The first Warden came low, a scything crescent shear that hissed for Li Tian's already-torn ankle. The second hung back half a pace, chest core brightening from ember to coal to sun, waiting for the inevitable jump.
Overhead, nine crimson petals ratcheted in a killing measure. Click. Click. Click. Each peak promised a blade of air thin as spite.
Match the beat, not the breath.
He didn't jump.
On the ratchet's peak, when the shear was at its quickest, he took a short, tight Star Lung breath, dumped height, and let gravity own him. The crescent skimmed over his skull, close enough to wind-burn his hair. A core-lance from the second Warden tore the air where his head should have been, carving a smoking line through the platform's far rail.
NULL. A true hold. The one beat that belonged to him.
He slid on his good heel, dead right arm locked against his ribs to keep it from flopping him off rhythm. A cracked star-metal staple jutted from the floor. As he passed, he pressed his side against it—mechanical damping, not power bleed—bleeding the tremor from his protesting ribcage into cold metal. The staple glowed dull orange, spat a spark, and the vise around his chest loosened half a notch.
The Wardens adjusted. Their shoulders shifted. Their cores pulsed in mirror of the petals above. He was the flaw in their metronome. They moved to erase him.
Let them.
He backed toward a specific intersection in the light—a crossing lane he'd mapped while he was "staggering." The Shard in his left hand throbbed a faint, precise resonance against his palm.
CLICK.
A razor sweep scythed horizontally from the petals.
Vein Step. One breath, one pivot. He placed the first Warden directly in the beam's path.
It had committed to its lunge; constructs don't wince. The sweep sheared through its extended forearm. Crimson fissures raced the limb's length. The hand fell in a glitter of ceramic and starlit dust, skittering off the platform into darkness. The Warden reeled, core stuttering.
"A minor dissonance," Wu Renshu said from the threshold, mild as tea. A jade slip winked from his fingers. "Let us retune."
The talisman—a Phase-Shear—touched a lens. The spire's rhythm stuttered. The next hold Li Tian needed curdled into a false null, silent and hungry.
The Ring burned his finger: Ban? No—Warning.
Wrong quiet. Wrong lull.
He stepped a half count off, twisting through a tighter angle that sent a spike of white pain through his split rib. The vertical crimson sweep that should have halved him tore open the stone where he'd been, carving a molten groove that hissed like a drawn breath.
"The melody is mine to compose, Junior Brother."
Li Tian didn't waste the oxygen to answer. His eyes cut to the railing—the ninefold scorch brand where he'd stolen the Witness Filament. A conductor. A path.
He lunged, snapped the Shard's tip against the brand as the second Warden's core ticked to peak.
The micro-lance fired. The brand drank a hair's breadth of it—enough to arc a blinding flare along its scorched geometry. The Warden flinched, sensor array dazzled, its next crescent slashing wide and screaming sparks from the floor.
Ten paces. The Ophidian Stair gaped like a stone throat behind the construct. Too far to walk. Too cluttered to run.
Star Vein Step · Crossing Line.
He pushed. A half-beat that lives between beats. His world shrank to ankle, calf, breath. He crossed half the distance in a blur of controlled fall.
The tax came due at once. The fire in his right calf exploded into a hot rope that wanted to snap. His wounded ankle buckled on landing. Vision tunneled to a black-ringed keyhole.
"A final crescendo," Wu murmured, almost pleased. A second talisman left his hand. Gain Spike.
The functional Warden's chest star flared white-hot. The ratchet rose to peak. The amplified lance cracked the air, aimed surgically at the point the Crossing Line should have carried him.
Break the pattern.
He went low on the peak, not high—threw himself into a roll that scraped skin off his knuckles and made his cracked rib sing. The boosted lance impaled the already-wounded Warden instead, spearing its core like a moth. Crimson fractures webbed its chassis. The construct froze. A breath later it fell apart quietly, into a cloud of dying motes and a rain of chalky shards.
One left.
The surviving Warden pressed hard. It stopped being elegant. It became efficient. Crescent shears crossed and recrossed, a net that shoved him toward the petals' centerline. Overhead, the ratchet's clicks crowded closer, eager.
Next sweep: vertical. Nowhere to go.
He made somewhere.
He dropped the Shard point-first into a floor staple and pushed, not bled—a tapping pulse back up the spire's own vein. A quarter-tone wrong, a wobble the machine could not ignore.
The lens above him shivered, misaligning half a degree.
CLICK.
The descending cut missed its mark by the width of a scream. It shaved the Warden's shoulder, gouging a deep, glowing furrow that threw the construct sideways. Not a kill. Space.
He snatched the Shard, staggered for the Stair. Vein Steps only on true holds. Every placement of his bleeding ankle was math written in agony. Every breath was a contract with the pain clamp around his chest. His left hand felt like it belonged to someone else. His right arm was a rope at his side.
The Warden recovered and came like an executioner.
He didn't look back. He didn't need to. On his last step before the Stair, he toe-flicked a broken staple shard. It chimed against a ratchet sensor.
CLICK.
Nine crimson knives cut where his ghost had just been.
He turned and committed into the Ophidian Stair. The stone throat swallowed him to the hips—
—and the Stair inhaled.
Pressure reversed. The ribs rippled. Gravity rolled like a wave. Down became sideways, then up. From the dark below, something uncoiled: a suggestion of length and coil and cold, a serpent made of shadow and breath.
The world fell sideways.
—
The Stair's first draw was a probe, not a kill. It tasted the corridor with a low harmonic that made his teeth sing. Stone ribs tensed, then relaxed, a peristaltic warning.
He pinned himself to the inner wall, breath in the Star Lung's tightest register—two notes above panic. The Shard scraped the ribbed stone; the Ring thumped a cold metronome in his finger. Do not devour. Ban enforced.
He obeyed. He had already lived this long by refusing the easy sin.
The Warden stalked into the throat behind him, careful as a butcher. Its crescent shears rasped the doorway's lintel, carving two thin smiles in the stone. Its chest pulse synced to the petals he could no longer see, each beat becoming this new corridor's click.
Match the beat, not the breath.
The Stair's cycle emerged, alien and serpentine. Draw—stone breathed in, pressure sucking sideways. Still—a true hold thin as paper. Purge—a forceful exhale that tried to spit him back onto the killing platform.
He moved only on stillness. A palm. A toe. A prayer.
The Warden fired a test lance down the throat. The beam came skewed by the Stair's draw, kissing the wall near his ear and drilling a perfect hole into darkness. Dust fell in a slow, stunned shower.
Li Tian angled his body so the next purge would throw him deeper instead of out. It meant turning his ribs into the pressure, letting the clamp bite. It meant trusting a machine to hate the same way twice.
The Stair obliged. The purge hit like a hand on his spine. He slid a body-length deeper, boots grating on stone.
The Warden advanced into the doorway, careful of its own shadow. Wu did not follow. His voice floated instead, tranquil and cruel.
"An education worth the cost," he said. "How cleanly you subtract yourself from sight." A patient pause. "Let us see if the Stair approves."
A third talisman flickered. Mirror-Bloom.
Behind Li Tian, the doorway's geometry rippled. The Warden's next lance refracted in the warped angle and sprang back into the threshold from a mirrored lane. The construct flinched; the beam slashed sparks from its own shoulder guard.
For the first time, Wu sounded faintly amused. "Even teachers can be surprised."
The Stair drew again.
Li Tian risked a step. He pressed the Shard into a shallow maintenance cradle etched into a rib joint—tiny, almost invisible. The metal kissed the crystal and hummed. A hairline string of cold light traced itself along the joint, a faint, obedient luminescence.
Not devour. Not bleed. Keying.
The rib relaxed a fraction sooner on the next draw. He slid, hip-first, past a swelling in the wall that would have snagged and held him for the purge. The adjustment cost him breath and a flare of red behind his eyes. He ignored both.
A whisper of wind stroked his cheek. The serpent silhouette below was not a trick of fear. It was there. Its breath turned the air around his ankles cool as a cellar. A scale of star-metal winked in the dark and then vanished, a suggestion more than a sight.
The corridor narrowed. Ribs leaned in until the passage was a seam. His dead arm dragged against the stone; the contact lit nerves with ghost fire up to the elbow. He bit his lip and tasted copper and cracked enamel.
The Warden committed to the throat.
Bad choice.
The Stair's next purge arrived as a cough—the entire passage flexed and spat. Li Tian flattened against the inner arc. The construct had no soft anatomy to absorb the turn. It hit the opposite ribs with a sound like a gong, then was yanked sideways by the partial gravity roll. It slashed a crescent out of reflex; the blade gouged the wall. Stone teeth fell. One punched into its knee joint.
The gap opened. Two body-lengths of mercy.
He took them.
Vein Step. Vein Step. Each on a true still.
The Shard's tip found another cradle. He pressed and held for a count that matched the corridor's mean note. The rib beside him fluttered and quieted—a local pacification. A window born of listening.
The Warden learned. It shifted its stance and began cutting only on the Stair's stillness. Its chest core shadowed the cycle, making a crimson punctum in the darkness with every click.
The serpent reacted.
A pressure front rolled up the Stair from below, silent and brutal. Not a purge, not a draw—an inversion. The corridor's floor became its wall, then its ceiling, then wall again. Bones complained. Metal sang. His right ankle ignited anew; the hot coil in his calf tried to twist itself into snapping.
He made himself small around his pain. He made himself timing.
The inversion settled into a new slant. He was forced to scramble sideways along rib-teeth, fingernails skidding on slick stone. The Warden wasn't built for scrambles. It dug a crescent into the ribs to anchor itself and hung there like a spider waiting for the web to stop moving.
"Almost elegant," Wu's voice breathed down the stone. No gloat. Simple assessment. "Almost."
The Ring's pulse changed. Not warning. Direction.
Down-stair, a node woke—faint star-glyphs limned by a breath of cold. The Ophidian liked keyed metal. The Shard hummed in answer. Li Tian ground its tip into the next maintenance notch and gave the corridor four heartbeats of quiet luminescence. The ribs listened. The serpent below paused its coil.
Space.
He slid through, shoulders scraping. He heard the Warden tear its crescent free and resume the hunt, the sound a chalk-on-glass scrape that skittered down his spine.
The last rib of the segment presented itself like a judge's lip. Beyond it: a kink, a tilt, a darkness that tasted of iron. He had to be through it before the next inversion or he'd be tumbled back under the Warden's knives.
His calf had one honest burst left. He saved it.
He foxed the timing with a cheat. He took a filthy, half-breath on the wrong side of the cycle, faking a stumble that would bait a lance on the Warden's predicted beat. The chest star obliged, swelling—and in that micro-stutter of its aim, when machine certainty outpaced truth, Li Tian shoved his shoulder through the rib gap on a true still and yanked the rest of himself after.
The lance shaved stone where his kidneys had been and burned his robe to cinder along the seam of his back.
The world narrowed to heat and grit and heartbeat. The Shard clinked on rock. He caught it with numb fingers by instinct alone.
Two more rib-steps. One.
He reached the kink—and the Stair turned.
Not a roll. A hinge. The corridor pivoted around its own axis like a door on a bad pin. The far wall became the floor with a jolt that made his cracked rib grind and splinter a little more.
He pitched forward into empty air.
The serpent uncoiled below like a line of midnight.
And the Warden, finally through the last rib of the segment, raised both crescents for the finishing cross—
—as the petals far above, faint through stone and distance, clicked in perfect red time.
The Stair bent toward that click like a snake to a flute.
Everything fell sideways.
To be continued…