capacity it had been designed for, amplifying the command source's accumulated power and directing it toward something more.

He stopped. The third junction was blocked.

Not physically. The rock was open; the tunnel was clear.

The block was a frequency wall. The relic amplified output of the command source, directed not at him specifically but as a field.

A total saturation output that filled the tunnel volume with concentrated wrongness frequency at an intensity that as he assessed it, significantly more than he had been told to expect.

Not at sixty percent, this. He reassessed it. The intelligence had said sixty percent accumulation. The intelligence had been based on Heimdall's external readings through the shielding, which the shielding had been designed to compromise. But the actual accumulation level

The frequency wall pushed at him and he pushed back.

Not with Mjolnir the frequency wall wasn't a physical thing, it didn't respond to physical force.

He pushed back with the counter frequency of Aesir divine power.

The active expression of his own divine nature.

The thing that the hammer channeled but that existed independently of the hammer.

It cost him. The sustained output required to hold position against the frequency wall, the divine capacity expenditure of running counter frequency at this intensity. He could sustain it. He could sustain it for the duration required. But it was not free.

He pushed through the wall. The third junction.

The command source was at the far end of the deep section, and the preservation chambers were to the right of the junction, and between him and both of them were four more command class entities in a defensive configuration that was the most organized and effective he had encountered, and behind those four entities the root note was fully present at its maximum intensity, and somewhere in the chambers to the right.

He went right. The command source could wait.

He needed to see what was in the chambers.

He needed to know what state the preservation situation was in, whether the relic's full activation was affecting the preserved people, whether the acceleration of the charge cycle was doing something to the people warehoused in it.

The first of the four command class entities at the right junction engaged him before he reached the chamber entrance.

This one was different. Older, the age and density of a command class entity that had been at this location for the full operational period.

One that had been here for decades and that had developed into something that has had time to refine itself, to develop its capacity and its tactical intelligence over a time that command class entities in younger nests hadn't had.

It fought him. Not the disrupted, overwhelmed response of the entities in the upper sections.

It fought him with intelligence. Reading his approach, adapting, creating engagement conditions that required more of him than the preceding fights had required.

He was aware of this as a professional observation, aware that the entities in the deep section were the oldest and most developed, aware that the four here were the inner defensive ring, the most capable of what the command source had available.

He fought back with everything he had. Mjolnir in full expression.

Not the controlled, precise discharge of an operator managing an engagement.

The full arc of divine lightning. The Aesir fire ran at the intensity it ran at when he wasn't managing it for safety requirements of a confined environment.

With preserved human lives in adjacent chambers.

Some of the tunnel structure paid for this, the resin burning at the contact points.

The rock cracking at the frequency discharge boundaries.

He was aware of the structural risk and he managed it but the management constraint was at a lower priority than it had been in the upper sections.

The first of the inner rings went down. He moved through it.

The second engaged him from the left and he took it on the left side, which was the side that had taken a strike earlier in the upper section.

A command class talon impact that had connected with his left flank and that at full divine form expression was a surface injury rather than a significant one, but that at this depth and with the frequency wall's ongoing cost and the sustained intensity of the engagement was present in a way he was noting.

He noted it. He kept moving. The second went down.

The third had positioned itself at the chamber entrance, with the intelligence of something that understood what was behind it and had decided about its priority.

He hit it with the full available output, and it was durable.

More durable than the others. He hit it twice and moved it and hit it again and it was still engaged, and he hit it with Mjolnir at contact range.

The resonance destruction technique rather than the arc discharge, the technique for entities with exceptional durability.

And the fourth hit him from behind. The back strike connected at his right shoulder, and he went forward but not down.

He would not go down. He moved forward and into the chamber entrance at an angle that was not the intentional angle, and the entry was not the controlled breach he'd been executing in the upper sections.

He was inside the chamber. And the preservation structures were there the resin chambers.

The sealed pods of the Grimstalker preservation system, each one containing a person in the suspended state that the resin maintained.

Alive, metabolically reduced, the horror of it that he had been dealing with for decades on this Earth and that never became something you could look at without it being the thing it was.

Forty, he estimated. Forty people in this chamber.

And in the back corner, not in a preservation pod that was the detail, not sealed in a pod, not in the standard preserved state but on the chamber floor, against the resin covered rock wall, with the look of someone who has been placed rather than thrown, who has been handled with a deliberate care that was its own category of alarming. Elara!

He was across the chamber before the thought was completed.

The fourth command class entity behind him in the entry he reached back without turning and Mjolnir went to his hand, and he discharged at the entry behind him without looking, the instinct of someone who knows where things are, and the entity in the entry took the discharge and was ended.

He was at her side. She was alive. He could see her breathing the visible rise and fall, shallow but present.

Her right forearm was wrong, the angle of it, the indicator of a fracture.

Her right side was held in the way of compromised ribs.

Her left ankle was swollen at the boot line.

Her face had a cut at the temple from the rock impact she'd taken in the fall.

Alive. Breathing. Conscious. She was moving as he reached her, the return to awareness from the root note saturation that had been the mechanism of her incapacitation.

"Elara," he said.

Her eyes opened. They found him immediately. Not the confused, directionless searching of someone still in the impacted state. Instead the immediate, direct focus of someone whose consciousness had come back online and was already running the operational accounting.

"Thor," she said. Her voice was present. Rough, and present.

"Yes," he said.

"The command source," she said. "It accelerated. The charge cycle"

"I know," he said. "I'm going to get you out first."

"The people," she said, and her eyes went to the preservation pods, the forty people. "You have to."

"The extraction team is behind me," he said. "Erik's people. They're coming through the upper sections they’ll be at this chamber in" he checked the operational timing “six minutes."

"The command source," she said again. More clearly now she was coming all the way back.

"I need to address it," he said. "I know. First"

"First nothing," she said, and the edge in her voice was the full edge, completely herself, completely operational, which was the most relief he had experienced in the entirety of the engagement.

The full edge. The exact quality of her.

"Get me up and get to the command source. I'll manage the extraction."

"Your arm"

"It is fractured," she said. "I know. Get me up."