The descent was violent enough to make the world lose shape.

Trafalgar’s body tore through collapsing sand and broken stone while Widow’s Whisper held fast between two plated rings, dragging him behind the worm like a hooked shadow. The desert floor had opened only for an instant before sealing over them again, and what little light had followed him down was gone almost at once. Heat disappeared with it. The air turned close, dense, carrying the taste of dust that had not seen the sky in a long time.

He finally ripped himself sideways and planted one armored boot against the wall of the tunnel. The impact jarred through his whole body, but it gave him enough leverage to wrench the dagger free. Widow’s Whisper dissolved into a thin shimmer and vanished from his hand before the worm could drag him into the next bend.

Trafalgar landed in a low crouch.

The place around him was immense.

This was no simple burrow. It was a buried kingdom carved by appetite and time, a labyrinth of monstrous passages wide enough for the worm’s full body to pass through without slowing. The walls curved in long, polished scars where those armored rings had scraped against compacted earth over and over until the stone itself had learned their shape. Smaller offshoots split away into darkness, some sloping upward, some dropping deeper, all of them carrying that same oppressive geometry of something enormous having ruled this place for years.

’Wow. I didn’t know the Academy had kept a sand worm here long enough for it to do all this.’

The thought crossed his mind only once before the tunnel shook again.

The worm had not stopped moving.

Its body slid somewhere ahead through the dark with a grinding roar that came through the walls before it reached the air. Sand sifted from above in thin streams. Dust drifted across his visor. Every step forward felt less like entering a cave and more like stepping into the inside of a machine built by hunger.

’Shit, visibility is bad down here.’

He lifted Maledicta slightly and sent [Arc Slash] through the dark. The dark-blue wave raced ahead, shaving loose sand from the floor and biting a long wound into the right-hand wall. The cut illuminated the tunnel just enough for him to see a wider chamber up ahead before the dust swallowed the line again.

Something moved through it.

The worm came from the left tunnel first, but only half of it. A section of plated body slammed through the chamber like a living battering ram, not trying to bite him this time, only to turn the entire space into a killing field. Trafalgar answered with [Severance Step], his body blurring into a curved dash that carried him up along the edge of the chamber and behind a jutting rib of stone just before the passing mass crushed through the place where he had been standing.

The chamber shuddered.

The tunnel above cracked.

A whole strip of packed earth broke loose overhead.

Trafalgar did not waste the opening. He swung Maledicta again and released a second [Arc Slash], not at the worm’s outer armor this time, but at the fractured ceiling above its path. The dark-blue wave cut through what little stability remained and brought half the roof down over the creature’s back in a storm of broken earth and stone.

The falling debris slowed the worm for barely a breath before its body powered through it with brute force, showering the chamber in fragments. Trafalgar raised one arm across his visor as chips of rock burst around him.

’Tch. Its body really is a tank. Hard enough that I’ll burn through my mana before doing anything meaningful to that armor.’

That was the truth of it. On the surface, he had already learned that shallow hits were not enough. Down here the problem was worse. The creature owned the terrain, and every time it chose not to expose the mouth or underside, he was left trying to cut through a moving fortress.

The worm came back harder.

It drove out of the darkness headfirst now, maw widening into those layered circles of teeth. The tunnel made it uglier. Above ground its size had been imposing. Here it was intimate, oppressive, the kind of enormity that filled vision and crushed thought if you let it. Trafalgar saw the mouth opening and used [Severance Step] again, the second blur of motion carrying him across the chamber in a curved line just as the worm lunged through the place he had occupied.

Its body slammed into the opposite wall and tore a trench through compacted stone before twisting back toward him.

Faster than before.

It was reading him too.

Trafalgar planted his feet and answered with [Morgain’s Requiem].

Maledicta moved in a sequence too fast to call elegant and too deliberate to call wild. Six curved slashes unfolded around him in blue-black arcs, each one spilling into the chamber and carving through the dark like pieces of a single violent dance. In the open desert the technique would have spread wider. Down here it became oppressive. The chamber narrowed it. Forced it. Each arc bit into wall, floor, ceiling, and whatever part of the worm crossed its path. Stone split. Sand burst outward. Fresh wounds opened between plated ridges as the slashes crossed the creature’s side in quick succession.

The worm recoiled with a shriek so deep it shook loose another wave of dust from overhead.

Good.

That one had hurt.

The problem was what came after.

The entire chamber began to buckle.

The curved slashes had done their work too well. Cracks spread along the ceiling, racing from one side to the other. Trafalgar heard the change in the structure before the first slab came down. He pivoted, felt the floor shift under him, and launched into [Severance Step] for the third time, his body cutting through the chamber in a tight curve just as the place behind him collapsed.

Stone thundered down.

The worm vanished behind it.

For half a second, all Trafalgar could hear was his own breath inside the helmet and the roar of falling earth filling the tunnel.

Then the rubble moved.

The worm burst through the collapse from below rather than through the front, using the broken chamber as cover to come at him from an angle he could not properly read. Its head shot upward with enough force to hurl boulders aside like kicked rubble. Trafalgar twisted away and brought Maledicta down in a hard [Severing Fang]. The pressure slash ripped diagonally across the side of the maw, carving through one row of hooked teeth and tearing open the flesh tucked between two armored ridges near the upper throat.

The worm crashed sideways.

Dark fluid spilled over the floor.

Trafalgar saw it.

Not the wound itself but what lay past it.

The creature had opened wider than before in that attack, and deeper inside the throat, beyond the first lines of teeth and plated flesh, there had been a momentary flash of something softer. A pale inner seam running along the mouth’s interior where the armored rings did not fully meet.

’There it is, huh.’

That was the answer.

Not the endless body, or anywhere in the exterior. The kill would have to go through the mouth, deeper than the first rows of teeth, into that softer inner line where the worm trusted size and momentum to protect what armor did not.

The worm lunged again before he could capitalize.

This time Trafalgar answered with [Earthsplitter].

Maledicta came down in a brutal two-stage cleave. The first impact struck the floor in front of the incoming maw. The second released through the ground itself, a mana shockwave fracturing the tunnel base and detonating upward through packed earth. The floor split, the forward line of the worm’s attack dipped, and the whole front of its body slammed off-angle into the chamber.

Stone burst around it.

The opening that followed was enough for Trafalgar to slip past the side of its head and drive a follow-up slash into the wounded section near the mouth. Another deep cut. Another ugly spill of dark blood. Still not enough.

The worm twisted in agony and fury, and the walls answered with another long groan.

The tunnel was failing.

Trafalgar stepped back into a side passage just before the main chamber ruptured. A whole section of the upper wall tore away under the pressure of the worm’s body, and daylight flashed through the crack for the briefest instant before sand poured down in a golden avalanche.

So there was his exit.

The worm saw it too.

Its body surged toward the break in a blind, violent line, trying to crush him into the collapse on the way. Trafalgar did not retreat deeper. He ran with the motion instead, cutting across the slanted tunnel while debris hammered against his armor. The worm smashed through the fractured opening in a spray of stone and sand, forcing its own way up toward the surface.

Trafalgar followed the breach a heartbeat later.

He emerged into the open with a burst of heat and light, boots skidding across a collapsing slope of sand while the worm tore out of the desert behind him in a broad, furious eruption. Air hit him like release. Wind cut across his armor. The sky had never looked cleaner. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

He turned at once.

The worm reared in front of him, blood darkening the edges of its mouth, the wound inside hidden again behind those terrible rings of teeth. Around them, the surface had changed. The eruption had shattered one side of the dunes and exposed hard ridges of stone beneath the sand, turning the place into rougher ground with fewer soft slopes and less room for the worm to hide its line of approach.

Better.

The terrain for the end of this fight had finally begun to take shape.