Cade approached the waist-high pedestal and paused, his hand hovering over its smooth surface.

  Migration. Zyrian had explained it during one of their quiet moments—how the Labyrinth could send you not just back to your entry sphere, but anywhere. You touched the pedestal, thought about where you wanted to go, and decided how much anima you were willing to spend. The more you offered, the more likely you'd arrive at your intended destination.

  No one knew exactly why. Maybe anima clarified intent, burned away the randomness that would otherwise scatter travelers across existence. Maybe certain spheres cost more to reach than others, their entry fees set by some incomprehensible cosmic logic. Maybe it was something else entirely—the Labyrinth's mechanisms were ancient beyond understanding.

  Cade closed his eyes and let his intent crystallize.

  Fair fights. Suffering to minimize. Unjust bondage to break.

  He focused on the anima he'd absorbed from the poison fruit—nearly half his progress toward tier-seven—and offered it to the pedestal. All of it, if that's what it took.

  The response was almost immediate. The portal consumed barely a quarter of what he'd offered, the rest settling back into his core like change returned from an overpayment. The outline on the wall shimmered, deepened, became a window into somewhere else.

  That was cheap.

  Cade didn't know what to make of that. Did it mean his destination was close? Unpopular? Desperate for visitors?

  He took a breath he didn't really need and stepped through.

  Darkness.

  Cade blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, his other senses reaching out to map his surroundings. The air was warm and dry, carrying a mineral smell like sunbaked stone. The space around him felt enclosed—walls close on three sides, ceiling perhaps thirty feet overhead.

  Slowly, details emerged from the gloom. He stood in a cavern, rough-hewn but clearly artificial, sized for beings perhaps twice his current height. Behind him, the portal had already faded to an outline. Ahead, a shaft of reddish light spilled down from an opening maybe a hundred feet up—a narrow gap leading to whatever lay above.

  No welcoming committee. No guardians posted at the exit. No equivalent of Ouric's jovial presence or the Preservation's monitoring network.

  That's probably good, Cade thought. Given what I asked for.

  He glanced back at the portal before moving on. The outline had already faded to a faint shimmer, but above it—carved or grown or simply there, the way it always was—the symbol waited. The same one that hung above every portal on every sphere. A spiral curving inward from its edges, the outer rim forking into branching lines like roots or river tributaries, each loop tightening as it wound toward a small, intricate knot at the center.

  Gather from the edges. Draw inward. Compress to the center.

  The instructions for advancement, rendered in a shape. He'd followed that pattern to reach every tier. Nice to know some things stayed constant, even when everything else changed

  He approached the far wall and began to climb.

  The ascent was trivially easy for his tier-six body—he could have simply jumped the distance, launched himself through the narrow opening like a missile. But caution won out over efficiency. He didn't know what waited above. Better to arrive quietly, observe before being observed, stretching out his anima and essence perceptions but finding little other than strange geometry.

  The climb took less than a minute. Cade pulled himself over the lip of the opening and found himself in the dead part of a dead end of a giant maze.

  The air tasted like nothing.

  Cade noticed it immediately—or rather, noticed the absence. The Kindred sphere had carried that faint mineral smell, the humidity of distant rivers, the organic richness of a living world. Here, he breathed and registered only temperature. No scent. No flavor. No texture beyond the simple fact of atmosphere entering his lungs.

  The reddish light emanating from the walls cast everything in flat, even illumination. No shadows worth mentioning. No variation in intensity. Just light, omnipresent and dull, revealing everything and highlighting nothing.

  Even the walls themselves seemed designed to bore the eye. The same gray-white worldbone everywhere, worked into functional shapes without ornamentation, without artistry, without any attempt to create beauty. The Kindred decorated everything—their buildings curved and spiraled, their instruments hung from every surface, their clothing was political expression made fabric. The Forged had built... corridors. Functional. Empty. Nothing.

  The walls boxed him in on three sides, rising a hundred feet to a flat ceiling. The construction was precise, geometric, clearly intentional—not a natural formation but a room, built from the same impossibly hard worldbone that formed the Kindred sphere's ground. A corridor extended from the fourth side, stretching perhaps a quarter mile before turning sharply right.

  Above and to his right, a triangular hole had been cut into the wall—starting about thirty-five feet up and extending to fifty feet. A window. A firing position. Cade stretched his other senses out again.

  Something about the configuration tickled his memory.

  Laser tag.

  The thought was absurd, but once it arrived, Cade couldn't shake it. The scale was wrong—everything sized for beings forty or fifty feet tall—but the design language was unmistakable. Cover positions. Sight lines. Choke points. This wasn't architecture meant for living. It was architecture meant for fighting.

  The silence was oppressive, broken only by the faint echo of his own breathing.

  Cade started walking.

  The corridor stretched on, silent except for his footfalls and the distant sound of rushing water. As he approached the corner, he could see around it—the far wall ending just past the corridor's width, revealing a ramp that climbed toward the ceiling in a long, sweeping curve.

  At the base of the ramp, a gap. Ten feet across, maybe fifteen deep. Water rushed through it—a river, channeled into straight-edged banks, flowing perpendicular to his path before disappearing into darkness.

  Water flows toward higher tiers.

  Rhys had taught him that. The moisture cycle of hollow spheres—evaporation at the hot equatorial oceans, condensation in the cooler outer rings, rivers flowing inward along gravity gradients. If he wanted to go deeper into this sphere, he'd follow the water downstream. If he wanted the outer reaches, the spawning pools, he'd go against the current.

  Good to know. But right now, he just wanted to understand what he'd walked into.

  Cade extended his will toward the river. His water essence responded eagerly—more eagerly than before, buoyed by his tier-six advancement. He gathered a stream, shaped it, hardened it into a bridge spanning the gap. The effort was noticeably easier than it would have been hours ago.

  He crossed casually, still scanning for threats, and began ascending the ramp.

  The ramp curved twice before depositing him in a square corridor that stretched toward distant vanishing points. Circular holes punctuated the interior wall at regular intervals—ten feet across, positioned thirty-five feet up, clearly meant as passages for beings who would not have to leap to see through it. Doorway-sized openings appeared less frequently, leading to spaces he couldn't see from this angle.

  Cade approached the interior wall and pressed his palm against the stone.

  The worldbone—the same indestructible stuff that formed the Kindred sphere's bedrock, the stuff that higher-tier inhabitants could shape into weapons and tools. He'd never tried manipulating it himself.

  Let's see.

  He pushed anima into the stone, willing it to part around his hand.

  The material responded. Slowly. Painfully slowly, drinking his power like sand absorbing water. A tiny gap formed, barely wide enough for his fingers, and the effort left him feeling drained.

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  That's going to need practice.

  He pulled his hand back and looked up at the nearest circular opening. Thirty-five feet. Easy jump for a tier-six.

  Cade backed up to give himself a running start, calculated the trajectory, and leaped.

  The curve caught him off guard.

  He'd experienced this before—in the tier-five forest approaching Fermata, leaping between branches while the world tried to bend his path. The Coriolis effect, amplified by the world's odd physics. Everything thrown or jumped curved windward, and the effect strengthened with gravity, with tier.

  His carefully aimed jump carried him sideways. He slammed into the wall six feet from the opening, caught himself, and slid back down in a controlled descent.

  Right. Adjust for curve.

  He circled back, recalculated, aimed noticeably to the right of his target. Leaped again.

  Better. Not perfect—he caught the lip off-center, one hand scrabbling for purchase on the sharp-edged stone—but close enough. He pulled himself up and peered over the threshold.

  Open space.

  Not truly open—massive stalagmite-like structures rose from a flat floor, hundreds of feet tall, arranged in a pattern that was clearly artificial despite mimicking natural formations. But the ceiling was gone, replaced by sky—churning clouds, atmospheric rivers, the familiar sight of a hollow world's weather systems spiraling overhead.

  In the distance, Cade heard voices. Yelling. Too far to make out words, assuming he could have understood them anyway.

  He pulled himself over the lip and dropped inside.

  The fall was faster than expected while not scraping along a wall on his way down. Gravity had increased again with his tier advancement—or maybe this zone was simply higher-gravity than where he'd entered. His body barely noticed the difference in terms of strain, but ballistics cared. Falls accelerated faster. Throws dropped sooner. Everything curved harder.

  Going to take some adjustment.

  Cade landed quietly and oriented on the distant voices. Time to see what kind of world he'd found.

  He moved from stalagmite to stalagmite, using the massive stone pillars as cover. Each was perhaps fifty feet in diameter, spaced a hundred yards apart with geometric precision. The "natural" appearance was a lie—this was as artificial as the corridors below, just wearing a different mask.

  Laser tag for giants, Cade thought again. Cover positions. Engagement ranges. Firing lines.

  The voices grew clearer as he advanced. Definitely not Kindred—the phonemes were wrong, full of clicks and stops that his ears didn't quite know how to parse. But something about the rhythm felt familiar. The structure of speech, if not the sounds themselves.

  He was perhaps three stalagmites away when he realized he'd emerged from the Labyrinth naked.

  Again.

  Death stripped you of everything. Clothes, weapons, possessions—all gone. He'd walked into a hostile environment wearing nothing but his skin.

  Hopefully that's normal here.

  Then another realization struck him. The sexual urges. The modified-body arousal, demands that had been his constant companion since the Kindred world altered him, amplified every time he advanced, driving him toward Rhys with embarrassing intensity.

  Gone.

  He'd advanced twice since his death—once in the Labyrinth, once just now with the fruit—and felt nothing. No surge of need. No desperate hunger for connection.

  Why?

  He didn't have time to puzzle it out. A head emerged from behind a stalagmite two positions ahead—large, reptilian, mounted on a neck that suggested a body perhaps fifteen feet tall.

  It said something in that clicking, stopping language. A question, maybe, or a challenge.

  "Hello," Cade replied, keeping his hands visible. "Sorry, I do not understand."

  The head stared at him. Something shifted in its expression—recognition that they couldn't communicate, followed by what looked distinctly like exasperation.

  It withdrew.

  Cade heard voices—four, maybe five, conferring rapidly in their incomprehensible tongue. Some kind of argument, quick and sharp. Then silence.

  Then movement.

  A half dozen figures burst from behind the stalagmite and sprinted into the distance, moving faster than anything their size should be able to move. They reminded him horribly of Kravil—that same impossible speed, that same sense of physics being merely a suggestion.

  They were armed. Spears, swords, axes, all crafted from that same indestructible stone. And they were large—fifteen feet at least, maybe more.

  Tier-seven, Cade estimated. At minimum.

  He watched them disappear into the stalagmite forest, grateful he hadn't been forced to fight, disappointed that his first contact had fled without explanation.

  Well. That could have gone worse.

  He started walking in the direction they'd gone, hoping to find something like civilization.

  He'd barely rounded the stalagmite they'd been hiding behind when a figure darted out and slammed into him.

  The impact drove him backward, off his feet, tumbling across the stone floor 50 feet or so. Not painful—his tier-six body barely registered the collision—but startling. He'd been watching ahead, not beside.

  Cade rolled to his feet in one fluid motion and assessed.

  Five of them. Stationed at the gaps between five adjacent stalagmites, forming a loose pentagon with him at the center. All armed. All watching him with expressions that suggested professional interest rather than hostility.

  They didn't want him to go anywhere.

  He tried walking toward one of the gaps. The creature there moved with him, blocking his path without aggression but without ambiguity.

  Guards, Cade realized. They're holding me for something.

  He considered forcing the issue. He was tier-six—stronger than he looked, faster than they'd expect. But they were probably tier-seven, given the one's speed, and there were five. Those weren't good odds.

  Better to wait. See what they wanted.

  He settled into a comfortable stance, arms loose at his sides, and watched.

  The creatures were fascinating to observe.

  Bipedal, like the Kindred, but that's where the similarities ended. Their bodies were powerfully built, with thick tails extending perhaps one and a half times their body length, tapering from muscular bases to whip-like tips. Rows of spines ran along the outer curve of each tail—some large and armor-piercing, others smaller and more numerous.

  Their skin was scaled, ranging from deep rust to muddy brown, with individual variations in the cresting along their heads and the pattern of their markings. They stood with a slight forward lean, counterbalancing their tail weight, legs bent in a digitigrade stance that reminded Cade of predatory birds.

  One of them shifted, adjusting its grip on a large rectangular shield, and Cade caught a glimpse of markings etched into the metal surface. Not decorative swirls or abstract patterns—letters. Characters he recognized.

  His heart jumped.

  The written language was the same.

  Rhys had explained this once, during one of their quiet moments. Every world used the same thirty-character alphabet, the same written words, the same meanings. But each world assigned its own sounds to those characters, drawing randomly from a large pool of possible phonemes. The result: perfect written comprehension across all worlds, paired with complete spoken incomprehension.

  Forged.

  That's what they called themselves. Or at least, that's what this one had carved into their shield—perhaps a declaration of identity, perhaps a boast, perhaps simply a label for their kind.

  The Forged.

  It fit. Everything about this place suggested beings shaped through pressure and heat, hammered into strength by relentless conflict. The architecture was a battlefield. The inhabitants were its product.

  Male and female differences were visible in their nakedness, but the musculature was identical across both. These were beings designed for combat, every line of their bodies optimized for violence.

  Fits the architecture, Cade thought. Everything here is about fighting.

  Half an hour passed.

  Five of the six who'd fled returned, approaching from the direction they'd originally run. The sixth came from a different angle fifteen minutes later, accompanied by a group of smaller Forged—eight of them, closer to Cade's height, moving with the nervous energy of beings who knew they were outmatched.

  Tier-fives, Cade estimated. They went to get fighters my size. Guess that's what aiming for fair fights got me.

  The returning tier-seven pointed at Cade and made a sharp gesture—get to work—accompanied by words that needed no translation.

  The tier-fives understood. They'd done this before. One of them, the largest, stepped forward into the pentagon and raised a wicked-looking two-handed mace, shouting something that was clearly meant to intimidate.

  It gestured at its tail, then pointed mockingly at Cade's tailless form.

  Cade's tail was there—recoiled against his lower back, a Kindred adaptation rather than a Forged one—but they couldn't see it, and apparently its absence was funny.

  They think I'm helpless.

  The tier-five Forged finished its display and dropped into a combat stance, mace planted against the ground, weight shifting to its tail-side.

  Here we go.

  The tail whipped around.

  Cade had been watching for it—the Forged fighting style obviously relied heavily on those spine-launching appendages—but the speed still surprised him. A thick spike detached and flew at his face, curving windward in that same Coriolis arc that affected everything in this world.

  He stepped aside easily. Oath enhanced tier-six reflexes against a tier-five attack.

  The Forged cursed—the tone was universal—and fired again, immediately charging behind the second spike. Clever tactics. Use the projectile as a distraction, close while the enemy dodges.

  Cade sidestepped the second spine without losing focus on his opponent. The mace came around in a low-to-high arc, anima-enhanced, carrying momentum that would shatter bone.

  Let's play, Forged.

  He backed away just enough for the swing to miss, keeping his movements economical, unremarkable. No point revealing his true tier before he understood what these people wanted.

  But the Forged had expected the dodge. Its tail came around as part of the same motion—a follow-up strike, spine-tips seeking flesh, perfectly integrated with the mace work.

  Cade couldn't dodge without revealing his speed.

  Instead, he grabbed the tail a foot from its tip, above the spines, and shoved upward.

  The Forged went airborne, its tense tail braced for impact carrying it upward with the shove, its lower body lifted by Cade's casual strength. For a frozen moment, it hung there, eyes wide with shock—

  Cade's fist punched through its hip.

  Not a precise strike. Not surgical. Just overwhelming force applied to a junction point, crushing the pelvis, assuming it had one, dropping the Forged in a heap of twitching limbs.

  Cheers erupted from the tier-sevens surrounding them.

  The tier-fives looked significantly less enthusiastic.

  The fallen Forged released its mace and began crawling toward Cade, dragging its ruined lower body with its arms, still trying to fight. Determination or madness—Cade couldn't tell, readying its tail as if to swing out more spines.

  He backed away.

  One of the tier-sevens made a sharp clicking sound—a command. The crawler froze, then slowly, reluctantly, turned its head toward the speaker.

  More clicks. A harsh exchange. The crawler's expression shifted through defiance, humiliation, and finally bitter acceptance. It stopped crawling, rolled onto its back, and raised one arm in what was clearly a gesture of submission.

  Yield, Cade realized. They made it yield.

  The tier-seven nodded, satisfied, and two others stepped forward to drag the injured Forged out of the pentagon—not by the tail this time, but under the arms, almost gently. They deposited it against a nearby stalagmite, where it immediately began the slow process of regenerating its crushed pelvis.

  No sense wasting strength, Cade thought. If I wasn't going to take the kill, why force it?

  The tier-seven gestured at the remaining tier-fives to get moving.

  Two of them stepped forward together this time.