Ascending was one step forward and two steps back.
Their teamwork in formation was working out well enough, but they weren't finding clues.
They'd completed the lower-tier district and had made it into a fancier section of the city, finding new, harder enemies, but they hadn't seen any sign of the quest clues.
Every time they reached a new area that looked important, they'd search around. Every time they found nothing, Sasaki glanced at Hisako like she was campaigning against her. Rao and Yasuda weren't buying into her disbelief over the quest, but they were becoming disheartened.
Hisako was becoming increasingly more on edge with each failed search. As she sifted through the tall grass around an overgrown grave, she swore she could feel judging eyes on her.
Serizawa was nudging loose bricks in a prayer fountain. Rao was carefully considering a handful of rusted old coins he'd dug out of the algae-green basin. Yasuda had climbed atop a dead tree and was searching about, hopping from tree to mini-mausoleum, to crumbling obelisk. When Hisako met her eye, she shook her head.
Sasaki was searching, honestly, just as earnestly–maybe just to prove Hisako wrong. She had an orb of light in her hand, illuminating the darkest corners of the small graveyard to her searching gaze.
Hisako finished her search and headed back to the entrance. The others slowly gathered.
Before anyone could voice a solemn failure, Serizawa spoke.
"Let's think about this," he began. "This is a test designed to be like a real door, but it isn't a real door. It's a test."
Sasaki rolled her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, but Serizawa continued hurriedly.
"What I'm saying is that we can make assumptions about how the exam is designed. We can, I believe the term is, 'meta-game' it."
Hisako's eyes lit up.
"The final boss is at the end of the level," Serizawa said. "And quests end with the final boss."
Everyone nodded, following along.
"So the parents will be at the final area, or at least between here and there. The first two clues–they weren't hidden. I don't think we're missing anything. I think we're just overcompensating too hard."
"That makes sense to me," Hisako agreed.
The others nodded and murmured their agreement as well.
"So, we should just continue forward. Keep our eyes peeled, but focus on moving forward," Hisako concluded.
More quiet agreement. The unnerving feeling of eyes pricked Hisako. She squirmed and began to walk.
Rao fell into step a sword-length and a half beside her, then Serizawa, a hand resting on Stinger. Behind him, the other two women followed. Yasuda had her crossbow raised and loaded. Sasaki walked as she usually did, but Hisako imagined she was always ready so long as she had her rings.
The next area, past a winding street of ragged storefronts, was a little square with a destroyed wooden seating area. An overgrown trellis had been tipped over, and vines with those moon-bright flowers had consumed the area.
Ahead, up the road, was a massive gate that led to a massive cemetery crowned with an elegant but horrifying cathedral. Even the extra-large moon struggled to backlight the severe, large shape of the building, but it illuminated each of the five piercing spires in full. The fencing on the roof looked like the bony spines of a creature, jagged, broken, and each slightly different than the last.
Her eyes fell back down on the gates. They were beautiful, covered in those elegant white blooms. Closed, they formed their own trellis of twisting, glittering black iron and glowing ivory petals.
She squinted. There was another white object, not a flower, on the gate. It was a small square of paper, pinned to the side of one of the bars of the gate by a sleek hairpin bearing a wilted, dried white flower.
"Ahead!"
Rao's cry broke her out of her entranced state. Her eyes snapped to the square right before them. Rao was already in an attack stance. Hisako summoned her sword into her hand before she saw–
A person. Two people.
Two people rising from the white bed of flowers. They were full-on knights of some sort, another fun anachronism of the Gothic world.
They were proportioned just a touch too wrong, she realized. She'd thought they were human initially, but now she could only see them as aliens pretending to be human.
Beneath their cloaks, a tattered, time-bleached gray covered in the vines and flowers, was gleaming silver armor. It was ornate and masterfully crafted with designs of horrific, winged angels and exposed bones. Hisako could not see their eyes past their helms. One was eerily tall, just enough to be uncanny, and the other looked more human but still off.
Guardians of the grand graveyard ahead, perhaps. Enemies.
A crossbow bolt whizzed over Hisako's shoulder. Hisako blinked, then jerked back into a defensive stance in surprise before her eyes processed what had happened.
The shorter knight had caught the bolt in their gauntlet. They snapped the shaft with ease, letting the pieces fall.
From the massive sheaths on each other's backs, they drew their weapons.
They both had half of a pair of massive scissors, almost like two odd swords with odd guards, but undoubtedly just sword-sized scissors.
The tall one held theirs out as if it were a rapier, and the other pulled theirs back like a knife in an ice-pick grasp. The strength required to do such a thing with such massive blades made Hisako jealous.
The second Hisako's feet solidified into her stance, the tall one burst forth. Her mind went blank at their speed. In a heartbeat, they'd crossed the clearing and were on her.
Her blade went up, barely deflecting the stabbing blade, then, on pure instinct, she dropped to the ground.
A moment later, the shorter one's blade swung where her chest had been, clanging against its twin. Another clash of metal surprised her, making her look up as she jumped back and onto her feet.
The two knights stood, the shorter one crouched, and the other stood tall on guard. They had single-handedly blocked Rao's attack. With a flick of their wrist, they knocked Rao away with his own strength, redirecting him aside.
The two knights shifted again, slowly, like they had all the time in the world. Their blades scraped along each other as the shorter one crept back, creating an eerie scream. Their cloaks and armor rubbed against each other, scattering a small shower of petals.
"They seem strong and fast," Hisako warned loudly, "but they take a second to prepare their attacks! Keep an eye out for patterns!"
Hisako shuffled back, sword raised to defend. Her eyes flicked between the two knights. The shorter one had crouched down a few strides back from the other, blade readied.
Rao swiped at the taller one again, only to be deflected again, then again. The knight was making a fool of Rao.
In a flash of light, one of Rao's clones exploded past Rao, past the knight, and stabbed at their back.
The katar pierced the cloak, tearing it, and broke through the armor with a loud scrape. The knight loosed a ghastly wail, like that of a banshee, and staggered forward. Rao took the opportunity to attack again, but it was deflected, and the knight twisted away before the clone could backstab again.
Hisako felt the other moving before she saw it. It was the perfect combo. She moved as soon as she knew it, and she just barely intercepted the shorter knight.
She raised her sword, using the edge to either clothesline or ward off the shorter knight. The knight did stop short, skidding and then sliding.
Hisako activated her power, focusing on dropping her blade to the ground as powerfully as possible. To her surprise, instead of her body's "down" being affected, just the blade was.
It jerked her down with it in her shock, but it did jerk down faster than the shorter knight could slide. She barely had enough time to twist the blade enough that the edge struck them instead of the flat.
In a horrible whine of metal and clatter of armor on stone, she put her sword through the knight's waist plates.
A blood-curdling yowl split the air, and the knight thrashed, gauntlets flying out at Hisako, trying to claw at her. The scissor blade arced uselessly in their mindless flailing.
She released her sword with one hand to shift away, but focused still on her power, successfully keeping the knight pinned.
Without the shorter knight to follow up on the taller's attacks, the taller one moved less effectively. Rao and his clone blitzed the knight, leaving them open for attacks from their backline.
Stinger flew when the knight drew their blade back, wrapping around the sword arm. Hisako abandoned her blade entirely and went to Stinger's chain, helping Serizawa control the knight.
Bolts started to pelt the knight. With their free hand, they deflected as many bolts and blades from Yasuda and Rao as they could, but they began taking damage.
Sasaki had moved closer to Hisako and Serizawa. She lifted her hands and concentrated, forcing a bubble shield around the creature's weapon hand, just past Stinger's chain.
The orb closed with the sound of a cleaver through flesh, quickly followed by another wail. The knight bucked wildly as their hand fell away into the bubble shield.
Hisako couldn't use her powers again to hold the chain down–she felt the strain all too clearly already, like the thin line of a forming headache, from using it on her sword.
Hisako and Serizawa jerked forward as the knight wrenched away again, and the knight's free arm connected with Rao's clone in a wild arc. All three of them went flying.
Serizawa landed in an awkward crumple behind Hisako, who did her best to catch herself but still ended up tasting stone. Rao's clone flew the furthest–he'd luckily taken the flat of the scissor blade, but the force had sent him flying against the gate with a loud, painful rattle.
Hisako shoved herself upright in time to see the bubble shield curl into a compact ball before exploding out into spikes, like a vicious sea urchin. The spines pierced the body through, denting armor inwards and pinning the knight's legs and disembodied hand to the ground.
Before the knight could even cry out, a massive bolt pierced their helm. The shaft was wide enough that if the walker had a face, it would no longer have most of it. It collapsed, slowly fading.
Hisako glanced back in awe. Sasaki was breathing heavily, rings fading from an intense glow, and Yasuda had opened her crossbow up further, turning it into more of a medieval turret than a hand weapon. She, too, looked rather drained from the effort, and she had to use her boot to fold the crossbow down to its previous size.
Hisako pushed herself up with urgency. Serizawa was doing the same. Rao was staring at his downed clone with a grimace, but had his other katar readied.
They all turned to the pinned knight, who'd stopped struggling as their partner finally faded into ash, leaving only their blade behind.
"I can't hold them much longer," she rasped, spitting out a few grittier pieces of broken-down stone and dirt.
The knight began to flail again, somehow more desperately than before, but also with more power.
"They're breaking free!" Sasaki shouted.
When Hisako's ability snapped, she felt it punch through her heart. She doubled over at the foreign, deeply discomforting feeling with a gasp.
Serizawa's Stinger flew out, ensnaring the knight by the torso and neck, but the knight seemed unbothered.
They rose to their feet despite Serizawa's pulling, and began to claw at their own chestplate, wrenching it free in an earsplitting display of raw power.
As they pulled themselves from their metal shell, they transformed. Their form expanded with the loud snapping of bone until a wolf in humanoid form stood.
Not quite a wolf, like they'd never been quite human enough.
Hisako watched in stunned silence as their maw split in an alien howl, four different parts of the jaw snapping out to form a lethal tunnel of fangs.
Their barrel-like chest heaved in the wake of the shout, and molasses-like split dribbled down, flattening pale white fur that had erupted from the gaps in the armor. Their hands flexed in the massive gauntlets, and their muscles bulged along their exposed arms, torso, and the gaps in the armor left by their new canine haunches.
Their eyes burned like two orbs of pure amber, fixed on the party. They continued to stare as they picked their blade back up, holding it in one hand, properly now.
The stage boss, Hisako thought with a rattled, nervous smile, has reached phase two of the fight.