The portal deposited them into silver light.

  Cade blinked, adjusting to the sudden luminescence. The space before them was a corridor—not a room, not an arena, but a long tunnel stretching into the distance. The walls gleamed with a soft, metallic sheen, as if the stone itself was producing the light. Smooth floor beneath his feet, rough walls maybe twenty-five feet to either side, creating a passage about fifty feet wide. The ceiling hung perhaps ten feet overhead.

  The corridor wound off to the right several hundred yards ahead, disappearing around a gentle curve. No obvious enemies. No scenario setup. Just the tunnel, silver and strange, waiting.

  "Different," Rhys murmured, her eyes scanning the space with professional assessment.

  A grinding sound came from behind them.

  All three turned.

  The corridor behind them—the section they'd just walked through, the portal still visible at its end—was moving. The far end had begun to curl upward, the stone folding back on itself like a sheet of paper being rolled. The portal disappeared into the fold, consumed by the impossible geometry.

  And the rolling was advancing toward them.

  "What—" Cade started.

  "Move," Rhys said, already backing away.

  The rolling continued, slow but inexorable. The section of corridor nearest the fold inverted, ceiling becoming floor becoming ceiling again as it wrapped into the growing spiral. The effect was hypnotic—stone behaving like fabric, reality folding itself into a scroll.

  Cade backed away faster. The ceiling above the rolling section was descending now, curving down toward where his head had been moments ago. He ducked instinctively, even though he was already clear.

  "It's speeding up," Zyrian observed, his voice tight.

  He was right. The rolling had started at a crawl, but it was accelerating. The fold advanced faster, consuming more corridor with each passing second. What had been a leisurely pace was now approaching walking speed.

  "The room wants us to keep moving," Rhys said. She glanced at the advancing phenomenon, then at the corridor stretching ahead of them. "We should put some distance between us and... that."

  She didn't seem to know what to call it. Neither did Cade.

  Rhys turned and broke into a run, her small form surprisingly fast despite her tier-three size. Zyrian matched her pace, his rust-red body a blur of motion beside her silver companion.

  Cade jogged after them. His legs were so much longer than theirs that a light jog was enough to keep up with their sprint. One of the few advantages of his size—covering ground required minimal effort.

  The grinding continued behind them, a constant reminder that stopping was not an option.

  They rounded the bend.

  A figure stood in the center of the corridor.

  Cade's first thought was not Kindred. The proportions were wrong, the features too sharp. About two feet tall, feminine in shape, but with an angular face that seemed designed for intimidation rather than expression. Sharp teeth visible even with her mouth closed. Clavicles and shoulder structures that protruded aggressively, making her look dangerous even standing still.

  The corridor straightened beyond her for maybe a hundred yards, then curved left in the distance. Another bend. Another stretch of unknown territory.

  The figure moved.

  It was a pirouette—graceful, almost dance-like, arms extended upward at an angle. But as she spun, the air around her hands began to twist. Visible distortion, like heat shimmer but more violent. Dust from the rough stone walls gathered into the rotation, forming a small vortex that grew with each revolution.

  She completed the spin—two full rotations, seven hundred and twenty degrees—and thrust her hands toward the approaching group.

  The vortex launched.

  "Wind attacks," Rhys said, her voice sharp with recognition. "Split up."

  She darted to the right, angling toward the wall. Zyrian reacted a beat later, breaking left. The two of them moved with the practiced efficiency of people who'd faced this kind of threat before.

  Cade stayed in the center.

  The vortex was coming straight down the middle of the corridor, a spinning column of dust and compressed air. It was moving fast—the hundred-foot distance would be crossed in seconds. Rhys and Zyrian were already out of its path, pressed against opposite walls.

  Can I push through it?

  He crouched, bracing himself, preparing to take the impact head-on.

  He forgot to close his eyes.

  The leading edge of the vortex hit him like a slap, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was the dust—a concentrated blast of grit and debris that drove directly into his unprotected face. His eyes, specifically. Fine particles scraped across his corneas, triggering immediate tearing and involuntary clamping of his eyelids.

  He couldn't see.

  The main body of the vortex struck a moment later. It was stronger than he'd expected—not enough to knock him down, but enough to shove him backward several feet. His bare feet scraped against the smooth stone as he fought for traction.

  Then it was past, dissipating behind him into nothing.

  Cade stumbled forward, cursing, hands coming up to his face. His eyes were streaming, the grit grinding against the sensitive tissue every time he tried to blink. He rubbed at them with his fingers—his dirty fingers, he realized too late, fingers covered in the same dust that had just blinded him.

  The corridor. The rolling corridor is still coming.

  He'd forgotten to check behind him. The grinding sound was still audible, distant but present, which meant the fold was still advancing. If he stood here too long, rubbing uselessly at his eyes...

  He forced himself forward, stumbling in what he hoped was the right direction. His eyelids were doing better work than his hands—something about the blinking motion was pushing the debris toward the corners of his eyes, clearing his vision incrementally.

  How do eyelids even work? he wondered, the analytical part of his brain seizing on the distraction. Does the grit get pushed behind the eye socket? Absorbed by the body?

  That sounded awful. He hoped that wasn't how it worked.

  He blinked again, hard, and his vision started to clear.

  Rhys had felt only a light breeze as the vortex passed the center of the corridor. She was already moving, running along the wall toward the wind user, when she saw the creature finish another motion.

  Fast, she thought. Very fast.

  The wind user's hands sliced through the air in a complex pattern—five distinct movements, each one launching something. Rhys couldn't see the attacks clearly at first. The first two picked up enough dust to be visible, curved lines of compressed air that bent toward her position along the wall. The third, fourth, and fifth were nearly invisible, their trajectories only apparent from the slight distortion they caused in the air.

  All five were aimed at her.

  She saw me as the greater threat. Or the easier target.

  The first slice came in high, aimed at her head. Rhys ducked under it, keeping her momentum forward. Keep moving. Don't let her predict your position.

  The second slice hit the wall directly in front of her, spraying dust and stone chips. Rhys had to stop, had to shield her eyes, had to—

  The third slice came through the new dust cloud, invisible until it was almost on top of her. She saw it at the last moment, a ripple in the suspended particles, and jumped.

  The blade of compressed air passed beneath her, cutting through the space where her knees had been.

  She was still in the air when she saw the fourth one.

  There was no time to dodge. No time to adjust. She was committed to the jump, gravity pulling her down, and the slice was coming directly at her midsection.

  It hit.

  The impact was like being struck by a whip made of pressure. The air blade cut into her stomach, just below her breasts, and the force of it sent her flying—backward, into the wall, all the momentum she'd built suddenly reversed.

  She hit the stone hard. The wind left her lungs in a single explosive gasp. She felt her body slide down to the ground, felt the cold floor against her back, felt the burning line of pain across her abdomen.

  Dark red, she noted, looking down at the wound. Not bleeding freely. Damage, but not critical.

  The fifth slice hit the wall a yard ahead of where she'd been running. A final trap, in case she'd kept her momentum. The wind user had anticipated every possible response.

  Rhys lay on the ground, hurt but alive, and watched the rest of the fight unfold.

  Cade's vision cleared just in time to see Zyrian engage.

  The wind user had surrounded herself with a sphere of spinning air, visible as a distortion, a boundary of compressed atmosphere extending about two feet from her body in every direction. She was running toward Zyrian, the sphere moving with her, clearly intending to use it as both weapon and shield.

  Zyrian didn't hesitate.

  He charged directly into the sphere.

  Cade saw him close his eyes at the last moment, throwing a forearm up to protect his face. Then he was inside the barrier, and the sphere was doing its work—thin strands of wind moving in opposite directions, pummeling his body from every angle. It looked like being caught in a washing machine made of pressure differentials.

  The wind user took advantage. She threw a punch while Zyrian was still disoriented, catching him in the face. He absorbed it—the motion was practiced, rolling with the impact rather than fighting it—but the damage was done. He was inside her sphere, recovering instantly from the punch, and she was backing away.

  She’s trying to force him out, Cade realized. Make him face the sphere boundary again.

  Zyrian saw it too. Instead of retreating, he lunged forward, closing the distance before the wind user could escape. She tried to turn, tried to run faster than she could move backward, but that was a mistake.

  Zyrian caught her legs.

  Grappling, Cade thought, a spark of dark amusement cutting through his concern. After everything he had said.

  But it was working. Zyrian took the wind user to the ground, her sphere of air still active but meaningless now that he was inside it. He maneuvered with practiced efficiency—leg control, hip placement, leverage—and twisted her limb into a position it wasn't meant to occupy.

  Her knee snapped with an audible crack.

  Zyrian didn't stop. He spun, repositioned, drove his knee into her head. The sphere of wind flickered and died as she lost concentration.

  Then he was on his feet, stomping down, and the wind user's head met the stone floor with terminal force.

  She dissolved into gray mist.

  Anima flooded into Cade—a modest amount, a reward for participating in a kill. He felt himself grow slightly, maybe an inch, the energy finding new spaces to fill.

  Zyrian got more. The killing blow was his.

  Rhys was getting to her feet as Cade approached, one hand pressed against the wound on her stomach. Her face was tight with pain, but her movements were controlled. Deliberate.

  "Keep moving," she said, walking past Cade and Zyrian without stopping. "The corridor is still coming."

  She was right. The grinding sound was still audible, fainter now but persistent. They'd put distance between themselves and the fold, but it hadn't stopped.

  Cade fell into step beside Zyrian, matching the smaller Kindred's pace.

  "Nice work back there," he said. "I think I saw some grappling in that sequence."

  Zyrian's expression flickered—annoyance, maybe, or reluctant acknowledgment. "The situation called for it. She was using mobility against me. Taking her to the ground removed that advantage."

  "So grappling does have its uses."

  "In specific circumstances. Against specific opponents." Zyrian's tone made it clear he didn't appreciate having his earlier lecture thrown back at him. "Don't let it go to your head."

  Cade let the subject drop. There would be time for gloating later, assuming they survived whatever else this corridor had in store.

  They rounded another bend, spreading out this time without discussion. Rhys took the right wall, her movement slightly stiff from her injury but still quick. Zyrian took the left. Cade stayed in the center, where his size could be either advantage or liability depending on what they faced.

  The corridor straightened again, maybe two hundred yards of silver-lit tunnel before the next curve.

  A figure stood in their path.

  Another one.

  This enemy was different from the wind user—similar size, similar not-quite-Kindred features, but the posture was different. More relaxed. More confident. And there was something on the ground in front of them—a purple mark, glowing faintly against the smooth stone.

  The figure made a gesture.

  Something small and purple shot from their hands, streaking toward Zyrian with unnatural precision. It wasn't fast like the wind attacks had been—more like a seeking projectile, adjusting its course as it flew, homing in on its target.

  Cade saw more purple marks on the floor. A triangle of them, arranged behind the figure extending to each wall, each one glowing with the same violet light.

  Arcane essence? he thought. Or something like it.

  He started running, no vortex to cause any hesitancy this time.

  His body responded with speed that surprised him. The enhancements from tier-three were more significant than he'd realized—his legs drove harder, his stride lengthened, the ground blurred beneath his feet. He was covering the distance to the enemy far faster than he'd expected.

  Rhys was running too, but she couldn't match his pace. The size difference, combined with his new physical capabilities, meant he was pulling ahead rapidly.

  The purple missile hit Zyrian.

  There was no explosion, no impact damage. Zyrian simply... wasn't there anymore. One moment he was running along the left wall, the next he was standing in front of the enemy, still moving in the same direction he'd been running.

  The enemy was already spinning, foot extended in a kick that would have hit nothing if Zyrian hadn't appeared exactly where he did. The timing was perfect—Zyrian's momentum carried him directly into the strike.

  The kick caught him full in the face.

  Zyrian's body went into an involuntary backflip, ragdolling through the air before crashing to the ground. He didn't get up immediately.

  Space magic, Cade thought, still running. The missile marks a target, the marks on the floor are destinations. She can move people against their will.

  Another purple missile launched, this one aimed at Cade.

  He was close now—maybe ten feet from the enemy, closing fast. The missile hit him mid-stride, and he felt something lurch inside him. A sensation of displacement, of his body being somewhere it shouldn't be.

  Then it passed.

  He was still there. Still running. Still ten feet—now five feet—from the enemy.

  The teleporter's eyes widened.

  They'd been angling past him, Cade realized. Running at an angle that would have taken them behind his position, assuming the teleport had worked. They'd planned to dump him at one of the distant floor marks, then focus on Rhys.

  The teleport hadn't worked, though.

  Cade didn't know why, didn't have time to figure it out. The enemy was right in front of him, still committed to their evasive angle, completely unprepared for him to still be there.

  He kicked.

  It was instinctive—the motion of a field goal kicker, foot swinging up in a powerful arc. The enemy's body was maybe the size of a football. The physics were similar.

  His enhanced tier-three strength drove his foot into the teleporter's midsection with devastating force. The body launched off the ground like a punted ball, rocketing toward the wall—

  Purple flash.

  The teleporter vanished mid-flight, reappearing at one of the floor marks near the left wall. But she was still moving—still carrying the momentum from his kick, now redirected horizontally. She shot across the corridor like a cannonball, tumbling end over end, completely out of control.

  Another purple flash. She appeared at a different mark, velocity redirected again, now angling upward toward the ceiling. The impact should have been fatal, but she teleported again before contact—appearing near the right wall, momentum carrying her in yet another direction.

  She's using the marks to redirect herself, Cade realized, already moving. Burning through her spatial anchors to avoid hitting anything solid.

  But the teleports were getting sloppier. Less precise. She appeared too close to a wall, had to burn another mark immediately. Then another. Her trajectory was chaos—a pinball bouncing between invisible bumpers, each jump buying her seconds but costing her options.

  Cade tracked her pattern. The marks on the floor were disappearing with each use, violet lights winking out one by one, and she was slowing down. She had maybe four left. Three.

  She materialized directly above him, falling now, the last of her horizontal momentum spent. Her hands were already moving, trying to form another purple missile—

  Cade jumped.

  His tier-three legs launched him upward with more force than he'd intended, but the timing was perfect. He caught her at the apex of his leap, both hands closing around her torso before she could complete the gesture. Her eyes went wide with something that might have been fear.

  He squeezed.

  The sensation was familiar now—the resistance of a body that didn't want to collapse, followed by the moment when it did. Bones cracked. An organ ruptured. The teleporter made a sound that cut off halfway through. Cade cringed at the combination of sensations.

  They hit the ground together, Cade landing in a crouch, the broken form still clutched in his hands. It dissolved into gray mist before he could let go.

  Anima flooded into him—more this time, the lion's share of the kill reward. He felt himself grow again, another couple inches or so, the energy settling into his expanded frame.

  And then he noticed what wasn't happening.

  No discomfort. No warning pulse from the Oath essence. No sense that he'd violated anything by crushing a person-shaped creature to death with his bare hands.

  I will seek to minimize suffering.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The teleporter had been trying to kill him. Had successfully hurt Zyrian. Would have kept hurting them if given the chance. But that wasn't why the Oath stayed silent.

  The labyrinth creatures don't suffer, he realized. Not really. They live for battle. They resurrect with rewards instead of penalties. This isn't violence against beings who can be harmed—it's... something else. A game they want to play.

  The relief that washed through him was profound. He'd been dreading this confirmation, half-expecting his essence to rebel against the necessary violence of the labyrinth. Instead, it recognized what he was only now understanding: these weren't victims. They were participants.

  He could fight here. Really fight, without the weight of ethical compromise dragging at his conscience.

  It felt like permission.

  Zyrian was conscious but dazed, lying on the ground where he'd fallen. His eyes were open, tracking movement, but he made no attempt to get up.

  Cade crouched beside him, then carefully—very carefully—slid his hands beneath the small form and lifted. Zyrian's naked body was light in his palms, fragile-seeming despite the evident toughness that had let him survive a full-force kick to the face.

  "Can you hear me?" Cade asked.

  "Yes." The word came out slightly slurred. "Just... need a moment."

  "The corridor is still coming."

  "I know."

  Cade looked at Rhys, who had caught up and was standing nearby, one hand still pressed to her wounded stomach. "Do we keep moving, or wait for him to recover?"

  Rhys tilted her head, listening. The grinding sound was still audible, but fainter than before. They'd put significant distance between themselves and the fold during the two fights.

  "Carry him," she decided. "He'll recover quickly—it was only one hit, and not a critical one. But we shouldn't stop moving entirely." She glanced at the corridor ahead, at the next bend waiting in the distance. "Let me go ahead a bit. Scout what we're facing next. You follow with Zyrian."

  "And if there's another enemy?"

  "Then I'll assess and report back. Or engage if I have to." Her expression was calm, despite the pain evident in her posture. "We need information more than we need all three of us charging blindly into the next fight."

  Cade nodded. It made sense. Rhys was wounded but mobile, and her smaller size made her harder to target. If something was waiting around the next bend, she'd see it before it saw her.

  "Be careful," he said.

  Rhys's lips quirked slightly—not quite a smile, but close. "Always."

  She turned and jogged ahead, her silver form growing smaller as she approached the next curve in the corridor. Cade watched her go, then looked down at Zyrian cradled in his hands.

  "Comfortable?"

  "No." Zyrian's voice was stronger now, some of the daze clearing. "But functional. Keep moving."

  Cade started walking, following Rhys's path, carrying his small companion as though he were precious and fragile.

  Behind them, the grinding continued.

  Rhys disappeared around the bend.

  Cade followed at a slower pace, Zyrian now walking beside him rather than being carried. The rust-red Kindred moved with only a slight unsteadiness, the effects of the kick already fading.

  "That teleportation didn't work on you," Zyrian said.

  "I noticed."

  "Do you know why?"

  Cade shook his head. "It felt like something tried to happen. A lurch, like my body was being pulled somewhere. Then it just... stopped."

  "Interesting." Zyrian's tone suggested he was filing that information away for future analysis. "Some essence types grant resistance to spatial manipulation. But you only have the Oath essence, and that shouldn't—"

  "I don't know," Cade cut in. "Add it to the list of things that are weird about me. I think I just had too much mass for it to handle. I’m guessing it wasn’t supposed to be facing Kindred my size. Just the Space equivalent of that earlier vortex not being able to take me off my feet."

  They rounded the bend.

  And stopped.

  The corridor ahead had transformed. Where smooth stone should have continued, dark water filled the passage from wall to wall. A pool, maybe two hundred feet long, stretching the entire width of the fifty-foot corridor under a slightly higher ceiling. On the far side, Cade could see the floor resume—silvery luminescent stone picking up where it had left off—but between here and there was nothing but murky liquid.

  And above the pool, moving across the ceiling like something out of a nightmare, was Rhys.

  She was climbing inverted, her small body pressed against the stone overhead. Her fingers dug into the surface with each movement, creating handholds where none existed, pulling herself forward in a motion that reminded Cade of monkey bars. Except she was making the bars herself, crushing indentations into solid rock with nothing but grip strength.

  "That's incredible," Cade breathed.

  Rhys paused mid-crawl, glancing back at him. "Tier-three is pretty strong, as small as we may be to you." She resumed her progress and said over her shoulder, "Hopefully you’ll be able to do something similar."

  Cade approached the wall, putting Zyrian down. The smaller Kindred was steady on his feet now, already moving toward the stone surface to begin his own climb.

  Cade pressed his palms against the wall and pushed.

  His body moved backward. The wall didn't budge.

  "You have to squeeze, not push," Zyrian said, carving his first handholds. "Compress the stone between your fingers. Create the indentations, then use them for grip."

  Cade tried again. He pressed his fingertips against the stone, trying to pinch rather than push. The surface resisted. He pushed harder, felt his fingers sliding rather than digging in.

  After thirty seconds of increasingly frustrated attempts, he managed to create shallow divots—barely deep enough to register. When he tried to use them to pull himself up, his fingers slipped free immediately.

  "It's not working," he said.

  "Keep trying. It takes practice to—"

  "No, I mean physically." Cade stepped back, examining his hands. "I think... the square-cube law, maybe? My body mass increases faster than my strength as I scale up. What works for you at two feet doesn't work for me at five and a half."

  Zyrian paused his climb, considering this. "That would explain some of your limitations."

  "Great. So what do I do about a two-hundred-foot pool of water?"

  Rhys had stopped again, hanging from the ceiling maybe fifty feet out over the water. She adjusted her grip, securing herself more firmly, then twisted to look back at him.

  "Just cross the water," she called. "Wade through. We'll watch over you from above."

  Cade looked at the dark surface of the pool. He couldn't see the bottom. Couldn't tell how deep it went. Couldn't see if anything was waiting beneath.

  "Fine," he said.

  Zyrian resumed his climb, quickly catching up to and passing Cade's position as he scaled the wall and began traversing the ceiling. Within moments, both Kindred were overhead, moving along the stone surface like particularly determined spiders.

  Cade stepped into the water.

  It was cold.

  Not painfully so, but enough to make him gasp as the liquid rose past his ankles, his calves, his knees. The bottom was smooth—the same stone as the rest of the corridor—and his bare feet found solid purchase with each step.

  The water reached his thighs. He was maybe a quarter of the way across, the far shore still frustratingly distant, when something grabbed his foot.

  Cade's first thought was octopus.

  Tentacles wrapped around his ankle, suckered surfaces latching onto his skin with alarming strength. The grip pulled downward, trying to drag his foot toward whatever body the tentacles were attached to.

  Panic surged through him.

  He lunged forward, trying to run, his enhanced strength letting him push through the water with surprising ease. His foot came down hard on the next step—and he felt the tentacles crush beneath the ball of his foot, silvery blood mixing with the dark water in the silvery light.

  At the same moment, a second set of jaws crunched around his middle toe.

  The pain was immediate and absolute. Cade bellowed—his physical voice, loud enough to make the water ripple—as something latched onto his foot with a wet, flattening pressure. He felt the beak engage: not a bite but a rotation, a grinding spiral that cored into the flesh of his toe like a drill made of bone. The digit didn't tear free—it was excavated, carved out in a perfect cylinder that disappeared into the creature's gullet.

  Blood bloomed around his foot, red mixing with silver, and the water ahead of him began to churn.

  More of them. Shapes moving just below the surface—flat, almost disc-like, with thin tendrils trailing behind them like hair. Drawn by the blood or the noise or both. Coming from everywhere at once.

  Cade took two more steps, felt something slap against his left calf and immediately compress. The creature flattened itself against his skin, going from fist-sized to pancake-thin in an instant, its branching tentacles spreading across his leg like roots seeking purchase. Tiny hooks—he could feel them, hundreds of them, rasping barbs that bit into his flesh and curled inward.

  He grabbed at it instinctively, trying to tear it free.

  The hooks dug deeper. What should have been removal became excavation—the barbs ripping channels through his skin as they refused to release, tearing him open in their effort to stay attached. Blood sheeted down his calf.

  Don’t pull. Don’t pull.

  He jumped instead.

  His tier-three body responded with power he hadn't expected. The leap carried him fifty feet—horizontal distance, ten feet of height—arcing over the churning water just under the ceiling of the corridor. He crashed down near the far edge, water exploding around him, and immediately felt more creatures attach.

  They were everywhere now. Latching onto his bare legs, his thighs, his lower body—flattening on contact, spreading across his skin like living bandages. He could feel the tentacles threading outward from each compressed core, the hooks finding purchase, the beaks beginning their horrible rotation wherever they'd landed. Circular wounds opening across his flesh, perfect cylinders of meat being carved away and consumed.

  One final leap.

  Cade threw himself toward the shore, landing on solid stone, creatures still attached. He rolled onto his side and forced himself not to grab at them—instead he started pounding, fists driving down onto the flattened cores, feeling them rupture beneath his blows. The bodies burst like blisters, spraying dark fluid, and when they died the hooks went slack. Only then could he peel the remains away, the limp tentacles sliding free of the channels they'd carved.

  Rhys dropped from the ceiling.

  She landed beside him and immediately went to work, her small hands finding the cores on the backs of his legs—the ones he couldn't reach, couldn't pound against the stone. She didn't try to pull them off. Instead she drove her fingers directly into each flattened body, puncturing the cores, killing them before extraction. Despite her size, her tier-three strength let her tear the dead things apart, peeling away the slack tentacles, clearing the wounds they left behind.

  Cade focused on the creature that had his foot—the one that had taken his toe. Its beak was still rotating, still grinding, working on a second digit. He grabbed it with both hands and squeezed, feeling the core collapse, the beak seizing mid-rotation. The hooks relaxed. He threw the remains aside and moved to the next.

  Eight. Nine of them. Maybe more. He'd crushed one under his hip when he landed, hadn't even noticed until he felt it pop.

  When the last creature died, anima flooded into him.

  Two toes were gone. The ones next to his big toe, just... absent. Ragged stumps where digits should have been, already starting to clot despite the severity of the wounds.

  "Great," he muttered. "Fantastic."

  Zyrian dropped from the ceiling, landing on the far shore with practiced grace. His expression was apologetic as he approached.

  "I couldn't help," he said. "You moved too fast. By the time I realized what was happening, you were already out of the water on the distant side."

  "It's fine." Cade examined his wounds—the amputated toes, the bite marks on his legs and lower glutes, the general mess of his lower body. "Nothing that won't heal with advancement. Assuming this corridor ever ends."

  Rhys was larger now. The anima from the creatures had pushed her past some threshold—she stood maybe three feet tall, her details more apparent, her wounds from the wind user's attack less prominent against her expanded frame.

  Zyrian had grown too, though not as dramatically. Maybe two and a half feet. His rust-red skin seemed darker at this size, his features sharper.

  Cade himself was well over six feet again. The constant fluctuation in height was becoming routine, if not comfortable.

  "This is definitely longer than usual," Rhys said, looking ahead at the next bend in the corridor. "Extended rooms sometimes grant rewards partway through. Opportunities for advancement. You can always tell by when an obvious essence fruit spawns." She paused. "Poison is not off-limits for the labyrinth, but it will never make poison look like a reward."

  The rumbling continued behind them. Distant, but persistent.

  "We should keep moving," Zyrian said. "Can you walk?"

  Cade tested his foot. The bleeding had already stopped—his accelerated healing working overtime—but the stumps were raw, the nerves screaming with every movement.

  He tried to stand.

  A heel-step limp on the injured side, keeping pressure off the missing toes. Each step sent pain radiating up his leg, jarring his wounds, reminding him of every bite and tear.

  "I can move," he said through gritted teeth. "Let's go."

  Rhys fell into step beside him, matching his reduced pace. "Look on the bright side," she said. "At least they didn't get anything more... sensitive."

  Her gaze dropped pointedly to his nakedness.

  Cade shivered at the thought. And then, impossibly, horrifyingly—

  He got hard.

  How? The question screamed through his mind. How is that possible? I’m missing toes. I’m covered in bite wounds. Everything hurts. How can my body possibly be responding like this?

  But it was. The arousal surged through him despite the pain, despite the circumstances, despite every logical reason why it shouldn't be happening. Whatever this world had done to his biology, it didn't care about context. Didn't care about injury or danger or basic self-preservation.

  It just wanted.

  Cade turned his hobbling into a run.

  The pain flared with each step—pushing off with three remaining toes, jarring the wounds, punishing his body for the speed. But if he could heal this fast, his body could handle a little more abuse. And he needed to get away from Rhys's teasing gaze before she noticed—

  Too late. She was already smirking.

  He ran faster.

  Rhys and Zyrian sprinted to keep up, their smaller bodies working harder to match his wounded strides. Rhys's increased size helped—at three feet, she could almost pace him when he was limping.

  The corridor bent again.

  And something was waiting.

  The creature was Cade's height.

  That was the first thing he noticed—finally, an enemy that matched his scale. Navy blue and gray, colored lighter on the undersides, with a bulk that reminded him of an elephant. But the proportions were wrong in ways that made his skin crawl. Six legs instead of four, arranged in two parallel rows like a massive insect. Tusks that curved forward and then up, serrated along their inner edges. And a tail—thick at the base, tapering to a point that gleamed like polished bone, held high and forward like a scorpion's stinger.

  No eyes that he could see. Just a smooth, featureless face above those killing tusks, the head swiveling slightly as if tracking him through senses he couldn't identify.

  It saw him. He saw it.

  They both charged.

  The corridor was maybe a hundred feet long between them. The creature closed the distance with horrifying speed for a creature so massive, those six legs moving in rippling coordination, tusks lowered, the tail arcing forward over its back like a loaded weapon.

  Cade's plan was simple: time the collision, use his tail to redirect its momentum, flip it onto its back. The same physics that had worked in training exercises. Just bigger.

  He was wrong.

  The creature didn't slow for impact. It accelerated, and those forward-curving tusks weren't just weapons—they were scoops, designed to catch and lift. Cade tried to dodge at the last second, but the thing was faster than it had any right to be. One tusk caught him across the hip, not piercing but shoving, and suddenly he was airborne, tumbling, crashing into the corridor wall hard enough to crack stone.

  He hit the ground gasping, his vision swimming. The creature was already turning, already coming back for a second pass.

  "Flank it!" Zyrian's voice cut through the ringing in Cade's ears.

  The two Kindred split apart, sprinting along opposite walls. The creature tracked Cade—the larger threat, the one it had engaged first—and charged again.

  Cade scrambled to his feet, barely getting clear as the tusks scraped the wall where his head had been. But this time, he saw Rhys and Zyrian reach the creature's hindquarters.

  They attacked together.

  Rhys went for the tendons of the rearmost legs, her tier-three strength letting her tear into flesh that should have been too tough for her size. Zyrian targeted the base of the tail, trying to disable the stinger before it could be brought to bear.

  The creature screamed.

  The sound was wrong—too high, too sharp, like metal scraping metal. It spun with shocking speed, the wounded rear legs barely slowing it, and the tail lashed backward.

  Zyrian dove clear. Rhys wasn't as lucky—the tail caught her across the ribs, not the point but the shaft, sending her tumbling across the stone floor.

  But the creature had turned away from Cade.

  He didn't think. Didn't plan. Just moved, sprinting toward the thing's exposed back while its attention was fixed on the small figures that had hurt it. His tail unfurled as he ran, the appendage he kept forgetting he had finally doing something useful.

  He leaped.

  Not over it this time—onto it. His hands found purchase on the armored plates along its spine, his legs wrapping around its midsection, facing backwards, his tail snaking forward to loop around its thick neck. The creature bucked, trying to throw him, but he held on.

  Then the stinger came for him.

  He saw it in his peripheral vision—that bone-white point arcing up and back, targeting the large threat now clinging to its body. He tried to twist away, to put the creature's own bulk between himself and the strike.

  He was too slow.

  The stinger punched through his left shoulder from behind, entering below the shoulder blade and exiting just beneath his collarbone. The pain was extraordinary—white-hot, all-consuming, a spike of agony that threatened to blank his mind entirely.

  But the tail was now stuck in him. The creature couldn't retract it without tearing free, and the angle was wrong for it to generate force.

  Now or never.

  Cade released his grip on the creature's back and threw himself sideways, off the thing's body, dragging his own tail—still wrapped around its neck—with him. The motion was ugly, graceless, powered more by desperation than technique. The stinger tore through his shoulder as he fell, widening the wound, and he screamed with his physical voice loud enough to shake dust from the ceiling.

  But the leverage worked.

  The creature's head twisted as Cade's weight and momentum yanked it sideways. Its six legs scrambled for purchase, but two of them were already wounded from Rhys's attack. It went over—not a clean flip, more of a rolling collapse—and one of those serrated tusks drove into the stone floor as it landed.

  One tusk. Not both. The creature was pinned but not helpless, its free tusk twitching against the floor, its legs still kicking, trying to right itself.

  Cade couldn't use his left arm. The shoulder was a ruin, blood sheeting down his side, the limb hanging useless. But he still had his right.

  He started pounding.

  Single fist, driving down into the creature's skull. Again. Again. The stone beneath them cracked. The creature's struggles continued, that free tusk gouging at air, legs churning uselessly.

  Rhys appeared at his side, her ribs clearly damaged but her hands still capable. She went for the creature's throat, tearing at the softer flesh beneath the jaw. Zyrian flanked from the other direction, attacking the joints where the embedded tusk met the skull, trying to keep it pinned.

  The creature screamed again, weaker now. Its movements slowed.

  Cade kept pounding until it stopped moving entirely. Then he pounded some more, just to be sure, until the body finally dissolved into gray mist beneath his fist.

  Anima flooded in. More than before—enough to push all three of them to the threshold of the next tier. Cade felt his body expand further, bones lengthening, muscles rebuilding around his new frame.

  Including his shoulder. The wound didn't heal completely—the hole was still there, still bleeding—but something had stabilized. The worst of the damage was being addressed, even if full recovery would require advancement.

  "That was nearly a disaster," Zyrian said, limping over to examine Cade's injury. "Your technique needs work."

  "My technique kept it pinned long enough to kill." Cade looked at his right hand, knuckles split and bloody from the repeated impacts. "I'll take ugly wins over pretty losses."

  Zyrian made a sound that might have been grudging agreement.

  For a vegan, Cade thought, I seem to have a disturbingly easy time killing things that don’t look human.

  The realization bothered him. Why did striking human-shaped creatures feel wrong, but pummeling a six-legged nightmare into the ground feel... fine? Was he really that much of a speciesist at heart?

  Cade returned to his hobbling limp, exhausted from pushing through the pain.

  The next bend revealed salvation.

  A stretch of solid green extended across the corridor—twenty feet deep, a different color and texture than anything they'd encountered so far. And in the center of that green space, glowing faintly against the altered floor, sat an essence ability fruit.

  Pale blue. Spherical. Waiting. And below it, a bunch of those bland green fruits that bubble up to provide sustenance in these rooms.

  "A break area," Rhys breathed, relief evident in her voice. "The labyrinth allows them in extended rooms. Time to recover. Time to advance." She started forward. "Just in time."

  The moment they stepped onto the green surface, the rumbling stopped.

  Complete silence. The grinding, rolling, corridor-consuming phenomenon that had been chasing them since they entered the room had simply... paused.

  "Stay inside the green area," Rhys cautioned. "Any of us stepping back out might end the reprieve."

  Cade sank to the ground, exhaustion suddenly catching up with him. His foot throbbed. His legs ached from dozens of bites. His body was a map of injuries that were healing too fast to be natural but not fast enough to be comfortable.

  But they had time now. Time to advance. Time to heal properly.

  "I want the fruit," he said.

  Both Kindred looked at him.

  "The Oath essence just amplifies my strength when I act in accordance with it. Useful, but passive. I want something active. Something like what the wind user had." He gestured vaguely at his battered body. "I'm tired of having to punch things."

  "You might not make it far on your first life anyway," Zyrian pointed out. "The higher tiers are brutal. Most people don't clear them until their third or fourth attempt at minimum."

  "Exactly. So why save essence slots for later? I might as well use them now, bank on having another shot if things go wrong." Agreeing without really being convinced he would be reborn at all. Cade looked at the pale blue fruit. "Besides, blue probably means water. And I've always loved water."

  He paused, glancing back at the bend in the corridor that held the dark pool they'd crossed on the other side.

  "Hungry weird octopuses aside."

  "You should advance first," Zyrian suggested. "Then take the fruit. That way your shadow self gains the fruit's ability one tier later. It gives you more time to master it before facing a version of yourself that has it too."

  That made sense. Cade nodded.

  All three of them settled into meditative postures and ate their fill of the simple green fruit, preparing for advancement. The green zone was peaceful—no sounds, no threats, no grinding doom approaching from behind. Just silence and safety and the promise of restored bodies.

  Cade closed his eyes and reached for his anima, ignoring the pain as much as he could, eager to get his toes back.

  The energy moved freely now.

  Before, guiding his anima had been like pushing water uphill—possible but effortful, requiring constant attention and will. Now it flowed where he directed with almost no resistance. Through his shoulder, down his arm, into his palm. He could feel the pathways, mapped and familiar, ready to be used.

  It still felt right to compress into his fist. Some things hadn't changed.

  He squeezed the energy down, tighter and tighter, following the pattern, until—

  The world went gray.

  The mindscape was familiar now. Gray ground stretching to infinity. White sky providing sourceless illumination. Black line crossing the floor between him and his opponent.

  But the shadow had changed again.

  A human torso—his torso, rendered in solid black—sat atop an octopus body. Eight thick tentacles extended from where legs should have been, rippling with slow, swimming motions as if suspended in invisible water. The shadow hovered, maintaining position with subtle movements of its appendages.

  Cade remembered the creatures in the pool. Their tentacles. Their hunger.

  "Can you hear me?" he asked.

  The shadow nodded.

  Cade blinked. That was new. "Can you talk?"

  A head shake. No.

  "Do you want to fight?"

  Another head shake.

  "Then why do you fight?"

  No response. The shadow continued its hovering, tentacles undulating, waiting.

  Yes or no questions only, Cade realized. Limited communication, but more than before.

  "Are you ready?"

  A nod.

  Cade approached.

  The tentacles lashed out faster than he'd expected—but not as fast as he'd feared. His enhanced tier-three body let him dodge with moderate ease, slipping between the strikes, reading the patterns.

  But the torso was high. Out of reach, suspended above the tentacle mass. If he wanted to end this, he'd have to go through the limbs first.

  He caught one tentacle with both hands and, one arm fully extended and the other pulling back from the shoulder, pulled apart.

  The appendage tore, the last several feet separating from the main body. He threw the severed end behind him and moved to the next one.

  Circle. Catch. Tear. Throw.

  The shadow adapted, tried to use its remaining tentacles to defend, but Cade was faster. Four tentacles down. Five. Six. With each loss, the shadow's mobility decreased, its ability to keep its torso elevated compromised.

  At seven, it started to descend.

  The torso came within reach, and it threw a punch. Slow—slower than Cade, slower than it should have been. He blocked the strike with one arm, reached up with the other, cupped the back of the shadow's head.

  And pulled down.

  The shadow's face met the ground. Its remaining tentacles splayed out behind it, useless. Cade wrapped an arm around its neck, felt the familiar position of a choke hold, head under his armpit, and squeezed and pulled.

  The shadow's hands beat against him. Weak. Ineffective.

  Something snapped.

  The mindscape dissolved.

  Cade opened his eyes to find himself back in the green zone, his body compressed down to its natural five-foot-seven, every wound healed, every injury erased. At the same time, his arousal was beyond anything he’d imagined possible. It was actually painful.

  It gets worse with each advancement, he realized with growing horror. Whatever this world did to me, it intensifies every time I tier up.

  Rhys and Zyrian had already completed their advancements. They sat nearby, watching him with patient expressions—larger now, both around two and a half feet tall. Their details were sharper at this scale. Their naked bodies harder to ignore.

  Cade very deliberately did not look at them below the neck.

  "You took your time," Rhys observed.

  "I was practicing. Like Zyrian suggested."

  "And grappling?"

  "...maybe a little grappling."

  He stood up, acutely aware of his condition, no longer bothering to try hiding it. What was the point? They'd been traveling together for hours now. They'd seen everything.

  "You two are larger," Cade observed, looking at his companions, voicing a question that had been bothering him. "But I thought advancement compressed us down?"

  "It does. To the starting height for the new tier." Rhys gestured at herself. "Tier-four starts at around two and a half feet. Before advancing, we'd grown to nearly four feet from accumulated anima. Now we're compressed to our new baseline."

  "And the baselines increase with each tier?"

  "Exponentially. Tier-one starts around seven inches. Tier-two around a foot. Tier-three, eighteen inches or so. By tier-eight, you're starting at nearly thirty feet tall." She studied him with that measuring gaze. "You, however, seem to have your own rules. You started enormous, grew a bit, and compressed back to exactly where you started."

  "Five-foot-seven."

  "Whatever that means. The point is, normal cultivators don't work that way. We grow within our tier, then compress to the next tier's starting point. You just... reset. Every time."

  Another item for the list of things that were wrong about him.

  The blue fruit waited in the center of the green zone.

  Please, Cade thought, approaching it with desperate hope. Please be a clothes essence. Some kind of ability that creates coverings. Something I can use on all three of us.

  He held his palm over the fruit.

  White sparkles flowed between his hand and the pale blue surface—a strong stream, nearly opaque, but not quite as overwhelming as the Oath fruit had been. Solid affinity. Not his primary, but close.

  "Strong connection," Zyrian observed. "But definitely not Covenant. The signature is different. That’s probably the best you could hope for, as it’s not usually best to have more than one covenant affinity. They generally work better as amplifiers of other essence types and sometimes contribute to interesting capstones."

  Cade paused. "Capstones?"

  "When you take your third essence type, your body creates a fourth. A combination of all three, filtered through your personality and soul."

  "That’s actually pretty interesting."

  Cade reached down, plucked the fruit from its stalk, and took a bite.

  It was delicious. Sweet and cool, with a flavor that reminded him of fresh streams and morning rain. The taste spread through his mouth, down his throat, settling into his core with a sensation of rightness. Cade finished the rest of the fruit eagerly, his satiety from the earlier green fruits not affecting his hunger for finishing this one at all.

  And then knowledge bloomed in his mind.