They left Helios Gate under blackout protocol at dusk.
No courtyard sendoff. No opening horns. No ceremony.
Just a side postern gate beneath the western bastion and a six-person file slipping into the ruins like ghosts pretending not to breathe.
Nyxara Vale took point.
Kael had expected a guide.
What he got instead was a woman who moved like the city itself had quietly agreed not to notice her. She wore layered dark leathers reinforced with thin plates of old silver alloy and carried no visible relic tech beyond a compass hanging at her hip and a long knife strapped at the base of her spine. Her hood stayed down now. No reason to hide a face that calm.
Sera seemed to like her immediately for reasons that probably said something unhealthy about both of them.
The route began in a collapsed drainage channel west of the wall, where rusted access grates and old utility housings leaned together under years of ivy and soot. Nyxara dropped into the channel without warning, landed in a crouch, and looked up at the rest of them like they were late.
"Move."
Toren peered over the edge.
"I miss walls already."
Malik shoved him in.
The drainage line fed into a maintenance tunnel wide enough to walk single file if no one got precious about shoulder space. Concrete sweated around them. Pipes ran overhead in thick rusted bundles. Old service lights flickered every fourth brace, creating alternating bars of dim gold and total dark.
Kael hated tunnels now.
Too many sounds.
Too much close blood.
Elara kept him in the middle of the file. Not subtle. Not insulting either. Just practical.
Nyxara slowed only once, at the first junction.
She touched the wall, counting cracked painted symbols half-hidden under grime, then angled left.
"Why left?" Toren whispered.
"Because the right side collapsed twenty years ago," Nyxara said.
"You've been here before?"
She glanced back just enough to answer.
"I'm still alive, aren't I?"
That seemed to be all the explanation she intended.
By the second junction, Kael had concluded three things about her.
First, she trusted no one until absolutely necessary.
Second, she was always aware of where every weapon in the group was.
Third, she had already noticed every way each of them might fail.
He almost respected that.
At the third junction, she proved it.
Without slowing, she said, "Bram's your anchor."
The statement came so suddenly Kael thought at first he'd misheard.
"What?"
She didn't look back. "Bram Holt. He's your emotional anchor."
Kael stared at the back of her hoodless head.
Toren made a strangled sound somewhere behind him that might have been laughter, choking, or both.
Elara's voice sharpened. "Focus."
Nyxara ignored her.
"You default to him when the room gets too loud," she continued. "Not Vance, which is interesting. Not Malik, which is healthy. Holt."
Sera's quiet laugh drifted up from the rear.
Kael frowned. "You got all that from one briefing?"
Nyxara finally looked over her shoulder.
"From the way you stand when he's near and the way you go still when he isn't." Her mouth did not smile, but something in it tilted slightly. "You're easy to read if a person pays attention."
That should not have irritated him as much as it did.
"I'm not—"
"Don't explain yourself. I don't care."
Then she turned forward again.
Conversation over.
Sera, of course, leaned around Malik just enough to catch Kael's eye and raise both eyebrows.
He glared.
She looked delighted.
The tunnel narrowed into an older access corridor with iron blast doors welded open along one side and long observation windows running the other. Beyond the glass lay a lower transit line, half-submerged in black water and broken machinery.
Toren pressed closer to the window.
"This predates the city."
Nyxara nodded once. "Most of the west underworks do."
Sen ran one gloved hand along a corroded panel. "Pre-Fall emergency infrastructure."
Kael heard it before anyone else.
A faint scraping somewhere beneath the waterline.
He stopped walking.
So did Elara.
Nyxara's hand was already on the hilt of her knife.
"What?" asked Malik.
Kael tilted his head toward the dark beyond the glass.
"Something's moving."
The others listened.
At first nothing.
Then—
scrape.
Scrape.
Scrape.
Like too many nails testing concrete.
Sera lifted her crossbow. "That's awful."
Nyxara didn't disagree.
She motioned them back from the glass and killed the nearest service light with a flick of her fingers.
Darkness folded in.
Then the thing on the other side of the window stood up.
It had been underwater.
Waiting.
Pale limbs unfolded from black water one by one until a long-armed shape pressed itself against the glass with no visible hurry at all.
A Grave Stalker.
Its skull-like face turned, blind white eyes finding each of them through the dark.
Then a second shape rose behind it.
Then a third.
Toren whispered, "Nope."
The first impact shattered the window frame before the glass fully gave.
"Elara—"
"Move!"
The corridor exploded.