The light took longer to fade this time.

When it did, Finn’s feet found carpet where stone should have been.

He opened his eyes.

The hallway stretched away in front of them. It was so vast that for a long moment he simply forgot how to breathe.

The ceiling soared overhead, lost in shadow, vaulted with ribs of dark stone that arched together like the spine of some enormous beast.

Stained glass windows ran the length of the walls, or had, once. Most of them were shattered now, their lead frames hanging empty, their fragments scattered across the floor in glittering drifts that crunched faintly when he shifted his weight.

Beyond the broken windows there was nothing to see but darkness.

The carpet down the centre was wide enough to fit a carriage and red enough to look as though something had bled into it for a very long time.

Suits of armour stood in alcoves at regular intervals. They were empty, or so he hoped.

And at the far end, perhaps a hundred yards distant, perhaps more, stood a single set of doors. Twice the height of a man, banded with black iron, set into the wall like the door to a vault.

Finn stared.

"A castle," Finn said quietly.

Nyx stepped forward, her shoes making no sound on the stone. Her crimson eyes moved slowly along the corridor, taking in the columns, the ruined tapestries, the darkness that pooled outside the windows.

’Not merely a castle. A court. Or it was, once. The bones of this place remember ceremony.’

Finn looked at her. "You recognise it?"

"Not this place specifically. But the shape of it. The proportions." She touched one of the columns as she passed, her fingertips trailing across its surface. Dust fell in a pale ribbon. "My people built places like this. A long time ago."

He filed that away. Every scrap she gave him about her past went into the same quiet drawer, the one he didn’t open in front of her because she would stop talking if he did.

There were no mobs.

That was the first thing that unsettled him. Every floor before this had thrown something at them within the first few minutes, wave encounters, ambient predators, environmental hazards. Floor Five offered nothing but silence and the sound of their own breathing.

Nyx tilted her head, the way she did when she was listening for something with senses he didn’t share. Her crimson eyes had gone narrow under the hood.

☼☼☼

They walked.

Neither of them spoke about it. There was nothing to scout, nothing to flank, no ambush to plan around. The corridor was a question with one answer at the end of it, and any cleverness they had left would have to wait until they could see what was waiting.

So they walked.

He counted the alcoves as they passed. Twelve to his left. Twelve to his right. Each one held a suit of armour that wasn’t quite a suit of armour, in that suits of armour, in his experience, did not contain shadows that shifted when no light fell on them.

He decided not to comment on this. Nyx had noticed too. He could feel it in the set of her shoulder against his.

’Bearer.’

’Yeah.’

’If even one of them moves before we reach the door, we are running.’

’Agreed.’

’I do not run, as a rule.’

’Today you’ll make an exception.’

’For you, Bearer, I shall consider it.’

None of them moved.

He almost would have preferred it if they had. The silence had the patient quality of something that had been waiting a very long time and could wait a little longer.

The doors grew.

He had thought they were tall, from a hundred yards out. He had been wrong about how tall. By the time they were ten paces away the doors had risen to something cathedral, dwarfing them both.

The handles were wrought in the shape of two hands, fingers interlocked, gripping nothing.

There was no lock.

[FLOOR 5 — BOSS CHAMBER]

[WARNING: Once entered, the chamber cannot be exited until the Boss is defeated or all challengers are dead.]

Finn read the notification twice.

"No way out once we’re in," he said.

Nyx read the warning in silence. Then she looked at him, and her expression held something he hadn’t seen before.

It wasn’t fear. Nyx did not do fear, or if she did, she buried it so deep beneath composure that even he couldn’t tell. But there was a gravity to the way she studied him, as if she were memorising something.

"Bearer."

"Yeah?"

"Whatever is behind that door, we face it together... and this time, don’t do anything reckless."

Her tone held no trace of humor. He nodded.

"I won’t." he said.

He put his hand on the door and pushed.

☼☼☼

The chamber beyond was a throne room.

It had to be, because at its far end, elevated on a dais of black stone, sat a throne. It was massive, high-backed, carved from the same petrified wood as the door. The room was circular, easily two hundred feet across, its domed ceiling rising into shadow.

Columns lined the perimeter, thicker than the ones in the hallway, their capitals carved with faces Finn couldn’t identify.

At the far end, raised on a dais of seven steps, a throne sat empty, its high back wrought into the shape of two great wings folded inward.

The throne was not what Finn looked at.

The throne was empty.

The figure was not on it.

It stood at the foot of the dais, perfectly still, facing them. It might have been waiting there for an hour. It might have been waiting there for a thousand years.

It was humanoid. That was the first and worst thing about it.

A man’s shape. It was tall, narrow, perhaps seven feet from the soles of its dark boots to the crown of its bowed head.

Plate armour the colour of wet ash sheathed it from throat to ankle, fluted and ribbed in places that armour ought not to be, etched with patterns that hurt to track.

A long, ragged cloak hung from its shoulders, hemmed with frost. Where its face should have been there was a helm shaped like a thing remembering what a face looked like and getting most of it wrong.

In its right hand, point-down on the marble, rested a sword.

The sword was the length of a man.

A pale light burned in the helm’s eye-slits. It was a cold, dark blue, like the heart of a flame that had given up on heat a long time ago.

The notification was almost an afterthought.

[Knight of the Vow — lvl 32 Final Floor Boss]

Finn’s stomach dropped through the marble.

Level thirty-two.

It was seventeen levels above them.

He had read the words ’final floor’ on the forums perhaps two hundred times. He had read them as a teenager curled around a phone in a dark room, mouthing them to himself like a prayer.

They had always sounded thrilling. The kind of thing you’d see written in red across the top of a guide.

In person, it made the hair on the back of his neck stand.

The Knight raised its head.

The blue light in its eye-slits found Finn first, then Nyx, and then, slowly, as if it had only just remembered something, it inclined its helm in what was almost, but not quite, a bow.

The sword lifted off the floor.