"Yeah."

"The alpha was guarding the approach from above. The centipede controlled the underground passages. The mosquito swarms handled aerial defense. Every core I’ve ever studied maintains a final layer of defense in the chamber itself."

"Maybe we killed enough of its forces that it doesn’t have anything left."

Blair looked at me. Her ice-blue eyes caught the golden light from the core and the blue light from the moss simultaneously, creating something that looked like dawn breaking over a frozen ocean. Dirt and blood streaked her face. Her red hair hung in tangles that would have given her personal stylist an aneurysm. The burns on her left side were visible through the tears in her tactical suit, red and angry and clearly painful with every breath she took.

She looked absolutely wrecked. She also looked like she was ready to fight God himself if God stood between her and the exit.

"Or it’s a trap," she said.

"Probably."

"You want to walk into it anyway."

"Do we have a choice?"

Blair considered this for approximately two seconds. Then she squared her shoulders, wincing as the movement pulled at her burns, and flames ignited across both her forearms. The blue-white fire cast dancing shadows across the cavern walls and turned the mineral pools into mirrors of light. The warmth pushed back the cavern’s chill and dried the moisture on my skin.

"Stay behind me," she said.

"Absolutely not."

"Monroe, I have an S-rank offensive ability and you have twelve percent mana and a small knife made of dead stuff."

"Seven percent. And it’s a kama, not a knife."

"You are going to stay behind me or I am going to physically set you on fire."

"Brand consistency. I respect it."

Blair made a sound that in a different context might have been a laugh. Then she walked toward the core, and I walked beside her because staying behind Blair Davenport was something I fundamentally could not do regardless of how many times she threatened immolation.

We crossed the cavern floor together, our boots clicking against the volcanic glass in a rhythm that sounded almost like a heartbeat. The core’s rotation accelerated as we approached, the color cycling faster, the hum climbing from sub-audible into a frequency that made my teeth itch.

The golden light grew stronger, pushing back the blue bioluminescence until the entire center of the cavern existed in a warm glow that felt like standing near a fireplace in December.

At thirty feet from the platform, my System went berserk.

Notifications cascaded through my peripheral vision faster than I could read them. THREAT DETECTED. MANA SURGE IDENTIFIED. ENTITY MANIFESTATION IN PROGRESS. SURVIVAL ADVISORY: RETREAT IMMEDIATELY.

The warnings stacked on top of each other until my entire visual field was bordered in flashing red text that I dismissed with a thought because retreating was not on today’s menu.

The core pulsed once. A single, massive throb of energy that expanded outward through the cavern like a shockwave. The mineral pools rippled. The stalactites sang in resonant frequencies that harmonized with the hum. The golden light dimmed to ember-orange, then flared back brighter than before.

And the floor came alive.

The volcanic glass between us and the platform cracked in spider-web patterns that raced outward from the core’s position. From each crack, something pushed upward.

Something organic and wrong, dark tendrils that looked like roots made of compressed shadow, each one as thick as my wrist, tipped with barbs that gleamed with the same color-shifting light as the core itself.

The tendrils erupted from the glass floor in a wave that traveled from the platform outward toward the cavern walls, transforming the smooth surface into a writhing forest of reaching, grasping appendages that moved with purpose and hunger. There were hundreds of them.

They grew from the floor like weeds from soil, stretching toward the ceiling in seconds, their barbed tips questing blindly for anything living that existed within reach.

"MOVE!" Blair’s voice cracked across the cavern.

I was already moving. I grabbed Blair’s arm and hauled us both sideways as a cluster of tendrils punched through the glass where we’d been standing a heartbeat earlier.

The barbs caught my right pant leg and tore through the combat suit’s compromised material, drawing a line of fire across my calf that felt like being branded.

Blair pivoted on her good leg and slammed both palms down toward the tendrils, releasing a concentrated blast of Hellflame that incinerated a ten-foot circle of the things in a flash of blue-white heat.

The tendrils grew back in three seconds. The charred stumps thickened, split, and produced new growth that rose even taller than the originals.

"They regenerate!" Blair’s voice held a note that might have been panic in anyone else. In Blair it just sounded furious.

I summoned the kama. Death mana flooded my channels and the weapon manifested in my right hand, the crystallized blade absorbing the cavern’s light and giving back nothing. I brought the blade down across a tendril that had reached for Blair’s ankle and the death corruption spread from the cut like ink dropped in water. The tendril withered. Blackened. Crumbled to ash that didn’t regenerate.

"Death mana kills them permanently," I said.

Blair’s eyes went from the crumbling tendril to the kama in my hand to the approximately four thousand other tendrils that now covered the cavern floor between us and the core.

"You have seven percent mana."

"Six and a half, actually."

"We need to reach that core."

"Yep."

The tendrils surged toward us in a coordinated assault, hundreds of barbed appendages contracting and then striking like a phalanx of spears.

Blair threw up a wall of Hellflame that intercepted the first wave, incinerating dozens on contact, but the second wave pushed through the gap before her fire could close it.

I stepped into the breach, the kama singing as it carved through tendril after tendril, each cut leaving behind a trail of permanent death that collapsed into black ash. The combination worked.

Blair’s fire burned back the mass while my death mana killed the regeneration points. Where fire met death corruption, the tendrils died permanently, just as they had when the two abilities combined against the alpha leopard.