The Fireside Ascent slowed outside the next boss gate and settled just enough for the group to take in the corridor ahead. Stone waited at the far end, a slab of carved ruin thick enough to swallow sound, and the air around it held a pressure that made the hall feel older than the floor around it.
FDR turned toward Eryndra. "A request."
Her answer came at once. "What?"
"Jefferson warned us that the next several bosses would be exceptionally powerful. We would like a turn."
She looked from him to the gate, then to the others, and let the silence drag just long enough to show exactly how little she liked the idea. Tension gathered through her shoulders and jaw, then eased when she clicked her tongue and folded her arms.
"Fine," she said. "But if this takes too long, I'm going in."
"That is acceptable," FDR replied.
Stone waited on the far side of the boss gate, a slab of carved ruin thick enough to swallow sound. Even the dungeon's usual unrest seemed to gather itself there. The air held old blood, powdered rock, and the stale heat of something enormous breathing on the other side.
Before anyone else could claim the room, Truman raised a hand and said, "Alone." He glanced back just enough to make the line belong to everyone. "I won't take long. Ninety seconds. If it goes past that, step in and end it."
"Generous," FDR said.
JFK stepped to the side, turned one palm outward, and raised a barrier around the rest of them. It settled with a clean crackle, sharp-edged and transparent, a dividing line between spectators and consequence.
Roy stayed near the gate, eyes fixed on the seam where ancient grit had been crushed into the grooves by centuries of opening and closing. "You want us to time you?" he asked.
"No need."
The answer drew a low sound from Lynder, respect without showmanship. Nearby, Eryndra held herself in impatient stillness, excitement packed tight through her frame and held there only by choice.
Truman placed his hand against the stone, and the gate folded inward with a heavy, grinding shift that let heat roll out first. Wet fur followed it, thick enough to coat the back of Roy's throat, and then came the breathing, slow and deep and full of teeth, while pale markings shifted deep in the dark until the Bouyes rose into view.
The motion pushed a broad wave of air through the chamber and lifted dust from the floor, carrying it through the gate-light before the creature's shadow swallowed it again. Roy tried to put a number to the size of the Bouyes and hated the attempt as soon as it formed. A hundred feet felt too small. The room belonged to its mass now. White spotting spread across the black-gray of its hide in broad patterns that only made the moving muscle beneath them easier to follow, while the head lowered and a grin full of tearing teeth opened across its face.
Truman walked into the chamber and looked up at it with calm, almost conversational interest. "What a big bastard you are," he said. "You know what happens to big bastards."
"Fission Magic: Little Girl."
Small orbs formed at his hands, bright at the core and held tight inside their fields. He tossed them with easy precision, placing them across the floor in the path the Bouyes was about to take.
The Bouyes answered by moving. It began upright, broad and looming, then folded forward mid-charge and dropped onto all fours with a violence that doubled its speed. Stone screamed beneath its claws. The distance between them collapsed, and each Little Girl detonated exactly where Truman had predicted, finding only air as the Bouyes threaded through the blasts with vicious grace. Twin screeches rang out as its paws gouged the floor in parallel tears, and the chamber filled with hard bursts of light and fresh craters while Roy felt his own body tense, already assuming Truman was going to stand there and let it hit him.
Roy had just enough time to think Truman was going to stand there and prove a point with his face before Truman changed the terms.
"Fission Magic: Fat Lady."
The next orb came bigger and heavier, and he dropped it straight into the Bouyes's path. Light flooded the chamber as the blast went off in front of its face, throwing fur back in a hard wave and forcing the creature's head sharply aside. Its forepaws carved furrows through the stone as the charge faltered, not enough to stop it, enough to break its rhythm.
Truman used the opening immediately. His boots planted in a new line, servos singing as he shifted to the flank with an ease that only looked simple because a machine was doing it.
"Fission Magic: Girl Squad."
Smaller detonations spread up the Bouyes from leg to shoulder, walking a rising chain of controlled blasts across its body, tearing fur, opening flesh, and finally dragging a roar out of its throat.
That roar carried something almost playful inside it, and buried in it was a low laugh that tightened Roy's chest more effectively than the blood ever could. The Bouyes lunged again, and Truman moved through the flurry in a tight, brutal pattern, knees bending, weight shifting, torso turning by fractions, every dodge coming close enough for Roy to hear the claws shear the air past metal while the higher pitch of Truman's servos told its own story.
"That's the hardest I've seen any of you pushed," Roy said before he could stop himself.
"Evarran subjected us to greater strain," FDR replied at once.
JFK's laugh came thin and sour. "Calling them mock battles would flatter them. We destroyed each other. We died. He resurrected us. Then he sent us back in."
Roy accepted that with far less disbelief than he should have. "Who won the most?"
JFK turned just enough to show the smile. "That information is classified, Captain. Submit the paperwork."
"Fantastic," Roy said. "I'll get right on that."
A fresh impact swallowed the rest of the exchange as the Bouyes clipped Truman across the shoulder with a sweeping strike and sent him grinding sideways through ash-coated stone. He absorbed the force, corrected, and turned his head a fraction, while the Bouyes watched him with visible delight and let its grin widen.
It came again, and Truman met it with a Fat Lady launched harder than the last one. The Bouyes snapped a forelimb up to shield itself, and the detonation bloomed at the point of contact inside a tight contained sphere. When the light fell away, the limb ended at the elbow in a raw stump.
The Bouyes looked at what was left of the arm, and a pleased sound came out of it while a roar began to gather in its throat, but it never made it into the room, because a second Fat Lady dropped from above and drove straight through the crown of its skull. The impact crushed the head downward, pinned the blast into the body, and shattered the floor beneath it in a spreading web of cracks. Fur vanished in the heat. Stone glowed through the wash of light. When it cleared, the Bouyes lay still.
Truman turned toward the group as JFK dropped the barrier with a soft snap. "Next," he said, giving them a short salute with two fingers before stepping back through the settling heat.
The next three floors passed in a blur that barely earned the dignity of separate memory. A gate opened, Truman and JFK entered, and another boss died.
The Flurfoak never got the chance to show what it could do. At JFK's suggestion, they tried a combination attack. Truman threw a Fat Lady, JFK wrapped it in a barrier the instant it left his hand, and then began compressing the barrier tighter and tighter around the blast as it traveled. By the time it struck the Flurfoak, the thing inside had become so violently concentrated that the monster came apart before it could launch its first attack.
The next two died to the same technique, though the execution sharpened each time. The second kill came faster. The third looked even more precise, as if Truman and JFK had already done the move together a thousand times and it only needed a body in front of them to prove that point.