Sunny slid down from the carapace and stood beside the body of the scavenger.
Nobody was hurt. The creature was dead. The whole thing had taken less than three minutes, which felt wrong in a way that took a moment to locate — not wrong because it had been easy, but wrong because the creature had been large enough and armed enough that easy shouldn't have been the outcome. Two forelimbs, a carapace that would have stopped most direct attacks, and the aggressive single-mindedness of something that had never learned to expect failure. And yet three people smaller than it by a significant margin had disassembled it with a choreography that had required less than three minutes to complete.
Nephis had done most of the work, Sunny thought. And Quinn's ability — whatever it was, that phase-strike that had gone through the armor and found the flesh underneath — had removed the variable that would have made Nephis's job considerably harder. But the killing blow had been his. The Azure Blade finding the junction, the shadow pulling him into position. His.
He let the thought sit there for a moment, not with pride exactly, but with the specific quality of attention he gave to things that were updating his model of the world.
Master Jet had told him once, in the flat and unremarkable way that she delivered the things she considered most important, that no one survived the Dream Realm alone. He had noted it the way you note things you aren't sure you believe yet — filed, not discarded. He had spent enough of his life being self-sufficient, had built enough of his survival on the principle that depending on anyone was a liability that would eventually present its invoice, that the advice had felt like something true for other people.
He was revising that assessment.
If he had been alone in that passage, the scavenger would have required everything he had, and everything he had might not have been sufficient. Nephis could hold a line that would have ground him down, but without someone to compromise the creature's structure from the inside, holding the line was all she could do — and holding was not the same as winning. And Quinn, with that particular ability of his, could exploit the opening but lacked the raw offensive capability to end the threat cleanly. But he could always run away with that ability, though.
Three people with three different shapes of usefulness, and the sum of them was something none of them were alone.
He walked over to check for wounds. Nephis shook her head. Quinn was already cleaning the axe, which answered the question.
Nephis looked at Sunny. "Memories?"
He shook his head. She absorbed this with the same expression she absorbed most things — noting it, filing it, moving on. She had asked Quinn the same question before they left for the labyrinth, and Quinn had nothing spare either. The armor he wore was the only Memory he carried, and it was spoken for.
Cassie rejoined them and they moved deeper into the labyrinth.
The pattern held through six more engagements.
Nephis into the open to draw. Quinn finding the angle and the phase-strike, compromising the limb or the joint or whatever structural element the approach permitted. Sunny taking the opening to end it. Each time faster than the last, the three of them developing the shorthand of people who had fought together enough times that the coordination stopped requiring communication.
The labyrinth thinned them out, one creature at a time, until the passages ahead held nothing moving that shouldn't be there. Quinn searched as they moved, checking the mud and the coral formations and the things that had washed up between them for anything that matched his ingredient list. Nothing presented itself. He noted this without frustration and kept walking.
The giant statue of the headless knight rose from the dark terrain with the patient authority of something that had been there long enough that the landscape had organized itself around it. They reached the stone platform at its base ahead of the black water, which was the only timing that mattered, and climbed onto it as the darkness began to thicken into night.
The four of them sat in the center of the platform and ate what they had — dried meat, the bottle of water passed in silence from hand to hand. No fire. No warmth beyond the biological kind. The shore extended in every direction, dark and patient and uninterested in their comfort.
Sunny produced the soul shards from the day's kills and laid them out on the stone between them. Nephis looked at the pile for a moment, then began to divide them without being asked — two for herself, one for Cassie, two for Sunny, two for Quinn. Clean and even, distributed with the quiet authority of someone who had decided that this was her responsibility and had simply taken it.
Then Sunny looked at his two.
He thought about what he needed, and then he thought about what Nephis needed, and then he thought about what Master Jet had said, and then he picked up his two soul shards and moved them across to Nephis's pile.
Nephis looked at him. "Why?"
"You're the one standing in front," Sunny said. "You absorb faster than any of us. And—" he paused, which for Sunny was unusual "—I want you to teach me the sword."
The silence that followed had a specific quality. Nephis looked at the shards, then at Sunny, then at the shards again, processing the transaction and the condition attached to it.
Then Quinn reached into the armor at his hip, found the rough cloth pouch, and slid three soul shards across to Nephis's pile as well.
Both Sunny and Nephis looked at him.
Quinn's expression was comfortable with being looked at. "My situation is a little specific," he said. "Soul shards aren't what I need most right now." He paused. "What I do need is ingredients. From the creatures we kill — certain parts, certain materials. I don't need them immediately, and I'm not asking for anything that's useful to you. But when we find what I'm looking for, I'd appreciate the help collecting it."
The offer sat on the stone platform between them.
Sunny and Nephis said nothing. But Quinn could see it in both of them — the calculation running, the question forming, the specific quality of attention that people gave to things that had just become more complicated than they appeared.
The night settled around the statue of the headless knight, and the Forgotten Shore made its usual sounds, and none of them said what they were thinking.
They didn't need to. Not yet.