Five minutes became ten. Nobody complained.
Jack sat with his back against the stairwell wall and counted his breaths. His gravitokinetic reserves were a dry riverbed — not even a trickle remained. The swordsman's presence lingered at the edges of his awareness like a sleeping cat, calm but ready. His body, at least, was holding. The gravity conditioning from earlier had made him denser, harder, and Lily's healing had patched the worst of the damage. But he could feel the ceiling of what his flesh could take pressing down.
Dex flexed his newly healed calf and winced. The muscle was whole again, pink skin visible through the shredded cargo pants, but he moved it gingerly, as if trusting Lily's work required an act of faith his body hadn't fully committed to.
"How's the back?" Jack asked Marcus.
Marcus rolled his shoulders experimentally. "Tight. Functional. Your sister's got a gift."
Lily sat cross-legged on the landing above them, her palms resting on her knees, eyes closed. A faint golden warmth pulsed beneath her skin in slow waves, rebuilding reserves one breath at a time. She looked younger in the dim light — fifteen years old and sitting in a dead tower full of monsters, and somehow the steadiest person among them.
Jack pushed himself upright. "Time."
They climbed.
The fourth-floor landing was identical to the ones below: poured concrete, a steel door with a narrow window, and the stairwell continuing upward. Marcus reached the next flight first and pressed his palm forward. It stopped flat against nothing.
"Another wall," he said. Then he turned and reached downward, back toward the third-floor landing they'd just left. His hand hit resistance there too. He pushed harder. The air didn't budge.
His expression darkened. "It's behind us now. Sealed both directions."
Dex looked back down the stairs. "So we can't retreat."
"The King doesn't want us to leave," Marcus said quietly.
Jack met the older man's eyes. "I wasn't planning on leaving."
Marcus held his gaze for a moment, then nodded once — a soldier's acknowledgment.
The fourth-floor door hung open. Beyond it, nothing made sense.
There was no office. No cubicles, no carpet, no fluorescent lights. The doorframe opened onto a vast expanse that shouldn't have existed inside any building. Above, the sky stretched unbroken — a moonless night salted with unfamiliar constellations, no clouds, no horizon line. Below where the floor should have been, dark water lapped gently against the edges of the doorframe, the surface black and still as spilled ink. The stairwell opened onto it like a dock jutting over the ocean, the concrete lip sitting inches above the waterline.
The air smelled of brine and something older. Something that had been dead for a very long time.
"He's doing it again," Jack said. "Splitting space. This isn't the tower anymore. He's pulled a piece of somewhere else and stitched it into the floor."
Dex stared at the water. His jaw tightened. "I don't like water. Especially water where I can't see the bottom."
"Can any of you?" Marcus leaned forward, peering into the black surface. It reflected nothing — not the stars, not the stairwell light, not his own face. It simply absorbed.
Lily opened her eyes. She studied the darkness for a long moment, then reached up and unclipped her headlamp.
"Take them off," she said.
"What?" Dex turned.
"The headlamps. All of them. Turn them off and take them off."
"You want us blind?"
"I want us smart." She held her palm out, and a soft golden glow bloomed across her skin, warm as candlelight but steady. "Divine energy gives light without being consumed — as long as I'm not channeling it into anything, it just is. It won't drain me. But those" — she pointed at their headlamps — "are batteries and bulbs. If we lose them to water, we lose them forever."
Jack unclipped his without argument. Marcus followed. Dex hesitated, then pulled his off and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. The stairwell dimmed to nothing except the golden warmth radiating from Lily's hands and the faint answering glow in Dex's palms as his own divine reserves surfaced.
Dex crouched at the edge of the doorframe, one knee on concrete, one hand extended over the water. His palm blazed with soft amber light. The glow reached down into the surface — and for the first time, the water relented. Below the surface, shapes emerged. A rocky shelf, then nothing. Depth that swallowed the light like a throat.
Then something answered.
Deep below, a pale blue-green luminescence flickered to life. A single point of cold light, beautiful and alien, hanging in the blackness like a lonely star.
"There's something down there," Dex murmured. He leaned closer, transfixed. The light below pulsed gently, rhythmically, almost hypnotic. It was rising.
"Dex," Jack said. "Pull back."
Dex didn't seem to hear. The cold light brightened and traveled — not freely, but along something. It traced the outline of a shape beneath the surface, illuminating the skeleton of a horror: a massive body the size of a grown man, bloated and armored in decayed fish-scale plating that glinted like wet slate. A cavernous jaw hinged open beneath the lure-light, revealing rows of needle-thin teeth as long as Jack's fingers. And trailing behind the body, unfurling from its underside like the arms of some nightmare kraken, dozens of long, pale tentacles drifted upward through the water with sinuous patience.
The lure-light sat atop a fleshy stalk protruding from the creature's skull. An anglerfish. A deep-sea anglerfish the size of a man, wrapped in the gray rot of undeath, its dead eyes two white marbles reflecting Dex's glow.
Dex's mouth opened. No sound came out.
The tentacles struck.
Three pale limbs erupted from the water and coiled around Dex's arm, chest, and throat with whip-crack speed. They were slick and ridged with suction cups that bit into flesh like tiny mouths. Dex managed a strangled yelp before the tentacles contracted and hauled him off the ledge. He vanished into the black water with barely a splash.
"DEX!" Marcus lunged forward.
Two more lights bloomed in the deep — one directly below Marcus, one beneath Lily. Then a third surfaced near Jack, pulsing with that same cold, hypnotic rhythm.
The water exploded.
Tentacles surged from the surface in a forest of grasping limbs. They wrapped around Marcus's legs and pulled. He went down hard on the concrete lip, fingers scrabbling for purchase before the grip tore him free and dragged him under. Lily threw up a shield of golden light, but the tentacles came from below, from the sides, from angles she couldn't guard. Two coiled around her ankles and ripped her feet out from under her. She hit the concrete shoulder-first and was pulled into the dark water before she could scream.
Jack's tentacles found him last. They spiraled around his waist, his left arm, his right thigh. Cold, impossibly strong, covered in a mucus that burned faintly where it touched bare skin. He grabbed the doorframe with his free hand and held on, boots sliding on wet concrete. The creature below pulled with patient, relentless force.
His fingers slipped. The water swallowed him whole.
The cold hit him like a wall. Salt stung his eyes, but the golden glow from his skin — faint, barely there — gave him just enough visibility to see the nightmare dragging him deeper. The anglerfish-thing was even larger up close, its body bloated and ridged with bony plates, its jaw opening and closing in mechanical hunger. The tentacles were everywhere, coiling tighter, pulling him toward that forest of needle teeth.
Somewhere to his left, muffled concussive thumps pounded through the water. Dex. Orange light flashed in staccato bursts as he detonated the tentacles gripping him. Each explosion severed a limb, and black ichor clouded the water, but more tentacles replaced the severed ones, reaching from the creature's body in an endless supply.
Below and to the right, Marcus had abandoned all finesse. He gripped a tentacle in both fists and pulled, tearing it free from the creature's body with raw brute strength. The anglerfish convulsed. Marcus grabbed another and did the same, ripping limbs away with furious, methodical violence, kicking toward the surface between each tear.
Lily's light blazed brightest of all. Golden radiance surrounded her like a second skin, and between her hands, something formed — a spear of pure divine energy, solid and sharp, burning white-gold in the black water. She drove it downward with both hands. The spear punched through her anglerfish's gaping mouth, through its palate, and into the base of its skull. The creature *shrieked* — a sound that traveled through the water as vibration and pressure, rattling Jack's teeth. Its tentacles went rigid, then slack. The body drifted downward, the lure-light extinguishing like a blown candle.
Jack had no such weapon. His gravitokinesis was empty. His aura was a murmur. The creature dragged him deeper, and the pressure built in his ears, in his chest, behind his eyes. He tried to push the thing away with gravity and felt nothing respond — the well truly dry.
Needle teeth closed around his left forearm.
Pain — white, electric, absolute. The teeth punched through skin and muscle like nails through wet paper. Jack screamed, losing his remaining air in a burst of silver bubbles. Blood ribboned upward. The creature bit down, grinding the needles deeper, and Jack's vision narrowed to a tunnel of agony.
'Think. Think or die!'
He couldn't push it away. He couldn't cut it. He couldn't blow it up.
But he could go up.
Not pushing the creature — pulling himself. The gravitokinetic reserves weren't entirely gone. There was a residue, a film at the bottom of the well, enough for one act if he committed everything. He gathered it, felt it coat his awareness like the last drop of water on a dying man's tongue, and inverted his own gravity.
He shot upward.
The anglerfish, still latched onto his arm, came with him. Three hundred pounds of dead fish and tentacles hauled skyward by the reversal of its prey's personal gravity. The creature thrashed, confused, its tentacles flailing, but it wouldn't release the bite.
Two more lure-lights rose from the deep to intercept him.
They came from either side — fresh anglerfish-horrors, their tentacles fanning wide like nets. One latched onto his legs. The other caught his free arm. The combined weight dragged against his ascent. He was being pulled in three directions at once, his body the rope in a tug of war between his failing gravity and three undead leviathans.
'I can't—'
The world shifted.
It was not a gradual transition. One moment Jack was drowning, and the next the swordsman was there, fully present, cold and absolute, looking through Jack's eyes at the black water and the three creatures tearing at his body with the same detached evaluation a butcher might give a carcass.
"Unacceptable."
Aura ignited.
It erupted from every inch of his skin — not the faint whisper Jack could summon, but a roaring, incandescent sheath of blade-energy that turned his entire body into an edge. The water around him split. A sphere of displaced ocean blasted outward in all directions, and the three anglerfish were caught in the shockwave, their tentacles severing like wet string against the cutting aura.
The swordsman didn't stop. He gathered the aura into his right hand, shaped it into a blade longer than his arm, and cut.
Three strokes. Three creatures bisected cleanly along their longitudinal axes, the halves drifting apart in slow-motion clouds of black ichor. The needle teeth still embedded in Jack's forearm went slack and fell away.
Then the swordsman turned his attention outward.
He hung in the center of a crater of displaced water, standing on a platform of solidified aura that gleamed like polished steel beneath his feet. The ocean pressed in around the edges of his domain but could not touch him. Stars wheeled overhead. The dark sea stretched in every direction, and beneath its surface, lights were appearing — dozens of them, then scores, cold blue-green pinpricks blinking to life in the deep like an inverted constellation.
Hundreds.
The swordsman exhaled slowly. He extended his awareness through the aura, sending threads of blade-energy outward like sonar pulses. Each thread found a mass, measured it, cataloged its distance and trajectory. The undead anglerfish were rising from every direction, their lure-lights brightening, their tentacles unfurling, drawn by the vibrations of the kill.
"Good," the swordsman said aloud, and the word fell into the silence of the alien sea like a stone into a well.
He cut loose.
Aura erupted in expanding rings — concentric crescents of blade-energy that raced outward across the water's surface and dove beneath it, slicing through everything they touched. The first ring bisected forty creatures before it faded. The second caught the ones rising from deeper water. The third reached the edges of the space itself and rebounded, catching stragglers. The water churned with black blood. Severed tentacles and split bodies surfaced in a spreading ring of carnage.
More came. The swordsman kept cutting. He moved across the water on his aura platform, each step precise, each swing economical. Where the creatures massed, he carved. Where they flanked, he detonated aura in bursts that turned the water to steam. It took three minutes. When it was over, the sea was still, and nothing living — or unliving — moved beneath its surface.
The swordsman turned toward the stairwell. It hung in the darkness like a doorway suspended in midair, its concrete lip jutting over the water. Marcus, Dex, and Lily had pulled themselves back onto the landing, soaked and gasping. Dex was clutching his leg and coughing water. Marcus was pressing both hands against a deep puncture wound on his thigh. Lily was already glowing, healing herself first so she could heal the others.
The swordsman crossed the water in three strides and stepped up onto the concrete beside them. Water streamed from Jack's clothes. Blood ran freely from the puncture wounds on his forearm, but he didn't seem to notice. He surveyed the three of them with eyes that were Jack's in color but not in expression — sharper, older, utterly still.
Then those eyes shifted. The swordsman looked up the stairwell, past the sealed gravity wall, toward the floors above. Something changed in his face — the detached calm cracked, just slightly. His head tilted, as if he was listening to a frequency the others couldn't hear.
"What is it?" Lily asked, her voice rough from salt water.
The swordsman was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was low and stripped of its usual cold authority. There was something else beneath it. Something Jack would have recognized if he'd been fully present.
"There is a presence above us," the swordsman said. "On the eighteenth floor. Familiar." His hand tightened on the aura blade until the knuckles went white. "Very familiar."
He said nothing more.