The staircase breathed behind them, as though the factory swallowed the sound of their passage and kept it for itself. Each step deeper into Kronoshpan felt like stepping farther into someone else's funeral. Plamen's body still ached—ribs half-mended, knuckles raw, every tendon screaming subtle warnings—but the ache had become a steady rhythm. It was easier to ignore pain when survival was the only option.
The ledge at the top of the stairwell opened onto a horizon that made the breath leave Plamen's chest. Where they expected another hall, another rust-scrawled chamber, there was a cliff of cracked bone and jagged metal, and below, an ocean. It was not the blue, breathing sea of the world above. It sulked and heaved like something alive—thick, viscous, the color of old rust and coagulated iron. It exhaled a sound that was not wind but a thousand small screams, and the mist rising from it clung to their skin like a wet shroud.
Kamen swallowed against the smell. "It… reeks of old blood," he whispered, voice thin.
Alex's shadowing smoothed about his ankles like a cloak. He didn't smile; he looked at the abyss with a hard, expressionless face that should have told Plamen something about where he'd been. "This is no tide. This is a grave's memory. Best not to linger."
The bone ledge cracked underfoot without warning. One second the three of them stood at the edge; the next the world tipped and they were falling.
Falling was not the right word. The plunge into that red sea was a swallowing. The liquid closed over them with a sound that sucked the air out of their lungs and the light from their eyes. The density of it dragged at limbs as if the ocean itself were a net, thick and suffocating. Plamen kicked until his legs burned; the surface was a rumor above them. Their movements became slow motion against the tide's infinite pull.
From below came a vibration, low and ancient—the first opening of a thing that had slept longer than any god's memory. It thrummed through Plamen's bones, and with that thrum the first lamps of hungry light opened in the depths. Spots of coals that grew into eyes, and eyes into lines and lines into a waking form.
They had seen large things. They had fought mindless monstrosities and kings made of bone. The Leviathan was not a beast to be categorized with earlier horrors. It rose as a cathedral of teeth and tentacles, a body threaded with spines like jagged ribs and scales that looked like broken mirrors. Its head broke the water like a cliff; its mouth unrolled into concentric rings of razor teeth. Where skin should have been, there were ridges of bone and molten seams that hissed where they flexed.
Plamen felt something cold in his gut. Not the usual heat of battle; something that narrowed his vision to a pinprick. Fear, old and animal. It slowed his breathing, made the world a little farther away. He swallowed it down with the same stubbornness he'd used to pull himself upright after every trial.
Alex was first to move. With a blur of shadow, he launched forward along the Leviathan's flank and struck at the seam between two plates. His blade bit, but the wound sealed as quickly as it opened—like a sculptor reworking clay. Still, the act pulled a howl from the beast, a note that cracked the surface into boiling waves. The abyss raged; currents smashed the three of them apart.
Plamen dove for the flank. He pressed his shoulder against the beast and drove his fist into the living armor, every muscle screaming. Bone Breaker flared—a low hum lacing his blow. The strike sent out a ripple of force that shattered the outer ridges and threw the Leviathan into unsteady motion. For a moment it felt as if they could hurt it. It was a brief, hot thought—then the Leviathan's tentacle snapped like a rod and slammed Plamen across the face with the force of falling masonry.
He tasted iron. Vision broke into fast sparks. Plamen kicked, the rhythm of his training chaining instincts together: punch to knee, elbow to jaw, the martial contours tightened and honed. His fists multiplied into a shape that was both strategy and animal.
Kamen's hands slammed to the abyssal sea. From the bloodwater's depths skeletal arms erupted, dozens at first and then hundreds, splintered bone carrying wicked hooks. Hone no Shokuzai for once looked like salvation—a mass of white hunting fingers burrowing into the Leviathan's base. The arms wound around spines, wrapped tendons, and tried to anchor the monster against the furious current.
The Leviathan reared and shook itself like an island. Hands sheared. Plamen was thrown into a wall of submerged bone; his hip cracked against a rib and stars erupted behind his eyelids. Alex's shadow-dashes became shorter, flaring in bursts that left echoes in the water—he was trying to strike the creature's eyes, to blind, to make a path.
But Kronoshpan was cunning. Where flesh bled, the Leviathan's gashes pulled at the bones and re-knit. Teeth grew another row. Where they tore, it grew more hide. The more wounds they made, the more furious it became, and fury in that ocean was a force of tide and ruin.
They learned quickly that brute force would not end this fight. It was a lesson taught with teeth.
Kamen's summons faltered. The skeletal arms he raised were torn apart and dissolved into the crimson foam as though the Leviathan's very essence ate bones. His breath came ragged. He had used every reserve to hold the creature. With a wet, rattling cough he spat blood into the tide.
Alex appeared in front of Plamen, voice muffled but sharp. "You're bleeding like a wounded ox. Move!"
"Not dying today," Plamen spat back. He pushed himself upward, knees pumping, lungs burning like coals. Fear had sharpened into an idea: hurt it but don't be swallowed. If swallowed, there would be no fight—only a long decay where the Leviathan digesters cut, rewove, and poured their names into its blood.
The Leviathan's next move did not come from its mouth. It was a ripple through the ocean—the belly bulged like a mountain rising, and multiple mouths along its sides split open, revealing inner maws that sucked space. Currents converged—a vacuum pulling at them. Alex darted sideways, shadow-stepping along the ripple and slamming his blade into a gap between plates. It worked; a choke of guts spewed out around his limp shape, the water dark with ichor. For a moment, the Leviathan staggered.
That moment became a teacher. Kamen, gasping, found a rhythm—call, hold, pull. He summoned hands not in a scatter but in a rope, a chain of bone that threaded beneath the Leviathan's throat and wrapped higher, anchoring like an industrial harness. Alex danced through shadows and slashed precisely, carving seams open in the membranes between plates.
Plamen felt his body fill with the old fierce calm that had carried him through every trial: the simplest law of all—aim where the system is weakest. He gathered his fists into a core of coiling power. A single thought congealed: the beast could knit itself, but not if its heart was stopped.
He launched. The Bone Breaker aura screamed like a bell in water as his fist passed through a seam and struck something deep within. The blow did not just crack bone; it ruptured a system. The Leviathan howled—the sound was not a noise but a collapsing geometry. The belly spasmed; tentacles lashed outward and caught Plamen, dragging him into a fold of flesh.
Inside was warmer than the sea had suggested; pulsing heat and a smell that made Plamen gag. The beast's throat was a cathedral that tried to squeeze his ribs flat. He could not find air. He could only find fight.
Kamen's voice was a cord in that dark. "Hold him! Stay alive!"
Alex was already there, shadowing inside the creature's stomach like a ghost, cut and bleeding but moving with impossible speed. He struck tendons that bound heart to spine, carving slivers where Kamen's skeletal fingers found purchase. Their coordination was a thing of blood. For every inch the Leviathan tried to glue its insides back together, Plamen and Alex and Kamen were tearing more open.
Plamen's lungs bleached white from the assault. He could see stars and the memory of training yards—the boy Alex, laughing as he missed a kick, the sensei's bark when Plamen's patience ran thin, Kamen's stubborn grin when he bled but still dared to plant his foot. The memory burned like a brand into his chest: they had promised to not leave each other. Promises were weight in Kronoshpan. Promises were teeth.
He squeezed the memory into a fist and punched.
The core of the Leviathan jolted. Plamen's fist crashed home, the Bone Breaker shockwave propagating in volcanic release. The beast convulsed like a struck mountain, a light—cold and wrong—flickered in its maw. It bucked, drowning the three of them in swirling ichor as it tried to expel them.
They shot out of that cavern like items flung from a furnace. Plamen's body tore open with new pain; blood traced the current. He swallowed seawater and bile and raw air when the tide let them breathe. The Leviathan's skin bled; a dozen gashes opened that did not mend as fast under the ongoing assault.
But death was not finished. The beast, wounded and frantic, gathered all the horror it had and lashed.
It struck with a series of tidal slams that bent the sea into mountains. A titanic fin pushed forward and knocked Kamen against the collapse of bone, breaking several of his ribs. A tendril caught Alex and flung him like a rag, his body spinning through the bloody spray before slamming into a shard of broken deck. Each impact was a bell clanged in some terrible church of agony.
Kamen's skeletal hands were splinters by the end; summoned bone could only do so much against a living engine that made bone into its marrow. He vomited and grabbed at his throat. "Gods… not yet," he croaked, summoning one more wall of arms around the Leviathan's flank. The arms were ragged, half-shattered, but they bought time.
Alex's eyes were slits. He moved like a living cut, appearing and disappearing, that shadow dash now a thousand tiny deaths that kissed the Leviathan's angriest places. Wherever Alex struck, the beast flexed in ways that opened a line to the core. Each strike bled it more.
Plamen's fists were a blur of bone-crushing fury. He did not think. Thinking meant guesswork. Muscle remembers. A dozen blows at precise intervals, hips and shoulders adding weight, the whole of his life's training made to a single sequence. He struck. The Bone Breaker aura turned each impact into internal earthquakes within the Leviathan's organs. Flesh tore. Blood boiled in the water around them.
The leviathan convulsed as if the world itself had been punched. Its great head tilted and, in a final attempt, it inhaled—an intent to swallow the three of them inside a single death. For a brief, horrific beat, Plamen thought the sea itself would become a tomb. Then Kamen's rope of bone, frayed and white, jerked taut around the beast's throat. Alex slashed at key anchors, and Plamen drove his fist into the exposed luminal chamber and detonated.
It wasn't one move that felled the thing. It was the squeezing of three lives into one purpose. Kamen's arms tore and reformed around it, anchoring, buying windows. Alex's blades opened seams that had to be kept open. Plamen's fist detonated into the beating center. A cathedral of bone split.
The Leviathan's cry was not a simple sound; it was an unraveling, a tearing of the factory's guts. It writhed off balance, scales cracking and steam of dark ichor puffing like smoke. For a long, terrible second it tried to swallow itself shut, but the wounds were too many. Its eyes dimmed. It rolled and folded into the depths, a broken mountain of flesh whose slow collapse eased the tides into a hush.
When the last convulsion shuttered through the corpse and the crimson sea became a plain of still black, the three of them hung in the water, not quite alive as they had been before. Plamen felt the edges of consciousness fray and tried to pull them together. His fingers found the slick carcass of the Leviathan drifting on the current. There, an obsidian scale the size of a hand floated, dark and glistening with a cold, slow light.
He reached and seized it. Unlike earlier rewards in Kronoshpan, nothing sang when he touched this scale. It felt like a memory of cold. It clung to his palm and did not let go.
They hauled themselves up onto bone steps that had reformed from the sea. The abyss unmade itself as if ashamed; the ocean dissolved back into stone and the stairwell resumed its function. The scale sat in Plamen's palm like a small, beating grief.
They didn't cheer. No one spoke for a long time. The silence of survival was heavier than any shouted victory. Plamen's ribs screamed with every breath. Kamen's breath was a wet, rattling thing. Alex sat hunched, head bowed, his shadow coiling in exhausted circles around his feet.
"Was it worth it?" Kamen whispered finally, more to himself than to the others.
Plamen looked at his friends—at the smeared blood on Alex's forearm, at the way Kamen's hands trembled despite the exhaustion, at the set of his own jaw, raw with new fractures. Worth was a soft word. They had survived. They had killed a thing that should never have woken. They had not been made stronger by it, only wearier, but something else had been revealed: the factory's cruelty was not measured only in the monsters it threw at them. It was in the way victory hollowed them out.
Alex snapped his gaze up then, and for the first time since Plamen had seen him in the Forgotten King's hall, his face softened in a way that was not a smirk. "We keep moving," he said. The voice was almost too small for the room. "We don't let it eat the promise."
Plamen closed his fingers around the obsidian scale until his knuckles whitened. It was a token, and Kronoshpan was hungry for tokens. He thought of the girl he had lost—her laughter as a ghost at the margin of memory—and of the countless faces they had seen swallowed by the factory's appetite. There were two trials left, and Kronoshpan had a voice like a noose.
They rose together, each step an effort of will. The staircase uncurled ahead, dark and patient. The factory had spared them for now. In the hush that followed, Plamen felt the burn in his chest like coal: alive but burned.
He looked at Kamen and Alex. Something smaller than relief, something like a hard, bright ember of trust, gleamed between them. It was enough—not to heal, not to soothe, but enough to make them climb.
They moved on.