He turned to look at her.

She stood with her arms held slightly away from her sides, the hem of the oversized hoodie already darkening where it dragged in the water. Her expression was the carefully neutral mask she wore when something had unsettled her and she would rather die than show it.

"You can’t swim."

"Creatures of shadow are not, as a rule, fond of water."

"...Right." He took a slow breath. "Then we move fast. And I carry you if the water gets too high."

Her ears went red. ’You will not.’

’I will if the alternative is you drowning.’

’I will not drown. Probably. The point is that I refuse to be carried like a helpless—’

’Child?’

’I was going to say something more dignified, but you have robbed me of the opportunity.’

"Come on," Finn said aloud, and started walking.

The water rippled out from each step in overlapping rings that caught the bioluminescent light and scattered it across the low ceiling. The tendrils above contracted as they passed, pulling away from the disturbance like fingers flinching from a flame.

’They react to movement,’ Nyx observed.

’Noted. Could be a detection system. If they’re connected to the boss, it already knows we’re here.’

’Then stealth is wasted.’

’Stealth is always wasted with me. You’ve said so yourself. I walk like a toddler with a drum.’

’I said you think like a toddler with a drum. The walking is merely unfortunate.’

They pushed deeper into the Drowning Garden. The cavern did not narrow. If anything, it widened, the walls pulling back into shadow until Finn could no longer see them. The ceiling remained oppressively close, the tendrils a pale curtain that he had to part with his hands as they thickened.

The water was rising.

He could feel it. It was taking its time, but the hem of his trousers had gone from damp to soaked in the space of five minutes, and the vibration through the floor was getting stronger.

[Current Depth: 0.3m]

"There," Nyx said.

She pointed with the Broodmother’s Fang toward a shape in the distance, barely visible through the hanging tendrils. A mound of something dark and solid, rising out of the water like a small island. As they drew closer, details resolved.

It was a nest.

The structure was woven from the same pale tendrils that hung from the ceiling, braided and knotted into a dense, matted mass the size of a bus. Things glinted within the weave, fragments of metal, scraps of cloth, the white curve of what was unmistakably a human ribcage.

And on the nest’s crown, motionless, something breathed.

[Warden of the Garden — lvl 28 Elite]

The creature was long and sinuous, somewhere between a serpent and an eel, its body coiled in overlapping loops across the top of the nest.

Its hide was the same blue-white as the bioluminescence, perfectly camouflaged against the roots and the glow, so that until you knew where to look it was almost invisible.

Its head was flat and broad, like a shovel blade, and from the underside of its jaw hung a dozen of the same pale tendrils, longer and thicker than the ones on the ceiling, trailing into the water around the nest.

They were the same tendrils.

The thing on the ceiling, the vast, pulsing organism that lined the entire floor, it wasn’t separate from the boss.

It was part of it.

The tendrils were its sensory network. Its nervous system. The entire Drowning Garden was its body. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

’Bearer.’

’I see it.’

’That thing is the ceiling.’

’I know.’

’The ceiling is alive and it is also the boss and we have been walking through its body for the last ten minutes.’

She went silent for a moment. ’I dislike this place.’

[Current Depth: 0.4m]

The water was at his shins now. It had risen faster in the last minute than in the five before it. It was accelerating.

Finn pulled them behind a broken pillar, one of several jutting from the water at irregular intervals, and crouched. The tendrils above shied away from their proximity.

"The forum posts," he murmured, thinking aloud. "I don’t remember this one. I don’t think anyone in the beta ever tackled this starter dungeon."

"Then we have no map."

"We work with what we can see." He peered around the pillar at the Warden. "Its body is the room. The tendrils are sensory organs. It felt us the moment we entered."

"And yet it has not attacked."

That was true. The Warden hadn’t so much as lifted its head from the nest. It lay coiled and still, breathing in that slow, vast rhythm that pulsed through the water and the ceiling alike.

"It’s waiting," Finn said. "It doesn’t need to chase us. The water does that. All it has to do is sit there until we drown or come to it."

"A patient hunter."

"The most patient kind. It controls the terrain. If we fight it in the open water, those tendrils will wrap us up and hold us under. If we wait, we drown anyway."

Nyx watched the nest through the curtain of hanging roots, her expression unreadable.

"Then we cannot fight it where it is strongest," she said. "We must change where it is."

"How?"

"You said the tendrils react to disturbance. They pulled away from us."

He saw where she was going.

"If we cause enough disturbance across the floor, force them to retract all at once—"

"...we blind it. Cut off its sensory network. It can no longer feel us approach."

"And if we can sever the tendrils closest to the nest..."

"...it must leave the nest to find us. Where it is no longer anchored to the room."

Finn stared at her.

’That’s brilliant.’

’Yes, Bearer. I know.’

[Current Depth: 0.5m]

The water was at his knees. They had maybe ten minutes, maybe fifteen if the acceleration was linear. If it was exponential, they had less.

"Now. Before it gets any higher." Finn pulled the longsword from its sheath. The blade caught the bioluminescent light and turned it into a cold, pale line. "I’ll cut a path through the tendrils on the approach. Wide, messy, as much disturbance as I can manage. You circle left and cut the anchor tendrils connecting the nest to the ceiling. When it comes off its perch—"

"I will be ready."

"Nyx."

She paused, half-turned, one foot already sliding into a shadow.

"Level twenty-eight. That’s fourteen levels above us."

"I am aware of what numbers mean, Bearer."

"If it grabs you, call for me. The recall will summon you to my side in an instant."

She looked at him for a moment. The cold light washed the colour from everything except her eyes, which remained that deep, steady crimson.

"Don’t worry," she said simply, "it will not grab me."

She stepped backward into a shadow and was gone.

[Shadow Step activated.]

Finn took a breath. Then another.

Then he raised the longsword and charged.