The golden fractures in the sky spread wider, thin lines of absolute darkness cutting through the amber light like necrotic veins.
The Knight turned its eyeless attention from Lou to the woman.
No one moved. Not the cultist, not the giant, not Lou.
It was as if the universe was holding its breath, deciding which of them to delete first.
This thing is attracted to movement, Lou realized, his Seer sight picking up the way the Knight's energy rippled whenever the floor shifted. Anything that moves in here is a target. Ironically, myself included, even though I'm the one who 'wrote' this place. It's like a motion-sensor turret with a god complex.
He looked at Baldy.
The man was forcing himself upright, blood dripping from his split lip and his arms trembling.
His eyes were wide, burning with the kind of desperation that usually leads to a very messy death.
"I'm not dying here…" the man rasped.
Baldy is an idiot, Lou thought, watching the man tense his muscles.
He attacks without reading the room. This giant formed because he moved and it attacked him because he moved. It only turned toward me because I flinched. As long as I stay as still as a statue, I'm safe. Well, "safe" is a relative term in a collapsing dimension.
Lou wondered if the raven-haired woman had done the math yet.
"We should kill the boy," she whispered sharply.
Fools, Lou thought, a grim smile tugging at his lips.
"You distract that giant thing while I kill the boy," she added.
Lou's grin vanished instantly. Great. Plan B is "Let Baldy die so I can finish the job."
If Baldy charged, he was a dead man. Lou knew it, and the woman probably knew it too.
She was using her partner as a meat shield to force Lou to move using her projectile shadows. Once Lou moved to dodge her, the Knight would pivot back to him and finish what the brute started.
Baldy wiped the blood from his mouth. "Better make this quick, then."
He roared and lunged.
The moment his foot left the ground, the space rejected his very existence.
The floor twisted violently, rising at an angle that snapped his balance like a dry twig.
His attack collapsed before it even began, and the woman hesitated, her own strike delayed by the sheer clumsiness of her partner's failure.
Then the Knight moved.
It was a blur of polished gold and a split second where reality seemed to skip a frame.
The blade fell in a single, heavy arc that sounded less like a sword strike and more like a final judgment.
Baldy's body froze.
For a fraction of a second, he just stood there.
Then, his upper half slid slowly from his lower, crashing against the warped golden floor with a wet, final thud.
Silence returned, and this time, it was heavy.
One down, one to go, Lou thought.
He'd promised to kill them both in the alley, and even if it was a five-meter golden glitch doing the heavy lifting, he was still the architect.
It counts, right? I'm responsible for his death, though I would've preferred to do it with my own two hands.
He looked at the woman. What now? You going to try your luck and join him in pieces?
The woman didn't scream. She didn't even breathe.
Her shadows flickered weakly at her feet and then withdrew, hiding in the folds of her clothes. Her eyes darted from the two halves of her comrade to the Knight, then to the bleeding cracks in the sky.
Understanding finally dawned on her. "…It reacts," she whispered.
Lou swallowed hard. She caught up to the rules. Damn.
She went completely still. No hostility, no energy flare, no movement. Even her shadow-form vanished. The Knight paused, its head tilting slightly toward her, then it stopped, returning to its hollow, terrifying vigil.
Move, damn it! Don't fuck up my strategy now! Lou screamed internally.
"…It only responds to instability," she said slowly, her eyes locking onto his. "Movement… intent… energy… You can't even control this, can you?"
Lou didn't answer. He didn't have the breath to lie, and moving his jaw felt like pulling a trigger.
Now it was a staring contest with the heat death of a universe as the timer.
The castle groaned, a violent, structural shriek. A deep fracture ripped across the sky, swallowing the light in streaks of void.
The ground beneath Lou flickered solid, then hollow, then gone. His knees buckled. The heat in his chest surged, no longer a controlled burn but a wild, screaming fire.
"I can't… hold it…" he choked.
And that was the mistake.
The moment his focus slipped, the castle panicked. The walls surged upward, twisting into unnatural arches, corridors stretched toward infinity and then folded back like broken glass.
The Knight's posture changed. It wasn't "waiting" anymore.
A crack spiderwebbed across the floor, racing toward the woman. She flinched, stepping out of harm's way.
Gotcha.
The Knight noticed. It began to glide toward her, moving with a haunting precision, stepping only on the fragments of the floor that weren't about to dissolve.
Her composure shattered. "No...no, wait....!"
She took a full step back, and the collapsing space pounced.
The floor beneath her didn't just broke and imploded into a bottomless nothing.
Golden light poured into the void as she screamed, jumping back toward what she thought was solid ground.
But the ground was a lie.
It shifted again, throwing her off balance, and in her panic, her shadows burst outward in a frantic shield.
That sealed it.
The Knight appeared in her path.
It didn't swing or strike. It simply occupied the only safe space left, its massive golden bulk a literal wall of fate. The corridors around her folded inward with impossible speed.
"No...WAIT.....!"
The space crushed her from all directions. There was a sound like a mountain being ground into dust, then a flash where light bent at impossible angles.
For one heartbeat, she was a silhouette stretched thin against the gold, and then she was gone, compressed into a single point of light before being extinguished by the dark.
The Knight stood alone in the wreckage, motionless once more.
The castle trembled in its final throes.
Lou dropped to one knee, his vision tearing at the seams as the world unraveled. The walls collapsed into glittering fragments of light. The sky shattered completely.
"I'm...getting...out…" he gasped.
But something felt wrong. The Knight turned slowly. It looked directly at him.
Lou's breath caught. …Shit. I moved.
The Knight took a step. The ground no longer responded to Lou's will; reality was flickering like a dying bulb. He tried to stand, but his legs were lead.
The Knight raised its massive sword. Not in anger, but with that same chilling, mechanical salute.
"No...."
The world shattered.
The gold, the knights, and the void exploded into a million shards of white light.
Lou was thrown back into the real world like a corpse spat from a shallow grave.
He hit the muddy cobblestones of the alley with a bone-jarring thud, his lungs screaming for air that wasn't filled with golden dust.
The mist of the Arkum District rushed back in, cold and damp, and for a second, he just lay there in the filth, making sure he was still in one piece.
I'm alive, he thought, staring at the gray sky through the fog. Three years, Klaus. We're still on schedule.