The creature's clicking slowed to a deliberate tick… tick… tick…
Each beat rolled off the distant rock pillars and came back altered — heavier, more certain, like a countdown that had already decided its answer.
The Depot pressed its emptiness against them.
No walls to redirect off.
No low ceiling to pull leverage from.
Just open stone stretching two hundred meters in every direction, moss-light bleeding faint green from high cracks above, long shadows pooling deep between the scattered formations.
Every step felt exposed in a way the corridors never had — like the space itself had been built for something with no patience for evasion.
One scythe drove straight at Bell — black blur, no warning.
Bell twisted aside, boot scraping stone, but the edge found him anyway, tearing a fresh line across his ribs that burned hot and immediate.
His palm came up in the same motion, electric flame snapping to life with a sharp crackle.
"Firebolt!"
The burst hit the creature's shoulder. It flinched back, a low rattle traveling up through the floor beneath their boots.
The boy was already moving. He came in low, cleaver arcing toward the leg joint — the damaged crease they'd been working— and the blade skipped across it with a dry crack, shallow, nothing left behind the swing to make it matter.
The creature answered without looking, one scythe sweeping sideways with a low hum that promised death.
He dropped flat.
Cold stone slammed against his chest, punching the breath out of him as the blade hissed overhead close enough to stir his hair.
He rolled — the motion dragged the wound across his back wider, heat blooming from shoulder to hip — and forced himself upright, vision tunneling for a heartbeat before it snapped clear.
He kept moving.
Stopping meant the red slits locking on for good.
Bell circled to the right, feet light despite the open ground. The Hestia Knife found cuts when openings gave them, purple wake brief in the air.
The creature tracked him with mechanical patience, red slits narrowing as its carapace creaked through each pivot, and a scythe crashed down where Bell had been standing a moment before. Obsidian struck stone with a thunderclap that rang through the chamber, vibration traveling up both their legs, loose pebbles scattering across the floor.
The boy rushed the divided attention. He raised the cleaver overhead — one hand, nothing to brace with — and brought it down.
Steel met blocking obsidian and the impact shot straight up his arm like striking an anvil, shoulder popping, fingers slipping on the sweat-slick handle.
He forced his grip closed. Teeth ground together against the tremor threatening to fold his wrist.
Then a shadow flickered at the edge of his vision — another scythe from the side, already past the point where blocking would mean anything.
He threw himself backward as it swept through, leather splitting where it grazed him, obsidian finding skin between the plates, fire streaking down his arm in lines that made the hand shake harder.
"Firebolt!"
The burst lit the Depot — struck the creature's face and snapped its head back, an angry screech raking the air hard enough to ring in their ears.
They kept circling.
Breaths hot and ragged.
The creature pivoted between them like a black hinge, red slits flicking fast to track both threats.
A scythe drove at the boy and he ducked, the blade burying deep into stone behind him, fragments flying. One chunk caught his cheek — sharp, gone before he registered it.
The creature wrenched free, stone groaning.
Bell fired and a limb swept it aside.
The boy's boots found loose grit and he slipped — caught himself just as another scythe came swinging.
He got the cleaver up one-handed and took the impact, driven back hard, spine meeting a rock pillar with a crack that punched air from his lungs, ribs creaking under the force.
The creature pressed forward.
Looming.
Scythes high.
Bell's next Firebolt hit the descending arc just enough to deflect it wide, sparks biting the boy's cheek instead of something worse.
He dove left, hit the floor hard, came up coughing copper into his mouth — not a wound, just everything inside him finally filing its complaint after two floors of full sprint.
The creature spun toward Bell. Two scythes came down together.
Bell dodged — one caught his arm, shallow, the sting immediate.
The boy rushed the blind side. Cleaver driving hard into the joint.
CRUNCH.
Not deep enough. Arm too far gone for full power.
But enough to draw a rattle.
Bell's ankle had been wrong since the corridors. He'd been compensating for it in the way he planted his stances, in the fraction of a second longer it took him to redirect. Now he forced it to hold anyway, setting his feet, breathing hard.
"FIREBOLT! FIREBOLT! FIREBOLT!"
Three bursts in quick succession.
The last one dragged audible in the breath that followed, the effort of it showing in the way his weight shifted without meaning to, settling onto his good leg for just one second before he raised his arm again.
They circled each other across open stone, the creature settling its attention on Bell with slow deliberate patience.
A scythe lashed low without warning toward his legs.
Bell jumped to clear it — but his foot came down wrong. The ankle gave on impact, pain spearing up his calf as the joint buckled under his weight.
He staggered, fighting for balance, and the follow-up came immediately, another scythe cutting hard through the air toward where he faltered. He threw himself into a forward roll before it could land, the blade slicing through the space he'd just vacated.
The boy intercepted — cleaver up one-handed, obsidian slamming against steel, the tremor ripping straight up through his arm.
The grip failed.
The cleaver slipped from his hand—but he snatched it again an inch from the floor before it could fall.
He took one breath. Just one.
"Bell!"
His voice came out lower than he meant it to.
"Use that arg—"
Word cut off. Bell's head jerked sharp.
"Use that OP bunker buster of yours."
Bell's eyes flicked—suspicion half a heartbeat—then hardened.
"Okay." He was already scanning the surroundings between himself, the creature, and the boy. "But I need time. Can you keep it occupied?"
The boy looked at the creature. At what keeping it occupied meant — one working arm, a back that opened wider with every breath, and a monster that had spent two floors learning exactly how he moved.
He looked back at Bell.
"On it."
Bell moved wide and kept moving, putting distance between himself and any line that ran through the creature.
His arm came up.
Sparkles flickered in his palm — faint white motes laced violet and crimson, hesitant embers that refused to fade.
A single soft chime rang out, distant and fragile, cutting through everything else like glass finding silence.
"Okay," the boy snarled, lips curling, "time for fireworks."
Red slits flared wide. Blazing fury.
The monster lunged straight for Bell.
The boy stepped into its path.
What followed wasn't fighting so much as feeding. A savage row of slashes tearing through open air, steel carving brutal arcs, and the boy taking every hit that would have bought the creature a glance toward Bell.
His arms burned. His lungs clawed for air. A block drove him back and he pushed forward.
The next strike came from an angle he couldn't cover both ends of and he took it — side opening hot and immediate — and kept moving, kept choosing it with every step, because Bell needed seconds and the boy had a body and that was the fact.
Keep the red slits on him. Deny the glance. Force it to see only the edge of the blade, the sweat stinging his eyes, the frantic hammering in his throat.
Couldn't let it turn.
Not now.
Bell circled wide, sparkles brilliant now, the chime building with each pass into something that pressed against the walls of the chamber.
He moved with knife and speed — cut when openings came, pulled back when they didn't.
The boy gave ground step by step in front of the creature, cleaver raised and shaking, legs barely holding the line.
Another scythe came across his stomach and he stumbled, caught himself, kept his eyes locked forward.
No turn.
No glance.
Just the red slits and the chime getting louder behind him and the knowledge that it had to be soon.
The light around Bell's hand surged blinding.
"Move!" He shouted.
The chime peaked — grand and resonant, deep enough to feel in the stone beneath their feet, the kind of sound that had weight.
The boy ducked.
"FIREBOLTTTT—"
White light and electric flame erupted together, brilliant sparkles roaring outward in a column aimed dead at the creature's chest — at the pulsing magic stone visible through translucent hide.
The creature twisted at the last second.
The beam carved through empty air.
It caught two scythes mid-swing instead. White fire consumed obsidian — a screaming instant — and the limbs were gone, stumps left behind still radiating heat where the obsidian had been.
The creature crashed back ten meters. The floor shuddered under the weight of it.
Chest intact. Magic stone pulsing — defiant, unchanged.
Fewer limbs than it started with. Nothing else.
The boy pushed himself up from the floor. His back had stopped being a wound and become a constant — something that simply lived there now, a slow fire that opened and closed with every breath. Vision going dark at the edges. He stayed on his feet because there was nothing else to do other than die.
Bell lowered his hand slowly. The full weight of the charge written in every line of him — breath ragged, arm hanging that fraction lower than it should, hair singed at the tips.
The creature's clicking resumed.
Slower.
Tick… tick… tick…
Three pairs of eyes at the entrance.
Raska, Welf, Lili — frozen at the threshold, breaths caught, the scale of what stood before them pressing against them like something physical. None of them moved. None of them spoke. There was nothing yet to say.
The creature's head tilted back slowly.
Red slits narrowed to pinpricks.
It had lost limbs. It had been pushed across open ground by two people who should have broken three exchanges ago. It had watched. It had measured. And somewhere in that calculation it had arrived at an answer.
The screech came without warning.
High-pitched. Piercing. The kind of sound that didn't travel through air so much as through bone — it split the chamber from the inside, eardrums screaming, vision blurring white.
The boy staggered, hand going to the side of his head. Bell flinched, knife dipping. At the entrance Raska's hands slammed over her ears, Welf dropped to one knee, Lili cried out, the sound ripping through every one of them regardless of distance.
The screech rolled through the Depot off every wall and pillar, dust sifting from the ceiling, small rocks breaking loose from the formations above.
And answered.
From the shadows between formations. From cracks in the walls. From passages that hadn't existed a moment ago — dozens of War Shadows poured out. Knife-clawed, red-eyed, frenzied, metallic limbs clicking together in unison, flooding the open ground at the boss's command.
The Irregular reared. Stumps still radiating heat. Remaining scythes slashing the air in a rampage. It charged forward into the horde — using them as shields, red slits blazing, moving like something that had decided to stop being patient.
The boy and Bell backed together. Cleaver and knife raised. The swarm closing in from every direction.
Raska charged first. Bare fists hit the lead War Shadow hard enough to hear the crack. Welf's greatsword swung wide. Lili's bolts flew.
The Depot became a maelstrom — five against a tide, the boss rampaging through its own minions, no end in sight.
Chaos swallowed everything.
***