"My name is Vanya."

  Elowen remained slumped against the stone wall. His breathing was still a ragged, wet rasp, his lungs aching from the brutal constriction of the loyalty iron. He didn't look at her face. He looked at her mutated left arm, at the obsidian scales that devoured the faint ambient light, and the thick, unnatural muscle that had woven itself over her slender bones.

  Names were a liability in the Weeping Court. The System didn't use them. To the Flesh-Smiths, a prisoner was a baseline, a reagent, or a failure. Elowen hadn't spoken his own name aloud in a decade. The hangman’s noose and the Remorse Loop had beaten it out of him, leaving behind only the cold, mechanical veteran that knew how to survive.

  But asymmetry was dangerous. If she gave him a piece of her identity and he offered nothing in return, she would look to him as a savior. She would expect protection. He couldn't afford that.

  He finally raised his head, his pale eyes meeting hers. There was no warmth in his gaze, no shared camaraderie of the surviving prey.

  "I'm Elowen," he rasped, his voice grinding like crushed glass. "And you're my lockpick now. You clear the path, I kill what gets in our way. Keep up, pull your weight, and we might see the surface. Falter, and I leave you behind."

  It was a contract, brutal and absolute.

  Vanya didn't flinch. She didn't weep or look betrayed by his coldness. She simply held his gaze, her jaw set, the feral light of the lower city slums burning behind her eyes. She recognized a transaction when she heard one.

  "Deal," she said softly.

  Elowen pushed himself off the wall, his atrophied Level 2 muscles protesting the movement. He had dropped his rusted falchion in the tunnel below. He was completely unarmed, dressed only in filthy, blood-soaked rags, his body bruised and battered.

  "Let's move," he said. "The patrols up here won't be mindless mimics or scavengers. They’ll be armed guards."

  They moved down the corridor. The environment had shifted drastically from the subterranean Flesh-Nursery. The walls here were dry, constructed of perfectly fitted, dark grey ashlar blocks. The floor was solid flagstone, swept clean of the organic rot and slime that coated the depths. Instead of glowing pools of caustic waste, the arched ceilings were lined with rusted copper pipes that hissed softly, feeding a network of caged, flickering gas-lamps.

  The light was dim and cast long, wavering shadows, but it felt agonizingly exposed after the pitch-black of the deep tunnels.

  Elowen walked with a pronounced limp, his bare feet making no sound on the stone. He kept his back brushing against the wall, checking every intersecting hallway and heavy oak door they passed. His Grave-Sight was dormant; the dry, aching pressure behind his eyes told him his Mana was completely empty. He was entirely reliant on his physical senses.

  "We need a blind," Elowen whispered, pausing at a four-way intersection. The distant, rhythmic clatter of iron-shod boots echoed from a stairwell somewhere far to their right. A patrol. "A place with one door. A place they don't check."

  Vanya nodded, her scaled hand trailing lightly along the stone wall. She stopped in front of a heavy, iron-reinforced oak door recessed into a shallow alcove.

  Elowen looked at it. A thick layer of undisturbed dust coated the threshold. A rusted iron placard bolted to the wood read: Contraband Annex 4 - Decommissioned.

  More importantly, it was secured by a massive, complex internal locking mechanism. There was no keyhole, only a heavily warded runic dial meant to be turned by a guard with the proper System clearance.

  Red text immediately bled into Elowen's vision as he stepped close.

  [Restricted Area. Clearance: Warden-Level Required.]

  [Warning: Tampering will result in severe Integrity deduction.]

  Elowen stepped back, pointing a bruised finger at the dial.

  Vanya stepped forward. She didn't bother trying to figure out the runes. She didn't care about the System's warnings, because the System didn't know she existed.

  She raised her mutated left arm. She jammed her thick, razor-sharp obsidian claws directly into the seam between the heavy oak door and the stone doorframe. The wood splintered instantly. She planted her boots, her face contorting with effort, and wrenched her arm backward.

  The sound of shattering iron and tearing wood was deafening in the quiet corridor. The internal locking bar bent, groaned, and snapped in half. Vanya ripped the door open.

  Elowen grabbed her good shoulder, shoving her inside, and threw himself in after her. He pulled the heavy, splintered door shut just as the distant footsteps of the guard patrol turned the corner at the end of the hall.

  They stood in the pitch-black room, holding their breath. Elowen pressed his back against the broken door, serving as a human wedge.

  The heavy, iron-shod boots marched past their alcove. They didn't slow down. The patrol faded away into the deeper levels of the prison.

  Elowen exhaled, sliding down the door until he hit the floor.

  "Barricade it," he wheezed.

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  Vanya moved efficiently in the dark. Elowen heard the heavy scraping of wood against stone as she dragged a massive piece of furniture—a desk or a cabinet—and wedged it firmly against the broken door.

  Once the door was secure, Vanya found a rusted gas-valve on the wall and turned it. A small, caged lantern hissed to life, bathing the room in a dim, amber glow.

  It was an old storage room, about twenty feet across, thick with dust and smelling of dry parchment and old leather. Stacked haphazardly in the corners were rotting wooden crates, broken chairs, and discarded alchemy equipment. It was a graveyard for forgotten things. A perfect safehouse.

  Elowen let his head fall back against the wood of the door. The adrenaline was finally leaving his system, replaced by a crushing, marrow-deep exhaustion. He felt incredibly frail.

  He closed his eyes and summoned the System.

  He didn't need to speak. He just visualized the interface, and the pale blue light flared behind his eyelids, laying out the exact, numerical truth of his miserable existence.

  [User: Elowen]

  [Status: Atrophied / Malnourished]

  [Level: 2]

  [Current Essence: 50 / 600 to Level 3]

  Elowen stared at the math. The two guards in the cell had given him 100 Essence. The Corpse-Weaver had given him 200, pushing him over the 300 threshold to Level 2. His pool had reset, and the escape from the massive Flesh-Amalgamate had dropped a meager 50 Essence into his account for fleeing a Boss-Class entity.

  He needed 550 more to reach Level 3. He was a terrifyingly long way from being a threat to anyone.

  He shifted his focus to his attributes.

  [Attributes]

  Strength: 1 (Atrophied)

  Agility: 1 (Impaired)

  Constitution: 2 (Critical)

  Perception: 3 (Enhanced)

  Arcana: 0 (Dormant)

  [Mana: 0/10. Regeneration: Paused due to extreme physical stress.]

  [Traits: Grave-Sight (Grade F - Active)]

  He was incredibly lopsided. Pouring points into Perception had kept him alive, allowing him to see the tripwire and navigate the acid pool, but his physical shell was useless. His Strength was at an absolute baseline; he could barely lift the halberd in the tunnels. If he got into a close-quarters fight with a healthy guard, he would lose. Period.

  Then, his eyes drifted to the bottom of the interface. The red text. The permanent scar.

  [Loyalty Integrity: 88/100]

  [Status: Subservience Logged. Enforcement Suspended.]

  Elowen touched the cold, rusted iron of the collar around his neck. The metal was quiet now, but the bruises beneath it throbbed with every heartbeat.

  Eighty-eight.

  He had lost twelve points of his soul to the High Lord’s leash. Twelve points of his own free will, burned away because he had dared to break the vat and fight back. He knew how the math worked. If that number hit zero, the collar wouldn't just choke him. It would sever his spinal cord, sever his soul, and throw him back into the Remorse Loop to be resurrected with even less of himself remaining.

  To survive the collar, he had to play the compliant dog. He had to lie to the iron, just as he had in the tunnel. He had to bow his head in his mind, over and over, until the System believed he was broken.

  I am not broken, Elowen thought, a cold, crystalline hatred solidifying in the center of his chest. I am just waiting.

  He dismissed the interface.

  When he opened his eyes, Vanya was standing over a heavy, iron-banded footlocker in the center of the room. It was chained shut, secured by a massive, fist-sized padlock.

  She wasn't looking at the lock. She was looking at her arm.

  Under the amber light of the gas-lamp, the full extent of the mutation was visible. The flesh of her left arm, from the fingertips to just below the shoulder, was entirely gone. In its place was a thick, reptilian musculature, corded like dark steel cables. The scales were deep, iridescent black, overlapping perfectly to create a natural armor. Her fingers ended in curved, obsidian talons that looked sharp enough to cut glass.

  She reached out with her human right hand, her trembling fingers lightly brushing the cold scales of her left arm.

  Elowen watched her from the floor. He knew exactly what she was feeling. It was the horrific realization that the thing attached to your body was no longer you. It was a weapon grafted onto a victim.

  "Does it hurt?" Elowen asked, his voice low in the quiet room.

  Vanya blinked, pulling her human hand away as if burned. She looked at him, her expression hardening instantly, burying the vulnerability behind a wall of defiance.

  "Only when I'm not using it," she said flatly.

  She turned back to the footlocker. She didn't ask for permission. She gripped the heavy iron padlock with her mutated claws. She braced her boots against the side of the trunk, gritted her teeth, and squeezed.

  The tendons in her unnatural arm bulged. The iron groaned, fought back for a fraction of a second, and then shattered. The heavy metal pieces clattered loudly against the stone floor.

  She threw the lid open.

  A cloud of stale dust plumed into the air. Elowen forced himself to his feet, his joints popping, and limped over to the trunk to look inside.

  It was a guard's confiscation locker. Over the decades, the patrols had dumped whatever they stripped off the incoming prisoners into this box, leaving it to rot. Most of it was garbage. Rotted leather tunics, moldy bread rations turned to stone, shattered wooden holy symbols from religions the Court had wiped out.

  But at the very bottom, wrapped in a heavy piece of oiled canvas, was a long, heavy shape.

  Elowen reached in. He pulled the canvas bundle out and set it gently on the top of the desk Vanya had used as a barricade.

  He unrolled the heavy, grease-stained cloth.

  Inside lay a weapon.

  It wasn't a rusty piece of garbage or a repurposed farming tool. It was a blade built specifically for the grim, claustrophobic violence of the Weeping Court's trenches.

  It was a shortsword, roughly two feet long. The blade was thick, heavy, and single-edged, resembling a brutal cross between a meat cleaver and a gladius. The steel was dark, almost gunmetal grey, and completely free of rust thanks to the oiled canvas. The hilt was wrapped in tight, worn sharkskin for a slip-proof grip, and it featured a heavy, solid iron D-guard designed to protect the fingers and act as brass knuckles in a grapple.

  Elowen picked it up.

  His wrist immediately popped with a sharp flash of pain. The tip of the blade sagged toward the floor, dragging his arm down with it.

  It was wildly unbalanced. The blade was top-heavy, designed for a user with the muscle mass to chop through bone. Elowen’s atrophied forearm trembled under the strain. If he tried to swing this with one hand in a fight, the momentum would rip the weapon right out of his weak grip—or dislocate his shoulder.

  The System prompt flared, confirming the problem.

  [Item: Trench-Scrapper’s Cleaver]

  [Grade: Uncommon]

  [Durability: 45/50]

  [Requirement: Strength 3 to wield effectively.]

  [Effect: +10% to physical damage against armored chitin.]

  Elowen gritted his teeth. He gripped the sharkskin handle with his left hand as well, wrapping both fists around the hilt.

  Using it two-handed, he could lift it. It felt less like a sword and more like a heavy executioner’s axe. He wouldn't be fencing with this; he would be hacking, using his entire body weight to drive the steel.

  I need to get stronger, Elowen thought, staring at the grey steel. Until then, I swing it like a hammer.

  He looked back into the footlocker.

  Beneath where the sword had been, Vanya pulled out a folded piece of thick, hardened leather. It was a boiled leather cuirass, stained dark with old sweat and oil, missing a few buckles but structurally sound.

  She held it up, measuring it against Elowen's emaciated frame.

  "Put it on," she said, tossing it to him. "It covers the collar. If a patrol sees us from a distance, they won't immediately know you're a runaway. They might mistake you for a slum-scavenger."

  Elowen caught the cuirass. He slipped the heavy leather over his head, tightening the remaining buckles at his ribs. It hung slightly loose on his starved frame, but the high, stiff leather collar effectively masked the iron loyalty ring around his throat. It felt warm, a tiny layer of armor between his frail body and the horrific world outside the door.

  [Item: Discarded Guard Cuirass]

  [Grade: Common]

  [Effect: Minor mitigation against slashing damage.]

  Vanya reached into the chest one last time. She pulled out a small, corked glass vial filled with a thick, dull red paste.

  [Item: Coagulant Salve (Poor Quality)]

  She looked at the vial, then looked up at Elowen's throat. The skin above the collar was raw, bleeding, and bruised deep purple from where the System had tried to crush his windpipe.

  She popped the cork with her thumb. She walked over to him, her expression neutral, and held out the vial.

  "Fix your neck," she said. "If you bleed out, I lose my meat-shield."

  Elowen took the vial. He dug two fingers into the thick, medicinal paste and rubbed it into the raw, broken skin around the iron collar. It stung fiercely, a sharp chemical burn that made him grit his teeth, but almost instantly, the bleeding stopped, and a dull, numbing coolness settled over his throat.

  He tossed the empty vial aside. He looked at Vanya, then down at the heavy, brutal cleaver resting on the barricade. He picked it up again, gripping it tightly with both hands, feeling the weight anchor him to the ground.

  But they were armed. They were hidden.

  Elowen walked over to the barricaded door and pressed his ear against the heavy oak. The corridor outside was dead silent.

  He looked back at the girl with the monster's arm.

  "Rest," Elowen commanded softly, his voice finally clear of the rattling wheeze. "When my Mana comes back, we hunt."