The moment the Goulizban's heavy footsteps vanished down the corridor toward the sound of the lure, Adil threw open the locker door. Cold dusty air rushed into his lungs like something he hadn't realized he'd been missing.
"We need to head toward the medical room," Adil whispered, the hunter's heavy dagger gripped in his fist. "He's not going to make it if we try to find an exit first."
Garu didn't argue. He got his arms under the semi-conscious tracker and hoisted him onto his back, adjusting his grip with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided complaining was a luxury he couldn't afford right now. "Lead the way. We don't have much time before that tiger figures out it's a trick."
They moved through the corridor in silence — the careful, deliberate silence they had learned the hard way, each footstep placed with the weight of knowing exactly what sound cost in this building.
They were halfway to the medical room when the mist ahead thickened, and a figure emerged from it.
Not a ghost. Not a spirit.
Something worse.
It had the shape of a person, approximately, in the way that a bad copy has the shape of the original. A reanimated corpse, its movements wrong in the particular way that things move when whatever controlled them is no longer interested in pretending. Its eyes glowed purple, the same purple as the spirits, the same purple as the hunter's, the same purple as everything in this world that was connected to something Adil didn't understand yet.
He filed it automatically. No time to think about it now.
The moment its hollow eyes found them it lunged.
Adil stepped forward and swept his arm back — the signal was simple, and Garu read it immediately: go. I'll handle it.
Garu hesitated for exactly one second. Then, trusting what seven years of knowing Adil had taught him, he moved forward.
I can't make a sound if it hits me, Adil thought, watching the creature reorient toward him. And I can't let those claws touch me — that thought from earlier, the one about poison, the one he'd filed and not finished — it pressed against the back of his mind with the particular insistence of something about to be proven right.
But I don't have a choice.
The creature lunged past him. Adil slid through the space beside it, letting its momentum carry it forward while he repositioned — the same instinct from Chapter 1's classroom fight, the same patience, the same waiting for the pattern to show itself.
The creature spun and came again.
Great. He's the straightforward type.
It swung wide. Adil twisted under it and drove the dagger across its neck in one motion.
Nothing. No reaction. No sound. The blade had passed through, and the thing hadn't noticed.
A muffled snarl. Claws coming in fast from the left. Adil barely got his arm up in time — the deflection saved his face, but the impact was enough to stagger him. He countered with an uppercut that accomplished almost nothing, which told him everything he needed to know about the gap between his strength and whatever was animating this thing.
It grabbed him. Both forearms locked, claws pressing inward, its face inches from his.
Those claws, he thought. Don't let those claws—
Instinct moved before the thought could finish.
He pulled his head back and drove his forehead straight into the creature's face.
The impact cracked through his skull like a bell being struck from the inside. A deafening ring tore through his brain, and his vision blurred white at the edges — but he pulled back and did it again. And again. Forehead to face, forehead to face, each impact a transaction he was paying for in real time, the pain a thing he was aware of and choosing to ignore, raining blows with his own skull until the grip finally, finally faltered.
He tore the dagger free and drove it into the creature's neck.
The trade wasn't free.
In the same instant — the same chaotic fraction of a second where he was committed and couldn't adjust — a claw ripped across his chest. Uniform and flesh together. He bit back the sound that tried to leave his throat with everything he had because the corridor's rules didn't care that he was injured, didn't care about context or fairness, cared only about sound.
Why hasn't it died—
He drove a front kick into its torso, buying distance. The wound across his chest burned with an intensity that suggested it was going to get significantly worse before it got better. The creature came again, but slower now — something had changed in its movement, a sluggishness that hadn't been there before. Adil read it the way he read everything in a fight: as information.
If Jake's here... he'll probably punch the first monster he sees.
He slid low and drove the dagger across its ankles.
The tendons were severed. It collapsed.
Maybe you can't feel pain, he thought, watching it hit the floor, but you can't move a body whose nerves are cut.
It kept moving anyway — dragging itself forward on ruined legs, those purple eyes still locked on him, still burning with whatever passed for intent in something that had stopped being alive some time ago. He cut through its other ankle. Purple blood spread across the concrete in slow patterns.
It kept crawling.
If it's not the head, Adil thought, looking at the thing pulling itself toward him across the corridor floor, then the eyes are the only thing left.
He kicked it onto its back.
Drove the dagger through its eye.
It stopped.
A blue panel materialized in front of him — crisp, clean, deeply incongruous with everything around it:
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OBSERVATIONS
Subject 999 has terminated
a Zogs.
Method: noted.
Efficiency: noted.
Cost to Subject: noted.
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ITEM LOGGED: Corruption Shard
Description: When exposed
to corrupted—
[DATA UNREADABLE]
Adil stood there, swaying slightly, blood soaking warm and continuous down his ribs, and read the screen.
Ok, whatever it is, then open the inventory
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INVENTORY
[SUBJECT 999 PARAMETERS
STILL UNRESOLVED]
Access estimated:
1 hour, 02 minutes.
The Eye is watching.
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He read it again.
...An hour.
I have a system that takes an hour to open a bag.
Somewhere in the dark behind him, something else was still listening. He didn't have an hour. He didn't have ten minutes. He let the panel flicker and dissolve and stood in the corridor alone with a chest wound and a broken system and four words sitting in the back of his mind that he couldn't place and couldn't dismiss:
The Fault of the Universe.
He felt like laughing and crying at the same time — but he could do neither.
The wound across his chest flared sharply, a surge of pain that traveled through his whole body and demanded his full attention. He pressed his hand against it, gritted his teeth against the sound that wanted to come with it, and pushed himself forward. His vision swam at the edges, but the corridor stayed mostly upright.
Later, he told himself. Everything is later.
Meanwhile, Garu's arms burned under the hunter's weight — a deep, sustained ache that had moved past the point of complaint into something that simply existed now, the way the cold existed, the way the damp existed, the way the sound of the hunter's labored breathing against his shoulder existed.
Where's Jake?
But it wasn't the weight that made his throat tight.
I hate this, he thought, adjusting his grip, blinking against the sting at the corners of his eyes. Why am I always the one running?
A flash — uninvited.
He remembered a smaller version of himself, curled on the cracked concrete of the orphanage yard, arms thrown over his head as fists and feet rained down from boys twice his size. Laughter. Someone's shoe was finding his ribs with the specific cruelty of someone who had decided he deserved it.
Then, a body stepped between him and the next blow. Smaller than the older kids, but standing his ground anyway, fists already raised, the particular stance of someone who had made a decision and wasn't revisiting it.
"Touch him again," Adil had said, voice shaking with something that wasn't fear, "and I'll make sure you regret it."
He hadn't even known Garu's name yet. He'd just seen someone smaller getting hurt, and that had been enough.
Garu blinked hard. The memory dissolved back into the dark, damp corridor — the hunter's weight resettling on his shoulders, the sound of labored breathing against his ear, the faint burn in his arms that grounded him back in the present.
Don't die on me, Adil, he thought, tightening his grip and pushing forward into the gloom. You're the only brother I've got.
He reached the medical room. Shifted the hunter's weight to one arm. Threw the door open.
And stopped.
Jake.