It came out of him like an exhale.

  That was the only way he could have described it not summoned, not activated, not any of the words he'd heard Wanderers use when they talked about their Eidos in the parish. More like something that had always been there, behind his ribs, waiting for the specific condition of there is no other option to finally present itself.

  Void rose from his skin without separating from it.

  A figure his height, his proportions, the same stance he was standing in assembled itself in the layer of air directly above him. Not beside him. Not behind him. On him, pressed close, the way a shadow is pressed to the thing that casts it except inverted darker than shadow, denser than air, a body-shaped absence that moved when he moved because it was him, or the part of him that this was. It had a form. Shoulders, arms, hands, a head. Where a face should have been there was a mask smooth, featureless, the suggestion of features without any, like a face seen through water that had gone still.

  No expression. No light. Nothing dramatic about it at all.

  Aris looked at his own right hand and watched Void's hand settle over it not gripping, not separate, just there, merged at the palm, occupying the same space without displacing it, like two temperatures in the same room finding equilibrium.

  He had exactly one second to register that this was happening before the axe finished its arc.

  "Repel"

  The word came out half instinct, half the specific memory of Edric explaining the Architect's principles to a twelve year old name the thing you mean, Aris, imprecision is discourtesy to the world and the burst came with it.

  It wasn't impressive.

  He'd be honest about that later, in the version of events he replayed while trying to sleep. The shockwave that left his palm was short and sharp and moved the air in the passage with enough force to flatten the nearby grass sideways and send the crystal light shuddering and produced a sound like a hand clapping in a very large empty room.

  The Hollow Guard slid.

  Three centimeters. Maybe four. Its floating plates shifted slightly on the redistributed air, its axe-arm pulled a degree off its intended line, its pale eyes moved from Aris's face to his hand with an expression that wasn't an expression because it had no face, but which communicated something in the register of noted.

  Then it kept coming.

  Aris had perhaps half a second before the axe corrected its line and completed what it had started, and his body spent that half second doing something his mind hadn't authorized turning, finding the boulder, the large irregular chunk of floor stone that had broken free from the wall at some point and been here so long it had grass growing at its base.

  He'd walked past it forty-three steps ago.

  "Gravity"

  The name was wrong he knew it was wrong, felt it like a misread word, the Eido's response coming slightly sideways of what he'd asked for but it worked, which was the only criterion that mattered right now. Void's hand over his tightened, or the sensation equivalent of tightened, and the pull came out of his palm like a question the boulder was compelled to answer.

  It was too heavy.

  He felt that immediately the weight of it registering through whatever connection Void was making between his intention and the physical world, a weight that hit his arm like he'd grabbed a rope attached to something massive and moving. His shoulder screamed. His feet shifted on the stone floor, losing half a step to the force of it before he locked his knees and pulled, not elegantly, not with any technique that anyone watching would have called controlled, but with the specific desperation of someone who had one option and was using all of it.

  The boulder lifted. Barely. Thirty centimeters off the floor, shaking, shedding dirt and the roots of the grass that had grown into its base over years.

  He threw it.

  Threw was generous. He released the pull and let the accumulated force carry it a lurching, spinning, ungraceful projectile that covered the distance between him and the Hollow Guard with none of the speed or precision he'd have preferred and all of the mass that mattered.

  It connected with the creature's upper left.

  The Hollow Guard did not shatter. It did not fall. The boulder impacted against its floating plates and the plates moved scattered outward from the point of contact, the creature's assembled form disrupting like a disturbed reflection in water, its enormous body stumbling three steps sideways before the plates began drifting back to their positions with the slow magnetic certainty of a thing that had been disrupted before and always reassembled.

  The axe came down where Aris had been standing.

  The floor cracked. A single clean fracture line ran from the point of impact outward in both directions, splitting the stone like an argument, and the shockwave that came with it hit Aris in the chest and shins simultaneously and took his balance for one lurching second.

  The grass in the impact radius was gone.

  The Hollow Guard straightened. Looked at him. The pale eyes were exactly the same as they'd always been patient, present, unhurried. It had been disrupted and it had not been hurt, and it understood the difference between the two, and it was already raising the axe again.

  Aris turned around.

  Grabbed the girl.

  She made a sound when he got his arms under her pain, sharp and involuntary, quickly swallowed and he got her up against his chest with both arms and ran. Not the careful weight-managed half-run of before. Just ran, her weight be damned, his ankle be damned, the floor and the dark and the distance all be damned, his boots hitting the stone as loud as anything had ever been on Floor Six and staying loud all the way to the passage bend.

  He took the corner without slowing.

  Behind him distant now, blessedly distant, but present the resonance of the Hollow Guard moved through the floor in a long slow pulse.

  Not chasing.

  Or chasing at its own pace, which was worse in a philosophical sense but better in a practical one.

  Aris ran.

  The girl's head was against his shoulder again, her breathing audible now shallow and fast, but there, continuous, the most important thing currently happening. He could feel the warmth of her through the torn cloth at her side, which meant other things he didn't have the capacity to think about while moving.

  Stairs, he told himself. Just get to the stairs.

  The passage opened ahead of him, the crystal light thickening toward the stairwell entrance, and he ran toward it with everything he had left and didn't look back.

  He heard them before he saw them.

  Claws on stone a dry, precise sound, each tap deliberate, the sound of something that moved with the confidence of a creature that had never needed to be quiet because nothing on this floor had ever given it reason to be. Then a second set. Then more, overlapping, a rhythm that wasn't a rhythm because each one was slightly offset from the others, the way a pack moves when it isn't coordinating because it doesn't need to.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Aris slowed.

  The passage opened into the antechamber before the stairwell the last wide space before the steps up, where the crystal light was densest and the ceiling lowest and the exit was a dark rectangular mouth in the far wall, thirty meters away, familiar and solid and completely blocked.

  Eight of them.

  The Grauw?lf were low to the ground and wide at the shoulder, their forms somewhere between wolf and something older that wolves had been descended from four-legged, heavy-necked, their fur the grey-white of the floor's stone, which was not a coincidence. Their eyes caught the crystal light and held it in the specific way that predator eyes do, each one a small cold mirror. They were spread across the antechamber in the loose, unhurried formation of animals that had heard something coming from a long way off and had simply arrived first.

  They weren't attacking.

  They were waiting to see what else arrived.

  Aris stopped walking. His lungs were doing something that wasn't quite breathing more like attempting breathing, making the motions without full commitment to the outcome. His arms were shaking from the weight of her. He adjusted his grip and she made a sound and he looked down at her and her eyes were closed and he looked back up at the Grauw?lf.

  Eight.

  Five, maybe he could have worked something out. Eight, in an enclosed space, with a girl who couldn't stand, with a Hollow Guard somewhere in the passage behind him eight was a different kind of problem.

  He could hear the resonance in the floor again. Distant. Getting less distant.

  Okay, he thought, with the strange calm of someone who had run out of the kind of thinking that produces panic and arrived at the kind that just processes. Okay. The exit is thirty meters away. There are eight of them between me and it. And there is

  Movement. Above the Grauw?lf, at the stairwell entrance. Shapes, descending the silhouettes of people, Wanderers, coming down from the floors above with the purposeful body language of a group that had a plan for their morning and had not included this in it.

  Something cracked open in his chest.

  "PLEASE," he heard himself say, and the word came out at a volume he hadn't known he had, bouncing off the low ceiling of the antechamber, scattering the nearest Grauw?lf half a step backward. "I NEED HELP"

  The group at the stairwell entrance stopped.

  He could see their faces in the crystal light four of them, mid-level gear, one with a hand already on a weapon, all of them taking in the same information simultaneously. The Grauw?lf pack. The man with the unconscious woman. The size of the pack. The sound coming from the passage behind the man.

  The one with the hand on the weapon looked at the passage behind Aris.

  Looked at the pack.

  Looked at Aris.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  They went back up the stairs.

  The sound of their footsteps receded with a speed that suggested they were no longer walking.

  Aris stood in the antechamber and listened to them go.

  He didn't move for three full seconds. The Grauw?lf watched him with their cold reflected eyes. The resonance in the floor pulsed again close now, very close and somewhere in the passage behind him the temperature dropped two degrees and kept dropping.

  Of course, some part of him thought, and it wasn't even bitter. It was just a thought. Of course.

  He shifted her weight. Looked at the exit. Looked at the pack between him and it.

  Fine.

  He raised his free hand.

  Void rose with it that same settling weight, that same merger at the palm, the masked featureless face hovering in the space above his own. He felt the connection form the way he always did, like tuning an instrument he'd only ever played quietly before, except he was playing it as loud as it would go now and his arm was already burning and he didn't have a better option.

  "Repel."

  The burst came out wider this time not the sharp focused shockwave from before but something broader, an expanding ring of displaced air that started at his palm and moved outward in all directions simultaneously. It hit the Grauw?lf like weather. Not enough to hurt them he could see that immediately, could see them dig their claws into the stone floor and absorb it but enough to make them move, enough to scatter the formation, enough to open a gap in the center that was approximately the width of one person carrying another person if neither of them breathed.

  He ran at the gap.

  Three of the Grauw?lf snapped at him as he passed he felt one connect with the back of his jacket, heard the canvas tear, felt the heat of it without the pain which meant the jacket had taken it and he was dealing with that information later. He hit the exit at full speed and kept going and he was through, he was through, he was

  The sound was enormous.

  He heard it before he felt it a crack from somewhere above, deep and structural, the sound of weight deciding to move. He looked up without stopping and saw the ceiling of the entrance passage fracture along a line that started at the wall and ran inward, crystal formations breaking free and dropping, the Hollow Guard's axe buried in the rock above and then wrenching free, the destruction it left behind releasing stress that the ceiling had been holding for longer than the city above it had existed.

  The rock came down.

  He threw himself sideways no technique, no decision, just the body moving before the mind caught up and hit the floor with her on top of him and covered her head with his arm and the world became noise and impact and dust and the specific darkness of debris filling the air so completely that the crystal light couldn't reach through it.

  Then it was quiet.

  Aris became aware of things in sequence.

  The dust. The weight on his arm. The fact that he was breathing, which was information. The girl's breathing, which he checked before anything else still there, still shallow, still the most important thing currently happening.

  He opened his eyes.

  The exit was gone.

  Not blocked gone, replaced by a wall of fallen stone and crystal that went from floor to ceiling without apparent gap, still settling, small pieces still dropping from its upper edge with sounds like punctuation. The passage back was visible through the dust in the other direction, and in it, outlined by its own pale light, the Hollow Guard stood with its axe returned to its hand the mana thread still visible for a moment between its palm and the rubble, then dissolving.

  It looked at him.

  Around him, in the antechamber, five Grauw?lf remained. Three had been caught by the debris he could see them, half-buried, unmoving. The five that were left had spread back to their waiting formation, ears flat, watching him with a patience that matched the creature behind him in every way except scale.

  Aris sat up slowly.

  His left arm was bleeding where a piece of falling crystal had caught it. His jacket was torn at the back. The antechamber was smaller now than it had been, the ceiling at the entrance cracked in ways that suggested opinions about the future, and he was sitting on the floor of it with an unconscious girl and no exit and five Grauw?lf and a Floor Thirteen creature and his lucky dagger.

  He looked at the dagger on his belt.

  He looked at the Hollow Guard.

  He looked at the blocked exit.

  There it is, he thought, with a clarity that he recognized as the specific mental state that exists on the other side of the place where panic runs out. Not calm exactly. Just the absence of alternatives presenting itself as a kind of peace. That's what that is.

  He'd had nothing coming in this morning. Canvas jacket, harvesting satchel, a flower run he'd done forty times before. No guild, no party, no armor, no name that meant anything to anyone in the middle or upper districts. He lived in a church that nobody came to and ran remedies for people who couldn't pay and went into the dungeon for flowers because the alternative was watching Edric apologize to the apothecary again about the outstanding tab.

  That was his life. In its entirety. And it had been fine. It had been enough. He'd made his peace with enough a long time ago.

  The Hollow Guard took a step forward.

  The Grauw?lf shifted.

  God's favorite child, said a voice in his memory Edric's voice, the specific warm unhurried quality of it, the one he used when he was saying something he meant completely and wasn't performing at all. Aris remembered the moment exactly: age eleven, sitting on the church steps after a particularly bad day involving a patient who hadn't made it and the specific weight of that, and Edric sitting beside him and saying it without preamble. You are God's favorite child, Aris. Just like that. No explanation offered.

  He'd spent five years intermittently annoyed by that statement.

  He wanted to laugh now felt the laugh somewhere in his chest, inappropriate and real, the kind that comes when the situation has moved so far beyond a certain threshold that humor is the only instrument left with enough range to reach it. God's favorite child. Sitting on a cracked floor with a torn jacket and one working arm, about to be killed by something that had walked up seven floors for no reason he'd ever understand.

  Well, he thought, I'm about to meet him. We can discuss the favoritism in person.

  The Hollow Guard raised its axe.

  Then the hand touched his back.

  Weak. Barely there the pressure of it less than a hand's weight, just fingers against the torn canvas of his jacket, trembling with an effort that communicated everything about what it cost to lift them at all. He turned his head.

  She had moved.

  Not far a few centimeters, enough to reach him, enough to close the gap between where she'd fallen and where he was sitting. Her face was turned toward him, pressed against the stone floor, and her grey eyes were open and clear in the way they'd been clear before, that surfacing quality, that specific borrowed lucidity.

  Her lips moved.

  The words came out in almost nothing. Less than a whisper. The kind of sound that exists at the very bottom of what a voice can do.

  "God," she breathed, and her eyes weren't on the Hollow Guard, weren't on the Grauw?lf, weren't on the blocked exit or the cracked ceiling or any of the inventory of disasters surrounding them. They were on him. "Save him."

  The Hollow Guard's axe reached the top of its arc.

  Aris looked at her hand on his jacket.

  Looked at her face.

  Looked at the axe.