The euphoria of Ryu's miraculous recovery was short-lived.
The air in their tomb was growing thinner, and the reality of their situation remained unchanged. They were trapped.
Kiera, still weakened from her injuries and the transfusion, could not hope to punch a hole through tons of reinforced concrete.
And Ryu, despite his newfound strength, was wary of unleashing another chaotic blast that could bring the rest of the tunnel down on their heads.
"Brute force is not the answer," Joric said, his voice raspy in the stale air. "Another shockwave like the last one, and this entire section will pancake."
Ryu closed his eyes, not in despair, but in concentration.
The world of energy was clearer to him now. He could feel the immense, dead weight of the rubble around them.
He could also feel the faint vibrations of the city above, the hum of power lines, the flow of water through pipes.
The world was a web of energies, and he was finally beginning to see the strands.
But it was not his new power that gave him the solution.
It was his old life. He was a dust-rat.
He had spent his entire life navigating the forgotten, crumbling infrastructure of the Outer Sector.
He knew how these tunnels were built.
He knew their flaws.
"The main service conduits," he said, his eyes snapping open.
"They run parallel to these transport tunnels. They're smaller, but they are reinforced with cylindrical permacrete. They are designed to withstand seismic shocks. If we can get to the conduit, we can get out."
Kiera and Joric looked at him, surprised.
He wasn't thinking like a warrior; he was thinking like an engineer.
Or a rat. He placed his hand on the wall of the maintenance hub.
"The conduit should be... here," he said, pointing to a spot on the curved wall. "About five meters of rock and fill between us and it."
"And how do you propose we dig through five meters of concrete, boy?" Joric scoffed.
"We don't," Ryu replied.
He closed his eyes again, focusing his senses. He could feel the dense, inert energy of the concrete wall.
He reached out with his ChainForce, not with a push, but with a delicate, probing touch. He was looking for cracks, for fissures, for points of weakness.
He found them, a network of micro-fractures invisible to the naked eye.
His plan was not to blast, but to 'vibrate.' He remembered the exercises with Kiera, the way he learned to absorb and redirect force.
Now, he would do the reverse. He would project a tiny, focused, and continuous stream of energy into the wall, a resonant frequency that would match the natural frequency of the concrete itself.
He placed both his hands on the wall.
A faint, blue light emanated from his palms. The wall began to hum, a low, deep sound.
The hum grew louder, the vibrations more intense. It was not a violent process.
It was a subtle, insistent persuasion. He was not breaking the rock; he was asking it to fall apart.
After a minute that felt like an hour, a crack appeared in the wall.
Then another. The concrete began to crumble, not into chunks, but into fine, loose gravel.
It poured onto the floor like sand from an hourglass. Kiera and Joric watched in stunned silence as Ryu, with nothing but his focused will, disintegrated a meter-thick concrete wall as if it were made of dust.
Soon, a hole was formed, leading into a dark, narrow space.
Ryu stopped, breathing heavily, but not in pain. He was tired, but not broken.
He had used his power with a control and precision that was born of both Kiera's training and a lifetime of understanding weakness.
He had used the strength of a god, but with the cunning of a rat.
"The service conduit," he said, a faint, triumphant smile on his face. "I believe this is our exit."