The cave entrance smelled like something had died in it recently and something else had moved in immediately after.
We went in quiet.
The first two chambers were straightforward, a handful of bandit guards, low light, bad positioning on their part. Lilith took the left side and I took the right and nobody got a shot off that mattered. No alarms, no broadcasts, nothing that would tell the back of the cave we were coming.
The third chamber was different.
It opened wide, a natural arena, ceiling high enough to disappear into shadow, torches mounted along the walls throwing uneven orange light across the floor. Stone pillars jutted up at irregular intervals, thick enough to cover behind. Multiple angles, multiple entry points, the kind of space that rewarded whoever used the environment better.
And on a raised platform of rock at the far end, Nine-Toes.
He was big. Not game-art big, just genuinely large, the kind of person built from years of doing violent things and eating enough to sustain it. Scars across both forearms. Armour plated together from three different sources that had never been meant to work as a set. And at his belt, a shield generator pulsing a steady blue that I had already clocked before we cleared the entrance.
Shield first. Wait for it to break before we push hard.
Nine-Toes looked at us.
Then he grabbed his belt buckle and thrust his hips forward with the full confidence of a man who had never once in his life considered that this might not be an appropriate greeting.
"You woke the wrong dog," he said, carrying across the arena like he'd done this before and enjoyed it. Then louder: "AWW YEAH."
"That's our guy," I said.
"Yep," Lilith said.
"Let's kill him."
"After you."
His first shot came faster than I expected. The incendiary pistol put fire across a wide spread and I went behind the nearest pillar while the rock above me turned briefly orange. I heard Lilith phase, the soft crack of displaced air and the faint pressure drop that the passive absorption picked up before my ears caught up, and then Nine-Toes swearing as she reappeared behind him.
I came around the pillar and fired twice. Both hit the shield, the blue flaring and absorbing the impact. Nine-Toes was quick for his size, pivoting between us, and I had to pull back as the incendiary pistol swung toward me.
"Shield isn't dropping fast," Lilith called.
"Pressure both sides," I called back. "He can't track two angles as easy."
It worked well enough. When he turned toward Lilith I moved forward and fired. When he turned toward me she closed distance and hit. Not clean but he was moving constantly, using the raised ground, firing in bursts that kept us from committing fully but the shield was taking damage, the blue cracking now with each hit.
Then he threw a grenade.
It landed between us, the pin already pulled. I didn't think about it. I just pulled it in the whole object, absorbed before it detonated, the blast happening inside my storage space and dissipating into heat that scattered across the materials I had on hand.
Silence.
Nine-Toes stared at where the grenade had been.
I stared at my hand.
"Did you just—" Lilith started.
"Apparently," I said, and fired three more shots into the shield.
It broke on the third.
The chains came from two alcoves set into the arena walls actual chains, metal on stone and Pinky and Digit came out finally.
They were smaller than the gully skags, lighter on their feet, armour plates bolted to their backs that caught the torchlight. They split immediately into a flanking pattern, moving with the kind of coordination that came from running this same arena enough times that it was muscle memory.
Nine-Toes dropped off the raised platform and started moving, using the pillars now, firing from new angles while the skags pushed us apart.
Lilith went right. I went left and Pinky followed me, tracking my movement with more focus than a skag its size should have had. I blinked to the far side of a pillar and overshot, ended up a half meter past it, got my footing and spun to find Pinky already reorienting.
Its mouth opened wide.
I fired into it.
The round hit somewhere critical. Pinky yelped and staggered, shaking its armoured head hard. I pulled material from the cave floor and shaped it fast, a dense irregular mass, not precise, just heavy and drove it forward. Pinky went down and didn't get back up.
Across the arena Lilith had Digit cornered against a pillar, hitting it in bursts while it tried to get around her. It got a shoulder into her once, hard enough that I heard the impact, but she took a step with it instead of against it and came back around and finished the thing before it could regroup.
Nine-Toes was alone.
He knew it. The way he was moving changed, no more working angles, just forward, both fists, the pistol holstered or dropped somewhere in the last thirty seconds. He crossed the arena fast.
I blinked sideways and felt the air from a swing that would have done real damage if it had connected. Lilith caught the follow-through on a phase-reinforced forearm and shunted it wide, grimacing at the impact.
"Hits hard," she said.
"Yeah."
Nine-Toes turned toward me. I was already pulling material, not shaping it, just compressing it and pushed it out in a directed mass that hit him across the chest and upper arms. Not enough to drop him. He was too heavy for that. But it shifted his balance half a step back, stance broken.
Lilith hit him with everything she had.
Phase energy, point-blank, tattoos blazing. The discharge staggered him into a pillar hard enough that dust fell from the ceiling above the impact point. He stayed up, the man was built like load-bearing infrastructure but barely.
I closed the distance and fired twice.
Nine-Toes' legs went.
He came down slow, the way big things did, settling rather than falling. Hit his knees, then his hands, breathing in long heavy pulls.
"I'll rip your arm off," he said, half to himself, with the absolute sincerity of someone who still believed it.
He tried to get up.
He didn't make it.
I fired once more.
Nine-Toes stayed down.
The arena went quiet except for the torches and the sound of both of us breathing. My arms ached from the sustained output. The material reserves were lower than I liked Lilith had a bruise forming along her forearm where she had taken Nine-Toes' swing and there was a cut above my eyebrow from a rock fragment that I hadn't noticed happening and was only noticing now because it had started bleeding into my eye.
I pressed my sleeve against it and looked at Nine-Toes.
Lilith crouched beside the body and picked up the pistol he had dropped, incendiary, Dahl machine pistol with a fire mod, the one T.K. had mentioned.
The Clipper.
She checked the magazine, tested the weight, looked at me. "You want it?"
"You keep it."
She holstered it alongside her repeater. Stood up. Looked around the arena.
"Alcove at the back," she said. "Nine-Toes must have a stash."
"Yeah," I said, and followed her.