They went in at first light with filters up and the antidote shelf split across four packs. The plan from his sickbed ran ahead of them, fire and frost assigned to plumbing, steel assigned to everything else.
"Known risks," Nox said at the junction, breath still shorter than yesterday, "the colony is mobilized, the gold is three corridors deep, and every vein it feeds gets faster."
"We cut plumbing, we collect idiots, we leave," he said, "and nobody duels anything."
The science wing had changed overnight the way ledgers changed after windfalls. New fur choked the entry corridors, veils moving in agitated weather, every feeder vein swollen with fresh gold-fed traffic.
Ava's fire took the first approach vein at the marked junction, burning plumbing instead of veils. The colony shuddered along the whole corridor, and the veils thinned as the supply line died.
Vasa took the second vein with frost driven deep into its pulse. Between the two of them the entry block went hungry in minutes, and hungry fur pulled back from the route like a tide deciding against the beach.
"It works," Ava said behind her mask, "and I hate that it needed proving on him."
The six gym fighters had made it two corridors in before the wing closed its arithmetic around them. They held a classroom doorway in a knot, spears out, powers dimmed to almost nothing after a night of being sipped.
Two of the six could barely lift their spear points off the tiles. The wing had drunk them politely, the way it drank everything, and the politeness was the horror of it.
One of them kept apologizing to nobody in particular for being empty. Filters went onto all six faces first, and antidote doses followed by weight, protocol running the room before sentiment could volunteer.
Diana held the corridor beyond them alone, and the corridor was the only clean ground in sight. Furniture hung in the air around her in slow orbit, desks, cabinets, a door, all of it moving in patterns that gave the veils nothing to land on.
She stood at the center of the moving furniture like a clock spring. Nothing inside the orbit wobbled even while she was speaking to them. Whatever the gym had seen in her before, this was the version underneath.
"He's past the storeroom line," she said, wasting no words on relief, "and the patron kept pushing him forward. Then it offered me a contract when the corridor started closing."
"Offered you what," Vasa asked, freezing the vein overhead.
"Conduit terms," Diana said, the words coming out with acid rims, "lend my body as fuel line, burn what I am to top up what he borrowed. The clause called me collateral in writing."
"You refused," Nox said, reading the orbit of furniture between her and everything.
"I counter-offered it nothing," she said, "so if you're selling extractions today, I'm buying for six plus two. Name your insult."
He named it, and it was an insult, priced to be remembered rather than to bankrupt. Every core the gym held as of this morning, one unnamed favor collectible on demand, and the extraction itself announced publicly, in those words, extraction.
The favor clause was the real tooth, and Diana saw it at once. An unnamed debt to Nox sat in a faction's books like a loaded weapon nobody was allowed to unload.
"The favor gets scope limits," she said, "nothing against the gym's survival, nothing that hands him to the patron. Write those in or no deal."
"Written," he said, because reasonable limits made contracts collectable, and collectable was the entire religion.
Two of the six fighters started to object on their champion's behalf. Diana turned her head a fraction, and the objection discovered it had always been a cough.
"Agreed," she said, before anyone could argue their pride into a grave, "he'd rather be alive and insulted. I checked."
The bloom chamber held Jax the way the fur held its feed stock, standing, wrapped to the waist. Gold guttered off him in threads, and the veins drank the threads as fast as they leaked.
He had cleared half the room before the colony's math beat his. Husks lay piled where the radiance had swung, and growth had already begun knitting over his knees.
"Stop glowing," Nox said from the threshold, though the reading of the room said the order was already impossible.
"It doesn't stop," Jax said, hoarse, "it's a state. The patron keeps it lit so the debt keeps counting."
"Then we cut the bill," Nox said, and the party went to work on the plumbing that kept it lit.
Frost sealed the four veins feeding the chamber while fire walked the fifth from its junction side. Kendra broke the growth at his knees with hammering patience, and Yeda's ruler opened the weave along its seams, freeing fabric instead of skin.
The colony fought the whole withdrawal the way any lender fought one. Custodians poured toward the dying veins, veils thickened to storm, and the party's diamond collapsed inward around its cargo one drilled step at a time.
His knife did its counting at the diamond's edge, throat seams and joint gaps, arithmetic without flourish. Kendra took a raking hit across the shoulders that her stone repriced into bruising, and Yeda cut them a door where the map said wall fur.
Jax walked in the middle of it all, carried by nothing, guarded by everyone. Being cargo in another faction's formation was its own kind of education, and his face said the course was landing.
Twice the six faltered when the storm pressed, and twice Diana's orbit widened to shelter the stumble. She was spending herself in careful denominations, exactly the opposite of how the patron had taught her champion to pay.
The border line arrived through the storm, then the junction light, then air that did not bill them for breathing it. The six went down coughing in a row, alive, drained, learning what their filters had been worth.
[ Enemies defeated: 9 Husk custodians (party). ]
[ EXP +600. (12,500 total.) ]
[ Level 16 reached. 5 assignable points available. ]
He spread the five across Strength, Agility, Endurance, Perception, and the Stamina line while the survivors steadied. The wing had paid for its own siege research, which was the correct direction for money to flow.
The gym's cores came across in a sack, every one of them, counted by Vasa twice. Thirty-one cores of assorted weight, the whole treasury of the school's second-strongest faction, moving one doorway to the left.
Jax stood through the whole counting with the guttered gold finally dark. When it ended he faced his six, faced Diana, faced the phones that had inevitably come up, and paid the last line of the price.
"The gym's champion was extracted," he said, "by Nox, at his price. Say it the way it happened."
The sentence cost more than the cores did, and everyone present knew it. Nox took the payment without decorating the moment, because collecting was the point, and mercy would have devalued the currency.
The story would cross the school by dinner, riding phone screens and ration lines. The champion extracted, the stray paid in full, the board's arithmetic confirmed in public a second time.
"Your corridor held," he said to Diana, which was as near to praise as inventory came.
Behind the words he filed her orbit beside Kendra's stone and Yeda's edge. That drawer held the things worth pricing later, and it had been filling all week.
"My corridor learned from your contracts," she said, "clean terms, no passengers. The patron hated it, which I'm choosing to find instructive."
Gold flared at Jax's wrists before the group had cleared the junction, bright, then brighter, demanding attention like a struck bell. He stood very still while script none of them could see unrolled across his sight.
"It says the debt is invalid," Jax said, reading, his voice gone careful, "and a champion's rescue cannot be owed to an unregistered stray. The ledger between us gets settled a different way."
He looked up from the script, and under the exhaustion something older than the patron moved in his face. Shame, maybe, or the first honest sight of the hole he had been shoveling.
"It's ordering me to challenge you," he said, "formally, publicly, soon."
"Of course it is," Nox said, shouldering the sack of cores, "since your patron just watched me buy its champion at a discount, and patrons can't hold assets that owe rivals. Tell it the challenge is fine."
"Just like that," Diana said, wary.
"Just like that," he said, "because a public challenge has public stakes, and I want its collateral in writing. Let it draft the terms, and I'll read them the way Vasa reads everything."
Vasa smiled at that, thin and bright as her own frost lines. Somewhere above the school, in whatever counted as a counting house for gods, a patron had just been added to an audit schedule.