The room got loud.
Fifty people was manageable. Sixty was crowded. By eighty the walls were full, the floor was claimed in patches, conversations overlapped from every direction. The portal kept opening — groups of three, five, seven, stumbling through into a room that had no space left to stumble into. Species Jake had never seen. The Vincu in the air thickened with every arrival — Jake could feel it on his skin, a pressure that hadn't been there when it was just ten of them.
Jake sat with his back against the wall, Kitch on his left, Vauren on his right. Watching.
"Eighty-six," Kitch said.
"You're counting?"
"I've been counting since twenty."
"You don't have to count. We'll know when it's a hundred."
"Counting is how I know things." One eye tracked a new group coming through the portal — two tall figures, one short, all three covered in what looked like chitin. "Eighty-nine."
Roden found Jake on what Jake's body said was the third day.
He sat down next to him with the heaviness of a man who had been standing for other people and needed to stop. He had a piece of dried meat from somewhere — his own pack, probably, the supplies he'd brought through two links — and he tore it in half and offered one piece to Jake without asking if he wanted it.
Jake took it. "Thanks."
"I have too much. I packed for a group of eight and we've been eating from each other's supplies." He chewed. "Where I'm from, you carry for the group. Always more than you need."
"Where are you from?"
Roden's eyes went to the ceiling. The flat grey light, the absence of anything. "A mining world. Underground, mostly. Tunnels, forges. You learn to carry because the person behind you might not have enough."
"Mining world," Jake said. "Is that where the markings come from?"
Roden studied his forearms. The geometric patterns — angular, precise, dark against his skin. "Forge marks. You get them when you finish your apprenticeship. The metal remembers the shape of what you made." He ran his thumb along one of the lines. "My first was a set of hinges. Nothing important. But the marks stay."
"That's your phenomenon? Metal?"
"Metal. Nexus." He held his hand out, palm up. The dried meat in Jake's hand trembled. The small buckle on Jake's pack — he still carried it, out of habit — shifted sideways by a centimeter. Roden closed his hand. Everything settled. "I don't create it. I talk to what's already there."
"Talk to it."
"Convince it. Suggest. Metal has memory — it remembers every shape it's been. I remind it." He picked up the remaining piece of dried meat. "Not very impressive at this stage. I can pull a blade off-line, bend a buckle. Small things."
"That sounds useful."
"In a mine, yes." His eyes moved across the room. Eighty-nine people. The noise. The bodies. The flat grey light on all of it. "In here I don't know what's useful."
The tired eyes, the heavy build, the markings that meant he'd finished something on his world. The way he'd torn the meat in half without thinking about it.
"Why'd you enter?" Jake asked.
Roden chewed for a while. "My brother went in three years before me. Same opening, different year."
"Is he still climbing?"
Roden's expression shifted. "You don't know how this works yet."
"How what works?"
"The Chain. People go in. They don't come back. That's the usual." He tore off another piece of meat. "A few years ago a traveler turned up on our world. She'd gotten as far as link twenty before she settled, then eventually made her way back out. She mentioned a man from a mining world with forge marks, working security for a trade guild somewhere around link nine or ten." He swallowed. "Could be anyone. Plenty of mining worlds. But the description matched."
"So he's alive."
"He was alive when she saw him. That was years ago by the time it reached me." His gaze went to the dark portal. "I'm going forward until I find him or find out what happened. Every link is one link closer."
The dark portal on the far wall. Link four. One link closer for Roden. One link closer for all of them.
"We'll get there," Jake said.
The tiredness in Roden's face parted for a moment. "You say that like you mean it."
"I do mean it."
Pol was harder to reach, even sitting three meters from Roden.
He was part of the eight — had been since link one — but he kept to the edge of the group. When Jake sat down next to him, Pol's four arms rearranged themselves. Two folded across his chest. One rested on his knee. The fourth stayed flat on the stone, the fingers spread, the grey skin slightly darker at the knuckles.
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"You again," Pol said.
"Me again. What's your world like?"
"Cold."
"That's it? Cold?"
"It's the relevant detail." His lower-left hand tapped the stone. The fingers were thick, blunt, built for gripping. "Ice world. My people live in the warm spots between glaciers. We don't talk much because sound carries and things listen."
"Things?"
"Predators. Big ones. You learn to be quiet or you learn to be fast." All four arms shifted — the ones on his chest unfolding, the one on his knee lifting. "We learned to be hard instead."
"Hard how?"
The four arms settled. "You're asking what my power is."
"Yeah."
"In a room full of strangers who might be enemies tomorrow." He folded two arms across his chest again. The lower-right hand tapped the stone. "Corpus. That's all you're getting."
"Fair enough."
"It is." His eyes went to the center of the room, where the bunny was currently absent. "The rabbit is waiting for a hundred. We're at eighty-nine. When it hits a hundred, something happens. The rabbit hasn't said what."
"You think it's bad."
"I think nothing about this room is an accident." His lower-right hand tapped the stone again. A nervous habit, Jake realized. The only part of Pol that moved without purpose. "The healing. The waiting. The sealed portal. A hundred is a number someone chose."
The four arms, two folded, one tapping, one still. The grey skin. The blunt honesty of a person from a world where noise got you killed.
"What's your name back home?" Jake asked. "Pol short for something?"
"Polverath." He said it flat. "Don't use it."
"Pol it is."
The lower-right hand stopped tapping. Started again. "You're strange," Pol said.
"I've been told."
"You talk to everyone. You sit down without asking. Your feet are bare." His eyes dropped to Jake's feet. "On my world that means you're either very brave or you've lost everything."
"Little of both," Jake said.
Pol's four arms shifted again. His face did something Jake couldn't read. It might have been a smile. On a face built for a frozen world where expressions were a luxury, it was hard to tell.
Ninety-four. Ninety-seven. Ninety-nine.
The room was full. A hundred people, pressed against walls, sitting in clusters, standing where there was space. The air was thick. The noise was constant — a hundred conversations in a hundred different rhythms, accents from worlds Jake couldn't imagine. Someone near the portal had vines growing from their shoulders. Someone else kept cracking their knuckles and each crack echoed louder than it should.
Jake stood in the middle of it. Kitch beside him, Vauren behind him. The bunny had been absent for hours.
The hundredth person came through. A woman, tall, scaled skin, alone. She took in the room. The room barely noticed her.
The portal closed.
The bunny was in the center of the room.
Nobody saw it arrive. One moment the space was empty. The next the rabbit was sitting there, cross-legged, ears up, the dark eyes open. The conversations didn't stop — most people hadn't noticed yet.
The bunny spoke.
"One hundred," it said.
The voice wasn't loud. It carried the way it always carried — light, clear, filling the room without effort. But something in it was different. The conversations nearest the center stopped first. Then the next ring. Then the next. The silence spread outward like something spilling.
The bunny stood up.
Jake had never seen it stand. Sitting, it was small — compact, absurd, a meter of white fur and dark eyes. Standing, it was the same height but the proportions changed. The legs were longer than they'd looked. The ears rose to full extension, nearly doubling its silhouette. The robe fell around it in clean lines. The hands hung at its sides, the long fingers still.
The dark eyes moved across a hundred faces. Slow. Patient. The ears rotated — a small constant adjustment, tracking something in the silence.
"You are the first hundred through this opening," it said. "The fastest. The strongest. The ones who cleared two links while the rest were still on the first."
The room was still. A hundred people watching a rabbit.
"This is link three. My link. I decide who passes through." The ears stopped moving. "You will fight. Teams of three. Single elimination. Team against team, until two teams remain."
The silence held. Jake could hear people breathing.
"Fighters do not have to kill," the bunny said. "You fight until your opponent cannot continue. I will handle the rest."
The rest. Jake felt the words land in his chest. I will handle the rest. The rabbit that put his ribs back with one hand. That reassembled bones the way you'd straighten a picture on a wall.
"The losers die," someone said. A voice from the back of the room, flat, stating it.
The bunny's ears tilted toward the voice. "Yes."
The room broke. A hundred people, all at once — voices, movement, someone shouting. A woman near the wall grabbed her pack. A man stood up fast enough to knock someone beside him sideways. The noise swelled and crested and kept building.
"No."
A man pushed through the crowd toward the center. Big. Broad. Horned — two thick ridges curving back from his temples, dark skin underneath. He'd arrived somewhere in the seventies, Jake remembered. Loud on arrival, loud since. The type who took up space and expected it.
"No," he said again, louder. He stopped two meters from the bunny. He was three times its height. "You don't decide that. A hundred people walked through two links to get here. You don't get to kill ninety-four of us because of a game."
The bunny looked up at him. The ears were still. The dark eyes were steady.
"You're a rabbit," the man said. He turned to the crowd. Looking for support, for numbers, for the weight of a hundred people against one small thing. "There's a hundred of us. What are you going to do?"
The bunny didn't move.
The man stopped talking. His mouth was open, his hands were raised, and he stopped. Everything stopped — his voice, his breathing, his body. He stood there with his arms half-lifted and his eyes wide and nothing moving. The horns on his head caught the flat light. His chest didn't rise.
Then he fell. Straight down, no bending, no collapse — his body dropped like the strings had been cut. He hit the stone and didn't move.
The room went silent. A different silence than before. The kind that lives in the throat.
The bunny looked down at the man on the floor. The dark eyes were steady. The ears tilted forward. One hand extended — the long fingers, the pale tips — and touched the man's back.
He gasped. His whole body seized, every muscle firing at once, his back arching off the stone. Then he was breathing. Shaking. Alive. His hands pressed flat on the floor and he pushed himself up to his knees and stayed there, trembling, staring at the stone between his hands.
The bunny pulled its hand back.
"Teams of three," it said. "You have until I return."
It sat down. Closed its eyes. The ears folded.
The man on the floor didn't move. His breathing was ragged. His horns scraped the stone as his head hung between his arms.
A hundred people. Ninety-nine standing. One on his knees.
Jake stood in the silence. Kitch beside him, feathers flat, every talon pressed into the stone. Vauren behind him, still as he'd ever been.
"So," Jake said. His voice came out steady. He was surprised by that. "Teams of three."
Kitch's head rotated toward him. Both eyes. "You're not going to say something about how we should fight this? Refuse? Challenge it?"
"Did you see what it just did?"
"I saw exactly what it just did. That's why I'm asking."
The man on the floor, still on his knees, still trembling. The bunny, eyes closed, ears folded, sitting in the center of a room it owned completely.
"I'm going to win," Jake said. "We're going to win. And then I'm going to walk through that portal and keep going until I find someone who can do something about this."
Vauren spoke. "Teams of three." His voice carried the same precision it always did. As if a rabbit had not just stopped a man's heart and restarted it. "We are three."
"We are three," Kitch said.
Around them, a hundred people who had just learned what they were in began to move.