The residue was four hundred meters ahead and Aris kept Void's awareness on it as they moved, the field narrowed now, focused rather than dispersed, tracking the location the way he tracked a stubborn debuff in the clinic, the attention holding the source without losing it.

  The corridor's blue walls moved past them.

  Three hundred meters.

  Two hundred.

  "It's in a chamber off the left wall," Aris said. "Fifty meters ahead."

  Colette nodded. Her hand was on the dagger and her eyes were moving across the corridor's space with the systematic attention she brought to unfamiliar floor territory, near walls, ceiling, the passage behind them.

  One hundred meters.

  Then Void found something else in the residue signal.

  Not dungeon ailment. Something warmer, more active, the specific signature of a living body carrying dungeon exposure rather than the static residue of past exposure. The distinction was one Aris knew from the clinic, the difference between a room where someone had been sick and a room where someone was still sick, and the difference here was unmistakable.

  "There's someone alive in there," he said.

  Colette stopped walking.

  She looked at him.

  "Alive," she said.

  "Carrying significant dungeon ailment exposure," he said. "Old injuries. The signature is—" He paused. "It's bad, Colette."

  She was already moving.

  The chamber entrance was a gap in the left wall, narrow, the blue-bck rock on both sides worn at shoulder height in the way that narrow passages were worn when things moved through them regurly, the contact marks of passage accumuted over time.

  From inside the chamber, a sound.

  Movement, slow and effortful, the specific sound of a body moving against the will of its own damage. And underneath the movement, breathing, the audible kind, the kind that became audible when the mechanism of it required more effort than usual.

  And then a word.

  Faint, dry, the voice of someone who had not used it properly in a long time and was finding it with difficulty.

  "...captain..."

  Colette went through the gap.

  The chamber was small retive to the corridor's scale, a natural pocket in the blue-bck wall, the ceiling here lower, two crystal formations in the upper corners providing light that was more than the corridor's but still incomplete, the shadows deep at the chamber's far end.

  He was on the floor at the far end.

  The blond hair was the first thing, matted and damp with sweat, spread across the stone beneath him in the way that hair spread when a person had been on the ground long enough that the arrangement had stopped being a choice. No cape. No armor, none of the Aurelian red that Aris had seen in fragments on the floors above. A tunic that had been white at some point and had been through everything since. Trousers torn at both knees.

  The left arm ended at the elbow.

  The cape was there, the red of it still red beneath the dungeon's accumuted evidence, wrapped around the stump with the careful wrapping of someone who had done field medicine on themselves under the worst avaible conditions and had done it well enough that they were still alive to demonstrate the result.

  He was trying to sit up.

  "Regis," Colette said.

  She crossed the chamber in four steps and went down to her knees beside him and her hands found his shoulders and her voice had lost every register except the one underneath all the others, the one that had nothing managed in it.

  "Captain," Regis said.

  His eyes found her face and the finding of it did something to his expression that the expression clearly hadn't done in a long time, the specific release of a person who has been alone with something for so long that the arrival of another person produces a physical response before the words do.

  "I'm here," she said. "Regis, I'm here."

  "You came," he said.

  "I've been looking," she said. "For weeks. I couldn't—the Lodge had nothing, and I—" She stopped. Her hands were on his face, the field assessment Aris recognized from every patient intake, checking the damage, finding the extent of it. "You're going to be alright. We're going to get you out."

  Aris came through the gap and stood at the chamber's entrance and took in Sir Regis of the Aurelian Compact in the two crystal formations' light and made his clinical assessment and kept it to himself because some of it was not information for this moment.

  Regis looked at him.

  "Who," he said.

  "Aris Edren," Colette said. "He's with me. He treats dungeon ailments." She looked at Aris. "The arm needs—"

  "I see it," Aris said. "Give me a moment."

  Void pressed toward Regis and found the dungeon ailment signature at full resolution and the resolution was not good. The exposure was extensive, weeks of unmitigated dungeon energy at this depth without treatment, the kind of accumution that the upper floors' Wanderers never reached because they came back up and came to the clinic and Void addressed it before it compounded.

  This had compounded.

  He came further into the chamber and crouched beside Colette.

  "I need to start treatment," he said to Regis. "It will feel like pressure and then cold and then significantly better. Don't move away from it."

  Regis looked at him with the eyes of someone assessing whether the person speaking was worth trusting, the assessment rapid and complete.

  "Do it," he said.

  Void's Hand formed.

  While the treatment ran Colette stayed at Regis's side and her hands stayed on him and she talked to him in the low continuous way that people talked to injured people, present and steady, and gradually the account came out of him in pieces, the way accounts came out of people who had been holding them alone for too long.

  "We reached Floor 46," he said. "Everything was normal. The floor was clear, we'd mapped it across two expeditions, we knew the geography. We were staging for the Floor 50 boss approach."

  "I know," Colette said.

  "We were ready," he said. "The party was ready. Everyone was at level." He paused for the specific pause of someone whose next sentence exists in a different category from their previous one. "Then it arrived."

  The chamber was quiet except for Void's treatment sound, the low absorption that the Eido produced when working at depth.

  "Arrived from where," Aris said.

  "Below," Regis said. "It came up from below Floor 46. There was no warning. No change in the floor's atmosphere, no creature behavior shift, none of the standard indicators of a powerful presence." He looked at the chamber ceiling. "It was simply not there and then it was there."

  "What did it look like," Colette said.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "Wrong," he said. "Everything about it was wrong. The shape of it changed. Not like a creature that moves, like a creature whose shape is not fixed, like something that has a form because forms are required in this space and has chosen one without fully committing to it." He looked at his remaining hand. "We hit it with everything. Every Eido in the party, every ability, every combination Sovereign would have given us if you'd been there." He looked at Colette. "Nothing worked."

  "Nothing," she said.

  "It didn't block our attacks," he said. "It didn't resist them. They went through it. Like striking water. The force passed through and the thing continued and the thing was invincible and we ran."

  "How many made it to the upper floors," Colette said.

  "Seven initially," he said. "Then five. Then three." He closed his eyes. "It followed us. It didn't hurry. It didn't need to hurry. It simply followed and the following was sufficient because there was nowhere to go that it wasn't eventually going to reach."

  "The white haired girl," Colette said.

  Regis opened his eyes.

  "Elysse," he said.

  "She made it to the surface," Colette said. "She's alive."

  Something moved through Regis's face. The particur movement of someone receiving information they had assigned a very low probability to and finding the probability revised.

  "She made it," he said.

  "With a sigil on her back," Colette said. "From the creature."

  "The mark," he said. "Yes. It marks the ones that survive contact." He tried to sit up straighter and managed it partially, Colette's hand at his back providing the support the arm couldn't. "I told her to run. The three of us remaining, I told the others to run and I held the stairwell." He looked at the wrapped stump. "The creature found me. I survived by going into a wall crack it couldn't follow me into." He looked at his arm. "Most of me survived."

  "Regis," Colette said.

  "I've been here since," he said. "I couldn't go up. It's still here. I can feel the mark it left." He touched the side of his neck with his remaining hand, the location Aris recognized. "It's looking for me. As long as I stay in the small passages it can't reach me but I can feel it looking."

  He reached up and took Colette's shoulders.

  His grip was weak and he used it anyway.

  "Captain," he said, and his voice had the urgency in it of someone who has been building to one specific point through everything they have said and has reached it. "It is still here. In this floor. In the floors below." His eyes were direct and fully present in a way that the rest of him was struggling to be. "I can feel it looking. Right now. It knows something new is here." He looked at Aris. "The treatment, the Eido work, it can feel that. It knows."

  "Why didn't other Wanderers—" Aris started.

  "It killed them," Regis said. "Everyone who came close enough to encounter it. Not only the ones it was following. Any Wanderer who crossed its territory. I've heard them from the small passages, heard the encounters, heard the endings." He looked at Colette. "I couldn't warn them without leaving the small passages. And I couldn't leave the small passages."

  "The Church," Aris said. "The Lodge should have sent—"

  "I waited," Regis said. "For weeks. Holy Padins, Lodge investigators, anyone with the level to address it." Something in his expression, old and cold. "No one came."

  The chamber held that.

  No one came.

  The Lodge's one page report. Noted and filed. The attendant's brother and his pride in his red cape. Vette's three unlicensed Wanderers with their stolen equipment and their kept silence.

  No one came.

  The floor moved.

  Not an impact, not a creature's weight on stone. The floor itself, the deep geology of Floor 12 resonating with something below it, the vibration coming up through the stone and through their boots and into their bones with the specific quality of a frequency too low to be a sound but present enough to be felt in every surface it contacted.

  Debris from the ceiling.

  Small pieces first, the crystal formations in the corners shedding fragments, the dust of the ceiling disturbing and falling in thin curtains through the crystal light.

  Regis's eyes went wide.

  "It's coming," he said.

  The urgency had become something beyond urgency, the register of someone whose body had been calibrated to one specific threat for weeks and had just received the signal it had been dreading.

  "We need to go," Colette said, already moving.

  "It knows you're here," Regis said, his voice climbing. "The treatment, the mana, it felt the mana—"

  The scream arrived.

  Not from one direction. From everywhere, the dungeon's stone transmitting it through every surface simultaneously, the walls and the floor and the ceiling all delivering it at once, and the scream was—

  Wrong.

  Every scream Aris had ever heard had a source and a quality and a reason and this had all of those things and they were all wrong, the source too rge, the quality of a human voice but not a human voice, the reason something he could not name because naming required a category and this exceeded the category.

  A thousand voices.

  That was the impression. Not a thousand voices in sequence or in harmony but compressed, yered on top of each other until the individual voices ceased to be individual and became a texture, and the texture was suffering, the specific sound of people in extremity, and it came through the walls at full volume with no attenuation for distance.

  Aris's mind went sideways.

  Not all the way. Void caught it, the passive absorption activating against the scream's psychic component the way it activated against dungeon ailments, the Eido recognizing the attack's nature and processing it, but Void was level one and the scream was not a level one problem and the processing was partial, the edges of his awareness going soft and strange, the chamber's familiar geometry becoming briefly unreliable, the crystal light in the corners doing something with shadows that shadows didn't do.

  He put his hand on the wall.

  The wall was real. He held that.

  Colette was on the floor.

  Not injured, not struck, on the floor with her hands over her ears and her eyes closed and her face doing something he had never seen her face do, the composed quality completely absent, the managed quality completely absent, every register she moved between stripped away by the scream and what was left underneath was a person in genuine terror.

  Regis had gone somewhere else entirely.

  He was against the wall, his remaining hand against his skull, the words coming out of him in a continuous low stream that had no coherence, sylbles and fragments, his head moving in short repetitive impacts against the stone behind him.

  Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  "Regis," Aris said.

  His voice came out wrong, the edges of his own cognition still unreliable, the words formed correctly but the production of them belonging to someone slightly further away than his mouth.

  He held the wall.

  Void absorbed what it could absorb.

  The scream continued, and the floor vibrated, and the debris fell, and somewhere below Floor 12 something that had been following a mark for weeks had found three new marks in the same location and was no longer moving slowly.