Running from four A-Rank bears taught Jacob things no Hunter manual had ever covered.
The first thing he learned was that Obsidian Bears didn't tire.
He'd been in the cavern for—he checked his status screen mid-sprint, nearly clipping a stone pillar—forty-three minutes. His legs had stopped burning twenty minutes ago, which he'd initially taken as a good sign before realizing it meant the nerves had stopped sending accurate pain signals. His body was rationing resources now. Prioritizing the systems that kept him alive and quietly deprioritizing everything else.
The bears looked exactly as fresh as when he'd started.
The second thing he learned was that Obsidian Bears were smart.
Not human-smart. But smart in the specific, practical way of predators that had been hunting things for a very long time. They'd stopped chasing him in a single pack around minute fifteen, when they'd apparently calculated that wasn't working.
Now two of them drove him from behind while the other two positioned ahead.
Herding.
Jacob had figured it out three seconds before they'd tried to execute it the first time. He'd cut hard left, vaulted a stalagmite cluster, and bought himself another eight minutes of running room.
They'd adjusted. Learned from it.
On their third herding attempt, the adjustment was faster. More refined.
*Intelligent threat escalation*, his father's manual called it. *Signs of high-rank creature cognition. Do not underestimate.*
Jacob was not underestimating.
He was, however, running out of cavern.
[STATUS UPDATE]
[ENDURANCE: CRITICAL]
[ESTIMATED PHYSICAL CAPACITY REMAINING: 11%]
[WARNING: HOST APPROACHING BIOLOGICAL LIMITS]
[WARNING: ZERO PERCENT FAILURE RATE CANNOT PREVENT UNCONSCIOUSNESS FROM PHYSICAL DEPLETION]
[WARNING: UNCONSCIOUS HOST CANNOT ATTEMPT ACTIONS]
[IHA RESPONSE: 2 HOURS 14 MINUTES REMAINING]
Jacob read the warnings while running.
The third one hit differently than the others.
Zero percent failure rate cannot prevent unconsciousness from physical depletion.
He'd been so focused on the power's applications that he'd missed the obvious limitation hiding in plain sight. The power guaranteed success on actions he *attempted*. If he was unconscious, he couldn't attempt anything.
Eleven percent physical capacity.
Two hours fourteen minutes until IHA response.
The math was ugly.
He couldn't outlast the bears. His body would give out long before the IHA arrived. And once he was down—unconscious, helpless on the cavern floor—four A-Rank creatures would walk through an unsupervised Gate into a partially evacuated Portland neighborhood.
Same math as three years ago.
Different variables.
Same unacceptable answer.
Jacob cut hard around a crystal formation the size of a small house and skidded to a stop behind it.
Twelve seconds before the bears rounded the formation. Maybe fifteen if they approached cautiously.
He used nine of them to think.
He couldn't fight them. Couldn't outrun them indefinitely. Couldn't wait for backup.
But the Gate was behind him.
And the cavern had a geography he'd been mapping for forty-three minutes while running for his life.
Jacob looked up at the ceiling.
Forty feet of cavern height. Crystal formations throughout, structural. The ones near the Gate entrance were particularly dense—massive pillars of blue-glowing mineral that had been accumulating for what looked like geological timescales.
His father's manual: Rank A dungeon environments often feature structural instabilities exploitable by experienced Hunters. Identify chokepoints early.
He hadn't identified them early.
But he had them now.
The first bear rounded the crystal formation.
Jacob ran directly toward the Gate.
***
The bears accelerated when they saw him heading for the exit.
That was the tell—the slight increase in pace when their target moved toward escape. They understood what the Gate meant. Either they'd been near gates before, or they were smart enough to recognize an exit by context.
Either way: they didn't want him leaving.
Which meant they really didn't want him blocking it.
Jacob filed that away and kept running.
Twenty feet from the Gate. Fifteen. Ten.
The lead bear was six feet behind him when Jacob stopped, turned, and looked up.
The crystal pillar to the left of the Gate was twelve feet wide at its base, narrowing to roughly four feet at the ceiling. Forty feet of accumulated mineral structure. Probably tons of weight.
Jacob looked at the crack running through its base—hairline, maybe three feet long, probably the result of whatever pressure the bears had been putting on the Gate boundary for hours before he arrived.
Structural instability.
Exploitable.
Maybe.
If success is theoretically possible under any circumstances.
The lead bear stopped six feet away and stared at him.
The other three fanned out to his sides.
Classic cornering formation. They had him against the Gate boundary with nowhere to go.
Jacob looked at the bear. The bear looked at Jacob.
"I want to collapse that pillar across the Gate entrance," Jacob said quietly. "Without killing myself in the process."
The power activated.
The certainty settled.
Possible.
Jacob grabbed the largest loose rock within reach—thirty pounds, roughly—and threw it at the crack in the crystal pillar's base with every ounce of his fourteen-point strength.
The throw was accurate in a way his arm had no business being accurate. The rock struck the crack at precisely the angle that would transmit maximum force into the existing fracture.
The crystal pillar groaned.
The lead bear charged.
Jacob threw himself flat against the Gate boundary as the pillar came down.
It didn't shatter—crystal of that density didn't shatter, it *fell*, in massive interlocking segments that cascaded from ceiling to floor in a sequence that took approximately two seconds and sounded like the world ending.
The lead bear skidded to a halt three feet from Jacob's prone body as a chunk of crystal the size of a compact car hit the ground between them.
Dust. Darkness. The blue glow cut by sixty percent as one of the cavern's main light sources went dark.
Jacob pressed himself against the Gate and didn't move.
The dust settled slowly.
When it cleared enough to see, Jacob assessed the damage.
The collapsed pillar hadn't sealed the Gate—he hadn't expected it to, and didn't want it to. Sealing a Gate from the inside was above his current ability and probably above his current understanding of how Gates worked.
But it had created a barrier.
A twelve-foot wall of crystal debris across the Gate's entrance, passable by a determined A-Rank creature but not quickly and not quietly.
Chokepoint.
The bears could get through. But not four at once, not at speed, and not without making enough noise to hear coming.
Jacob crawled to the far side of the debris field and put his back against the Gate boundary.
His status screen updated:
[ENDURANCE: 6%]
[STRENGTH: DEPLETED]
[AGILITY: DEPLETED]
[WARNING: HOST APPROACHING CRITICAL BIOLOGICAL THRESHOLD]
[IHA RESPONSE: 1 HOUR 58 MINUTES REMAINING]
Six percent.
One hour fifty-eight minutes.
Jacob looked at the debris field. The lead bear was already testing the edges, pushing against the crystal chunks with one massive paw, gauging resistance.
Smart.
Too smart.
They'd be through in twenty minutes. Maybe less.
Jacob's body had maybe fifteen minutes of functional capacity remaining.
He needed a different solution.
He closed his eyes and thought about what he actually knew.
He knew the bears were trying to breach the Gate. He knew they'd been doing it for hours before he arrived—the cracked concrete outside, the pressure building against the boundary.
He knew they were territorial in the specific way of predators that controlled resources. The cave. The crystals. The Gate.
He knew they were smart.
Smart predators don't attack things that aren't worth the cost.
Jacob opened his eyes.
The lead bear had stopped testing the debris and was watching him.
Eight hundred pounds of A-Rank creature, eyes reflecting blue crystal light, absolutely still.
Waiting.
Jacob looked back at it.
"You were trying to get through the Gate," he said. Not to communicate—he had no reason to think it understood English. But talking helped him think, and right now thinking was all he had left.
"Something on the other side triggered your territorial response. Or you were already trying to expand territory and the Gate was the path."
The bear didn't move.
"You're not trying to kill me specifically. You're trying to remove an obstacle."
Jacob looked at the Gate behind him.
He was between the bears and their objective. He'd been between them and the Gate since he entered the cavern—running, yes, but always positioning himself between the bears and the exit.
From their perspective, he wasn't a prey animal.
He was a guardian.
Something that had placed itself between them and what they wanted, and had been successfully preventing them from getting it for the past forty-three minutes.
Intelligent threat assessment.
Jacob's father's manual, page 147: High-rank creatures recalibrate threat levels based on demonstrated capability. An opponent that survives long enough becomes categorized as a significant threat regardless of apparent power differential.
Jacob had survived forty-three minutes against four A-Rank creatures with D-Rank-baseline stats.
From their perspective, that wasn't weakness.
That was a warning.
He didn't move. Didn't run. Didn't throw anything.
He just sat against the Gate boundary and met the lead bear's gaze.
His body had six percent capacity left and was draining with every passing second.
He needed the bears to decide he wasn't worth the cost.
He needed them to believe he was more dangerous than he looked.
Which was either brilliant or the last mistake he'd ever make.
The lead bear took one step toward the debris field.
Jacob didn't flinch.
The bear stopped.
They watched each other across forty feet of crystal-lit cavern, and Jacob thought about probability, about his parents, about the IHA response timer counting down in the corner of his vision.
One hour forty-one minutes.
He had to last one hour forty-one minutes.
Against four A-Rank creatures.
With six percent physical capacity.
And no weapons, no skills, no backup.
Zero percent failure rate.
If success is theoretically possible—
The lead bear growled. Low. Subsonic. Jacob felt it in his chest more than heard it.
Then it sat down.
Not retreat. Not submission.
Reassessment.
The other three bears stopped moving.
Jacob let out a breath so slowly it didn't count as relief.