The Rabbit's name, Aris decided, was not something he was going to think about right now.

  Right now the Rabbit was sitting back on its haunches again and its eyes were going bright and the fur on its spine was doing the slow rise that Colette had given him two seconds to work with.

  He counted.

  One.

  He repositioned left, fast, the boot finding a clear patch of floor between a bent sword belt and something he didn't look at closely.

  Two.

  Repel pushed at the Rabbit's chest, the deflection, three degrees—

  The Rabbit didn't release the beam.

  It released something else.

  The mist gathered and shaped and came out not as a beam but as a projectile, a compressed sphere of frozen air the size of Aris's head, moving faster than the beam had moved, and it hit him in the left shoulder before he finished the deflection and the cold went through his jacket and into the skin underneath and kept going, the freeze working inward with the specific intent of something designed to do exactly this.

  He went down on one knee.

  The cold climbed his shoulder toward his neck.

  "Aris—"

  Void reacted before he directed it.

  The Eido pressed close to his left side and the absorption started, Void pulling the cold out of his shoulder the way it pulled dungeon ailments out of patients, the freeze retreating from his neck and then from his shoulder and then from the surface of his skin, leaving behind the absence of cold which felt, for three seconds, like burning.

  He stood.

  His left arm was numb from shoulder to elbow and would be numb for a while. He moved it experimentally. It moved.

  Fine.

  "New attack," he said.

  "I noticed," Colette said, from the Rabbit's left side, her dagger low. "It adapts."

  "How many attacks does a floor boss have," Aris said.

  "More than two," she said.

  The White Sentient came off its haunches.

  The movement was fast and low, the body dropping closer to the floor before it pushed forward, and the paws hit the dome stone in a sequence that built speed rather than just expressing it, the size of the thing accelerating toward Aris with the specific momentum of mass that had decided on a direction.

  He ran left and felt the air dispcement of the paw as it came down where he'd been, the wind of it physical and immediate, the stone cracking under the impact in a ring of fractures that spread half a meter in every direction.

  Not a miss. A test. The Rabbit pulled the paw back and the cracks remained.

  It looked at him.

  Aris looked back.

  Something in the red eyes, the floor boss quality, the specific attention that was not animal. It had adjusted its approach after the beam deflection. It had changed from beam to projectile. Now it had tested what happened when it closed distance.

  It was building a picture of him.

  He found this more frightening than the attacks.

  "It's reading us," he said.

  "Yes," Colette said. "So read it back."

  She was already moving, coming in from the Rabbit's left at the low angle she'd found before, the dagger aimed at the foreleg's compromised point. The Rabbit's head swung toward her, tracking, and Aris pushed Gravity at its haunches as it turned, the pull disrupting the weight distribution, the Rabbit's turn becoming slightly wider than intended.

  Colette's dagger found the foreleg.

  Deeper this time.

  Green blood, dark and thick, running down the white fur and pooling on the dome floor with the slow viscosity of something cold. The Rabbit made the sternum sound again and the mineral light flickered.

  Aris came in from the right with Elysse's sword.

  The reach was right now, fully calibrated, six weeks of carrying the sword having settled into his muscle memory without his noticing. The bde went into the Rabbit's right shoulder, not deep, the fur and the density beneath it resisting, but present, the cut opening and the green following.

  He pulled back before the head came around.

  Not fast enough.

  The Rabbit's nose hit him. Not a bite, not a deliberate strike, the head simply moving and his body being in the path of it, and the impact sent him sideways across the dome floor, his boots losing the stone, the world tilting and then presenting him with the floor at speed.

  He rolled.

  Came up.

  His ribs had opinions but his ribs could wait.

  The third attack was the worst.

  The Rabbit stomped.

  Both front paws simultaneously, the full weight of it coming down on the dome floor, and the floor responded the way floors responded to that weight, the stone cracking in a radius and the cracks propagating outward with speed, and from the cracks a cold came up, the freeze moving through the fractures in the stone like water finding channels, spreading across the floor surface in a white crystalline growth that moved toward them from every direction.

  "Up," Colette said.

  They both jumped, finding the rger floor items, the bent armor ptes and the thicker pieces of scattered equipment, anything elevated above the spreading frost. Aris nded on a shield, ft on its back, big enough to stand on. Colette found a broken crate frame, one edge, her bance precise.

  The frost reached the edges of what they were standing on and stopped.

  The Rabbit watched them standing on things in the middle of its frozen floor with the ft red attention of something noting the adaptation.

  "It's going to do something about this," Aris said.

  "Yes," Colette said. "Jump left when I say."

  The Rabbit's eyes went bright.

  "Left," Colette said.

  They jumped.

  The projectile hit the shield Aris had been standing on and the shield crystallized completely, the metal going white, and when it hit the dome floor it shattered into frozen fragments that slid across the frost in every direction.

  Aris nded on the dome floor, the frost retreating from the heat of his boots slowly, the cold trying to climb his soles.

  Void absorbed it passively. A continuous effort now, the Eido working against the ambient cold the room had accumuted, the temperature having dropped significantly since the Rabbit's stomp.

  He was tired.

  Not dramatically tired. The specific fatigue of someone whose Eido had been working harder than usual for longer than usual and was communicating this through the channel of mild persistent headache and the feeling that his connection to Void was slightly thinner than normal.

  He looked at Colette.

  She was breathing harder than she had been. The dagger hand steady, the rest of her showing the accumution of the st ten minutes in the way bodies showed it, the small postural signs of expenditure adding up.

  The Rabbit sat back.

  Eyes rising to bright.

  "Again," Aris said.

  He went for the eye.

  Not pnned. Opportunistic, the Rabbit's head dropping slightly as it gathered the mist for another projectile, the angle presenting itself, and Aris came in under the head with the sword extended, the reach of it doing what reach was for.

  The bde found the right eye at the corner.

  He pushed.

  The Rabbit screamed.

  The sound this time was not the sternum compression. It was a genuine vocalization, high and resonant and too loud for the dome to contain properly, the sound reflecting off the curved ceiling and arriving back at them from every direction simultaneously, and Aris's hands went to his ears before he could stop them, the sword dropping, the echo of the scream moving through the dome's stone and into the floor and up through his boots.

  Green down the white fur. The right eye closed, permanently, the lid pressing down over the damage and not reopening.

  The Rabbit turned its head.

  The left eye found him.

  The red in it was different now. The floor boss quality still present but something added to it, something that had not been there before the eye, a heat in the red that the cold of everything else in the dome made more visible by contrast.

  "Aris," Colette said, very quietly.

  "I see it," he said.

  "It's going to be less patient now," she said.

  "I know," he said.

  He picked up the sword.

  Less patient was an understatement.

  The Rabbit moved continuously now, no more sitting back on haunches, no more assessment pauses, the body in constant motion across the dome floor, circling them, the one eye tracking both of them simultaneously in the way that predator eyes tracked multiple targets, the head moving in short arcs to compensate for the lost right side.

  It attacked in combination.

  Stomp into projectile. Circle into charge into stomp. The freeze on the floor thickening with each stomp, the ambient temperature dropping further, Void working harder to keep the cold from climbing Aris's legs, the headache behind his eyes developing into something with a pulse.

  Colette got a cut along her forearm.

  Not the dagger side. The Rabbit's fur caught her right arm as the body passed, the close-cropped coat dense enough to score skin at that speed, and she pulled the arm in and kept moving, the blood on her sleeve dark in the dome's light.

  Aris didn't acknowledge it. She hadn't acknowledged the ribs he'd taken. They were keeping that accounting separately and would settle it ter.

  He was leaving marks.

  Every time the angle presented itself he put the sword in and pulled it out and the green accumuted on the dome floor alongside the old dried brown of previous encounters. The cuts were real. They were not enough. The Rabbit's mass absorbed each one with the patient endurance of something that had significantly more of everything than they had.

  He looked at Colette across the dome.

  She looked back.

  The same assessment in both directions. The same conclusion.

  "Sovereign," he said.

  She was already raising her hand.

  The blue came down.

  Not the gradual arrival of the Underbowl, the staged amplification of a pnned engagement. This was immediate, Sovereign manifesting at full output because there was no longer a reason to conserve it, the crowned luminous form pressing above Colette's skin and the blue light falling across the dome and finding Void above Aris and running through it.

  He felt the difference in his hands first.

  Void expanded. The passive absorption that had been working continuously against the ambient cold became active, became directed, the Eido's range and depth increasing under Sovereign's amplification the way it had increased in the Underbowl but fuller here, the dungeon's ambient energy feeding into Colette's output and coming back through Void with more behind it than the Underbowl had been able to provide.

  The headache receded.

  Not gone. Receded, the connection to Void thickening back toward normal under the amplification, the Eido's fatigue compensated for by what Sovereign was feeding into it.

  "How long," he said.

  "Not long," she said. "Make it count."

  The Rabbit's eye found him. Bright immediately. No patience left.

  Aris looked at the sword in his hand.

  He looked at Void above him.

  He thought about the clinic. About the way Void's Hand worked on a debuff, the sphere pressed against a condition and the absorption running through the contact point, the force of it directed inward at the target rather than outward. The same principle as Repel but inverted, the output concentrated at the point of contact rather than projected forward.

  What if the contact point was the sword's tip.

  "Colette," he said. "When it charges."

  She understood before he finished.

  The Rabbit charged.

  He didn't move.

  The Rabbit covered half the dome in two seconds, one eye, full speed, the paws finding the stone in the sequence that built momentum, and the air pressure ahead of it reached Aris before it did, the wind of the oncoming mass pushing at his clothes and his hair and everything in the dome that wasn't fixed to the floor.

  He set his feet.

  Raised the sword in both hands, point forward.

  Void gathered at the bde's tip, the absorption force concentrated there by the amplification Sovereign was running through it, the bck of the Eido pressing into the metal with the specific density of something that had been given a direction and was committed to it.

  The Rabbit reached him.

  The sword went in.

  And Aris triggered Repel at the tip.

  The force released inward and forward simultaneously, Repel pushing through the point of contact into the wound rather than away from it, the bde driven deeper by its own projected force, and Void's absorption following the bde's path into the tissue and pulling outward against the resistance, the combination of forces working in opposite directions through the same entry point.

  The effect was not subtle.

  The Rabbit screamed again, the full vocalization, and green erupted from the wound in a volume that the cut's size didn't account for, the internal pressure releasing through the opening Repel had created, and the Rabbit pulled back and the sword came with it for a moment before Aris released the grip and let it go.

  The dome was quiet except for the sound of green hitting the stone floor.

  The Rabbit stood with one eye and a wound in its left shoulder that was producing green at a rate that even its mass couldn't sustain indefinitely.

  Aris looked at it.

  The Rabbit looked at him.

  Then it opened its mouth.

  Not for a beam. Not for a projectile. It held the mouth open and the sound that came out was low and continuous and felt in the chest wall and the fillings of back teeth and every small bone in the inner ear simultaneously.

  A call.

  The dome's walls answered.

  From every tunnel entrance, from every passage that fed into the dome's circumference, white came. Small white, Floor 7 white, the regur variety pouring through the tunnel mouths and spreading across the dome floor with the unified movement of things responding to a specific signal, hundreds of them filling the dome's entrances and moving inward and the red of them reflecting off the frozen floor in broken lines everywhere.

  The White Sentient's mouth closed.

  It watched them with its one eye from behind the wall of its summoned colony.

  Aris looked at Colette.

  She looked at the entrances. All of them blocked. The Floor 8 tunnel behind the Rabbit, the way back behind a wall of red eyes and white fur, the dome's curved walls offering nowhere to be that was not currently being occupied by something with teeth.

  "Options," she said.

  Her voice had the quality of someone asking a genuine question with no preferred answer.

  Aris looked at the ceiling.

  The ceiling where the White Sentient had come through it. The hole it had made, the rock crumbling around the edges of the entry point, the darkness of the passage above visible through the gap thirty meters up.

  Then the floor beneath them cracked.

  The Rabbit's st stomp, deyed, the fractures from it finally reaching the dome's center, and the cold came up through the cracks and the floor began to give way beneath their feet and the Rabbit watched with its one eye and the colony watched with all of theirs and Aris had approximately two seconds to solve a problem that had no good solutions.