With the abjection finally gone — hopefully gone — the group's remaining danger was the collapsing walkway beneath their feet. The platforms still trembled from the creature's earlier thrashing, each slab crackling and swaying as they moved across it. No one spoke; all breath and focus were spent on staying alive.
One misstep, one loose stone, one crack too wide — and they'd follow Beardy into the darkness.
Piece by piece, step by shuddering step, the unstable path began to level out. Kael's boots finally touched solid flooring — a stretch of stone that felt blessedly unmoving beneath him. He exhaled in relief.
Then a fist slammed into his face.
His head jerked sideways, a burst of white filling his vision as he stumbled and fell hard to the floor. Before he could even blink, the guard had yanked him up by the collar, lifting him enough that his toes barely scraped the ground.
"You little rat!" the guard snarled, rage distorting every word.
"You lied to us! You said you used every drop of the oil!"
Kael winced, teeth grit, blood warm in his mouth.
The guard shook him.
"Do you have anything to say for yourself?!"
Kael forced a crooked and breathless grin.
"Well… looks like you're alive to complain about it, aren't you?"
The guard's eyes flared. "You—!"
"Enough."
The old man began to cut in between the two. He stepped forward and looked between them with cool disapproval.
"Is that how you treat our savior?"
The guard rounded on him. "He withheld critical supplies—!"
"And still saved us," the old man countered. "Which is more than can be said for your leadership…"
The guard's jaw clenched, his muscles were tight, but slowly — with a sharp exhale — he released Kael's collar. Kael slumped, catching himself with a hand against the floor.
The old man crouched before him. His eyes were strange but familiar — that quiet, cold, calculating looks — yet something like amused curiosity also glimmered beneath them.
"Well then," he murmured, "have you any more tricks tucked up that sleeve of yours?"
Kael swallowed and shook his head.
A simple "no."
The old man cast a brief glance toward the boy — the aged-eyed youth — who returned a silent nod of confirmation. Satisfied, he then rose.
"Very well." The old man turned back toward the path ahead.
"Let us continue."
But before moving, he paused at the edge of the yawning abyss behind them. The darkness below still swallowed the echo of Beardy and the abjection alike.
"One less mouth," he said quietly, almost to himself, "to share our spoils..."
***
Four left.
Their formation felt different now — tighter, quieter, and strained in a way no one wanted to acknowledge. The guard who had lost his brows kept himself planted right behind Kael's shoulder—close enough that Kael could feel every shift of his armor.
The man wasn't subtle; he didn't intend to be. His distance was a warning in itself, a silent way of saying he had been watching Kael ever since that stunt Kael did earlier, and he would continue to watch until he was convinced the boy wouldn't pull something else. Kael didn't protest. He didn't flinch at the hovering presence or the weight of suspicion pressing between his shoulder blades. Truthfully, he was simply relieved. Relieved they hadn't gutted him the moment they discovered his lie. Relieved he was even still walking with them at all.
But as they moved deeper, Kael's mind wasn't on the guard, or his anger, or even the fact that they'd just watched one of their own vanish screaming into the abyss. Something heavier tugged at him, something that had been bothering him since the instant the torches died and chaos erupted.
The brayhound.
The one he had supposedly "killed."
No — not killed. He hadn't killed it. He hadn't even touched it. The beast had leapt at him, and all Kael had done was to lit a platform on fire. Its own momentum had carried it off the edge. It was its own weight, its own reckless lunge, that sent it plummeting into the black throat of the chasm.
Yet earlier, the two creatures he had killed — those he'd directly brought down — had both released that strange dark orb. A drifting sphere that rose from their bodies like some final exhale and flowed into him without resistance.
He remembered the sensation vividly. Those orbs came to him. Always. Immediately.
But this time…
Nothing.
No light or a flicker. Not even the faintest pulse lurking in the depths below.
Was it because he didn't kill it with his own hands?
Did the rules somehow require the finishing blow to be his?
Or was the distance too great? The fall too deep?
He clenched his jaw. Those were the comfortable explanations.
The safer ones.
The ones he wanted to believe.
But there was another possibility. The worst one. The one that made the hairs on his arms prickle.
Maybe... the Brayhound never died at all.
***
The old man took point now. The boy stayed close with soundless steps. Kael followed, and the guard shadowed him so closely that Kael could hear every irritated huff through the man's teeth.
They walked for another stretch through weaving passages until the corridor widened into a circular chamber — and then all four stopped at once.
Because ahead, the floor was gone.
Not collapsed — intentionally removed. Long ago.
A massive rotary mechanism dominated the room like the remains of a colossal gear. Half of it was still embedded in the floor. The other half lay tilted, cracked, and useless. Metal beams jutted out across the empty chasm it once bridged, forming a skeletal lattice of rusted rails and disjointed supports.
It was the only way forward.
"Great, another one of these..." Kael muttered under his breath.
The old man studied the mess with narrowed eyes.
"The traversal array," he murmured. "I'd hoped it'd still be intact."
"Clearly not," the guard growled — shoving past Kael to the front, as if asserting his presence.
Kael didn't comment. He was too busy staring downward. Far below, nothing but darkness. The kind of darkness where even falling debris made no sound.
A thin walkway remained: a series of rust-choked beams and narrow support struts, barely wide enough for their boots. They'd have to cross single file.
Of course.
"Watch your footing," the old man advised, stepping carefully onto the first beam.
The boy followed him with eerie ease, like someone who'd walked this path before — or someone who simply didn't fear falling.
Kael took a steadying breath and stepped next. The beam groaned. Then the guard stepped behind him with a heavy, armored stomp.
Kael snapped his head back. "Would you stop—?"
"Shut up and move," the guard barked.
So Kael moved.
Step by trembling step, they crossed the iron skeleton. The room's stale draft howled through the open abyss, making the beams sway just enough to spike everyone's heartbeat.
Halfway across, Kael's nerves flared.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
That same instinct — the one that warned him of the Brayhound before — tightened painfully in his chest.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
He didn't hear breathing. But he heard metal.
A faint clink.
A scrape.
A shift.
Too close.
Kael's fingers curled around nothing again as he turned his head just slightly—
From the darkness below the beams, something moved.
A blur of pale hide. A shape hunched and wrong. Claws scraping metal.
A guttural snarl vibrated the entire framework.
Kael's blood ran cold.
"…No," he whispered. "No, no—"
The guard frowned. "What are you—"
A shriek tore from below — the same Brayhound roar he had heard before, only angrier, hungrier, its throat raw as if from the fall.
It wasn't dead.