Hoju landed on stone.
He came back to himself in pieces, first the cold of polished floor under his palms, then the ringing quiet where Fragg’s laughter used to be, then the light.
It came from everywhere and nowhere at once, soft and golden, pooling along walls that seemed carved from a single seamless material he had no name for.
He pushed himself upright slowly, one hand braced against the nearest pillar, and looked around at a place that made absolutely no sense next to anything he had ever known.
It looked like a temple.
Rows of towering golden pillars stretched away from him in every direction, spaced with a precision no human mason in Teria could have managed, supporting a ceiling so high it faded into shadow before he could make out any detail.
The air smelled faintly of something he couldn’t place, clean and metallic, nothing like the damp pine of the mountain he’d grown up under.
He ran to where the entrance should have been.
There was nothing there, no shimmer, no seam, only more of the same smooth golden wall stretching unbroken in either direction.
He pressed both hands flat against it anyway, half expecting his fingers to pass through the way they had on the way in.
Instead he was thrown backward, hard enough to knock the air from his lungs a second time that day, landing several feet away on the polished floor.
He lay there for a moment, staring up at a ceiling he couldn’t see the top of, and let himself feel, just briefly, exactly how alone he was.
Then he made himself stand up, because feeling sorry for himself had never once fed him, clothed him, or kept him alive in sixteen years of practice, and it wasn’t going to start now.
He decided, without anyone to consult and nothing but instinct built from years of hunting unleveled game in the forest below the mountain, that the smart move was to observe before he moved.
He found a wide pillar near the entrance wall and pressed himself into its shadow, watching the space in front of him for any sign of movement, any flicker of something that might be a monster.
Nothing came.
After what felt like a long, careful stretch of silence, he risked stepping out and moving along the wall, staying low, staying close to cover, the same instincts that had once let him track rabbits without spooking them now scaled up to a space that dwarfed anything he’d ever hunted in.
There were no monsters.
Not one.
He crossed the width of the hall without incident, then the length, tracing the perimeter of what turned out to be a surprisingly contained space, more like a single grand chamber than the sprawling dungeon layouts he’d heard travelers describe over the years in half remembered rumors.
Golden pillars.
Golden floor.
Golden light with no visible torch or window feeding it.
He covered nearly the entire chamber in under an hour, and the only thing in it that wasn’t more of the same repeating architecture was the gate.
It stood at the far end of the hall, easily three times his height, wrought from the same golden material as everything else but carved in patterns that hurt slightly to look at directly, symbols that shifted at the edge of his vision whenever he tried to focus on them too closely.
Duncan’s voice came back to him unbidden, something about dungeons that had no monsters, only riches, dungeons that appeared randomly the way this one had.
Maybe this was one of those.
Maybe the gate was simply the vault, and behind it sat whatever treasure Fragg had half convinced himself, or half pretended to convince himself, Hoju might actually walk away with.
He approached slowly, one careful step at a time, every instinct he had built over a decade of survival telling him this was either the safest thing in the room or the single most dangerous.
He was three steps away when the gate reacted.
It did not open.
There was no groaning of hinges, no visible seam splitting apart.
The golden surface simply rippled, once, like water struck by a stone, and then something pulled at him from the center of it, a force with no visible source that closed the remaining distance in an instant and dragged him through before he had time to plant his feet or brace against it or do anything at all except feel the world tear sideways around him.
The temple was gone.
Hoju hit the ground hard, rolling once across a surface that crunched and scraped under him, and came up on one knee with dust and grit stinging his eyes.
When his vision cleared, nothing about what he saw matched anything that had come before it.
The sky above him was not a sky.
It burned, streaked with what looked like stars on fire, drifting slow and deliberate across a black expanse that had no moon, no sun, nothing familiar to anchor it.
The ground beneath him was scorched black in wide uneven patches, cracked in places deep enough to swallow a grown man, and the air itself carried a pressure that made his ears ache and his chest feel tight in a way no altitude on the mountain back home had ever managed.
Somewhere ahead of him, past a ridge of broken black stone, he heard it.
Not the sound of a fight the way he understood fighting, the scrape of blades, the grunt of effort.
This was something else entirely, a low continuous rumble that rolled through the ground and up through his knees before it ever reached his ears, punctuated every few seconds by impacts that shook loose dust from cracks in the stone around him.
He felt it before he understood what he was feeling.
A pressure settling over the entire battlefield, ancient and enormous, the kind of weight that made every hunting instinct he had ever trusted scream at him in a language older than words.
Hoju had never in his life stood this close to something his body recognized as death before his mind had finished catching up.
He was still frozen there, one knee on scorched black ground, staring toward the ridge where the sound of impossible violence kept building, when something rose into the sky above it, silhouetted against the burning stars, moving with a speed his eyes could barely track.
It had six arms.
Each one carried a different weapon.
And it was only one of two things fighting on the other side of that ridge.