It started as a dull, throbbing ache at the base of his skull, like a frozen needle pressed against his brain stem.

  Elowen opened his eyes in the pitch-black storage room. The ache didn't fade; it spread, blooming into a pool of icy, hyper-alert clarity behind his retinas. The brutal exhaustion that had anchored him to the floor began to recede, replaced by the faint, static hum of the dungeon’s magic tethering itself back to his soul.

  The pale blue text materialized in the dark.

  [Mana: 10/10. Grave-Sight available.]

  He took a slow, deep, rattling breath. The Coagulant Salve had numbed the raw meat of his throat, and the iron collar was quiet. He gripped the sharkskin hilt of the Trench-Cleaver, the heavy steel resting across his lap. The metal was freezing against his palms, a grounding tether to the physical world.

  He looked across the room. Vanya was already awake. She was sitting perfectly still in the dark, her knees pulled to her chest, her obsidian claws lightly tapping against the stone floor in a silent, restless rhythm. She didn't look like a scared girl hiding in a closet. She looked like a coiled spring, a predator that had finally accepted the laws of the food chain.

  Elowen stood up. His joints cracked loudly in the silence, the sound echoing off the rotting crates. He limped to the heavy oak door and pressed his face against the splintered wood.

  He didn't need to listen. He closed his eyes and pushed the cold magic into his optic nerves.

  [Trait Activated: Grave-Sight.]

  [Mana: 9/10]

  The physical world washed away. The thick, solid oak of the door dissolved into a grainy, translucent charcoal grey. Elowen’s vision pushed out into the corridor beyond, reading the thermal and magical signatures bleeding through the stone.

  Fifty feet down the hall to the right, two massive blooms of bright orange heat were moving toward them.

  Elowen watched the thermal silhouettes. They were large—much larger than the emaciated guards in the lower cells. They walked with perfect, synchronized discipline, their footfalls hitting the stone at the exact same intervals. He could see the cold, dense outlines of heavy plate armor encasing their torsos, thick vambraces on their forearms, and the long, freezing-cold voids of halberds resting on their shoulders.

  Court Enforcers.

  Elowen dropped the Grave-Sight, plunging back into the mundane dark of the storage room to conserve his pool.

  "Two of them," Elowen whispered, moving back to the heavy wooden desk barricading the door. "Heavy armor. Long reach. Polearms. If they catch us in the light, my sword won't even scratch their breastplates before they run us through."

  Vanya stood up, her mutated arm hanging low by her side. "So we stay here and pray they don't check the lock."

  "They're sweeping the annexes," Elowen said, grabbing the edge of the heavy desk. "They'll see the splintered wood. We have ten seconds before they breach. Help me pull this back."

  Together, they hauled the desk backward, the heavy wood scraping violently against the flagstones. They moved it just enough to let the splintered door open inward.

  Elowen looked at Vanya. His face was a pale, hard mask in the gloom.

  "We need the dark," Elowen said softly. "But if I break the gas-lamp in the hall, the System logs it as sabotage of Court property. It'll choke me to death before I can even swing my blade."

  Vanya stepped up to the cracked door. She peered out into the corridor. The hissing, caged copper gas-lamp was bolted to the wall directly above their alcove, casting its wavering amber light over the dusty flagstones.

  She looked at her left hand. The dark, thick tendons flexed.

  "I break it," she said.

  Elowen nodded. "The second it goes dark, they're blind. I have Grave-Sight. I take the one on the left. You take the right."

  He didn't ask if she was ready to kill. He didn't ask if she knew how to fight. They were far beyond the luxury of treating her like a civilian. In the Weeping Court, you were either a weapon or a victim.

  Vanya slipped through the narrow crack in the door, stepping silently into the amber light of the corridor. Elowen followed, pressing his back against the cold stone outside the alcove, gripping the heavy cleaver with both hands, his knuckles turning white.

  The heavy, rhythmic clank-clank of the Enforcers' boots grew deafening. They were twenty feet away, just rounding the curve of the hall, their armor grinding with a brutal, mechanical efficiency.

  Vanya reached up. Her mutated left arm effortlessly bridged the gap to the high wall bracket. She didn't try to finesse the latch or unhook the cage. She wrapped her thick, scaled fingers completely around the glowing glass and the pressurized copper pipe feeding it.

  She squeezed.

  The glass shattered with a sharp, echoing pop. The thick copper pipe crumpled like wet paper under her claws. The hissing flame was snuffed out instantly as the fuel line folded in on itself.

  The corridor plunged into absolute, suffocating blackness.

  Elowen held his breath, his eyes wide in the dark. He waited for the rusted iron collar to heat up. He waited for the jagged red text of the System to bleed across his vision and crush his windpipe for daring to plunge the High Lord's hallway into darkness.

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  The iron remained freezing cold.

  "Halt!" a deep, augmented voice barked from the darkness down the hall.

  "Lamp blew," the second Enforcer grunted. The heavy, metallic sound of shifting steel echoed loudly as they lowered their halberds from their shoulders, dropping into combat stances. "Get the lumen-crystal out. We have scavengers."

  Elowen didn't give them the time.

  [Trait Activated: Grave-Sight.]

  [Mana: 8/10]

  The pitch-black corridor exploded into greyscale. The two Enforcers stood ten feet away, massive towers of orange body heat trapped in freezing cold steel armor. They were turning their heads blindly, searching the void.

  Elowen lunged.

  He didn't swing for the heavily armored chest or the helmet. He targeted the structural weak point.

  Elowen threw his entire, emaciated body weight forward, gripping the Trench-Cleaver like a lumberjack’s axe. He swung horizontally, aiming low, directly for the joint behind the first Enforcer’s knee.

  The impact sent a horrific, jarring shockwave up Elowen’s weak arms. His 1-Strength shoulders screamed in agony, the muscles tearing micro-fibers just to arrest the sudden loss of momentum. The sheer kinetic weight of the unbalanced cleaver crushed the armor links directly into the kneecap.

  Bone shattered with a wet, echoing crunch.

  The Enforcer roared in pain, a deep, guttural sound of shock, his leg buckling instantly. As the massive man collapsed to one knee, bringing his unarmored neck down to Elowen's level, Elowen ripped the blade free. He wrenched it upward in a sloppy, desperate two-handed uppercut, driving the heavy iron D-guard and the base of the blade directly up under the Enforcer's jaw.

  The helmet snapped back. The guard hit the floor hard, thrashing violently in the dark.

  Beside him, the second Enforcer panicked. Blinded and hearing his partner fall, he swung his heavy halberd in a wide, desperate arc that whistled through the air.

  The blade caught empty air. Vanya wasn't on the floor.

  She had used the wall. Bouncing off the stone with a feral leap, she landed squarely on the Enforcer's back. The man staggered forward under the sudden, localized weight, his heavy boots scraping against the flagstones.

  Before he could drop his halberd to reach over his shoulder, Vanya struck. Her right hand grabbed the rim of his heavy iron helmet, jerking his head violently backward and to the side to expose the weak chainmail of his gorget.

  Her left hand—the obsidian claws—plunged into his throat.

  The dark talons shredded the steel rings like cobwebs. She dug in and ripped outward. A thick geyser of brilliant, hot-white thermal blood painted the walls in Elowen's Grave-Sight.

  The Enforcer made a horrific, bubbling sound. He dropped his weapon, his heavily armored hands flying to his ruined neck, and collapsed backward, pinning Vanya's legs beneath his massive bulk.

  She didn't let go. She rode him to the floor, tearing her claws free and pinning his armored shoulder to the flagstones to ensure he didn't get back up. The guard thrashed wildly, his life violently bleeding out onto the stone.

  Elowen stepped over the twitching body of his own kill. He raised the heavy cleaver, his arms trembling wildly from the exertion, and brought it down like an executioner, severing his guard's spine.

  Then he spun toward Vanya's guard. The man was drowning in his own blood, seconds away from death.

  Elowen limped over instantly. The System only rewards the blade that ends the life, his veteran mind calculated coldly, his survival instincts overriding the chaos of the melee. She doesn't have a Core. She isn't registered. If he bleeds out from her claws, the Essence rots in the air. I need those points.

  He didn't hesitate. Elowen drove the heavy Trench-Cleaver straight down through the dying Enforcer's breastplate, using the man's own shattered gorget as a guide for the blade. The steel pierced the heart, ending the thrashing immediately.

  Silence rushed back into the corridor, broken only by the wet, ragged breathing of the two survivors.

  Elowen deactivated his Grave-Sight, dropping back into the mundane dark to save his Mana. He leaned heavily against the cold stone wall, letting the tip of the heavy cleaver rest on the floor. His wrists felt like they were on fire. The trembling in his forearms was so violent he could barely keep his grip on the sharkskin hilt.

  The pale blue text flooded his vision, casting a faint, ghostly light over the dark hallway.

  [Enemy Defeated: Court Enforcer (Level 5)]

  [Enemy Defeated: Court Enforcer (Level 6)]

  [Essence Siphoned: 400]

  [Current Essence: 450 / 600 to Level 3]

  He stared at the numbers. He was agonizingly close. One hundred and fifty Essence left. One more fight. If he could reach Level 3, he could finally dump points into his atrophied Strength, and this heavy cleaver would become a weapon he could actually control.

  In the dark, Elowen heard the heavy scraping of metal against stone.

  Vanya was pulling herself out from under the dead Enforcer. She stood up, her breath hitching slightly in the quiet corridor. She didn't speak. She just wiped her blood-soaked, scaled hand against the dry stone of the wall.

  "Good kill," Elowen rasped.

  He knelt down beside the second Enforcer, feeling blindly along the man's heavy leather utility belt in the pitch black. His fingers brushed against a heavy iron ring, and then a cold, smooth stone housed in a metal bracket. He pulled the bracket free from the leather loop and twisted the housing.

  A pale, steady white light bloomed from the crystal, cutting through the absolute dark of the hallway. It wasn't wired into the dungeon's magic. It was a portable tool, completely disconnected from the Court's infrastructure. The System remained silent as he held it up.

  [Item Looted: Standard Lumen-Crystal.]

  Vanya squinted against the sudden, harsh light. She looked from the glowing crystal in Elowen's hand down to the butchered men on the floor. In the stark white light, the corridor looked like an abattoir.

  "They have to have keys on them," Vanya said, her voice flat, devoid of the adrenaline that was currently wrecking Elowen's nervous system.

  "We don't just take keys," Elowen said, his voice dropping into the harsh, authoritative tone of a veteran instructor. "We take everything that keeps us alive. Check the pouches. Leave the armor, it’s too heavy for us to carry and too big to wear. Leave the halberds, they'll just get snagged in the narrow stairwells. Look for consumables, maps, and rations."

  Vanya knelt beside the man she had brought down. She ripped a heavy leather pouch from his belt, her claws making quick work of the thick stitching. She dumped the contents onto the floor.

  A heavy, rusted iron key-ring clattered against the stone, holding three jagged, asymmetrical keys. Beside it fell a small, stoppered glass vial filled with a pale yellow liquid, and a hard, wax-paper-wrapped square.

  Elowen scooped up the vial and the square.

  [Item Looted: Iron Cell Keys (Upper Block B)]

  [Item Looted: Alchemical Stamina Draught (Minor)]

  [Item Looted: Hardtack Ration]

  Elowen didn't save the ration. His stomach was a hollow, aching cavern. He ripped the wax paper open with his teeth and bit into the rock-hard bread. It tasted like ash and sawdust, but as he swallowed the dry lump, a tiny fraction of the deep, lingering weakness in his core subsided.

  "We can't leave them here," Elowen said, his mouth dry from the hardtack. He hooked the Lumen-Crystal to his own belt, casting long, stark shadows down the hall. "The next patrol will trip right over them. We have to drag them into the annex."

  Vanya looked at the two massive, armored corpses. Together, they easily weighed over five hundred pounds.

  She didn't complain. She grabbed the collar of the first Enforcer’s breastplate with her mutated arm. Elowen grabbed the dead man's boots. Even lifting the legs sent a fresh wave of fire through his exhausted back muscles.

  It was a brutal, agonizing process. They dragged the first body across the flagstones, leaving a wide, thick smear of crimson blood in their wake, hauling him into the decommissioned storage room. They went back for the second, dumping him unceremoniously onto the rotting wooden floorboards beside his partner.

  Elowen walked back out into the hall. He kicked a pile of thick, centuries-old dust from the corners of the corridor over the massive bloodstains, scuffing it with his boots until the wet crimson was buried beneath a layer of grey grime. It wouldn't fool a tracking hound, but in the dim, flickering gas-light of the other wall sconces, it might pass a casual glance from a bored guard.

  He stepped back into the storage room and pulled the heavy oak door completely shut, wedging the desk firmly against it once more.

  The room was silent, save for their heavy breathing and the faint, pale glow of the Lumen-Crystal resting on the desk.

  Elowen slid down the wall, collapsing against the stone. He rested the heavy cleaver across his knees. He looked at Vanya. She was sitting on one of the wooden crates, meticulously using a torn scrap of the guard's cloak to wipe the thick, drying blood from her obsidian scales.

  She was too calm. She was too efficient. The transactional nature of their partnership made sense, but the sheer ferocity she had displayed in the hallway spoke of a different kind of motivation.

  "You didn't hesitate," Elowen said quietly, the white light casting deep shadows under his eyes.

  Vanya didn't look up from her claws. "You told me to take the one on the right."

  "I did," Elowen agreed. "But you fight like someone who has somewhere to be, not just someone trying to run away. Most people thrown into the vats just want the fastest way to the surface."

  Vanya finally stopped wiping her arm. She let the bloody scrap of cloth fall to the floor. She looked up, her dark eyes locking onto his.

  "I'm not going to the surface," she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "Not yet. I need to get to the Processing Level."

  Elowen felt a cold spike of dread hit his stomach. The Processing Level was Level Two of the dungeon—a heavily guarded administrative block where the Flesh-Smiths catalogued the new meat before sending them down to the lower vats. It was a fortress.

  "That's suicide," Elowen stated flatly. "We are heading up. Processing is deeper into the garrison."

  "I don't care," Vanya said, her jaw tightening. "The Enforcers raided the lower slums four days ago. They took fifty of us for the vats. But they separated the young ones before they dropped us into the dark. They kept them up top."

  She looked down at her mutated arm, the thick muscles clenching.

  "They took my brother," she said. "He’s ten. He's up there. I’m not leaving this pit without him."