Chapter 354: It Kneels for Something Else

The chain at my waist hits its limit again.

The jolt drags me back from the Deep statue, hauling my body away while the water is already past my chin. I try to plant my boots on the floor, but I can barely feel the stone under my feet. The pressure of the ducts runs through the whole gallery and turns every attempt at balance into a fight I’m losing.

The spear stays a few steps from my hand, and Rhayne stays under the water.

’Come on... Come on!’

I fire Pressure Step one more time.

The pressure builds under my foot and I drive my body forward. Underwater, though, the burst dies fast. The current catches me before I gain any distance, and the chain at my waist pulls tight until it hurts my ribs.

I end up almost exactly where I started, swallowing water that’s hitting my face hard now.

My chest tightens.

There’s no time left for another careful approach.

Then I get an idea, and I grab Kraken.

"Go!"

I throw the sword with everything I have, in the last few inches I still have above the water.

It picks up speed and dives in. For an instant the water knocks it off its line and I think I’ve just wasted our last chance. Kraken corrects itself. The blade starts rotating on its own axis, slowly at first, then violently, cutting through the current like a screw driven through the water.

It crosses the gallery like a spinning torpedo.

The point strikes the Deep spear.

The mechanism comes down.

Nothing happens for one second... two...

Undertow is still stretched taut across the room, disappearing under the surface where Rhayne is trapped. Veric hauls on the shield’s chain with both arms, trying to keep her above the water. Meanwhile almost all of his own face has gone under. The only thing holding him now is his chain, locked at the waist, and nothing else.

Then the first crash comes from the walls.

A floodgate closes.

Another answers further off.

The sound runs through the gallery in sequence, metal and stone crushing the flow coming in through the five gates. The current bleeds off little by little, still pushing at our bodies, but without the violence that had been trying to tear everything off the floor.

The statue chains release.

The water starts dropping. A few inches at first, then faster.

My mouth comes back into the air and I pull in a breath immediately, coughing while I look for the others.

"Hold on!" I shout. "It’s over! But we’ve lost our anchors!"

Veric surfaces first, Undertow still holding Rhayne, fighting not to slide while he coughs hard enough to nearly lose his footing. Rhayne comes up right after, hauled in by the shield’s chain and by her own Battle Ribbon. She tries to breathe, chokes, and coughs water back out. Her eyes are red, her face is pale, and her purple lips shake while she tries to stay upright.

Zhang Xi runs, crossing the water while it’s still knee-high.

"Rhayne... Suzanoo’s Love!"

Zhang’s hands light up as Suzanoo’s Love takes hold. The OXI wraps around Rhayne’s chest and spreads under the skin in thin lines. Rhayne folds into a harder cough, brings up water, and tries to pull in air again. This time it goes in better, though it still comes with a wet sound.

I go to Veric.

He’s sitting against the base of one of the statues, breathing through his mouth. The water has already dropped to our calves, showing the dark stain on his thigh again where the Brinekin punched through.

"Let Zhang look at that when—"

"I’m fine."

He cracks open a small regeneration potion before I can finish.

"You look great."

Veric drinks all of it.

The reaction is immediate.

His body locks up and his hand grips the stone behind him. The puncture in his thigh starts closing from the inside out while he pushes air through his teeth. The effect reaches his lungs right after. Veric doubles over, coughs water onto the floor, and puts a hand to his chest while the accelerated regeneration repairs the raw tissue.

"That tastes horrible," he mutters once he can breathe properly.

At least he can still complain.

A heavy grinding crosses the gallery.

We all look at the far wall.

The great metal door starts to rise, scraping against ancient stone rails. Small fragments of rock fall from the edges while a dark opening appears slowly underneath it.

Zhang Xi keeps working.

Rhayne is breathing without choking now, though her eyes stay red. Suzanoo’s Love pulses over her chest one more time before Zhang takes her hands away.

Freya came out of the flooding better than anyone. She’s soaked, but the Permafrost wings still hold a thin layer of ice around her body. During the worst of it, the temperature had formed a kind of uneven cocoon that turned part of the water aside and preserved small pockets of air near her face.

She looks at the newly opened door.

"Boss room?"

"Second room. It has two stages. The boss comes after the first."

Freya runs a hand through her wet hair and shakes out the small ice crystals forming in it.

"Are we going to have to fight?"

"If everything stays close to what I remember, only if we get the puzzle wrong. Especially at the boss."

She gives me a look.

"I hope there isn’t another change from your future waiting to almost kill all of us."

"As if I had any control over that."

Freya takes a moment before she answers.

"If you don’t have control, stop treating it like something you know. A cup full of coffee can’t take any more milk unless you empty it first."

I look at her for a second.

The comparison is strange. The problem is that she’s right.

Chaos Theory has already moved things I remembered clearly. The route through the dungeon, the first room, even the logic of the puzzle have all shifted. Treating ten years of memory as a finished answer could get us killed before I notice the difference.

Experience still works.

Certainty doesn’t.

That distinction just cost Rhayne most of a lung.

Once Zhang Xi confirms she can keep going, we help the two of them up. Veric is already putting weight on the regenerated leg, though he still tests the movement before each step. Rhayne stands there for a few seconds holding the Battle Ribbon at full extension before she reels it all the way in.

A moment later, we go through the door.

The sound of the water falls away behind us.

The next room is wide and cold, the high ceiling lost in darkness. A low mist covers the floor and moves slowly between the stones, pushed by a breeze I can’t find the source of. Small whispers travel through the hall. No sentence ever forms completely. They’re pieces of voice that arrive too close and disappear before I can work out where they came from.

The golem is at the center.

Twenty-six feet of stone kneeling in front of us.

Its structure is humanoid, though barely worked. Thick arms rest on its legs, the torso looks carved straight out of a single block, and the lowered head has no visible features at this distance. The posture looks respectful. Almost devotional.

Six pillars surround the creature.

Each one has its own shape and a symbol cut deep into its face.

An eye.

A hand.

A crown.

A foot.

A heart.

A mouth.

’This room is exactly the way I remember it. Nothing out of place.’

Freya runs her eyes across the six pillars.

"What kind of puzzle puts a giant golem in the middle of the room and no monsters?"

"The first room tests endurance and intelligence."

"So this bastard is the one that tests what our bodies can do," Veric says.

"Exactly. It’s what’s left. When I came through here, this was the hardest part of the dungeon."

The breeze changes.

The mist drops for a few seconds at the back of the hall, revealing something that had stayed hidden until now behind the fog and the distance.

A beam of white light comes down from the ceiling.

And finds the statue.

It’s far larger than the golem. A female figure standing behind everything, maybe sixty feet tall, carved from a pale stone that has stayed almost immaculate despite the age of this place. Great wings fold behind the body. The head tilts slightly downward, and the arms open in a posture of redemption, palms turned forward.

And there are six of them.

My body stops.

I know that statue.

I walked through this hall several times in the other life. I remembered the golem, the pillars, and that white figure at the back. Back then, the six arms were just one more strange thing in an ancient dungeon.

Now my eyes have an address.

The ears.

The shape of the eyes.

The unusual line of the face, delicate and alien at the same time.

The six arms.

My stomach drops.

’Chronia...?’

The statue doesn’t have her face. Even so, the features belong to the same race.

Duvilin carries them too.

I stand there, unable to shake the feeling that something very old is falling into place in front of me.

Duvilin lived on this planet when it had another name.

Ocean’s Law stopped him from saying which one.

And now there’s a monumental statue of their race inside the Ferryman’s Toll.

I saw this three years from now.

I walked past it.

I left the dungeon.

I never knew what was in front of my eyes.

’Who were you?’

Movement on my left pulls me back.

Veric is walking toward the statue.

He’s already past the first pillar.

"Veric."

"We just get to the statue and make the wish, right?" He keeps going.

My attention drops to the golem kneeling between us and the white figure.

One of its stone fingers moves.

The friction makes a low sound.

My blood goes cold.

"VERIC! LOOK OUT! DON’T IGNORE THE GUARDIAN GOLEM!"

The giant’s head, still facing down, starts to rise.

Two dark hollows appear in the featureless face, and then a red light is born inside them.

Deep.

Intense.

The mist around the golem pulls away as it slowly begins to move.