THE IRREGULAR:
The screeching died.
The War Shadows answered.
They poured from everywhere — gaps, cracks, passages that hadn't existed before the sound — knife-claws clicking against stone, red eyes catching the moss-light wrong.
The Irregular moved through its own horde without slowing, scythes carving wide arcs, red slits already fixed ahead like the bodies dissolving around it were furniture.
Raska read the chamber once.
"Red hair."
Welf's jaw tightened.
"Don't come down." He didn't look up. "Either of you. In that rampage you'll just die."
A beat passed — the kind that meant he understood and hated it at the same time.
"Stay up. The supporter covers from range." His eyes flicked toward Lili for the first time. "You keep her alive."
Lili already had the crossbow raised.
Raska rolled her shoulders once.
Then she stepped off the edge and dropped in.
---
What followed had no clean lines.
The Irregular used the bodies as both cover and obstacle. Too much movement. Too many red eyes. The ground between formations churned with clicking claws and flashes of obsidian in the moss-light.
Bell cut through the War Shadows the way you cut through something when stopping means dying.
Above them, Lili's bolts fell in a steady rhythm.
The boy and Raska stayed at the Irregular's edges, splitting its attention, watching the scythes.
Two separate clicking sounds filled the chamber beneath everything. The War Shadow swarm's knife-claws. The Irregular's obsidian limbs. Layered until the air itself felt wrong.
Then it found the boy.
Not a blade.
The flat of the scythe crashed into him — pure mass behind it.
The hit folded him and hurled him off his feet.
The sound it made wasn't sharp.
Just heavy.
He left the ground.
He hit the rock formation behind him. The crack rang through the chamber. He slid down the stone, dust still rising.
The War Shadows nearest him were already turning.
He didn't get up.
He didn't move.
---
Welf watched from the high ground.
His greatsword was in his hand. It had been in his hand for a while now. He couldn't remember why.
There was nothing up here that needed killing. Nothing his blade could reach. Nothing his reach could touch.
Below him the chamber churned. Raska was somewhere inside it, carrying the Irregular alone. Bell couldn't push through. The boy was down.
And Welf stood on a ledge with a sword and a perfect view.
Something in his chest was twisting into a shape he had no name for.
And he couldn't stop it.
---
Lili fired. Bolt after bolt, forcing the rhythm steady, her hands shaking between each reload in the half-second Welf could see them.
He didn't look at her face.
He didn't want to know how afraid she was. If he did, he might move.
Raska carried the Irregular alone.
Close range — inside the scythes' full reach, the only place they couldn't wind up properly. Every movement was about staying there. Her hands caught whatever they could — joints, edges, plates — dragging the limbs off-line whenever the arcs began to form.
War Shadows pressed at her flanks. She dealt with them without breaking from the Irregular. She couldn't give it distance.
Distance meant reach.
Reach meant death.
---
The clicking shifted — fewer now, thinner. Three scythes already gone. The Irregular adjusted.
Still patient.
Then the blunt hit.
The flat of the scythe crashed across her cracked ribs. Her breath burst out of her as her spine slammed into the stone wall.
The follow-through came immediately.
The scythe drove through her right shoulder.
The same place.
Her jaw locked.
Her free hand caught the scythe's haft, fingers tightening as the blade ground deeper into bone. She wasn't stopping it.
Only slowing it.
Her other arm hung useless at her side.
The Irregular stood before her, red slits watching the way something watches a problem already solved.
The second scythe rose.
No hurry.
It had time.
It knew it had time.
---
For the first time after so long, her mind went somewhere other than forward. Not to fear. To everything still waiting.
The particular grief of someone who suddenly remembers they are not finished yet.
The quiet, stubborn refusal of someone who was not finished yet.
All of it arrived at once, crowding the back of her skull while the monster was the only thing filling her vision.
The second scythe was still coming down.
She didn't close her eyes.
She couldn't.
A long breath tore out of her.
"Damn it all—!"
It came out more like a howl than a yell.
---
Lili's arrows came down without stopping.
The bolt crossed the chamber and one of the Irregular's spare scythes swept it aside without the red slits even moving toward her. Like she hadn't happened.
Lili's face went pale. Fresh tears traced down her cheeks — not the terrified kind, not the helpless kind she'd been crying since the scythe rose.
Different.
Raska was on the wall below her. The woman who had thrown herself between a supporter and death on Floor Seven, again and again, for no reason Lili had ever been given. The woman who had done something Lili once believed only Bell would ever do.
And Lili had stood up here the whole fight with a crossbow and empty hands and watched her get broken and couldn't give any of it back.
The tears kept coming.
She fired.
Again. And again.
Her hands reached for another bolt.
Nothing.
Reached again.
Her only weapon. Empty. Then what was left to give?
Herself.
---
"Hey——! OVER HERE——!"
Lili's hands were empty and she did the only thing left — she screamed, she waved, she made herself a target, trying to pull those red slits upward, look at me look at me look at me — and the Irregular didn't look.
Not once.
Not even for a single moment across the entire fight.
Her final desperation too, failed miserably.
Her heart sank.
---
Welf made one step toward the edge.
Stopped.
His sword hand was shaking. He didn't know when that had started. The blade that had never felt useless in his grip — not once, not in any fight, not on any floor — just weight in his fist now. Just metal.
He stood there and let it shake.
---
Bell cut through the horde like a man trying to swim through wet concrete. Every step forward cost him two. His knife flicked out, found a throat, found another, found nothing but more bodies filling the gap before he could push through it. Firebolt snapped from his palm — not aimed, just thrown ahead like a scream made of light, blasting a tunnel of charred bodies that collapsed back in before he could take three steps through it.
He could see her.
Raska against the wall. One hand locked around the scythe buried in her shoulder, fingers clawing at the haft as the blade ground deeper into bone with every second she held it. Her other arm hung useless at her side, the Irregular standing over her with the calm patience of something already certain of the kill.
The second scythe rose.
Move. His teeth found each other. Move move move —
The horde didn't rush him. Didn't need to. They simply flowed — shoulder to shoulder, claw to claw — replacing every gap he carved the instant it opened. A knife in an eye socket; two more stepped into its place before the body dropped. Firebolt burned three at once; four filled the smoke before it cleared.
Ten paces became eight. Eight became six.
Still six.
Still six.
Then he heard it — cutting through the clicking, through the Firebolt, through everything — a long breath tearing out of her, raw and ragged, more howl than anything else.
"Damn it all—!"
His lungs stopped.
He lunged. Not technique. Just forward, pommel into a jaw, shoulder driving through the body before it fell, the distance widening one heartbeat — then closing again, the horde sealing shut like water.
You need to save her!
Don't let her die!
Move.
Move.
Move.
Against the wall, Raska's legs braced and pushed — not kicking, pushing, every muscle wrenching against the thing pinning her, her free hand grabbing the scythe's shaft and shoving, striking it, shoving again.
Nothing gave.
Bell stumbled on something wet, caught himself on a corpse the press of bodies held upright. His knife hand shook. He didn't drop it.
He was close enough now to hear her shallow breathing.
Close enough to watch her hands drop.
Her legs stopped. Her body went still against the wall — not death, the other thing, the moment the body finally understands what the mind refused to.
The boy had already gone down. Bell isn't fast enough to reach her. Welf and Lili would be the next after this monster finishes both.
She had taken everything it had — and it still wasn't enough to keep them safe.
Her face turned sideways, away from the scythe, away from the red slits watching her finish.
Her eyes closed.
Not enough.
Never enough.
He lunged anyway. Because stopping would mean admitting it.
Then —
The air split.
ZINNGGG——
---