Floors 10 and 11 gave them nothing.

  Not in the way that absence was restful. The absence was active, the specific frustration of two people looking carefully at every surface of every chamber and passage they moved through and finding only what the floors naturally contained, which was Stonebacks and Grauw?lf and the dungeon's own accumuted evidence of itself.

  The Stonebacks on Floor 11 were rger than Floor 10's. Aris noted this and adjusted his timing accordingly and they didn't engage unless engaged first, which the Floor 11 Stonebacks seemed disinclined toward, the creatures occupying their cavern spaces with the self-contained indifference of things that had long ago decided that the world could come to them.

  The Grauw?lf were everywhere and Aris had stopped thinking about them as a category of threat. They were present and they were addressed and they were behind him, the calcution taking less time each instance, the sword finding its angles with the familiarity of repetition.

  "You've stopped hesitating on the Grauw?lf," Colette said, on Floor 11, after the third pair.

  "They telegraph," Aris said. "The left shoulder drops before the rush. Every time."

  "Every species has tells," she said. "The longer you're down here the more you read them without thinking."

  "Is that reassuring or concerning," he said.

  "Both," she said. "Usually both."

  They found no red capes. No cw marks at the relevant scale. No geometry on the walls. The floors held their secrets or had no secrets to hold and either way the result was the same, two people moving deeper through dungeon that offered nothing but itself.

  Floor 12 received them through a passage that had been narrowing for twenty meters before it opened again.

  It was darker.

  Not dramatically. The incremental dark of descent, each floor a degree less illuminated than the previous, the mineral deposits here smaller and further apart, the amber-cool quality of Floor 10's light giving way to something with less color in it, the deposits on Floor 12 producing light that was closer to white and illuminated less of the surrounding space for it.

  The passages were wider than Floor 11 but the dark made them feel narrower.

  They moved close together without discussing moving close together, the natural adjustment of two people whose spatial awareness of threat had calibrated to the avaible light and arrived at the same conclusion about optimal distance from each other.

  The corridor they entered was long.

  Longer than any passage above it, the far end not visible, the mineral deposits here spaced far enough apart that there were genuine gaps of dark between them, five meters of nothing between one pool of white light and the next. The floor was dry and ft and their footsteps had a different quality here, the stone denser, the sound of each step returning from the walls more quickly.

  "This floor is quiet," Aris said.

  "Yes," Colette said.

  "Too quiet is a thing that means something down here," he said.

  "Yes," she said.

  They walked.

  The third light pool behind them. The fourth ahead. The dark between pressing from both sides with the patient quality of dark that had been dark for a long time and had no interest in being otherwise.

  The sound came from behind them.

  Not movement. Not the rustling aggregate of the Rabbit colony or the grinding approach of a Stoneback. A single sound, metallic, the specific ring of armored contact with stone, one note and then silence and then one note again, rhythmic, measured, the sound of something that moved with deliberate pcement of weight rather than animal instinct.

  They stopped.

  Turned.

  The corridor behind them was dark between the third and fourth light pools. The sound was in that dark, moving toward the nearer pool, and as it moved the pool's light found it and the finding was gradual, the shape assembling itself from the dark in pieces as it walked forward.

  Armored.

  Entirely armored, the pting covering every surface without gap, the joints articuted in overpping yers that moved with the smoothness of something that had been built rather than grown. The helmet was full, no visor opening, no eye slot, the face of it a ft bnk surface that reflected the mineral light back without expression because there was no surface beneath the armor that had expressions.

  No flesh.

  The armor moved but the armor was the thing. Whatever animated it from inside was not visible from outside, the ptes sealed against each other with the completeness of a structure that had no need to breathe or see or accommodate the biological requirements of an occupant.

  In its right hand, a sword.

  The sword was the armor's material, the same dark metal, and it was held with the specific grip of something that had been holding it long enough that the grip was not a decision.

  It walked toward them at the same pace it had been walking. Measured. Patient.

  "Hollow Knight," Colette said.

  The name meant nothing to Aris. The thing it named meant a great deal.

  "The core," she said, moving. "Inside the chest cavity. A mana bulb, bright, you'll see it if you create an opening. That's what you destroy."

  "How do I create an opening," he said.

  "Work on that," she said.

  Aris went in first.

  Void manifested and he directed Gravity at the Hollow Knight's center mass, the same sideways pull that had worked on the Stoneback, the force hitting the armored form and—

  Nothing.

  The Knight continued forward at the same pace, the Gravity finding the armor and distributing across it and producing no meaningful disruption, the mass too uniformly dense for the sideways pull to find a differential to exploit.

  Aris tried forward pull instead.

  The Knight's advance slowed fractionally. The mana required to maintain the pull against the Knight's continued movement was significant and the return was not, the Eido working hard for a result that could be described as marginal.

  The Knight reached him.

  The sword came in a horizontal arc, technically precise, the movement of something that had been making this arc for longer than Aris had been alive, and he got the sword up in time and the block sent a shock up both arms that rearranged his opinion of his own structural integrity.

  He stepped back.

  The Knight stepped forward.

  "It doesn't stop," Aris said.

  "No," Colette said, coming in from the Knight's right. "It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get frustrated. It executes."

  Her dagger found the joint at the Knight's right shoulder, the gap between the upper arm pte and the pauldron, and went in and found—

  Resistance. The gap was there but the material beneath it was not soft tissue. The dagger met something denser and slid rather than penetrated and Colette pulled back before the Knight's elbow came around.

  "The joints are reinforced," she said.

  "Everything is reinforced," Aris said.

  The Knight turned toward him.

  The sword came in a vertical arc this time, the variation deliberate, and Aris moved right instead of blocking and the bde passed close enough that he heard it in the air beside his ear, and he brought his own sword across the Knight's left side as it completed the arc.

  The sound of metal on metal.

  His bde skated off the pting and his hands absorbed the deflection and the Knight was already bringing its sword back.

  "Distance," Colette said, sharply. "Don't stay at contact range after a strike. One hit and disengage. Create the gap."

  He created the gap.

  "You're thinking about the attack," she said, moving around the Knight's opposite side, keeping its attention divided. "Think about what comes after the attack. Every strike has a recovery. Use the recovery."

  "While I'm thinking about the attack," he said.

  "Yes," she said. "Simultaneously."

  The Knight tracked her. Aris came in from behind, sword at the joint where the helmet met the gorget, and hit the same reinforced resistance and disengaged before the Knight could turn.

  "There's nothing soft," he said.

  "The chest," she said. "The ptes there are thinner. They have to be, the core needs less interference."

  The Knight turned back to Aris.

  He was watching the sword now, the timing of it, the arc patterns. Horizontal, vertical, the diagonal that came when the horizontal was avoided, the specific sequence of a thing that had a repertoire and executed it without variation.

  It wasn't reading him the way the White Sentient had read him.

  It was executing.

  "It doesn't adapt," he said, moving.

  "No," Colette said. "It's not alive. It runs its patterns."

  "So if I learn the patterns," he said.

  "You can predict it," she said. "Yes."

  He watched the next arc. Horizontal from the right. Vertical follow. Pause, the briefest pause, the mechanical equivalent of a breath between combinations.

  The pause.

  He went in during the pause, inside the sword's range, and drove his bde at the chest ptes with everything he had.

  The bde caught and held, a centimeter, and the Knight's elbow came into his sternum and he went backward and the breath left him comprehensively.

  "Distance," Colette said again, not unkindly.

  He found his feet.

  "I know," he said, without breath. "I know."

  It went on.

  Ten minutes of it, the three of them in the corridor's dark with the mineral light pools as context, Aris learning the patterns and Colette providing the disruption that kept the Knight's execution from becoming singur focus and the Knight continuing its repertoire without variation or fatigue or any of the biological limitations that were making both of them breathe harder than they had been.

  Colette's dagger had found two joints that yielded slightly more than the others. Not openings. Progress, the specific incremental progress of work that was accumuting toward something without arriving there yet.

  Aris had a bruise across his left forearm from a block that had held but expended its holding capacity entirely in doing so. His right shoulder had an opinion about the elbow impact. He had stopped tracking the minor accumutions and was tracking the Knight's patterns instead.

  Horizontal. Vertical. Diagonal left. Pause.

  Horizontal. Vertical. Diagonal left. Pause.

  "The pause," he said. "It's consistent."

  "Use it," Colette said.

  He looked at the corridor walls. The mineral deposit in the nearest light pool was embedded in a formation of rock that extended from the wall into the corridor space, a protrusion a meter long and half a meter thick, the stone dense and heavy, connected to the wall above and below by the thinner rock of its base.

  He looked at the base.

  He looked at the Knight.

  "Get clear," he said.

  Colette read his eyeline. Moved left, fast.

  The Knight tracked her.

  Aris put Gravity into the rock formation's base and pulled.

  The base cracked. The formation tilted. He pulled harder, the mana output climbing, and the crack propagated and the formation separated from the wall and the Gravity took it and he directed it at the Knight with everything remaining in the pull.

  The formation hit the Knight at center mass and drove it into the opposite wall.

  The sound was significant.

  The Knight hit the wall and the formation pinned it there, the weight and the angle combining to hold it against the stone, the sword arm trapped against the wall by the formation's position, the legs working but finding no purchase against the floor's angle from the impact.

  Aris crossed the corridor.

  He reached for the Knight's sword hand, the trapped arm, and got both hands on the wrist and pulled and the Knight's grip held and he pulled harder and the grip held and he changed approach, Repel at the joint between the wrist pte and the gauntlet, and the force broke the grip and the sword fell and he kicked it down the corridor.

  The Knight's free arm came around.

  He took the hit on his left shoulder and stayed on his feet and drove his sword at the chest ptes with Repel building at the tip.

  The bde caught.

  The armor resisted.

  He pushed more mana into Repel, more than he'd used on the Sentient, more than he'd used on anything, and the bde moved, a millimeter, two, the chest pte deforming inward under the combined force of the bde's physical pressure and Repel's output behind it and he felt the resistance change quality as the pte gave way and then—

  Light.

  Bright, white-blue, the mana bulb visible through the gap he'd made, and he angled the bde toward it and triggered Repel one final time with everything remaining.

  The bde reached the core.

  The light went out.

  The Knight's legs stopped working. The free arm dropped. The formation held it against the wall for a moment and then the Knight's mass was no longer active mass, just weight, and the formation and the wall held the weight between them and everything was still.

  Aris stepped back.

  He looked at his sword hand. The tremor in it was not dramatic, just present, the fine motor expression of a system that had been running at capacity and had delivered the final output and was now accounting for the cost.

  He leaned against the opposite wall.

  The corridor was quiet.

  "Aris," Colette said.

  "Fine," he said. "Give me a moment."

  She gave him the moment. She stood in the corridor and looked at the Knight against the wall and looked at him against the other wall and said nothing, the specific silence of someone who understands that the moment is what is needed and supplying it is the contribution.

  He breathed.

  His Void was thin. Genuinely thin, the Eido barely present above his skin, the form indistinct, the mask face visible but the body behind it close to transparent.

  "Are you doing okay?" Colette said.

  "I'm alright." he said. "Just give me a moment."

  "We need to discuss something," she said.

  He looked at her.

  "We're at Floor 12," she said. "At our current level, with our current mana reserves, that," she indicated the Knight against the wall, "That is reaching closer to what a two manned party can do, especially two low levels."

  "I know," he said.

  "If we go deeper and we encounter something stronger before our mana recovers," she said, "we don't have the output to address it."

  "I know."

  "Which means we need to find what we came for," she said, "on this floor or the next, and we need to find it before we're too depleted to get back up."

  Aris looked at the dark of the corridor ahead of them, the pools of white light and the genuine dark between them, the dungeon below Floor 12 continuing without concern for their timeline or their mana levels.

  "Then we move quickly," he said. "And we find it."

  He pushed off the wall.

  Void steadied above him, slightly more present than the moment before, the brief rest doing what brief rests did.

  "Quickly," Colette agreed, and they went forward.