The Glutton charged.

It didn’t lunge the way the Barrow Lord had, all straight lines and brute geometry.

This thing moved like an avalanche that had learned to think, its bulk rolling forward with a terrible, ground-shaking momentum that made the stalactites overhead shiver loose dust.

Nyx was already gone.

She flickered left, then right, her Shadow Step carrying her across the cavern in stuttering bursts of darkness.

Each time she reappeared, she struck, a slash across its forelimb, a jab at the seam between two plates of chitin, and vanished before it could answer.

The Glutton didn’t seem to care. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

It absorbed each cut the way a river absorbs a thrown stone, a brief disturbance, then nothing. Its attention never wavered from her.

It tracked her movements with a patience that was far, far worse than rage.

It was learning.

’Bearer. The thing is learning. Every step I take, it answers half a beat sooner.’

’I see it. Keep going. Three more passes, I need it angry enough to rear.’

’And should it catch me before then?’

’It won’t.’

’Such certainty, Bearer. Misplaced, perhaps. But flattering all the same.’

Finn pressed himself against the far wall of the cavern, circling wide. The longsword he’d taken from Rask felt clumsy in his grip. It was too long, too heavy, balanced for a man six inches taller and twenty pounds heavier.

But it was steel, and it had an edge, and that was going to have to be enough.

He watched Nyx draw the creature through a figure-eight pattern across the chamber floor, her movements growing tighter, more economical.

She was conserving MP now, spacing her Shadow Steps, filling the gaps with raw footwork.

She was fast. Genuinely, terrifyingly fast. Her Agility had climbed since he first summoned her, and whatever instinct drove her combat sense went deeper than any number on a sheet.

But the Glutton was faster than it had any right to be.

On her sixth pass, it anticipated her.

She stepped out of shadow behind a stalagmite on its left flank, dagger already descending, and the Glutton’s tail whipped around in a low, scything arc that should have been impossible for something that size.

It caught the base of the stalagmite and shattered it.

Nyx threw herself backward, the spray of stone shards raking across her forearms. She hit the ground rolling, came up in a crouch, and for the first time since the fight began, she wasn’t smiling.

’It read my exit.’

’I know. Switch pattern. Don’t use the same shadow twice.’

’I had no intention of doing so. Credit me with some small wit, Bearer.’

’Then use it. Quietly.’

She did not answer at first. Finn felt the silence settle through the bond before she said. ’Charming.’

The Glutton swung its head low, mandibles scraping stone, and from deep inside its chest came a sound like a furnace door being cranked open. A dull orange glow kindled behind its serrated maw.

The breath attack.

Finn’s blood went cold. ’Nyx, move. NOW!’

She was already moving. The Glutton reared up onto its hind limbs, its bulk rising like a collapsing building played in reverse, and from its open maw a torrent of corrosive vapor erupted across the cavern floor.

The stone where Nyx had been standing dissolved.

Not melted. Dissolved. The rock simply ceased to be solid, bubbling and hissing into a smoking trench that ate three feet into the floor in under two seconds.

The acrid stench hit Finn an instant later and his eyes watered so badly he nearly lost sight of the creature entirely.

But he didn’t need to see it.

He needed to see its back.

And there they were.

The cluster of eyes on the rear of its skull had opened when it reared, seven of them, arranged in a tight rosette pattern.

Each one was the size of a fist, each one a deep, wet amber that caught the dying glow of its own breath like tiny lanterns.

They were looking straight up. Not at him.

Finn ran.

He didn’t think about the distance. Didn’t think about the fact that his HP was still in the fifties, that his arms were shaking, that the sword in his hands felt completely foreign.

He thought about the angle. The trajectory. The half-second window that was already closing as the Glutton’s forelimbs began to descend.

He planted his left foot on a broken spur of rock and launched himself upward.

For one suspended heartbeat, he was airborne, the cavern wheeling beneath him, the stench of acid in his nostrils.

Then he brought it down.

The blade punched through the central eye with a sound like a boot going through wet cardboard.

[CRITICAL HIT!]

The Glutton screamed. Not the roar it had used before, not the predatory snarl. This was a sound of genuine, blinding pain, a shriek that hit a register Finn felt in his fillings.

It thrashed. Its massive body torqued sideways, and Finn was flung free, the sword wrenching from his grip as he tumbled through the air.

He hit the cavern floor shoulder-first, rolled twice, and fetched up against a stalagmite hard enough to see white.

[-22% HP]

[HP: 34%]

The Glutton staggered. Amber fluid streamed from its ruined eye cluster, and its limbs moved with a new, jerky uncertainty, the coordination broken.

But it wasn’t dead.

Its head swung, mandibles snapping, searching. The remaining eyes, six of seven, locked onto Finn with a hatred so pure it was almost admirable.

It charged.

’Bearer!’

Finn tried to stand. His right leg buckled. Something in his knee had gone wrong on the landing, a deep, grinding wrongness that sent fire all the way up his thigh.

He could see the Glutton closing. Could count the cracks in its chitin. Could smell the acid still steaming from the vents along its jaw.

Then Nyx appeared between them.

Not behind it. Not at its flank. Between.

She stood in the direct path of the charge with both daggers drawn, her hair whipping in the displaced air, and she did something Finn had never seen her do before.

She planted her feet.

The girl who fought like smoke and water, who barely ever met an enemy head-on, squared her shoulders and held her ground.

’Nyx, what are you—’

’Returning the favour, Bearer.’

Her eyes blazed crimson. Not the usual steady glow. Something deeper, something that seemed to push against the borders of what her sealed power allowed.

The air around her thickened, the shadows at her feet stretching and darkening until they looked less like shadows and more like wounds in the floor.

The Glutton hit her.

Or tried to.

At the last possible instant, she dropped to her knees and drove both daggers upward into the soft tissue of its underbelly.

It was the place the forum post had mentioned, the place that was only exposed during the rear-up.

Finn realized with a jolt of understanding, during a full-tilt charge when its forelimbs lifted off the ground.

She hadn’t just understood his plan.

She’d improved it.

[CRITICAL HIT!]

[CRITICAL HIT!]

[POISON STATUS APPLIED!]

The Broodmother’s Fang sank to its hilt. The second dagger followed it. Nyx twisted both and ripped sideways, opening a gash along the Glutton’s belly that spilled something black and steaming across the cavern floor.

The creature’s momentum carried it over her, its bulk sailing past like a derailed train. It crashed into the far wall with enough force to bring a curtain of stone down from the ceiling, burying half its body in rubble.

It twitched.

Shuddered.

Tried, once, to drag itself free.

Then the poison took hold. Its limbs seized, its mandibles locked open in a silent scream, and slowly, with the terrible fear of something that had never imagined this outcome, the Dungeon Glutton died.