The scream woke him before anything else registered.
Sunny was on his feet before his mind caught up to his body. His shadow sense swept the ridge in every direction, searching for the threat that had produced that sound, and found no creatures on the stone and no movement in the labyrinth below. The eastern horizon showed the first grey suggestion of dawn, and in that thin light, Nephis stood nearby with her longsword raised, scanning the darkness with the same tight readiness.
Cassie was stumbling toward the ridge's edge.
She was ten meters from the drop, then eight, her arms outstretched and her hands searching for a wall that didn't exist. Her face was twisted with terror.
Sunny closed the distance in a few seconds and caught her around the waist, pulling her back from the edge and dragging her toward the center of the ridge. She fought him for a moment, her body rigid with panic, her fingers clawing at his arms. Then she went limp and started shaking.
"I've got her," he called back to Nephis. "No threat."
Nephis lowered her sword and crossed to them. She looked at Cassie, then at Sunny, and the brief evaluation in her eyes told him she'd noted the speed of his response. She didn't comment on it.
"Cassie?" Nephis said. Her voice was the same flat tone she used for everything, but she pitched it quieter. "What happened?"
Cassie was shaking. Sunny kept his arm around her shoulders and waited while her breathing slowed from ragged gasps to something closer to controlled. The trembling continued, running through her body in waves that he could feel against his side.
"I don't know," she said finally. Her voice was thin and unsteady. "Maybe it was just a nightmare."
Sunny and Nephis looked at each other. People didn't dream in the Dream Realm. Whatever Cassie had seen, a simple nightmare was the least likely explanation.
"You can tell us what you remember," Sunny said. "We might be able to make sense of it."
Cassie was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, she did it with her eyes closed and her hands gripping her staff so tightly that her knuckles had gone white.
"At first, I saw a boundless darkness locked behind seven seals. Something vast was moving in that darkness. I felt that if I looked at it directly, I would lose my mind." She swallowed. "As I watched, the seals broke one after another until only one remained. And then that seal broke too."
She trembled.
"After that, my mind shattered. Fragments everywhere, each one reflecting its own image. Most of them were dark and frightening. Some I've already forgotten. But the others..."
She paused, gathering herself.
"I saw the human castle again. Only this time, it was at night. A lonely star was burning in the black sky, and under its light the castle was consumed by fire. Rivers of blood flowed down its halls. I saw a corpse in golden armor sitting on a throne, and a woman with a bronze spear drowning in a tide of monsters."
Cassie's voice dropped to almost nothing.
"In the end, I saw a colossal crimson spire. At its base, seven severed heads were guarding seven locks. And at the top, a lonely star was falling into a shadow that reached up to catch it. When the star's light went out, I felt as though something so precious it can't be described with words was taken from me."
Her hands were shaking again.
"Then I felt so much sorrow and rage that whatever remained of my sanity seemed to disappear. That was when I woke up."
Sunny sorted the images for patterns and actionable intelligence, the way Anvil had trained him to process fragmented information. Most of it was opaque. The seven seals, the golden-armored corpse on a throne, the woman with the spear. He didn't know enough about the Dream Realm's mythology to decode any of it.
But the last image stayed with him. A lonely star falling into a shadow that reached up to catch it. His Aspect was called Hollow Shadow. Nephis's True Name was Changing Star. The Spell had a tendency to name things with precision, and now Cassie's vision had placed a star and a shadow together at the top of whatever that crimson spire was, locked in something that could have been an embrace or a destruction.
He didn't believe in coincidences. Anvil had trained that out of him early.
"It could be a side effect of your Aspect," he said carefully. "Your previous visions were clear and direct. This was fragmented and symbolic. Maybe not everything your ability shows you is a prophecy. Some of it might just be dreams."
He didn't believe it, and he suspected Nephis didn't either, but Cassie needed something to hold onto, and there was a chance, however small, that he was right.
Cassie turned toward him with faint relief on her face. "You really think so?"
"It's possible."
Nephis studied them both for a moment, then stood.
"We'll figure out what it means later. Right now, we train."
As the sun climbed above the labyrinth and the dark water finished its retreat, Nephis led Sunny to the western edge of the ridge. Cassie sat near the center with her staff across her knees, the tremors from the nightmare finally fading, her head tilted in their direction so she could listen.
Nephis drew her longsword and faced him.
"Show me a downward slash."
Sunny gripped the Azure Blade with both hands and considered his options. The downward slash was fundamental, the first technique every swordsman learned and the last one they stopped refining. He could perform it at several levels. Anvil's instructors had drilled the mechanics into him thousands of times before he turned ten, and by now the motion existed in his muscles the way breathing existed in his lungs.
The question was how well to perform it.
If he fumbled it or made it sloppy, Nephis would teach him the basics, and the basics were something he'd mastered years ago. He would learn nothing and waste time pretending to improve. Worse, if a real fight came tomorrow and he had to execute at full capacity, the gap between his training performance and his combat performance would be impossible to explain. An outskirts kid who could barely swing a sword one day and fought like a seasoned warrior the next would raise questions he couldn't answer.
But if he showed everything, she would know that someone had trained him. Sunny settled on the middle ground. He performed the slash cleanly, with proper form and good power generation, at the level of someone with natural talent and some real combat experience but no formal instruction. He let the hip rotation drive the stroke the way it should, let the push-pull of his hands generate the force correctly, and deliberately left the recovery a fraction too wide, as though he'd figured out most of it through practice but had never been corrected on the follow-through.
Nephis watched him.
She didn't say anything for several seconds. Sunny kept his face neutral and waited.
"Again."
He did it again, the same calibrated version. Clean but imperfect.
Nephis tilted her head slightly. Then she stepped forward and corrected his recovery angle, placing her hand on his wrist and adjusting the blade's return path by a few degrees.
"Your fundamentals are solid," she said. It wasn't a compliment. It was an observation delivered with the same flat tone she always seemed to use.
Sunny waited for the question. Where did you learn? It sat in the air between them, obvious and unasked. If she asked it, his Flaw would force a true answer.
She didn't ask.
Instead, she raised her own sword and said, "Attack me."
Sunny adjusted his grip and came at her with a controlled overhead strike that used the form she'd just seen. She deflected it and reset. He came again from the left, a lateral cut at half speed. She stepped inside it and tapped the flat of her blade against his ribs.
"Faster."
He increased his speed, still well below his ceiling but closer to it. He mixed strikes, varying the angle and timing the way his training had taught him, and Nephis countered each one with an economy that told him she was working at perhaps a quarter of her capacity.
Then she attacked him.
The first strike came without warning, a straight thrust that he parried on instinct. The second came from below, angled to catch the gap his parry had opened, and he twisted to avoid it. The third was a feint that he almost fell for. He stepped back and reset, and Nephis lowered her sword.
"You're reading my attacks before they arrive," she said. "You're predicting based on stance and weight distribution, then pre-positioning your defense."
Sunny said nothing. His pulse was elevated from the exchange, but his face was still.
"That's good," Nephis said. "It means someone taught you to fight, or you've been in enough real combat to learn it yourself. Either way, you're not a beginner
"The outskirts teach you fast," he said.
Nephis held his gaze for a moment. Whatever she was looking for, she either found it or decided not to press further. She raised her sword again.
"Your method works against creatures because they're predictable. You read the stance, anticipate the action, and position yourself before the strike comes. Against a skilled fighter, that approach has a weakness."
She came at him again, and this time she changed her weight distribution mid-stride. The shift was subtle, a fractional adjustment in her hips that redirected the energy of her attack from overhead to lateral without any preparatory movement that Sunny's training had taught him to read. His anticipation said overhead. His eyes said lateral. By the time his body resolved the conflict, her blade was already at his neck.
"You commit to your read too early," she said. "You see the setup, you predict the outcome, and you move to counter before the attack develops. Against something predictable, that's efficient. Against something that can change after you've committed, you're exposed."
Sunny absorbed this. She was right, and the rightness of it bothered him because it identified something specific about the methodology Anvil's instructors had built into him. They'd trained him to read and pre-empt. Nephis fought by reading and responding, holding her commitment until the last possible moment, which meant she could adjust to changes that Sunny's approach would miss. It wasn't that his training was worse than hers. The two approaches were built for different problems. His was optimized for eliminating targets who didn't know he was there. Hers was optimized for surviving exchanges where both fighters were fully engaged.
"What do I do about it?" he asked.
"You learn to hold your read longer before acting on it. Watch the attack develop instead of predicting where it will end. Respond to what's happening, not what you think will happen."
She demonstrated by attacking slowly, letting him see the moment where her strike's direction became committed rather than flexible. It was later in the movement than his training assumed. Much later.
"The window between when an attack can still change and when it can't is where the real fight happens," Nephis said. "Most people never learn to see it."
Sunny spent the next hour working on this. Nephis attacked, and he practiced holding his response, fighting the deeply conditioned impulse to pre-empt and instead waiting for confirmation that the strike was truly what it appeared to be. It was difficult in the way that unlearning something was always more difficult than learning it in the first place. His body wanted to move early. His training demanded it. But each time he forced himself to wait and read the full development of Nephis's attack, he found himself countering more accurately, with less wasted motion and fewer false reads.
By the end, his arms were burning and his shirt was soaked through, but something had shifted. Not dramatically, not yet, but enough that Sunny could feel the outline of what Nephis was teaching him, the way you could feel the shape of a room in the dark before your eyes adjusted.
"Better," she said.
Sunny wiped the sweat from his face and looked at her. She wasn't breathing hard. She'd spent the last hour attacking him at varying speeds and angles while simultaneously coaching him through corrections, and the effort hadn't touched her.
He thought about having to fight her for real and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
"Same time tomorrow," Nephis said, and walked back to Cassie.
Days passed.
The routine deepened. Mornings belonged to training, the exchange-reading drills that Nephis ran him through with a patience he hadn't expected from her. Afternoons belonged to hunting, the two of them descending into the labyrinth to find and kill scavengers while Cassie waited on the ridge. Evenings belonged to the quiet work of survival, cleaning wounds, preparing food, dividing soul shards that Sunny handed over without absorbing because the trade had already been made and the Flaw wouldn't let him pretend otherwise.
Nephis grew stronger with each shard she consumed. The increments were small individually, but they accumulated, and Sunny tracked the changes. She moved a fraction faster each day. Her strikes landed a fraction harder. The gap between them wasn't widening, because Sunny was improving too, his shadow fragments accumulating with each kill and his body sharpening under the pressure of daily combat. But it wasn't shrinking either, and that told him something important about the mission he had been given.
If the order came now, today, the exchange-reading she was teaching him might be enough to close that gap. She was training him to counter the very thing that made her dangerous. And if the training wasn't enough, the Last Lesson sat in his soul sea, patient and absolute, waiting for the moment it was made for. One perfect strike that could not miss and could not be blocked. Between what Nephis was teaching him and what Anvil had forged for him, the mission was more achievable now than it had ever been.
That thought should have been reassuring. It wasn't.
The teamwork was the part he hadn't accounted for. It grew out of repetition, the way most useful things did. Nephis would create an opening, and Sunny would be there to exploit it before she had to call for him. Sunny's shadow sense would identify a threat, and Nephis would adjust her approach based on his warning without needing the details explained. They were starting to anticipate each other, which made the hunting faster and the fights shorter.
Anvil would have recognized the efficiency of it. He would also have recognized the danger, because an operative who fought well alongside his target was an operative who was building the kind of unconscious trust that made killing difficult. Sunny recognized the danger too, and filed it as another problem he couldn't solve yet.
Cassie was getting stronger in her own way. She learned the terrain by sound and shadow, mapped the ridge's edges in her memory until she could navigate it without guidance, and developed a quiet system for managing supplies that freed Sunny and Nephis from the logistical burden of keeping the group fed. She couldn't fight, but she made the fighting possible by handling everything around it.
On the clearest day, standing at the ridge's western edge, Sunny could see something on the horizon that might have been towers. The distance made it impossible to confirm, but the shape sat in the right direction, and Cassie's vision had shown them a castle full of people, and the scavenger-monsters had carried their stolen soul shards west without deviating.
Whatever waited there, they were heading toward it.
The hunger came and went in waves. Sunny fed it after kills, pressing his palm to dead carapace and letting the Awakened shadows satisfy what the mundane coral couldn't. The relief always lasted the same amount of time before the gnawing rebuilt to where it had been. On days without kills, it pressed at him and by evening, a restless discomfort that sat beneath his ribs and made the stillness of camp harder to bear. He never let it reach the point where it threatened his control, but the possibility was always there.
At night, he lay on the stone and listened to the tide as he thought about what he was becoming. Something was growing in him that Anvil hadn't built and wouldn't recognize.