Kai stepped into the tunnel. The ceiling was low, forcing him to hunch his shoulders. The sound of the city above: the carriages, the bells, the humming lamps all faded into a wet, rhythmic thumping.
Below, there was only the sound of his own breathing and the distant, high-pitched skitter-skitter of legs.
The lantern light hit the walls, revealing massive salt icicles hanging from the brickwork. They weren't white like usual; they were a bruised, sickly purple.
The creeper Queen's presence had turned the natural defence of the city into a hive. Kai pulled The Scourge from his back. As he moved deeper into the tunnel, the blade began to vibrate in his hand.
"Resonance," Kai whispered.
The blade was feeling the Void energy nearby.
Suddenly, the splashing water ahead stopped. The darkness didn't feel empty; something was there ahead of him.
Six pairs of glowing, violet eyes snapped open in the dark. These weren't the small Creepers from the mine. These were the Soldier Creepers, the size of wolves, their shells thick with jagged salt crystals that acted like natural armor.
Kai can't use his fire here.
He remembered Kaelen's warning about the water. If he flared here, the salt-saturated steam would cook him from the inside out.
He had to use the flow. He lowered his center of gravity, gripping the Nodachi with both hands, using the weight of the blade to lead his movement.
The first soldier creeper lunged. Ksi stepped to his side, the beast's jagged shell scraping against the stone wall.
Kai used a short, powerful thrust, driving the heavy tip of The Scourge into the soft joint between the creature's head and thorax.
The obsidian shell cracked with a wet crunch. The creature collapsed, leaking blue ichor into the grey sludge.
The other five didn't hesitate. They moved in coordinated swarms, their legs clicking against the ceiling and walls to flank him.
Kai exhaled, a slow, controlled breath. He felt the hunger of the Mark clawing at his gut, but he pushed it down into the back of his mind.
One strike, one kill.
He spun, the massive blade whistling through the air, using the momentum of the first kill to shear through the legs of two more attackers.
The tunnel was becoming a slaughterhouse of blue ink and broken salt. But as the last soldier, Creeper fell, Kai heard it: a deep booming vibration that shook the very foundations of the sump.
The Queen had heard the noise of the fight. And she was much bigger than the one in the mines.
The deep vibration from the end of the tunnel wasn't just a sound, but also a physical pressure. Kai felt it in his bones.
The sewer walls, caked in centuries of salt runoff, began to flake away, raining white dust into the grey sludge.
"Kaelem," Kai called out to his left, but the veteran barman was already back at the gate winch, his face pale in the lantern light.
"The vent is just past the next bend!" Kaelen shouted, his voice echoing. "If you don't break the crust now, the pressure will blow the floors out of the Ash pit. Do it and get back!"
Kai turned the corner. The tunnel opened into a wide, circular chamber where four sewer lines met. In the center, a massive volume of purple glowing salt rose from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like a pulsing organ, thick with veins of dark Void energy.
This was the nest.
The Creeper Queen wasn't a separate creature; she was fused to the salt pillar. Her upper body was a mass of obsidian quills and multiple, milky white eyes that twitched in unison as Kai entered. Below her waist, she merged into the crystalline structure of the vent.
The air here was shimmering with heat. The reaction between the Queen's Void aura and the city's salt waste was creating a localized pressure cooker.
Kai's skin felt tight, the moisture being sucked out of his pores. He could taste the salt on the back of his throat.
The Queen let out a sound like grinding stones. A dozen soldier Creepers detached themselves from the walls of the chamber, their salt crystal armor clicking as they circled Kai, as they waited for the Queen's command.
Kai gripped the hilt of The Scourge. He looked at the void sleeve on his wrist; it was smoking. The sheer intensity of the void energy in this room was trying to burn through his disguise.
If the sleeve failed, the shackle would ping Vane immediately
'I have to be fast,' Kai thought.
He abandoned the flow thrust. Against a target this big, he needed the momentum arc.
He lunged at the pillar itself. He swung the massive Nodachi in a wide, horizontal sweep. The weight of the blade, combined with the Red he let leak into his arms, made the steel whistle.
The blade bit deep into the purple salt. Instead of a crack, there was a wet, hissing sound. The pillar leaked a thick lavender colored gas.
As gas filled the air, Kai's lungs felt like they were being filled with hot needles.
"The vapor…" Kai coughed, his vision swimming.
This was the salt vapor reaction.
Every breath was damaging his internals. He dropped to one knee, the heavy blade acting as a crutch.
The Queen shrieked, the sound vibrating the very air out of Kai's chest. She raised a massive, quill-covered arm to crush him, but Kai's focus was elsewhere.
He focused on the base of the pillar. He saw a fissure, a weak point where the grey sewage was eating at the purple crystal.
"One strike," Kai whispered to himself, his blue-tinted hand shaking.
He didn't imagine the red as stagnant oil; he imagined it as a physical hammer. He didn't care about the shackle, nor did he care about the steam burn. He threw everything he had into this strike.
And hit it with precision. And in an instance everything went blank.