CHAPTER 687: HALF-BREATHS BUY ROOMS (1)

"We still have to win."

He nodded once. He did not glance at her; he kept his eyes on wrists and angles. "We will. We just won’t do it with a hammer."

He lifted his hand again, palm flat, fingers speaking more than his mouth. The wedge captains watched his knuckles instead of his eyes. He liked that; it meant they trusted their own lanes. "No kill-rush," he said. "We cradle the limiter first. Then we take the head."

A bright heart rolled near the crack as if to test them. No crowns flared. Librarian hands stayed neat. He heard one lich draw in a breath it did not need and let it go. Good.

"Invest for archer velocity and rim re-knit only," he added, eyes on the boss’s elbow as a Scurabon tapped it again with delicate malice. "No glamour. One-cycle delay holds."

Thalatha’s shoulders lowered by a hair. Even that small change mattered; it bled a little fear out of the ring. "Order with mercy," she murmured, almost like she was agreeing with someone who was not present.

The Hypnoveils kept seeding doubt, never the same picture twice. One showed the chain sliding off a rim with no bite; the next showed a cleaver kissing a roof shield instead of glory. The Juggernaut started correcting for ghosts. Every correction cost a half-breath. Half-breaths were a currency you could buy rooms with.

Mothcloak drifted along the outer ring like a memory of night, touching single-stroke smears across fussy glyphs until they remembered rain and soft earth and decided to be less sharp. Silk’s thimble-bells fell on stray runes with soft, homey pops that made Mikhailis think, absurdly, of lids settling on soup. Ankles wrote the floor in a language even bone had to obey. Wights tripped on the past and fell into squares Slime had already persuaded to be safe. Tangles cut leverage at the last link. A chain that had dreamed about swallowing ankles found its mouth full of polite string instead.

Rodion’s numbers trickled like a weather report. Birth tempo minus eighteen percent. Cleaver concurrency reduced by one arm per cycle. Filament over-correction up twenty-two percent. Favors us.

Mikhailis rolled the lotus sling’s chain along his palm until the metal warmed with contract authority. He didn’t pull power. He asked permission like a clerk with a stamp. The crack pulsed once—small, birdlike, a beak pressing cage wire. He breathed out. Okay. Gentle then.

"Crymber," he said, less command than request, "cradle it. Frost first. Then Ember. Soft."

Frost breathed a clean white ring around the fissure. Ember’s two knuckles tapped warmth into that white without chasing it. Slime dotted anchors so the heat would stay where it was loved. Silk unfurled a breathing cloak over the split. It flexed with the room’s slow inhale-exhale, never locking, never cracking.

"Hold him," he told the wedge, and the front line set like a city wall at dusk. A Hypnoveil lifted one more honest mirror and set it under the boss’s next step. The Juggernaut corrected into a gap that wasn’t there. That was their inch. He tapped the lotus seal to the crack, not like a hammer, like a librarian closing a ledger at closing time.

The warden script unbraided from bone with the patience of a long braid undone by tender fingers. Green threads slid out of the stag skull and ran toward the elvish river line he had followed in dust. The mask slackened. The ribplate harness lost its license and folded like tired scaffolding. The sound it made was a book deciding to be shut.

The room’s bass dropped. It did not vanish—only lowered to a hum that did not bully the ribs. Mikhailis heard, or maybe wanted to hear, a thin harp-string note behind the wall. He let himself believe the seam had answered.

They harvested without greed. Hands tagged clean and sour. Drift raised only what a ring needed—rim plugs, spear fillers, two archers to stitch a hole no one liked. No plates. No plaques. He took one seal-marked splinter for Elowen and placed it in the pocket he saved for promises, not prizes. Rodion recorded the signatures without praise or scorn.

Thalatha stood shoulder to shoulder with him and watched wrists, not trophies. "The elder necromancer I trusted," she said after a breath, small as a secret that could live in daylight, "would have liked this."

"I’ll try to deserve that," he answered, same size. Big words make floorboards creak. He would save them for rooms that didn’t listen.

The chamber shifted its weight like a beast waking. A rumble came up through stone as if the Whiteways cleared a deep throat.

Rodion did not shout. Load redistribution catastrophic.

Mikhailis tasted old metal. "Nope. I don’t like that word."

The mandala wasn’t a rug. It had been a keystone. With the warden heart unbound, the weight changed its mind. Ribs groaned and slid. Seams unzipped. Plinths sighed and moved. The floor took one long, rude step and then decided there was no floor anymore.

"Shields roof!" Thalatha’s voice cut through dust. Tower shields clapped up and kissed edges. Silk threw a low dome that would bend instead of break. Slime laid two slick lanes where bodies were already going. Tangles fired anchors into ribs still pretending to be ribs.

"Inside! Inside!" Mikhailis waved bones with his whole arm—no finesse now, only urgency—and the liches herded their work with crowns dimmed to steady lamps. Archers dropped bows and became catchers. Crymber breath traced the dome’s seams—white, warm—so it would flex like a lung.

The chamber made a choice. It sheared. They fell.

Rodion got there first. The lotus chain yanked his wrist with a clean, mean jerk. Hard-light bloomed like a ribbon.

Hard-light sling deploying. Two warm bio-signatures prioritized.

He did not have time to argue. The sling caught the two closest warm bodies on instinct and math. Mikhailis hit silk. Thalatha hit him. The net held with good manners and glue.

Her pauldron pressed into his chest. His shoulder pressed under her collarbone. He smelled leather and iron oil and the faint bitter of the tincture she used on aches. Around them, bones tumbled like dice in a cup. Silk rails screamed as anchors found new ribs. Tangle lines sang under weight that would make a wiser line snap.

He found his voice in a place that didn’t like jokes.

"Are you still alive?"

"Professionally," Thalatha answered. She took one breath, counted another, and gave him the truth with the third.

Only then did Mikhailis notice the way the hard-light sling bit across both of them. Rodion had stitched the load path wide, sharing inertia between chest and pauldron, ribs and leather. They were literally bonded—her armor bruising his sternum, his shoulder hooked behind her collarbone—undignified, ridiculous, and very alive.

Good, he thought, and a smaller, worse part of him added, at least I wore the subtle cologne today.

Dust sifted down in tired curtains. Silk rails squealed somewhere above, warping under tension. The dome flexed like a lung. Around them, bones rolled and clicked within the net, each clatter a coin tossed by a bored god.

He swallowed, careful not to jar her chin with his chest. He tried to make his words the same size as the air they had left.

"Um... are you... okay?"

Her eyes had settled into their usual soldier’s calm: not empty, simply busy. "Breathing. Counting. Working." A beat. "You?"

"Performing the same tricks with less grace," he said, and felt her shoulder shift—approval or impatience, hard to tell.

A faint tingle ran through the sling’s filaments as Rodion redistributed pull. The lattice hummed against his ribs, a mechanical purr.

He angled his jaw downward, the closest thing to a nod the sling allowed. "Rotational humor minimized."

Her mouth didn’t move, but he could feel the almost-smile in the slight ease of trapezius against his collarbone. The net dipped. The dome below caught them again with a firm, patient bounce. He felt the formation’s center breathe through the silk, the way a hand feels a drum’s skin.

Below, liches shepherded scattered bones into tidy clumps with worklight crowns held low, not to dazzle. A shield crawled along its own straps to find its partner’s rim. A bow slid across stone like a polite animal returning to its owner.

Mikhailis let out a breath he hadn’t noticed he’d been holding and looked past her ear. Even in crisis her hairline was clean, a neat edge where leather met skin. Sweat had come up there in a fine line, not beads—her body rationed every indulgence.

"Pain?" he asked, small.

"Later," she said. "Useful now."

He accepted the answer and checked his own inventory by feel: lotus chain in palm—warm; vials—intact by miracle; silk coil—half a loop snagged under his belt; dignity—unlikely to be recovered.

Around them, the army reorganized itself in quiet beats. The Sky pair, suspended in another panel of netting, were already passing their bows hand-over-hand along a silk gutter to a safer perch. Ankles archers had done the sensible thing and tied themselves in with their bowstrings, knuckles white but lanes still clear. The Myco‑Archivist clung side‑on to a rib with three delicate tools pinched in one hand, its gills fanning to taste shards of air, deciding which dusts mattered.

The Juggernaut’s husk, half collapsed, hung on a jut of broken mandala like a shed carapace. The stag mask had slackened into a tired frown. From the fissure Mikhailis had opened, a green thread—faint as a vein under wrist skin—trailed toward the elvish seam, then vanished as if swallowed by stone.

He felt the desire to reach for it the way fingers itch to pluck a loose string. He made his hands behave.

The sling creaked. Rodion eased the share again.

"Your favorite," Mikhailis murmured.

"Mine too," Thalatha said. No sarcasm.

Their panel drifted a hand’s width and settled. The silk threads around them quivered, then went still, taking on the same steady cadence as the count strip before the drop.

"Listen," he said. His voice re-found that small teacher tone that made people lean without realizing. "We have to finish this the way we started. No big heroics. We are not hammers."