The colony pushed inward.

  Not fast. Methodically, the Floor 7 Rabbits advancing from every wall simultaneously, reducing the open space in the dome by increments, the red eyes at floor level and the White Sentient's single red eye above them across the room, watching the compression with the patience of something that had done this before and knew how it ended.

  Aris and Colette stepped back until their backs found each other.

  The nearest Rabbit was three meters. Then two.

  "Repel," Colette said quietly, behind him. "Clear a path to the northern entrance. I'll pull you and we run for—"

  The White Sentient charged.

  The dome floor registered it before they saw it move, the vibration through the stone arriving first, and Colette grabbed Aris's arm—

  He pnted his feet.

  "Aris—"

  He pulled every thread of Void he had and every thread of Sovereign's amplification running through it and he pushed outward.

  Not directed. Not shaped. Every direction simultaneously, the Repel expanding from him as a sphere, as rge as he could make it, Sovereign's boost behind it making it rger still, the force building for the half second he held it before releasing it all at once.

  The colony left the floor.

  Every Rabbit in the dome's interior went backward, the force catching them uniformly, lifting them off the stone and carrying them across the dome and into the walls with impacts that cracked the stone and cracked most of the Rabbits, the sound of it a single massive compression of air that left the dome ringing afterward.

  The White Sentient hit the far wall.

  It didn't go down. It was too rge to go down from the impact alone, the mass absorbing what would have fttened anything smaller, but it staggered, the one eye losing its tracking focus for two seconds, the wounded shoulder dropping.

  Two seconds was what Aris had.

  He was already moving.

  Across the dome floor, the frozen surface cracking under his boots, the sword up, Void compressed at the tip with everything Sovereign had left to give it, and the headache behind his eyes was a steady pressure now and the connection to Void was thin and he did not slow down.

  The White Sentient found him with its eye.

  Too te.

  He drove the sword in at the junction of the neck and the left shoulder, the compromised side, the side Colette's dagger had been working on since the fight's beginning, and he triggered Repel at the tip with everything remaining.

  The force released.

  The sound was wrong. Not the dome ringing or the colony impact. Something wetter and more final, the specific sound of a structure failing along a compromised line, and the green came not in a pour but in a wave, hitting Aris full in the chest and face and coating everything above the knee in the dark thick green of the White Sentient's internal architecture expressing itself externally.

  He stepped back.

  His boots slid on the green-slicked stone and he caught himself and straightened and looked at what was in front of him.

  The White Sentient was on the dome floor.

  The left portion of it separated from the right at the point of entry, the wound too rge and too deep and too thoroughly addressed by Repel's final output to hold the structure together. The one eye was open and the red in it was present for another three seconds and then it wasn't.

  The dome was very quiet.

  Around the walls, in the tunnel mouths and the cracked warren openings, hundreds of red eyes watched. The colony, the ones that had hit the walls and survived, the ones that had been in the passages when the Repel went out, all of them watching the dome floor and the Sentient on it.

  One by one the eyes disappeared.

  Back into the walls, back into the passages, the colony retreating the way water retreated when the pressure behind it stopped. The tunnel mouths emptied. The warren openings went dark. The red disappeared from the dome until there was none of it left and the dome's mineral light fell on nothing but stone and ice and green and the Sentient's still form.

  Aris stood in the middle of it.

  He was covered in green from chest to boot. His face had not been spared. The smell was the smell of something biological that existed deep underground and had never developed an opinion about how it smelled because nothing had ever survived long enough to have the conversation.

  He heard Colette cross the dome behind him.

  She came around to his front and looked at him.

  She looked at him for a long moment, the assessment moving from the top of his green-coated head to the green-soaked boots, and then at the White Sentient on the floor, and then back at him.

  She smiled.

  Not the almost-smile. A real one, the full version, the kind that arrived without being managed.

  "You've found some confidence," she said. "Good." She looked at the green covering him from colr to boot. "You look like a piece of moss."

  Aris looked down at himself.

  "It smells," he said.

  "Profoundly," she agreed.

  "Like something that has been underground for—"

  "Yes," she said.

  "For a very long time without—"

  "Yes, Aris."

  He looked at the Sentient on the floor. At the green spreading slowly across the dome's frozen surface, mixing with the melt of the ice where the ambient temperature was already recovering without the boss's cold output maintaining it.

  "Water," he said.

  "The lower floors have underground streams," Colette said. "Floor 9 or 10. I'll find one."

  "Promise," he said.

  "Promise," she said, with the tone of someone who has just made a commitment they intend to keep for reasons that include but are not limited to personal proximity to the current situation.

  The hide came off in sections.

  The White Sentient's fur, dense and close-cropped and built for dungeon cold, was worth money if you knew who to sell it to, and Colette knew who to sell it to, the specific knowledge of a former guild captain who had been converting dungeon harvests into operational funds for three years. She worked quickly and practically, the dagger finally being used for something she didn't object to using it for, and Aris helped with Elysse's sword, the two of them working around the areas of worst green damage where the hide's integrity was compromised.

  "How much," Aris said.

  "Per section," Colette said, cutting a clean edge. "Twenty silver minimum. Maybe thirty if we get it to the right buyer."

  "Each," Aris said.

  "Each."

  He cut faster.

  They worked in the dome's warming air, the ice retreating from the floor in a slow melt that ran in thin channels through the stone's cracks, the green of the Sentient darker where it had pooled. Around them the evidence of every previous encounter the dome had hosted y undisturbed, the old brown and the scattered items, the dome's record of itself unchanged by the newest entry into it.

  The Sentient's body began to lose coherence.

  Slow at first. The edges of it, the boundary between the Sentient's mass and the surrounding air, becoming less defined, the material breaking down into the ambient dungeon energy the way dungeon creatures broke down when they were done, the biological structure returning to the energy that had produced it. The green faded as the mass faded, the dungeon reciming its materials with the efficient indifference of a system returning components to inventory.

  The hide sections they'd already cut held. Removed from the body before the dissolution began, they retained their structure, the fur still dense and the material still present, lying on the dome floor in the sections they'd taken them in.

  Aris watched the rest of the Sentient disappear.

  It took four minutes. By the end there was nothing on the dome floor where it had been except the stain of green and the cracks from the stomp and the melt water running through them. The dome held its evidence of every encounter it had hosted and added this one to the record in the only way the dungeon recorded things, as residue and absence.

  "Ready," Colette said, folding the st hide section.

  She had them in a roll, the fur outward, tied with the cord from her pack with the efficiency of someone who had been field-packing dungeon harvests since she was fifteen. She shouldered the roll and looked at the northern entrance behind where the Sentient had been.

  The Floor 8 tunnel. Open. The dark of it genuine and deep, the mineral deposits in this section of dome not reaching far enough into the passage to illuminate more than its first few meters.

  "Aris," she said.

  He was still looking at where the Sentient had been.

  "The geometry," he said. "In the nest. On the wall above the warrens." He hadn't been going to say it yet. It came out anyway. "It was the same as the sigil on Elysse's back."

  Colette was quiet.

  "Larger," he said. "Much rger. Carved into the rock. Old."

  "How old," she said.

  "The warrens had grown over the lower portion of it," he said. "The Rabbits had been nesting under it for long enough that the upper part was the only section still visible."

  She looked at the sealed wall across the dome, the one he'd closed with Gravity.

  "That's what you didn't want to talk about," she said.

  "Yes."

  She absorbed this in the way she absorbed things, completely and without visible disruption.

  "Floor 8," she said. "We keep moving."

  "Yes," he said.

  He picked up Elysse's sword and followed her toward the northern passage and the green on him walked with him and smelled the way it smelled and the dome fell away behind them with all its evidence intact, the dungeon's record of what had happened here permanent and uninterested in being read.