The stairwell smelled like ash and iron.
For a while none of them said much. Lily sat on the step below Marcus with both hands pressed over the deep bruising the vampire's telekinetic blows had left across his side. Gold moved under her fingers in a tired, steady pulse. Marcus gritted his teeth and let her work. Dex cleaned black ash off the barrel of his rifle with a strip torn from his sleeve, muttering under his breath every time a fleck of it stuck to his skin. Jack leaned against the wall with his eyes closed and tested the weight within himself.
Gravity answered quickler now.
That still felt strange. A few floors ago, emptying himself had meant weakness that lasted hours. Here, after the village, the strength was already crawling back into his arms and chest like waves returning to the beach.
The tower was trying to kill them.
It was also sharpening them every floor.
Lily let out a slow breath and sat back. "You'll live."
Marcus glanced at the faint gold still fading from under his skin. "Didn't think I'd be the one getting a glow-up."
Dex snorted. "You earned it. Getting skewered by bone knights, almost staked by a vampire with telekinesis. All real inspiring stuff."
"Good to know my suffering makes you happy," Marcus said.
Jack opened his eyes. "How bad?"
"We're upright," Lily said. Her own face looked pale with exhaustion, but her gaze was clear. "That's the going standard."
Nobody argued.
Jack looked up the stairwell. Concrete steps. Dim emergency lights. The next door above them. It was quiet for now.
The vampire's last words still scraped at the inside of his head. "My master will hear of this."
"My master". Someone above him. Maybe the king, or something beside him. Could be something the tower had started to letting in.
Dex must have seen it on his face. "We deal with the master later," he said. "We deal with the next floor first."
Jack nodded once, pushed himself off the wall, and picked up his weapon. Marcus rose with a low grunt. Lily stood last, steadying herself on the railing before letting go. Together they climbed the next short flight.
Jack put a hand on the door.
Warm, wet air pressed through the crack around it.
"Please be normal," Dex said.
Jack opened the door.
The eleventh floor was a swamp under a dim green sky.
Black water stretched through drowned cypress trunks and hummocks of slick mud. Curtains of gray moss hung from branches that looked dead but still swayed as the wind blew through them. The air was thick enough to drink, rank with rot and stagnant water. No birds called. No insects buzzed. The silence was suffocating.
A narrow rise of muddy ground slithered away from the doorway before sinking beneath shin-deep water.
Dex stared out at it and sighed like the tower had personally insulted him. "Another water floor. Great. Fantastic. Exactly what I wanted."
"At least it's not a black ocean," Marcus said.
Dex gave him a look. "That is not the comfort you think it is."
Jack stepped out first. The mud sucked at his shoes immediately, just enough to unsteady him. He widened his gravity sense. Mass answered from all over the swamp—small things beneath the water, clinging to trunks, buried in mud pockets, hanging motionless under the surface.
"They're everywhere," he said quietly. "Mostly small."
"Mostly?" Lily asked.
Jack didn't answer right away.
They moved in a tight line, Marcus leading with the shotgun, Jack just behind him, Lily and Dex flanking the rear. Water lapped against their legs in mucky ripples. Twice Jack felt a faint pull at his boots, a little drag in the mud that wasn't from the mud.
The swamp came alive.
Three long black shapes shot from the water and latched onto Marcus's calf, Dex's ankle, and the trunk beside Lily's shoulder. Their mouths were pale rings lined with tiny hooked teeth, their bodies thick as wrists and slick with grave-colored slime. The instant they latched on, Jack felt the tug, a violent suction, far stronger than their size should have allowed.
Marcus swore and slammed the butt of the shotgun down, crushing the one on his leg into the mud. Dex kicked hard enough to tear his ankle free, and blasted that thing apart in a hot orange-white pop that sprayed black fluid across the water. Lily burned the third with a thin lance of gold that made it shrivel in on itself like dehydrated grapes.
The water around them erupted.
Dozens of leeches surged out in twisting knots, some no longer than a hand, others nearly as long as Jack's arm. They came from every direction, mouths pulsing open and shut. Some hurled themselves straight at faces and throats. Others slapped onto boots and shins and pulled backward with impossible force, trying to drag their prey off balance into deeper pools.
Jack threw out a gravity pulse. The nearest cluster flattened into the swamp with wet smacks. He stepped through them and split two more with a short black-edged slash. Lily's light flashed left and right, precise, conserving strength. Every time gold touched one of the things it convulsed and went still. Dex started cursing at first and then settled into the work, detonating pairs and trios with clipped little bursts that left steam rising from the water. Marcus used the shotgun like both club and gun, firing when one got a clean line at somebody's chest, smashing when they crowded too close.
They handled them.
That was almost worse.
The floor felt too simple. The leeches were nasty, but compared to gorgons, and vampires, these things were easy.
Jack cut down another writhing bundle and shouted, "Keep moving. Don't stop in the water!"
Ahead, through the trees, he could just make out a patch of raised ground and the dark frame of the next stairwell door standing crooked.
They were halfway there when Marcus disappeared.
One second he was wading through black water with the shotgun half-raised.
The next, the swamp beneath him opened.
A mouth the width of a car tire, burst up from below in a tower of slime and black water. Ringed teeth clamped around Marcus from the hips to the chest and yanked him down so fast his shout came out chopped in half. The thing was a giant leech, all throat and muscle, its body buried in the mud below like a living well.
"Marcus!" Lily screamed.
The huge mouth sucked inward. Marcus's hands clawed at the ring of teeth as he was dragged deeper, shotgun lost into the dark.
Jack moved before he thought.
He lightened himself, skimmed over the water in two impossible steps, and drove his weapon down in a black-gold arc. Gravity and divine force bit together. The slash split the giant leech from mouth to hidden body. The ring of teeth peeled apart in two wet halves and a wave of foul black fluid burst over Jack's legs.
Marcus dropped to his knees in the mud, coughing and swearing and coated in slime up to the neck.
Dex hauled him backward by the jacket while Lily flashed gold over the bite marks dug into his ribs and stomach. The leech halves thrashed once, twice, then went still.
Marcus spat something dark into the water and wheezed, "I hate this floor."
Dex pointed at him. "See? That's what I've been saying."
Even Lily let out a breath that was almost a laugh. It lasted less than a second.
Something hit Jack from the left.
It was bigger than a dog, and wrong in every way. Frog legs. Bloated slick body. Wide splayed feet that slapped onto a cypress trunk, hanging there upside down. Where a frog's head should have been, there was only a pale leech mouth opening and closing in hungry rings of teeth.
The thing launched itself again before Jack could swing.
He barely got his shoulder up in time. The mouth struck his forearm instead of his throat and the suction nearly ripped the weapon out of his hand. He slammed it against a tree. The creature peeled away and bounded into the water, vanishing under the black surface so fast it looked like it had never existed.
"That," Dex said, backing up, "is worse."
The leech-frog burst out behind Lily. Marcus caught it mid-leap and hurled it sideways, but the creature stuck to a trunk with all four limbs, compressing itself, and spranging back. Jack snared it with gravity for half a second, its body flattened, and wriggled free like a soapy hand trying to hold on to wet rubber.
Dex fired. The blast clipped one hind leg off. The thing didn't even slow. It hit him in the chest and its mouth latched onto his jacket. The suction dragged him a full step through the water before Lily seared it off with a gold slash that filled the air with burnt-rot stink.
The creature landed on a log, twitching, readying another leap.
Jack raised his weapon.
A bigger mouth exploded out of the water beneath it.
The wounded leech-frog vanished in a single gulp.
For one frozen second, all Jack saw was a pale ring wider than a truck tire and a slick green-black body the size of a horse heaving up through the swamp. Then it dropped back with a splash that drenched them to the waist.
Ripples spread.
Many ripples.
All around them, huge shapes rose under the water and between the trees. Massive frog bodies hunched on root mounds. Lamprey mouths opened where faces should have been. Their swollen sides pulsed with trapped black fluid. Some clung to trunks, vertical and silent. Others crouched half-submerged, ready to spring.
Dex stared in disgusted disbelief. "Of course there are bigger ones."
The first large leech-frog jumped.
It crossed fifteen feet in a blur.
Jack threw gravity upward and the creature slammed short of Lily, crashing into the water hard enough to throw muck across all of them. Marcus charged in and smashed the side of its body with the recovered fence-thick branch he'd torn from a dead cypress. The thing rolled, mouth snapping at the wood, and Lily drove gold into the open ring. It's flesh shrieked without a voice.
Two more came from the right.
Dex detonated the water beneath them, throwing one off course, but the other latched onto his leg and the suction dragged him down to one knee. Jack yanked with gravity in the opposite direction while Marcus waded through the spray and hammered the creature until it let go.
"They're anchoring when you grab them," Jack shouted. "Hit them when they stick!"
Another one dropped from a tree behind Lily.
She spun, light bursting from both hands at once, but the suction from its mouth caught her around the waist before it touched her and dragged her forward through the water. Jack felt terror rip through him so hard it sharpened everything. He cut across the pull with a gravity slash. The black-gold edge sheared through one front leg. The creature faltered. Dex's blast punched into its open mouth. Marcus finished it with a downward smash that drove it half into the mud.
The swamp churned with splashes, and wet sucking impacts. They stopped trying to kill one at a time.
They started fighting like one body.
Jack cast his gravity sense wide and shouted every movement before it happened. "Left tree! Behind Dex! Two in the water!"
Lily answered by marking targets with quick bursts of gold, splashing holy light across slick hides so they glowed in the murk. Once marked, the things couldn't hide in the black water. Dex used that, placing explosion after explosion into open mouths and wounded joints with brutal precision. Marcus took the hits no one else could afford, meeting each leap with blessed wood, knee, fist, or shoulder, knocking the monsters into the lines Jack set with gravity.
When three of the big ones rushed together through the shallows, Jack pulled the locals downward. Their bodies hit the mud all at once, flattened just long enough. Lily flooded their mouths with gold. Dex shouted something Jack didn't catch and fired straight into the glowing mass.
The blast turned the swamp white.
When Jack could see again, chunks of black flesh rained down around them and the water hissed where divine fire torched it.
The last two tried to flee towards deeper water.
Marcus caught one by a hind leg before it could jump and heaved it backward with a roar. Jack pinned the second mid-leap. Lily lit them both. Dex ended both with twin detonations that echoed throughout the swamps trees.
Silence was all that was left.
Black water settled in widening circles around floating pieces of dead things. Moss swayed. Somewhere far off, something heavy sank into mud and did not rise again.
Nobody moved for several breaths.
Dex bent over, hands on his knees, and said, "If the next floor even smells like a lake, I'm turning around and haunting this tower on principle."
Marcus laughed once, rough and breathless. Lily covered her mouth with one muddy hand, half horrified, half amused. Even Jack felt the tightness in his chest loosen.
They made for the stairwell door on the raised ground beyond the trees, limping more than walking by the time they reached it. The swamp began to blur at the edges as soon as Jack touched the handle, the swamp dissolving into a damp, dark office floor. They stumbled through into concrete and stale stairwell air, and the door slammed shut behind them with a sound that felt final.
For a long time they only sat.
Lily healed what she could, circular bite wounds, bruised muscle, Dex's torn leg, the deep crush marks where the force of suction had nearly pulled joints apart. Jack said nothing while Lily worked. He listened to their breathing, to the building humming around them, to the faint pressure of the floors still waiting.
Seven more to the eighteenth.
Then the roof.
Then the King.
He gripped his weapon across his knees and looked at the others. Mud-streaked. Exhausted. Hurt.
Still here.
"We rest," he said quietly. "Then we climb."
Nobody argued.