The walls came in.
He read the narrowing as he approached it and did not slow down. Post spacing normal. Thermal clean on the floor. Warm patches in both walls, three on the left and four on the right, all of them loaded, all of them waiting for the right position. He mapped the trigger zones by angle and kept his line down the centre of the bridge where the zones did not reach and walked into the corridor at pace.
Left wall, first hole: warm. He shifted right two steps without stopping. The hole passed on his left. Nothing fired.
Right wall, two holes close together: warm. He shifted left, threading the gap between their overlapping zones. Both passed on his right. Nothing fired.
Floor ahead: cold band, thin, running the full width. He measured the gap with two strides, adjusted his third, stepped over the release edge with his left foot and committed the right foot to the far side. The planks held. He kept walking.
A chest to the right of his line. He clocked the mark inside the lid from four metres without stopping, the lock-on holding the image steady as he passed. Cross inside the lid. He passed it. Something in him registered the trap mechanism inside it as a thing that probably had scrap value and filed it as a thing he would not go back for. He kept moving.
The corridor tightened. Walls close now, six metres from the railing on each side. Holes dense on both walls, the spacing between them barely a metre in some stretches. He modulated his line continuously, never a straight path, always the current angle through the current threat, the adjustments small and fast and without calculation.
Right wall: a hole at knee height. Different from every hole before it. He had never seen one aimed that low. The thermal showed it loading as he drew level, the mechanism's heat spiking. He stepped left and accelerated, the legs taking the acceleration without protest, and the arrow crossed the space behind his right heel with a sound like cloth tearing and buried itself in the left railing.
He was three strides past it before the sound reached him.
Floor: another cold band. Wider this time, a full panel rather than a seam. He went right to avoid it and the wall holes on the right were warm and he held the right edge of his available lane without entering the trigger zones, one foot on the railing's lower rail briefly, the leg armour holding him steady on the narrow surface, and stepped back onto the planks beyond the panel.
The wall to his right produced a snap. He was already left of where the arrow wanted him. It passed through the air he had been in and hit the opposite post.
The combo section opened ahead.
He read it from twenty metres: the post spacing had tightened, the floor had two cold bands in sequence, and the wall holes on both sides were clustered in a density he had not seen outside the first dense corridor. The wall holes were aimed at the centre of the bridge. The floor drops were positioned to push a person to the centre to avoid the edge. Both pressures pointing at the same space.
He went left. Hard left, to the railing edge, inside the wall holes' trigger zones but below their firing height, the holes aimed at a standing adult's torso and his body angled low as he moved along the railing's outer edge. The cold bands ran across the centre of the bridge and did not extend to the railing itself. He moved along the railing edge at a pace the leg armour made sustainable, his right hand on the top rail for two strides, the hydraulic arm closing over the wood with precise grip, and crossed the section.
Four holes fired in sequence as he cleared the second cold band. All of them aimed at the centre. All of them put their arrows into the opposite railing. The sound was four consecutive hard knocks, evenly spaced, like something counting.
He was back on the planks by the third knock and walking.
The thermal display went to static.
Two seconds of grey noise across the visor, the overlay information lost, the bridge ahead visible but unread by the suit. He slowed fractionally, not stopping, his feet reading the planks the way they had before the helmet, the pressure through the leg armour transmitting the floor's give to him directly. Post spacing: normal by eye. Grain: straight by eye. He pressed the nearest plank lightly with his toe. Solid.
The thermal came back. No cold signatures in the floor. Three warm wall holes ahead and to the right, already mapped, already accounted for.
He walked on.
A railing post pivoted.
The post to his left swung outward on a hidden hinge at its base, sweeping from its fixed position toward the centre of the bridge at roughly hip height, a blunt beam designed to knock a person sideways into the void. He heard the mechanism before he saw the motion and the hydraulic arm was already moving, the left arm rising and meeting the post's sweep, the force amplified by the arm's mechanism into a controlled block that stopped the post's arc and held it there. The post strained against the hold for two seconds and then the mechanism released and the post swung back to its original position.
He was walking again before it locked.
The walls began to widen. The hole density dropped. The post spacing normalised. The thermal showed nothing on the floor for the next forty metres. He walked the forty metres and the walls were at their standard distance and the bridge ahead was the same grey distance it had always been.
He had not stopped.
Not when the arrow came from below. Not when the thermal glitched. Not when the post swung. He had not stood at any point in the corridor and evaluated and decided. The corridor had presented and he had responded and the suit had carried the responses that his body could not have carried alone, and all of it had happened at a pace that left no space for anything except the next movement.
He reached the chest at the far end of the corridor. Single horizontal mark. He opened it: food, water, a roll of fresh wound packing for the shoulder. He ate standing, drank measured, packed the wound packing in his jacket pocket. Then he kept walking.
The bridge did not acknowledge what had just happened. It never did. It simply continued, the same grey planks and the same hum and the same void on both sides, indifferent to whether the person crossing it had come through the corridor differently than they had entered it.
He had.