Chapter 2: The Drowned Cathedral

Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Drowned Cathedral

Crossing a gate always felt like being swallowed.

One step, and the rail yard’s cold air was gone. The next, Elias was standing knee-deep in water so black it looked like ink, and the silence pressed against his ears like a hand.

The Drowned Cathedral was enormous. Its pillars rose into darkness, crusted with barnacles and pale weed that swayed in currents he couldn’t feel. Half-sunk pews stretched down the nave, and everywhere, in the pews, along the walls, lining the aisles beneath the surface, candles burned. Their flames were a steady green-gold, perfectly still under the water, lighting the whole place from below like a lantern held under a chin.

"Creepy," Dex whispered. "Love that for us."

"Formation," Garrick said.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The guild master walked to the front of the line and rolled his shoulders once, and his skin went grey. Granite spread from his knuckles up his forearms, across his neck and jaw, until his face was a carved thing with living eyes. Stoneform. B-rank, and he wore it like a coat.

"Brody, Sato, shields on my flanks. Petra, center. Colt, rear. Vance, high ground. Porters, ten meters back." He glanced over his shoulder, and his stone mouth made something close to a smile. "Touch nothing that isn’t dead."

The first acolyte came out of the third pew.

It rose without a sound, water streaming off its rotted robes, and then there were six more, clawing up from under the benches with fingers like wet roots. Their faces were swollen and grey, their eyes milky, their mouths open in a hymn that made no noise.

Garrick met them head-on.

Claws skittered off his granite chest, and he answered with a fist that turned the first acolyte’s skull to paste against a pillar. Brody and Sato closed the flanks behind raised shields, and Vance’s arrows hissed down from the choir loft, pinning acolytes to the pews like insects to a board.

It was, Elias had to admit, efficient.

It was also sloppy.

He counted as he walked, because counting kept his hands steady. Seven in the first wave. Twelve in the second. Nineteen by the transept. Forty-three by the time they reached the altar steps. He hauled whatever the hunters left behind: waterlogged rosaries, tarnished relic coins, pale blue cores the size of marbles that he pried from ribcages with a porter’s hook. The pack grew heavier. The count grew higher.

And he noticed.

Brody’s new shield was still stiff at the strap, so his guard rose half a second late, and twice an acolyte raked his forearm before he laughed it off. Petra spent mana healing scratches, then spent the lulls checking her phone for a signal that didn’t exist. Vance kept shooting acolytes that were already down, so the kills would count on his status window. Nobody watched the ceiling. Nobody marked the way back.

And the candles leaned. Just slightly, every flame in the cathedral, toward the far end of the nave, as if something down there was breathing in.

"You’re doing the thing," Dex murmured, falling in beside him with his own overloaded pack.

"What thing?"

"The face. The ’everyone here is going to die of stupidity’ face."

"I don’t have a face."

"You have exactly one face, and it’s that one."

Forty-three, Elias thought. A C-rank cathedral usually held twenty-five acolytes. Thirty on a bad day.

He didn’t say it out loud. Porters didn’t make suggestions. The last porter who’d told Garrick Holt how to run a raid had been reassigned to washing SUVs, and the one before him hadn’t come back at all.

The boss door stood at the end of the apse, and it was the biggest door Elias had ever seen.

Two slabs of bronze, gone green and crusted with barnacles, rose three stories into the dark. Carved across them was a crowned figure made of bones, one skeletal hand raised, holding a chain that ended in a censer. The candles at its base burned brighter than anywhere else, their flames bent straight toward the seam between the doors.

The hunters spread out at the foot of the steps to catch their breath. Brody wrapped a bandage around his forearm. Petra finally put her phone away.

"Moreau," Garrick said. "Read it."

Dex swallowed, passed his pack to Elias, and raised one hand toward the door. The Appraiser lens flickered into being in front of his eyes, pale and white.

"Boss chamber," he said. "Designation... the Ossuary—"

The lens turned red.

Not a flicker. It flooded red all at once, like blood filling a glass, and Dex jerked back as if the door had slapped him.

"Grade C," he read, and his voice cracked. "No, B. B-plus. It’s still climbing." Lines of text scrolled across the red, too fast to follow. "A-minus? That can’t—"

A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose. He cut the skill off and staggered, and Elias caught his elbow before he went down in the water.

"Irregular," Dex said. He wiped his nose with his sleeve and stared at the smear. "Guild master, the boss is irregular. It’s reading way above C. Way above."

Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the dark, water dripped.

Everyone knew the rule. It was the first thing the Association drilled into you, before ranks, before loot shares, before anything else. Irregular boss: withdraw, seal, report. An irregular in a C-rank gate was how guilds became names on memorial plaques.

"Protocol says we pull out," Sato said quietly.

Garrick didn’t answer. He was looking at the door.

Elias watched him look at it, and he knew exactly what the guild master was seeing, because he was seeing it too. He carried loot for a living. He knew the market boards by heart. A normal C-rank boss core covered a raid’s expenses and a decent dinner. An irregular core, soaked in A-rank mana and pulled from a C-rank gate, was a different animal entirely. Research labs fought over those at auction. The last one had sold for more than Ironfang earned in a year.

More than enough to pay off every pink envelope in Elias’s jacket. More than enough to keep Mira on her treatment until she was thirty.

He hated that he’d done the math. He hated more that he could see Garrick finishing it.

The granite of Garrick’s face shifted, and the corner of his stone mouth curled.

"Irregulars are overrated," he said. "Half of them are Appraiser glitches." He glanced at Dex. "No offense, Moreau."

"None taken, sir, but it read A-minus—"

"It read a lot of things." Garrick turned to his hunters. "Brody, Sato, shields up. Vance, you’re on the door. We hit it hard, we hit it fast, and we walk out of here rich." His eyes passed over the porters and lingered on Elias for half a second longer than they should have. Then they moved on. "Everyone gets a bonus."

Nobody argued. Nobody ever argued with Garrick Holt.

At the foot of the boss door, every candle flame bent a little further toward the seam. And far away, deep in the bones of the cathedral, a bell began to ring.