The frozen descent took longer than any pause Sekai had used before.
He walked the steep path alone while the world remained locked. The enormous shape below hung motionless in the dark, its many red cores still glowing even in stopped time. Black chains the thickness of tree trunks held what remained of its body against the cavern walls. Several links had already snapped. Others were stretched to the edge of breaking.
Up close the creature was worse than it had looked from the platform. It was not a single body but a mass of fused forms, as if dozens of earlier experiments had been forced together and then left to grow for centuries. Arms, partial torsos, and elongated spines jutted from the central mass at wrong angles. The cores burned in irregular clusters along its length, each one pulsing with a slow, hungry light.
Sekai spent a long stretch of stopped time simply mapping every core and every remaining chain. He could not destroy them all at once. Even with the pause button the work would take more time than he liked. But if he freed the wrong chains first the entire mass would collapse into the party the moment the world moved again.
He returned to the frozen platform, repositioned Leafa, Fury, and Niña at the strongest points along the edge, and borrowed both Leafa's sword and the short blade Niña carried. Then he went back down into the dark and began the careful work of cutting.
He severed the most unstable chains first, letting the mass settle into a more controlled position while still frozen. Next he opened thin paths through the outer layers of living shadow that protected the nearest clusters of cores. The work was slow. The darkness resisted even while time was stopped, trying to close around the blades. He kept cutting until three separate tunnels of clear space led straight to the largest cores.
When the paths were ready he placed the borrowed swords in position, returned to the platform, and released the pause.
The cavern exploded into sound and motion.
The creature roared with a voice like grinding stone. The remaining chains snapped under the sudden strain. Black limbs lashed upward toward the platform. Liquid shadow surged from the floor in rising waves.
Leafa met the first sweeping arm with a clean cut that severed it at the joint. Fury's light flared in tight, controlled bursts that burned through the nearest cores. Niña dropped from the platform edge onto a lower outcrop and drove her recovered blade into a cluster of smaller cores before the creature could focus on her.
Sekai stepped into the first tunnel he had prepared and destroyed the core at its end with a single precise strike. He moved to the second tunnel without pause. The third core shattered under the same treatment. Each destruction sent a violent shudder through the entire mass.
The creature thrashed harder. A thick tendril of pure darkness whipped across the platform and nearly caught Fury. Sekai pressed the pause button again before it could close.
In the new silence he cut the tendril free, dragged it away from the others, and opened one final path to the largest remaining core buried deep near the creature's center. He positioned himself at the mouth of that path, controller ready, and released time once more.
The final core burst under the strike.
The entire mass convulsed. Darkness poured from every broken core in thick rivers. The remaining chains tore free from the walls. The fused body collapsed inward on itself, folding and dissolving until nothing remained but a spreading pool of evaporating shadow and a handful of cracked red fragments on the cavern floor.
The pulse that had filled the lower levels since their arrival simply stopped.
Silence returned, broken only by the sound of their own breathing.
Fury lowered her hands. Light still flickered around her fingers. "That was no servant. That was a seed. Something the King of Darkness planted long ago and left to grow until it could feed an entire front."
Leafa cleaned her blade in short, efficient strokes. "Is it finished?"
Sekai looked at the empty space where the creature had been. The black growth on the cavern walls had already begun to wither. "The source is gone. The darkness above Highmere should start to pull back once the feeding stops."
Niña sat down hard on the stone. "Good. Because I am done with giant nightmare things for at least a day."
They climbed back to the upper levels in a tired silence. Captain Rena met them at the first sealed door with a squad of tense soldiers. When she saw their faces and the absence of pursuit, some of the rigidity left her shoulders.
"The black fog outside the walls has already thinned," she said. "Whatever you did down there worked."
Sekai checked the timer.
Fourteen hours remained.
Enough time to rest for a few hours and then begin the ride back toward the capital. The second front had been closed before it could fully open. Alicia's ritual still held. The barrier around the capital still stood.
But the King of Darkness had shown that he could plant these seeds in more than one place. There would be others.
Sekai closed his hand around the controller and followed the others up into the cleaner air of the fortress.
Fourteen hours.
They would use them carefully.