He hit the tendril field at a dead sprint, the blade sweeping in wide, slashing arcs that severed dozens of the pale filaments with each stroke.

They snapped with a wet, fibrous sound and recoiled toward the ceiling, spraying droplets of luminescent fluid that stung wherever they touched his skin.

The effect was immediate.

A shudder ran through the entire cavern. The tendrils on the ceiling rippled in a wave that expanded outward from Finn’s position, contracting and writhing like a sea of disturbed worms.

The bioluminescent light flickered and dimmed as the organisms pulled inward, and for a few seconds the Drowning Garden plunged toward darkness.

On the nest, the Warden’s head rose.

Slowly. The broad, shovel-shaped skull lifted from the coils of its own body, and in the shadow beneath its jaw, a ring of pale eyes opened.

Twelve of them. Arranged in a circle around the base of its skull, each one the size of Finn’s thumbnail, each one milky and wet and fixed on him.

It did not roar. It did not hiss. It simply uncoiled, one loop at a time, its body sliding down the nest with a terrible liquid grace, and the water around it began to move.

[Current Depth: 0.6m]

The water surged. Not evenly, it was being pulled, drawn toward the Warden in a vortex that tugged at Finn’s legs. The creature was controlling the water. Using its connection to the room to turn the rising tide into a weapon.

The current hit him mid-stride and nearly took his feet from under him. He planted the longsword point-first into the stone beneath the water and held on, the flow dragging at his waist.

’Nyx, it’s pulling the water toward itself. Watch the current—’

’I noticed, Bearer. Rather difficult to miss.’

Across the cavern, a series of rapid, precise cuts bloomed in the darkness. Not slashes, precise strikes. Nyx was severing the thick anchor tendrils that connected the nest to the ceiling, each one as thick as a man’s wrist, each one parting under the Broodmother’s Fang with a sound like rope snapping.

A strand snapped. Then another and another.

The nest lurched. Without its supports, the woven mass listed sideways, and the Warden, halfway down its flank, staggered. Its tail whipped out and caught a pillar, anchoring it, but the sudden loss of balance disrupted its control.

The vortex weakened. The water around Finn slackened.

He wrenched his sword free and ran.

More tendrils burst apart overhead. The whole ceiling seemed to shudder.

On the sixth cut, the nest collapsed.

It came apart like a scaffold with the bolts pulled, the dense weave of tendrils and debris unravelling in a cascading avalanche that hit the water with a sound like a building coming down.

The splash sent a wave rolling across the floor, waist-high, churning with fragments of bone and metal.

The Warden screamed.

Not with its mouth. With the room.

Every tendril on the ceiling contracted at once, pulling so hard they tore free of the stone in places, raining chunks of rock into the water. The bioluminescent light flared, then died, then flared again in a strobing pulse that turned the world into a series of frozen images.

In one burst of light, the Warden was fully uncoiled, its body stretching across thirty feet of open water, its jaw hinging wide to reveal rows of translucent teeth.

In the next, Nyx suspended mid-Shadow Step, materialising from a shadow that was already dissolving.

Then the light snapped on again, and Finn saw the tendril, one of the thick anchor lines, severed but not dead, whipping through the water toward Nyx’s ankle.

’Nyx, Left!’

She twisted. The tendril missed her leg by the width of a finger and slammed into the pillar behind her hard enough to crack the stone.

She hit the water badly, disappeared beneath the splash, then surged up coughing with one hand hooked into a fissure in the pillar. Both daggers were still clenched in her fists.

The Warden turned toward her.

"Hey!"

Finn slammed the flat of his longsword against a pillar. The clang rang through the cavern like a bell, and the Warden’s ring of eyes swivelled toward him.

’I need you behind it. Same as the Glutton. But this time, go for the tendrils on its jaw. They’re the last connection to the room. Cut those, and it’s just a snake.’

’Just a level twenty-eight snake.’

’A beatable one.’

’Your optimism borders on mental illness, Bearer. I find it deeply charming.’

She was already moving, dragging herself up the pillar rather than trusting the water, then vanishing through a smear of shadow beneath the broken nest.

The Warden lunged.

Its body cut through the water like a torpedo, leaving a wake that swamped Finn to the chest. He threw himself sideways, the creature’s jaws snapping shut where his torso had been, close enough that he felt the displacement of air. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

[Current Depth: 0.8m]

The water was at his waist and climbing. Every second he spent in the open was a second closer to going under.

He found footing on a broken spur of pillar, hauling himself up until the water was only at his shins. The Warden circled, its body carving a slow, tightening spiral around his position. The jaw tendrils trailed behind it in the water, still connected, still feeding it information.

Its eyes never left him. All twelve of them.

Finn raised the longsword. His arms ached. His lungs burned. The blade felt like it weighed twice what it had an hour ago.

But he held.

"Come on, then," he said, very quietly. "I’m right here."

The Warden lunged again.

This time, Finn didn’t dodge. He stepped forward, into the strike, and brought the longsword down on the bridge of its skull with every point of Strength and Agility his body possessed.

[CRITICAL HIT!]

The blade bounced. It skidded off the Warden’s hide with a shower of sparks and a vibration that rattled his teeth, leaving a white scar on the scales but nothing deeper.

But the impact accomplished what it needed to. The Warden recoiled, its head jerking sideways, its jaw tendrils flaring wide—

—and Nyx was there.

She rose from the water behind it like something from a nightmare, soaked through, the grey hoodie plastered to her frame, her hair slicked back and her crimson eyes blazing.

The Broodmother’s Fang bit through the first jaw tendril. The second. The third. She moved along the underside of its skull, each cut opening a new spray of luminescent fluid into the dark water.

The Warden thrashed. Its body whipped sideways and caught Finn across the chest, hurling him from the pillar into open water.

He went under.

[Current Depth: 0.9m]