The brutalist ruins closed like a noose as the first two Shadowborn Hounds boiled out of the gray fog, five mismatched paws apiece scraping violently against the ink-black stone floor. The noise rang through the colossal, ribcage-like columns, bone on glass, sending a sharp chill through Marcus's teeth before the beasts cleared the mist.
Then came the sudden, violent eruption of sound ripping through the pillars.
The Nameless Choir began to sing.
The Choir's familiar mournful hum became a jarring, dissonant harmony, like rusted metal grinding against silk. The voices, overlapping and entirely inhuman, vibrated through the black monoliths with enough force to make the stone groan.
Marcus gasped as psychic pressure slammed into his mind. His knees nearly buckled.
Through the blinding haze of the frequency, his investigator's brain fought to analyze the acoustic data. The sound warped the air currents, vibrating the crystallized shards drifting through the fog. Light fractures, Marcus realized, his jaw clenched against the psychic noise. The song was more than background to the ambush: it drove the environmental danger. Sound waves became a physical barrier, shattering the Spire's light and fracturing the room's structure to trap them.
"Marcus! Look out!" Taryn's warning cut through the thrumming weight.
The first pack of Shadowborn Hounds charged.
Their bodies were spun from viscous, liquid shadow, born of the Spire itself, swallowing the pale orange glare around them. They moved in blurred, untraceable leaps.
Taryn did not wait. She screamed, smashed two vials against her gauntlets, and threw her hands forward.
Red flares bloomed as eruptions of raw crimson brilliance. They flashed off the black stone like blood on glass. For a fraction of a second, the flares outlined the Hounds: thin, ribbony shapes of fluctuating darkness, jaws gaping too wide, jagged crystalline teeth lining them.
Two beasts recoiled, their hides sizzling where the fire touched them. Three more leapt over the charred remains of their kin.
To Marcus's left, Lysara raised her staff, her gaze narrowing. The air before her rippled into a series of violet tears in the fabric of the mist.
One Hound lunged for her throat and vanished into a portal mid-leap. Half a second later it was spat out twenty feet away, slamming into a black stone wall with a sickening crack of shadowbone. Lysara's portals steadied the air around them, buying precious seconds.
Now it was Marcus's turn.
The Choir's song still had him reeling, but his body knew how to navigate the tactical chaos. He surrendered conscious direction and followed the flow of Marcus Reed's lethal muscle memory.
His hands blurred in an arc, parrying a Hound's claws with a metallic chime he felt in his teeth. He twisted clear of snapping jaws with a grace he did not remember possessing. He drove his leading blade into the creature's throat, and it dissolved to smoke before hitting the ground.
A second Hound approached from his right flank. He shifted to meet it.
And shifted wrong.
Under the pressure of the Choir's rising chant, under the exhaustion of a body that had been running hard for longer than he could track, his old Earth habits took over. The left-forward guard he had deconstructed vanished. His years on the Chicago streets returned instead: weight rocking onto his back right hip, the wrong shoulder forward to absorb the blow.
The Hound's claws found the gap that stance left on his left side. They raked across his ribs through the leather armor.
Pain knifed through his ribs; the armor had absorbed most of the blow. He staggered sideways and caught himself against a pillar, one hand braced on cold stone. The impact had been real, and he had put himself exactly where it could land.
He knew what had happened.
You corrected it in the alcove. Ten minutes of careful work. The second pressure spiked, you went back to the old way. The stance was not his yet; stress sent his mind back to Kael Renard's habits. What Kael knew before was a death sentence for this body.
He straightened, ribs burning beneath the torn leather. He shifted his weight again, deliberately this time, forcing his mind to align with the somatic wiring. Left foot back, left shoulder forward. The body settled into it with a small, involuntary exhale. The lock found its tumblers.
A second Hound came from the left. This time he met it from the correct angle. The parry landed clean: inward wrist rotation, downward deflection. Instead of traveling into his bruised shoulder, the force scattered harmlessly. He pivoted off the momentum and drove the dagger through the creature's spine as it passed.
That was the difference. Exactly the difference.
"Marcus!" Lysara called, sharp and directional. "Left cluster. Three of them."
He looked. Three Hounds had broken through Taryn's line, moving in a deliberate triangle, coordinated pack tactics rather than instinct.
He moved to intercept, holding the left-forward stance and keeping it conscious. Its unfamiliarity sat in his hips, while his left arm naturally wanted to lead. The body helped. It knew this. He held the door open for the body's technique.
The Choir's song built toward a crescendo, voice piling on voice until the foundations of the Threshold shook. The melody carried an uncomfortable familiarity, though a gap remained in what he remembered of Aetheris.
The song mourned what the Spire had lost and warned that danger remained; battle was nowhere in it.
He looked at Taryn and Lysara, fighting for their lives. Their faces held the hard lines of people who had done this before. They saw someone growing stronger, holding the line. They had not seen the half-second when he reverted to the wrong stance and paid for it in torn skin. They had not seen the two deliberate beats that followed.
His ribs ached. The lesson stayed with him.
He would make the mistake less often; in the Spire, that counted as progress.
"They're coming again!" Taryn shouted, her hands blazing with new fire.