Cade stepped out of the portal into light.

  The forest was exactly as he remembered it—the stalky trees, blue leaves, the humid air carrying that faint mineral smell, the distant sound of streams and rapids. The same exact area where they'd met Ouric three days ago. Where they'd learned about the city.

  Three days ago.

  For Cade, no time had passed at all. One moment Kravil's fingers were touching his cheek with obscene gentleness. The next, he was here, whole, standing on solid stone with his heart hammering against his ribs.

  Rhys.

  The memory hit him like a physical blow. Her head—gathering. Drawing inward toward that dark palm like light falling into a black hole. Her features compressing, folding, vanishing into a point smaller than a fingertip. The silver of her skin going dark. Going gone.

  Cade's knees buckled.

  He caught himself against the wall near the portal, one hand pressed flat against cool stone, the other clutching his chest as if he could physically hold himself together. His breath came in ragged gasps. His vision blurred, and it took him a moment to realize he was crying—great heaving sobs that echoed off the cave walls and came back to him distorted, mocking.

  She was gone. Not dead—sphere-born didn't truly die—but gone. Respawned at tier-zero in some spawning pool on the other side of a Jupiter-sized world. A new body. New skin. New face. No memories of him, of them, of anything they'd shared until she climbed back to tier-five.

  How long would that take? Years? Decades? And even then—

  How would I find her?

  The sphere had two outer rings of spawning pools, separated by the vast bulk of the inner tiers. Rhys had explained it during one of their quiet moments, tracing patterns on his chest while describing the geography of her world. Fifty-fifty chance she'd spawn on the same hemisphere as him. If she didn't, reaching her would mean traversing tier-ten territory—the crushing depths of the equatorial ocean where beings like Kravil made their homes.

  Kravil.

  What tier had that monster been? Seven? Eight? The speed had been incomprehensible. Cade had fought a tier-six minutes before—had killed one—and thought he understood the progression. Thought he could extrapolate.

  He'd been so fucking wrong.

  Kravil hadn't fought him. Hadn't struggled or strained or shown any effort at all. He'd simply appeared at the end of twenty feet and reached out with casual indifference, like a man swatting an insect. Cade's resistance had meant nothing. His strength, his essence, his desperate will to survive—all of it meaningless against that void.

  And I just kept breaking contracts. Kept reaching for the next one while Rhys begged me to stop.

  The guilt was worse than the grief. Rhys had grabbed his arm. Had told him they needed to go. Had thrown herself between him and death, buying him one precious second that he'd wasted standing frozen like a fucking statue while Kravil redirected and killed her instead.

  If he'd listened. If he'd stopped after the second contract, or the first, or never started at all—

  She'd still be here. She'd still remember me.

  The sobs intensified. Cade approached and slid down a nearby tree until he was sitting on the stony forest ground, knees drawn to his chest, face buried in his hands. He wept for Rhys. For Zyrian, probably being tortured right now for information about the strange spotted tier-five who could dissolve contracts. For his own arrogance, his certainty that he was doing the right thing, his refusal to see the danger until it was too late.

  A sound penetrated his grief. Something heavy landing on stone.

  Cade looked up through tear-blurred eyes to see a massive yellow form approaching. Eight feet of muscle and good nature, a face designed for smiling currently twisted in confusion.

  Ouric.

  "Cade?" The guardian's voice was uncertain, his head tilted like a dog encountering something it couldn't quite process. "How did you... I saw you exit this portal three days ago. There are no other portals for hundreds of miles. How did you get back in and come out here so fast?"

  Cade stared at him. The words registered, but they seemed to come from very far away, filtered through layers of grief and shock.

  "Are you okay?" Ouric stepped closer, concern replacing confusion. "You look... Cade, what happened? Where are Rhys and Zyrian?"

  The names hit like hammer blows. Cade flinched, fresh tears spilling down his cheeks.

  "Gone," he managed. "They're... Rhys is..."

  He couldn't finish. Couldn't explain. Couldn't bear the weight of Ouric's questions, his sympathy, his presence. Cade needed to be alone. Needed space to think, to grieve, to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do now.

  He pushed himself to his feet.

  "Cade, wait—"

  But Cade was already moving, stumbling back toward the portal's shimmering surface. Ouric called after him, something about danger and solo runs and waiting for backup, but the words washed over Cade without purchase.

  He stepped through the portal.

  And into the Labyrinth.

  The transition was instant—one moment the cave, the next a corridor of worked stone stretching into darkness. The same blue phosphorescence painted the walls here, casting everything in cold light. The air was different. Staler. Ancient.

  Cade walked.

  He didn't think about where he was going. Didn't scan for threats or check his corners or do any of the things a sane person would do in a labyrinth room. He just walked, one foot in front of the other, while his mind churned through impossible questions.

  What happened to Zyrian?

  Killed? Captured? Contracted, maybe. Zyrian would be interrogated about the tier-five who could dissolve bonds. About where Cade came from. About how he'd developed that ability.

  They'll want my name.

  Names persisted between lives. If Kravil learned what to call him, he could spread word among watchers at spawning pools—the Coordinators, Rhys had called them. Could track Cade's progress through the tiers. Could ensure he never reached tier-five and the memories it would unlock.

  But Cade hadn't told Kravil his name. And neither had Rhys.

  Zyrian knows.

  The thought was ice in his veins. Zyrian knew both their names. Under enough pain, under Dominion contracts designed to extract information, he would tell them everything.

  And then what? Cade would respawn at tier-zero, climb back up, and the moment he hit tier-five and remembered—someone would be waiting. Ready to kill him again. Send him back. Keep him cycling forever at the edge of memory, never quite reaching the knowledge of what had been done to him.

  Except I didn't respawn at tier-zero.

  The realization cut through his grief like lightning. Cade stopped walking, suddenly aware that he was still tier-five. Still five-foot-seven. Still carrying the accumulated power of a year of advancement.

  He should have woken in a spawning pool. Should have emerged as a four-inch infant with no memories of Rhys, no knowledge of Kravil, no understanding of why he felt such inexplicable sadness, or at least in the tier-zero area since he seemed immune to the sizing rules here. Instead, he'd stepped out of a Labyrinth portal fully intact, as if death were just a doorway.

  Why?

  The question consumed him. He walked on, barely registering the corridor widening around him, the ceiling rising, the phosphorescence dimming as the passage opened into something larger.

  Was it his Oath essence? Some protection granted by the sphere? A quirk of being an Earth human rather than a natural-born soul? He had no idea. No framework for understanding what had happened.

  But he was grateful. God, he was grateful. The alternative—tier-zero, no memories of the Kindred world all over again, Rhys's face fading into the void of forgotten lives—

  The snake bit him.

  Pain erupted in his right thigh, so sudden and overwhelming that Cade's thoughts shattered like glass. He looked down to see a serpentine head the size of a dog's, jaws clamped around his leg, fangs sunk deep into muscle. Its body stretched back into an alcove he'd walked right past, coiled and massive, easily fifteen feet of scaled death.

  Venom hit his system like fire.

  No—

  His legs buckled. His arms went slack. Cade collapsed sideways, landing hard on stone, completely paralyzed. He couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Could only watch as the serpent released his thigh and repositioned itself beside him, its body rippling with terrible purpose.

  This isn't how snakes eat.

  The thought was absurd, clinical, detached from the horror of what was happening. Snakes swallowed prey whole. They unhinged their jaws and consumed things larger than their heads through patient, gradual effort.

  This snake bit.

  Its jaws opened to reveal rows of teeth that belonged on a shark, serrated and numerous, designed for tearing rather than gripping. It lunged at his left hand and chomped, severing three fingers in a spray of blood that Cade couldn't feel through the paralysis.

  He tried to turn his flesh to water. Tried to use his essence to escape, to fight, to do anything. But the heavy injection of venom had locked down more than his muscles—his power responded sluggishly, without the fine control he needed, producing only a faint shimmer in his remaining fingers that the snake bit off anyway.

  Essence-enhanced venom. Of course.

  The snake worked its way up his arm with methodical efficiency. Bite, tear, swallow. Bite, tear, swallow. Cade watched it happen with the distant awareness of someone observing their own autopsy. The sounds were wrong—wet, crunching, organic in ways that bypassed his paralysis to trigger some deep mammalian revulsion.

  When it reached his shoulder, consciousness began to fade.

  When it reached his chest, he died.

  Cade walked out of the portal.

  He stood in the same blue-lit corridor, facing the same widening passage, seeing for the first time the space he'd walked through blind. The alcove was there on his right, wide enough for a coiled serpent, shadowed despite the phosphorescence.

  I died.

  The thought was strangely calm. He'd died. Again. Respawned at the same portal—not at a spawning pool, not at tier-zero, but right here, ready to try again.

  That one wasn't quick.

  At least the paralysis had spared him the pain. But the sounds... the sight of his own arm disappearing chunk by chunk... the slow fade as the snake ate its way toward his heart...

  Never again. He was never going through that again.

  Cade stood at the entrance to the wider room, watching the shadows in that alcove, and forced himself to think. He couldn't afford to stumble through the Labyrinth lost in grief. The Labyrinth would kill him for it. Had just killed him for it.

  So think. Plan. Survive.

  He didn't want to go back to the Kindred world. Not without Rhys. Not without the strength to face Kravil and the other Unbound. Breaking those contracts had felt right—his Oath essence singing with purpose as each bond dissolved—but he'd been pathetically outmatched. A tier-five against a tier-something. Maybe tier-eight. Maybe higher.

  He needed power. Needed time. Needed to grow strong enough that monsters like Kravil couldn't simply reach out and end him.

  Maybe I should migrate.

  The thought surfaced unbidden. He'd learned about migration from Rhys—using anima to travel between spheres instead of advancing. Other worlds existed out there, each with their own inhabitants, their own cultures, their own forms of suffering.

  Suffering.

  His Oath essence pulsed at the word. I will see to minimize suffering. That was his purpose, his drive, the thing that made breaking those contracts feel like breathing after a lifetime underwater.

  The Kindred sphere had suffering, yes—that city, those contracts, the Unbound's cruelty—but it was isolated. Hidden. The sphere itself encouraged peace, and most of its inhabitants lived in something approaching contentment. Cade had to seek out misery to find it.

  What if there were worlds where suffering was everywhere? Where his essence could feast on liberation after liberation, growing stronger with each bond he broke, each soul he freed?

  And if those souls aren't connected to Rhys—

  The logic was cold but compelling. He'd gotten Rhys killed by dragging her into danger. If he found people to help elsewhere, people detached from everyone he cared about, he could make mistakes without destroying anyone he loved.

  Learn. Grow. Get strong enough that tier-sevens couldn't swat him like an insect.

  Then come back. Save that city. Find Rhys.

  Yes. That's the plan.

  But first, he had to survive this room.

  Cade approached the alcove with his weight on his toes, ready to move. The snake had bitten his right leg, which meant it had probably struck from the right side. Which meant it was probably coiled in there right now, waiting for him to walk past again.

  No body on the floor. Either the room had reset, or he'd traveled back in time, or—

  Can't be time travel. Rhys and Zyrian weren't at the portal when I exited.

  Some other mechanism, then. The Labyrinth recycling its challenges, preparing fresh tests for fresh attempts. It didn't matter. What mattered was that the snake was almost certainly there, and this time Cade wasn't going to let it ambush him.

  He prepared himself. If it bit him again, he'd turn the bitten flesh to water immediately—push the venom out before it could enter his system. He'd practiced transmutation on his hands, his arms, his torso. Never his head—something about that terrified him in ways he couldn't articulate—but everything else was fair game.

  Cade crouched, tensed, and leaped around the corner.

  The snake was ready.

  Venom sprayed from its open jaws, a pressurized stream aimed directly at Cade's face. In the narrow confines of the alcove, there was no room to dodge.

  Cade didn't try.

  He manifested an orb of water between himself and the spray, catching the venom before it could reach him. The liquid swirled, yellow-green poison mixing with his essence-strengthened water, contained and controlled.

  The snake lunged, going completely airborne.

  Cade threw the orb upward, pressing it against the ceiling, and grabbed for the serpent's neck with both hands. The catch wasn't even that hard, the airborne snake not having much leverage to redirect its predictable path. His fingers closed around scales as thick as leather, muscles writhing beneath them, and redirected the head away from his body, aiming those terrible jaws at empty air.

  Don't crush it.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The venom spit suggested it might be contact-sensitive, not just injectable. Crushing the head could spray poison across his hands. Instead, Cade adjusted his grip, wrapping both hands around the body just below the head, and tore.

  The snake fought. God, it fought. Its body coiled around his arm, squeezing with crushing strength, tail whipping against his legs. But Cade was tier-five, with muscles that had killed a tier-six Kindred, and he didn't stop pulling.

  Something gave.

  The head came free with a wet rip, trailing six inches of spine and viscera. Blood sprayed—not venom, just blood—and the body went slack around his arm.

  Done. It's—

  The head started regenerating.

  Cade watched in horror as flesh began knitting itself back together, new tissue sprouting from the severed neck like time-lapse footage of a wound healing. In seconds, it would have a body again. In seconds, he'd be fighting a fresh serpent.

  No.

  He manifested water around the head in his hands, encasing it in a rectangular prison, and squeezed. His will became walls, pressing inward, containing the regeneration. He could feel the healing trying to push outward, to expand, to rebuild what had been lost.

  Cade held it. Barely. The effort was immense, requiring every scrap of concentration he possessed, leaving no attention for anything else—

  The orb fell.

  He'd forgotten about the venom-laden water he'd pressed against the ceiling. Without his will to hold it, it dropped directly onto his head, splashing across his face and shoulders, diluted poison seeping into his skin.

  Fuck.

  The effects hit immediately. Tingling spreading from his scalp downward, muscles beginning to stiffen, paralysis creeping through his nervous system.

  Cade made a decision.

  He thrust his hand into the water prison, grabbed the regenerating head, and crushed. Bone cracked. Tissue pulped. Venom sprayed into the water, but he was already pulling his hand back, already separating the poison from his skin with his essence abilities, more of it absorbing into him anyways.

  The serpent died.

  Cade felt himself grow—an inch or so—as anima flooded into him. Then his legs gave out and he collapsed to the stone floor, paralyzed for the second time in minutes.

  Great. Just great.

  But this time, he had time.

  The snake was dead. Nothing else was attacking him. He could lie here on the cold stone and work through the problem systematically.

  Cade tried turning his head to water—his usual response to internal threats—but something blocked him. He could do his nose, his ears, the surface tissues of his face, but the deeper structures refused to transmute. Some psychological block, maybe. Some instinctive terror of dissolving the thing that made him him. The venom was dampening his abilities rather than shutting them down completely, but the reduced control shook his confidence.

  Fine. Work around it.

  He turned his hand to water instead. Through his essence, he could perceive the venom distributed through the liquid—bright spots of wrongness scattered through what had been his flesh. He gathered them, pushed them outward, separated them from himself.

  His hand became flesh again.

  He could still feel the venom's effects in the rest of his body, spreading through his bloodstream, locking down his muscles. But his hand was clean now. The question was whether clean meant functional.

  It didn't. He still couldn't move his fingers.

  Why?

  The connection between mind and body was severed somewhere. Maybe his nervous system was compromised. Maybe his brain needed to be venom-free before it could send commands. Maybe—

  Stop theorizing. Keep cleaning.

  Cade turned his hand to water again. More venom had accumulated—drawn from the surrounding tissue, concentrated in the extremity he was repeatedly transmuting. He pushed it out. Returned to flesh. Waited a minute. Did it again.

  Less venom this time.

  He repeated the process. Again. Again. Each cycle extracted a little more poison, drew a little more toxin out of his system. His body was using his hand as a filter, and he was manually emptying that filter over and over.

  Guess this is why most people don't do the Labyrinth solo.

  Fifteen minutes later, Cade could move his fingers. Twenty minutes after that, he could sit up. Thirty minutes after that, he climbed to his feet and looked out at the room beyond the entrance corridor.

  A jungle stretched before him.

  Massive trees rose toward a ceiling lost in shadows, their trunks wrapped in vines, their branches forming a canopy that blocked the phosphorescence. Undergrowth carpeted the floor, dense and tangled, perfect cover for—

  Snakes.

  They were everywhere.

  Coiled around branches. Draped across roots. Clustered in writhing mating balls on the jungle floor. Hundreds of them. Each one as large as the serpent he'd just killed, each one equipped with venom that could paralyze a tier-five and teeth that could tear flesh from bone.

  "Jeez," Cade breathed.

  He backed into the entrance corridor.

  Okay. New plan.

  One snake had nearly killed him twice. A thousand was simply impossible through direct combat. He'd be paralyzed and eaten before he could kill a dozen.

  But he had advantages they didn't. He had water essence. He had time. And he had a corridor they didn't seem interested in entering—maybe some rule of the room, keeping the challenge contained until the challenger was ready.

  Cade sat down on the corridor floor, facing the jungle, and began to think.

  Water helped with the first snake. He'd contained its head in a water prison, controlled its movement, prevented it from striking. Could he scale that up?

  Snakes could swim. But could they swim against water that actively resisted them? His manifestation ability let him create water from nothing, and his strongest affinity—covenant and absorption—let him harden that water into barriers, walls, prisons. If he flooded the room...

  Yes.

  He imagined a wall, a dam across the corridor entrance, and began manifesting water on the jungle side. It poured from a line in front of his palms like a low-head dam, splashing against the stone floor and tumbling into the undergrowth. Not fast. Not dramatic. Just a steady flow that would, given enough time, fill this entire space.

  The snakes would have to deal with rising water. They'd have to swim. And when they swam toward him, they'd hit barriers they couldn't pass.

  Cade settled in to wait.

  Hours passed.

  The water rose slowly—inches per hour, spreading through the jungle in a gradually deepening flood. Cade watched it with half his attention, maintaining the flow, conserving his energy for the battle ahead. Strategizing on how to deal with the snakes with the water once he was done.

  The other half of his mind wandered.

  Rhys.

  He couldn't stop thinking about her. The way she'd explained the sphere's mysteries with patient warmth. The way she'd offered herself to him when his modified body demanded release, no judgment, no hesitation, just simple acceptance of what he needed. The way she'd followed him through a portal into a city of hidden horrors because he'd asked her to.

  And now she was gone.

  The grief came in waves. Sometimes he could think about her clinically, analytically—she'd respawn, she'd advance, someday she'd remember. Other times the loss hit him like a physical blow and he had to stop manifesting just to breathe.

  Sarah.

  The name surfaced unbidden, dragging memories from a life that felt increasingly distant. His ex-girlfriend back on Earth. The woman he'd loved for years before everything fell apart.

  He wondered how she was handling his disappearance. It had been a year now—a year of him being simply gone, vanishing without explanation. Had she already moved on when he'd left? Mourned him? She had to know, given she used to work with Cade until recently, and he didn't show up for work. Someone would tell her.

  They'd been perfect together, once. Before Cade started thinking about the world, about what was right and wrong, about systems and suffering and his responsibility for changing things. Sarah just wanted normal. A house. Kids. A life that didn't involve agonizing over problems too big to solve.

  This world wasn't like Earth, though. The Kindred sphere didn't force the impossible choices that had driven them apart. People lived in peace, advanced at their own pace, found meaning in art and games and simple pleasures. Suffering existed—that city proved it—but it was an aberration, not the default.

  Things had been easier with Rhys. She understood the sphere's reality, accepted its constraints, didn't ask him to be someone he wasn't. And now—

  Stop.

  Cade forced his attention back to the water. It had risen to nearly five feet, filling the jungle chamber in a slowly deepening flood. The snakes had retreated to the trees, clustering on branches above the waterline, watching him with cold reptilian eyes.

  He'd been manifesting for almost a day, fed a steady stream of food the Labyrinth blossomed next to him. His body was exhausted. His mind was fogged with grief and sleep deprivation. He couldn't sustain this much longer.

  Time to see if it works.

  Cade slipped into the water and began to swim.

  The jungle floor was easier to navigate now—the undergrowth submerged beneath five feet of his manifested water, leaving a clear path between the massive tree trunks. He moved slowly, carefully, keeping his head above the surface to watch for threats.

  The snakes watched him back.

  For a long moment, nothing happened. They coiled on their branches, hundreds of serpentine bodies pressed together for warmth or comfort, and simply observed this strange creature swimming through their domain.

  Then a dozen dropped into the water.

  They hit the surface like missiles, bodies arrowing toward Cade with terrifying speed. Whatever discomfort they felt in the water didn't slow them down—they swam like eels, sinuous and fast, jaws already opening to reveal those shark-like teeth.

  Shit.

  Cade submerged himself, grateful that his tier-five body no longer needed to breathe. He sank to the floor, pressed his back against a tree trunk, and willed.

  A barrier snapped into existence—a quarter-sphere of hardened water extending five feet into the room. The first snake hit it at full speed and bounced off, visibly confused. Others piled up behind it, pressing against the invisible wall, jaws snapping uselessly at water that refused to yield.

  It works. The snakes have barely any leverage to break through.

  Cade created a second barrier closer to himself, leaving a one-foot gap between it him, several feet between it and the outer barrier. Then he formed a small opening at the base of the outer barrier—just large enough for a snake to slip through—directly beneath one of the aggressive, pressing serpents.

  The snake took the bait. It slid through the gap, oriented on Cade, and slammed into the inner barrier with its jaws extended.

  Cade closed the outer gap and willed a diamond-shaped prison around the snake's head, locking it in place. The serpent thrashed, but its own skull prevented it from backing out—the funnel narrowed behind its head, trapping it perfectly. The snakes barely had any leverage to push against, making it shockingly easy to hold it.

  He reached through the inner barrier, grabbed the snake's body, and pulled.

  The head crushed before it detached—exactly as he'd planned. He felt himself grow an inch as anima flooded into him, dragging the dead snake's head through the funnel as the body disappeared. The water remained venom-free, contained within the dissolving snake bodies.

  Sustainable.

  Cade grinned despite everything—a fierce, predatory expression that would have surprised anyone who knew him from Earth. He opened another gap in the outer barrier.

  The next snake slid through.

  He killed them in batches of twelve.

  That seemed to be the room's rule—only a dozen snakes would attack at once, no matter how many clustered in the trees. When Cade exhausted a batch, he'd surface briefly, let the watchers know he was ready, throwing some taunts their way, and another dozen would drop into the water.

  It became almost mechanical. Open gap. Trap head. Pull body. Absorb anima. Repeat.

  After forty snakes, Cade felt ready to advance. The anima bar at the edge of his senses was nearly full, months of accumulated power compressed into hours of methodical slaughter.

  Then half of it vanished.

  Cade froze mid-kill, the snake in his hands going limp as its head crushed. His anima—his progress—had just dropped. Dramatically. As if someone had reached into his soul and stolen half of everything he'd earned.

  What the hell?

  Was this a price for dying? Some cosmic tax on resurrection? If he had to pay half his accumulated power every time he died, that would be... manageable, actually. Frustrating, but manageable, if it only happened once.

  Doesn't change the task.

  He had plenty of snakes left to kill. The room would provide more than enough anima to recover his losses and push him over the edge into tier-six.

  Cade opened another gap and resumed the slaughter.

  Three hours later, the last snake died.

  Cade floated himself towards the center of a water-filled chamber, an area now absent of enemies. He was ready to advance.

  The room transformed around him.

  The trees dissolved, along with the vines and undergrowth and everything else that had made this place a jungle. What remained was a simple stone chamber, perhaps a hundred feet on each side, with smooth walls and a high ceiling. A pedestal rose from the center of the floor. A portal shimmered against one wall.

  And floating in the air where the largest tree had been, a fruit materialized.

  It was teardrop-shaped, green and yellow, glistening with something that might have been dew or might have been venom. Probably poison—this had been a snake room, after all.

  Cade didn't care. He was exhausted beyond words, his body pushed past every limit, his mind foggy with grief and sleep deprivation. The fruit could wait. Everything could wait.

  He dismissed his manifested water, sinking himself to the stone floor, and collapsed.

  Sleep took him instantly.

  Cade didn't advance immediately.

  He sat in the empty chamber, back against the pedestal, and let himself fall apart.

  The tears came first. Not the controlled grief of someone processing loss, but the ugly, gasping sobs of someone who'd been holding everything together through pure survival instinct and had finally run out of threats to distract him. His body shook. His breath came in ragged bursts. He curled in on himself, forehead pressed to his knees, and wept until his throat was raw.

  Rhys.

  Her silver skin. Her patient explanations. The way she'd accepted him completely—his strange body, his driven nature, his obsessive need to fix things. The way she'd followed him through that portal because he'd asked her to, even though she'd known—she'd known—that something was wrong with that city.

  Stop. Cade, stop. We need to go.

  He could still hear her voice. Could still feel her hand on his arm, pulling, urgent. Could still see the moment she'd thrown herself between him and Kravil, buying him one second of survival that he'd wasted standing frozen like an idiot.

  She'd died because of him. Because he couldn't stop breaking contracts. Because his Oath essence had been singing and he'd mistaken that song for righteousness instead of recognizing it as addiction.

  Just one more. Just one more bond dissolved. Just one more soul freed.

  And now she was gone. Respawned somewhere on the far side of a Jupiter-sized world, a new body with no memories of him, no knowledge of what they'd shared, no understanding of why she might feel a strange, inexplicable sadness when she looked at spotted patterns or thick-bodied strangers.

  How long until she reached tier-five again? Years? Decades? And even then—how would he find her? The sphere had billions of inhabitants. She could spawn in any of thousands of pools. She'd have a different face, different coloring, different everything.

  The only thing that would persist was her name.

  Rhys.

  He said it aloud, letting the sound fill the empty chamber. A promise. A reminder. Something to hold onto when everything else had been stripped away.

  The grief ebbed and flowed over the following hours. Sometimes he could breathe. Sometimes it crashed over him again, fresh and overwhelming, triggered by a stray memory or a sudden absence—reaching for someone who wasn't there, turning to share an observation with empty air.

  He ate mechanically when the room provided food—bland fruits that appeared on the pedestal at irregular intervals, the Labyrinth apparently recognizing that he wasn't moving on yet. He drank from water that pooled in a depression near the wall. He slept in fits, nightmares jolting him awake, Rhys's face imploding behind his eyelids over and over.

  Days passed. Two, maybe three—time was hard to track in the unchanging light.

  On the second day, his thoughts turned to Zyrian.

  The rust-red Kindred had been alive when Cade died. Was he still?

  Cade remembered Kravil's cold efficiency. Cade didn't respawn as a tier-zero, but Zyrian knew Cade's name, Rhys's.

  The realization hit like ice water. Names persisted between lives. If Kravil extracted that information—and he would, eventually, no one could resist Dominion contracts forever—then the void-user could spread word among the Coordinators at spawning pools across the sphere. Could track Rhys's progress through the tiers. Could ensure that every time Rhys approached tier-five and the memories it would unlock, someone would be waiting.

  An eternal cycle. Die, respawn, climb, get killed just before remembering, repeat forever.

  I'm sorry, Cade thought, though there was no one to hear it. I'm sorry I got you into this. I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry I was so certain I was doing the right thing that I couldn't see the danger until it killed everyone around me.

  The guilt joined the grief, braiding together into something heavy and cold that settled in his chest.

  He could go back. Could step through the portal, return to the Kindred sphere, try to rescue Zyrian before Kravil broke him completely.

  And accomplish what?

  Kravil was tier-seven at minimum. Maybe higher. The speed, the casual lethality, the way he'd simply ended Rhys and Cade without apparent effort—Cade would probably die. Again. And it was possible this time there'd be no Labyrinth portal to catch him. He'd respawn at tier-zero like everyone else, memories locked away, Kravil's name spreading through the Coordinator network before Cade even knew to be afraid.

  He couldn't save Zyrian. Not yet. Not at tier-six. Not without power that could challenge what Kravil represented.

  Then get stronger.

  The thought was Rhys's voice in his memory, practical and patient. You can't help anyone if you're dead. Grieve, yes. But then move. Then grow. Then come back and make it mean something.

  Cade wiped his face with the back of his hand. Took a breath. Then another.

  The poison fruit still hung in the air where the largest tree had been, patient and glistening. The pedestal still waited. The portal still shimmered against the far wall.

  He wasn't ready to move on. Not yet. But he would be.

  Soon.

  Hours later, Cade looked at the poison fruit, still floating where the tree had been. Reminded himself why he was here.

  He needed to advance before he could consume it as anima—he was already at capacity, the pressure of accumulated power at the limit, his height at his normal six-foot-eight before his advancements. He definitely didn't want poison as his third essence type. Made him think of water back home, water and poison mixing to create the ability to destroy ecosystems.

  Time to grow.

  He sat cross-legged on the stone floor and began the compression.

  The process was familiar now—gathering his anima, condensing it into an ever-smaller point, tracing the pattern. But tier-six required finer control than tier-five. The compression had to be tighter, the knot smaller, the concentration absolute.

  Cade pushed.

  The world fell away.

  He stood in the infinite mindscape—white sky above, gray ground below, that impossible line of demarcation stretching to every horizon. But the figure waiting on the other side had changed.

  It was still him. Still that shadow-silhouette of Cade's own form, rendered in pure blackness. But the shape was wrong. Insectoid. Not just the lower half this time. A head like a praying mantis perched atop a body built for jumping, grasshopper legs folded beneath it, very Cade-like arms instead of the expected pincers.

  Cade approached the line.

  "You mentioned last time that you get rewarded if you win these," he said. "Do you remember?"

  The shadow-insect nodded.

  "Do you know any others like you? Shadow reflections?"

  A shake of the head.

  "Do you plan to help others with your reward?"

  A shrug. The gesture was strange on an insectoid body, but unmistakably a shrug.

  Cade took a breath. "I need to advance. I need to save a city—a people—and those I love that I just lost. They'll be born again, but they won't remember me. I need strength to find them. To protect them. To make sure nothing like this ever happens again."

  The shadow was motionless.

  "I'm sorry," Cade said. "I'm sorry it's designed this way. One of us or the other. But I need this. Not just for me. For everyone I'm going to save."

  Nothing.

  Cade nodded, showing respect for something that might not deserve it, might not even understand the concept. "Thank you for your sacrifice."

  He launched himself across the white line.

  The shadow hesitated.

  It was barely perceptible—a fraction of a second where the insectoid form should have been moving and wasn't. But Cade was already committed, already closing the distance at full speed, and that hesitation gave him everything he needed.

  He got inside the scything arms before they could orient. Got his hands on the shadow's body, his legs braced against those powerful grasshopper limbs. Water manifested around the shadow's head and shoulders, surrounding it, and Cade's will hardened—locking the water into a prison that slowed every movement.

  The shadow struggled, but shock and water resistance robbed it of coordination. Cade pivoted, braced both hands against the backward-bent knee, angled almost upside down, hooked his other foot into the water block behind its head, and started kicking.

  Full force. Again and again. Targeting the spine just below the neck, where the mantis meets the insectoid body.

  The shadow went limp.

  It dangled from the water prison, suspended by its trapped head, legs swinging uselessly. Cade hung beside it, breathing hard, mind racing.

  Not dead yet.

  He willed the water to form an edge—sharp, compressed, harder than steel. Then he grabbed the shadow's torso and pulled.

  The edge bit deep. The shadow's human head split, spraying something that wasn't quite blood, and the figure dissolved into nothing.

  Cade fell.

  And woke up in his body.

  Tier-six.

  He could feel the difference immediately—more power, more presence, more substance to his existence. His body had shrunk again, the advancement compressing him down to his normal five-foot-seven, but the strength packed into that smaller frame was tremendous.

  The teardrop poison fruit still hung before him on its simple green stalk, patient and glistening.

  Cade rose to his feet, stretched muscles that had been remade by advancement, and considered his options. He was tier-six now—equal to the lightning-wielder he'd killed.

  Not strong enough. Not nearly strong enough to face Kravil.

  But strong enough to survive somewhere new. Strong enough to grow, to learn, to build power in a place where his mistakes wouldn't get Rhys killed again.

  Migration.

  The word felt right in his mind. He'd use his fruit-endowed anima for travel instead of advancement, find a sphere that matched his intent, and throw himself into whatever suffering awaited there. His Oath essence would feast. His power would grow.

  And when he was ready—tier-eight, tier-nine, tier-ten if that's what it took—he'd come back.

  For Rhys. For Zyrian. For every soul trapped in that city.

  But first: the fruit.

  Cade reached out and plucked it from its stalk. Cade focused and absorbed the anima from it. The fruit turned white immediately, then shrank in proportion to what he drew out.

  Cade grew back to six feet or so with the anima, almost halfway to another tier up.