Mio
The third floor was different.
Darker. The lights had gone out. Most shattered, glass crunching under her feet. The ones that remained cast thin pools of yellow that didn't reach the walls.
The slimes had gathered here. Sixty, maybe seventy survivors clustered in a ring around something at the center of the garage. Still. Waiting.
Pools of dark liquid spread across the concrete. Old blood, black and thick, seeping from the figure kneeling at the center. The slimes drank from it, membranes flushing darker as they absorbed the corruption.
And in the center of the ring, a knight.
Kneeling. Head bowed. Gauntlets clasped around a hilt at its waist. Just a hilt, the blade shattered to a jagged edge no longer than her finger.
A broken sentinel guarding nothing. But waiting anyway, because that's what it was made to do.
Its head moved.
Slowly. Grinding. Rust on rust.
It looked at her.
And rose.
Plate armor, rusted and black. Fused to the flesh beneath. Where metal met skin, the boundary had rotted away into something hybrid. Gauntlets ending in points, fingers merged with steel.
No face. The helmet was solid, featureless, except for a thin gap where something red and wet gleamed in the darkness.
[Putrid Knight — C-grade Elite]
[HP: 15,000]
The pressure hit. Cold and heavy, pressing against her chest, trying to freeze her lungs, trying to lock her legs, trying to trigger the response that kept prey alive long enough to run.
[Status Effect: Fear]
She waited for the terror. The animal panic. The voice screaming run until her legs obeyed.
It didn't come.
She'd felt pressure before. In a cathedral that shouldn't exist, watching an Entity descend from a ceiling that went up forever. Flowers blooming in stone. A smile too wide for a human face.
Sixty-four candidates. A year of watching.
The Putrid Knight was ten feet tall, radiating death, ancient and wrong and hungry.
Gaian had clapped when Mio survived.
[Status: Resisted]
The knight's gauntlet flexed. It had expected her to run. They always ran.
She didn't.
The knight rolled its shoulders. Slow. Testing. Rust flaked from the joints, raining onto the concrete in orange dust. It opened and closed its free hand, the one not fused to the broken hilt, watching the fingers respond. Remembering how they worked.
The slimes noticed.
The ring around it tightened. Membranes pulsing faster now, agitated. Two of the larger ones, mothers bloated and spawning, pressed against the knight's legs. Not attacking. Feeding. Trying to drink deeper from the source they'd been nursing for centuries.
The knight looked down.
One gauntlet closed around a mother slime. Squeezed.
The membrane burst. Gel and half-formed spawn splattered across the concrete, across the knight's rusted greaves. It didn't flinch. Just watched the mess drip from its fingers.
Then it kicked. Casual. A dozen fodder slimes scattered, some bursting on impact, others tumbling into the blood pools where they dissolved into nothing.
The survivors fled. Pressing back against the walls, the pillars, anywhere that wasn't near the thing that had finally woken up.
The knight watched them scatter. Didn't follow. They weren't the prey it wanted.
It turned back to Mio.
Something inside it began to turn. A sound first. Low, grinding, metal on metal. Then deeper. A hum that started in the knight's chest and spread outward, vibrating through the concrete, rattling the dead lights, shaking dust from the ceiling in thin curtains.
Ancient machinery waking. Calibrating.
Her jaw clenched. She lifted her palm and fired.
Lightning struck rusted plate. Crackled. Dispersed. No anchor, nowhere to ground.
Two damage. That was it.
[HP: 14,998/15,000]
Fuck.
The hum peaked and steadied. Purple flames bled from the gaps between plate and flesh, filling the joints. The helmet brimmed with light that spilled from the visor.
Slimes were F-grade for a reason. This thing was C-grade for one too.
It raised one gauntlet, fingers spread wide, and spoke. Syllables that scraped against her ears and left something oily behind.
A rune formed in the air before its palm. Lines first, thin and precise. Then geometry blooming outward, shapes connecting to shapes, the whole structure humming as it built.
Quiet at first. Then louder. An inevitable crescendo.
She wasn't looking at the knight anymore.
Cracked beam. Six meters to its left. Concrete sagging above it, rebar visible through the fractures.
Load-bearing.
The knight's gauntlet blazed purple.
Her fingers aimed toward the beam.
First bolt. The beam groaned.
Second bolt. Dust rained.
Third bolt. The beam shattered.
The knight fired at the same instant, but it staggered, arm jerking as the floor shifted, and the beam of purple death went wide. Two meters to her left. Close enough to feel the heat sear her cheek.
It carved through the concrete wall behind her, sheared through rebar, and vanished into the dark where the ceiling should have ended but didn't.
The floor above came down.
Rubble first. Concrete chunks the size of refrigerators crashing onto rusted armor. A support column followed, slamming across its shoulders.
Then the SUV. Black, expensive, someone's pride parked one level up. Dropping like a guillotine blade onto something that used to be human.
Dust. Silence. Rebar settling. Concrete groaning.
[HP: 14,400/15,000]
She stared at the number.
Six hundred damage. She dropped a sublevel on it and that's all it did.
The rubble shifted.
A gauntlet punched through. Fingers flexing. Finding grip.
It stood.
Concrete sliding off its shoulders. The SUV crumpled behind it, frame bent in half. Purple light still bleeding from the gaps in its armor, brighter now, angrier.
The knight stepped forward. Then again. Not running. Walking. The pace of something that had waited centuries and could wait a few seconds more.
One gauntlet hung at its side. The other still clutched the broken hilt. Knuckles fused around it, fingers that hadn't unclenched since the blade shattered.
It fought one-handed. Because it had forgotten how to let go.
Run. Just run.
She ran. Tripped on a crack in the cement.
"Ow."
Her phone and keys clattered across the concrete.
Shit.
She grabbed them. Shoved them back in her pocket. Scrambled up.
She'd almost forgotten about the knight.
All fifteen thousand of it.
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