Callow was no longer Callow—no longer the smug surgeon with his scalpel smile, no longer the clinical scientist who wore his intellect like armor.
No, he was sothing else now, sothing stitched together from the corpses of his own making. Limbs writhed out of him in every direction, arms bending backward, torsos half-lded into his flesh, skulls bulging from his shoulders like tumors with teeth.
His body stretched high into the dark arches, scraping the ceiling with a grotesque elegance, as though the very laws of anatomy had given up trying to contain him.
The pale horrors that had crawled from the muck poured into him still, their bodies lting against his like wax, feeding him, shaping him, morphing him into sothing less than a man and far too much of a god.
And through it all, the heartbeat in the center of the chamber—the great crimson mass tethered by cords of flesh—pulsed harder, faster, like a drum beating for his ascension. The water at our feet quivered with every throb. My lungs couldn’t decide whether they were full of air or fear.
"Well," I rasped, tightening my grip on the dagger. "This seems a bit unfair."
The knight beside had his fists already clenched, posture thrown wild with so kind of suicidal delight. "Unfair? This is glorious!" he bellowed, and then, without warning, he charged.
Saints preserve , he charged the writhing mass of stitched limbs like a toddler running headfirst at a windmill.
Salem darted beside him, far more precise, blade singing arcs that sparked against the twisted flesh. Rodrick, gods bless him, still bleeding from the ribs, snatched up whatever rubble he could find and hurled it like he ant to take down a fortress with rotting wood alone. Dunny shrieked sowhere in the background.
And ? I danced between panic and bravado, the two old lovers who shared custody of my spine. My dagger slashed deep into a limb, but it was like trying to shave a mountain with a butterknife. Flesh parted, but the wound closed again almost instantly, sinew knotting itself tighter, cords of muscle thickening like vines drinking blood.
Then Callow struck back.
An arm the size of a tree trunk swept sideways, catching the knight mid-laugh and hurling him into a pillar. The crack of stone nearly drowned out the crack of ribs.
Salem ducked the follow-up strike, rolled, and ca up slicing, his blade carving a grotesque smile into one of the bulbous skulls along Callow’s torso. The head scread, high and wet, before collapsing into goo, but two more sprouted in its place like unforgiving weeds.
The heart behind Callow pulsed again. Then the water level surged suddenly, as if the chamber itself had inhaled. One of the pillars groaned, then broke with a thunderclap, stone crashing into the shallow water. The ripples threw us off balance.
Callow’s enormous form staggered but then anchored itself, its writhing arms digging into the floor like roots. His laughter—oh gods, his laughter—gurgled from a dozen mouths at once, a chorus of derision.
"This is fine," I lied aloud. "Everything’s fine."
The knight staggered back to his feet, blood pouring down his temple. "Ha!" he roared, spitting red into the water. "Bastard hits harder than my mother!"
"Your mother must have been terrifying," I snapped, dodging a tentacle-thick arm that smashed a crater where I had stood a breath earlier.
I tried not to think about that. I tried not to think about the way Callow’s bulk lood over us like a cathedral turned inside-out, or the way the heart in the center of the chamber had begun to collapse inward, as though feeding itself to him, its cords snapping one by one in a grotesque symphony of tearing flesh.
I tried dodging and slicing, slipping in when Salem carved an opening, trying not to vomit at the way Callow’s new mouths whispered fragnts of thought that weren’t his own. "Help ," one gurgled. "Kill ," another pleaded. "More," another begged.
The water churned black with blood and bile as we fought, shards of stone raining from the ceiling.
It was then that the tide broke.
A single arm—massive, glistening with cords of muscle—lashed out, caught Salem mid-step, and slamd him into the wall with a force that rattled the chamber. He was pinned, his blade straining against the weight crushing him, his teeth bared in a snarl.
"Damn it!" he barked, the sound sharp against his tongue.
The knight didn’t fare much better. One of Callow’s writhing limbs shot out, quicker than seed fair for sothing so massive, and snatched him straight out of his charge. For a heartbeat he dangled there, squirming and cursing, and then the limb whipped down with a force that made the air itself shudder.
He hit the water with a crash that sent black waves slapping the walls, the impact so hard I swore I felt it in my teeth.
Rodrick was gasping now, drowning in blood. Dunny had vanished entirely, though his whimpers echoed faintly from so coward’s corner.
That left . Alone.
I dropped to my knees, my dagger clattering into the water. My chest burned. My head swam. And in the echoing silence between heartbeats, I realized just how catastrophically wrong I had been.
I’d dragged them here. My madness, my ambition, my stupid need to make this wretched city bend to —had dragged all of them into this pit. And here they were, broken at my feet, while I knelt, useless before a monster that should’ve never been born into existence.
"I can’t," I whispered. "Gods, I can’t."
"Yes," Salem hissed, straining against the arm pinning him, his eyes burning holes into . "You can. You must." His voice cut like steel. "Use it. My skill. The burst."
My head snapped up, disbelief choking . "I can’t—"
"YOU CAN!" he roared. "Or we all die here, and your regret will be nothing but rot in the dark!"
My heart clenched, my lungs seared, and the world tilted. The monster lood closer, its limbs spreading like a grotesque eclipse. A massive hand, thick with writhing sinew, rose above , ready to co down like divine judgnt.
I closed my eyes. I breathed.
Then I reached.
Energy coiled within like a storm, violent and uncontainable. I tried to split it, to diffuse it through every limb, to make it more than just a burst of raw chaos—but the threads slipped, tangled, burned against like fire ropes cutting my skin from the inside. My body convulsed, my teeth ground, my vision splintered with white. I was failing. I was falling.
Then I heard it.
A voice. Whispered. Not through the ears but through the bones, a vibration that quivered in the hollows of my ribs and slid cold fingers up the back of my neck. Familiar. Too familiar.
It took only a second to realize it was her—the woman from the cube, the phantom who had stitched herself into the marrow of my soul and lingered there like a scar that refused to fade.
She didn’t scream, didn’t command, didn’t hurl divine thunder into my skull. She spoke with a softness that terrified more than any roar could, a softness like silk draped over a knife, a softness that implied she had never once needed to raise her voice to bend the world.
One word. So simple it shouldn’t have mattered.
"Relax."
It was then that the world lted.
I felt my body dissolve, every nerve unspooling, every bone loosening into water, every thought scattering like petals. The world slowed to a crawl, and I realized I had never truly breathed until now.
The hand descended. But then I moved.
Lightning—that’s the only word to describe it. I was lightning, a crack tearing the world in half, a shiver that left reality trailing behind in stunned silence. My body beca a blur beyond sound, a jagged streak across the chamber. Shockwaves scread in my wake, ripping water from the floors and walls, pulverizing pillars into dust, flinging cultist corpses like ragdolls into the shadows.
I ricocheted off a pillar, the stone cracking under the force, my dagger tearing a canyon down Callow’s thigh. He roared—a dozen mouths, a dozen deaths—but I didn’t care. Another rebound, another strike; my blade tore into his chest, black ichor spattering across the chamber like liquid night.
I was everywhere—at his back, at his side, across his face—each cut deeper, sharper, carving him open like an autopsy perford by a god.
The ceiling cracked. The chamber groaned. The heartbeat collapsed entirely, its crimson mass sloughing into the water with a wet thunder, rippling waves that nearly threw off course.
I surged upward, rebounding off the rubble, tearing through air until I reached the ceiling itself. Stone splintered beneath as I kicked off, the entire cavern groaning under the force of my impending strike.
I bolted down before whipping around midair, every ounce of force condensing into my heel. I ca down like judgnt. My foot crashed into Callow’s skull with the weight of a falling train. The sound was apocalyptic—a crack that split stone, split air, split hope and fear alike.
His skull cratered the floor with the force of a bullet, the entire chamber convulsing with the impact. Pillars toppled in cascades of rubble while water erupted outward in a tidal fury that swallowed the room as though the sea itself had been unchained.
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