The fourth time he hit the floor he stayed there for a moment.

  Not from choice. His legs simply filed a report indicating they needed a second, and his body, which had been overriding reports for the past several minutes, decided this one was worth acknowledging. He lay on his back on the cracked stone and looked at the ceiling and breathed in the specific shallow way that his ribs were currently permitting, which was not the way he would have chosen.

  The sword was still in his hand.

  He stared at the ceiling. The crystals up there were beautiful, he thought, distantly even now, even broken and swinging from the earlier impact, they caught the light they produced and scattered it back in patterns that moved slowly across the stone like something alive. He'd always found Floor Six beautiful. That had never changed no matter how many times he came down.

  Get up, he told himself.

  I know, he told himself back.

  He got up.

  The Hollow Guard watched him do it with its pale eyes and its cracked face plate and the patience of deep stone. The constellation of dents across its armor had grown he'd been adding to it every exchange, each strike landing in the same geography, deepening what was already there rather than spreading to new territory. It wasn't working. He understood that in the clear-eyed way of someone who had moved past the point of self-deception. He was making marks on something that had been making marks on him, and the exchange rate was not in his favor.

  His left side was wet. He didn't look at it.

  His forehead had dried, mostly the blood from earlier tacky now, pulling at his skin when he changed expression. His shin had stopped being a specific pain and joined the general condition. The sleeve that had been mostly gone was entirely gone now, the canvas torn away somewhere in the third exchange, and the arm underneath was scraped from wrist to elbow in the way that stone floors scrape skin when introduced to it at speed.

  He raised the sword.

  Again, he said, though not out loud.

  He went in lower this time.

  The Hollow Guard adjusted it was learning him too, that was the honest truth of it, each exchange refining its model of how he moved and where he committed and what he flinched from. But lower meant inside the axe's natural arc, meant the creature had to change its geometry to bring the weapon to bear, meant a half-second where the floating plates were redistributing and the gaps between them were wider than usual.

  He put the sword into the gap at the left shoulder.

  Void's weight came with it and something else, something that hadn't been there in the first exchange or the second, a quality to the connection between his hand and the merged presence above his skin that had been building without him noticing, like pressure in a room with a closed door. His mana output had been climbing. He could feel it now that he was paying attention Void pressed closer than before, the mask hovering directly above his face, the merger at his sword hand deeper and more complete, and where the blade connected with the armor the result was different.

  Not a dent.

  A cut.

  Shallow barely a centimeter, clean-edged, the armor parting under the blade with a resistance that was still enormous but was no longer absolute. The gap in the floating plate widened slightly. The phosphorescent nothing inside pulsed once, brighter than before, and in that brightness

  He saw it.

  He didn't know what he was looking at for a full second. Then he did.

  Inside the creature's chest not where a heart would be, lower, deeper, suspended in the dark absence between the inner surfaces of the floating plates a core. Roughly spherical, roughly the size of both his fists together, pulsing with a slow light that was a different quality from the pale eye-lights. Denser. Warmer. Structured, the way something is structured when it has been accumulating for a very long time.

  Mana. Concentrated. Crystallized, almost.

  His brain, in the middle of a fight for his life on a cracked floor in a collapsed antechamber, performed an automatic and completely involuntary appraisal.

  That, some part of him thought, with the detached certainty of a person who had spent years listening to Aldric describe material values over the parish clinic's back counter, is worth more money than I have seen in my entire life combined.

  The Hollow Guard's free hand connected with his chest and sent him across the floor.

  He skidded, rolled, came to a stop against the far wall, and lay there for a second with the most inappropriate expression the situation had ever produced spreading across his battered face.

  He was laughing.

  Not loudly his ribs prevented volume but genuinely, the real kind, the kind that comes from a place too deep to be performed. He was lying against a wall in a sealed antechamber with damaged ribs and a torn-off sleeve and he had just appraised a monster's mana core in the middle of getting beaten to pieces by it, and the appraisal was accurate, and that was that was the most him thing that had ever happened.

  Edric, he thought, would be so disappointed in me right now.

  The laugh faded.

  Then

  "Please"

  Broken. Smaller than before. The word coming apart at the edges, the last of something running out.

  He turned his head.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She had pushed herself up on one arm at some point he hadn't seen it happen, had been too occupied with the floor and the ceiling and the mathematics of mana cores and she was watching him. Had been watching him, he understood suddenly, through all of it. Every exchange. Every wall. Every time he'd gotten up.

  Her arm was shaking. Visibly, continuously, the deep tremor of a body that had passed its limit several floors ago and had been running on something other than physical capability ever since.

  As he watched, that arm gave out.

  She went down slowly not a collapse, not a fall, just a slow losing of the argument her body had been having with gravity, her shoulder dropping, her cheek finding the stone floor, her grey eyes staying open for one more second and then closing.

  Still breathing. He could see it from here the shallow rise and fall.

  But gone.

  Something happened to the room.

  Not physically. The Hollow Guard was still there, still advancing, its cracked face plate and its dented constellation and its axe and its absolute patience all exactly where they'd been. The antechamber was still sealed. Nothing had changed in any measurable way.

  But something happened to Aris.

  He looked at her on the floor.

  He thought of the church clinic at six in the morning, the smell of candle wax and dried herbs, the old Wanderers who came in with dungeon exposure and left with functioning joints again. He thought of the girl with the infected wound last winter who'd grabbed his sleeve when the pain eased and looked at him like he'd done something extraordinary, when all he'd done was what he always did. He thought of Edric's hand on his shoulder this morning that firm, brief pressure and the soup that would be on the table when he got back, if he got back, which required

  I'm not nothing.

  The thought arrived without announcement. Not loud. Not triumphant. Just present, the way true things are present quietly, completely, without needing to argue for themselves.

  She's depending on me. They depend on me. The clinic depends on me. Edric depends on me. I go into the dungeon for flowers and I come back and I treat people and some of them get better and that is that is something. That is not nothing.

  He stood up.

  The Hollow Guard stopped advancing. Its pale eyes tracked him standing, sword raised, Void rising with him and pressing closer than it had yet, the masked face directly above his own, the merger at his sword hand so complete now that he couldn't tell where his grip ended and Void's began.

  His mana output was different. He could feel it not the careful, coaxing trickle of clinic work, not even the desperate bursts of the earlier exchanges. Something had opened. The door he'd been pressing against for the last fifteen minutes had finally moved, and what came through it wasn't rage or grief or any of the things that stories said unlocked power.

  It was just clarity.

  I have to get her to Edric.

  Simple. Complete. The only thing.

  He looked at the Hollow Guard. Looked at the cracked face plate. Looked at the ceiling above the creature the ceiling that had already demonstrated its structural opinions once today, the ceiling with the fracture lines running outward from the entrance collapse, the lines he'd been looking at every time the floor introduced itself to his back.

  He looked at the mana core glowing inside the creature's chest.

  Bait.

  He moved left deliberately, telegraphed, the kind of movement that an opponent who had spent fifteen minutes learning him would read as a committed approach. The Hollow Guard tracked it. Adjusted. The axe came back, the creature's weight shifting to its right, the floating plates redistributing into the geometry of a swing that had ended several of the previous exchanges.

  Aris planted his feet and stopped moving.

  The axe committed.

  He dropped under it felt the displaced air above his head, felt the wind of it on the back of his neck and came up with both hands on the sword and Void's weight fully behind it and drove the blade into the crack on the face plate with everything the clarity had unlocked.

  The plate fractured further. The creature staggered one step, two, moving backward for the first time in the entire exchange.

  Aris looked up.

  Raised his left hand.

  "Gravity."

  It came out differently than before fuller, the connection between intention and output cleaner, Void's presence at his palm complete and certain. The pull went upward. Not at the creature above it, at the ceiling, at the fracture lines that had been waiting for the right argument to finish their conversation with the rock around them.

  The ceiling answered.

  The sound it made was the sound of something that had been holding on deciding not to anymore a deep, slow crack that spread faster than he could track, running along the fracture lines and then beyond them, and the crystals went first, dropping in a cascade of cold blue light, and then the rock came with them, and the Hollow Guard looked up for exactly one second before the ceiling came down.

  The impact shook the floor.

  Dust. Darkness. The crystal light extinguished in sections as the formations dropped and shattered, the antechamber filling with the noise of a great weight settling into a new configuration. The Hollow Guard was somewhere inside it he could hear it, a muffled resonance through the debris, the axe swinging blindly and connecting with rock, the pale light of its eyes visible in fragments through the gaps between fallen stones.

  Burying it. Slowing it.

  Not killing it. He had no illusions about that.

  He was already moving.

  She was where she'd fallen, untouched by the debris he'd watched the ceiling, had placed the pull carefully, had been right about the fracture lines. He got his arms under her and lifted and she was the same impossible weight as before and he didn't care, had stopped caring about the weight several exchanges ago, and turned toward the blocked entrance.

  The debris from the ceiling collapse. The wall of fallen stone and crystal that had sealed them in.

  He looked at it.

  Looked at his left hand.

  His mana reserves were not bottomless. He knew that felt the edges of them now, the specific tiredness that came from sustained output, the way the connection with Void felt slightly thinner than it had at the ceiling. What was left was not a lot.

  He thought about what he'd said.

  I'll protect you to the end.

  Like God's favorite child would.

  He planted his feet. Got his grip on her as secure as it could be with one working arm and one that was expressing its structural concerns. Raised his left hand toward the wall of rock and crystal and everything between him and the surface.

  Took a breath.

  "GRAVITY"

  The word tore out of him with everything remaining not a command, more like a declaration, the kind of thing you say when you need the universe to understand you mean it. Void's hand over his locked completely, the merger absolute, and the pull that came out of his palm was not the careful precise tool of clinic work or the desperate improvisation of the fight.

  It was everything.

  The debris moved.

  Not all of it he wasn't under the impression he was moving all of it, his body was very clear on what it was currently capable of and what it wasn't. But the pieces closest to him, the ones at the base of the blockage, the ones that the others rested on those moved. Grinding, protesting, shedding smaller pieces as they shifted, opening a gap that started at knee height and widened as the connected pieces followed, a gap that was not a door and not an archway and was exactly large enough.

  His nose was bleeding. He noticed this distantly.

  Behind him, in the debris of the collapsed ceiling, the Hollow Guard's axe swung and connected with rock and the resonance of it moved through the floor toward him.

  The gap was large enough.

  He went through it on his knees, pulling her through after him, the stone scraping his shoulders and the top of his head and adding to the inventory of damage that he had stopped filing individually and was tracking as a single aggregate condition called later.

  The other side.

  The passage. The steps. Floor Five above him, and Four above that, and Three with its roosting bat-things, and Two with its loose stone, and One with its Calveth gate clerk, and above all of them.

  Valerne.

  He crawled toward the first step.

  Then the second.

  One arm. Both knees. Her weight across his back, her breathing against his neck, shallow and continuous and the only thing that mattered.

  "Almost there," he said, though she couldn't hear him.

  He wasn't sure he wasn't saying it to himself.