Pain didn't come in sentences.
It came in inventory.
Hot in his thigh where the rusted blade had kissed him. Cold in his fingers where the blood had decided it didn't want to visit anymore. A pulsing ache in his shoulder that felt like someone had tried to pull his arm out of its socket and left it halfway convinced.
Zidane blinked and the basement didn't go away.
Stone. White lantern light. Mist clinging to the floor like it had paid a bribe. Iron bars. Piles of bones behind them—too many, stacked like a secret that had gotten lazy.
He tried to inhale.
His ribs punished him for the attempt.
He tried to laugh.
It came out as a wet, stupid sound.
"Alright," he thought, very calmly, as the edges of the world narrowed. "So this is the part where I die dramatically and everyone learns a lesson and—"
No one was here.
No one was going to learn anything.
He felt his pulse, though. Somehow. Still there. Still stubborn. Still thumping like it hadn't been told the show was over.
The skeletons were gone—mostly. He could hear them farther off, faint clicking in corridors, that meandering hunger drifting toward easier prey.
Zidane's cuff bit into his wrist when he shifted. The chain made a small jingle against stone, proud of itself. His free hand twitched, wanting to rub that familiar spot like friction could sand fear into something manageable.
He couldn't even manage that.
His eyes slid toward the stairwell where he'd thrown Quina.
His chest did something sharp and childish and dangerous.
Please.
A scrape answered him.
Soft. Close.
Not bone. Not blade. Not the wet whisper of Mist.
Something small dragged itself into the lantern glow.
A crooked chef hat. A round body smeared with dust and damp. Tiny hands working stubbornly against slick stone like the world's most determined little nightmare.
Quina.
Not waddling. Crawling.
Quina reached Zidane's boot, stopped, and looked up at him like this was normal.
Zidane tried to say the name.
It came out as air and blood.
Quina blinked once. Then it climbed—hands on Zidane's torn shirt, knees on his ribs—until it was perched on his chest like a weight meant to keep his heart from falling out.
Warmth spread under its little body, immediate and real.
Zidane's eyes stung.
He told himself it was the Mist.
Quina stared down at him, calm as a priest. Hungry as weather.
"Friend," Quina said softly.
Zidane's mouth tried to make a grin out of habit. It failed halfway, then found it again in pieces.
"Yeah," he rasped. "Hi."
Quina tilted its head, listening—not to his voice, but to his breathing, the hitch in it, the stutter in his pulse like his body couldn't decide whether to keep trying.
"Friend dying," Quina said, politely.
Zidane swallowed. It tasted like iron and failure.
"Not dying," he whispered. "Just… resting."
Quina blinked.
"Friend lies."
A laugh tried to happen again. It turned into a cough. It hurt. It was still somehow funny in the worst way.
"Okay," Zidane breathed. "Fine. Maybe a little."
Quina didn't comfort him.
Quina didn't panic.
Quina offered terms.
"Deal," Quina said.
Zidane's eyelids fluttered. "Deal?"
"Hunger," Quina said. Then, without pause: "Survival."
Two words. Two coins on a table.
Zidane stared at Quina's face. The hat. The ridiculous calm. The fact that it had come back into the basement like it didn't understand leaving.
His throat tightened around something too big to swallow.
"What are you—" he tried, voice cracking.
Quina leaned closer until the brim of its hat brushed Zidane's forehead.
"Let me," Quina said, and paused like it was choosing the simplest shape of the truth, "in."
Zidane's heart stumbled.
His body knew that word. In. Doors. Locks. The inside of places you weren't supposed to survive.
His brain produced a dozen jokes and none of them fit through his mouth.
He could feel himself slipping—edges dimming, sound draining, the basement getting farther away like he was being pulled under black water.
He couldn't run.
He couldn't fight.
He couldn't charm bone into mercy.
He had one choice left.
His free hand barely lifted. His fingers trembled. He touched Quina's sleeve—more a brush than a grip, like he was afraid to prove it was real.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay."
Then, softer, because this was the part he never said out loud:
"Don't leave."
Quina blinked slowly.
"Stay," it said, like it wasn't a promise so much as a fact.
Then Quina opened its mouth—
Not wide like a threat.
Wide like an idea.
The air changed.
The lantern light sharpened. The Mist on the floor stirred, curling tighter, curious. Zidane felt pressure behind his ribs, not pain—something deeper, like a door in his blood being leaned on from the inside.
Heat poured into him.
Not normal heat. Engine-room heat. The kind that kept you alive in metal guts and forgotten corners. It surged through his veins like a bright animal, dragging something with it: hunger. Not starving panic—hunger with confidence.
Zidane gasped and his ribs tried to protest.
The protest didn't finish.
Pain was still there, but it was suddenly behind glass, muffled and distant, like someone had shut a door between him and his own damage.
He sat up.
Not slowly.
Not carefully.
He snapped upright like a puppet whose strings had been yanked by a laughing god.
His cuff chain rattled. The brass tag scraped stone. The sound made his grin return—fast, sharp, wrong.
His skin prickled. His hair lifted with static. The air around him shimmered with a bright pressure, the kind that made the world feel thinner, easier to cut.
He breathed in.
He breathed out.
He could move.
And he was—absurdly—too happy about it.
A click echoed in the corridor.
Zidane's head turned.
One skeleton had wandered back into the chamber, drawn by blood-scent or habit or stupidity. It stepped into the white lantern light, bones damp with Mist, rusted blade dragging a faint spark across stone.
Its empty sockets fixed on Zidane.
It lifted the blade.
Zidane stood.
His body blurred.
He didn't run at it.
He simply wasn't where he'd been anymore.
One heartbeat—gone.
The next—he was beside it, low and close, like a rumor slipping under a door.
His hands were empty.
Then light snapped into shape along his knuckles—thin, bright slivers, short blades made of something harder than metal and meaner than glass.
Zidane grinned wider.
"Hey," he said, warm as ever, like this was a polite greeting and not a murder.
He moved.
The blade swung.
Not wild. Not clumsy.
Joyful.
He cut across the skeleton's ribs and the thing didn't just crack—something holding it together let go. The Mist binding shuddered like a thread snapping. The skeleton twitched, trying to remember how to be upright.
Zidane ducked under the rusted blade as it swung, laughing—bright, feral laughter that belonged to a kid who'd been trapped too long and finally found the edge of the cage wasn't real.
His second strike went up through the spine.
Clean.
Final.
The skeleton collapsed mid-motion, bones clattering across the stone in a dry, useless rain. The rusted blade hit last with a single ring, loud in the emptiness.
Zidane stood over the pile, chest heaving. Not from exhaustion.
From being alive.
The light-blades flickered in his hands and dissolved back into heat under his skin.
The lantern light steadied.
The Mist loosened its curl.
Silence settled, tentative at first—like the basement didn't trust quiet to last.
Zidane listened.
No more clicking footsteps returning.
No more hungry bones testing their luck.
Just his own breathing, loud and real.
Just his heartbeat—steady now, stubborn as ever.
And deep inside his ribs, a small, satisfied presence curled warm around his pulse like it had always belonged there.
Zidane's grin softened, just a fraction.
He swallowed, tasted blood, and felt the world hold still.
The last skeleton dropped.
Everything went quiet.