The dead end behind me felt colder than the rest of the maze.
I could feel it at my back even without touching it, a clean, pale wall sealing off every bad decision that had led me here. No hidden opening. No narrow gap. No hope of slipping past the wolf if I just moved fast enough or found the right angle. The maze had done its job perfectly.
It had run me down into one place and closed its hand.
The Rendwolf knew it too.
It did not rush me now.
That would have been almost kinder.
Instead it stood at the mouth of the corridor with its head lowered slightly and its body coiled in patient readiness, letting me see exactly how trapped I was before it finished the work. Its hide looked worse in stillness than it had in the chase, patches of mangy grey-black fur giving way to scarred flesh that looked almost fused over in hard ridged seams, like old wounds had healed wrong and then had grown stronger because of it. The left side of its jaw twitched once, showing a line of dark gums behind teeth too broad and heavy for a normal wolf's skull. The silver eye stayed on the egg in my hand. The yellow one flicked once to the sword, then back again.
It had already decided what mattered.
Not me.
What I was holding.
Its breath rolled out in slow white-gray gusts against the dim air of the corridor. Every exhale carried the smell of blood, old meat, and something hot and rotten underneath it, like a kill left too long near a forge.
I tightened my grip on the sword.
Then on the egg.
Every instinct I had screamed at me to move anyway, to charge, slash, force something before the thing in front of me decided the pace completely. But the corridor was too narrow, the footing too bad, the monster too ready.
And I knew.
Normal swordplay wasn't going to be enough here.
Not while protecting the egg. Not in a corridor this tight. Not against something built like that.
The wolf took one careful step forward.
Its claws clicked against the stone.
Then another.
I didn't realize I was holding my breath until Finn spoke.
"If you want to survive this, we cannot do it the way we have before."
My eyes stayed on the wolf. "Meaning?"
"You will need more of me."
The answer landed cold and immediate.
I knew what he meant before he said anything else.
Not just guidance. Not just words in my head and a little sharpened instinct. Something deeper. Closer. More dangerous.
The wolf's lips twitched back from its teeth.
I didn't take my eyes off it. "That sounds bad."
"It is."
For one heartbeat, despite everything, I almost laughed.
Of course it was.
"Explain," I said.
The wolf lowered itself another inch, weight shifting onto its forelimbs. Ready now. Watching for weakness, for panic, for the first useless movement that would tell it exactly when to strike.
Finn spoke with infuriating calm anyway.
"We join more fully. I'll push more of my power through you. You stop fighting the overlap and let it happen."
I swallowed once. My mouth had gone dry.
"And then?"
"And then," he said, "you become more dangerous for a short time."
The phrasing alone told me enough.
"For a short time," I repeated.
"Yes."
"And what happens after?"
A brief pause.
"If you survive," he said, "you suffer for it."
I almost snarled.
"Not specific enough."
The wolf stepped again, slow and horrible and certain.
Finn answered at once.
"Your body is not ready for this level of joined magic. It may tear at the channels that carry your spirit power. It may damage the structure of your well's output. If you force too much, you could cripple your ability to wield spirit power properly ever again."
That cut through everything.
Even the wolf.
For half a second the corridor, the egg, the dead-end wall behind me, all of it narrowed down to that sentence.
Cripple your ability to wield spirit power.
Not death.
Worse, in some ways.
Not here. Not now. Not immediate.
But an ending.
An invisible one. A future ripped apart before it had even started.
My grip on the sword shifted without meaning to.
A colder part of me started calculating instantly. If I did it and survived, I might win the fight and lose the very thing I had crawled all this way to build. The spirit power. The deeper well. The training. Sylarion. The academy. Revenge. All of it.
The wolf's silver eye narrowed.
It knew I was hesitating.
Good.
Let it know.
I was still thinking.
"I'm not ready," I muttered.
"No," Finn said. "You are not."
The beast's claws scraped once against the stone.
It was almost close enough to spring.
I looked down at the egg for one stupid second.
It rested in my palm like some impossible problem the maze had shoved into my hands just to make the answer uglier. Pale shell veined with silver-blue lines. Warmth living under it. A pulse, faint, real, undeniable. That thread of connection I had felt when I first caught it remained there too, almost imperceptible but impossible to dismiss now that I knew it existed.
Alive.
Fragile.
And somehow, absurdly, mine for the moment.
I looked back up at the wolf.
"If I drop the egg, does it go after that instead?"
"Probably," Finn said.
"Probably?"
"You do not have time for certainty."
No. I didn't.
The corridor smelled like the next few seconds deciding everything.
The wolf took one more step.
Its shoulders lowered.
Its jaws opened.
Refusal rose in me so fast it almost felt clean.
Not here.
Not like this.
Not cornered in some academy maze because another candidate had been clever enough to use me and a monster had been fast enough to make it matter. Not after Astralon. Not after my parents. Not after Nate. Not after the lion, the pact, the forest, the dragon, the fruit, the road, the academy, the exam.
I was not dying right here.
That thought became the only clear thing in me.
I looked straight at the wolf.
"Do it."
Finn did not waste time answering.
"Then do not resist."
Pressure hit first.
Not outward.
Inward.
Something in me tightened, then opened, then tightened again around a presence I had only ever felt beside my soul before, never this close, never this deep. Finn moved through me not like another person stepping into a room but like cold light being forced through cracks too narrow to carry it. My spine arched hard. Breath caught in my throat.
Pain followed immediately.
Sharp. White. Internal.
It cut from my chest outward through my shoulders and down both arms, then dropped hard into my core where my spirit well sat cold and heavy beneath everything else. It felt like hands, impossible, invisible hands, were gripping the edges of that deeper reservoir and wrenching them wider while forcing power upward far too fast through channels not built to hold that much at once.
I gasped.
The egg pulsed in my left hand.
My knees almost buckled.
"Hold," Finn said, his voice no longer just beside my thoughts but through them, layered into my own awareness in a way that made the word feel half mine and half not.
"I am…"
"No. You are panicking."
The wolf lunged.
I barely got the sword up in time.
It slammed into me like a collapsed wall with teeth. Its jaws snapped for my upper body and missed only because I twisted, letting the impact glance off the flat of the blade and my shoulder instead of hitting square. Pain exploded through the arm holding the sword. I hit the side wall hard enough to bruise instantly and nearly crushed the egg between my ribs and forearm.
The joined power surged wildly in response.
Not controlled. Not elegant.
Just there.
Cold and violent and heavy, flooding my limbs faster than I could fully understand it. My vision sharpened in one direction and blurred at the edges. Sound changed. The scrape of claws, my own breathing, the tiny clicks of the wolf's weight shifting before another strike, everything came clearer and harsher, as if the world had moved slightly closer to my nerves.
The monster recoiled for a second, surprised that I hadn't gone down.
Then it came again.
This time I saw it better.
Not because it was slower.
Because I was different.
Its shoulders bunched a fraction before the spring. The injured side favored a hair less weight than the other. The left paw scraped wider when it committed. Its head angled not for my throat but lower—for the hand holding the egg.
I moved without planning it.
The sword cut across its line of approach in a short brutal slash and bit into the side of its muzzle. Dark blood sprayed hot across my hand and sleeve. The wolf shrieked—not in pain alone, but rage—and crashed into the opposite wall hard enough to crack stone.
For one impossible second, triumph flared.
Then the backlash hit.
Not enough to stop me.
Enough to warn me.
My right arm spasmed from shoulder to wrist, every channel in it burning like I had poured molten metal through the veins. My chest tightened so hard breathing became work. The power was there, yes, more than I had ever held before, but it did not sit naturally in me. It strained. Pressed. Threatened to break past what my body could safely carry every time I drew on it.
"This is bad," I hissed.
"Yes," Finn said.
"Useful, though."
"That depends entirely on whether you live."
The wolf launched again before I could answer.
No more testing. No more slow approach.
Now it knew.
Now it wanted the kill before whatever had changed in me stabilized further.
It came low, then high in the same movement, foreclaws gouging toward my legs while its jaws snapped for my upper body. I barely managed to keep the egg protected, twisting my torso and dragging the sword down in a hard parrying arc that knocked one claw wide and redirected the rest of the beast just enough that it hit me at an angle instead of head-on.
Its weight still drove me back into the dead-end wall.
Pain burst through my spine.
The egg knocked against my chest.
The wolf's breath hit my face hot and foul. One claw raked my side, not deep, but enough to slice cloth and skin and wake every older wound beneath it. I snarled and drove my knee up hard under its chest. Not enough to injure it badly. Enough to create a sliver of space.
"Inside line," Finn snapped.
I didn't think. I just obeyed.
The sword shot up between the wolf's forelimbs in a savage thrust toward the throat. The beast twisted faster than I expected, and the blade plunged into thick muscle along the shoulder instead. Still bad for it. Not enough.
It screamed.
I ripped the sword free and stumbled sideways just as its jaws closed where my face had been.
Stone chips sprayed.
Its teeth had bitten into the wall.
I pushed off the dead end and moved.