"Alright," he said softly, almost content. "Let us keep going."

They came on. He went to meet them.

And the chamber sang, and sang, and sang. Steel, and hollow thunder, and the quiet, invisible sound of threads being cut faster than anyone could count.

The chamber rang with the last, long toll of falling plates.

Xavier stood amid the ruin, breath steady, aura low, dagger resting against his thigh. Silver smoke drifted in ribbons through the vast spherical hall. At its far end, the sealed door's sigils flared—one lock, then another, then a cascade—until only a single bar of light held.

Something heavy stepped through the haze.

It wasn't like the others. Taller by half a head, broader through the chest, two-handed greatsword resting on one shoulder like a judge's gavel. A mantle of segmented plates framed its helm, each rib etched with tiny runes that crawled and brightened as it moved. Where the lesser constructs emitted a cold regular hum, this one carried a low, resonant note—subsonic, like the chamber itself admitted it.

The Silver Marshal. The boss of the floor.

No announcement. No flare. No words. It lifted the sword from its shoulder, the blade humming to life—two parallel glyph-lines igniting along the fuller, crackling with suppression field and cutting intent. The air sharpened.

Xavier slid one foot back and lowered his head by a fraction. His left hand opened—a pale tremor of raw mana gathering in his palm, colorless and mean.

The Marshal moved.

No blur. No flourish. Just three perfect steps and a vertical drop cut that split the floor from roof to root. Xavier met it with crossed guard—Moonshield blooming just before steel—CLAAAAAAAAANG—a sound like a bell splitting. The force bit into his bones, drove him three paces back, boots cutting trenches, shield webbing with cracks that healed as fast as they formed.

The Marshal didn't reset. The blade reversed mid-arc into a diagonal rip, then snapped into a backhand cross; Xavier's dagger caught, slid, recut the angle, his shoulder rolled, spine dipped, and he felt the weight of every ounce of metal skim his ribs by the thickness of a breath. The third strike came with a shock-pulse along the flat; he took it in his forearm, grounded it down the leg, and sent it away with a hewing parry that knocked sparks from the plate at the Marshal's hip.

It didn't flinch. It advanced.

They traded a blur—dagger against tower steel, raw mana against suppression gyres. The Marshal's edge bit the air so cleanly the seams it carved took a second to heal. Xavier's counters obeyed the geometry of death—inside lines, false leads, wrist traps that should have disarmed a living opponent. But this wasn't living; every joint locked with machine certainty, every reset perfect.

He adjusted—stopped trying to disarm, started unmanning the field. His palm stamped out null rings along the floor in tight, concentric bands as he moved. Each ring shaved the suppression by a hair's breadth. He built a corridor through the Marshal's pressure, step by step, until the next cut met his shield without that tremble of iron in his teeth.

Now.

He let the dagger go quiet—let it be a hinge and key. The other hand spoke in needles of raw mana. Not beams now, not punches, but microlines—hair-fine severances of the puppet threads woven deep in the Marshal's seams. He put three into the gorget, two into the left hip, one behind the right knee.

No collapse. Of course not. The Marshal ran redundancies. Threads braided with threads. Control stacked like cables.

The greatsword rose. It came down like an execution.

Xavier stepped into it.

His dagger kissed the flat, turned the drop into a miss by a thumb's width. His body ran up the blade, boots finding purchase on rune and fuller as if the sword were a ramp. He vaulted over the helm, landed cat-light on the Marshal's spine, and hammered a void pin—a needle of nothing—into the notch where the mantle met the backplate.

The Marshal shuddered. Barely. It spun, trying to hurl him; he rode the turn, dropped, and let the momentum slingshot him under an arm. His palm touched the inner elbow joint—erase—and for one perfect instant the arm lost order. He chained it: hip seam—kiss—knee back—tap—spine base—sting.

The Marshal's timing finally slipped. The greatsword hit floor a hair late, skittered, cut a gouge that threw off its line.

That was the opening.

He drew a breath so deep the chamber seemed to move with his ribs. Moonlight gathered—not as glow but as edge—a geometry that could slice a thought in half. He sheathed that edge in the pure malice of uncolored mana, the way a surgeon's needle carries medicine deeper than flesh.

He named it in silence: Lunar Severance.

And cut.

The line he drew was so narrow it looked like a strand of hair drawn across a mirror. It slipped under the right pauldron and across the clavicle seam, dived into the sternum latch, swept the inner ribs where puppet threads crossed in thick bundles—

—and the Marshal stopped.

For a breath, all was still.

Then its sword fell from numb fingers with a calamitous clang. It didn't collapse—its redundancies kept the plates standing—but control was gone. The armor muttered with dying mana. The head turned a half-degree out of time with the body, then another. The plate-mantle rose, fell, rose again.

Xavier stepped in and placed his palm where a heart would be.

The mana burst he gave it was small—almost gentle. It entered like a sigh.

Inside, it unmade the tyrant thread: the master line all others obeyed.

The Silver Marshal bowed forward, plate by plate, until it knelt and folded into itself with the solemnity of a temple collapsing. A hollow shell.

The last lock on the gate flashed and dissolved.

Xavier didn't look back at the ruin. He wiped the edge of his dagger on his palm and walked toward the opening.

The doorway's light swallowed him in a breath.

He emerged into silence again—but not the same kind.

The upper level wasn't a sphere. It was a ring—a vast circular corridor encircling a central abyss, bridges and ribs arcing over emptiness. The floor was a lattice of dark metal shot through with pale veins. Above, a vaulting ceiling of black crystal mirrored every glint of steel. The air carried weight—not gravity, but order.

He knew before he saw them that this floor wasn't a repeat.

They stood waiting on the nearest bridge and along the far ribs: an army composed not of copies, but roles. Armor configurations varied by function—some heavy with tower-shields that locked edge to edge, others lean and jointed with lines that promised speed. A few bore gauntlets instead of blades, knuckles studded with suppression sigils; some bristled with halberds crowned in cages of glyph metal; at the rear stood standards—luminescent lances that shed halos of convex light.

The first rank stepped; shields rose into an impenetrable wall, five plates thick. Gaps no wider than a coin. Behind them, spear-heads leveled through the murder slits. To his left, shadows warped—the Phantoms blurred and stuttered, teleport cadence building like a heartbeat. To the right, juggernaut Warbringers flexed hands the size of anvils, gauntlets humming with stored shock. On high ribs, Nullchain elites unspooled glowing links that hung in air like nets of force. In the rear, the Luminary standards brightened—and the whole army's aura sharpened, threads pulling tighter, timing locking like teeth.

He said nothing.

He ran.

The Shield Wall tried to box the bridge. He refused the funnel by climbing when there was no wall—boots kissing rail, then rib, then the underslung truss. He came around behind the first block just as halberd points stabbed through the slits where he should have stood. His dagger hooked a strap at the base rim of the rearmost shield; he yanked the stack half a step out of true. That was enough.

His palm met seam.

Not a beam. Not here. The shields would drink the spill and reflect. He injected seed-nothing—tiny voids that confused the puppet braid. It took a heartbeat, then another, and the rear Knight's shield went a fraction limp. Weight sagged on the others. Lines shifted.

He pushed through that slack like water through reeds.

A Warbringer met him with a fist. He slid inside the arc and let the gauntlet graze his shoulder—pain bright and clean—and paid it back by draining the charge from the impact sigils with a touch of raw mana set to hungry. The gauntlet died cold. He used it as a hook, spun the Warbringer by the dead arm into two Phantoms blinking in—and erased all three with three perfect taps: collar, spine base, hip seam. They fell at different speeds, plates scattering into the abyss in silver rain.

Chains hissed. He looked up in time to see a glowing net fall to pin his aura. He dropped a null ring at his feet and made it breathe—expanding and contracting in a rhythm that inverted the chain's cadence. The links hit the ring in the ring's inhale and stuttered; he stepped between two loops, caught a length on his dagger's guard, and wrenched.

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