The path narrowed without warning.
One mont they were walking through a relatively wide canyon passage, the next the walls pressed in from both sides until they could only proceed single file. Dante went first because he always went first, his eyes scanning for the threats he knew were coming.
The passage opened into a dead end.
"Shit." Astrid pressed up behind him. "We have to go back."
Dante didn’t move. His eyes swept the cliff walls rising around them, the too-convenient boulder formations that could hide a dozen ambushers and the single narrow entrance they’d just walked through.
"It’s a trap," he said quietly.
"What?"
"We’ve been herded." He turned slowly, taking in the kill box’s dinsions. "This passage wasn’t here when I climbed Floor 13 before. Soone carved it recently, probably within the last few months. The stone edges are still sharp."
"Carved by who?"
The answer ca in the form of movent at the canyon’s only exit.
Bodies poured through the opening, n and won in coordinated red armor carrying weapons that glead with enchantnts. They moved with military precision, spreading out to block any escape while more climbed down the cliff walls on rope ladders.
Twenty. Thirty. The number kept climbing.
"Fla Court," Dante said, recognizing the phoenix emblems on their chest plates. "The faction from Floor 11. Looks like they decided to follow us."
"There’s forty of them!" Leon’s voice cracked. "How are there forty?"
"Because humiliating a faction doesn’t make them go away, it makes them angry." Dante drew his sword with a slow, deliberate motion. "Everyone, defensive formation. Ren, front and center. Astrid, watch our flanks. Healers to the middle."
"You think we can fight forty people?" Torian asked, his voice tight with fear.
"No." Dante watched as the Fla Court soldiers finished their encirclent. "But I don’t think they’re planning to fight fair either."
A man stepped forward from the enemy ranks, wearing more ornate armor than the others and carrying a staff topped with a crystalline sphere. His face was cruel but intelligent, and he moved with the confidence of soone who’d already won.
"The infamous Lightbreakers," he said, his voice sohow audible despite the howling canyon wind. "You caused quite a stir on Floor 11. My employers were not pleased."
"Your employers should have sent better soldiers the first ti." Dante kept his voice casual, buying ti to assess the situation. "Who are you? I don’t rember your face from the trash we beat down."
The man’s eye twitched at the insult. "I am Commander Darius of the Fla Court’s Hunting Division. I was assigned to track you after your little economic stunt embarrassed our leadership."
"And you tracked us through a jungle and a canyon that drives people insane just to... what? Avenge so hurt feelings?"
"To send a ssage." Darius raised his staff, and the crystal at its tip glowed with pulsing crimson light. "And to test a new acquisition."
He threw sothing into the air.
It was a lure, a glowing orb that humd with a frequency that made Dante’s teeth ache. The sound bounced off the canyon walls, amplifying with each echo until it beca a song that promised death.
The wind changed.
"Oh no," Ravenna whispered behind him. "Sothing’s coming. Sothing hungry."
She dropped from the sky like a cot.
The Siren Queen was beautiful in the way that natural disasters were beautiful, terrible and impossible to look away from. She had a woman’s upper body, voluptuous and pale with features that seed to shift depending on the angle, and massive wings erupted from her shoulders spanning thirty feet tip to tip. Her lower body was scaled and powerful, talons designed for rending flesh.
And when she opened her mouth, the world ended.
The scream hit them like a physical force.
Dante had exactly one second of warning before the sound slamd into his brain like a battering ram. He saw his team collapsing, hands pressed to their ears as blood poured between their fingers. Ren went down first, then Astrid, then everyone else in a wave of failing legs and overwhelming agony.
The Fla Court soldiers watched smugly through what had to be enchanted earplugs, completely immune to the attack that reduced everyone else to writhing heaps.
Dante’s knees buckled.
He caught himself on his sword, driving the blade into the stone to give himself an anchor. Blood poured from his ears, his nose, probably his eyes too, and every nerve in his body scread at him to collapse and let the darkness take him.
He stood, though the effort made his vision swim.
It took everything he had. The Ancient Core flared in his chest, burning through his veins as it tried to repair the damage faster than the scream could cause it. The pain was indescribable, a thousand knives driven into his skull simultaneously, but Dante had experienced worse.
He felt the Archon’s touch. This was nothing.
"Is that all?" he rasped through blood-stained teeth.
The Siren Queen paused mid-scream, her expression shifting from predatory confidence to sothing almost like confusion. None of her prey ever stood up before. None of them ever looked at her with eyes that promised violence instead of submission.
Darius took a step back, his smug expression flickering. "Kill him! All of you!"
His soldiers hesitated. Dante was one man, bleeding from every orifice, barely standing against an attack that should have turned his brain to mush. He should have been easy prey.
But sothing about the way he smiled made them think twice.
Dante launched himself at the Siren Queen.
He crossed the distance in a heartbeat, Shadow Step carrying him through space in a blur of green-gold light. The Queen tried to scream again, tried to bring him down with another wave of that devastating power, but he was already too close.
His hand caught her wing mid-beat.
The impact jarred his shoulder, nearly ripping it from the socket, but his grip held. The Queen shrieked, a different kind of scream now, one of fury rather than domination, and her talons ca around to tear him apart.
Dante swung up onto her back.
"Let go!" She twisted in the air, trying to shake him off like a horse with an unwanted rider. "What are you?"
"Having a bad day." He grabbed a fistful of feathers and used them as leverage to orient himself, one leg wrapped around her neck while his free hand drew his sword. "Make it worse."
She dove toward the canyon floor.
The ground ca up fast, the Queen clearly planning to smash him against the canyon floor, but Dante did this for too long to fall for such an obvious tactic. At the last possible mont, he released his grip and kicked off her spine, launching himself clear as she crashed into the stone.
The landing shattered rock. The Queen tumbled through the debris, wings askew and a pained shriek escaping her throat that sent the nearest Fla Court soldiers flying backward from the sonic force.
Dante hit the ground rolling and ca up running.
She was trying to rise when he reached her, talons scrabbling against broken stone as she fought to get airborne again. He didn’t give her the chance.
His blade caught her in the throat.
Not a killing blow, not yet, an injury designed to silence rather than end. Dark blood sprayed across the canyon floor, and more importantly, the Siren Queen’s voice died in a wet gurgle that would never form a scream again.
"My turn," Dante said, and set to work.
The Queen fought hard. Even wounded, even silenced, she was a harpy boss monster with levels that probably dwarfed most of the people present. His team was struggling. Torian was on his knees, shield raised but trembling. Her wings battered him with concussive force and her teeth snapped at any limb that got too close.
It didn’t matter to him.
Dante killed things worse than her a hundred tis over, and today all his rage about Seira, about Adrian, about the Archon and the mories and the inevitable betrayals yet to co, all of it focused down into his blade and the creature beneath it.
The Siren Queen died ssily.
When it was over, Dante stood over the corpse with blood dripping from wounds he couldn’t feel yet and a sword that needed cleaning and every eye in the canyon fixed on him.
The Fla Court soldiers hadn’t moved. They were supposed to attack while the Queen distracted him, supposed to pick off his unconscious teammates while he went down. Instead, they watched him grapple a boss monster in mid-air and butcher it in close combat without any of them lifting a finger.
Dante turned to face them.
He picked up the lure artifact from where it had fallen near the Queen’s body and held it up for Darius to see.
"You dropped this," he said, and threw it at the Commander’s feet.
Darius caught it reflexively, then stared at it like he never saw the object before.
"That was a newly captured harpy queen," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "A boss monster from Floor 17. How did you..."
"Leave your gear." Dante’s voice cut through the canyon wind like a blade. "Walk away naked. Or die here."
Nobody moved for a long, frozen mont.
Then one soldier started unbuckling his armor.
It spread like a virus. First one, then five, then all of them stripping off equipnt and weapons with shaking hands while Dante watched without expression. Darius tried to rally them, screaming orders that nobody obeyed because they all saw the sa thing and none of them wanted to fight soone who could do what Dante had just done.
In five minutes, forty Fla Court soldiers stood in their underclothes with their gear piled at Dante’s feet.
"Run," he said.
They ran.
Darius was the last to leave, his face twisted with impotent fury as he stumbled toward the canyon exit. He paused at the threshold, turning to look back with eyes that promised future retribution.
"This isn’t over," he spat.
Dante threw the Siren’s claw.
It covered the distance in the ti between heartbeats, burying itself in Darius’s thigh with a aty thunk that drove him to the ground screaming.
"Now it is," Dante said.
He walked back to his team, who were starting to stir as the Siren’s scream faded from their nervous systems, and started checking for serious injuries.
Behind him, Darius crawled toward the exit, dragging his ruined leg through the dirt. Nobody helped him. The canyon wind howled its approval, and for once, the whispers sounded almost like laughter.
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