CHAPTER 657: THE UNDEAD BOSS (3)

"Time to get serious."

He didn’t bark it like a hero, didn’t whisper it like a prayer. Mikhailis let the words slip out on an exhale he’d probably been hoarding since he was young enough to hide under banquet tables. A thin smile tugged at one corner of his mouth as if it, too, was tired of pretending this was all a joke.

His cracked lenses caught the amber light of the wall-lamps and broke it into little knives. He tugged his coat aside—habit that made space for nerves—and unrolled a bandolier that wasn’t cloth so much as memory and oath. Bone-etched hex medallions clicked softly, silk-bound rings kissed his knuckles, and chips of carapace floated in ant-amber like ancient insects trapped mid-flight.

The talismans trembled. Not loud—no dramatic ringing—just a subtle vibration that ran up through the bones of his hand and nested in his wrist, like a secret greeting shared between co-conspirators.

"Been a while since I equipped all of you," he murmured, voice pitched for himself and whoever listened in the spaces between roots. "Damn... not even sure you can be summoned from this deep."

The dungeon answered first.

The Necro-Colossus exhaled a noise like frozen forests cracking at dawn. Scarred runes pulsed scarlet along ribs the size of pillars, joints locked and unlocked with a butcher’s rhythm, and ligaments of black vine coiled tight. It hauled a sword from the dark. Not a sword, really—more slab than blade, a piece torn from the idea of destroying barns, bridges, and bad decisions.

Tiles shivered. Dust lifted in small breaths from between the slabs as iron hoops welded to bone hissed, heating with each shuddering step.

"Move!" Thalatha snapped.

The command was correct, the tone clipped, but the sound thinned on the way out. She had already done the math—the sweep of that killing arc, the way it would gouge stone and split cloth and catch a human body like a blade of grass. Her legs launched on training, not hope.

Too far. Too slow.

The air cracked.

Not thunder. Not some flashy spell. Just speed. A sudden theft of sound that returned a heartbeat later like a slap.

Mikhailis wasn’t where the sword thought he’d be.

He was perched on the ribbed cornice that ringed the dais, boots hooked casual over bone like he’d spent childhood climbing ship masts for dessert. From up there he looked smaller, wirier, wind-tossed—grinning like a boy who’d gotten away with stealing pastries from the palace kitchen.

Thalatha’s lungs forgot the choreography of inhale/exhale. For a single startled blink she saw Mikhailis the way court saw him—the prince who flirted with mushrooms, danger, and women; the eccentric who joked just so his teeth didn’t chatter. Then that picture sloughed off him like rain off lacquered armor.

Rodion answered the silence in his own way.

Summoning appears successful.

The little construct’s chassis split down the center with neat inevitability. Plates slid. Internal joints clacked shut like well-oiled shutters. Shield-plates fanned from forearms; dorsal housings irised open into neat nests of silk batteries; stabilizer claws bit into stone with tiny, impatient scrapes. If a samovar had ever voted for war-form, this would be it.

Transforming to battle mode.

The words fell flat and calm, like reporting the weather. Still, the chamber took a different shape when he said them.

Mikhailis dropped from the cornice.

He didn’t leap; he fell with the sort of relaxed trust that says, the ground and I have an agreement. His boots kissed tile, and the talismans’ hum surged like a pack of hounds feeling the hunt at last. The sound met his pulse and nodded—yes, yes, we remember you.

Okay, he thought, a little dry, a little savage. No more running mouth. Running legs only.

He tapped the first hex. Something unwound from the bandolier—not smoke, not cloth—more like silk moving underwater. It climbed his shins and tasted the shape of him, finding where to land. Another talisman met his palm and dissolved into threads that lay along tendons like clever hands. Another. Another. More of them woke with the small impatience of tools that have long wanted to be used.

A smell lifted: resin, rain, mint that stung the nose. The dungeon’s sour breath recoiled a fraction.

The giant tilted its skull. Blue fire winked open in the caves of its eyes. Its jaw creaked wider. It didn’t roar. It didn’t have to. The room did the roaring for it—the root-ribs above thrummed, the gates behind them groaned like they remembered a thousand similar footfalls.

Mikhailis lifted his face into that pressure the way swimmers lift their chins to find air.

"Miss Thalatha," he called, gentle and bizarrely courteous, like they were standing in a quiet book hall rather than a tomb. "If this goes badly, tell Lira she still owes me three cups of coffee for that toad incident."

"Focus," she hissed.

It came too fast to be a smile, but the corner of his mouth acknowledged the line. That small, stupid flicker of humor steadied her grip better than any mantra.

The sword fell.

Rodion moved. The construct met the blow with squared forearms the way a seasoned guard meets a charging boar. The sound that came out of metal was almost a plea, a reverent ahh just this side of breaking. Bone chips scythed outward. Rodion’s dorsal batteries flared, flinging silk out like umbrellas; the webs caught splinters mid-flight and glued them harmlessly to stone.

Vector mapped. Weak-points prioritize: wrist carpal lattice, popliteal gap behind knee, and... sternal rune sub-core.

"Copy," Mikhailis answered.

His voice had shed the soft edges. Lighter. Cleaner. The voice of someone who has already signed the important paper and thrown away the pen.

Thalatha’s throat worked. She dragged her breath lower, forced it to sit heavy in her belly the way instructors had hammered into her bones. Her ribs still hurt, her shoulder burned, but the simple weight of air obedient in her lungs made the world less tilted.

The colossus drew its blade back for another sweep.

Mikhailis’s hand hovered over the next talisman. The hex-sigil under his glove warmed, lines pulsing in a rhythm that matched the faraway thunderbeat of the tree. The bandolier vibrated against his ribs—impatient, eager, alive.

The sword came. The tile quivered. The whole hall seemed to lean in to watch.

Thalatha saw everything at once—the angle, the speed, the inevitable path. She saw where his head would be if he stayed where he was, and where his heart would be if he tried to step the wrong direction, and where she would need to be if she could be faster than her own doubt.

Her calf muscle bunched. She pushed off.

Her boot skidded a hair on a patch of glossy sap she would have mocked yesterday. In the instant it took to correct, she knew—too far, too slow.

Her mouth made a small sound that almost wasn’t her voice.

The air snapped again.

It was not showy. No lightning tear, no sweet smear of light. A whip-snap. The simple hard physics of speed, leaving the ear a half-beat behind the eye.

Where there had been a prince, there was now only space and the wake of him.

He reappeared on the cornice—no, above it—perched on a rib like a swallow flirting with a mast in crosswind. He crouched there, balanced on the edge of void and arrogance, and tilted his head to look down at them as if he’d merely climbed a stair.

Thalatha let that stolen breath leave her. The tightness in her fingers eased. She wanted to be angry at him for the stunt. She wanted to laugh. She could do neither, so she settled for not collapsing.

Rodion’s shields retracted a fraction, tiny servos cooling with brief, controlled sighs.

Biometric stress indicators stabilizing, he noted, because of course he did. Continue avoidance of horizontal sword trajectories. Probability of survival increases by thirty-one percent.

Mikhailis’s grin sharpened. "Ah. So: don’t get hit. Genius."

He slid down the pillar in a controlled fall and landed in the radius of his waiting talismans. The hum braided around his ankles again, licked up the tendons like a friendly fever.

Closer now, the colossus’s smell was an old graveyard after rain—iron, tannin, mushroom rot. Thalatha’s nose wrinkled before she could stop it. Sweat prickled under her collar, a bead tickling the curve where leather hadn’t quite covered skin. She ignored it. She had bigger problems than an itch.

The bandolier rattled in a rhythm that wasn’t random. In the split second between sword strokes, Mikhailis’s fingers hovered over the order only he knew. Left, right, skip, press, press—he touched each charm like a musician testing strings.

The dungeon listened; that was the wrong word, but it would do. The tree’s deep throb nudged against his palm, hesitant as a dog that wasn’t sure if it was invited. He welcomed it without saying so, elbows tucked in, shoulders relaxed, head a fraction low. Not a warrior’s pose, not exactly; something older and more practical: the stance you take when you expect to be pushed from an unexpected angle and want to turn that shove into a step.

The giant’s skull pivoted, the light in its sockets flaring with cold attention. A little trickle of gravel slid off a high ledge somewhere, the room’s own small panic.

"Miss Thalatha," he said again, gaze still on the monster. "If I go down, tell Elowen I finally did what she hired me for."

"You won’t go down,"