Date: February 12, 542 years since the Fall of Zanra the Dishonored.
Moving through the Pyramid of Scales was like walking inside someone's nightmare, where space itself had lost its stability. The walls of the corridor, built of cyclopean obsidian blocks, would spread apart, turning the passage into a majestic canyon, then suddenly constrict, forcing Kaedan to instinctively duck.
"Don't lose pace," Iskon's dry voice echoed off the glossy surfaces.
Iskon walked first, and his Scaling Spirit was now in a state of constant wakefulness. The young man would occasionally make strange gestures, as if smoothing out invisible folds in the air. Each time the corridor tried to "collapse," Iskon would thrust his hand forward, and the space before him would momentarily stabilize, allowing the group to pass.
Kaedan followed, feeling his Unbreakable Armor grow heavier. This wasn't ordinary fatigue. His stone armor seemed to have begun its own life, absorbing the distorted essence of this place. At one point, the young man noticed a strange detail: cracks in the floor, previously barely visible, now resembled deep ravines.
"Bert, Olaf, stay close!" Kaedan commanded, turning to the knights.
He froze. His comrades, walking just a few paces behind, were suddenly far below. Or was he taller? No, the world around was changing too fast. The ceiling soared into infinite heights, and the floor slabs turned into vast squares. Kaedan looked at his hands and saw with horror his fingers in basalt vambraces become thin and short.
The process was silent and frighteningly fast. Within minutes, four Order knights had turned into tiny figures, their height no more than ten centimeters. For them now, even ordinary dust on the floor seemed like flying boulders, and the smell of old stone became suffocating and thick.
"It's a... scale anomaly," Iskon maintained icy calm, though his sword now seemed no longer than a needle. "The Pyramid isn't just changing the walls. It's changing us."
"And how do we get our size back?" Olaf panicked, raising his shield, looking around wildly.
Instead of an answer, from the darkness of a giant—by their current measure—crevice between the slabs came a sound that froze the blood in their veins. It wasn't the roar of a monster, but the heavy, wet breathing and scrape of claws on stone. From the shadow emerged something monstrous.
The creature, which had been an ordinary grey ruin rat, now towered over the knights like a giant dragon. Its eyes, two murky red lakes, blazed with hunger, and its fur resembled a palisade of dirty, jagged spears. A long tail, covered in scales, struck the floor, and for the shrunken warriors, it resonated like a genuine earthquake.
The rat let out a deafening squeak that hit the knights' eardrums with the force of a rockslide.
"To battle!" Kaedan instantly summoned all the power of his defense.
His Unbreakable Armor materialized, but due to his small size, it looked like a miniature but incredibly dense piece of jewelry work. Kaedan felt his inner energy had compressed along with his body, becoming even more concentrated. He thrust out his arm in its stone vambrace, ready to take the blow.
The beast leaped. An enormous paw with claws the size of a good two-handed sword descended upon the group. Kaedan didn't dodge. He planted his feet on the stone slab, using the "Rooting" technique, and took the blow on his cuirass.
A ring sounded. The rat's claws slid helplessly over the basalt surface of Kaedan's Armor. Despite his tiny size, the density of his defense remained the same—it was the power of a Warrior, compressed into a point. The ground under the young man's feet cracked, but he held, bearing the monster's weight.
"Iskon! Now!" Kaedan roared, feeling the muscles of his back groan under the load.
Iskon didn't need to be told twice. His Spirit, in this distorted world, worked with frightening efficiency. The young man didn't try to change his own size—that would require too much energy. Instead, he directed his will at his double-edged sword.
At the very moment the rat opened its mouth to bite, the blade of Iskon's sword suddenly lengthened dozens of times. The thin steel needle cut through the air, entering the beast's eye and exiting through the back of its head. The rat didn't even have time to close its mouth; its giant body toppled sideways, showering the knights with a rain of hot blood that now seemed to them like whole buckets of red liquid.
Iskon abruptly shortened his sword, shaking off the blood. His face was pale from the strain; using his Spirit in this place required surgical precision.
"One down," he tossed out laconically. "But I sense hundreds more such sources of energy in the walls. To them, we're just tiny prey that's wandered into their domain."
"We need to move towards the source of the distortion," Kaedan wiped the blood from his cuirass. His regeneration had already begun to soothe his humming, strained muscles. "If we don't get our size back, we'll just drown in the first puddle."
They moved on through the giant—to them—expanse of the hall. Kaedan walked ahead, his stone greaves thudding measuredly on the slabs, which now seemed like endless fields. Somewhere deep in his Vessel, anxiety pulsed. He understood that in the Pyramid of Scales, their true strength lay not in their swords, but in their ability not to lose the greatness of their spirit, even when the world turned them into grains of sand.
Ahead, beyond the horizon of one slab, a strange greenish light glimmered. A new trial already awaited those who dared to challenge the scales of the ancient Temple.