The tunnel to Floor 8 ended in light.

  Not the sparse mineral blue of the passages behind them. Something warmer, more diffuse, coming from multiple sources at once, the specific quality of light that exists in rge spaces where many small deposits combine into something approaching genuine illumination.

  They slowed before the entrance.

  Colette's hand went to the wall. Aris stopped beside her. They listened.

  Nothing. No movement, no creature sounds, no rustling through stone.

  They stepped through.

  The dome was enormous.

  The ceiling curved upward thirty meters above them, a natural formation, the dungeon's geology having produced something that had no business existing this far underground. The mineral deposits up there were dense, embedded in the ceiling rock in consteltions, and their combined light fell downward across the space in the warm directionless way of an overcast afternoon.

  Every tunnel on every level fed into this room.

  Aris counted eight separate entrances around the dome's circumference, evenly spaced, all of them opening into the same central space. He understood immediately what that meant architecturally. This was the junction. Every path on Floor 7 eventually arrived here.

  Then he looked at the floor.

  Items everywhere.

  Not dropped, not pced. Scattered, the specific distribution of things that had left their owners suddenly and violently and had nded where physics took them. Sword belts without swords. A boot, one, separated from any context that expined its single presence. Cloth in Wanderer colors, multiple guilds, the insignia of at least four different organizations visible in the pieces rge enough to still carry them. Armor ptes, some bent, some simply lying as though removed carefully except the person who removed them was not present.

  Dried blood in arcs across the stone.

  Old arcs, dark brown, the specific color of blood that had been on stone long enough to lose its original quality. Weeks at minimum. Months possibly. More than one source, the arcs overpping and diverging from multiple points of origin, the floor's stone recording every encounter this room had hosted with the patient permanence of stone everywhere.

  Colette looked at the floor.

  She looked at it the way she'd looked at the cape fragment, the professional assessment and the personal weight existing simultaneously, her eyes moving across the items and the blood and arriving at the center of the dome.

  "This is where they went," she said. "The Wanderers who came down and didn't come back. All of them."

  "All the tunnels lead here," Aris said.

  "You can't avoid this room," she said. "Whatever path you take on Floor 7, you end up here."

  They stood at the entrance and neither of them moved forward immediately, the floor's record holding them at the threshold the way certain things held you before you were ready to enter them.

  Then Aris stepped forward.

  His boot came down on the scattered cloth and he moved toward the center of the dome, picking his way through the items, and Colette followed him, close, the two of them moving together through the evidence of everything this room had done.

  "The entrance to Floor 8," Colette said quietly. "It should be on the far side. The northern—"

  The digging started.

  Not from the tunnels. From above.

  The sound of something massive moving through stone at speed, the ceiling's rock transmitting the vibration before the sound arrived, the mineral deposits in the dome's roof trembling in their settings, their light flickering with the impact of each movement.

  Getting closer.

  Getting significantly closer very fast.

  Aris and Colette looked up.

  The ceiling cracked.

  A single fracture line appearing across the dome's roof, running from one edge to the other in under a second, and through the fracture the rock separated and the ceiling came apart and something came through it and nded in the center of the dome.

  Almost no sound.

  That was the wrong part. Something that size, coming through stone from above, should have made the kind of sound that rearranged your internal organs. Instead the nding produced a single compression of air, a thud felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears, and then silence, and then the dome's scattered dust settling slowly through the warm light.

  The White Rabbit of Floor 7 was the size of a rge dog.

  This was not that.

  This was the size of a building.

  Four meters at the shoulder, the white fur dense and close-cropped, the body built with the specific mass of something that had been doing this, whatever this was, for long enough that the doing had shaped its entire physical structure. The paws were ft on the dome's floor and each one was the size of the dome's entrance behind them. The head turned and the eyes found them.

  Red.

  Not the ft animal red of the Floor 7 Rabbits. Something deeper and more present, the red of eyes that registered what they were looking at with the specific quality of attention that floor bosses had and regur dungeon creatures didn't. It looked at them the way things looked at things they had looked at before and had formed opinions about.

  The dome was very quiet.

  Aris understood now why the floor was covered in what it was covered in. Every Wanderer who reached Floor 7 eventually found this room. And every Wanderer who found this room found this.

  He took a step backward.

  The Rabbit's head moved with him. Tracking.

  "The path," Colette said, very quietly.

  Aris looked. The northern entrance, the Floor 8 tunnel, was directly behind the Rabbit's position. Between them and it: four meters of floor boss and no obvious route around it.

  "Running," he started.

  "It came through stone from above," Colette said. "At that speed."

  He stopped considering running.

  His heart was doing something that he was choosing not to pay detailed attention to. His hands were fine. The hands were always fine, the clinic had given him that, the years of treating things that required steady hands regardless of what the rest of him was doing.

  He was aware that steady hands were not the primary skill set required right now.

  The Rabbit inhaled.

  The fur along its spine rose slowly, from the base of the tail to the back of the skull, each individual hair lifting in sequence, and the air in the dome changed temperature, dropping several degrees in the space of two seconds, the cold arriving from the Rabbit's direction with the specific directionality of something being produced rather than something ambient.

  A white mist formed around its mouth.

  "Aris," Colette said.

  A hand covered his.

  He looked down. Her hand over his, the same gesture as the bench outside the Undercourse, brief and certain.

  "We need to know what happened to them," she said. "My guild. We came this far." She looked at him directly. "We can do this."

  He looked at her.

  Then at the Rabbit.

  Then at the sword in his right hand, Elysse's sword, the bance still slightly wrong for him and increasingly familiar.

  He breathed out.

  "Alright," he said.

  Void rose.

  The mist released.

  Not a breath. A beam, the cold concentrated and directed, the Rabbit's mouth opening and the white releasing in a straight line across the dome floor that frosted everything it touched, the stone surface crystallizing in the beam's path, the scattered items on the floor crackling with sudden ice as the temperature reached them.

  Aris and Colette were already moving, splitting, the beam passing between them.

  Aris felt the cold on his left side as it passed, the temperature drop immediate and significant, the air around the beam several degrees below the beam itself.

  "It aims," Colette said, from the right side of the dome.

  "I noticed," Aris said, from the left.

  The Rabbit's head tracked right. Toward Colette.

  She was already moving, the dagger out, not because the dagger was the right tool for something this size but because the dagger was what she had and Colette used what she had. She moved toward the Rabbit's left side, fast, drawing its attention and keeping it there.

  Aris went for the right.

  Void's pull reached toward the Rabbit's right foreleg, the same Gravity he used for extraction in the clinic, applied here to something significantly rger than a dungeon ailment. The leg pulled sideways, not enough to take the Rabbit off its feet, enough to shift its weight, the bance disrupting fractionally.

  The head swung back toward him.

  He was already moving.

  The second mist beam hit the dome wall where he'd been standing and the stone cracked with the cold, a fracture line spreading from the impact point, ice crystals forming in the crack.

  "The eyes," Colette called. "When it charges the mist the eyes go brighter. You have two seconds."

  He filed this.

  The Rabbit moved.

  Not a charge. A repositioning, the massive body shifting across the dome floor with the same wrong quietness as the nding, the paws finding the stone without impact, moving at a speed that the body's size suggested was impossible and that was happening anyway. It covered half the dome in the time Aris processed what was happening.

  He ran.

  Properly ran, the full commitment of someone who had assessed the distance and found deliberate movement inadequate, cutting across the dome toward the dome's curved wall, putting the wall at his back, creating the angle.

  The Rabbit stopped.

  It sat.

  The sitting was somehow worse than the movement. The deliberate quality of it, the weight settling back onto its haunches with the patient composure of something that had done this many times and had no particur concern about the outcome.

  The fur on its spine rose again.

  Eyes brightening.

  "Two seconds," Aris said, to himself.

  He pushed Gravity outward, not pull, push, the Repel directed at the Rabbit's chest as the mist gathered in its mouth, and the force hit the Rabbit and didn't move it and didn't stop the mist and did shift the angle, the head moving three degrees left as the beam released.

  Three degrees was enough.

  The beam hit the wall beside him and the cold washed over his right arm and he felt the temperature in the fabric of his sleeve and the skin beneath it but the beam itself missed and the frost on the wall beside him spread outward from the impact point in a crystalline pattern that was almost beautiful in the dome's warm light.

  Almost.

  He looked at his arm.

  Ice on the sleeve. He bent the elbow. The fabric cracked slightly and flexed and his arm worked underneath it.

  Fine.

  "Void can deflect the beam," he called.

  "How much," Colette called back.

  "Three degrees. Maybe four."

  "That's enough if we're not standing still," she said.

  "That's what I thought," he said.

  The Rabbit's head turned toward Colette.

  She was close, closer than Aris had realized she'd gotten, the dagger finding the space between the Rabbit's left foreleg and the dome floor in the gap created when Aris's Gravity had shifted its weight earlier. The cut she made there was not deep retive to the Rabbit's mass. It was precise retive to the anatomy.

  The Rabbit made a sound.

  The first sound it had made since the nding. A low resonant compression of air that was less a vocalization and more a physical event, felt in the sternum, and the dome's mineral deposits flickered with it, the light pulsing once.

  Its left foreleg buckled fractionally.

  "There," Colette said, pulling back from the leg. "That's the point."

  The Rabbit's eyes went very bright.

  Both of them moved.

  The mist came not in a beam this time but in a spread, the Rabbit's mouth opening wide, the cold releasing in a cone across the dome's center, and the temperature drop was immediate and total and Aris felt it across his entire left side as he cleared the cone's edge, the air itself crystallizing briefly in the spread's path, visible for one second as a white opacity before dispersing.

  Three items on the dome floor were now encased in ice.

  "It's angry," Aris said.

  "Good," Colette said. "Angry things make mistakes."

  The Rabbit's left foreleg was shaking slightly. Not colpsing. Shaking, the specific tremor of a compromised support bearing weight it was less equipped to bear than it had been thirty seconds ago.

  Aris looked at it.

  He looked at Void above him.

  He looked at the leg.

  "Colette," he said. "When I pull, push."

  A pause.

  "Understood," she said.