The descent to Floor Three alone felt different than it ever had with a party at his back. William moved through the stairwell corridors at a careful jog, mana potion pouch clutched tight against his ribs, every echo of his own footsteps sounding too loud in the empty stone passages.
’No going back now.’ He forced the thought down before it could turn into something closer to panic. ’Just find him. Find him and get out.’
The threshold to Floor Three pulsed as he approached, and the transit pulled him through in that same disorienting instant, stone corridor dissolving into grey marsh, the sourceless white sky stretching overhead exactly as it had hours before. Except now the reeds around him were scorched black in a wide radius, the earth gouged with claw marks deep enough to swallow a grown man’s arm to the elbow.
William’s stomach turned. This was the fight that had happened after they fled. This was what Reyes had bought them with his body.
He crept forward through the ruined marsh, senses stretched as far as his Talent allowed, searching for any flicker of a living aura that might belong to a C Rank hunter clinging to survival. What he found instead, half sunken into a scorched crater thirty meters ahead, was Reyes’s shield arm, the iron gauntlet cracked clean through, still smoking faintly at the edges.
’No.’ William’s legs carried him forward before his mind caught up, dropping to his knees beside the wreckage. ’No, no, this can’t—’
There was no body. Just the gauntlet, and beside it, a long furrow in the mud where something massive had dragged its prize away, deeper into the marsh, toward whatever passed for a lair on a floor that shouldn’t have held a creature like this at all.
William’s hands shook as he picked up the ruined gauntlet, turning it over once before setting it down with a care that felt absurd given everything else happening around him. ’He’s not dead. He can’t be dead. Wounded, taken somewhere, still breathing, that’s all this means.’
He wanted to believe it. He wasn’t sure he did.
The pulse he’d learned to recognize hours earlier returned then, faint but unmistakable, drifting from somewhere deeper in the marsh where the reeds grew taller and the ground turned soft and black with old rot. William followed it without letting himself think too hard about what he was walking toward.
The lair, when he found it, wasn’t a cave or a den in any conventional sense. It was a hollow carved directly into the marsh floor, walls of packed black earth rising ten feet on either side, the space beyond swallowed in a gloom that seemed to resist the white sky’s light entirely. And in the center of that hollow, chained by nothing but its own exhaustion, lay Cerberus.
All three heads were down, sides heaving with labored breath, black blood matting the fur along one flank where Reyes’s earlier strike had landed true. The creature that had seemed unstoppable hours ago now looked smaller somehow, diminished, a wounded animal too spent to do more than lift its heads and growl weakly as William’s presence registered.
There was no sign of Reyes anywhere in the hollow.
William stood frozen at the lip of the depression, torn between the desperate hope that Reyes might still be alive somewhere nearby and the plain, sick certainty settling into his gut that he wasn’t going to find him. The marks in the earth, the missing gauntlet, the absence of any trace beyond that single piece of armor, none of it painted a picture with a happy ending.
’He’s gone.’ The thought finally landed, cold and absolute. ’He held the line so we could escape, and it cost him everything, and I couldn’t do a single thing to change that.’
Grief and rage tangled together in his chest, sharp enough that for a moment he forgot to be afraid of the creature lying wounded thirty feet away. Cerberus’s center head lifted higher, red eyes fixing on him with something that might have been curiosity or might have been the last flickering instinct of a predator recognizing prey.
William’s Taming Talent stirred instinctively, the same reach he’d thrown out hours ago in a moment of pure desperation. This time, weakened as the creature was, the rejection came slower, softer, though it still hit like a wall of ice water down his spine.
’Still too strong. Even half dead, still too strong for a Common grade Talent to bond.’
He staggered back a step, and that small movement was enough. The right head snapped upright, a low snarl building, and the exhausted stillness that had held the creature in place shattered in an instant. It surged toward him across the hollow, faster than something that wounded had any right to move, and William barely had time to throw himself sideways before jaws the size of his torso closed on empty air where he’d stood.
He scrambled back through the reeds, heart hammering, mana potion pouch forgotten in his panic, and the creature gave chase with a wounded fury that made it no less dangerous for its injuries. William’s foot caught on a root and he went down hard into the mud, and when he twisted to look back, the center head was already looming above him, red eyes reflecting a version of himself he barely recognized.
’This is it.’ The thought arrived with a strange, distant calm, the kind that sometimes came in the last instant before something irreversible. ’This is how it ends. Not even a real fight. Just... this.’
The jaws descended.