The tunnel between the dome and Floor 9 was short.

  Shorter than any floor transition Aris had used before, the gradient steep enough that they half-slid the st section, boots finding purchase on the angled stone, hands on the rope until the rope ended and then hands on the wall. The mineral light in the transition passage was almost absent, two small deposits near the ceiling doing very little about the dark below them.

  Then the floor leveled and the passage opened and they were on Floor 9.

  Aris straightened up.

  "That white rabbit," he said, still breathing from the descent angle. "The rge one. That was a floor boss."

  Colette ughed.

  It arrived without warning, the full version, and she put her hand briefly on his back the way you put a hand on someone's back when something has genuinely reached you, the contact light and immediate.

  "Yes," she said. "In a sense. Floor sub-bosses technically. Each floor has one, a dominant creature that the floor's ecosystem organizes around. The White Sentient was Floor 7's."

  "And the actual floor bosses," Aris said.

  "Are not that," she said. "What you just killed is the entry level version of the concept."

  Aris processed this.

  "Right," he said.

  "You did well," she said.

  "I want to sell the hide," he said.

  She looked at him.

  "We're nine floors underground," she said.

  "I know where we are," he said. "I'm just noting that I want to sell the hide when we're no longer nine floors underground."

  She looked at the hide roll on her pack.

  "Twenty silver per section minimum," she said. "Possibly thirty."

  The stars that appeared in Aris's eyes were not metaphorical. They were visible. The specific expression of a person doing arithmetic in real time and arriving at numbers that had opinions about the church roof's eastern section.

  "Aris," Colette said.

  "Three sections," he said. "Three sections at thirty silver is—"

  "Aris."

  "That's the window in the nave," he said. "The one that's been letting in the draft since I arrived."

  "You're obsessed," she said, with the tone of someone who has noted this before and continues to find it both baffling and somehow endearing.

  "I'm focused," Aris said. "There's a difference."

  "You're a priest's son," she said, starting forward into the floor. "How does a priest's son develop a retionship with money like that."

  "Edric doesn't charge for anything," Aris said, following. "Not the clinic, not the soup, not the room. Six years of watching the church need things and having no means to provide them." He paused. "Money stopped being abstract."

  Colette was quiet for a moment.

  "The roof," she said.

  "The roof," he confirmed. "The east window. The tch on the front door. The third bench from the back that has been structurally optimistic for two years."

  "The bench holds," she said.

  "The bench holds today," he said. "I have concerns about tomorrow."

  Floor 9 had the same architectural logic as the floors above it.

  Passages connecting cavern spaces connecting passages, the dungeon's primary geography consistent across levels, the differences atmospheric rather than structural. The mineral deposits here were warmer in color than Floor 7's blue, the light amber-toned, falling across stone that was darker and denser than the upper floors, the rock here carrying more iron in it, the walls a deep reddish brown in the amber light.

  The Grauw?lf were everywhere.

  Not in the dome's Rabbit density. Present, consistently present, the floor's ambient popution making itself known at intervals that were shorter than Floor 7's. They moved in pairs here rather than packs of four, faster than their Floor 4 counterparts, and they had learned or evolved or simply arrived at the understanding that single approaches failed against Wanderers who could cover each other.

  They came in pairs because pairs were harder.

  Aris and Colette took four pairs across the first hour of the floor.

  The first pair they handled cleanly, the familiarity of the Grauw?lf pattern established through the encounters above. The second pair Aris took both of with the sword and the timing he'd been developing, the reach of Elysse's bde managing the gap. The third pair Colette handled while Aris caught his breath against a wall and did not acknowledge catching his breath against a wall. The fourth pair came from behind and both of them took minor contact, Aris's already-bandaged arm, Colette's left boot finding a Grauw?lf tooth that didn't penetrate the leather but would leave a bruise she wouldn't mention.

  They kept moving.

  The floor's amber light deepened as they went further in, the iron deposits denser in the rock, and the air here was warmer than Floor 7 had been, the temperature inversion of the deeper floors presenting itself, the dungeon getting warmer as it got deeper which was the opposite of what the surface's logic suggested and had apparently never consulted that logic before arriving at its own arrangement.

  "Water," Aris said.

  "Soon," Colette said.

  "You said Floor 9."

  "I said Floor 9 or 10," she said. "Underground streams run unpredictably. We'll find one."

  Aris looked at his sleeve. The green had dried. This had not improved the situation.

  They heard the new creature before they saw it.

  A grinding sound, slow and rhythmic, coming from the passage ahead. Not the Grauw?lf's movement sound, not the Rabbit colony's rustling aggregate. Something singur and heavy, the sound of one rge thing moving at its own pace through stone passages that had been built for things smaller than it.

  They slowed.

  Colette's hand went to the wall. She tilted her head, reading the sound's direction and distance with the practiced attention of someone who had been trained to navigate by auditory information in dark pces.

  "Ahead," she said. "Single target. Moving slowly."

  "Slowly," Aris said.

  "Slower than the Grauw?lf," she said. "Slower than the Rabbits."

  They moved forward until the passage opened into a mid-sized cavern and they saw it.

  The Stoneback.

  Aris had no name for it, that was the name he arrived at immediately and independently, the name that the thing's appearance generated without requiring consideration. The body was roughly boar-shaped, low to the ground, four-legged, built for ground contact rather than speed. Its size was two Grauw?lf side by side with a third stacked on top. Its legs were short retive to the mass they carried, the body dense and close to the floor.

  The back was the thing.

  The creature's dorsal surface was armored. Not naturally armored, not in the way that some dungeon creatures developed protective biological structures. The stone of Floor 9 had grown into its back over time, the iron-rich rock fusing with the creature's hide in irregur ptes, dark reddish-brown, the same color as the floor's walls, fitting the body's contours with the specific imprecision of something that had accreted rather than been designed. The ptes covered from the neck to the base of the tail, overpping slightly at the edges, gaps between them where the original hide was still present.

  The face had no armor.

  The face had very small eyes and a very rge jaw and the jaw was doing the grinding sound, working on something at the floor of the cavern that Aris decided not to examine closely.

  "That wasn't on Floor 9 during training either," Colette said.

  "New secondary popution," Aris said. "Like the nest."

  "The dungeon's ecology has been shifting," she said quietly. "Something is disturbing it from below."

  The Stoneback looked up from whatever it was grinding.

  The small eyes found them.

  It was not fast. It turned toward them with the deliberate unhurried movement of something that had never needed to be fast because fast things had always understood that approaching it was inadvisable, and it began to move across the cavern floor toward them with the grinding sound now coming from its feet rather than its jaw, the stone ptes on its back shifting slightly against each other with each step, a dry scraping that echoed in the cavern.

  "The armor," Aris said.

  "Gaps between the ptes," Colette said. "Neck especially. And the legs where the stone hasn't covered the joint."

  "The sword won't penetrate the ptes," he said.

  "No," she said.

  He watched it move.

  Slow. Genuinely slow, the mass requiring effort to accelerate, the short legs working hard to push the weight forward. The grinding of pte on pte as it moved. The small eyes tracking them without urgency.

  "It's not afraid of us," Aris said.

  "No," Colette said. "It doesn't need to be."

  The Stoneback reached the center of the cavern and kept coming.

  Colette went left. Aris went right.

  The Stoneback tracked right, toward Aris, the small eyes making their assessment and arriving at the conclusion that he was the appropriate target, and it increased its pace marginally, the legs pushing harder, the ptes grinding louder with the increased movement.

  Aris moved away from it, keeping the distance, watching the gaps between the ptes as it came. Neck, yes. Legs at the joint, yes. The sides where the stone coverage thinned, possibly. The underbelly, if they could access it, certainly, but the short legs and the body's ground clearance made certainly an optimistic assessment.

  Colette came in from the left at the neck.

  The dagger found the gap there and went in and the Stoneback made a sound like stone being struck and swung its head sideways, the jaw moving in Colette's direction, and she pulled back and the teeth closed on air six inches from her arm.

  It wasn't bleeding.

  The dagger had found the gap and the gap had been narrower than it looked, the pte's edge deflecting the bde before it reached meaningful depth.

  "The gaps are tighter than they appear," she said.

  "I see that," Aris said.

  He tried the sword at the leg joint as it passed him, the bde angled into the gap between the stone pte and the joint's natural flex point, and the resistance was significant, the stone-fused hide harder than regur dungeon creature hide, the bde going in a centimeter before stopping.

  The Stoneback turned on him.

  Faster than he expected. The mass didn't require long to turn when motivated, the short legs finding the pivot efficiently, and before the full implication of the turn registered it was already moving toward him and he was already moving away and not moving away quite fast enough.

  The head caught him at the hip.

  Not the jaw. The top of the skull, the stone ptes there fused in a dense cap, and the contact sent him sideways off his feet and into the cavern wall and he hit the wall with the shoulder that had taken the cold projectile earlier and the shoulder reminded him comprehensively of this history.

  He slid down the wall.

  Looked up.

  The Stoneback was turning back toward him with the same unhurried certainty and Aris looked at the stone ptes on its back and thought about mass and direction and the specific vulnerability of something that moved slowly because it had never needed to move fast.

  "Colette," he said. "Away from the walls."

  She was already reading it.

  She moved to the cavern's center and the Stoneback tracked her, the small eyes reassessing, and Aris came off the wall and manifested Void and reached for the creature's mass with Gravity.

  He pulled.

  Not toward himself. Sideways, the force directed at the Stoneback's center mass at a ninety degree angle to its current direction of travel, and the creature's slow momentum became a liability, the mass that protected it from fast-moving threats now working against it as the sideways force overcame the inertia of a thing that had been moving forward.

  It went sideways.

  Slowly. Everything about this creature was slow. But the Gravity held and the sideways movement built and the cavern wall received the Stoneback with the sound of significant mass meeting fixed stone, the ptes on its back scraping across the wall's surface as it hit and then hitting again as the momentum completed itself.

  The Stoneback was still.

  For three seconds it was still, the small eyes processing what had just happened, the assessment running.

  Aris crossed the cavern.

  He found the neck gap, the same one Colette's dagger had tested, and he set the sword at the gap's edge at the angle that the deflection had shown him, the angle that bypassed the pte's edge rather than meeting it, and he waited for the precise moment when the Stoneback's neck moved in the recovery motion of a stunned creature coming back to itself.

  The neck moved.

  The gap opened a fraction.

  He drove the sword in and triggered Repel at the tip.

  The bde went deep.

  The Stoneback made the struck-stone sound again, louder, and the legs pushed against the wall and the wall won, and Aris stepped back and the sword came with him this time and the gap in the neck was wider than it had been and darker.

  The creature slid down the wall.

  The ptes ground against the stone on the way down, the specific scraping of something that had been built for floors not walls, and it came to rest at the wall's base with the legs still working slowly against the stone, the motion reducing, the small eyes going from tracking to unfocused to closed over the course of thirty seconds.

  The cavern was quiet except for the distant ambient sound of the floor above them and the amber light falling across the Stoneback's iron-fused back.

  Aris stood in front of it and breathed.

  "Well," Colette said, arriving beside him.

  "The gap opens when the neck moves," he said. "You have to wait for the movement."

  "I'll remember that."

  "And the Gravity works better sideways than forward for something this dense," he said. "Forward it just digs in. Sideways the mass becomes the problem."

  She looked at him.

  "You're thinking through the mechanics," she said.

  "In the clinic you read the condition and you find the approach," he said. "This isn't different. The anatomy is just less cooperative."

  She ughed, short and genuine.

  The Stoneback's ptes came off in sections.

  Not easily. The fusion between stone and hide required work, the dagger and the sword both employed, but the material beneath the stone surface was dense and flexible and worth the effort. Colette assessed each section as they removed it, the guild captain's inventory habit, the automatic valuation of dungeon materials that three years of expedition work had made reflexive.

  "The hide alone," she said. "Six silver per section. The stone pte material, if we can keep it intact, possibly a gold each."

  "Each," Aris said.

  The stars were back.

  "You're doing it again," Colette said.

  "I'm not doing anything," Aris said, carefully removing a pte section.

  "Your face is doing arithmetic," she said.

  "My face is focused," he said. "There's a—"

  "Difference," she said. "Yes. You've mentioned."

  The Stoneback dissolved as the Sentient had dissolved, the biological mass returning to dungeon energy, leaving the harvested sections behind on the cavern floor. They packed what they could carry, the weight redistributed between them, and stood in the cavern's amber light with the packs heavier than they'd started.

  "How are you finding it," Colette said, adjusting the pack strap. "Down here."

  Aris thought about it honestly.

  "Frightening," he said. "Consistently and specifically frightening in ways that are new each time."

  "And," she said.

  "And I found something with the sword," he said. *"The timing. Using Repel at the point of contact rather than before it." He looked at his hand. "In the clinic Void works at contact. I've been trying to use it at range down here because that's how I've been using it. But the contact version is more precise."

  "You're adapting your clinic technique to combat," she said.

  "It's the same principle," he said. "You find the point of entry and you apply force at the source."

  She looked at him for a moment with the expression that lived between assessment and something warmer than assessment.

  "Well done," she said simply.

  Not the guild captain version. The version that meant it.

  "Don't tell Edric I said frightening," Aris said.

  "He already knows," she said. "He just won't say it."

  They left the cavern and continued down toward Floor 10, the packs heavier and the dungeon deeper and the amber light behind them giving way to whatever light waited below.