Floor forty-eight turned out to be nothing more than a stretch of collapsed ventilation shafts and rooms too flooded with rust-colored dust to search properly, and for once, nobody complained about a floor being boring. Boring, by this point, had become the closest thing to a gift sent from heaven.
⠀
"I could get used to this!~" Haddler said, kicking a dead fan housing out of his path. "You know, the not almost dying part..."
⠀
"Don't," Prospero said. "Every single time someone in this facility has said a sentence shaped like that, the next floor has taken it as a personal challenge."
⠀
"That's not a real pattern."
⠀
"I've had three years and an obscene amount of processing time to study patterns nobody asked me to. Trust me on this one."
⠀
Haddler didn't say anything else shaped like that for the rest of the floor, which Roby found, privately, hilarious enough that he had to bite down on a laugh twice.
⠀
They found the stairwell down without incident, and floor forty-seven, when it opened up around them, smelled faintly of something sweet and rotten that none of them could place until Armor, walking point, stopped dead in the doorway of what had once, judging by the long steel tables and drainage grates, been some kind of processing room.
⠀
"...We're not going in there," he said, flat, already turning them away before anyone could ask why.
⠀
Nobody argued.
⠀
They made camp on forty-five, in a wide, half-collapsed atrium that had, at some point, clearly been meant as a garden, with dead planters still bolted to the walls in tidy rows and a single, long-dead tree fused into the floor at the room's center, its branches petrified into something more mineral than wood. It wasn't comfortable. It wasn't even particularly safe. But it had enough space for nine people to spread out without tripping over each other, and after forty-seven, that counted for a great deal.
⠀
Yuhuan sat with his back against the dead tree's base, Quantum Serpent curled loose and drowsy around his wrist, and it was there, sharpening a whetstone against his yanyuedao out of habit rather than need, that he noticed Jianhuan a short distance off, doing the same to his guandao with a care that looked almost ceremonial.
⠀
"You always do that," Yuhuan said, not quite a question.
⠀
"Do what."
⠀
"Clean her like that. Every time we stop. I don't think I've ever seen you skip it, even when we've had ten minutes to breathe, let alone rest properly."
⠀
Jianhuan didn't look up from the blade. "She's a weapon."
⠀
"She's our family."
⠀
"She's a guandao," Jianhuan corrected, mild, though something in his voice had gone careful in a way it usually only did when he was choosing exactly how much of a sentence to let out into the open air. "Not our family anymore."
⠀
Across the atrium, Leopold, half-listening while he fed the last of the kindling to their small watch fire, glanced over with the particular attentiveness of a man who'd learned, over the last several floors, that Jianhuan rarely said anything without meaning at least two things by it.
⠀
"You've called her lǎolao before," Armor said, from where he sat cleaning his gauntlet, not looking up either, though the question in it was plain enough. "Back in our employer's office, I remember it. I never asked."
⠀
"Nobody ever does." Jianhuan set the whetstone down, turning the blade slowly in the firelight, the way a person turns something they're deciding whether they're ready to talk about. "It's rude, where I come from, to ask a man about his grandmother uninvited."
⠀
The word landed in the quiet atrium like a dropped plate. Around the fire, the rest of the group had gone quiet without anyone meaning to.
⠀
"It's tradition, in our family," Yuhuan said, "for the elders to be bound. When they pass, and only if they choose it, and only if the family judges them worthy of carrying forward. Their soul is set into a weapon, forged for exactly that purpose, and given to the youth of the household to carry into whatever fight comes next. Not as a relic or an heirloom to be admired in a case." Jianhuan's fingers tightened slightly around the shaft of his lǎolao as Yuhuan continued. "As a companion. Someone who already knows the weight of the family name to help carry it, so the ones who come after don't have to carry it entirely alone."
⠀
Mori's mouth had gone dry. "And lǎolao—?"
⠀
"Is our grandmother. Yes." Jianhuan said it plainly, without ceremony, though something underneath the plainness shook, just slightly, at the edges. "She passed the year I turned six and when Yuhuan had turned eight."
⠀
"I remember she was kind to me," Yuhuan said quietly. "I remember she used to sneak me sweets when Father wasn't looking. I don't remember much else."
⠀
"She was kind to everyone who wasn't trying to grind her down for it," Jianhuan said. "Which, in our house, was a shorter list than it should have been." He looked down at the blade again. "She asked, at the end, to be bound. She told the elders she'd rather keep fighting than lie still in a garden plot, forgotten the moment the flowers died. The binding chose me to wield her."
⠀
Armor broke the silence. "...You've been carrying her this whole time."
⠀
"Every duel. Every skirmish. Every idiotic thing I've done since I was old enough to hold her properly." Something that might have been the ghost of a real smile crossed Jianhuan's face, gone as fast as it came. "She complains, if you're wondering. Constantly. About my form, mostly, though she's had opinions about my choice of employer too, on occasion."
⠀
"She can talk to you?"
⠀
"Not in words. Nothing so tidy as your serpent's little arrangement." Jianhuan's gaze flicked, briefly, to the sleeping coil on Yuhuan's wrist. "More like... a feeling. A weight shifting the right way a half-second before I'd have made the wrong choice on my own. She's saved my life more times than I've bothered to count, and scolded me for needing saving every single time afterward. Oh, sweet lǎolao, how I miss your real voice singing in my ears."
⠀
Yuhuan stared at the blade for a long moment, something complicated moving behind his eyes. "Why don't you treat her with respect then?"
⠀
"Because you left," Jianhuan said, and for the first time, something sharp crept back into his voice, old and familiar, the posture Yuhuan had almost forgotten belonged to his brother before the fall to fifty-four had briefly, carelessly, worn it away. "You left the Pavilion, and the family, and every obligation that came attached to both, and I stayed, and carried what was left standing. It isn't fair for you to expect me to take on all of your responsibilities and treat them with respect."
⠀
"Jian—"
⠀
"Don't." Jianhuan stood, sheathing lǎolao with a motion too smooth to be anything but old habit. "It's late. We should sleep while we still have the luxury to."
⠀
He walked off toward the far edge of the atrium without waiting for a response, and Yuhuan let him go, some old, familiar ache settling back into his chest that he'd half-convinced himself, over the last several floors, had finally stopped hurting.
⠀
"...That went about as well as these things usually do," Leopold said, quiet, once Jianhuan was out of earshot.
⠀
"He's not wrong," Yuhuan admitted. "I did leave. I don't regret it. But I never once thought about what leaving would cost the others..."
⠀
"Family's like that," Leopold said, and something in the way he said it made Saoirse, curled up nearby with Stuffy and Arnold already half-asleep in her lap, glance over with a curiosity she couldn't quite name, though she let it pass without comment, too tired to chase it any further tonight.
⠀
Floor forty-four opened with a groan of old hydraulics none of them trusted, a wide bay of collapsed scaffolding stretching down into darkness Mori's scarf couldn't quite reach the bottom of.
⠀
"Careful," Armor called back, testing the first section of catwalk with his boot before committing his weight. "This whole floor's held together with hopes and dreams."
⠀
They crossed single file, the catwalk groaning under each step, and it was somewhere near the middle, with Roby three steps ahead of Saoirse and Haddler bringing up the rear, that the whole structure gave a sudden, shuddering lurch.
⠀
"MOVE!" Armor bellowed, already scrambling back the way they'd come.
⠀
Roby froze, halfway between the section that was still holding and the section that very clearly wasn't going to for much longer, his whole body locking up the way it hadn't in weeks, ever since the serpent, ever since the loops, ever since he'd started noticing, quietly, privately, that his hands shook a half-second longer than they used to before a fight actually started.
⠀
"ROBY!" Yuhuan shouted.
⠀
He didn't move. Some old, stubborn part of him screamed to lunge forward, to punch through whatever was collapsing, as he always had, fists first, worry later. Every other part of him, the newer, quieter part that had started showing up sometime after the elevator first opened on the hundredth floor, screamed the opposite: brace. Cover. Don't be the reason someone else has to catch you.
⠀
He dropped flat instead, gripping the catwalk's rail with both hands, curling small and low the way he'd have mocked anyone else for doing a month ago.
⠀
It was the right call, though nobody had time to tell him so before the section directly ahead of him tore loose entirely, plummeting into the dark with a shriek of metal that none of them wanted to hear the ending of.
⠀
Mori's scarf flared, hot and sudden, and something happened that he didn't fully understand until it was already over: a strange, singular clarity dropped over him, the whole scene slowing at the edges, not truly, not the way Kopf Dirigent's baton had stopped the world outright, but enough. Enough that he saw, a half-second before it happened, exactly which section of railing was about to give next, exactly where Saoirse's foot was about to land wrong.
⠀
"LEFT!" he shouted, without entirely deciding to. "SAOIRSE, GO LEFT, NOW!"
⠀
She went left. The section under her right foot buckled a heartbeat later, empty, and she stumbled onto solid catwalk instead of open air, Stuffy letting out a startled, uncharacteristically sincere yelp before catching himself.
⠀
Wow, thank you so much, Scarfy!" she exclaimed, once they had all scrambled to the far platform, breathing heavily, the ruined scaffolding still creaking and settling behind them.
⠀
Mori stared down at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else. For a second... I saw the floor crumble under her... Like the room was showing me the next thing before it happened. Something warm settled beneath his ribs, unfamiliar and quiet, a feeling he didn't have a name for until Yuhuan, checking him over for injuries out of pure reflex, caught his eye and said, simply, "That's twice now you've saved us."
⠀
Hey, I'm not useless anymore! Mori thought, and the thought surprised him with how much weight it carried, how long it had apparently been sitting somewhere under his ribs waiting for a reason to surface. He'd spent so long being the one who needed watching, the one whose power needed containing more than commanding. This felt different. This felt like something he'd actually earned rather than something that had simply happened to him.
⠀
The warmth didn't last long before something colder settled in behind it.
⠀
This is getting dangerous, though... he thought, quieter, and didn't say either half of it out loud, watching his scarf's embers pulse once, twice, in a rhythm that felt, uncomfortably, like something learning to keep time.
⠀
Roby said nothing about freezing on the catwalk, and nobody brought it up, though Yuhuan noticed, later, that Roby had started walking a half-step further back from the front of the group than he used to, close enough to still be useful, far enough to never again be the first thing standing between the group and whatever came next.
⠀
It was Haddler who finally caught him alone, on the stairwell down to forty-three, in the particular quiet that settles between two people who both know something's wrong, and only one of them is willing to say it first.
⠀
"You good?" Haddler asked, casual, the way he asked everything, though his eyes stayed on Roby a beat longer than the question strictly required.
⠀
"Peachy," Roby said. "Why?"
⠀
"You froze up there."
⠀
"I didn't freeze, I—" Roby stopped, jaw tight, and let out a long breath instead of finishing the lie. "...Yeah. I froze."
⠀
"It happens!~"
⠀
"Not to me, it don't! Not before all this... I used to be the one who ran in first. Now I keep thinkin', every single fight, what if this is the one where runnin' in first gets me actually killed instead of just banged up? And then I'm standin' there, like, an idiot, not doin' anything, while everybody else does the thing I used to be good at..."
⠀
"Sounds like you're just paying attention now," Haddler said, mild. "Ha! That's not the same as being scared! ...Well, It's a little the same. But it's not the bad kind!~"
⠀
"Feels like the bad kind..."
⠀
"Yeah, it usually does, right up until it saves yourlife instead of somebody else's." Haddler patted him once on the shoulder, easy, and left it there a beat longer than the gesture needed. "For what it's worth, I'd rather fight next to somebody who's scared and careful than somebody who's fearless and stupid. Fearless and stupid's the version of you that doesn't make it out of this place."
⠀⠀
Floor forty-three greeted them with a low, mechanical hum they hadn't heard on any floor since the hundredth, a deep, patient thrum that seemed to come from everywhere at once, pulsing beneath the floor itself like something enormous, breathing.
⠀
"...Prospero," Pallas said, slow, already bracing for whatever answer was coming.
⠀
"I feel that too," Prospero said, and its voice had lost every trace of its usual dry composure. "I don't have eyes on this floor either, but I have enough sensors left in the walls to tell you that whatever's making that sound is large, it's close, and it's sitting still."
⠀
"Sitting still how?" Armor asked, already drawing his greatsword.
⠀
"The way a predator sits still," Prospero said, "when it's watching its prey."