The words sat in my head like a stone as I stood where the wagon had been. The merchant knelt and wept into his hands. Crates lay like corpses. The air smelled of damp earth and old metal. The Spire did not care. It only kept breathing in the slow, indifferent way of things that have stood for longer than men.
I had a choice. Walk away with what I had taken and disappear into the city, stitch myself into anonymity, and let the Spire keep its mysteries. Or push on and deliver the cargo to the place the merchant had called Paradise. Two floors stood between me and the market city. Floor Two Hundred was the gate. Floor Two Hundred had a boss.
I counted my veil's. I checked my wounds. Kuraihane hummed quiet under its cloth like a watchful thing. My slate still rattled with the Ascender's numbers. The choice felt smaller and sharper than the veil's in my hand.
I climbed back onto the wagon and hoisted what I could carry. The merchant looked at me with a gratitude that tasted like prayer and fear. "If you go," he said, voice small and brittle, "be careful. Floor Two Hundred remembers those it feeds."
I did not answer. I pulled the wagon along the narrow path and felt the Spire close around us like a throat narrowing. The light grew thicker and sweeter. The vines grew taller and their bulbs pulsed with soft lumensap. Birds I had never seen sang like glass. Paradise lived up to its name in every trivial way. It smelled of flowers and the sound of coin.
The path to Floor Two Hundred curved around a lily pool and then dropped. The gate was a carved arch of stone veined with white crystal. The world beyond it opened into a vast chamber that smelled of iron and honey and old iron. At the far side of the chamber stood the thing that had answered the Spire when the merchant had spoken of a price.
It was a goliath on a scale that made my lungs collapse with a small, useful fear. Think of a tortoise the size of a ship with plates of translucent crystal along its back that caught the light and splintered it into shards. Think of a maw like a cave rimmed with jagged teeth. But the worst were the extra bits, the aberrant growths that had turned its legs into rooted pillars and raised a fist that ended in a mass of writhing tendrils. It was a mutation the likes of which I had not seen. This was not a boss the guild had named and blessed. This was something the dungeon had made when no one was watching and had been hungry.
The goliath turned. Its single eye opened like a sun in the cavern and found us. It bellowed a sound that was both a summons and a curse. The ground shook and the lilies shuddered.
We fought like people who barter in blood for everything. I had no illusions that I could beat it alone. Kuraihane was under my cloak and the cloth felt like a small, steady heart. I kept the sword hidden until I had to show the world what it could do.
The goliath moved with terrible purpose. Tendrils lashed and knocked crates from the wagon. One strike split a wheel and sent the wagon pitching. I rolled and came up with a shardcore in hand and lashed at the tendrils to buy space. The merchant screamed and dove. Halven was gone. He had not been part of the crew for long enough to matter. The world narrowed to breath and bone and the naive insistence that I would not die here.
I drew Kuraihane. The cloth fell away and revealed the blade black as a drowned night with veins of red light that looked like angry blood. It did not sing or promise. It simply waited.
I moved toward the goliath and found there was no graceful way to approach a thing built like an island. Its legs were rooted in rune-carved rock and its body was like a mountain plate. I slashed at the tendrils when they reached and felt the sword cut through the sinew as if it were mist. The goliath howled and the chamber filled with the sound of it and the breaking of glass.
We cost it. We cost it a lot. With each slice tendrils fell away, and plates of crystalline armor fractured. The merchant and I worked the gaps. I could feel the sword answering to me like a grudging animal that respected teeth and rhythm. I pushed forward until the goliath reared and batted at me with its fist that ended in a mass of barbed growths.
It hit me full in the chest. The air whooshed out of me. My lungs screamed. My ribs sang with pain. I hit stone and something cracked from inside me. Stars exploded behind my eyes.
I rose. I lied to my body by forcing it to move. The goliath struck again and this time it crushed the wagon's axle and sent the crates spilling. A small jar of lumensap cracked and its glow splashed like blood over the stone. I heard the merchant cry out and then the goliath pivoted toward us again, slow and terrible.
I do not remember all the strikes. Fight compresses. It becomes a loop and memory loses its thread. I remember that I bled, that I fought, that I felt my hands go numb, and that the Spire was watching me with an appetite that smelled like iron.
When the world went very thin and my knees failed me, a shadow moved across my vision and a blade sang a different song. The goliath reeled because the strike that found its joint was not mine. The tendrils that had whirled toward my throat were severed by a flash of silver quick and clean. A woman moved through the clearing like she belonged to the air. She planted a boot on a broken plate and put a dagger under the goliath's eye with such precision that the thing flinched like an animal that had been told a secret.
She looked at me then. Close enough for me to see her breath, to see the pale dust on her lashes. She had hair like winter straw, tied back tight, and eyes that were both cold and amused. Her armor was not ornate. It was functional and stamped with the silver sigil of a Floorwalker. A belt of small knives circled her waist and on her shoulder a badge glinted with a rune I had only seen in the guild hall. She moved then like a person who had practiced saving lives whose value the world contested.
She finished the thing with movements that read like prayer and war. The final strike was unsentimental and clean. The goliath folded and its crystalline plates shattered into a snowfall of bright shards. The air smelled of ozone and crushed petals and the world somehow seemed quieter.
I sagged to my knees and the last thread of consciousness frayed. The woman crouched beside me and the world went soft.
"You should not have been alone with that," she said. Her voice was low and wasted with the kind of humor that quiets a room.
My head turned. My vision swam. "You saved me," I managed. It felt like a stranger's observation.
She smiled something close to pity. "Hardly. I finished a job and you were in the way. Who are you that the Spire insists on making messes around you?"
"Hakari Aragiri," I said. I forced the name like a talisman. "I was delivering goods."
"Of course you were." She dug into her satchel and handed me a small flask. I took it and drank. Warmth slid through me and the world knit a little tighter. "I am Yuki Hoshizaki," she said. The name hung in the air like a proper thing. "Floorwalker. Try not to be foolish again."
"You are a Floorwalker," I said, each syllable asking if the world had not tilted. "Why help me?"
She shrugged once. "Goliath mutations are not common unless someone stirred the Echo. I follow disturbances. You looked like trouble and trouble interests me. Also you are not dead. That makes tonight more interesting."
I tried to smile. My lips betrayed me with a taste of iron. "Thank you."
"You do not get rescued for free," she said. Her eyes were sharp as a knife edge. "You owe a story. Tell it later. For now sleep. The inn in Paradise will look after you. Do not try to walk when you wake."
I wanted to argue. My knees refused the attempt. The world blurred into the color of her cloak and then nothing.
When I came back it was to the smell of herbs and something like clean linen. I blinked and the ceiling above me was plastered and painted and not stone. Light filtered through a window that had glass that made the world soft around the edges. A bed held me upright and I felt weight that was not my own. For a slow second the memory of the goliath moved like film through my brain and then the more immediate detail took over.
Yuki sat on the floor beside the bed, her back against the wall and one boot off. Her eyes were closed and her sword lay across her knees like a sleeping thing. She did not look like a savior. She looked like someone waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to what she had done.
"Where am I?" I croaked.
"Paradise," she said without opening her eyes. Her tone had a weary ownership to it. "Inn called the Petal Keep. You fought like a man who wanted to survive and not like someone trying to be a legend. That is useful."
"Why help me?" I asked again. The question felt smaller now that sleep had thinned the edges.
Yuki shifted and opened one eye. The iris was a grey that collected the light. "Because I prefer the Spire to be tidy. Also because I asked myself what a new name should look like if it is not stamped by death. You will keep your secrets while you are under my roof. Do not think this means you are safe forever. Floorwalkers do not grant pasts. We only clear present messes."
You could call it mercy. You could call it interest. I called it a night that had weight.
I sank back into the pillows and the last thing I felt before drifting was the faint thrum of Kuraihane beneath the cloth at my side and the sound of Yuki's even breathing on the floor below. The Spire hummed far away and for once, in a strange room in a stranger city, I let myself sleep.