The doors waited at the end of the violet corridor, and they were far too big for a place like this.
Boran stopped ten meters away and looked up. They were made of dark stone, twice as tall as the tunnel that led to them, carved with lines that started as geometry and slowly became figures. Men with shields. Men with spears. A thing with too many arms above all of them. Dust had settled into every groove, so the carvings looked gray instead of black, and where the dust had fallen away, faint blue light moved inside the stone like water under ice.
He had never seen a door that made him feel small before. This one looked like it had been built thousands of years ago to hold something back.
He did not go in. He sat down with his back against the wall, six meters from the doors, and took the lantern out of his inventory one last time.
He shook it. Nothing moved inside.
One bottle of oil had carried him for more than a day. Part of it had gone into a fire to cook Dark Crawler meat and the rest he had burned low for hours to stretch it. Somewhere back in the skeleton passages it had finally gone out, and he had not noticed for a while, because by then he had stopped needing it.
Boran put the dead lantern away and took out the phosphor mushrooms instead.
There were still three bundles of them in his inventory, left over from the very first hour of the mission, back when this had been a resource job and his biggest problem was mud. They glowed faint blue in his palm, soft and cold. Bright enough to find a wall. He broke one bundle apart and pressed the pieces into a crack in the stone beside him.
The corridor came back in pale blue. Not much of it. Enough.
Twilight Pit was full of light like that, once he stopped fighting the dark and started using it. Blue moss, crystal veins, fungus in every crack that held water. It was never bright, and it never ran out of oil.
He still had the two glowsticks he had bought at the same stall on the same terrified afternoon, five gold each, never used.
Then he started counting what he had.
[HP: 53/85]
[Mana: 11/20]
Eleven mana. Shield Slam cost two. That was five slams if he spent nothing else, and Fortify alone was five mana, and Brace was two every time a hit came in that he could not avoid. Eleven mana was nothing.
So he waited.
He waited longer than he wanted to. There was no timer on the quest, which had scared him at first and now helped him, because nothing in the System was telling him to hurry.
William had given him a few rations and a waterskin with them.
Boran unwrapped the bundle on his knees and ate half of it, dried meat and hard bread and two of the salted biscuits everyone in the Hub complained about, and drank a third of the waterskin. Then he put the rest away, because whoever walked out of that hall was going to want it.
Then he slept, and he had not planned to.
He woke twice, both times sure he had heard stone move, and both times it was only water dripping somewhere behind the wall.
[Long Rest completed: 7 hours]
Seven hours. On a stone floor, six meters from a door with a monster behind it, and he had slept like something that had been switched off. His shoulders told him about the floor when he sat up. Everything else told him something he had not felt since the burrow, which was rested.
When he checked the numbers, they had crawled upward.
[HP: 68/85]
[Mana: 18/20]
"That's better."
Boney had not been idle.
Boran had given him the small knife before lying down, mostly because the skeleton kept tapping the quiver and then tapping the sack of loose bones they had dragged out of the archer hall. Companion Link let him use Boran's crafting skills. Fletching I let him do it badly but not uselessly.
He woke up to a workshop.
The shafts were laid out on the marble by his boot in a row, sorted by length. Bone dust and rejected pieces had been swept into a neat pile off to one side. The quiver was full enough that it did not rattle when he lifted it. And Boney was still sitting cross-legged in the pale mushroom light with a shaft in one hand and the knife in the other, turning it slowly, checking it.
Boran opened the notification log, and it went on for a while.
[Improvised Bone Arrow x9 created by Bound Skeleton Companion]
[Quality: Crude - Damage 22]
[Repetition threshold reached]
[Utility Skill increased: Fletching I → Fletching II]
[Bone Arrow x7 created by Bound Skeleton Companion]
[Quality: Standard - Damage 26]
[Repetition threshold reached]
[Utility Skill increased: Fletching II → Fletching III]
[Fletching III: shaft straightness and head fitting improved. Bone-tipped arrows may now be produced at Good quality. Crafting time reduced by 30%.]
[Reinforced Bone Arrow x8 created by Bound Skeleton Companion]
[Quality: Good - Damage 30]
[Bound Skeleton Companion: extended handling of bows and shafts has improved control. Ranged Accuracy +1.]
[Utility skills: Gathering F / Botanist F / Survival FF / Fletching III]
"Good job, Boney," he said.
Boney held up the shaft in his hand, then pointed at the pile of rejected pieces, which was much larger than the row of finished arrows.
"Yeah, I can see how you did it," Boran said. "Two hundred bad ones and you learn."
He counted the arrows himself: six original bone arrows, eight Reinforced, seven Standard, and nine Crude.
He put a hand on top of Boney's skull, briefly, the way you would with a dog.
"Good work."
Boney went very still, then went back to the shaft in his hands.
The two vials sat in his inventory. He opened the descriptions again, because he wanted to be sure before he wasted either of them.
[Minor Health Regeneration Potion]
[Restores 30 HP over 60 seconds]
[Minor Mana Regeneration Potion]
[Restores 15 Mana over 90 seconds]
Not instant. Neither of them. That mattered. If he drank the health potion at the wrong moment, he would die halfway through the sixty seconds and the rest would be wasted on a corpse.
Boran leaned his head back against the stone and stared at the ceiling.
"Thanks, William," Boran muttered.
He pushed himself to his feet.
The doors did not open when he touched them. They opened when he pushed, slowly, with his shoulder and both hands.
The hall was enormous. The ceiling went up so far that he could not find it at all, and old crystal chandeliers hung down out of that darkness on chains, still glowing faintly blue after however many centuries. That was where most of the light came from. Under it, thin lines of pale fungus grew along the cracks in the floor and in the broken edges of the carvings, so the whole room sat in the same cold underwater glow as the rest of the Pit. The floor was marble, laid in huge blocks, and every block had geometric patterns cut into it. The patterns pointed inward, all of them, toward a circular platform in the center of the room that rose maybe half a meter above the floor.
The walls had been carved into stories. Battles. Cities. Most of it was cracked, and some of it was scorched black.
There were bones everywhere along the edges.
And on the platform, kneeling, was Mur-Azar.
Boran first thought it was a statue. Then he saw blue light leaking from its joints and realized it was alive.
It was four meters tall, kneeling. Its body was stone, gray-white and smooth in some places, rough and unfinished in others, carved with patterns that ran from its chest to its shoulders and from its hips down its legs. But the stone was not all of it. Bone had grown into the seams. It filled the gaps at the elbows and knees like tendon, and it wrapped the spine in a long ridge of vertebrae too big for any animal Boran wanted to imagine, and inside the open stone cage of its chest he could see ribs. But three times too large, curving around a core of light.
Its head was a helmet with no face inside it, only dark, and a crown of stone feathers swept back from the top. Where the feathers ended, thin bone spurs continued them.
A stone cape hung from its shoulders, cracked in two places.
In its left arm it held a shield the size of a wall. Not a shield shape, really. A slab. It was patterned like its body and laced across with bone, and in the center sat a dark blue crystal.
In its right hand, resting point-down against the platform, was a sword. Stone again, with a line of small bones set into the middle of the blade like a spine.
The blue light in its joints pulsed slowly. In. Out. In. Out.
It was asleep.
Boran stood very still in the doorway and understood, with total clarity, that he did not have to do this today.
Except that he did, because the exit portal was disabled until Objective 4 was complete, and Objective 4 was that.
"Boney," he whispered. "Do not shoot it yet."
Boney lowered the bow.
Boran crouched at the edge of the doorway and just watched for a while. That was the one advantage he had. It was asleep, so he could look.
He looked at the chest first, because the chest was the only part of it that was not gray.
The light behind those big ribs was not like the blue in its joints. It was brighter. Almost white.
Then he looked at the arm holding the shield.
The slab was not near the chest. It was in front of it. Left forearm across the ribs, crystal facing out, and even asleep, kneeling, alone in a sealed room, it had not let that arm drift anywhere else.
"I can't beat it by trading blows. I'd need four hundred swings, and it only needs two. The only part that looks breakable is the light in its chest—and there's a shield like a wall in front of it."
He watched the blue light pulse in the joints. In. Out.
"Which means I don't have to be stronger than it," he said. "I just need that arm out of the way. Once."
It was a good thought—but he owned nothing that could shift a four-meter statue's arm. Still, he ran through his inventory in his head: a rusted sword, a dagger, a shield, a roll of bandages... and twenty meters of rope.
He stopped on the rope.
He could not pull that arm anywhere with a rope. He was nowhere near strong enough and he knew it. But the rope did not have to pull. It only had to be in the way while the thing pulled itself.
Everything down here ran at him sooner or later. And when something that heavy started running, it could not stop in the middle.
"Boney," he whispered. "If that runs at me and its foot goes through a rope, what happens?"
Boney thought about it, then tipped one bony hand slowly sideways.
"That's what I think too. It goes down."
Then it would get up again, and he would be exactly where he started, because a rope lying on a floor could not hurt anything that heavy. Tripping it was not enough. He needed it on the ground with that arm stuck under something.
So he looked at the pillars.
There were six of them standing around the platform. One had already come down and lay in long pieces across the edge. The one beside it was still up. It was cracked the whole way around near the base, and it leaned, maybe a hand's width off straight, seven meters of old stone standing there out of habit.
"I tie one end to that pillar. The other end stays down here on the floor, right where he'll run. He charges, the rope catches his foot, he can't stop, and he pulls the pillar down on himself."
Boney looked at the leaning pillar, then back at Boran.
"It's leaning, so the base is lifted off its seat on one side and there'll be a gap under there. I put the rope through the gap first, then take the rest of it around and around the stone and haul it tight. Then it isn't sitting on the pillar. It's holding the pillar."
Boney's skull tipped slowly forward.
"It comes down on him and he goes down with it, arm and all. He can't keep a shield in front of his chest if he can't get that arm out."
The only hole in it was the low end. If that end moved when the foot hit the line, the rope would slide along the floor and the pillar would never feel a thing. It had to be tied down. To marble.
And he did have a way to fix something to the floor. He had been carrying it since the burrow and had never used it once.
Boran opened the shield's form list and read the line under Root Shield again.
[Root Anchor I - Root Shield Form]
[Load Limit: 200 kg. Requires natural ground within 2 m. Placed anchors remain until destroyed or replaced. Limit: 1 active.]
Dirt, or something the roots could hold on to.
"So that's my whole problem," he murmured. "I need dirt. In a marble hall."
Then he started looking at the floor.
The platform was cracked. Badly. There were splits in the marble radiating out from the center, the kind of damage that came from something heavy hitting the same place many times. Along the outer edge, where the platform met the floor, a whole section of blocks had sunk and broken apart, and in the gap between them, Boran saw something that made him stop.
Gray fungus. A thin line of it, growing along the crack.
He had pulled a hundred mushrooms out of wet ground in his first hours down here, and not one of them had been growing on rock. Fungus needed something to sit in.
Soil.
Boran moved along the wall, keeping low, staying in the bone drifts where the chandelier light did not reach. When he got to the broken section he pushed two fingers into the crack. The marble had split all the way through, and under it there was wet dirt, packed and cold and full of little roots.
"Dirt," he whispered. "That's my low end. The pillar's the other one. It works, Boney."
Boney scratched its skull.
"One part you're not going to like. The anchor only comes out of the Root Shield, and changing form puts you back inside the shield with it." Boran held up a hand before the skeleton could tap anything. "It's a minute. Two, maybe. I plant it, I tie the rope, I change straight back, and you're out again the second I need damage."
Boney waved goodbye.
[Adaptive Shield: change form?]
[Warning: Bone Shield Form III is active. Changing form will dismiss all linked features: Bound Skeleton Companion, Bone Exoskeleton III.]
"I know. Change."
The bone shield came apart on his arm and reformed, pale wood and woven root, ugly and light, and Boney came apart with it. The mist pulled off the floor in a long purple-white ribbon and went back into the face of the shield, and the blue fire in the eye sockets was the last thing to go out.
[Root Shield Form active]
"Root Anchor."
[Root Anchor I activated]
[Load Limit: 200 kg]
Roots poured out of the shield's face and drove into the crack, into the dirt, thickening as they went until a knot of them the size of his chest sat wedged in the broken marble. He pulled on it with both hands and put his whole weight on it. It did not move.
Two hundred kilograms. Mur-Azar weighed a great deal more than that, and so did the pillar.
"Doesn't matter," he whispered. "You're not holding him. You're holding a rope for one second, long enough to pull a pillar down on his head."
He tied one end to the root knot. Then he crossed the floor, kept low, and tied the other end to the pillar, under the base first and then around it until it could not come off.
The rest of the rope he left lying flat in the gutter of broken marble at the low step of the platform. Gray rope on a gray floor. Anchor on one side, pillar on the other, and the charge would come between them.
It was stupid. He knew it was stupid. It was also the only idea he had, and he had learned in the Rootgnawer burrow that stupid ideas that used the room were worth more than smart ideas that only used his HP.
"Bone Shield Form Three," he whispered.
[Adaptive Shield: change form?]
[Note: Root Anchor I is placed. Placed anchors remain until destroyed or replaced.]
Boran let out the breath he had been holding since he read that line in the doorway.
"Change."
The roots on his arm hardened, split, and rebuilt themselves into ribbed bone. The skull settled into the center with a dry click.
[Bone Shield Form III active]
[Select linked feature]
[1. Bone Exoskeleton III - 75 HP]
[2. Bound Skeleton Companion - Boney Stark]
"One," Boran said, and hated the sound of it. "Sorry, Boney. Let me do the heavy lifting first."
The cold came under his sleeves, and the plates crawled up his forearms and across his chest and around his waist and down his thighs, thicker than the last version, heavier.
[Bone Exoskeleton III activated]
[Exoskeleton HP: 75/75]
He walked out onto the open floor.
He made himself stop at nine meters. He broke a second mushroom bundle and scattered the pieces in a short line on the marble behind him, off to one side. Not to see by. To know where the edge of the platform was when he was too busy to look for it. Then he wiped his hands on his trousers.
Then he raised the Bone Shield.
"Hey," Boran said.
Mur-Azar didn't move.
"HEY!"
The head moved first. Turning on a neck of stone and stacked bone, with a sound like a millstone starting. Two points of blue light woke inside the empty helmet and found him.
[Eternal Guardian Mur-Azar - Level 12]
[HP: 480/480]
[Warning: Level difference 9. Retreat recommended.]
"I know," Boran said.
Mur-Azar stood up.
It took its time doing it, and that was somehow worse than if it had moved fast. Stone slid on stone. Bone creaked in the joints like a ship. Every centimeter it rose, the room got smaller, and when it finally reached its full height its crown of feathers nearly touched the lowest chandelier and the crystals up there began to ring softly against each other.
Then it spoke, and its voice was high and grinding, metal on metal, the worst sound Boran had heard since he arrived in this world.
"FLESH," it said. "I SMELL... FLESH. HOW MANY... DID THEY SEND?"
"There's just me," Boran said.
"ONE." The joints made a sound that was almost a laugh. "ARMIES HAVE DIED... ON THIS FLOOR. AND THEY SEND ME... ONE CHILD... AND A DEAD MAN'S SHIELD."
"Nobody sent me," Boran said. "I just need to kill you to get out of here."
"THEN COME IN, LITTLE ONE. THIS ROOM IS ALREADY... A GRAVE. I WILL ONLY... WIDEN IT."
It raised the shield, and the dull crystal in the middle of it woke up bright blue. Mur-Azar leaned back very slightly, right shoulder dropping.
Then the sword came around in a flat horizontal arc, and Boran did not need to be told what to do about that. It was slow. It was so slow that he had time to think about how slow it was while he was moving. He stepped back two paces and the wind of it dragged dust off the floor and pushed his helmet crooked.
The sword hit a fallen pillar behind where he had been standing and broke it into three pieces. The blue in the joints had run down the arm and into the blade as the sword came around.
"Okay," he said to himself. "The light goes where the hit goes."
He kept his eyes on the joints after that.
Mur-Azar's left foot slid forward.
Boran did not know what that meant yet, so he did the safe thing and put a broken pillar between them. The Guardian charged. Mur-Azar crossed nine meters, and the shield took the pillar out of the world entirely. Chips of it hit Boran's chestpiece and his cheek.
[HP: 68/85]
[Exoskeleton HP: 75/75]
No damage.
"Left foot forward is the shield," Boran said out loud, because saying it made it stick. "Lean back is the sword."
He learned the third one the hard way ninety seconds later.
Mur-Azar bent its knees, and the light in its joints swelled and went from blue to deep red. Boran had never seen that color on it before and had no idea what it meant. Then the shield's lower rim came down flat on the floor, and the patterns in the marble lit up under his boots.
The floor threw him.
There was nothing to block. It was not coming at him, it was coming up at him, and a shield in front of his chest was worth nothing at all. The energy came through the marble and through his boots and through his knees, and the exoskeleton under his clothes rang like someone had struck a bell against his spine. He came down on his shoulder five meters from where he had been standing and skidded, and the shield edge screamed on the stone.
[Exoskeleton HP: 47/75]
Twenty-eight damage, and there wasn't a thing he could've done about it—because it was bludgeoning damage.
He got up.
Blue was normal. Red was worse. Nobody had told him that. He had worked it out in three minutes, the way he learned everything, which was by having it applied to his body.
Then he tried to hurt it.
He had to. The plan was a guess and he only had one rope, so first he wanted to know if the simple answer worked. Maybe there was still a chance, a small stupid chance, that a Tank with a bone shield and a rusted sword could just grind a boss down the way he had ground down Bone Archers.
He waited for the sword to come around, stepped inside the arc while it was still finishing, and hit the Guardian's leg with everything he had.
[Mur-Azar HP: 479/480]
One.
He hit it again with the shield edge, the sharp rib side, the part that had opened Bone Walkers.
[Mur-Azar HP: 478/480]
One.
He summoned the Rusted Bone Walker Sword and stabbed into the seam behind its knee, where bone filled the gap between stone plates, and the blade skipped off and nearly came back into his own thigh.
[Mur-Azar HP: 477/480]
Boran backed away with his heart going like a hammer.
"Fortify!"
[Fortify activated]
[Mana: 13/20]
[Current Physical Defense: 15]
"Shield Slam!"
[Shield Slam activated]
[Mana: 11/20]
The skull in the center of the shield flashed red-white and the impact drove into the Guardian's shin hard enough that Boran felt it in both shoulders. A crack opened in the stone. Actual damage, this time.
[Mur-Azar HP: 460/480]
No stun. Bosses were not going to be stunned by him.
Seventeen damage for two mana and a twelve second cooldown. Boran did the arithmetic while running sideways out of a sword sweep, and he did not like it. Twenty-seven more slams. He did not have fifty-four mana. He had eleven, plus fifteen in a bottle, and Fortify was going to eat five of that every thirty seconds if he wanted the slams to be worth anything.
He was not going to win this by hitting it.
Which meant he had to make it open. The chest.
The arm was worse than he had thought, though. Every time Boran moved to the left, the shield turned. Every time he tried to slip inside its reach on that side, the slab came down and he had to throw himself away from it. It was not clumsy at all, and whoever had written the guides that called Guardians clumsy had probably been standing behind five other people when they learned it.
He learned the rhythm properly. Every attack had a windup and a recovery, and the bigger the attack, the longer both were. Blue attacks came almost casually, one after another, and cost the Guardian nothing. Red attacks made the light in its joints swell first, brightening from blue into deep red over a full second, and after a red attack there was a pause of two or three seconds where nothing in that enormous body could change direction.
Brace was only worth mana when the hit actually came at him and he could put the shield in it. He used it once, on an overhead swing he could not avoid because he had backed himself into a corner like an idiot, and the shield held and his arm went numb to the elbow.
[Exoskeleton HP: 31/75]
[HP: 68/85]
[Mana: 9/20]
His breathing was wrong now. Too fast, too shallow. There was blood in his mouth from somewhere and he could not tell where, and the bone plates around his ribs pressed harder every time he pulled air in.
"Come on," he told himself. "Three more steps. Three."
He reached the broken section, planted his boots on the far side of the rope, and turned to face the Guardian across it.
Then he lowered the shield.
It was the hardest thing he did all day. Lowering a shield in front of that thing felt like putting his head on a table.
"HEY!" Boran shouted. "ROCK HEAD!"
Mur-Azar's helmet turned.
"You know what I think?" His voice cracked halfway through and he kept going anyway. "I think you've been standing in this room for a thousand years because nobody wanted you anywhere else!"
The light in the joints went red.
"I think they built a door this big so they wouldn't have to look at you!"
"YOU WILL SCREAM... LONGER... THAN THE OTHERS DID."
"Any village stonemason could carve better than whoever made you!"
The left foot slid forward.
Boran's whole body went cold, and he stayed exactly where he was, which was the single most difficult act of his life up to that point. He needed the charge. A charge put weight behind the shield and the shield low and the legs committed. A charge was the only attack in Mur-Azar's list that could not stop, and the only one big enough to pull seven meters of pillar down on top of itself.
It came.
Four meters of stone and bone accelerating across marble, the slab dropping toward the floor as it came, the crystal in the center of it blazing blue, the patterns under his boots lighting up in a line pointing at his chest.
Boran waited.
Then he threw himself sideways, and Mur-Azar's leading foot came down into the gutter of broken marble, and the rope came up out of the dust.
It caught the leading ankle, dragged up the stone plates, and went tight.
The root knot held. That was all it had to do, and it did it, and everything the Guardian had put into that charge ran down the line and into the bottom of the pillar.
Seven meters of old stone came off its base and fell.
It came down across Mur-Azar while the Guardian was still moving, from the right shoulder all the way down to the knees, and it drove the whole thing flat into the marble. Boran had never heard anything that loud. The floor broke in a circle. Dust went up to the chandeliers and came back down slowly.
When he could see again, Mur-Azar was on its back with the pillar lying across it.
It was all the way under. The stone held the right arm and both legs down against the floor. The left arm was caught underneath its own slab, where the shield had gone into the broken floor edge-first. The sword had come out of its hand and lay six meters away.
It pulled once and the pillar did not move. It pulled again and the pillar only ground down onto it harder.
Nothing on it was free except its head, and the space between the two.
That space was its chest.
[Root Anchor I destroyed]
[Rope destroyed]
In the gap between the stone plates, behind the too-large ribs, a crystal the size of his head burned white-blue, and the light of it threw the whole hall into sharp shadow.
Boran got up off the floor.
"Boney," he said. "Now."
He opened the form list while he was still running.
[Adaptive Shield: change form?]
[Warning: Bone Shield Form III is active. Changing form will dismiss all linked features: Bone Exoskeleton III.]
"Change."
[Bone Exoskeleton III dismissed]
[Bound Skeleton Companion summoned]
The mist poured out of the face of the shield, ran along the floor in a long purple-white ribbon and stood up out of itself, and the blue fire came on in the eye sockets. Boney had the bow off its shoulder before its feet had finished forming.
It looked at the thing pinned under the pillar.
He pointed at the white light burning in the open chest.
"Just shoot that!"
Boney was already pulling one out of the quiver.
He climbed onto the fallen pillar and then onto Mur-Azar's chest, planting his boots between the ribs on stone that was still straining to wriggle free.
"Fortify!"
[Fortify activated]
[Mana: 4/20]
[Current Physical Defense: 15]
Then he took out the mana potion, drank all of it, and dropped the bottle.
[Minor Mana Regeneration Potion consumed]
[Restoring 15 Mana over 90 seconds]
Two mana a slam. Fifteen more coming into him drop by drop over the next minute and a half. A boss on its back that could not reach him.
"Shield Slam!"
[Shield Slam activated]
[Mana: 2/20]
The ribbed edge of the Bone Shield came down on the crystal with his whole weight behind it, and the skull in the middle of the shield flashed red-white.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 426/480]
Thirty-four. Seventeen doubled, because it was the core.
The first arrow came in past his knee.
He never saw Boney shoot it. It went into the crack the shield had just opened and buried itself to the fletching, and the light came up around it.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 366/480]
"Again!" Boran shouted. "Don't stop!"
Twelve seconds until the skill came back. Boran did not stand still for one of them.
He set his boots wider between the ribs, took the shield in both hands, hauled it up over his head and brought it down on the crystal. The sound of it came back off the walls a second later.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 358/480]
Up. Down.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 350/480]
Up. Down.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike x2]
[Mur-Azar HP: 334/480]
"Shield Slam!"
[Mana: 0/20]
The skull flashed and the shield went through the crystal like a hammer through ice.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 300/480]
[Fortify expired]
The potion was still going into him drop by drop, and drops were not slams.
The Guardian came alive under him. Stone screamed on stone, the whole chest heaved up off the marble and the pillar ground it flat again, and the two blue lights in the empty helmet swung around and found him standing on its own ribs.
"OFF... MY... BONES."
"No."
The second arrow came in over his shoulder while he was saying it.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 240/480]
"I WILL WEAR... YOUR SPINE... ON MY CROWN."
[CRITICAL: Core Strike x4]
[Mur-Azar HP: 208/480]
The crystal was not smooth anymore. White cracks ran out from where the edge kept landing and where the arrows kept going in, spreading through it like ice on a puddle, and the light coming out of the splits was too bright to look at.
His arms had stopped belonging to him. His shoulders burned. His hands shook so badly that he had to lace his fingers through the ribs of the shield to keep hold of it.
"A CHILD," Mur-Azar said. "WITH A DEAD MAN'S SHIELD. AND STILL... MY LIGHT... IS GOING OUT."
"Shut up. I had to spend all that time in a fucking cave because of you," Boran said, and stepped off the line without being told to.
The third arrow went through the space where he had been standing.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 148/480]
Then the crystal under him changed color.
The white went out of it. Red came up in its place, and the red ran out of the chest and into the joints, down the buried arm, along the pinned legs, until every seam in the thing he was standing on was burning with it.
"ENOUGH."
The right arm moved.
It had been flat under the pillar since the stone came down, and it had been empty since the sword was knocked out of it. Now it came up. Stone ground on stone, the pillar lifted a hand's width off the shoulder holding it, and the arm dragged itself out from underneath with a noise like a house coming down, and Boran's boots went out from under him on the ribs.
The empty hand closed around him, lifting him off the chest the way someone plucks a stone from a field.
Then Mur-Azar threw him.
He flew across the hall. For a split second, he saw the entire room from the air—then he slammed into the wall.
[HP: 33/85]
[Injury: Cracked ribs]
He could not breathe. He lay there with his cheek on cold stone.
He got his head up.
The pillar came off the Guardian's chest.
Mur-Azar stood amid the swirling dust.
Every seam, every joint, all the way out to the crown, burning yellow-white.
The shield came up out of the broken floor with it, still hanging off its left arm. Mur-Azar looked down at it for a second.
Then it threw the shield away.
The shield went across the hall end over end, took a piece out of the carved wall and came down flat, and the blue crystal in the middle of it went dark on the marble.
The chest was open now. The cracked core sat there in plain sight, burning white between the ribs, and the thing walking toward him did not care.
It picked up the sword. This time, it gripped the hilt with both hands.
"NOW," it said. "THE REST... OF ME."
Boran got an elbow under himself. His ribs went into him like a knife and it took two tries to get to one knee. He put the shield up, because that was the only thing he knew how to do.
Then Mur-Azar crossed the hall.
He did not see it start. There was four meters of stone by the platform, and then there was four meters of stone standing over him, and the sword was already coming around flat. The same attack from the first minute of the fight. The slow one.
It slammed into his shield, sending him flying to the far side of the room.
[HP: 21/85]
Twelve meters away, back in the bone drifts along the wall, Boney was shooting as fast as it could pull. An arrow went past the Guardian's shoulder and broke on the wall. Another one skipped off a plate on its hip and spun away. Nothing moving that fast could be hit from that far.
Boran got a hand flat on the floor and pushed.
"DIE!"
He never saw that one either. The flat of the blade came across and the shield went with it, out of his grip, sliding away over the marble, and he went down on his hands with his arm dead from the shoulder.
[HP: 10/85]
He could hear himself breathing hard. The floor under his hands had his blood on it.
Mur-Azar stopped over him and took the sword up in both hands. Lifting it that high pulled the chest wide open.
Boney ran.
Boran had never seen it run. It came out of the bone drifts at a flat sprint with the arrow already on the string, and it did not stop to shoot.
[Bound Skeleton Companion: Must protect master]
[Ranged Accuracy +2]
Six meters.
The blade came down.
Boney shot.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 88/480]
The gold stuttered, and the swing came apart in the middle of itself. The sword went into the marble beside Boran's head instead of through it, close enough to take the skin off his ear.
Mur-Azar turned its head away from the boy on the floor and looked, for the first time, at the small dead thing that had crossed the whole room to get to it.
"YOU... WHO… ARE YOU?"
Boney put the second arrow through the same hole as the first.
[CRITICAL: Core Strike]
[Mur-Azar HP: 0/480]
The gold went out like a cut wire. Out of the crown first, then the arms, then the legs, and the last of it drained back into the chest and died there. The sword came down out of both hands and rang on the marble. Four meters of stone and bone came down after it and stopped being anything at all.
[Eternal Guardian Mur-Azar defeated]
[+3000 XP]
[OBJECTIVE 4: COMPLETE]