2. **Gather.** A slow majority fills the broad lanes. Faster packs take side routes, climbers come from ceilings and ducts, and a few heavy bodies bend the flow so you have to change course.

3. **Crest.** Two or three movement patterns overlap. You choose the dense line your build rewards, the safer line that protects your condition, or a costly retreat that spends oxygen and position. If you are working toward something that moves — a carriage, a rising lift, a walking scan — it keeps going through the fight rather than turning the room into a defence circle.

4. **Break.** Your build kills faster than the routes can fill, you close a bulkhead or a source, or you outrun the woken area. The music, the flow and the room's silhouette all release together. The lull that follows belongs to looking, salvaging and deciding where to go.

*Proposal.* A temporary upgrade is earned by **resolving a crest** — winning the room or shutting it. You resolve a crest by **breaking** it, when the source runs dry or you out-kill it and the room visibly releases, or by **sealing** it, when you close its door, hatch or lock as a finished act. **Running away does not count.** Leaving the woken area saves your life but earns nothing, and stepping back in resumes the same unresolved crest rather than starting a new one, so there is nothing to farm.

Each source area pays out once per trip. A crest is the peak a room announces — its feeding mouths open fully, several movement patterns overlap, warning lights and music shift — not a straggler or a lone creature, so a small teaching room awards nothing. A large machine you deliberately wake is its own source and may offer a rarer choice. What the upgrades are, and how many you choose between, belongs to Build Rules.

**Rhythm.** An ordinary trip toward one objective crosses roughly three to five sources beyond ground you have already cleared: a small side source or two early, a larger hall or two, then the objective's own crest. A player who fights or seals their way through gets a choice every few minutes of travel, not only at the climax. Sealing gives a weaker player a way to earn power without winning every fight, at the cost of the bigger payoff a full break brings. **How it could fail:** crests that come too often turn choosing into a chore; too rarely, and the build barely grows between climaxes.

Some objectives are physical work: cutting bolts, turning a valve, framing a record. Prefer work that moves with you over work that pins you to a panel. When work does hold you in place, it shows its current stage, and every completed checkpoint stays done. You lose only the unfinished stage — by cancelling, being knocked off the control, or having a creature occupy it. Damage alone does not stop you. Capturing a record is all or nothing: interrupted before it commits, there is no record.

An expedition ends when you are back aboard, whether you walked or revived.

- **Temporary combat upgrades end on every return home** — an owner decision. Each expedition starts a fresh climb toward spectacular power.

- **Everything physical you carry comes home**, even after death — an owner decision. Oxygen breathed and material consumed stay spent. Ordinary condition is restored for the next trip; field healing and lasting injuries are not yet designed.

- **Walking home alive** leaves the station as it was. Places you cleared stay cleared, and places still occupied stay dangerous.

- **Dying** shifts the station — an owner decision. Unconnected areas gain new neighbours, transient crowds reset, and a new set of crowds comes with the new arrangement. That is never a reaction to how well your build did, and death carries no extra penalty beyond losing your position and any unfinished work.

**Where the fresh climb happens.** After a living return you walk back out through ground you cleared, at your starting power, and the climb begins again at the first occupied source beyond it: the frontier. Cleared ground should be quick to cross, so that a reset upgrade does not mean a long flat walk before anything happens. Occupied areas beside a cleared route can still drift into it visibly. That is ordinary movement, not a respawn. Sources you already broke or sealed stay resolved on a living return, so they cannot pay out again; the next choices come from the frontier. What the upgrades do is described in [Hordes and Builds](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Hordes%20and%20Builds) and Build Rules.

[Combat And Enemy Roster](/Hold%20The%20Flood/Combat%20And%20Enemy%20Roster) owns each creature's warning, action and recovery. In a crowd they play distinct parts. **Pressers** are the slow majority that fills the lane. **Flankers** are the fast packs on side routes. **Callers** wake the next source. A **Boltspitter** demands a ranged line, a **Clampcrawler** occupies the control you are working, and a **Veilbearer** briefly hides the crowd behind it. Three special creatures — **Bellback**, **Shutterback** and **Glass Siphon** — change force, cover or your oxygen clock enough to deserve a featured entrance.

Everything attacks on sight, investigates recent noise and pursues what it saw, then searches locally and gives up. Nothing knows where you are without perceiving you, and nothing tracks you across the station.

The balance gallery is broad, and it is the right kind of room for a big fight. As you enter, a Bellback plants itself across a fixed rib, its chest filling for a pressure wave, while the two feeding mouths at the gallery's far end are already crowded. Around you the station's own machinery keeps time: a Breath Bank draws across one lane on a three-beat rhythm, and a balance chamber tilts toward whichever side carries more weight.

The crest comes from both mouths at once. The Bellback's wave shoves bodies into the chamber, and the floor tips. A cautious player seals one mouth early, shelters at the rib and crosses on the Bank's quiet beat. A player with a crowd build steps into the neutral lane and lets both mouths empty into it — and then releases. In the break, one pin through the rib locks the chamber permanently, and on the far wall a mark that matches the sample counter turns an old record into a lead.

**How it could fail:** three simultaneous rhythms become unreadable, so the player dies to something they could not see coming.

Target overrides and aim assistance; damage, health, warning timings and displacement; exact crowd sizes, performance and effect density on screen; how surviving creatures hold on a living return; the exact spacing of crests along an objective route and what the upgrades do; and whether the frontier stays close enough after a reset for the fresh climb to feel quick. Nothing here is tested.