My fingers clawed against the basalt as another useless breath convulsed through my chest. My pulse hammered against my throat, each beat harder than the last as my heart desperately tried to circulate what little oxygen remained in my blood. Pressure swelled behind my eyes. Something warm traced across the white of one before my vision blurred, tiny vessels beginning to rupture beneath the combined strain of heat, pressure, and oxygen deprivation.
The world pulsed.
For several seconds, the battlefield came in pieces.
My hands pressed against black stone. The translucent curve of Felicity's barrier trembled overhead. Beyond it waited a crater so large that the place we had been fighting moments earlier barely existed anymore. At its center, Kael hovered above nothing, suspended where solid ground had simply ceased to be.
That was when I finally understood what an S-Class actually was.
Not the rankings I'd read about. Not guild reports or televised dungeon clears where someone destroyed a monster while cameras recorded from a safe distance. Not a letter placed neatly beside someone's name.
This.
An entire section of a dungeon had been converted into a crater because one man had closed his hand.
And he was supposedly on our side.
The thought should have been reassuring.
It wasn't.
This gate was different from everything I had cleared alone. There was no convenient weakness waiting to be discovered, no monster whose attack I could redirect, no feature in my suit capable of turning the situation around. Even my ability was useless. Inertia needed motion, force, something physical attempting to interfere with me.
There was nothing here for me to fight.
I was suffocating in the aftermath of someone else's power.
My vision narrowed.
Darkness crept inward from the edges, retreating whenever I forced another useless breath and returning stronger afterward. My heartbeat, which had been pounding hard enough to hurt moments earlier, began to slow as the remaining oxygen in my bloodstream disappeared.
For most of this second life, some part of me had treated death differently.
I'd already done it once.
Maybe that had made me careless. Maybe somewhere beneath all the confidence and terrible decisions was the quiet assumption that having already died somehow made me less vulnerable to doing it again.
That illusion disappeared while I knelt on the basalt and listened to my own heart slow.
I was going to die.
Again.
And this time I didn't want to.
A shadow moved through the red haze in front of me.
Dorian.
He stepped closer despite the pressure dragging at all of us, his suit completely sealed. Warning lights flashed across sections of his armor, and the distortion surrounding his body pulsed every time the atmosphere tried to drag something toward the crater.
He crouched beside me.
"Stay with me, kid."
I wanted to tell him that was currently the plan.
My mouth moved.
Nothing useful came out.
The alarms from the others reached me through the ringing in my ears. Felicity's suit chirped somewhere to my left. Another warning sounded from Elias. Even Dorian's armor carried a steady emergency tone beneath his voice, each suit sealed against the environment and running independent life-support systems that had allowed them to remain conscious through conditions that were killing me.
They were still being pushed toward their limits.
That frightened me almost as much as suffocating.
These people were S-Class, and their equipment reflected it. Their suits had been built for environments where ordinary people would die almost immediately, with sealed systems and independent air supplies meant to keep them functional when the world outside stopped being hospitable.
Mine protected me from the neck down and had been designed around one central problem: keeping my own ability from eventually turning my body into paste.
Apparently nobody had thought to include surviving next to a man-made star on the specification sheet.
Fair.
I hadn't either.
My heartbeat slowed another fraction.
The darkness returned.
This time it stayed longer.
Something descended through the haze.
At first I thought my vision was failing again, but the silhouette gradually resolved into a human figure lowering toward Felicity's barrier. Kael floated above what remained of the battlefield, suspended in an atmosphere still glowing with residual heat.
There was no ground beneath him anymore.
Only a crater.
He descended through the barrier and landed several feet away. His helmet turned toward the others first, then toward me.
I was on my knees with one hand against the basalt and the other clawing uselessly at my throat while my body tried to breathe an atmosphere that no longer existed.
Whatever satisfaction had remained in Kael's posture disappeared.
"Oh."
His head tilted.
"That's not good."
I would have appreciated more concern if I hadn't been busy dying.
Kael reached toward his belt and removed a narrow reinforced canister. A valve opened beneath his thumb, releasing a colorless compound into the enclosed space around us. His other hand rose beneath it, producing a flame so small and controlled that it looked almost ridiculous after what I had just watched him do.
He passed the heat through the escaping compound.
The reaction spread through Felicity's barrier.
I didn't need a system warning to tell me something had changed.
My body knew.
I dragged in a breath so violently that my chest seized.
Air.
Actual air.
I folded forward coughing as oxygen tore into lungs that had spent what felt like an eternity contracting against nothing. Another breath followed, then another, each one ragged and painful enough to make my ribs ache. My hands shook against the basalt as my heart accelerated again, forcing newly oxygenated blood through a body that had been moments away from shutting down.
The darkness receded.
The cavern returned piece by piece. First the basalt beneath my hands, then Felicity several meters away with both arms still raised toward the barrier. Elias stood near her, his suit venting heat in short bursts, while Dorian remained close enough that I could feel the oppressive weight of his ability holding us against the ground.
Then I saw Kael.
I looked up at him through bloodshot, watering eyes.
"Why the hell didn't you do that to begin with?!"
Kael glanced at the canister in his hand and gave it a small shake.
"Because I can only carry so much of this stuff. It's for emergencies."
I stared at him.
He stared back.
Apparently my expression communicated enough.
"You looked like you were about to kick the bucket," he continued, entirely too casually, "so I figured this qualified."
A chuckle slipped through his helmet.
"Don't need the guild writing me up for killing the rookie on his first real mission."
I opened my mouth.
The dungeon moved.
The change began beneath my palms as a vibration so low I almost mistook it for the aftereffects of Kael's attack. It traveled through the basalt in a slow pulse, disappeared, then returned stronger, carrying a rhythm that felt disturbingly deliberate.
Everyone noticed.
Kael stopped laughing.
Felicity's head turned toward the crater. Elias straightened beside her, and Dorian's attention shifted away from me without another word.
For several seconds, none of us moved.
Something about the dungeon was different.
The ruined battlefield beyond Felicity's barrier had been stripped almost beyond recognition. What had once been a forest of jagged basalt formations was now a vast depression whose edges still glowed orange-white beneath drifting clouds of vapor. Rivers of liquefied stone crawled down the crater walls, gathering in incandescent pools while columns of superheated gas rolled upward toward the distant cavern ceiling.
Something inside that devastation moved.
At first it was difficult to distinguish from the convection currents. Vapor twisted naturally above the molten terrain, forming temporary spirals before dispersing into the cavern.
One spiral didn't disperse.
It tightened.
The surrounding gas followed.
Liquid basalt began moving next.
Streams that had been flowing down the crater walls slowed, stopped, and reversed. Glowing currents crawled uphill toward the center as droplets separated from molten pools and rose into the air, hanging there briefly before accelerating toward the same point.
Then the solid remains joined them.
Chunks of basalt lifted from the crater.
Fragments scraped free from the walls.
Even the remnants of the golems Kael had destroyed began to move, pieces of blackened stone dragging themselves across the ruined terrain before rising toward the growing concentration at its center.
My stomach sank.
Everything Kael had destroyed was coming back.
Gas condensed around a nucleus suspended above the crater. Molten basalt wrapped around it in luminous bands, cooling unevenly as darker material gathered over the surface. Solid fragments arrived next, slamming into the forming mass before sinking into it as though swallowed.
The shape grew.
And changed.
The earlier golems had been crude things, broad through the shoulders and built from dense slabs of stone that barely resembled anatomy. They looked like the dungeon had taken rock and forced it into the rough approximation of a body.
This was different.
The forming figure was lean.
Proportioned.
Humanoid in a way that made it considerably more unsettling.
Long arms emerged from the gathering material as layered basalt folded over a skeletal framework of glowing stone. Its torso narrowed at the waist before widening across shoulders that looked almost anatomically correct. Dark plates hardened over channels of molten material while vapor escaped continuously through narrow gaps between them, leaving portions of the creature caught between solid matter, liquid rock, and something closer to incandescent gas.
It was just solid enough to possess a form.
Not solid enough for me to know what would happen if I punched it.
The thing continued assembling itself from the aftermath of Kael's attack until its shadow stretched across the crater.
Kael stepped forward.
The humor had disappeared from his voice.
"Guys…"
His hands rose as he settled into a fighting stance.
"I think we're about to meet the boss."
The nucleus pulsed.
A deep vibration rolled through the cavern and entered my body through my hands and knees, rattling somewhere behind my ribs. The forming creature responded by lifting its head, and although no face had finished forming there yet, I had the unmistakable sensation that something had finally acknowledged our presence.
Dorian's helmet turned toward Kael.
"Stand down."
Kael glanced toward him.
Dorian didn't move.
"You push yourself any further, and we'll be carrying your body out of this gate."
That was when I looked at Kael properly.
The light surrounding him had dimmed.
His stance was still loose, his hands still raised, but the effortless energy from earlier was gone. His suit continued venting residual heat through its seams, and beneath the humor he was trying to maintain, there was a slight instability in the way his weight shifted between his feet.
The power had come with a price.
And the bill was arriving.
Behind him, the thing in the crater continued assembling itself from everything Kael had destroyed.
Dorian watched it for another moment.
"All ability restrictions are lifted."
Kael's head turned toward him.
So did Felicity's.
Even Elias went still.
I didn't know enough about these people yet to understand exactly what those words meant, but their reaction told me enough.
Dorian stepped toward the crater.
"Our objective is no longer to clear the gate."
The forming creature lifted its head completely.
Molten light burned through the unfinished seams of its face.
Dorian's voice remained perfectly calm.
"Survive."