Marcus stared at it.
"Eudora," he said lowly.
His face stayed still but something behind his eyes did the thing it did when information arrived that the rest of him wasn't ready to process yet.
"What the…" he said quietly.
The cave was completely silent except for the sound of Liz's sharp intake of breath beside him and the low pulse of the rune on her blade which had gone from silver to something colder and more urgent.
Then from behind the door came a sound. Not shrieking. Not the sound of creatures. The particular grinding rhythmic sound of something large moving with purpose, stone on stone, the footsteps of things built from the cave itself.
Marcus stepped forward.
"Marcus." Liz's hand closed around his arm.
"Don't."
He looked at her hand. Then at the door.
He stepped forward anyway.
The door swung inward on its own weight before his palm even touched it, like whatever was on the other side had been expecting him and had decided to skip the formality.
The chamber beyond was wide and high ceilinged and the red veins in the walls were denser here than anywhere else in the cave, thick and pulsing, throwing everything inside in long shifting red shadows that moved even when nothing else did.
The air was heavier. Not the cave weight from earlier. Something older than that. Something that had been sitting in this specific room for a very long time and had soaked into the stone itself.
Two figures stood at the far end.
Eight feet each, rough hewn directly from the cave floor, with cracks running through their surfaces leaking the same red light as the walls. Fists like boulders at their sides. No eyes anywhere on their flat featureless faces. Just two points of dull red where eyes had no business being.
Between them on the floor lay Fredrin and Lisa.
Crumpled and still. Gear torn. Fredrin's sword broken in two pieces beside his open hand. Lisa's fire had scorch marks on the floor around her that told the story of a fight that had been serious before it ended badly. Guild insignias visible on both of them.
Wiped.
The whole party. In the time it had taken Marcus and Liz to walk the left passage Squad Rambo had come through the right one and arrived at the same chamber from a different entrance and encountered something they hadn't been equipped to handle.
Marcus found her body on the ground near the door. He crouched down beside her and closed her eyes gently with two fingers.
"Go to rest," he said quietly. "Don't worry. I'll take care of the rest."His mind couldn't register the need words for this moment.
He stood up and looked at the chamber.
Funny, he thought. Not a single creature the entire way here. That explains itself now. Everything in this cave had the sense to stay away from whatever was sitting in this room.
Then at the two stone figures.
Then at the thing standing between them.
The system tagged it immediately, the name appearing above a figure that was tall and still and wearing a darkness that moved independently of the available light.
[THE HOLLOW KEEPER]
It looked at Marcus with the particular quality of something that had been waiting a very long time and was not remotely surprised by what had finally arrived.
"Finally," it said. The voice came from everywhere the red light touched, from the walls and the ceiling and the cracks in the floor simultaneously.
"Someone worthy to bestow death upon me." A pause, measured and deliberate. "Do you understand how many centuries I have waited for that sentence to be true?"
[NEW OBJECTIVE]
[DEFEAT THE HOLLOW KEEPER]
[REWARD: CLASSIFIED]
"The system and me sure has like minds"
"Oh you want to die," he said quietly, rolling his neck once. "Just stay still. Let me make this quick."
Emanating from the confidence he could hold he's own with he's pen knife.
"Liz," he said.
"I see them," she said. Her voice had changed completely. The conversational ease was gone, replaced by something flatter and more focused, Threadreading running hot, the suggestions it gave pointing at specific things with the urgency of a system that had identified multiple threats simultaneously.
"Take the left golem," Marcus said. "Keep it off me."
"And the right?"
Marcus looked at the Hollow Keeper standing between its sentinels with the patience of something that had been in this room for centuries and found it comfortable.
"Focus on your task ,"
Liz looked at him. "Marcus."
"Trust me," he said.
She held his gaze for one second. Then she moved left, her blade blazing white against the red chamber light, drawing the nearest golem's attention with the clean efficiency of someone who knew exactly how to make herself the most pressing problem in a room.
Marcus walked forward toward the right golem with slow calculated steps.
It raised its fist.
He moved to go under the arc.
He almost made it.
The impact came from his left, the side he hadn't covered, the Hollow Keeper's hand moving faster than something that size had any right to move, catching Marcus flush across the chest with a force that had no interest in being gradual about it.
He left the ground.
The far wall of the chamber arrived very quickly.
The impact when he hit it was absolute. Not pain exactly. More like the concept of pain arriving all at once and then everything going very quiet very fast.
He slid down the wall and the stone floor came up to meet him and the red light in the chamber pulsed once above him and then the world narrowed to a point and the point went dark.
Silence.
Then the system flickered.
[FATAL DAMAGE DETECTED]
[HP: 0/100]
[DEATH CONFIRMED]
A pause. One beat. Two.
[DEVIL LOOM COAT — TIER A]
[INNATE ABILITY: NULLIFY LETHAL DAMAGE — ACTIVATED]
[ONE TIME USE PER ENCOUNTER]
[DEATH NULLIFIED]
[HP RESTORED: 1/100]