For a long moment, nobody moved.
Fels slowly turned his hooded head toward the two women by the wall, reading the heavy history of that name off them just as he read everything else.
Finn's calm expression had shifted into something incredibly still and incredibly dangerous.
A hard, wet shine glossed over Alise's eyes; she was holding back her fury through sheer willpower alone.
"She was supposed to be dead," she said, her voice quiet but shaking. "Or gone. Or finished. We bled for that. We buried our people for that! The Familia I—" Her voice broke.
She forced it back under control, swallowing her grief. "She does not get to still be here. She does not get to hide under the city, playing with ancient monsters and kidnapping people from markets, not after everything she already—"
"Alise." Kaguya's voice was soft, and the sheer rarity of that softness stopped her captain instantly.
"Not here. Not in front of him." Kaguya didn't take her eyes off Merek, but she deliberately took her hand off her sword and rested it on Alise's arm.
"He's just the shovel someone else was holding. Save your anger for the hand."
Alise took one hard, ragged breath through her nose.
She nodded and stepped back against the wall, though she still looked like she was ready to burn the entire city to the ground.
Rayleigh pushed himself off the doorframe.
The pieces were all on the table now, and seeing the complete picture didn't make him like it any better.
A guardian that even Daedalus feared, waking up a little more each day.
A scholar who had handed over the key and understood his mistake too late. A hired handler standing between everyone and the truth.
And pulling the strings behind it all—patient, unseen, tracing her old burns—was a woman the Astraea Familia had already paid a bloody price to stop.
"She's not targeting the surface," Rayleigh stated. "She never was. Corvin, the property deeds, the poor bastards she's been feeding to that monster—that's all just the cost of admission to get deeper underground."
"She's testing the routes, she's testing whether the guardian can be weaponized. And she's doing all of it to reach the one door it was built to protect." He looked over at Fels. "The deepest one. The lock the little dreamer keeps seeing."
Fels remained quiet for a long time.
When he finally spoke, his dry, ancient voice had lost its usual academic detachment.
"If that is truly what she wants," Fels said, "then she is infinitely more dangerous now than she was during the war. Back then, she only wanted Orario to suffer." The dark void beneath the hood turned toward Rayleigh.
"Now, she wants a specific prize. And people who want things are willing to open doors that should remain permanently closed."
"Then we get there first," Alise said from the wall. Her voice was hoarse, but steady as iron. "Or we shut it behind her while she's still on the wrong side."
Rayleigh looked around the room.
He took in the shaking scholar, the frozen fury radiating from the Astraea captain, the ancient skull-faced mage calculating catastrophes in the corner, and Finn—who was already quietly plotting their next move.
"One or the other," Rayleigh agreed. "But first, our reader here is going to draw us every single rhythm he gave them, along with every route he opened. Because if we're going down there after her, I'd rather knock on the doors myself than let that monster answer them for us."
Merek—who had clearly expected a fate much worse than doing the one thing he was actually good at—nodded so frantically he nearly wept with relief.
...
Merek's maps ran out three hundred feet down.
They ended at a black arch where his copied rhythms had no more answers.
Below that, nobody had a map.
But, they had Cassandra.
She stood at the edge of the arch, Yumeutsutsu bare in her hands and her slight frame strung tight.
She didn't look like someone who belonged at the front of an expedition into the worst hole under the city; she looked like she wanted to be anywhere else.
But she was here. Daphne stood right at her shoulder, a hand hovering near her back and a glare ready for anyone who dared suggest the girl couldn't do this.
"You don't have to go first," Rayleigh told her. "You point. We walk."
"I have to see it before you step on it." Cassandra's voice shook, but her resolve didn't. "That's the whole reason I'm here. If I hang back where it's safe, I'm just a girl having bad dreams in a tunnel."
Behind Rayleigh, Alise made a small sound of approval. Even Kaguya inclined her head.
It was a good team for a bad place.
The Astraea captain and her two sharpest blades. Finn, Riveria, and Gareth—the calm core of Loki Familia.
And standing a step to the side, filling most of the archway by himself with his arms folded and silent as a wall, was Ottar.
Freya had sent her strongest down into the dark, and he had come without a word of complaint.
A creature that even Daedalus feared was exactly the kind of test the Warlord spent his life hunting.
Tenken hung at his back, and the reiatsu bleeding off the sheathed blade was so heavy that even the monstrous violas in the walls seemed to lean away from him.
"We go until we find her, or we find the door," Finn ordered. "If the path behind us starts to close, Rayleigh and Riveria will hold it open. If it can't be held, we fall back and try again with more rope and fewer heroics."
His eyes swept the group before settling on Alise. "That last part is not optional."
"I heard you the first four times!" Alise replied.
"I'll say it a fifth if you keep looking at that arch like it owes you money."
Rayleigh almost smiled. Then, Cassandra lifted her sword.
"Open your eyes within the dream, Yumeutsutsu."
A mark bloomed on the floor just beyond the arch.
It was a single glowing petal, red as a warning light, resting over a patch of stone that looked perfectly normal.
"There," she whispered. "The floor's a lie. Don't step where it's red."
They descended into the unmapped dark.
This time, the girl with the bad dreams walked point.
The deep routes were worse than the flooded level in every conceivable way.
The violas grew thicker down here, forming massive, fleshy reefs that choked the walls.
There were so many stolen voices layered together that the sound lost all meaning, degrading into a low, animalistic moaning that throbbed against the skull.
The stone itself remembered how to move, even without a Knocker to wake it.
Twice, a corridor tried to crush them shut.
Twice, Cassandra saw it a breath before it happened, a scatter of red petals sending the entire line pressing against a safe wall while the passage ground its teeth on empty air.
But the maze had guardians of its own down here, and they didn't wait to be knocked awake.
The first burst out of a viola reef as they passed. It was a hulking mass of rooted flesh and ancient chitin, resembling a monstrous spider.
It dropped from the ceiling on six legs, its open mouth keening in three overlapping voices.