The first Grave Stalker came through the glass sideways in a shower of black water and steel shards, hit the corridor wall feet first, and lunged straight for Sen.
Malik intercepted it in two steps and buried his sword through the thing's jaw before it could reach the archivist. The blade punched through the back of its skull with a crack of bone and wet stone. The creature kept twitching.
"Of course it does," Malik muttered.
A second Stalker slid through the breach on all fours, limbs too long, body too light, moving like a spider trying to imitate a person. Sera put a bolt through one eye and the thing still managed to make it halfway up the wall before Nyxara's knife caught it under the clavicle and pinned it there.
The third went for Kael.
He didn't think.
He stepped into it and drove his spear upward, but the creature twisted around the shaft mid-lunge, hooked one arm over it, and almost used the leverage to drag him down.
Its mouth opened far wider than a mouth should.
Then shadow snapped off Kael's forearm like a hooked blade and sliced the creature across the throat.
Black blood sprayed the tunnel wall.
Everyone saw it.
Kael saw that everyone saw it.
No one had time to comment because the rest of the transit line woke up.
Shapes moved below the dark water. Climbing. Testing. Scraping their way toward the broken window in numbers.
"Elara!" Toren shouted over the sound. "That is too many!"
She saw it too.
"Fall back! Junction three!"
They ran.
The corridor became a strobe of weak emergency lights, splashing boots, and pale limbs hammering through the shattered breach behind them. Kael kept to the rear flank with Malik as the others pulled Sen forward. The Grave Stalkers moved with unnerving bursts of silence between impacts, vanishing in one patch of dark and reappearing on the walls ten feet closer.
At the first corner, Nyxara slid under an old pipe brace, slashed a release lever, and dropped a rusted maintenance gate behind them.
It bought exactly three seconds.
The Stalkers hit it all at once and bent it inward with a scream of old metal.
"Good gate," Toren said breathlessly. "Useless gate, but emotionally supportive."
Sera vaulted a fallen panel and turned mid-motion to fire two quick bolts back down the line. Both found targets. Both only slowed them.
"We need light!" Ilya shouted.
Nyxara snapped, "Then make some!"
Ilya tore the cap off the silver lantern at his belt and drove his thumb into the solar trigger.
The lantern erupted.
White-gold light flooded the tunnel like a miniature sunrise.
The lead Grave Stalkers recoiled with shrieks sharp enough to drill through bone. Their pale skin blistered instantly, black veins standing out under the glow. Two stumbled back into the others and the whole wave of them folded into itself in a thrashing knot of limbs.
"Move!" Elara shouted.
They did.
Junction three opened into an old service exchange room ringed by dead consoles and maintenance doors. Nyxara pointed toward the western hatch.
"That one."
"It's sealed," Toren said.
"Then unseal it."
He stared at the thick iron lockwheel.
"I love when your confidence in me is irresponsible."
Kael and Bram would have ripped it open by force.
Bram wasn't here.
So Toren dropped to one knee, slammed both hands on the locking plate, and closed his eyes.
For one second nothing happened.
Then the old ward sigils around the wheel flared pale blue.
The iron bolts withdrew with a violent clank.
Everyone stared.
Toren stared too.
"Okay," he said quietly. "That's new and bad."
Malik hauled the door open.
"Admire yourself later."
They poured through into a lower tunnel section just as the service room behind them filled with shrieking pale shapes. Elara slammed the hatch shut. Nyxara dropped the crossbar. Malik drove his sword through the wheel spoke to jam it in place.
The first impacts hit immediately from the other side.
Heavy.
Persistent.
The old metal buckled inward a fraction.
"We keep moving," Nyxara said. "If they smell us from this line, others will too."
Sera wiped black blood off her cheek with the back of her hand.
"Do you have any routes that aren't nightmares?"
Nyxara gave her the faintest sideways look.
"No."
Kael leaned one hand against the damp wall and forced himself to breathe around the pounding in his chest.
Too much blood in the air.
Too much fear.
Too much noise.
Elara stepped in front of him just enough to block the others' view.
"You holding?"
He nodded.
It took effort.
She saw that.
Before she could say anything more, Sen's voice drifted from a few feet away, shaky but lucid.
"These tunnels are wrong."
Malik turned. "That's your contribution?"
Sen pointed to the wall.
At first Kael saw only age-stained concrete.
Then the faint curves beneath it.
Scratched into the wall by something deliberate.
The same crescent-and-circle symbol.
Not fresh.
Old.
Very old.
Nyxara touched one with two fingers and swore under her breath.
"This route has been used before."
"By who?" asked Toren.
No one answered.
Because they all knew.
The Eclipsed Hand had been under Helios Gate longer than anyone wanted to think.
Somewhere deeper in the dark, the hatch behind them screamed as the metal began to tear.
Nyxara straightened.
"Run."
So they did.
Deeper west.
Deeper down.
Toward the Black Library.
And toward whatever had been waiting there long before any of them were born.