The depression beneath the earthen wall was deeper than it looked from a distance, shadowed enough that even with his new clarity of senses William had to crouch and feel his way forward through the dark. Cerberus’s single head pressed close behind him, close enough that its breath stirred the hair at the back of his neck, a silent presence he found himself grateful for despite everything that had happened between them in the last hour.
"Reyes?" His voice came out cracked, barely above a whisper. "Reyes, can you hear me?"
Something shifted in the dark ahead, a small sound, more exhale than words, but enough to send William’s heart lurching sideways with something close to hope. He scrambled forward on his knees, ignoring the fresh pain that lanced through his shoulder with every movement, until his hands found fabric, then flesh, then the unmistakable shape of a man curled protectively around his own ruined arm.
"I’m here," William said, hands hovering uselessly over Reyes’s body in the dark, unsure where it was safe to touch. "I’m here, you’re not alone, just hold on."
Reyes’s eyes cracked open, glassy and unfocused, finding William’s face somewhere in the gloom. "Belforht." The word came out slurred, barely intelligible. "Told you... to run."
"I did run. Then I came back." William’s throat tightened. "Don’t talk. Save it."
He needed light. He needed to see the extent of the damage before he could figure out what to do next, and fumbling blind in the dark was only wasting time Reyes might not have. William reached instinctively for the bond still humming warm and new at the edge of his awareness, and Cerberus’s head lowered past his shoulder into the hollow, jaws parting slightly, a low ember glow building at the back of its throat.
[Hellfire Manipulation — Available]
’Not fire. Not here, not this close to him.’ William’s hand shot up instinctively, though he had no idea if the gesture would even register. "No, wait, don’t—"
The glow steadied instead of igniting, settling into something closer to a controlled ember, black flame contained and dimmed until it cast only a faint, flickering light rather than open fire. William stared at it for a stunned second before understanding settled over him. ’It listened. It actually listened.’
The light was enough. Reyes’s condition came into focus in ugly detail, his left leg bent at an angle that made William’s stomach turn, blood soaked through torn cloth along his ribs, his face pale in a way that had nothing to do with the strange black glow illuminating it. But his chest still rose and fell, shallow and uneven, and his eyes, though glassy, were still tracking William’s movements.
"You’re going to be fine," William said, with more confidence than he felt. "I’m getting you out of here."
"Guardian." Reyes’s hand closed weakly around William’s wrist. "Where’s the guardian."
William glanced back over his shoulder at Cerberus, still holding its dim ember light steady, patient and quiet in a way that felt almost surreal given what it had been an hour earlier. "It’s with me now. Tamed. I’ll explain everything once we’re out of here, I promise, but right now I need to get you moving."
Reyes’s grip loosened, some mix of shock and disbelief crossing what little of his expression remained readable. "Tamed. A guardian class." A weak, broken laugh escaped him, more cough than laughter. "Belforht, you absolute—"
"Save your breath," William said, though something in his chest loosened slightly at the sound of it, some proof that the man beneath his hands was still fighting to stay conscious, still stubborn enough to find something to say even half dead in the dark. "I need you to tell me if you can move your leg. Any of it."
"Doesn’t feel like much of anything down there."
’Broken. Badly.’ William forced the panic back down, forced himself to think through it the way he’d trained himself to during years of being the least useful member of every party he’d ever joined. He had no healing skill. No medical training beyond basic field triage every hunter learned before their first Tower entry. What he had was a mana potion pouch Ilsa had pressed into his hands hours ago, and a bonded guardian capable of things he didn’t yet fully understand.
He fished the pouch open with shaking hands, found the vial marked for wound stabilization rather than mana restoration, and pressed it to Reyes’s lips. "Drink. Slowly."
Reyes obeyed with the docility of a man too exhausted to argue, and a faint shimmer of pale gold light spread briefly across his ribs where the worst of the bleeding had been, the potion’s magic doing what little it could to slow the damage without fully healing it. It wasn’t enough. William knew that even as he watched it happen. But it was something, and something was better than watching a man die in the dark because he had nothing at all to offer.
"I need to carry you," William said. "It’s going to hurt."
"Already hurts." Reyes’s eyes had drifted half closed again, consciousness slipping despite his efforts to hold onto it. "Do what you need to."
William looked to Cerberus, and found the guardian already lowering itself, single head dipping in something that looked almost like invitation. Understanding passed through the bond before William fully articulated the thought, some instinct on Cerberus’s part reading the shape of what he needed before he asked for it.
"You’ll carry him?" William asked aloud, feeling faintly absurd speaking to a creature that had nearly killed him an hour earlier, and yet the moment the words left his mouth, the answer came back clear and certain through the bond. Yes.
Together, carefully, they moved Reyes onto Cerberus’s broad back, the guardian holding impossibly still despite the awkward weight and the fresh blood soaking into its fur. William followed close behind as they made their way out of the hollow, back through the scorched marsh toward the stairwell that would carry them up and out of the Tower’s reach, every step a fresh negotiation between urgency and the fragile, unconscious man draped across a monster’s back.
’We’re going to make it.’ William repeated the thought like a mantra, matching his pace to Cerberus’s careful, deliberate steps. ’We’re actually going to make it out of here.’
Behind them, the marsh lay quiet and ruined in the pale, sourceless light, bearing no trace of the guardian that had called it home for however many hours it had been stranded there, displaced from a floor seven levels below the one it should never have reached. William didn’t look back to wonder why. There would be time enough for that question later, once Reyes was safe, once the adrenaline finally burned off and left him to reckon with everything that had changed in the space of a single desperate afternoon.
For now there was only the stairwell ahead, glowing faintly with its patient, ancient light, and the long climb back toward the world he’d left that morning as a Common grade nobody and would return to as something the Tower itself had never quite prepared him to become.