The swing came from his right shoulder, the arc wide and readable, the committed movement of someone who had the courage for it and none of the technique. The blade crossed the distance toward Crux's left side and Aris put everything behind it, every gram of the weight of Kai against the wall and the cracked pit floor and the twenty gold they didn't have and Elysse sitting at the pit's edge with cracked ribs because of something someone put on her back without her knowing.

  Avalanche expanded into a partial Mantle, the mass thickening between the blade and Crux without effort, and the sword connected with the surface of it and stopped.

  The force of the connection didn't stop.

  It reversed, traveling back through the blade into the grip and through the grip into Aris's hands and through his hands into his arms and through his arms into the rest of him, and the rest of him went backward in the way that physics indicated, which was completely and without dignity, the pit floor arriving to introduce itself with considerable thoroughness.

  He lay on the cold stone and looked up at the Underbowl's ceiling, at the lamps hanging far above, at the crowd looking down at him from the tiers with the collective expression of people who had seen this before and felt something about it anyway.

  Everything hurt in the distributed way of things that had absorbed force they weren't built for.

  "Aris."

  Elysse's voice. Close. From the pit stairs, closer than she had been.

  He heard her moving.

  "Stay back," Colette said, sharp and low. "Elysse, you're injured—"

  "He's on the floor—"

  "He's getting up, look at him, he's—"

  Aris got up.

  He found his feet the way you found your feet when the floor had been making arguments against the idea, through the specific stubbornness of someone who had decided that down was temporary. The sword was somewhere nearby. He found it. Picked it up. Turned back toward Crux.

  Crux was looking at him.

  The dark unhurried eyes with the assessment moving through them, and what the assessment said was different from what it had said at the start of the bout. Not alarm. Not concern. The specific recognition of someone who had seen a category of person before and was placing this one correctly.

  "You're not a fighter," Crux said.

  His voice was the first thing he'd said since they'd descended the stairs. Low and even, the voice of someone who used it sparingly because they'd learned that sparing use gave it weight.

  "No," Aris said. He was breathing harder than he wanted to be. "I'm not."

  "Then why are you standing up."

  Aris looked at him across the pit floor. At the geological mass of Avalanche pressing close around him. At the crack running three directions from where one strike had landed on the ground.

  "We need something from the man upstairs," Aris said. "Apparently this is how we get it."

  Something moved in the landscape of Crux's expression. Small. In different light it might have been the very beginning of something that wasn't quite a smile.

  He came forward.

  Aris swung the sword again.

  It was better than the first swing in the specific way that things are better when the person doing them has received comprehensive physical feedback about what not to do and has applied that information. The arc was tighter, the approach less readable, and he came at Crux's right side rather than the left because the left was where Avalanche had been thickest and he had opinions about experiencing that again.

  The blade connected with the surface of Avalanche and skated across it, finding no purchase, the mass beneath too dense for the force behind the swing to do anything meaningful with.

  But it had connected.

  Aris noted this. The sword had touched the Eido and the Eido had redirected it rather than stopping it, which was a different category of response than the first attempt. Redirection meant surface engagement. Surface engagement meant there was something to engage with, even if what he could do with that engagement was currently very limited.

  He came in again, lower this time, angling for the transition between Crux's body and Avalanche's mass at the hip, the place where the compression was thinnest because it had to accommodate the mechanics of movement. The blade found the gap and went in two centimeters before Avalanche thickened there and pushed it out, but two centimeters was two centimeters and Crux's attention registered it the way it had registered everything, with the dark unhurried eyes finding him and the assessment updating.

  "Better," Crux said.

  "Thanks," Aris said, from three meters away where the momentum of extracting the blade had taken him.

  On the far side of the pit Kai was burning.

  Not visibly. Not in any way the crowd could see. But Aris could see it because he knew what Kai looked like at full capacity and the person currently moving across the pit floor was not that. The intervals between reposition and strike were fractions of a second longer than they'd been at the start. The scythe's arc was marginally shorter, the commitment of each cut pulling back slightly from the full extension as Reaper's output adjusted to what remained in reserve.

  He was spending the last portion of something, and the precision of how he was spending it was the only thing keeping the fight from having already ended.

  Kai came in with the feint sequence, the one that had produced the deepest cuts, right then left, Harvest swinging for the shoulder. The blade went deep, deeper than any previous cut, and Kai twisted the arc at the bottom of the swing to extend the seam downward before the redistribution could close it from above.

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  Avalanche shuddered.

  The crowd made its sound.

  But Crux had adapted.

  His counter didn't wait for the full redistribution this time. Before Avalanche had finished closing the seam his left hand was already moving, not Impact, something shorter and more direct, a palm strike with enough of Avalanche compressed behind it to deliver the message clearly. It caught Kai on the left shoulder, the same shoulder the coat was already torn at, and the force of it turned him fully around, his feet losing the pit floor briefly before Reaper's speed found him and pulled him into a controlled landing four meters back.

  He stayed upright.

  Barely.

  His left arm was hanging at a different angle than arms were supposed to hang.

  "Kai," Aris said.

  "It's fine," Kai said.

  "Your arm—"

  "Is fine," Kai said, with the specific emphasis of someone converting pain into vocabulary. He rolled the shoulder and the arm moved and his expression did something that he did not acknowledge. "It's fine."

  Crux looked at him across the pit with the patience of someone who had all the time available.

  Aris crossed the floor toward Crux again, sword up, not because he thought the sword was the answer but because Kai needed thirty seconds and he was what was available. He swung twice, quick, testing the angles, the blade skating across Avalanche's surface and finding the hip gap again and going in the same two centimeters before being pushed out.

  Then Crux looked at him directly and swung.

  Not the full Impact. Something more economical, his right arm coming around in a horizontal arc with Avalanche compressed along the length of it, the force distributed across the swing rather than concentrated at a point. It caught Aris across the left side and picked him up off the pit floor and deposited him two meters to the right and the cold stone greeted him again with the thoroughness it had developed for this purpose.

  He lay there and breathed and conducted a rapid internal assessment of whether everything was still attached in the correct configuration. The assessment returned mixed results. His left side had opinions. His shoulder had a formal complaint. His head had submitted documentation.

  He got up.

  "You keep doing that," Crux said.

  "Yes," Aris said.

  "It isn't working."

  "I'm aware," Aris said. He found the sword. Picked it up. Stood with it and looked at Crux and looked at Kai across the pit moving carefully on a shoulder that wasn't working the way shoulders were supposed to work.

  He thought about level one.

  He thought about what level one meant in practical terms, which was that the gap between him and the person standing in front of him was not a gap he could close with effort or creativity or the specific stubbornness that had been getting him off the pit floor. It was a structural gap, the gap between the first floor of a building and the fourth, and no amount of stairs invented in the moment was going to address it.

  He was a healer from a lower district clinic who treated dungeon ailments for free and harvested Deepbloom flowers on Floor Six and had gotten here because someone needed curing and he had not been able to sit in the church and let that be someone else's problem.

  He could not beat Crux.

  The thought arrived without drama, the way honest thoughts arrived when you'd stopped arguing with them. He could not beat Crux. He could not help Kai beat Crux. Everything he'd tried had either done nothing or been absorbed or been turned around and applied to him at higher velocity.

  He looked at the pit wall where Kai had hit it. At the cracks in the floor. At his own hands holding Elysse's sword, the grip slightly too large for him, the balance wrong for someone who hadn't trained with it.

  Then he looked at the pit stairs.

  Elysse was standing at their base, not sitting, having gotten to her feet at some point without anyone successfully preventing it. Her grey eyes were on him with the quality they had when she was doing her reading of a situation and had arrived at conclusions she wasn't announcing yet. The borrowed armor, the white hair, the careful management of her body that couldn't quite hide what the management was costing her.

  She was worried.

  He could see it in the specific stillness of someone who was holding themselves in place against an instinct to move.

  He looked at her for one second.

  He turned back toward Crux and raised the sword.

  I came down here for a reason, he thought. I didn't come down here to win a fight. I came down here because there's a pattern on her back that I can't remove and somewhere in this building is the item that might tell me where it came from and I am not going back up those stairs without it.

  He went in.

  The sword swung and Avalanche redirected it and he let the momentum carry him into Void's range and directed the pulling force at the hip gap while the blade was still in contact with the surface, both pressures at the same point simultaneously, and the mass shifted slightly, two centimeters of deformation where the gap was, Avalanche thinner there than anywhere else.

  Not useful.

  But real.

  He was still finding things.

  Kai moved.

  He came in from the opposite side, the coordination unspoken, finding the moment that Crux's attention was divided between Aris and the hip gap, and Reaper swung with everything remaining in reserve, the scythe coming down in the deepest arc yet, the full commitment of a person who had decided that this was the strike that needed to matter.

  The blade went deep.

  Deeper than any previous cut. The seam opened into Avalanche's mass and kept opening, darkness following the blade's edge down through the grey geological layers, and Avalanche shuddered with a violence it hadn't shown before, the mass losing its configuration briefly, the distortion in the air around Crux stuttering.

  The crowd went loud.

  Crux turned toward Kai with the full weight of his attention and his right arm came up and Impact released, not the palm strike, the real one, the full delivery of Avalanche's compressed mass through his fist in the direction of Kai's chest.

  Kai had nothing left for Swift.

  He turned the shoulder. The injured one, the wrong one, taking the strike there instead of the chest, and the force of it spun him and threw him and he hit the pit floor and rolled and came up on one knee with Reaper still present above him and his left arm definitively not working now, hanging at the angle that arms did not come back from without Marionette or something like it.

  He stayed on one knee.

  The scythe was still in his right hand.

  "Kai," Aris said, from across the pit, and his voice had something in it that his voice didn't usually have, something that had been building since the first time Kai hit the wall and had arrived at a place where it was coming out regardless.

  "I'm," Kai started.

  "Don't say fine," Aris said.

  Kai closed his mouth.

  Crux stood between them and looked at both of them with the dark patient eyes and said nothing. He didn't need to say anything. The arithmetic of the pit said everything that needed saying and it said it clearly and without sympathy.

  Aris looked at his hands.

  At the sword. At Void pressing close above him, the masked featureless face tilted at its slight angle, the dark presence that had been with him since he was ten years old and had never once failed to do what he needed it to do in the clinic, in the church, on Floor Six.

  Here it had done nothing.

  Here it had found a problem it couldn't treat, the same category of problem as the pattern on Elysse's back, the category of things that exceeded what he currently was. And the distance between what he currently was and what the situation required was not a distance he could cross tonight, in this pit, with a sword he didn't know how to use and a level that had never been designed for this.

  He was weak.

  The thought arrived the same way the previous one had, without drama, without argument. He was weak and Kai was hurt and the item was in a pocket upstairs and the person it was for was standing at the base of the stairs with cracked ribs managing her own body's complaints with the composure of someone who had been doing this since before it was practical.

  He looked at Elysse again.

  Her eyes were on him.

  The worry in them was no longer the contained version. It had exceeded containment and was visible in the set of her jaw and the quality of her stillness, the stillness of someone holding themselves in place by diminishing margin.

  He looked at her and thought about the pattern on her back and about Void's Hand pressing against it and the sphere absorbing the darkness and stopping halfway, the first limit he'd ever found, the first time in six years the answer had been not enough.

  He was not going back up those stairs without the item.

  He raised the sword and turned back toward Crux.