Ardi didn't ask again.
She trusted him and she let the trident's go.
The two walls of held water fell at once.
All of it came rushing back into the drowned hall from both sides, a black tide folding in on the bared floor, on the violas, on the cell men at the far wall, and on the Knocker standing patient in the middle of it all.
It came for Rayleigh's team too.
For half a second, the roar of crashing water consumed the hall.
That was the exact second he needed.
"Reign over the frozen heavens, Hyōrinmaru."
With a single exhale, the cold erupted from him.
The rushing tide stopped dead. From the floor to the broken pillars to the ceiling, the entire flooded hall—caught in the act of drowning them—turned to blue-white ice in a flash.
The black tide became a frozen, glittering wave, curled and utterly still.
At its heart, Rayleigh and his team stood untouched in a clear pocket of air, simply because he had willed it.
A sudden, silence fell.
The violas were frozen mid-writhe. Two of Corvin's men were trapped up to their hips, their faces stunned as they tried to flee—still breathing, but going nowhere.
The tapper was stuck on his knees inside a clear blue shell. His iron rod was still raised, his mouth open for a command he would never speak.
And the Knocker was buried to the shoulders. Its long arm was frozen mid-reach toward the wall, its towering shape trapped in the ice like a bug in amber.
Ardi let out a foggy breath in the biting cold. "You froze the entire floor."
"I froze the entire floor," Rayleigh replied, already watching the buried monster, waiting.
"With us standing right in it."
"You'll notice you're not frozen."
"I noticed! I'm just choosing not to find it comforting."
Kaguya turned in a slow circle, taking in the glittering hall as her breath clouded the air.
"I will admit," she said, "this is far more dramatic than my methods."
But Rayleigh wasn't listening.
The instant the water solidified, he felt what he had actually come down here for—the real prize hidden beneath all the spectacle.
The maze had stopped shifting.
The walls were no longer leaning. The floor had stopped trying to tilt them into the dark. The restless, hungry labyrinth that had fought them every step of the way was finally dead still.
The energy controlling it had been flowing through the water all along, and now, that water was solid stone.
'There it is.'
A grim satisfaction washed over him, colder than the air.
The mechanism is under the flood.
Freeze the flood, and you don't just trap the puppet, you cut its strings.
That was when the Knocker began to break free.
It didn't struggle like a living creature; there was no panic, no wasted movement. The ice around it simply began to crack.
A slow web of fractures spread from its buried body as it forced itself loose, inch by inch. It was patient and relentless because it felt no cold, never tired, and had all the time in the world.
Alise's fire would have been useless here—she'd been left up top for this exact reason.
Ryuu's ash lay frozen in the walls.
This fight was his!
Rayleigh crossed the ice in a blur of Shunpo and brought Hyōrinmaru down on the trapped beast before it could free its long arm.
A dragon of ice tore from the blade, striking exactly where he swung.
The Knocker took the full weight of the blow and the frost beast combined, smashing a crater into the frozen wall behind it.
Grey dust exploded from a dozen fresh cracks. A faint whisper of stolen voices scattered and died in the freezing air.
Despite the impact, the monster yanked its arm loose and swung at him.
Rayleigh caught the strike on the flat of Hyōrinmaru, letting the blade's intense cold pour into the block.
Where a normal parry would just deflect, this one froze.
The Knocker's long arm iced over from the joint outward, seizing mid-swing as its hardened roots and old metal turned brittle and white.
Rayleigh stepped inside its reach and drove his sword's point through the frozen limb. The entire arm shattered at the shoulder, the pieces clattering loudly across the ice.
For a moment, the Knocker stood ruined and lopsided. Missing an arm, buried to the waist, and cut off from the maze that fueled it, it was vulnerable.
Rayleigh could have finished it right then.
He knew that.
The heavier power resting at his hip—the deeper ability of Benihime could destroy it.
One word would unleash that power and dismantle the creature down to its very foundation.
But he didn't.
Not here.
He had thought this through before they ever came down, just as he analyzed anything that could get his people killed.
'Kannonbiraki Benihime Aratame' wasn't meant for a flooded chamber with a low ceiling and four friends standing close by.
It destroyed things on a massive scale, enough to bring the entire drowned level—ice, stone, and roof—crashing down on them.
He refused to trade a disposable puppet for the girl who had trusted him enough to lower her defenses.
And there was a colder truth: this creature belonged to Knossos, and the maze could always grow another.
Wasting his trump card on a tool the labyrinth would just rebuild was a terrible trade.
He would finish it when killing it actually mattered—when he could sever it from the maze forever, rather than just for one night, and when the ceiling wasn't a mere foot above Ardi's head.
So, he didn't destroy it.
Instead, he broke its leash and let it run.
"Get out of my maze!" he told it.
He drove Hyōrinmaru's cold into the ice at the creature's waist until the frozen shell cracked wide open, freeing the ruined monster to move.
The Knocker turned its faceless head toward him one last time.
Whatever passed for thought inside it seemed to weigh the odds just as Rayleigh had, reaching the same conclusion.
Missing an arm and disconnected from the walls, it had nothing left to win here. It wrenched itself out of the shattered ice.
Instead of attacking him, it turned and slammed its remaining arm into the frozen floor at the deep end of the hall, where the green light of a cracked seal still glowed beneath the ice.
The ice split open.
A dark shaft appeared, plunging straight down—deeper than the flooded level, deeper than anything on Cassandra's maps.
It exhaled a stench of cold and rot from somewhere far below.
The creature poured itself into the gap and vanished, retreating toward the lock the little dreamer had seen in her sleep.
Rayleigh let it go. He would have chased it if the path wasn't a black hole dropping into uncharted darkness, especially with his team behind him and a prisoner to drag back.
There was a time to chase a monster into the deep, but it wasn't now, not while the ceiling groaned and Ardi's ice was already starting to melt.
"It ran," Ardi said, staring at the dark shaft.
"It ran deeper. That's not the same as defeated, but I'll take it." Rayleigh turned away from the hole.
"We got what we came for. And we got a little extra."
He walked over to the tapper, who was still frozen on his knees inside his blue shell.
The man's wide eyes tracked Rayleigh with the specific terror of someone who had just watched his monster get brushed aside like bad weather.
Rayleigh crouched down to study him. The man clearly wasn't a fighter. He had soft hands, ink-stained fingers, and a scholar's stoop, even while kneeling.
Around his neck, half-hidden under his collar, hung a fragment of pale carved stone on a cord.
It bore markings Rayleigh had seen only once before—in a labyrinth that answered to knocking.
And here is the man who taught the maze to listen.
"You're not Evilus muscle," Rayleigh said. "You're the one who reads the walls. Corvin's people bring the muscle and the greed, but you bring the language."
He tapped the ice an inch from the man's face, making him flinch from the biting chill.
"Which makes you the most useful thing in this entire flooded hole—and the only one I'll carry out alive if I have to choose."
The tapper's mouth moved, but nothing came out except a thin, shaking breath.
"Kaguya," Rayleigh said as he stood. "Cut him out. Carefully. He's fragile, and I want him able to talk when we reach the surface."
Kaguya was already moving.
She chipped the man free with quick, precise taps of her blade, treating him more carefully than he deserved.
"You realize," she noted, "between the frozen thugs and this scholar, you've turned an execution into a delivery service."
"Airmid will thank me. She prefers patients over corpses." He glanced at the two half-frozen guards, still breathing but stuck fast.
"Bring those two as well, once they thaw enough to walk. Loki's people can interrogate them topside." A thin smile crossed his face.
"Everyone makes it out of this level today. That's better than the man on the floor got."