They planned through the morning.
Nephis sat with her sword across her knees and listened while Sunny described what his shadow sense had mapped overnight. The creature patrolled a stretch of labyrinth roughly half a kilometer long, moving in a loop that took it through the same junctions every few hours. It herded smaller scavengers ahead of it as it moved, using them as a living screen that would alert it to threats before they reached it.
"It's smart," Sunny said. "Smarter than the regular ones."
Nephis absorbed this without expression. "Where is the patrol narrowest?"
"There's a section where two passages merge into a single corridor. The walls are high and close together. When it passes through, the bone scythes scrape both sides. It can't swing freely in there."
"How long is the corridor?"
"Roughly fifteen meters."
Nephis studied the ground between them as though reading the terrain from his description alone. Then she looked up.
"We funnel it into the corridor and hit it from both ends. The Echo pins it from behind while we attack from the front."
"It will try to back out the moment it realizes it's trapped."
"That's what the Echo is for. It blocks the retreat and keeps the creature committed to the corridor."
Cassie, who had been listening from her seat on the Echo, spoke quietly. "You're forgetting the main advantage we have over that thing."
They both looked at her.
"We're intelligent and it isn't."
Sunny considered that. Cassie was right, but intelligence only mattered if they could translate it into a plan the creature couldn't adapt to. The regular scavengers were mindless. This thing had enough cunning to use other creatures as scouts, which meant it could learn mid-fight if they gave it the chance.
"We don't give it time to think," he said. "Fast engagement and committed strikes. If we stall, it figures us out."
Nephis nodded.
They spent the rest of the morning preparing. Nephis absorbed the remaining soul shards Sunny had been saving, crushing them against her palm one after another, and the incremental strength settled into her frame with each absorption. Her movements afterward were fractionally sharper, her grip on the sword fractionally tighter. The boost wasn't dramatic, but against something that outclassed them, every fraction counted.
Sunny used Shadow Consumption on the coral near their camp, pulling hardness from the stone and layering it into his forearms and hands. The reinforcement would fade within an hour, which meant timing the approach was critical. He also consumed from a section of the Echo's carapace near the tail, where the chitin was thickest and a small loss wouldn't compromise its armor. The density settled into his chest and shoulders, and the hunger retreated to a murmur.
By midday, they were ready.
The corridor was exactly as he'd mapped it. High coral walls pressed close together over a narrow floor, built for creatures that moved in single file rather than formations. The bone-scythe scrapes were visible on both walls, pale grooves in the red coral where the creature had passed through on previous patrols.
Sunny positioned the Echo at the corridor's southern entrance and sent it into a crouch, its pincers lowered, its body blocking the passage. Then he and Nephis moved to the northern end and pressed themselves against the walls on either side, weapons drawn.
They waited.
His shadow sense tracked the creature's approach through the labyrinth. It was moving at its usual pace, unhurried, with two smaller scavengers ranging ahead of it. The scouts entered the corridor first, scuttling through the narrow space without stopping, and Sunny let them pass. They emerged from the northern end and continued into the labyrinth beyond, unaware of the two humans pressed against the walls they'd just walked past.
The creature followed.
Sunny felt it enter the corridor through the change in the shadows around him. The density of its shadow pressed against his awareness like something heavy being lowered onto a table, and the scrape of bone on coral filled the passage with a grinding sound that set his teeth on edge.
He looked at Nephis across the corridor. She met his eyes and gave a single nod.
The creature was halfway through when the Echo rose behind it and slammed its pincers against the coral walls on either side, locking itself into the passage like a cork in a bottle. Chitin crashed against stone loud enough to echo through the entire passage, and the creature stopped.
Instead of panicking, it turned its upper body to assess the Echo blocking the passage behind it, then faced the northern exit again. Its bone scythes shifted into a forward position, angled to cut through whatever was ahead.
Sunny and Nephis came around the corridor's edge together.
Nephis went left. Sunny went right. The corridor was narrow enough that the creature couldn't swing its scythes in a full arc, which forced it to thrust rather than slash, and while by no means easy the thrusting reach of a bone scythe in a confined space was something they could work around.
Nephis struck first. She came in low and fast, her sword targeting the joint where the creature's forward leg met its body. The blade bit into the gap between plates and drew azure blood, and the creature lurched sideways, bringing its left scythe down in a vertical chop that Nephis sidestepped by centimeters.
Sunny used the opening. While the creature's attention was fixed on Nephis, he pressed his free hand against its flank and pulled. Shadow Consumption drank the hardness from a palm-sized section of carapace, and the chitin went chalky and soft beneath his touch. He drove the Azure Blade through the weakened patch and felt it sink deep into the tissue beneath.
The creature screamed.
The sound was unlike anything the regular scavengers produced, a layered shriek that filled the corridor and bounced off the walls until Sunny couldn't tell where it was coming from. The creature twisted toward him, and the bone scythe on its right side came around in a short, vicious arc that he read a fraction too late.
Sunny used the opening. While the creature's attention was fixed on Nephis, he pressed his free hand against its flank and pulled. Shadow Consumption drank the hardness from a palm-sized section of carapace, and Sunny pushed what he'd taken into the Puppeteer's Shroud. The armor's surface tightened against his skin as the stolen toughness layered into it. The chitin where he'd touched went chalky and soft, and he drove the Azure Blade through the weakened patch and felt it sink deep into the tissue beneath.
The creature screamed.
The sound was unlike anything the regular scavengers produced, a layered shriek that filled the corridor and bounced off the walls until Sunny couldn't tell where it was coming from. The creature twisted toward him, and the bone scythe on its right side came around in a short, vicious arc that he read a fraction too late.
The scythe caught him across the left thigh.
The reinforced Shroud caught the cutting edge and held, the stolen toughness stopping it from breaking his leg, but the force behind the blow still knocked him down and dropped him into the mud. Pain lanced up through his hip, sharp and hot, and his left leg went numb below the knee for a full second before sensation flooded back in. It might not have been broken, but the muscle beneath the armor was screaming, and standing on that leg was going to hurt.
He stood on it anyway.
Nephis had already moved into the space he'd vacated, pressing the attack while the creature was still turned toward Sunny. She was faster than she'd been a week ago, the accumulated soul shards expressing themselves in the quickness of her footwork and the precision of her strikes, and the creature was struggling to track her movements.
But it was learning. Sunny could see it shortening its strikes to match the confined space and using its bulk to crowd Nephis against the wall rather than trying to cut her down. It was fighting smarter with each exchange, and Nephis was running out of angles.
She committed to a thrust targeting the gap between the torso and the segmented body, the same weak point she'd been working toward since the fight began. The blade sank in deep. She twisted it, grinding the edge through the tissue beneath, and the creature shrieked and brought both scythes down in a crossed chop that she couldn't sidestep because her hands were still on the sword.
The scythes caught her across the back.
The Starlight Legion Armor took the worst of it, but the impact drove her face-first into the creature's body and then to the ground. She hit the mud and didn't get up immediately, and Sunny could see the dent in the armor's backplate where the scythes had connected, a deep crease ran down it.
The scythes caught her across the back.
She had no armor. She'd given hers to Cassie weeks ago, and nothing they'd found on the Forgotten Shore could replace it. The scythes hit flesh and bone with nothing between them but the seaweed wrap she'd been wearing since they arrived, and the wet, splitting sound of the impact echoed off the corridor walls.
Nephis went down. She hit the mud face-first and didn't get up immediately, and Sunny could see the cuts across her back, deep and dark with blood that looked black in the corridor's dim light.
The creature reared above her. One scythe rose for a killing stroke.
The Echo hit it from behind. It slammed into the creature's rear legs with its full weight, pincers clamping onto the joints, and the impact drove the creature forward and down. Its front legs buckled against the uneven ground and its torso dropped.
Sunny crossed the corridor. His left leg burned with every step, but the muscle held and the pain was something he could work through. He pressed his palm against the creature's carapace near the base of the humanoid torso and consumed what was left of its toughness, pushing the stolen density into the Azure Blade. The chitin crumbled beneath his hand, and the sword grew heavier in his grip as the weight settled into the metal.
Then he drove the reinforced blade through the weakened patch and into the body cavity, angling the stroke upward toward whatever central system kept it alive. He felt the blade catch on something dense and pushed through it, and the creature's scythes dropped as its legs stopped pushing.
It died beneath his hands, collapsing into the mud in stages, and Sunny held the blade in place until the last tremor passed through its body.
[You have slain an Awakened Monster, Carapace Centurion.]
[You have received a Memory.]
[Your shadow grows stronger.]
Sunny pulled the blade free and turned to Nephis.
She was on her knees in the mud, one hand braced against the ground, the other pressed against her side. Her breathing was wrong, shallow and hitching, and when she tried to straighten up her face went tight with a pain she couldn't quite hide. The cuts across her back were still bleeding, and Sunny could see from the way she held herself that the damage went deeper than skin.
"How bad?" he asked.
She didn't answer immediately, which told him it was worse than she wanted to admit.
"Ribs," she said. "Maybe more."
Then she closed her eyes and the white flame ignited against her own body.
It was different watching it from the outside. In the corridor's dim light, the flame burned white and steady against her back, and the cuts began to close as Sunny watched. Nephis's face went through a sequence of expressions he'd never seen on her before. Pain first, a tightening around the eyes that lasted several seconds. Then concentration, as though she was directing the flame to specific places inside herself. Then something that looked like it cost her more than either of those, a slow draining of color from her skin that started at her hands and crept inward until her face was bleached white.
This was worse than the shoulder. The wounds were deep and structural, and the flame burned longer and hotter to fix them, and each second it burned was a second that took something from Nephis.
The cuts sealed. Nephis's breathing steadied, the hitching replaced by slow, controlled inhales that still sounded like they hurt but no longer sounded dangerous.
She opened her eyes. They were glassy and washed pale, the grey in them diluted to something closer to silver.
"Let me see your leg," she said.
"Don't."
"Let me see it."
"You just burned through yourself to fix your own ribs, my leg is just bruised. It can wait."
She looked at him with an expression that allowed no argument, then reached out and placed her hand against his thigh. The flame ignited again, smaller this time, and the pain in his leg dissolved into warmth and then into nothing. The whole process lasted maybe five seconds.
It cost her anyway. What little color had returned to her face drained away again, and when she pulled her hand back, her fingers were trembling.
"You didn't need to do that," Sunny said.
"I know."
She tried to stand and her legs folded. Sunny caught her before she hit the ground.
He held her against his chest and felt her heartbeat through the armor, rapid and thin.
"Cassie," he said. "Cassie, come here."
The blind girl slid down from the Echo and made her way toward them by sound, her staff tapping the ground ahead of her. When she reached them, she knelt and took Nephis's hand.
Nephis's breathing steadied. Slowly, over several minutes, the color began to return to her face. The glassy quality left her eyes, and her heartbeat settled from rapid to merely fast. She blinked and focused on Sunny, then tried to sit up.
He didn't let her.
"Stay down."
"I'm fine."
"You're not."
She looked at him with an expression that might have been irritation, and then she closed her eyes and let him hold her. Sunny sat in the mud of the corridor holding the person he'd been sent to kill, and thought about nothing at all.