"Good," Asta said, breath hitching, blood copper on his tongue. "I was starving."
Dust hung in the air like faded snowfall. The chamber had stopped screaming; the crystal-veined walls beat a tired, slowing pulse. What remained of the Crownless Warden, cloak scraps, shattered crown-shards, a leaking smear of lightless fire, was settling into the floor as if ashamed to be seen.
Lysandra's arm stayed around his shoulders a half second longer than necessary, then withdrew with the economy of a soldier counting breaths. "Don't pass out," she told him, voice raw but steady. "You'll hate waking to chains."
"I don't… pass out." He tried to stand. His knees disagreed. The shadow-hound wedged itself under his thigh, bracing him up like a living crutch of night. The Black Knight's silhouette loomed at his back, white eyes steady, sword angled toward the ground like a flag planted in conquered earth.
The System slid a pane across his vision, elegant and merciless.
[Commandment Two Complete: SLAY]
[Reward: Sovereign Embers x3 (Unallocated)]
[New Commandment: 3 — DEVOUR TO GROW]
[Skill Unlocked: Devour (Rank: F)]
[Description: Consume weakened shadows or remnant essence to restore, strengthen, and evolve bound shades. Side-effect: erosion risk to Vessel—monitor.]
Another flicker, colder:
[Bound Shadows: Hound (F), Black Knight Fragment (???), Crownless Fragment (Partial)]
[Synergy: Shadow/Shardlight Resonance (Temporary)]
Lysandra pushed to her feet and turned a slow circle, assessing the ruin. Her silver-black armor looked stitched together with stubbornness and cracked pride. She wiped blood from the corner of her mouth with the back of her wrist, then flinched when the motion tugged her ribs. "We need to move. Rifts collapse badly." She nodded at the ceiling, where fresh cracks sketched spiderwebs across sagging concrete. "Either the tunnel holds… or we dig."
Asta's gaze fell to the puddled smear where the Warden's sideways eye had imploded. It wasn't gone. Not entirely. Remnant essence bled into the stone, thick and wrong. His mouth went dry as the new word whispered in his head like a priest's sin made helpful: Devour.
He felt Lysandra's stare. "Don't."
"Why?"
"Because the first time you do it… it feels like swallowing an apology you'll never get."
He crouched anyway, gauntlet flexing. "I haven't gotten many of those."
A shard of the Warden's crown lay near his boot—black metal that drank light. He pinched it between gauntlet fingers. Cold leapt up his arm and scratched at his nerves like a cat at a door.
[Target: Sovereign Remnant (Weak)]
[Devour? Y/N]
[Projected Gains: Minor restoration, +Bind Strength (Crownless Fragment), +Sovereign Pressure (trace)]
Asta looked at the crack that was closed now, at the place where his dead had braced it and were ground to ash. He thought of the leader who never said his name, of being assigned to carry and bleed and then carry some more. His throat tightened.
"Yes."
He brought the shard to his mouth. It didn't want to be eaten. It wanted to be obeyed. He closed his teeth on it anyway.
Ice knifed down his tongue and into his lungs. His vision narrowed, black edges, white center, then widened with a dizzying lurch. The world tilted; for an instant the chamber wore two shadows per object: one that belonged here, one that looked at him.
[Devour: Successful]
[Restoration: +10% Essence]
[Crownless Fragment: Bind Strength +1]
[Passive: Sovereign Pressure (Minor) intensified]
[Erosion: 2% — Within Tolerance]
He exhaled, steam painting the air. The cold turned warm in his stomach, a coal left behind by a winter that had finally noticed his bones. He stood without the hound's help this time. "Still not passing out," he said, voice steadier than it had any right to be.
Lysandra watched him with the careful expression of someone checking a door for traps. "It gets easier," she said quietly. "And that is its own trap."
He rolled the remaining shards with his boot. "You warning me because you care, or because you're tethered and don't want to drown with me?"
"Yes," she said, and the half-smile was quick and unsentimental. "Both."
The chamber groaned. Pebbles trickled from the ceiling in a lazy rain. The torchlight, still guttering where the raid party had left it, now burned with a taller, cleaner flame. No Rift-wind to bully it. The dungeon was dying, and the world was remembering how to be stone.
"Tunnel," Asta said. "We walk. If it drops on us, the Knight holds it."
Lysandra's brows lifted at "the Knight," as if she were filing away the capital letter for later use. "Lead, then, Lord Hollow."
He scowled. "Asta."
"Asta, then." She tested his name like a blade on a whetstone. "Move."
They moved.
The way out was a ragged mouth of concrete and warped steel, framed by black crystal veins that had lost their pulse. Asta's shadow slithered ahead of him like a scout. The hound padded forward, nose to ground, then flicked an ear: no enemies, just the stale ache of spent magic. The Knight fell in step behind, its footfalls nonexistent but somehow weighty enough to make the tunnel feel narrower.
They stepped over the first body with care: a veteran whose name Asta didn't know, his eyes filmed with dust. Lysandra paused long enough to close them, thumb and forefinger gentle. "You bind the dead," she said, not accusing. "Do you bury them?"
Asta glanced back. His bound thralls had been crushed into shadow-ash when the crack sealed. He could still feel where they had torn, like missing teeth his tongue wouldn't stop returning to. "I remember them," he said. It wasn't enough. It was all he had. "And if I find who sent us into a double… I'll bury that person, yes."
Her mouth twitched. Approval? Maybe. Maybe something crueler.
They walked. Each step traded one risk for another: collapse for exposure, darkness for light, secrecy for witnesses. Asta's shoulder throbbed under the jagged crescents of shadow-plate; the gauntlet felt heavier with the Warden fragment humming inside it, like a caged heart.
"Lysandra," he said at last, because silence was starting to sound like a trap. "What were you? Before chains."
"Before chains?" She huffed a laugh that didn't like being a laugh. "A spear pointed the wrong way, if you ask some. A guardian, if you ask others." She ran her fingers along the cracked edge of her breastplate, tapping on a seam that had been mended and then broken again. "There are ranks in the dark, Asta. Warden was not the worst." Her eyes slid to him, pale and lucid. "You bound a fragment of one, and it will try to convince you it was a favor."
"I don't do favors."
"You will, if the System orders." The word System came out as if it tasted like old iron. "Watch the Commandments. They're more like appetites than laws."
They turned a corner. The air grew fresher, tasted faintly of wet asphalt and outside. Somewhere far above, a siren wailed and Dopplered away. Asta's chest unclenched. "Almost there," he said.
A new pane ghosted across his sight.
[Area Status: Perimeter Response]
[Guild Security En Route — ETA: 02:10]
[Recommendation: Conceal anomalous shadows; conceal External Vessel.]
He snorted. "Subtle as always."
"What?"
"Visitors in two minutes." He glanced at her armor, alien, cracked, unmistakable. He glanced at his gauntlet, impossible, hungry, unmistakable. "We're not subtle."
Lysandra's gaze dropped to his hand, then to his shadow dog, then to the Knight. "No," she agreed. "We are not."
The tunnel dipped and gave them a gift: an alcove where concrete had spalled away, forming a shallow niche and a ledge. A hazard sign, half torn, hung at a crooked angle: KEEP BACK, RIFT ACTIVITY. Below it, a maintenance locker door gaped open, its contents spilled during the collapse—coils of cable, a stained tarp, a pry bar bent like a question mark.
Asta shoved the tarp toward her. "Throw that over the armor. You can pass for 'injured civilian' if no one looks too hard."
She half-smiled. "You're optimistic about their eyesight."
"Fine. 'Suspicious survivor.'" He slid his gauntlet behind his back and let the Knight draw close. The armor-plates along his shoulder hissed as he willed them to melt; the gauntlet shrank reluctantly, shadows retracting like a tide. The dog flattened against the tunnel wall, its shape blurring, then spilled into his ankles to hide.
[Shadow Armament: Partial-Dismissed]
[Essence: Stable]
His hand beneath the gauntlet was a mess, blood, bruises, deeper shadows in the knuckle-wrinkles where the metal had been. He flexed it, the ache a steadying anchor. "Better?"
Lysandra eyed him critically, then reached up and smudged a line of dirt across his cheekbone, covering the neat cut the Warden's knife had carved. "Less pretty," she said. "More believable."
He almost laughed. It cracked and escaped as a cough. "You flirt like a medic with a death wish."
"Flirt?" Her eyebrows lifted, wry. "If I'm flirting, you'll know. You'll have a list of rules and a blade at your throat."
"Noted."
The tunnel tightened. Asta took point again. The world smelled like rebar and old rain, and the sound of wind became a real thing instead of a memory. Light ahead wasn't torchlight, it was the honest gray of a city that had forgotten the sun but remembered the workday.
"Two minutes," he said.
"Less."
He slowed. The Black Knight pressed a hand, cold as idea, between his shoulder blades: steady, steady. The dog's not-there breath warmed his calf through torn fabric. Lysandra ghosted at his flank, the tarp muting the foreign angles of her armor to a civilian's asymmetry.
They reached the mouth of the tunnel.
The veil of plastic and chain-link that the guilds used to mark safe zones flapped in a half-hearted breeze. The RIFT CLOSED warning light strobed a sleepy amber. Beyond, a parking lot pocked with oil stains and neglect opened under a sky the color of unpolished steel. A mobile barricade had been dragged into place—too late—and a battered van with Guild Security stenciled on its side skidded to a stop, tires squealing.
Three people piled out. Two wore the hard-edged boredom of men who expected paperwork; the third moved like someone who liked knives too much.
"Hands!" the knife-lover barked, already raising a flechette rifle. "Hands where I can see 'em!"
Asta lifted his palms, slow. The Knight vanished into his shadow with a whisper that sounded like a bow drawn across a cello string. The dog didn't vanish; it went perfectly still—a dark stain in the tunnel's shade that only a shadow would notice.
Lysandra let the tarp slip further over her shoulders, bowing her head as if dazed. It helped. The pale blaze in her eyes banked.
The bored ones saw two survivors. The knife-lover saw something else. Her gaze snagged on the way Asta's shadow didn't match the angle of the light; it lingered on the way his pupils drank the morning.
"What happened in there?" one of the bored men asked, already pulling a tablet to log casualty counts. "We lost comms with the raid team. You two the only—"
Asta let his voice crack, let exhaustion decorate his words. "Double Rift," he said. "It—" He didn't have to fake the swallow. "It killed them. I… I think I closed it."
"You closed it?" The knife-lover's mouth went crooked. Her eyes were the only friendly-part of a wolf. "You got a license for that miracle, Hollow?"
Lysandra shifted almost imperceptibly. Asta's hand snapped up a fraction, a warning, a please don't. He didn't know why he trusted her to keep still. He just did.
"Name?" the bored one asked.
"Asta," he said.
"Guild and rank?"
"No guild," he said. The word tasted like street-salt, like childhood. "Rank… Hollow."
The knife-lover's grin had no weather in it. "He admits it. Honesty from a rat. Cute."
Asta smiled back with the kind of slow, stupid smile a man wears when he doesn't know the rules and has decided to lose on purpose. "Cute is what people say before they step on a rat and wonder why their boot's bleeding."
Her grin thinned. The rifle's barrel ticked one degree higher.
A new pane blinked.
[Recommendation: Assert Pressure]
[Note: Minor Sovereign Pressure may influence weak wills. Caution—visible anomaly.]
Asta didn't need a pane to know that flexing would be a mistake on a parking lot full of witnesses and lenses. He did it anyway, just a whisper. The air tightened around his words until even the bored men quit tapping their screens and looked up like prey remembering that it had a heart.
"You want a miracle logged?" he said, voice quiet. "Fine. Log this: your team is gone because someone cleared this job with bad intel. There was a double. There was a Warden. I killed it." He glanced down, one heartbeat to the tarped Lysandra, then up. "We can argue about licenses after I get to a wall and bleed in peace."
The knife-lover studied him like a puzzle box she half wanted to smash. "And her?"
"Survivor," Asta said. Truth enough to stand upright. "Needs a medic."
"Lift the tarp," she said.
Lysandra didn't move. Her head stayed bowed. Small tremor in her fingers—real or faked, Asta couldn't tell. Maybe both.
"Now," the knife-lover said, and her tone put a leash on the air.
Asta's smile didn't move. "No."
Silence popped like a bubble. The bored men glanced at each other. The knife-lover's rifle did a little dance; her finger disciplined it back in line.
"Kid," she said. Not unkind. Not kind. "If I have to shoot you and find out you were telling the truth after, my lunch gets cold and my inbox gets loud. Don't make me do paperwork. Lift the tarp."
The Knight's hand on Asta's spine became the memory of a hand. The dog's shadow tensed like a held breath. Lysandra's head tipped, just a hair—ready to run, or kill, or both.
Asta decided.
He reached for the tarp.
A horn blared from the street. A second security van fishtailed into the lot, back doors already swinging open. A blast of cold air rolled over the asphalt and made every hair on his arms stand up. Not weather.
Something stepped down out of the van in a coat too nice for this neighborhood and shoes that didn't accept puddles. A badge glinted. Power wrapped the person like a well-fitted lie.
The knife-lover straightened. "Director."
The newcomer glanced once at Asta's face, once at the shadow that wasn't behaving, and once at the tarp where a woman breathed like someone who had spent too long learning the precise weight of silence.
"Lock it down," the Director said. Calm. Curious. Hungry. "Nobody moves until we figure out which miracle we're billing."
The System chimed, cool as a blade across knuckles.
[New Objective: Survive First Inquiry]
[Optional: Conceal Commandment Three]
Asta let his hand fall from the tarp.
"Alright," he said softly, as the Knight withdrew into him and the hound bared teeth invisible to anyone who hadn't already died once. "Ask."