He turned to face them both, unhurried, and let the illusion of beauty and unassuming skinsuits fall away as Rusalka shed her drowned-corpse glamour and Nuckelavee split into the flayed horror beneath its human shell.
"Anyways," Damien said, setting the cocktail down on the sand with exaggerated care, like a man setting aside something precious before a bar fight. "Let's rid the world of the two of you."
Shadows uncoiled from his shoulders in twin ribbons, and he was moving before the sentence finished.
Rusalka struck first.
She didn't charge. she arrived, her rotted body dissolving into a wall of black water that surged up from the lake and swallowed the beach whole. Damien didn't fight it. He let it take him under, let the current close over his head, and inside that churning dark he felt them: hundreds of drowned faces pressing close, mouths working soundlessly, hands. real hands, cold and desperate.clawing at his arms, his legs, his throat.
'They're trying to pull me down. Not attack. Drown'
That distinction mattered. He stopped resisting the current and instead reached out with his mind the way he'd learned to since Baran. not commanding the shadows to do something, just letting them become an extension of what he wanted. Darkness bloomed from his own skin like ink dropped in water, and it didn't fight the drowned souls.
It ate them.
Not violently. Almost gently, the way night swallows dusk. The screaming faces thinned, their grip loosening one by one, and Damien surged upward through the collapsing water, breaking the surface in an explosion of black spray.
He landed on the sand, soaked, and found Rusalka already re-forming ten feet away, her expression somewhere between fury and genuine confusion.
"You...." she started.
"That's a new one," Damien admitted, shaking water from his hair. "Never had someone try to drown me with their own murder victims before. Kind of fucked up, honestly."
"They are not victims," Rusalka snapped, her voice fracturing into that awful dozen-throated chorus. "They are mine. Every soul who ever touched my water belongs to me. Forever."
"Yeah, that's the fucked up part."
She screamed and came apart again, dissolving into a towering black column, and this time Nuckelavee moved with her. the two of them attacking in tandem, the horse-horror's hooves tearing craters into the sand as it flanked him from the left while Rusalka's water-arms lashed from the right.
Damien pivoted low, sliding between a hoofstrike and a grasping tendril of drowned water, and drove a dagger up into the seam of Nuckelavee's ribs.
It didn't rotate away this time.
Instead, the creature's single red eye rolled toward him with something almost like amusement, and its raw-muscled torso twisted unnaturally, wrapping around his wrist like a snake constricting. the wound sealing itself around his blade, trapping it inside.
"Oh, that's disgusting," Damien said, genuinely startled, as the dagger was slowly, grotesquely absorbed into the meat of the thing's arm.
He didn't have time to recover it. Rusalka's water-arm caught him across the chest and sent him skidding across the sand, his shadow-armor hissing where the black water touched it like acid meeting stone.
He rolled to his feet, spitting sand, one dagger short and genuinely rattled for the first time in longer than he could remember.
'Okay. Different rules apply here'
He watched them for a beat. really watched, the way he hadn't bothered to with the first four Dungeon Rexs, because those had been fast, brutal, and straightforward. These two weren't fighting like predators. They were fighting like a digestive system. Absorb. Drown. Consume. Everything about them was built to take him apart from the inside rather than simply overpower him.
Nuckelavee lunged again, its skinless horse-body covering the distance in three impossible strides, and this time Damien didn't dodge.
He let shadow flood out from every point of contact the instant the creature's flesh touched his, mirroring what it had done to his dagger. except in reverse. Where Nuckelavee absorbed, Damien's shadows rotted. The raw muscle along its foreleg blackened and sloughed away in ribbons the second his skin made contact, and the creature reared back with a shriek like tearing canvas, dragging half its own flesh loose in the retreat.
"There we go," Damien muttered. "Turns out I can be disgusting too."
Rusalka surged in from behind to cover her partner, and this time Damien met her head-on rather than dodging. driving both hands into the leading edge of her water-column and pulling, shadow threading through her mass like roots through soil, searching for the thing he'd found last time: the center that wasn't water at all, but grief given shape.
She screamed as he found it, and for one instant he saw her. not the seductress, not the drowned horror, but something small and old and endlessly, endlessly tired of dragging the dead down with her.
He didn't detonate this time.
He pulled her apart, gently, the way you'd unpick a knot rather than cut it. releasing every soul trapped inside her one at a time instead of all at once, their bodies settling into the sand with something closer to peace than the violent unmaking he'd given her before.
Rusalka's final form. small, human, exhausted. knelt in the wet sand at the center of the emptied basin.
"You could have just killed me quickly," she said quietly.
"Could've." Damien agreed. "Didn't feel right...."
He ended it with a single clean strike. No cruelty in it. She didn't scream this time.
Nuckelavee, alone now and missing half a foreleg's worth of flesh, came at him one final time in raw desperate fury. no more calm apology in its voice, just a wordless, tearing scream.
Damien caught the horse-half's charge on crossed forearms wrapped in shadow, absorbed the impact, and drove his remaining dagger up through the ruined red eye socket a second time — except now, with the creature already weakened, already rotting from his earlier touch, the blade sank clean through skull and out the other side.
Nuckelavee's body seized, convulsed, and finally split apart at the seam Damien had marked out from the very first exchang. rider-half and horse-half separating for good this time, no absorption left in it to save itself with.
Silence fell across the drained basin.
Damien stood in the center of it, breathing hard, one dagger still lodged somewhere inside a corpse he'd have to dig it out of later, his shadow-armor cracked and steaming faintly where drowned-water had touched it.
"Fourth and Fifth Dungeon Rexs," he said to no one, rolling his shoulder. "Grotesque as hell, both of you. I'll give you that."
He looked down the basin toward wherever Floor Seventy-Three would begin, retrieved his lost dagger from what remained of Nuckelavee with a grimace, and kept walking.
Three left.
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