Before they moved on the creature, they gathered every soul shard they had between them and handed it all to Nephis. No discussion. She was the one who needed it most, and they all knew it.
Then the three of them walked into the dark.
Sunny climbed to a jagged shelf of rock above the creature's position and pulled the bell from his memories. It was a small thing, unremarkable to look at. He rang it once.
The creature heard it.
It turned and came for him with the particular single-mindedness of something that had decided a problem existed and intended to solve it immediately. Sunny ran, which was the plan, keeping just far enough ahead to stay alive and just close enough to stay interesting, threading the creature through the terrain toward the spot they had prepared.
It charged toward the line of rocks ahead. It didn't see the golden rope strung low across the ground nearby, because it wasn't looking for that kind of problem.
Sunny watched the angle and the timing and called out: "Pull now."
Quinn pulled.
The rope snapped taut. One of the creature's legs caught, stumbled, the massive body lurching sideways as the weight shifted wrong. Both bone scythes drove into the ground to catch the fall, the creature's attention split between staying upright and the noise ahead.
Quinn was already moving. He looped his end of the rope around a rock, grabbed the axe, and drove it into the muscle between one of the creature's scythe-arms and its body — not through the armor, but into the gap, the way a blade finds the space between stones. The axe bit deep and stuck.
Sunny's Echo hit the creature from the side. It wasn't enough to bring it down but it didn't need to be — it just needed to hold the geometry for one more second. The Echo took damage doing it and didn't complain.
Nephis came out of the dark.
She had been waiting in the shadow of a rock formation with the patience of someone who had decided that patience was a form of violence when applied correctly. She crossed the distance in a breath, both hands on the sword, and drove the blade into the gap in the creature's carapace with everything she had. The sword went in deep — deep enough that the crossguard nearly touched the shell.
The creature screamed and moved.
Quinn wrenched at the axe but the muscle had closed around it and the leverage was wrong. He let go and rolled backward as the creature's arm swung — not the bone scythe, the other limb, the one that had been occupied — and came upright in time to see it rounding on him. He ran. Nephis pressed herself against the creature's flank, into the blind spot just below the shoulder joint, staying there while the bone scythe swept the air above her like something harvesting grain.
Sunny appeared behind the creature.
He put the Azure Blade into a leg joint and felt it stop against bone. Too hard. The blade didn't go through. He pulled back and the creature turned and Sunny was the only thing it could see.
He pulled his shadow into the armor and took the hit.
The bone scythe caught him across the chest. The armor held — it didn't go through — but the force behind it was not the kind of force that needed to puncture to do damage. Sunny went sideways and hit the cave wall and slid down it and stayed there.
Something in his chest was wrong. Several things. He tasted blood, which was on the inside of him, which was not where blood was supposed to be. His lungs were doing something complicated and unwilling.
He sat against the wall and watched Nephis and Quinn fight the creature without him.
The axe was still in the creature's arm. The sword was still in its side. Neither of them had a weapon that wasn't currently inside the monster, which was not a position anyone had planned for but which they were navigating with the focused desperation of people who didn't have another option.
Sunny found the moment when the creature shifted toward Quinn. He sent the Echo in.
The creature turned from Quinn and raised its remaining bone scythe to deal with the Echo. In the instant it raised the arm, lightning struck.
It hit the axe.
The axe, buried in the muscle of the creature's arm, conducted the strike inward. The creature staggered. It didn't fall, but it moved like something that had lost confidence in its own legs, a slight wrongness in the way it was distributing its weight.
Quinn saw it. "My axe has venom in it," he shouted. "Looks like it's gone deep."
Nephis was already moving. She grabbed the handle of her sword and pulled — not carefully, not cleanly, tearing it free with the section of carapace that had closed around it. Blood followed. More blood than before, darker, moving with the sluggishness of something that had been compromised at the source. The venom was in.
She dodged a swing from the remaining bone scythe and looked up. The axe had split the carapace around it — a jagged crack running through the shell where the blade had gone in. She set her feet, swung the sword into the crack with everything she had, and didn't stop pushing until something gave.
The scythe-arm came off at the joint. Blood went everywhere. The severed limb hit the ground and the creature screamed something that wasn't quite sound.
The remaining bone scythe caught Nephis and put her into the wall.
Quinn was already at the creature's legs. He drove the axe — somehow retrieved in the chaos — through one of the joints, dropping its front end. It was still moving, still trying to reach Nephis where she'd fallen, but the leg didn't cooperate anymore.
It turned on Quinn instead. One arm left, the good one, and it swung.
The Echo hit it in the face first.
The creature drove its remaining bone scythe through the Echo. The Echo, in the same motion, put its own limb through the hole Nephis's sword had opened in the side.
The creature went rigid.
Then it went down.
The Echo was badly damaged but still present. Sunny dismissed it before it could suffer more, the connection dissolving with the specific grief of letting go of something that had spent itself for you.
The cave went quiet.
Sunny tried to breathe and couldn't do it properly. His vision was doing something it shouldn't be doing. He heard footsteps coming toward him, fast, and then two hands touched his face, very gently, and the darkness that had been waiting at the edges of his sight came forward to claim the rest.