Darkness pressed in from every side.
Sunny moved through it like a knife.
He stepped out of his own shadow into the middle of the cavern, the Midnight Shard already in motion. The Fallen Beast directly ahead of him didn't get a chance to react. It reared slightly at the sudden disturbance , too slow.
He drove the black blade up into the gap between its forward plates, feeling the familiar, ugly resistance of flesh and armor. Hot, reeking ichor splashed over his arm and chest, hissing faintly where it touched the cold stone. The creature spasmed, its many legs flailing wildly, mandibles chomping uselessly at the empty air.
Sunny didn't linger. He pulled the tachi free and dissolved again, sinking directly into the pool of shadow spilling from the dying monster's convulsing limbs.
The place was a jagged maze of uneven rock and treacherous footing. Broken slabs of the collapsed ground lay at crooked angles, creating pockets of deeper black within the already perfect, suffocating dark. True darkness might be present, but the shadows were evermore. The air was thick with dust, its chalky taste coating his tongue and throat. Every breath rasped faintly.
But in the shadows, he could see perfectly.
Sunny surfaced from a crack between two boulders, half-crouched, feeling the cold stone under his boots. The nearest Fallen was to his right and slightly behind him, its many limbs clattering against the rock as it scuttled along the cavern wall, trying to circle.
The second was further out, pacing in a slow, predatory arc, its mandibles clicking as it tasted the air.
The third—
The third had vanished from his sight for a second.
Sunny froze.
His shadow sense swept outward in a rush, his awareness snapping from shadow to shadow, checking every hollow and overhang. For a terrifying heartbeat, he couldn't find the missing mass.
Then he saw it.
Above him.
It was clinging to the slanted ceiling with its hooked limbs, directly over the hollow where he stood, compressed into an unnaturally tight coil. Waiting. Silent.
Clever bastard, Sunny thought offended.
He shifted his weight, feinting a step forward.
The beast took the bait and dropped.
All that heavy mass came down in one brutal, unstoppable plunge, mandibles gaping wide enough to shear his head clean off his shoulders. Even expecting it, Sunny realized he had no time to fully Shadow Step, the distance was too short, the timing entirely too tight. He threw himself sideways, twisting his body to turn a decapitation into a broken shoulder.
He still wasn't going to make it.
His instincts screamed at him. The beast was inches away—
Something massive and heavy whistled through the dark.
It sounded like an iron bridge swinging through the air.
The next instant, there was a wet, deafening crunch directly above his ear.
The massive body of the Fallen Beast crashed down half a meter to his left instead of on his skull. It hit the rock with a bone-jarring thud and a sickening grind of carapace on stone. One of its front legs spasmed violently, gouging a long furrow in the floor where Sunny had just been standing.
Sunny stumbled, catching himself on one hand, and rolled away, coughing as a fresh wave of dust billowed up.
He looked at the creature. It was writhing in place, its many limbs flailing chaotically. Its head had been completely caved in from the side. Wrapped tightly around its crushed skull, biting deep into the cracked chitin, was a thick, glowing chain.
Sunny stared at the chain, his heart hammering against his ribs.
There had been no warning. A terrifying whistle, that impact, and a perfect, lethal strike in absolute, pitch-black darkness.
He slowly turned his head, his shadow sense tracing the length of the chain backward.
Far across the cavern, standing atop a collapsed pillar, he saw her.
Wings folded tight.One hand holding the taut end of the chain, the other resting calmly at her side.
"Left," Cielle's voice echoed softly through the cavern. Calm. Low. Entirely unbothered.
Sunny didn't question it.
He pivoted immediately, bringing the Midnight Shard up just as the second Fallen lunged out of the gloom to his left, its scythe like limbs scissoring. Without her warning, it would have taken his side clean open. As it was, he met the descending limb with the flat of his blade, redirecting the massive weight just past his ribs. The impact juddered violently up his arms.
He let the momentum carry him forward, stepping directly into the monster's reach rather than out of it.
The Midnight Shard punched up into the soft spot at the base of its jaw, twisted maliciously, and then ripped free in a spray of hot black blood.
The Fallen nightmare creature screamed, the sound bouncing painfully off the walls.
Sunny hissed through his teeth, blinking sweat out of his eyes out of pure habit. He stilled, looking through the shadows at the third presence.
It had gone still when its brother's head was caved in. Now it was moving again. Faster. Agitated.
It wasn't circling Sunny anymore. It was going straight for the girl with the chains.
"Cielle!" he snapped.
"Fine," she replied from the dark. "It is closing the distance."
Sunny watched through the sprawling darkness of the cavern. The Fallen Beast was a massive wall of chitin moving in an aggressive rush, its legs were finding the best grip even on the unstable rock.
Cielle was standing perfectly still on her pillar. She couldn't open her wings down here without slamming them into the low, jagged ceiling. She didn't have her spear. She just had her chains.
"Three steps," she called out to the empty dark. "Then duck."
Sunny blinked. What?
She wasn't talking to him. She was talking to the monster.
The Fallen Beast bounded over a jut of rock, its claws scattering fragments. It took three massive, galloping strides and reared up to clear a boulder in its path, throwing its weight forward.
Cielle yanked her right arm back.
The heavy iron chain that was still wrapped around the skull of the first dead monster suddenly went entirely taut. Using the dead beast's massive weight as an anchor point, Cielle pulled herself violently forward, essentially slingshotting herself across the cavern directly toward the charging monster.
She flew through the pitch-black air like a missile, her boots slamming squarely into the softer, unarmored joint of the beast's front leg just as it reared up.
The joint snapped backward with a sound like a gunshot.
The monster's forward momentum tried to continue without its main support. The result was catastrophic. It pitched sideways, its massive bulk slamming horribly into the rock wall. One of its own legs drove into the floor inches from Cielle's head as she executed a short, highly controlled slide under its collapsing mass.
"If you cannot see, you should stop moving," Cielle informed the writhing monster politely. "You are very loud."
Sunny stared at her through the shadows.
He had not made a sound since he'd started fighting. Not with his feet. Not with his breathing. He'd been careful.
She wasn't talking about physical sound.
Sunny looked closer, his eyes narrowing.
There was some true darkness in the cavern. Which meant, technically, there should be no defined shadows. The darkness down here was absolute, an unbroken ocean of black. Sunny's shadows simply merged into it, using the ambient darkness as their canvas.
But as Cielle stood up, brushing dust off her knees, Sunny saw something that made him feel cold all the way down to his bones.
Attached firmly to her heels by some perfectly ordinary physical law, was her own shadow.
Except it wasn't behaving normally.
It should have been a vague, formless blot swallowed by the absolute dark.
Instead, it… twitched.
Sunny held perfectly still and watched through as Cielle shifted her weight experimentally. Her shadow moved a fraction of a heartbeat later. It didn't look like a natural shadow. It looked like a poorly trained animal trying its absolute best to mimic a trick it had seen someone else do.
The half-crippled Fallen Beast beside her tried to rise. Its back legs scrabbled uselessly on broken stone, mandibles opening and closing in a blind frenzy.
Cielle stepped lightly onto a boulder near its flank, gaining the high ground. She did not summon her spear. She raised her free hand, summoning a second chain from her soul sea. It materialized with a heavy, grinding clatter.
"Don't move," she said.
Sunny obeyed without thinking.
She turned her head. She didn't look toward the writhing monster beneath her. She looked slightly off to one side, directly toward the darkest, deepest pool of shadow in the cavern, where Sunny's own gloomy shadow was currently hiding.
Her green eyes were completely unfocused, staring entirely past the physical world.
She swung her arm.
The heavy chain lashed out with no wasted motion, following a trajectory that made absolutely no sense visually. In this blackness, with no depth cues and no light sources, it should have been complete guesswork.
It wasn't.
The iron links whipped through a narrow gap between two broken slabs and smashed directly into the soft, unarmored underside of the beast's chest, the exact, precise spot Sunny would have aimed for if he had swung his sword.
The monster convulsed once, its internal organs ruptured by the blunt-force trauma, and then went permanently still.
Silence settled over the cavern again, heavy and thick.
Sunny swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.
He stepped carefully over the broken ground, moving out of the shadows and walking until he reached the boulder Cielle was standing on. Up close, he could hear her breathing more clearly, it was fast, but perfectly controlled. The adrenaline hadn't even put a single crack in her calm facade.
He climbed up to join her.
They ended up standing back-to-back, both facing different directions, weapons lowered. Their shadows pooled together at their feet, intertwining in the absolute dark.
Sunny let his perception sink fully into that joined darkness.
His gloomy shadow was there, moody, exasperated, muttering about how close that ceiling drop had been to ruining its day. The happy one was hopping up and down, acting out the last fight with overly dramatic, chaotic flails.
And threaded through them, clumsy but incredibly attentive, was a third movement.
Cielle's shadow.
Sunny watched it. The happy shadow threw a fake punch. Cielle's shadow watched it do it, paused for a second, and then awkwardly threw the exact same fake punch.
Sunny's grip tightened on the hilt of his sword until his knuckles ached.
"…Cielle," he said quietly, his eyes unfocused, watching the strange, impossible mirroring happening in the dark. "You couldn't see that one above me."
"No," she agreed calmly, dispelling her chains. "I could not. It was very dark."
"Then how," he asked, very carefully, his voice tight, "did you know exactly where to hit it?"
There was a brief pause. He could almost feel her thinking, weighing how to process the question literally.
Finally, she said, with absolute, terrifying simplicity:
"Your shadow showed me. He is very expressive today."
As if to prove her point, down on the stone floor, her shadow lifted one indistinct arm and pointed directly at Sunny's happy shadow, mimicking the gesture with only the vaguest hint of delay.
Sunny stared down at the overlapping silhouettes at their feet.
For the first time since coming to the Chained Isles, a chill that had absolutely nothing to do with the crushing crawled slowly up his spine.
She had gained a sentient shadow.