"You've had a wasted trip," Valletta said, and turned her back on them again to keep working the door.
"But I do appreciate the company. It's been so quiet down here."
Alise took one step into the chamber, and her voice came out low and terrible.
"Step away from it!"
"Or what, little Scarlet?" Valletta didn't look up.
Her scarred fingers moved over the ancient marks in a slow, practiced pattern, and where they passed, the deep carvings woke and glowed a sick green-gold, one after another around the vast circle.
"You'll kill me? You had years to be angry about that and you never managed it. Why would tonight be different?"
"Because tonight you're standing in front of something worth stopping." Finn's spear was already in his hand, and his calm had a blade's edge to it.
"Whatever that door is, it's staying shut."
"Oh, it's not a door." Valletta laughed, delighted, still tracing the marks. "That's the wonderful part. It's a lid. Daedalus dug too deep, all those centuries ago, and he found something down here he couldn't kill and couldn't move, so he did the only thing his kind ever does. He built a box around it and told himself the problem was solved."
Another mark flared to life under her fingers.
"But a box is just a promise. And I've spent three years and a great many lives learning how to break this particular promise!"
Rayleigh felt it then, through the soles of his boots and the deep part of him that read these things.
Behind the sealed circle, something enormous shifted in its sleep.
Something old, and patient, and very, very hungry, stirring toward the first crack of light it had felt in a thousand years.
'She's not trying to open a route.... she's trying to let something out!'
"Why," Kaguya said. Her blades were drawn, her voice flat as a held breath. "You gain nothing. It won't spare you. A thing like that doesn't take sides."
"I don't want it to take sides." Valletta turned to face them fully now, and the madness in her ruined face was almost serene.
"You think I'm doing this to rule anything? To win? No. The war took that out of me. Zald's dead. Alfia's gone. My god abandoned the whole beautiful project and went home to the sky." Her smile stretched.
"There's nothing left to want but the ending! So I'm going to open the lid, and I'm going to let the oldest hungry thing under the world walk up into Orario, and I'm going to sit right here and watch this city finally get what it always had coming. Call it a late payment."
Behind her, a small terrified voice said, "Valletta. Valletta, this isn't— you said routes. You said we were testing—"
Corvin had been there the whole time, pressed against the chamber wall, and Rayleigh had marked him and set him aside as harmless.
Now the handler came off the wall with his face grey, finally understanding that the woman he worked for had never been building a smuggling operation.
She'd been building a doomsday, and he'd carried her tools.
"You said we could control it," Corvin said, shrill now. "The guardian! You said the marks would hold it—"
"I said a great many things, Corvin." Valletta turned back to the door. "You were paid to believe them."
And that was when the far wall of the chamber split open, and the Knocker came home.
...
It did not step out this time.
It unfolded out of the stone, taller than before even down an arm, and the moment it stood in the chamber every glowing mark on the great lid seemed to pulse in answer, because this was its post.
This was the door it had been made a thousand years ago to hold shut, and it had come back to find its door surrounded by strangers and a scarred woman with her hands all over the seal.
The stolen voices poured out of it, dozens at once, but this time they weren't luring anyone.
They were a single rising wail of alarm.
Corvin, drowning in panic, did the only thing he knew how to do.
He fumbled the iron rod out of his coat and hammered it against the wall, the old rhythm, the knock that had opened a hundred routes.
Two knocks. A pause. Three more.
"Stand down! I command you, stand down, I have the—"
The Knocker's long arm took him across the chamber in a single motion, faster than his eyes could follow, and Corvin's command ended in the middle of the word.
There wasn't much left of him after. The rod rang once on the stone and went still.
'And there's the leash he thought he held.' Rayleigh had known it was coming since the flooded level, and it was still ugly to watch.
The tool had never had a master, it had only ever had a door.
Then it turned on all of them at once.
...
The chamber came apart into chaos.
The Knocker didn't distinguish between the heroes and the madwoman at the seal.
It struck at everything that moved near its door, that one long arm sweeping through the chamber like a falling mast, and the whole company scattered to survive it.
Gareth got his shield up and took a blow meant for Riveria and skidded ten feet back across the stone.
Ottar met the next one head on, Tenken already drawn, the giant ghost-arm slamming up to catch the Knocker's swing so the two vast limbs locked and strained against each other in the center of the room.
"It's stronger here!" Ottar called, and there was something almost like joy in it. "At its door, it is stronger!"
"Then keep it off the seal!" Rayleigh was already moving, because the Knocker had bought Valletta exactly what she needed: a room full of people too busy staying alive to stop her.
She hadn't stopped working.
Through all of it, through Corvin's death and the guardian's rampage, Valletta stood at the great lid with the chaos breaking around her like water around a stone, tracing mark after mark, and more of the circle bloomed green-gold with every breath.
Over half of it glowed now.
Behind the seal, the enormous sleeping thing had begun to wake in earnest, and the whole chamber had started to tremble with the size of it.
Rayleigh cut toward her through the madness.
Ryuu's ash swept a viola-strike off his flank. Alise put herself between him and the Knocker's backswing and turned it with a wall of fire, teeth bared, buying him a step.
Cassandra's petals bloomed under his feet, red and then safe, red and then safe, threading him through the collapse Daphne was hauling her clear of.
He got within twenty feet of Valletta before the Knocker's arm came down between them like a dropped bridge, and the whole floor jumped, and he had to throw himself back or lose his legs.
'It's guarding her by accident. It wants us off the door, and she's standing on the door.'
There was no way past it.
Not while it stood.
And it would not stop standing, because it could not be made to stop by anything he'd done so far.
He'd cut it in half once and watched it walk away.
He'd frozen it and shattered its arm and it had simply come back with the arm regrown.
Every honest blade in his hands, every clean strike he'd trained his whole life to make, was worthless against a thing with no heart to find and no place it couldn't lose.
Behind Valletta, another mark flared.
The seal was two-thirds lit.
The trembling had become a slow, grinding shudder, and a hairline of pure black had opened along one seam of the great lid, and out of that thread of dark came a cold so old and so wrong that even Ottar's face changed.
They were out of time, and out of ordinary answers.
'Fine.' Rayleigh's hand left Hyōrinmaru and Senbonzakura and every blade that only knew how to wound, and settled on the one at his right hip, the one Alfia had pointed him toward in her dry certain voice, the deeper thing he almost never asked for.
This was the room she'd meant.
Space enough overhead.
A thing that had to be unmade rather than cut. And a reason, at last, that made spending it worth every consequence.
He'd told the guardian he would finish it when finishing it meant something.
It meant something now.
The chamber shook.
Valletta traced the mark that would light the final arc of the seal.
And Rayleigh planted his feet in the center of the chaos, leveled Benihime's red blade at the tall thing that could not be killed, and stopped holding back.
"Bankai."