Page 65 of Orc’s Hex

I choose the disruption.

The blood threads go thinner. The construct’s outer limbs begin moving again—slow, testing the new limits.

“Ziva.”

Not alarmed. Warning.

“I know.”

I push harder into the center.

The crypt shakes—a full structural shudder, the foundation stone responding to the reversal work running through it. Dust falls from the ceiling in sheets. A crack splits the far wall, following a channel the reversal work opened, and the light from the lifted sigil inscription flares and dims and flares again.

A chunk of ceiling stone breaks free above me.

I feel it before I see it—the pressure change of something large about to fall—and I throw myself sideways without releasing the threads, dragging the construct’s bind at an angle it wasn’t braced for as the stone impacts where I was standing a half-second earlier. It shatters against the floor. Fragments catch my calf, my shoulder, small cuts that register as distant information rather than pain because pain is a luxury I don’t have room for right now.

I don’t lose the threads.

I reset my footing against the new debris and push back into the working, and the construct—which had gained a half-second of slack while I moved—strains against the bind with renewed force, sensing the opening. I close it. Barely.

Stay standing. Stay working. The ceiling can fall again and you still don’t stop.

The construct’s ribcage collapses inward.

The center breaks open—not destroying it, not finishing it, but cracking the densest compression and releasing the pressure. The form destabilizes: limbs losing coherence, proportions shifting, the not-face tilting at an angle no face should tilt. It screams again and the crypt shakes.

I am doing significant damage.

I am not finishing it.

The reversal work runs out of pathway.

I can crack the density, disrupt the compression, make the construct weaker and more erratic—but I cannot dissolve it. What I have been doing is damage, not ending.

It ends through his blood.

Not mine.

His.

I look across the crypt at Drazhul.

He is pulling the chain taut. The bracket is old and he is pulling with both hands and everything his arms have left—I can see the muscles in his forearms, the scar tissue across his wrists where the stone is cutting through, and his face is doing nothing except what it does when the deciding is over and what remains is execution.

He knows.

He’s known since before I said it.

“Get free.”

“Working on it.” Through the chain and the crypt and the construct’s screaming—absolutely level.

Of course it is.

The construct breaks free of the threads.

The blood threads have been going thinner for two minutes—the trade I made, disruption over binding—and the construct has learned the new limits and now it drives sideways with a force that has no business coming from something built the way it’s built, and the threads snap and it is loose.