Eloy’s cheek pressed flat against the wet stone. His fingers twitched, clawing for purchase that wasn’t there. The tripled gravity had him pinned at the knees and chest, his spine curved under a weight that turned every breath into a negotiation with his own ribs.

I can’t ... I can’t lift my arm. Need to think. Buy time.

The Masked Inquisitor stood over him.

Her pristine uniform showed no dust, no strain, no evidence that she was maintaining a gravity field across fifty meters of underground chamber. The silver mask pulsed in perfect sync with the chains behind her.

Each flare dimmed Valen’s HP another fraction, the glow casting moving shadows across the Inquisitor’s polished boots. The pressure on Eloy’s chest was so intense his ribs creaked.

The sound came from inside his own skeleton, wet and organic. Copper flooded his mouth from where he’d bitten through his tongue on the way down.

[ MANA SUPPRESSION ]

Crimson consumed his vision.

"The pages stolen from the Cathedral. Return them. Refuse, and I crush her ribcage first."

The Inquisitor tilted her head toward Maya. Toward the blue ledgers shaking against the girl’s chest, pinned beneath the same crushing weight. The threat required no loudness. No emphasis. Physics was already doing the work.

Isolde forced her head up. The motion scraped skin from her forehead against the stone, leaving a dark smear across her temple.

Her bleeding knuckles left wet streaks as she pushed, failed, pushed again. She made no sound. Her jaw was set so tight the tendons in her neck stood out like cables, and her breathing came in short, measured intervals through her nose. Deliberate. Controlled. Each exhale timed to a count she refused to break.

"Don’t."

Maya’s face had turned the color of wet paper. The pressure on her lungs made each word come out in a whisper.

"I didn’t— I didn’t tell her. Eloy. The name. It wasn’t me."

Her fingers locked white-knuckled around the ledgers. The only thing she refused to release, even with gravity trying to peel her hands open.

She wasn’t looking at the Inquisitor. Her eyes found Eloy’s and held.

"Yeah. I know, Maya. Just... keep hold of the papers. Don’t let go."

He didn’t look at her. His eyes moved across the chamber instead. HUD, ticking down. Chat window, flickering with spam he couldn’t silence. The walls. The ceiling.

[xX_Shatter_Xx]: 4% MANA AND BLEEDING. HE’S COOKED.

[NoGainNoPain]: RIP BOZO SPEEDRUN OVER

[LoreSeeker]: wait where’s the scout dude

Valen was watching him.

Not the Inquisitor. Not the chains draining his life away in steady four-percent increments. Him.

His right hand pressed flat against the inside of his coat. Fingers wrapped around a shape that didn’t match the fabric’s drape. Something hard. Something round. Something that had been concealed there from the moment they entered the chamber.

Valen caught Eloy’s eye.

No smile crossed his battered face. His lips pressed together once, a deliberate compressed line, and his chin tilted two degrees. Toward the ceiling. Directly above the Inquisitor’s position. The cracked keystone where the vaulted arch met in a point, already stressed, already shedding fine dust.

Eloy held the gaze for one second. Two. Then dropped his eyes back to the floor.

"Hey. Quick question."

He shifted his weight forward, pressing his palms harder into the stone. Coiling whatever leverage remained in his arms. His bandaged right arm screamed at the pressure and he ignored it.

The mask turned toward him. The silver glow didn’t flicker. She didn’t shift her weight. She didn’t adjust her stance.

"You have nothing worth asking."

"Yeah, I figured. Just checking."

Eloy pressed his forehead to the stone. Squeezed his eyes shut.

Valen pulled the alchemical sphere free of his coat and hurled it at the ceiling.

"NOW, WINDGIRL! BLOW THEM BACK!"

The sphere left Valen’s hand in a high arc toward the cracked keystone above the Inquisitor. The tripled gravity pulled at it, slowing its ascent, but the veteran had factored the weight into every muscle memory of that throw. Decades of calculated desperation compressed into a single motion.

It sailed true.

The shockwave hit. A wall of dust and debris erupted from the junction, the ceiling coming down in massive rectangular slabs.

Maya’s fan was already moving, her Wind Gale spell tearing through the chaos with a sound like canvas being ripped apart. A razor-sharp corridor of air carved a path through the collapsing stone, scooping up Eloy and Isolde from the crumbling floor and hurling them headlong into the narrow escape tunnel.

Eloy slammed into the tunnel floor shoulder-first. The impact drove the air from his lungs and his head wound split open, hot blood running into his eye and blinding the right side of his vision red.

Isolde crashed into the curved wall in a heap, coughing dust, her body limp with exhaustion. The roar of the collapse cut off.

A ten-foot wall of broken masonry and packed earth sealed the junction chamber shut. The silence that followed was absolute and physical, a pressure change in the air itself.

Normal gravity, finally. His lungs expanded fully for the first time in minutes. The air tasted of limestone and pulverized mortar and something acrid beneath it.

We’re alive. The Inquisitor is walled off.

Valen.

[ HUD UPDATE ]

[ PARTY MEMBER: VALEN CROI — STATUS: CAPTURED — LOCATION: UNKNOWN ]

[xXClericXx]: CAPTURED NOT DEAD. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE. COPE.

[SpeedrunGod]: o7 scout dude

[coldfront44]: one hour until she digs out. clock is running.

Isolde rose first. She didn’t speak. Her gaze fixed on the solid wall of rock where the entrance had been, tracking the uneven edges of broken stone. She touched her bleeding knuckles to the surface once.

Pressed. Pulled her hand away. Her shoulders dropped, then snapped back into place.

"The chains are broken. The gravity stopped."

Her eyes moved from the wall to the dark passage ahead. The length of it. The direction.

Maya lay on the stone, gasping. The blackmail ledgers pressed against her stomach, their corners digging into her ribs. The satchel with the Sealed Communication Crystal was trapped beneath her hip. She stared at the collapsed ceiling with wide, unfocused eyes, her breath coming in shallow, uneven bursts.

"He just... threw it. He had it the whole time..."

"Yeah. He was waiting."

Eloy wiped the blood out of his eye with the back of his hand.

He pushed himself upright along the tunnel wall, favoring his injured ankle, the stone cold and gritted against his palm. His left hand found purchase and he hauled himself forward.

[SmokeDog128]: ALCHEMICAL SPHERE IN THE SEWERS. OLD SCHOOL TECH.

[LoreSeeker]: OK BUT DID THE CHAINS BREAK BEFORE THE HP HIT ZERO

[xXClericXx]: no one asked how the inquisition knew the title yet

[IsoldeSimp47]: o7

The tunnel stretched ahead into darkness.

Carved symbols marked the walls at irregular intervals, too worn to read, their edges smoothed by centuries of groundwater. Pre-dated kingdom work. Older than the Academy. Older than the Inquisition.

Eloy filed them without comment.

Further down the passage, where a sealed side channel branched off into deeper black, the stone was scorched at chest height. A horizontal burn line with lightning-pattern branching. Too precise to be accidental. The blackened edges still faintly warm under his fingertips as he passed.

Maya shifted the satchel higher on her shoulder.

The Sealed Communication Crystal inside emitted a single low-frequency hum. More felt than heard. A vibration against Maya’s ribs through the leather, deep and regular, pulsing with a rhythm that didn’t belong to anything living.

Maya stopped walking.

"The crystal."

She didn’t open the satchel. Her hand pressed flat against the outside of it, fingers splayed, feeling for the vibration. Her expression didn’t change. The calculation behind her eyes was visible anyway, rapid and uneasy.

Eloy turned. Looked at the satchel. Looked at her hand on the leather.

"Does it do that a lot?"

"It has never done that before."

She kept her hand on the satchel. Started walking again. Her fingers didn’t leave the leather.

[wo1flion]: crystal just woke up. that can’t be good.

The hum stopped.

The tunnel was silent. Their breathing. The distant, barely audible sound of stone settling somewhere behind the wall. Nothing else.

[ Valen Croi — Loyalty: 0 / 100 → 31 / 100 ]

[ +31: voluntary self-sacrifice with no guaranteed survival, executed without hesitation or negotiation ]

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Achieve 10 Loyalty with any mentor character! ]

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Achieve 20 Loyalty with any mentor character! ]

[ ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Achieve 30 Loyalty with any mentor character! ]

This... The numbers sat in his vision, steady and impossible. I never saw this happening before. Not in the whole trilogy.

Eloy walked. The HUD ping sat in the corner of his vision, steady and unhelpful. CAPTURED. UNKNOWN. Somewhere behind a wall of rubble, a gravity Inquisitor was already moving stone.