The corridor wasn't large enough for real maneuvering, but with the combined power flooding my body I could at least turn faster, recover faster, see a little more before the thing's movement finished becoming action. Not mastery. Not control. Just enough sharpened perception to keep the fight from ending in the next breath.
The wolf's silver eye fixed on me again.
Blood ran down its muzzle.
Its shoulder bled heavily where the blade had entered.
Still it came.
Of course it did.
Monsters did not stop because they were hurt.
Neither did I.
Not anymore.
The next exchange was too fast to think through cleanly.
The wolf lunged. I pivoted, cut, missed the neck and opened the ribs. It slammed into me anyway. I half-fell, half-slid under the impact, barely keeping the egg trapped safe against my body with my left forearm while my right arm brought the blade around in a short ugly slash at its hind leg. It yelped, twisted, backclawed, and one talon tore across my thigh hard enough to nearly drop me.
Pain flared white.
I hit one knee.
The power surged harder in response, not because I controlled it well, but because fury and survival were both easy doors for it to come through.
Darkness crowded the edges of my vision for a second.
Not faintness.
Excess.
Too much pressure. Too much force looking for a body better built to contain it.
"Control it," Finn said.
"You control it."
"I am not the one with hands."
That made me want to laugh and scream at the same time.
The wolf hit me again before either happened.
Its body crashed into mine side-on and drove me across the corridor. My shoulder struck the wall. The sword jarred loose in my grip. One of the beast's claws slammed down over my forearm and pinned the blade halfway to the floor.
Its face came in close.
Too close.
I saw every string of saliva between its teeth. Saw the blood on its muzzle. Saw the blind fury in the silver eye and the hungry possessiveness in the yellow one.
It wanted the egg.
That realization came like a knife.
Not me.
Still not me.
It would tear me apart because I was between it and what it wanted.
Fine.
Let it.
But not for free.
I let go of the sword.
Just for a second.
The wolf did not expect that.
Neither, maybe, did Finn.
I drove my now-free right hand straight into the side of its wounded muzzle with every bit of spirit power I could rip through the channel without stopping to think about the cost. Not a refined technique. Not a spell. Just power and rage and refusal forced into one close-range strike.
The effect was immediate.
Cold-black force burst from my arm into the impact point like a hammer made of storm-dark water. The wolf's head snapped sideways. Bone cracked. It reeled off me with a strangled howl and smashed shoulder-first into the opposite wall.
Pain detonated up my entire arm.
I cried out.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I couldn't.
The channels through that arm felt scorched. Torn. Wrong.
"That," Finn said with terrible calm, "is exactly how you cripple yourself."
"I know."
"Good."
The wolf shook itself, dazed for only a heartbeat, then recovered.
I seized the sword again.
My hand almost failed closing around the grip. I forced it.
The joined power was getting harder to hold cleanly now. Harder to separate from pain. Harder to tell where Finn ended and I began once the actual fighting started. His instincts rode closer inside me than before, pushing angles and timing into my body before thought could catch up. My own rage met them halfway. Between the two, I was becoming fast enough. Strong enough.
And far too unstable.
The egg pulsed again.
This time stronger.
Not enough to matter tactically. Just enough that the slight connection I'd been feeling sharpened into one impossible second of sensation that wasn't mine, fear, heat, waiting. Then it was gone, leaving only warmth against my palm.
No time.
The wolf gathered itself.
So did I.
This time when it came, I met it head-on.
Not because that was wise. Because there was no room left for anything cleaner.
Its leap took half the corridor. I stepped inside it instead of away, hearing Finn curse somewhere through the overlap of our thoughts even as I moved. The egg stayed clamped against my chest by my left arm. My right brought the sword up in a rising slash powered not by muscle alone but by the flood of spirit force roaring through every channel I still had left to ruin.
Steel met flesh.
Then more than flesh.
The sword was no longer just steel.
For a single terrible second I felt the spirit power catch along the blade and pour through it, cold and dark and heavy as if the sword had become the only honest line for all that unstable force to take. The edge flashed, not visibly to the eye in any normal way, but to my own senses it became a seam of sharpened intent wrapped in spirit pressure strong enough to make my teeth ache.
The strike carved from lower chest to throat.
The wolf twisted during it, which saved its head for a second longer than I wanted, but the wound opened huge and immediate. Blood exploded across the corridor. The beast hit the wall, rebounded, and tried to come again anyway, half-choking on its own ruined throat.
Still not enough.
Of course not.
Nothing easy.
It staggered forward.
I did not retreat.
Refusal burned through me harder than pain now. Refusal at dying here. Refusal at being used. Refusal at watching another monster stand over me and decide whether I was worth finishing.
Not again.
Never again.
Finn's voice cut through the roar in my blood.
"Now."
I stepped in and drove the spirit-endowed sword straight through the wolf's neck with both hands.
This time the blade did not meet resistance the same way.
The power along it tore through meat, bone, and whatever armored wrongness lay underneath in one brutal line. The point punched out the far side of the neck and into the wall behind it with a cracking impact. Spirit power surged through the steel and into the wolf's body like cold fire.
The beast convulsed.
Its jaws opened.
No howl came out.
Only blood.
I ripped the sword free and, before it could drop or thrash or somehow continue because monsters always seemed able to continue longer than they should, I reversed the grip and hacked once across the side of its skull just above the silver eye.
The spirit power carried the edge through.
The wolf collapsed.
Not gracefully. Not cleanly. It folded in on itself in a violent ruin of weight and blood and twitching limbs, crashing to the stone with enough force to shake the corridor beneath my boots.
Silence followed.
Not real silence.
My own breathing filled it too hard for that.
But monster silence.
Dead silence.
I stood over the body with the sword still raised for another strike that never came.
Then my knees buckled.
I caught myself on the wall with one hand and nearly dropped both sword and egg in the process. Pain ripped through my whole body at once now that survival had stopped masking it—arm, chest, thigh, side, ribs, channels, all of it lighting up together in one sweeping blaze of consequence.
The joined power collapsed inward.
Not vanished.
Collapsed.
Like a flood being forced back through cracks too narrow to hold the retreat cleanly. My vision wavered. My stomach lurched. I nearly blacked out standing up.
Finn withdrew enough that I could feel the difference instantly, though the closeness of him still lingered under my skin and behind my thoughts like an ache with a voice.
"Steady," he said.
"Easy for you to say."
"Well, because I'm steady, and you're not."
I almost laughed. Instead I slid halfway down the wall and had to force myself upright again because sitting beside the wolf's corpse felt like the sort of mistake that led to dying five seconds after victory.
My right arm would not stop shaking.
The spirit channels in it felt flayed.
I could feel the deeper well still there beneath everything, colder, heavier, real—but the output pathways felt raw in a way I instinctively understood was dangerous. Like stretched fibers pulled nearly to tearing and only now beginning to realize what had been forced through them.
Finn confirmed it before I could ask.
"Do not do that again carelessly."
I wiped blood from my mouth with the back of my wrist and hissed at the movement. "Noted."
"You could badly damage yourself."
"I know."
"Worse than badly."
I looked down at the wolf's corpse, then at the sword in my hand.
Finn continued, relentless as ever.
"If you keep forcing power like that through channels not ready to bear it, you will not simply exhaust yourself. You could cripple your ability to ever wield spirit power properly again."
I shut my eyes for one second.
"I already know that."
The words came out rougher than I intended.
Not angry at him. Not fully.
Angry at the truth of it.
Angry that the first time I had reached for something beyond ordinary survival, it had almost torn me apart in the process.
Angry that it had still worked.
Because that was the part that made it tempting.
Finn went silent after that.
For a few breaths, neither of us said anything.
I looked down at the egg.
Still whole.
No cracks. No damage. The warmth under the shell remained steady, and when I shifted it slightly in my hand I felt that same faint thread of connection again. Not stronger than before, but still there. Alive. Waiting.
"Still with me," I muttered.
The egg pulsed once against my palm, almost in answer.
I stared at it for another second, then tucked it more securely against my side and forced myself to stand straighter.
The wolf's body lay stretched across half the corridor, blood spreading darkly around it. Its silver eye had dulled completely now. Good.
I looked awful, I knew that without needing a mirror. Blood from the wolf. Blood from me. Torn clothes. Shaking legs. Breath still refusing to settle. If anyone had seen me right then, they would have learned exactly how ugly victory could look when earned by desperation.
And still, beneath the pain and exhaustion and warning signs running through my body, one hard fact remained.
I had won.
Not cleanly.
Not safely.
But I was still here.
The corridor behind the corpse gave nothing back. The dead end still stood at my back, pale and final.
Then the stone moved.
At first I thought the dizziness was making the walls swim again.
Then the sound came, deep grinding, slow and deliberate, the unmistakable shifting of the maze itself.
I turned sharply, ignoring the protest from my ribs.
The dead-end wall behind me split along lines that had not existed a moment before. Stone blocks slid inward and sideways with controlled, mechanical certainty, revealing a new corridor beyond where there had been none.
For one second I simply stared.
Then Finn spoke, dry as ever.
"The maze has decided you may continue."
I looked from the opening to the wolf's corpse and back again.
My body still shook.
My channels still burned.
The egg sat warm against my side.
And the path forward had opened.
"Well, let's go see what else this fucking maze has to offer."