The first thing Cade noticed was that he could move.

  The tight squeeze of the portal had given way to something else—still confined, still pressing against him, but with space ahead. A passage, maybe three feet high and widening gradually, carved from the same seamless stone that made up the rest of this world.

  He shuffled forward on his arm and hip, torso angled downward, elbows digging into the smooth floor, legs pushing from behind. The passage curved slightly, then opened further, then—

  Light.

  Not the dim glow of the eternal overcast he'd grown accustomed to. Actual light, warm and golden, streaming in from somewhere ahead. Cade pulled himself toward it, feeling the passage widen with each foot of progress, until finally he could get his knees under him, then his feet.

  He emerged standing, blinking against the brightness, and found himself in a forest.

  Trees rose around him, their trunks thin but densely packed, their canopies forming a continuous cover overhead. They were taller than him—maybe eight or nine feet—which meant he couldn't see over them, couldn't get any sense of the larger space he'd entered other than a curving of the cavern walls out over the trees.

  "Well," he muttered. "This isn't helpful."

  Cade twisted around, wanting to check the portal he'd just come through as a possible exit point. He turned and saw two figures emerging from the passage behind him. The entrance had already begun to shrink, moving to become as if it never was.

  The silver one came first, pulling themselves through with practiced efficiency. Then the rust-red one, close behind.

  His unwanted passengers.

  "You have got to be kidding me," Cade said.

  The silver one stood and brushed off their arms with exaggerated casualness. "Surprised?"

  "I was hoping to be alone."

  "Hope is a beautiful thing." The rust-red one joined their companion, both of them looking up at Cade from their tier-two bodies—just under a foot tall—without a trace of shame. "Rarely accurate, but beautiful."

  Cade stared down at them. They stared back.

  The entrance behind them had sealed completely now, leaving only smooth stone and no sign of a passage at all. Whatever this place was, they were all stuck in it together.

  He sighed. If he couldn't escape them, he might as well know who he was dealing with.

  "I'm Cade," he said. "Since we're apparently going to be spending time together, I should at least know your names. Who are you two?"

  The silver one inclined their head slightly. "Rhys."

  "Zyrian," the rust-red one added.

  Wonderful. Cade turned back to face the forest. "Try to keep up."

  He started walking, pushing through the trees. They were thin enough that he could shoulder past them without much effort, their trunks bending and swaying as he passed. But they were also densely packed, limiting his visibility to maybe ten feet in any direction.

  He needed to see. Needed to understand what kind of space he was dealing with.

  Cade stopped, braced himself, and shoved.

  The tree in front of him snapped.

  Not bent—snapped, the trunk cracking near the base with a sound like breaking kindling. The whole thing toppled away from him, crashing into its neighbors, which bent and swayed but held.

  Huh.

  He tried another one. Same result—the trunk gave way with minimal effort, the wood brittle and dry despite its green appearance. These trees weren't meant to withstand anything his size.

  Cade started pushing through in earnest, not bothering to navigate around obstacles anymore. He simply walked forward, snapping trunks, shouldering through canopy, leaving a path of destruction in his wake. The warm golden light grew brighter as he cleared the overhead cover.

  And then, finally, he broke through to a clearing and saw where he was.

  The space before him was impossible.

  A dome stretched overhead, so high that it took him a moment to register the ceiling at all. The light came from there—a faux sun, perfectly round, hanging at the apex like a theatrical prop. It pulsed faintly, a slow rhythm that reminded him uncomfortably of a heartbeat.

  Below the dome spread a landscape.

  Not a cavern. Not a dungeon. A landscape, complete with varied terrain compressed into a space that couldn't have been more than a quarter mile in any direction. Cade could see it all now that he was free of the trees—forests and plains and what looked like a miniature mountain range, maybe a hundred feet tall at its peak. On the far side, beyond the mountains, a glint of water suggested an ocean or lake, though at this scale it was probably more like a large pond.

  The edges of the dome were painted. Actually painted, like a theatrical backdrop, with crude renditions of distant horizons and clouds. The effect might have been convincing from a distance, but from here Cade could see the brushstrokes, the places where colors didn't quite blend properly. A stage set. A model world in a box.

  And in the middle distance, on a stretch of open plains, a city.

  Smoke rose from it. Not the peaceful smoke of cooking fires—dark billows, suggesting battle or destruction. Even from here, Cade could see movement on the walls. Flashes of light that might have been fire.

  The city was under siege.

  Something flickered at the edge of his vision.

  Cade froze, instinctively reaching up to touch his face—but there was nothing there. No injury to his eye, no debris caught in his lashes. The flicker wasn't external at all.

  He turned his attention inward, trying to locate the sensation, and found it—a shape hovering in his peripheral awareness, like an afterimage that wouldn't fade. When he focused on it directly, it resolved into something recognizable.

  A gauge.

  What the hell?

  It wasn't physical. Wasn't projected onto the dome or floating in the air in front of him. It existed somewhere between his eyes and his mind, visible only when he paid attention to it—like knowing which direction was north without consciously thinking about it. A vertical bar, empty, with gradations marked along its length. At the top, a symbol he couldn't quite parse—something that suggested completion, or victory, or progress.

  He blinked hard. The gauge remained.

  Am I getting a heads-up display? Like a video game?

  The thought was absurd. But then again, so was everything else about this world. Spawning pools. Cultivation tiers. A tail that retracted into his spine. Maybe the labyrinth just... provided feedback. A way to track progress that bypassed the need for explanation or instruction.

  Currently, the gauge showed nothing. Empty from bottom to top.

  Great. He had a magical progress bar, and he was already failing.

  Rhys and Zyrian emerged from the path of destruction behind him, picking their way through fallen trunks and scattered branches. They stopped when they reached the clearing, staring at the dome with what looked like grudging appreciation.

  "Impressive," Rhys said. "Most rooms don't bother with scenery."

  "You've done these before?" Cade asked.

  "Quite a few times, though probably not as many as I have yet to remember." Zyrian gestured at the miniature world, the faux sun, the painted horizons. "This is... definitely on the more interesting side."

  "Any advice?"

  The two Kindred shared a look. Then Rhys shrugged.

  "It's your scenario to resolve. Labyrinths don't always have clear objectives—sometimes you just have to figure out what you're supposed to do. We're just here to observe." A pause. "And collect whatever rewards we can without getting in your way."

  "Comforting."

  Cade turned back toward the city. The buildings, now that he looked more carefully, weren't much taller than him—maybe six feet at most, with walls that rose to about his height. A city built for people much smaller than himself.

  "Stay back," he told his companions. "I'm going to see what's happening."

  The forest thinned as Cade approached the city, trees giving way to open grassland that stretched toward the walls. Up close, the settlement was larger than he'd expected—a proper fortification, with gray stone walls maybe five feet high and buildings clustered within. The walls were built from gray stone and mortar—surprisingly, not the seamless material that composed everything else in this world. Ramparts. Towers. Gates.

  And defenders.

  Figures moved along the top of the walls, humanoid shapes roughly seven inches tall. Tier-ones, he guessed—the same size as the smaller Kindred who'd followed him through the outer rings.

  But something about them was... off.

  As Cade drew closer, he realized what it was. They were identical.

  Not similar. Not variations on a theme. Identical. Every defender had the same face, the same build—androgynous and heavily muscled, with broad shoulders and thick limbs that looked designed for combat rather than daily life. Their expressions were blank, focused, lacking the individual quirks and variations he'd grown accustomed to seeing among the Kindred.

  They wore what looked like leather armor—dark, segmented plates covering their chests and shoulders. The material had a strange sheen to it, catching the light oddly, but Cade couldn't place what was wrong about it.

  The defenders spotted him before he could examine them further.

  "Giant!" someone shouted from the walls. The voice was identical to every other voice he'd heard from the defenders. "A giant approaches!"

  More figures appeared along the ramparts, all of them staring down at him with the same blank expression gradually giving way to hope. He was massive compared to them—at five-foot-seven, he loomed over their seven-inch frames like a building.

  The gate opened before he reached it.

  A delegation emerged—three figures in what looked like ceremonial robes over their armor, flanked by a half-dozen others with fire flickering around their hands. They were all identical to the defenders on the walls. Same face. Same build. Same blank-but-intense gaze.

  The leader—distinguishable only by the robes—stepped forward and bowed.

  "Champion," the leader said. "The labyrinth has sent us a champion."

  Cade stopped, looking down at them. "I'm not—I don't know what I am. I just entered a portal and ended up here."

  "Yes, yes, exactly so." The leader's voice was eager, almost desperate, but delivered with a strange flatness that didn't quite match the emotional content of the words. "Delvers come to aid us in our time of need. The labyrinth provides. You've seen the enemy?"

  "I saw you fighting something. What's attacking?"

  "Insects." The word came with what might have been rehearsed disdain. "Beetles, from beyond the mountains. They raid our walls, trying to breach our defenses. We need help driving them back."

  "How long has this been going on?"

  "Generations." The leader gestured at the walls, at the defenders, at the city behind them. "We've held them off, but their attacks grow bolder. A being of your size could turn the tide."

  Cade considered. A siege scenario. Defenders against monsters. Seemed straightforward enough—help the humanoids, kill the bugs.

  "That armor," he said, nodding toward the leader's segmented plates. He was acutely aware of his own loincloth by comparison. "What's it made of?"

  "A local material." The leader touched the dark surface. "Very durable against piercing attacks. Not so much against fire." A smile that didn't reach the eyes. "Which works in our favor."

  "I'll help," Cade said. "Show me where to fight."

  The beetles came in waves.

  Cade stood on the plains outside the city walls, watching the first group approach. They emerged from a gap in the mountain range—a narrow pass that seemed to be their primary route of attack. Maybe thirty of them, moving in a loose formation that spread as they crossed the open ground.

  They were beetles. Exactly that—oversized beetles, roughly a foot tall at the thorax with iridescent shells that caught the faux sunlight. Their bodies were heavily armored, with thick carapaces covering their backs and sides. But it was their pincers that drew Cade's attention.

  Massive mandibles, curved and serrated, designed for cutting and crushing. On a normal-sized beetle, they'd be formidable. Scaled up to this size, they looked capable of severing limbs.

  Those could take my finger off. His fingers were about as wide as the tier-one defenders' necks. The beetles' pincers were clearly designed to sever exactly that.

  Here goes nothing. He moved to intercept them, keeping his hands in fists, fingers protected.

  The first beetle reached him and reared up, pincers snapping at his ankle. He kicked it reflexively and watched it tumble backward, legs flailing.

  It righted itself almost immediately. Unhurt.

  Okay. Kicking wasn't going to cut it.

  Then they all attacked at once.

  The beetles didn't swarm mindlessly. They spread out, circling him, cutting off escape routes. Some went for his legs while others positioned themselves to intercept if he tried to run. The formation was tight, coordinated, clearly rehearsed.

  These weren't animals. This was a military unit.

  The first pincer caught him on the calf.

  Cade screamed.

  The pain was extraordinary—a sharp, tearing agony that shot up his entire leg. The beetle's mandibles had clamped onto his flesh and twisted, serrated edges sawing through skin and muscle. Blood welled up immediately, hot and red against his pale skin.

  He grabbed the beetle with both hands—fists still closed, protecting his fingers—and squeezed.

  The carapace resisted for a moment—it was tough, remarkably tough—but his enhanced strength was enough. He felt the shell crack, then cave inward, then rupture completely. The beetle went limp in his hands, ichor mixing with his own blood as he dropped the crushed body. Thank god. He'd half-expected the tier difference to make them invulnerable—but no, his strength was enough. They could be killed.

  Another beetle lunged at his other leg. He stomped on it, driving it into the ground, feeling the crunch through the sole of his bare foot. That worked too—the impact concentrated enough force to break the shell.

  But there were too many of them.

  One got him on the thigh. Another on his hip. A third leaped—actually leaped, launching itself off the ground with powerful hind legs—and caught his forearm with its pincers before gravity pulled it back down.

  Cade punched it with his other hand, keeping his fist closed.

  The beetle went flying, tumbling across the grass—and then got back up. Dazed, maybe, but intact. Punching wasn't enough force to crack the carapace.

  Crushing. I have to crush them. And keep my fingers away from those pincers.

  He started moving.

  It went against every instinct—when you were hurt, when you were bleeding, you wanted to stop and assess the damage. But stopping meant letting them surround him. His only advantage was his size, his stride length, his ability to cover ground faster than they could.

  So he ran.

  Not away from them—around them, circling wide, forcing them to chase. And as they chased, he picked them off. Grab one, squeeze until it cracked and crumpled, drop it and keep moving. Catch one under his foot, grind down until he felt the crack, then push off toward the next. Slam one between his palms and the ground, feel the carapace give way. Never stopping. Never letting them pin him down.

  The fire-wielders on the walls were helping, he noticed. Balls of flame arced over his head, landing among the beetles—but the fire didn't seem to do much. The carapaces were too tough, too insulated. The beetles shook off the fireballs and kept coming.

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  But then he saw their real tactic.

  A cluster of beetles had reached the wall, climbing the stone surface with practiced ease. Three defenders stood above them, and instead of hurling fireballs, they did something else. They raised their hands and held them there, and what emerged wasn't a projectile but a continuous stream—a flamethrower, pouring fire directly onto the climbing insects.

  The beetles didn't burn. But they slowed. Stopped. And then, after several seconds of sustained flame, they fell from the wall, their legs twitching weakly.

  Cooking the insides. The carapace was too tough to pierce, too insulated to ignite—but it was still shell, and shell conducted heat eventually. Hold the fire long enough, and the creature inside cooked in its own armor.

  Brutal. Effective.

  He filed that away and kept fighting.

  One of them got lucky.

  Cade was mid-stride, reaching for a beetle he'd just knocked down, when another one leaped at his face. He tried to turn away, but it was too fast—it hit him square in the mouth, pincers snapping shut on instinct.

  One mandible caught the inside of his cheek.

  The beetle's weight pulled it downward as gravity took hold, but the pincer stayed clamped, and Cade felt his flesh tear—a ragged line from the corner of his mouth up through his cheek, exposing teeth and muscle. Blood poured down his chin, into his mouth, the copper taste overwhelming everything else.

  He grabbed the beetle with both hands and crushed it so hard that ichor sprayed across his face.

  The pain was blinding. He could feel air against parts of his mouth that should never feel air. His words, when he tried to speak, came out slurred and wet.

  But he kept moving.

  Grab. Crush. Move. Grab. Crush. Move.

  The wave broke eventually. The surviving beetles retreated toward the mountains, dragging every fallen beetle they could carry with them. Almost as if timed to let them carry most of the dead away. Cade stood in the middle of the carnage, chest heaving, his body a map of wounds—his calf, his thigh, his hip, his forearm, his face.

  The gauge in his peripheral vision flickered. A thin line of progress appeared at the bottom, barely visible. And Cade found himself growing once again, the battle over. A few inches taller, up to 6' from that wave.

  And then something strange happened.

  A few of the beetles paused in their retreat. They turned back toward the fallen, toward their crushed companions, and made sounds. High-pitched keening, their bodies swaying, their pincers clicking together in what looked almost like—

  Grief.

  They were mourning. Mourning the fallen, or something larger—the battle itself, the slow losing of their war?

  The defenders on the walls were cheering—all of them making the same sounds, the same gestures, in perfect unison. Cade limped back toward the gate, blood still dripping from his ruined cheek, and found the leader waiting with that identical smile.

  "Magnificent," the leader said. "You see now why we need you. With your strength, we can finally finish this."

  "When will the next wave be?" Cade asked, his words thick and slurred.

  "They come every few hours. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But you've depleted this one significantly. The next will be smaller."

  The leader gestured toward the gate. "Please, come inside. Rest. We'll call you when the next wave approaches."

  Cade looked at the gate. Then at the walls. Then back at the gate.

  The opening was maybe four feet high and three feet wide. Generous for seven-inch defenders. Completely inadequate for someone his size.

  "I don't think I'll fit," he said.

  The leader's expression flickered—the first genuine reaction Cade had seen on that identical face. They looked at the gate, then up at Cade, then back at the gate, as if only now registering the scale difference.

  "Ah. Yes. That... could be a problem."

  Cade considered his options. He could probably force his way through—the walls weren't the seamless metal that composed most of this world, just simple gray stone held together with mortar in an oddly thin layer by human standards. One good shove and he'd be through.

  But that would mean destroying their defenses. Knocking down walls that these people needed for protection.

  "I'll wait out here," he said. "Near the wall. Just... bring me what you can."

  The leader nodded, that unsettling smile returning. "Of course. Rest. Recover. The next wave won't come for several hours."

  Cade planted himself against the outer wall, his back pressed against the rough gray stone. The mortar crumbled slightly under his weight, and he shifted carefully, trying not to put too much pressure on any one spot. The last thing he needed was to accidentally collapse a section of wall because he leaned too hard.

  He'd just killed... how many? A dozen? More? Crushed them with his fists, stomped them under his feet, torn them apart with methodical efficiency. And he felt—

  Fine. He felt fine.

  That bothered him more than the killing itself.

  On Earth, he'd never had a problem with insects. Mosquitoes, flies, the occasional spider that made its way into his apartment—he'd kill them without a second thought. Even as a vegan, even with his commitment to minimizing suffering, insects had always existed in a different category. Too alien. Too simple. Too far removed from anything he could empathize with.

  But these beetles weren't like the insects back home. They'd reacted. When he'd crushed the first one, the others had responded—not just with aggression, but with something that looked almost like alarm. They'd changed tactics. Coordinated. One had made a sound when he'd torn its leg off, a high chittering that might have been pain or might have been a warning to its companions.

  And still, killing them had felt like nothing.

  Maybe that's the problem, he thought. Maybe I'm adapting too well.

  His mind drifted, unwillingly, to Pell and Tormina, how they had forced him to kill. The way they'd engineered the entire scenario—maneuvered him into position, ensured he had no choice, made him complicit in deaths he'd explicitly refused to cause.

  He still remembered the sound. The wet crunch of impact. The way the small bodies had gone still.

  That had felt like something. That had felt like everything.

  But the Kindred hadn't understood his horror. They'd looked at him like he was the strange one, the broken one, for caring so much about a single death. And maybe, by the standards of this world, he was.

  Death wasn't final here. That was the thing he kept forgetting, the thing his Earth-trained instincts couldn't fully absorb. Those he'd killed—they'd respawned somewhere. Not even lost any memories or progress, being tier-zero at death. The beetles dissolving into mist around him—they'd reform in some spawning pool, ready to fight again, maybe with fragments of this battle encoded in whatever passed for their minds.

  It wasn't murder. It was... setback. Inconvenience. A cost that everyone here had apparently decided was worth paying, over and over, for the chance to advance.

  They choose this, Cade reminded himself. Everyone in the labyrinth chose to be here. Everyone fighting for advancement chose to risk death. It's not like Earth, where death is theft—where you're taking something that can never be returned.

  The logic helped. A little.

  But he couldn't shake the memory of Pell and Tormina's casual cruelty. The way they'd violated his explicit refusal, treated his ethics like a game to be manipulated. They hadn't cared about his suffering—only about getting the result they wanted.

  Death might be temporary here, he thought, but violation isn't. What they did to me—that doesn't respawn away. That stays.

  Maybe that was the line. Not death itself, but consent. The beetles had come to kill him; he'd defended himself. But Pell and Tormina had taken his choice away, and that—

  That was the thing he couldn't forgive.

  From behind the walls, the defenders brought him food—fruits and berries, similar to what he'd eaten in the tier-one jungle—and water in containers far too small for his needs but appreciated nonetheless. They passed the offerings through the gate, tiny hands extending toward his massive ones, then retreated quickly as if afraid he might grab them by mistake.

  His wounds were still bleeding. The cheek was the worst—every time he moved his jaw, he could feel the torn edges shift against each other, fresh pain radiating through his face. The other injuries were painful but manageable. Deep cuts, not life-threatening.

  But something strange was happening.

  The bleeding was slowing. Not gradually, the way wounds normally clotted, but rapidly—visibly, almost. He watched the gash on his forearm go from steady flow to trickle to nothing in the space of maybe twenty minutes. The edges of the wound were still raw, still open, but the blood had simply... stopped.

  He touched his calf, where the first beetle had torn into him. Same thing. The wound gaped, ugly and red, but no fresh blood welled up when he pressed near it.

  His cheek took longer. The damage there was worse—torn muscle, exposed teeth, and a flap of skin hanging loose where the pincer had ripped through. But even that stopped bleeding within an hour, the ragged edges dry and crusted rather than wet and weeping.

  He probed the wound with his tongue, feeling the wrongness of it from the inside. Air where there shouldn't be air. Texture where there should be smooth flesh. The tear hadn't healed—it had just stopped getting worse. He'd be scarred. Disfigured, probably, at least until... what? Would advancement heal him?

  The uncertainty gnawed at him. Everything in this world operated by rules he didn't understand, and he kept discovering them through damage rather than instruction.

  He let his head rest against the stone wall, watching the mountain pass in the distance. The conversations he'd overheard churned in the back of his mind—took this territory, breeding population, cleansed—but he pushed them aside for now. He needed to recover before he could act on what he'd learned.

  Rhys and Zyrian had appeared at some point during his recovery, settling themselves a few feet away. They weren't looking at him—their attention was fixed on the gap in the mountains where the beetles had emerged.

  "How long until the next wave?" Rhys asked, not turning around.

  "Few hours, they said." Cade's words still came out thick and slurred, his torn cheek making speech difficult.

  "We could help," Zyrian offered. "Next time. Keep the beetles off you while you do the heavy work."

  Cade considered this. Two tier-twos, foot-tall, against beetles their own size. They'd be evenly matched physically, which was more than the defenders could say and their requiring walls and numbers.

  "You'd risk dying? Starting over?"

  "We've come this far." Rhys finally turned to look at him, that silver face unreadable. "Besides, watching you fight from a distance isn't nearly as informative as fighting alongside you. We want to see how you handle things up close."

  Still studying me.

  "Always." No shame in the admission. "But we can study and help at the same time. Consider it... mutually beneficial."

  Cade grunted. It wasn't agreement, but it wasn't refusal either.

  The three of them sat in silence for a while, watching the mountains, waiting.

  And as they waited, Cade listened.

  His hearing had sharpened at some point—another change he hadn't noticed until now. The defenders' voices carried clearly through the stone wall, conversations that should have been muffled into unintelligibility reaching him with surprising clarity.

  "—good thing the giant came. We were starting to run low on reserves."

  "How long until we can push to the island?"

  "Soon. Once we've weakened them enough. The queen can't have many warriors left after all these years."

  "Should have finished them when we first took this territory. Would have saved us generations of trouble."

  "The elders wanted to be thorough. Clear the land properly before settling. Can't blame them for being careful."

  "Careful, sure. But leaving a breeding population was a mistake. Now look at us—still dealing with the remnants."

  "Not for much longer. The giant will handle the rest."

  Cade kept his expression neutral, but something cold was settling in his stomach.

  First took this territory. Not defended. Took.

  Leaving a breeding population. Like they were pests to be exterminated, not enemies to be defeated.

  The remnants. Survivors. Of something that had happened before.

  He thought about the beetles' tactics. The way they'd coordinated, adapted, protected each other. The body recovery and mourning display.

  And he thought about the armor the defenders wore. That strange leather that caught the light oddly. That was very durable against piercing attacks.

  Like pincers.

  Like beetle pincers.

  Cade looked at the nearest defender visible through the gate, at the segmented plates covering their chest, and finally saw what he'd been missing. The iridescent sheen. The rigid structure. The way the segments fit together.

  Carapace.

  The armor wasn't leather. It was beetle shell. Painted to hide its origins, but unmistakably the same material as the creatures he'd been fighting.

  They were wearing their enemies' corpses.

  More conversation drifted through the wall.

  "—think he'll really go to the island?"

  "Why wouldn't he? He seems to love killing things, with that fierce display earlier."

  "Just seems like a lot of effort. We've been handling this ourselves for generations."

  "Handling it slowly. The giant can end it quickly. Purify the last of the infestation and let us finally expand."

  "The island would make good territory. Rich resources, defensible position. Once it's cleansed."

  Purify. Infestation. Cleansed.

  The words painted a picture Cade didn't want to see.

  This wasn't a siege. This wasn't defense against invaders. The beetles hadn't come to this territory—the fire-wielders had. They'd invaded, killed the original inhabitants, taken their land, built a city on top of it. And now they were finishing the job, exterminating the survivors who'd been pushed to a tiny island with nowhere else to go.

  The beetles weren't attacking. They were fighting back. Desperately, hopelessly, trying to reclaim something that had been stolen from them.

  And Cade had been helping the invaders.

  He looked at the gauge in his peripheral vision. That thin line of progress, representing all the beetles he'd killed.

  As he watched, it drained.

  Not slowly. Not gradually. All at once, from that thin line to completely empty, as if someone had pulled a plug at the bottom.

  The labyrinth knew. The moment he truly understood—the moment he'd recognized what was really happening here—the scenario had reset.

  Cade glanced at Rhys and Zyrian. They were still watching the mountains, oblivious to what he'd just heard. To what he'd just realized.

  "The next wave," he said slowly. "When it comes. I want you two to stay back."

  Rhys turned, one eyebrow raised. "Changed your mind about our help?"

  "Just... stay back. Watch from a distance. I need to try something different."

  The two Kindred shared a look. Whatever they saw in his expression, they didn't argue.

  "Your scenario," Zyrian said. "Your choice."

  Cade settled back against the wall, his partially-closed wounds itching as they continued their too-fast healing. His torn cheek had stopped bleeding entirely now, the edges dry and crusted, the damage permanent until something more significant happened to his body.

  The next wave would come. The beetles would emerge from their mountain pass, charging toward the walls, and the defenders would expect him to meet them in the field.

  And he would join in.

  Just not the way they expected.

  But for now, there was nothing to do but wait. Rhys and Zyrian had settled into a meditative stillness next to him.

  Cade opened his mouth, then closed it. Opened it again.

  He'd been getting by with his workaround voice for weeks now—functional enough to communicate, but still carrying that distant, echoing quality that made every conversation feel like he was calling from another room. The Kindred understood him. They just also flinched slightly every time he spoke, as if his words were arriving from somewhere they couldn't quite locate.

  He was tired of it. And with nothing else to do while they waited...

  "Can you help me with something?" he asked, his soul voice echoing as always.

  Rhys cracked one eye open. "Your voice."

  "Is it that obvious?"

  "You sound like you're being digested," Zyrian offered. "Slowly. By something that's taking its time."

  "Thanks for that image."

  "You already have the mechanism," Rhys said, studying him with those dark eyes. "You're projecting into the shared space—that's the hard part, and you figured it out on your own." She sat up straighter, giving him her full attention. "But you're doing it wrong. You're pushing your words out there, like throwing stones into a pond. We don't push. We simply... are heard."

  Cade frowned. "That's not actually helpful."

  "It's very helpful. You're just not listening." Rhys fixed him with an irritated look. "When I speak to you, am I pushing something at you?"

  "No."

  "Am I making something happen?"

  "I... no?"

  "I'm intending to be heard. The sound follows. You keep trying to create sound and then control it. That's backwards."

  His cheek throbbed as he considered this. The torn flesh pulled at the edges whenever he moved his jaw, not quite painful but deeply unpleasant. He'd pushed through it—the damage was to his cheek, not his tongue, not the deeper places where the soul voice seemed to originate.

  Intention, not creation. Being heard, not making sound.

  He'd touched on this during stolen moments of practice while climbing through the jungle, but he'd never been able to hold onto it. The concept felt slippery, counterintuitive. His whole life, speaking had been a physical process—air and vibration and resonance. Now he was being told to skip all of that and just... want to be heard?

  "Let me try," he said.

  He closed his eyes. Instead of thinking about where the sound should come from, he thought about Zyrian and Rhys. About wanting them to hear him. Not loudly, not forcefully, just... heard. Present in their awareness.

  "Test," he said.

  The word came out differently. Still not right—there was an odd delay to it, like an echo arriving before the original sound—but it had presence. It existed in a way his strangled workaround never had, without the physical force of his booming voice.

  Zyrian's eyes widened slightly. "That was better."

  "Do it again," Rhys said, and for the first time she sounded genuinely interested rather than annoyed.

  Cade tried. The second attempt thinned out, losing the presence and sliding back toward mechanical. The third cracked into full volume halfway through, making both Kindred wince. The fourth was barely audible at all.

  But the fifth—

  "Testing," he said, and the word was simply there. Not pushed, not forced, not strangled. It existed in the space between them the way the Kindred's voices always did.

  "Finally," Rhys murmured.

  "Can you hold it?" Zyrian asked.

  Cade tried a longer phrase. "The beetles will come from the mountain pass."

  The first half held. The second half wobbled, gaining an unpleasant vibration before he managed to stabilize it.

  "Mostly," he said—and that word came out right. "It's like a muscle I haven't trained. I can find it, but I can't maintain it."

  "Then train it." Rhys resettled into her meditative posture. "You have time before the next wave. Talk to yourself. Talk to the wall. I don't care. But stop sounding like a dying animal. It's embarrassing for everyone."

  "Your bedside manner is incredible."

  "I don't know what that means."

  "It means thank you, Rhys."

  Rhys grunted, which Cade decided to interpret as you're welcome.

  He spent the next hour practicing while his companions rested. Simple phrases at first—the wall is tall, the beetles are coming, my face hurts—then longer ones. Questions. Statements. The kind of everyday speech he'd been strangling through for weeks.

  He failed often. His voice cracked into full volume at least a dozen times, the boom making him wince. It thinned to inaudibility even more frequently, words disappearing into his own head without reaching the shared space. But each time he found the right intention—the right wanting to be heard—it got a little easier to find again.

  The strangest discovery was that the soul voice could still carry breath-sounds. He could sigh through it, let frustration or relief color his words, gasp in surprise—all without any movement of air, without any involvement of his non-functional lungs. The emotional content traveled alongside the meaning, decoupled from breath entirely. It was like learning that his shadow could make gestures his body didn't perform.

  By the time the horns sounded from the mountain pass, Cade could maintain his refined soul voice for several sentences at a stretch. The distant quality hadn't disappeared entirely—Zyrian said he still sounded like he was "speaking from the next room over"—but it was a dramatic improvement over the bottom-of-a-well echo he'd been living with.

  "Better," Zyrian said. "You sound like you're speaking from far away now. Not like you're dying."

  "What does that mean, exactly? 'From far away'?"

  Zyrian tilted his head, considering. "Like your voice is traveling further than it should to reach us. Like part of it is still somewhere else." A pause. "It's not bad. Just unusual. Give it time."

  The silence stretched comfortably for a while. Cade ran through his new voice exercises in his head, mouthing words without projecting them, trying to build the mental pathways that would make the skill automatic.

  But his mind kept drifting to the fight.

  He'd won. Barely. Against beetles that were, by any reasonable measure, much weaker than him—smaller, slower, less intelligent. And he'd nearly lost his face in the process.

  The problem wasn't strength. He had plenty of that. The problem was that he had no idea how to use it.

  Thirteen years of training, and none of it was combat training. He'd never thrown a punch with intent to harm. Never learned to kick, to defend against something actually trying to hurt him. His body was a machine built for controlled movements under heavy load—squats, deadlifts, presses—not for the chaotic violence of a real fight.

  He'd been treating this world like a gym. Trying to find ways to maintain his routine, to keep his muscles working, to preserve what he'd built. But what good was a strong body if he didn't know how to fight with it?

  "Zyrian," he said, testing his refined voice. It held, mostly. "How does muscle work here, for our bodies?"

  Zyrian opened one eye. "Work how?"

  "If I stop training, do I lose muscle? Atrophy, fading." The words came easier now, though he could feel the voice wanting to wobble. "Is it like that at all?"

  "Ah." Zyrian sat up slightly, apparently finding this question worth actual attention. "No. Muscle is... permanent. Once gained, it remains until death resets the body."

  Cade stared. "Permanent?"

  "Extremely difficult to build in the first place," Zyrian continued. "Which is why your physique is so remarkable. Most Kindred never develop significant muscle—it takes enormous sustained effort, more than most consider worthwhile when advancement offers easier paths to strength. But once you have it..." A shrug. "It stays. Your body remembers."

  "So I could stop training entirely. Never lift anything heavy again. And I'd keep..." He gestured at himself, at the shoulders and arms he'd spent years building.

  "Until you die and respawn, yes. Then you'd start over." Zyrian studied him with open curiosity. "Why?"

  Cade was quiet for a moment, processing.

  For years, his life had been structured around not missing workouts. The anxiety of losing progress, of watching his hard-won gains slowly melt away, had driven him to train even when exhausted, even when injured, even when every reasonable part of his brain said to rest. The fear of atrophy was a constant background hum, a voice that whispered you're falling behind every time he took a day off.

  And now that voice was... irrelevant.

  He didn't have to maintain anything. The muscle was his, locked in, preserved by whatever strange physics governed this world. He could focus on other things—on learning to actually fight, on developing his anima control, on understanding the abilities that might keep him alive—without that gnawing fear that his body would betray him while he wasn't looking.

  It felt like setting down a weight he hadn't realized he'd been carrying.

  "I think," he said slowly, "I've been focused on the wrong things."

  "The right things for you, perhaps." Zyrian's tone was neutral, observational. "The wrong things for most."

  "I nearly died today because I don't know how to fight. I have all this strength and no idea how to use it." Cade flexed his hand, watching the muscles move under his skin—familiar, reliable, and completely untrained for violence.

  "Here, strength without skill can just be a larger target."

  "Exactly."

  Rhys spoke without opening her eyes. "Then learn skill. You have time. You have a body that won't betray you while you're learning." A pause. "And you have two Kindred who've died in more fights than you can imagine. We could teach you. If you asked nicely."

  "I thought you were just here to observe."

  "Observation gets boring." Rhys cracked one eye open, a flicker of amusement crossing her silver features. "Besides, watching you flail at beetles like a child having a tantrum isn't particularly educational. We'd learn more by seeing how you adapt to actual training."

  "A child having a tantrum."

  "You crushed them. Effectively. But with no technique, no efficiency, no awareness of your own body's capabilities." She closed her eye again. "You fight like someone who's never been in a fight. Because you haven't. That's fixable."

  Cade considered this. Combat training from beings who'd spent lifetimes fighting and dying and fighting again. Who carried memories of techniques honed across multiple existences.

  "Perhaps not this moment," he said. "But I'd like that."

  "Ask nicely," Rhys repeated.

  "...Please."

  "Better." The word carried a note of satisfaction. "We'll make a warrior of you yet. Or watch you die trying. Either way, educational."

  "Your encouragement is overwhelming."

  "I don't know what that means either."

  Cade almost laughed. It hurt his torn cheek, but he almost laughed anyway.