CHAPTER 659: THE UNDEAD BOSS (END)

"Make it a hundred," Thalatha said through her teeth.

Two arrows—one high, one low—punched two joints.

Clack.

The fingers splayed uselessly. The sword sagged half a degree.

Scarlet light crawled. The thing learned as they watched. The broken hand knitted not into fingers but into a hook, a barbed cleat that wouldn’t drop a blade twice. The cracked fissure up its thigh bubbled with black sealant that foamed and dried into necrotic glue.

"Ew," Mikhailis said. "No points for style."

The ceiling cracked open like brittle teeth. Stalactites of bone sheared loose, and a hailstorm fell. At the same moment, glyph channels that had slept under dust woke along the floor, threads of red light bleeding toward them like veins filling.

Rodion threw three silk domes in quick triangles. They popped and spread like parachutes, catching the worst of the bone rain in sticky webs. Mikhailis blink-skipped—here, not there—and a flat of rock slammed down where he’d been. He landed against the giant’s breastbone and felt the heat of something that wasn’t heat on the other side.

Up close, under the cage of ribs, a knot pulsed. Not a heart—he had cut hearts before. This was meaner. Twined vines and glassy resin, cabled up the spine, pumping a beat that didn’t match anything alive. He marked it with two quick sigils that sank like fish into dark water.

Thalatha’s breath ran smooth now. She sang without meaning to—the lullaby her aunt had taught when the world was kinder. The old cadence rode on her arrowpoint as it flew. The shaft lodged under the clavicle groove and the hum of her small song vibrated the bone there until it loosened a hair.

Full Ravager flex. Mikhailis slid his hips down and ran the inside line like a knife follows a seam. He scythed figure-eights at the pelvic rim, the Scurabon edges raking the marrow that held bad spells like fat holds flavor.

Thalatha watched the footwork, and memory stopped being memory. The goblin in the lair had moved this way. He had saved her using geometry, not luck. She had wanted the past to stay tidy. It refused. The savior she’d built a myth for was a prince with mud on his boots and foolish jokes in his mouth and a way of making terror laugh for a second before it came back to bite.

Shadows threw lines from his fingers. They weren’t ropes; they were decisions. They tethered one ankle to the mangled wrist in a simple trap-line the giant’s own weight would tighten if it tried the wrong step. He curled a handful of dark and flung it like seed. Skeletal gnats unfurled and flew, burrowing into the fresh crimson knitting glyphs to gum the logic and slow the heal.

Rodion’s chest diode narrowed to a point. A needle of blue light shot out and Mikhailis angled his left knife until the blade became a mirror. The laser kissed its edge and skittered, bending to stab the sternal runes he’d chalked. The bone under the mark stayed bone, but something in it softened.

Thalatha put an arrow on that soft and the sound it made when it went in wasn’t a crack. It was a chime.

The floor itself hated them. Tendrils of ossified root burst up and lashed ankles. Vents popped open with little wicked sighs and exhaled green acid that smelled like rotten apples left in vinegar.

Mikhailis snapped his wrist. The Slimeweave blossomed umbrellas that caught the spray and turned shiny. He flicked the whips, and the acid he’d stolen came back out as polish bright on the giant’s hip seams. The stuff foamed and ate.

He vaulted high. The wings beat once and carved the mist into a spiral, a small cyclone that sucked the worst of the air out and up until it slapped flat against the ceiling and spread harmless. The talons flared and a line of lightning leapt between the greatsword and the rib cage, braided bright. The current didn’t fry bone—it locked it. For three counts the monster could pull but not close.

Ice kissed the sternum latch and glued it shut with a soft, satisfying grit. Fire tapped the same place and spot-welded it. The chest wanted to open to protect its foul seed; his hands told it no.

Window: nine seconds.

"Then we do it in eight," he said, and the grin he flashed looked like home and trouble both.

He palmed chalk and stroked three marks—hip, spine base, sternum. Each brand flared in a triangular language that belonged to no court. He pulled a thread of shadow and needled it through the three until a tilted pulley took shape, a geometry of force more than matter.

Thalatha stepped into his space and laid her hand on one brand. Her voice left the lullaby and took the shape of orders. The glyphs answered from some old agreement between Elf and the things trees remember. For a moment there was no prince and no captain, only craft meeting craft. "I won’t freeze again," she whispered, and it was promise, apology, prayer.

Resonance at one point six two. Now.

Rodion’s chest poured a spear of blue into the lattice. The floor woke. Not the gaudy red of Blight, but the old white that belonged here before corruption. Runes that had slept a hundred lifetimes lit in a ring beneath the colossus and the sound rising wasn’t a roar. It was a note so pure it hurt the back of the eyes.

They pulled.

The pulley bit. The sternum stuttered. The vertebral tethers sang a little, like bowstrings rubbing glass. The thing they wanted didn’t want them. The seed bunched and stretched, its filaments going long and thin like pulled sugar.

The giant slammed the sword. Rodion stepped into it and took the blow with his shield arm. The arm broke, clean at the hinge. Servos screamed a complaint he didn’t have time to listen to.

Proceed.

Mikhailis dropped his center so low his knee glanced the tile. He cut the last hinge in the exact rhythm she remembered from the lair: low, rising, twist, draw. The sound it made wasn’t loud. It was decisive.

He is the savior.

Thalatha’s chest hurt in a way she could endure. Pride is a warm pain.

The seed came free. It didn’t fall; it fought. A black star the size of a skull wrapped in ribs of glass and vine, lit inside by a sick light. It spat spore like glitter flung by a spoiled child, and the whole chamber groaned as if relieved and offended together.

The colossus didn’t die gracefully. It flailed, and the ceiling finally gave up pretending. Big bone broke, and a hailstorm fell again. Thalatha spun, legs light now, and shot debris out of the air when it came for Mikhailis’s head. Rodion, somehow still moving, coughed a silk canopy and caught a slab that would have made red paste of them both. The canopy sagged, snapped, and the slab crushed him like a beetle under a boot. His optic dimmed but didn’t go dark.

The seed bit. Tendrils lashed like giant jellyfish stingers, searching for warm skin. One found Mikhailis’s gauntlet. The Slimeweave drank it like soup. He pushed it down the lines into the Crymber channel and thermal-snapped it back so fast the tendril went brittle and cracked like spun sugar in winter.

He let the Hypnoveil throw its prettiest pattern, right in the seed’s face. The rhythm inside it hiccupped, lost count. Thalatha drove a ward-stake into the lip of the dais and her song stopped being song and started being command. Sleep. The word didn’t come out of her mouth; the rune said it for her. The seed faltered.

He took it up on threads. The wings turned the air around it into a slow storm; the Crymber gloves named the beats—freeze, fire, freeze—and cracks spidered under his eyes like glass trying to remember how to be sand again.

Rodion’s speaker hissed.

One vector remains optimal: downward.

Mikhailis set his palm to the tiles. The old circle woke fully this time. It blazed white, not pretty, not safe, just true. Thalatha’s chant poured into it like water finding a dry riverbed and running again as if it had never stopped.

"You press on the world," he murmured, voice doubled by something older and quieter that lived in the hive-bond. "It presses back."

Blue-white light condensed out of nowhere into a lance as neat as a librarian’s pencil. It didn’t fall from the ceiling; it happened between floor and sky and ignored both. The spear harpooned the seed in midair and then didn’t stop. It drove it down—down through the air, down through argument, down into the waiting lotus vessel he and Thalatha had read as trap and found to be cage.

Chains snapped tight, silver runes racing like fish in a net. Petals that had been gently closed became teeth. The lotus bit. The seed screamed a sound made of glass and bad dreams. It wriggled. It finally stopped.

Silence fell hard. The kind that makes ears ring and bodies realize what they owe.

The colossus stood a breath longer. It looked at them. It might have bowed. Then the logic that held it up evaporated. A cathedral of bone collapsed inward on itself with the tired grace of a tent being dropped after a long market day. Motes drifted like ash-snow. The greatsword slumped and lay like any other dead thing. The red knitting went out one rune at a time.

Rodion’s single good manipulator extended from beneath the cracked slab. It lifted like a tired thumb.

Target neutralized.

Thalatha lowered her bow and made herself breathe. Her eyes never left Mikhailis.

He rolled his shoulders; the knives clicked and disappeared back into carapace slots with the satisfaction of tools in a well-ordered drawer. He glanced at the lotus, quiet and mean, then at the knee-high hill of bones that used to think it owned the room.

He smiled. Half-wicked. Half-relieved. Entirely himself.

"Looks like it’s the perfect warmup!"