Either he cut the rope on his own, or something cut it for him.

I was already moving before the realization fully registered. Even a half-second hesitation could be the difference between life and death. I needed to get in there. Now.

Reading my intent, Halima placed herself between me and the ripple. Her face was drawn and pale but her mouth was set. “Our orders were explicit.”

“Get out of my way,” I growled.

Below her, her small bush-with-legs summon looked back and forth between us, collateral caught in the crossfire of a detonating team dynamic. Talia squared off with it and the bush-thing cowered.

“Halima, don’t—” Keith tried.

“The Ceaseless Knight—” she cut off, hand gripping her hilt tighter as I ignored her and attempted to walk around, and she shuffled in front of me.

“Move!” I reached out to shove Halima out of the way. Instead of engaging, she danced backward, taking a much more serious stance.

Interesting. Not like Keith. Much more experienced, despite the social naivety. She was fully prepared for this to come to blows.

“Go back to the entrance,” I tried again.

“Not without you.”

I threw back my head and laughed, then fixed her with an icy stare. “Okay. Fine. We can do this the hard way. But you better be ready to kill me.”

“It doesn’t have to come to that—” Halima started.

“Yes, it does. For your sake—”

I took another step forward. Halima wasn’t much shorter than me, but when you were standing within spitting distance of another person, the inches really added up. She didn’t budge, but the fire in her eyes grew uncertain.

“—Because if your little obstruction here costs me the time I need to save Nick? I won’t report it to Hastur. Or Sunny. Or Aaron. I won’t report it at all. In retrospect, you’ll realize what a massive fucking blunder you made. And you’ll wonder why there were no consequences. In the meantime, everything around you—your every dream, desire—anything you care about will fail. Everything you touch, turned to ruin.”

“You’re posturing. Yes, you might be further along and have a special class, but you’re just another User,” Halima said. It sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

I leaned forward, looking straight ahead, and whispered just loud enough for her to hear. “If you really believe that, why don’t you head over to Region 6. Ask them if fucking with me was worth it.”

Halima’s resolve disappeared. To her credit, she didn’t move out of the way. But she also didn’t move to stop me as I circled around her.

“What do we do?” Keith called after me.

“Go back to the entrance. Or don’t. Your call,” I said.

He might have said something else, but I didn’t hear it. I splashed through the stream and used the rock alcove for support, lowering myself through the mirage.

Almost immediately, I started falling.

The <Operator’s Belt> was already on from earlier. I instinctively oriented myself so my feet faced the ground and bent my knees. My eyes took their time adjusting to the darkness, rendering me mostly blind.

<Perception> flared at the last second. I landed in a crouch. My bones jostled from the sudden impact, but somehow I stayed on my feet, maintaining the low-to-the-ground position as I waited for my eyes to adjust.

The chamber resembled a pit more than a cave. All dirt and mud. There were long lengths of tree trunks spanning from the packed-dirt ceiling to the muddy floor, branches and dying greenery squished against the ground.

A bead of moisture touched my cheek, then another. If the tree situation wasn’t disorienting enough, floating beads of water descending from the entrance in a chaotic spiral populated the cave, as if gravity lost hold on them once they entered the ripple.

Other than the scattered taps of water beads colliding with each other, the cave was utterly silent.

The silence—more than anything else—scared the hell out of me. I’d expected to find Nick entrenched in a life-or-death battle. I knew from the way the rope had spasmed there was some sort of struggle close to the ripple’s entrance. Screams, clashing swords, bestial growling and gnashing of teeth, I would have taken any or all of them over the silence.

Because silence, more often than not, meant the struggle was over.

It was so complete that I was startled when Talia landed beside me in barely more than a whisper.

Fighting my instinct to charge blindly into the dark, I activated <Harrowing Anticipation>. As the threads spread from my core, the surrounding ground lit up an endless sprawl of glowing red semi-circles, including one directly about two feet in front of me.

Mines?

Probably not, but from the spacing and size, that’s what they looked like. I went down on one knee and leaned forward for a better look, prepared to react at the slightest movement.

When none came, I leaned closer.

The color was strange. Off-white. And despite the perfectly rounded hole that ensconced it, the surface itself was bumpy. There was a slit between a pair of parallel protrusions, and to the side of that, a distended knot with two holes—

That’s a face.

I breathed out.

Dirt scattered as the face rotated forcefully, parallel protrusions of its mouth parting to reveal flat, horse-like teeth. Still mostly covered in dirt, the mouth snapped several times, its teeth clicking together in a hollow snap.

There was a chorus of snaps that followed from either side, as several surrounding faces replied in kind.

Talia tensed beside me, but after the short echo of chattering, the faces fell dormant again.

Something odd about that response. Felt instinctual, like something an animal or insect would do.

I flicked a piece of moist dirt toward the mouth. Watched it bounce off the creature’s cheek. The direct hit elicited no reaction. After a few seconds, a split tongue emerged from its mouth, cleaning the surface of its face in a practiced, clocklike motion, knocking the dirt free.

I replayed the events in my head, coming to an inevitable conclusion. Whatever these things were, they triggered on sound.

I stood slowly, panning the subterranean until I found what I was looking for. A cluster of holes, each big enough to house a small body. As I’d noted earlier, Nick wasn’t built for stealth. His armor would have given him away immediately if he was moving. Talia fell in line behind me as we tread carefully, following the trail of holes, noting scuffled footprints in the mud.

We passed by a thick trunk of inverted oak and found the source of the trail.

There were a dozen of them, maybe more. Now that I had a better look, their pale skin looked far closer to the mandrakes we’d killed on the surface than a human’s. Still—their anatomy wasn’t far off, though it gave the feel of something prehistoric. They had giant hands and feet, and a vicious curve in their spines that gave them the look of something that was always hunched over. And like that first face in the dirt, they had no eyes or indents for them, everything from their forehead to their noses a smooth line of flesh.

Cavefiend.

Several held Nick down. Given the two dead cavefiends, bleeding black blood into the dirt beside him, they weren’t taking any chances. Nick was on his back, each arm and leg pinned in place by several cavefiends, an endless number of pallid hands and fingers with too many knuckles keeping him flat against the ground.

One dug its fingers into his throat, keeping him from calling out. Another cavefiend, larger than the rest, stood over Nick. It was trying to pry his mouth open. I solved the mystery of why with a glance at the circle of rope hanging on the cavefiend’s filthy belt, and the small pieces of pink flesh that hung from that rope like macabre ornaments.

Trophies that looked very much like tongues.

I wasn’t able to save Jinny. It was a failure I still carried with me. Her death happened too quickly, the wound too decisive. But this was different. These motherfuckers had made a critical error. Instead of killing their prey immediately, they intended to toy with it instead.

The feeling of helplessness disappeared, consumed by something raw, something visceral.

Something feral.

I snapped.