The air changed ten feet past the mangled Exterminator corpse.
It didn't just smell worse; it felt thicker, colder, and heavier. It was like walking into an industrial freezer designed by a lunatic.
Wren moved like a fish in the current while Zane stumbled after her, the Scraps-Shine making his limbs frantic and his mind hyper-alert.
He wondered if Reapers were common knowledge. Even if they weren't, she knows a lot about them. He had confirmed that earlier and she didn't even take it seriously. Like it was the most normal thing ever.
Sure, nothing was normal in Nuln, but still…
"What is this smell?" Zane whispered, his voice catching in his throat. "It's like a mix of sulphur and rotten meat."
"That's misery," Wren said, not looking back. "The monster leaks it. It's why nothing else lives down here. It poisons the soul."
Zane activated his Whispers skill, but he didn't need it. The raw, psychic agony could be felt physically.
The collective scream of the Grave-Warren was still distant—a howling ocean behind a dam. But here, the monster's individual presence was a cold, wet spike.
[...KILL... MEEEE... WHY... LIVE... SSUFFEERRR...]
It was a thought, but it was also a wave of static pain that made Zane clap his hands over his ears. Forcing its way into his head—it hurt more than the withdrawal.
"Fuck!" Zane hissed. "It's loud. And it's close."
Wren stopped. She held her oily lantern up, casting a weak, flickering pool of light on the tunnel ahead.
"We stop here," she said. "The tunnel curves in front of us. It won't see the light."
Zane peered around the bend. He saw a massive, bubbling pile of foul sludge where the sewage met a blockage.
The air was thickest there.
"That's its den," Wren continued. "The creature blocks the ancient floodgate that keeps the Warren sealed. Go."
Zane checked his internal UI.
TIME REMAINING: T-minus 0:55:03...
He had fifty-five minutes to kill a miserable, armoured, tentacled behemoth and feast on a thousand souls.
"You said it leaks despair," Zane said, trying to steady his frantic breathing. "If I just walk in there, I can try—"
"No," Wren cut him off, her voice firm. "I tried. You can't just 'eat' it. It's too dense. It's like trying to drink sludge. You have to pry it open. You have to make it suffer before you can harvest it."
He looked at her strangely. His theory was that she had been sent by the death god as well, but he didn't want to say anything yet. Just in case she was like the others with their versatile knowledge.
She looked at the mangled Exterminator corpse at the tunnel junction. "That Cleaners-fuck tried to stab it. It just laughed and twisted his armour off. It's strong enough to rip steel. You have to fight it."
"I'm a former hotline operator in my old world," Zane snapped, not caring about his secret and gripping the hilt of his rusted knife. "My combat skills are 'stabbing a guy who fell on his own cleaver.' I can't fight a goddamn tentacle beast."
"Yes, you can," Wren said, her ice-cold eyes meeting his. "You have shadows. You used them to scare Gart into stabbing himself. You used them to hide from the Cleaners. That isn't combat. That's terror."
She spoke the word like a weapon.
"You're a Sump-Demon, Zane. Your power isn't in punching. It's in fear. You walk in there, you hit it with its own miserable thoughts, and you scare it to death. You make it feel the end."
[...WHY... IS... IT... TALKING... TO... ME...] The monster's thought was a distant, mournful shriek.
"How do I hit it with its thoughts?" Zane demanded. "The Umbral Cloak just hides me."
Wren shrugged. "Figure it out, Stain. You have five minutes before this Scraps-Shine starts making you panic. But I can tell you this… the monster is crying."
She pointed her rebar spear toward the gloom. "The despair isn't just leaking. It's concentrated grief. And if there's one thing a monster that lives in sorrow hates, it's hope."
Zane paused. Hope.
His Ironic Flaw. The thing that kept him starving.
"If I hit it with hope, I'll just save it," Zane argued. "I'll lose the meal."
"No," Wren countered, a feral grin splitting her lips. "Hope is poison to despair, Zane. You can't save a thing that is the suffering of a thousand dead souls. You'll just make it recoil. It will reject the feeling, and when it does, the despair will shatter."
Zane understood. He wasn't saving the monster—he was using the chemical purity of his accidental empathy to create a violent, psychic allergic reaction. He was going to use his inner 'HopeLine operator skill' as a weapon.
He checked his UI.
TIME REMAINING: T-minus 0:53:50...
He had to move.
He pushed the activation for the Umbral Cloak, but instead of full power, he channelled only a little to shield but not cover him completely.
He wanted just enough shadow to make his form indistinct, but not enough to drain his battery.
He felt the cold, heavy Essence in his battery compress slightly. It worked. He was a fuzzy, grey outline.
He crept around the bend. But the sight made him freeze.
The guardian was massive.
It was a shifting, dark purple mass of corroded metal, slick tentacles, and muscle, rooted in the sludge. Its core was a mangled, silver exoskeleton—the remnants of a huge Exterminator knight.
The despair from the Grave-Warren had seemingly consumed the knight, reanimating it as a grotesque, weeping leviathan.
It didn't have eyes. It had sockets that leaked thick, black fluid onto the sewage. It was huge.
It was crying.
The sound wasn't noise; it was pure psychic grief that hammered Zane's soul.
[...I... AM... ALONE... I... AM... A... PRISON...]
Zane felt his chest tighten. His old instincts, those goddamn, cursed hotline instincts, were screaming at him to kneel and offer comfort.
"No," Zane whispered, clamping down on the urge. "Not this time."
He channelled the purest, most ridiculous, most infuriatingly optimistic thought he could find—the one he always used on his hardest cases. The phrase that had saved hundreds of Marks.
"It gets better."
He launched the thought, weaponized, straight at the monster's core.
"You think this is the end? Bullshit. You can start over. You can leave the past behind and choose a new path. You're not a prison, you're just waiting for your next shift to start, you miserable fuck."
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The creature's mass convulsed. Its tentacles thrashed violently, tearing chunks of brick from the tunnel walls. The dark fluid leaking from its eye sockets erupted into a frantic spray.
[...NOOOOO! LIIIEEES! NO... NOO... HOPE... DIIIEEE!]
The despair signature shattered, violently fracturing into a thousand sharp, agonizing shards of misery.
Zane gasped, his head swimming, but the massive, agonizing signature was gone. He had broken it.
He staggered back, blinded by the psychic backlash.
But the silence that followed was broken by a cold, victorious laugh from Wren.
"It worked! You broke the damn thing! Get back!"
Wren charged past Zane, her figure a blur in the dim light. She held her rebar spear with both hands, aiming for the core of the convulsing, weeping beast.
"I told you," Wren screamed, leaping onto the slick, moss-covered tunnel wall for leverage. "Hope is poison to sorrow! Now, die and give me your fucking loot!"