CHAPTER 684: SMALL STONES UNDERFOOT (2)

Slime skated out in a hurry he didn’t love. The plates moved like flat beetles on iced glass, bellies just kissing the stone. They left a track only his trained eye noticed—light bent wrong there, as if the floor had been polished by fog.

"Three joints," he said, pointing with two fingers so even a skeleton would understand. "The ones that shiver."

The plates veered with tiny, respectful pivots. They slid to the outer ring seams and nosed into the hairline where tile kissed tile. It wasn’t flashy. It looked like a dentist using a pin to fix a grand clock. Gel beaded out in hair-thin wedges. No shine. No bragging. Just small honesty pressed into a crack.

Crymber Frost leaned over each bead and exhaled slow. The frost line took like chalk on old slate. Crymber Ember followed with two gentle taps, sealing the chalk into quiet. Tap. Tap. Not a hammer. A lullaby.

The next mouths opened, but they didn’t fully flower. Petals of bone lifted and stuck, like lids on jars a child couldn’t twist. What came out had the angles wrong. A shoulder up, a hip late. That first dangerous second—the wild bite—belonged to them now.

"Tangles, stitch the hairline cracks," Mikhailis called. His voice stayed low, not to disturb the thin peace they were buying. "Keep the flip-flop from spreading."

Two Tanglebeetles answered with a tidy click. Blue lines snapped across five-finger spans. They hummed with a sound that made the jaw want to unclench, then snapped back to their spools with polite satisfaction. A chain swept to test one crack; a line hooked the last link, sang once like a plucked string, and returned. The chain missed the angle it wanted. Not a big win—the kind you stack until even stone learns better manners.

He stayed out of the pocket. His hands itched to be clever. His feet leaned, almost without permission, toward the mask where the antler threads clung to the idea of victory. Don’t be a hero. Coach the rhythm. Let the line win.

A shield rim began to breathe too fast. Thalatha flicked two fingers and the rim settled back into its kiss with the neighbor. She walked as if in a tailor’s shop, adjusting hems, not bellowing orders. She wasn’t smiling, but the iron at the back of her tongue loosened into air.

"Nice," Mikhailis said, meaning it, then swallowed the part of him that wanted to make a joke.

Ankles arrows hissed low, a dry grass sound. They kept the Wight fronts arguing with gravity instead of the wall. Sky arrows rose in clean arcs and made Skullcasters shy to show a jaw. Silk’s micro-bells, small as thimbles, landed with tiny pops on any stray rune that thought it might roll away and grow up into trouble. The floor, which had been sly, grew shy.

The Juggernaut pushed again. Blades scissored low-to-high, neat as a barber. Chains snapped bright curves for wrists and ankles. They answered with small things. A Scurabon tapped a wrist seam instead of chasing the edge. A dot of gel popped under the boss’s lead foot so the ankle had to argue with reality for one heartbeat and lost. A Hypnoveil lifted its mantle to reflect the last miss on the opposite side of where the boss looked. Bit by bit, a large animal learned it had bad knees.

He did not dive. He did not try to be brilliant. He counted. He corrected. He stole seconds from mistakes and handed them to his people like coins to spend.

Restraint is not cowardice, he told the loud part of himself. It is a kind of sharpness.

Thalatha’s shoulder dropped a half-inch out of guard for the first time all day. She didn’t thank him. She didn’t need to. She kept walking the line with her two-finger grammar, and lives stayed inside their bodies because of it.

A skullcapped Wight crawled out of a ring mouth backward, offended by its own hips. It tried to stand on a tile that no longer cared to flip. A blue staple hummed under its foot. The halberd came down late, met wood not bone, slid, and found no story to tell. An Ankles arrow kissed the bridge of its foot. The Wight forgot about glory and learned about floor.

"Wrists quiet," Thalatha told a spear skeleton, touching the haft with a knuckle. "Let the wood take the lie." The skeleton sank a little. The next impact traveled the shaft and died in the stone, not in the bones that held it.

A chain swept for an archer’s knee. A Tangle line snagged the last link and hummed like a short laugh. The hook wandered just enough to land in a silk veil. Silk firmed under Crymber breath and the chain realized it had made a bad investment.

The room’s breath tried again to trick ankles, but Rodion’s count strip ran like a thin river of blue across the stone—hold, hold, bite, slide, reset—and even the skeletons seemed to breathe to it though their chests did not move.

A clatter rolled out from under a broken choir. It sounded like lazy river stones. Cores. Bright ones. Clean hearts. Almost pretty. The kind of shine that makes a crown greedy without admitting it.

One lich’s crown lifted by a hair. Not a flare. A suggestion.

"Hold," Mikhailis said. He didn’t raise his voice. The word went around the ring like a calm hand on a nervous horse. Crowns steadied.

He crossed to the bright pile and crouched. He put his knuckles to the floor beside it so the rule would belong to the room, not just his mouth. "Drift only," he said. "No names. No plaques. These go to archers on the rim. No leverage. You wait one full count cycle before you spend them."

Crowns dimmed back to worklight. Not shame. Listening.

"Good librarian," he said under his breath, and meant the patience more than the obedience.

Thalatha watched the bones of their hands, not the flames on their heads. Hunger lives in wrists. She saw none. Her jaw loosened another notch. Not a smile. A choice.

"Efficient," she said, which from her was a sonnet.

"Boring is beautiful," he answered. "We can be brilliant later when no one is dying."

The Myco-Archivist fanned its gills. Its delicate tool tapped two of the bright hearts with approval. They rolled to the left cloth. No one pounced. No one hurried. They invested when the strip pulsed green two cycles later and not a beat sooner.

Archer lines thickened where gaps had annoyed everyone in silence. The sky got a little more crowded. The room did not enjoy that.

"Dummy loft," he told the Sky squad, pointing over the mask. "Make the threads flinch."

Bows rose in unison. Strings took tension like they trusted hands. Arrows lifted without hunger, without drama, and fell as if gravity belonged to them today. The antler filaments wavered together like hair brushed by a cold hand. They drew tight toward the right.

"Hypnoveils," Mikhailis said, "show me the boss’s last miss on the left."

A mantle opened. It didn’t lie. It held up what had been true a breath ago—the chain kissing a rim and finding no gap, the cleaver scraping a roof shield instead of glory. The Juggernaut corrected for a mistake that wasn’t there and leaned.

"Moth," he said, "smear a bind-rune near the right antler."

Mothcloak rose like a piece of night learning manners. A soft pinion kissed a thin bind-mark no one else could see. It didn’t go out. It blurred. Enough.

"Door," he said, and the wedge smiled because the word fit in their hands now.

First rank pinned with shields. Second rank punished with points. Slime popped a mean coin of gel under the boss’s lead foot. For one heartbeat the knee believed in the world more than in itself.

Rodion flashed green in his sightline.

"Nothing fancy,"