Chapter 25: The Endless Fall

The darkness is absolute, a return to the suffocating void.

But this darkness is not still. It is chaos. The raft spins like a prayer wheel in a hurricane, a tiny speck of steel at the mercy of a furious, unseen god.

The current that has us is not a river; it is a siphon.

Behind us, the groan of the collapsing cistern is a deep, thundering bass note that I feel in my teeth. It is the sound of a mountain giving up the ghost, a final, drawn-out scream of brick and stone and rebar surrendering to the void.

The roar of the water is a different beast entirely. It is a high-pitched, deafening shriek that swallows all other sound. We are inside the throat of the world, and it is swallowing us whole.

I am pressed flat against the cold, wet steel of the raft, my fingers locked in a death-grip on a support strut. The Phoenix-light is gone, snuffed out. The divine, cleansing fire that shattered the Heart has left me hollow, an empty vessel. All that remains is the cold, the wet, and the bone-deep, rattling exhaustion.

My daggers are still in my hands, but they are just metal again. Cold, useless metal. I do not have the strength to lift them, let alone sheathe them.

Kizawa is a solid, unmoving presence beside me. He is the anchor. I feel his energy, not as a weapon, but as a shield, a bulwark against the chaos. He is kneeling on one knee, his back to the non-existent wind, his head up, listening past the roar.

"Status!" he bellows, his voice barely audible over the din.

"Here!" Erima's reply is tight, strained. She is a knot of coiled tension at the prow, her eyes, useless in this dark, wide with animalistic instinct.

"Sick! Going... to be... sick!" Hachiro groans. He is not laughing now. The brawler, who finds joy in punching demons, is reduced to a miserable heap, clinging to the center of the raft.

"It is... it is not... slowing!" Yogawa wails, his voice cracking with pure, unadulterated panic. "The magic... the walls... this is not a sewer! It is too old! Too... smooth!"

His terror cuts through my exhaustion. He is right.

Even as we spin, I can feel it. When the raft slams against the tunnel wall, it is not the rough scrape of brick. It is a sickening, glassy shiiiiiing sound, the sound of steel on polished, wet obsidian. This tunnel is ancient, carved by something other than human hands.

The air changes. The thick, miasmic stench of the Miasma Core is gone, ripped away. It is replaced by something else. The smell of deep, cold stone. The smell of minerals and pressure. The smell of the earth's blood.

And we are accelerating.

The tunnel, which must have been level, now begins to tilt. We are no longer just being pulled. We are falling.

"It is a spillway!" Kizawa roars, his voice now tight with genuine alarm. "A cistern! We are in a drainage channel! Brace! Brace now!"

The warning comes a fraction of a second too late.

The world drops out from under us.

One moment, we are on the water. The next, there is no water. There is only air. And the sound of a million-ton ocean falling into an abyss.

We are in freefall.

The raft, heavy as it is, is tossed like a leaf. I am weightless. My grip on the strut is torn away. I am airborne, tumbling in the pitch-black, my red-and-black kimono flapping around me like broken wings.

My stomach is in my throat. I cannot breathe. I cannot see. I cannot even scream.

There is only the fall.

Time stretches into an agonizing, endless second. My life does not flash before my eyes. There is only the thought: To die like this? Drowning in the dark? After everything?

A small, stubborn spark of defiance, buried deep beneath the exhaustion, flickers. No.

WHUMP.

I hit the water. It is not a splash. It is an impact, as solid and unyielding as concrete. The force of it knocks the last wisp of air from my lungs.

Then the cold.

It is not the sewer's chill. This is a primordial, glacial cold, a temperature so low it feels like fire. It sears my skin, bypasses my kimono, and sinks its teeth directly into my bones. It is the cold of the deep earth, where the sun is not even a myth.

I am sinking. Tumbling end over end in the roaring, icy, black water. The current is a liquid avalanche, grinding, churning, pulling me down.

I am disoriented. Which way is up? Which way is down? It does not matter. My limbs are numb. My daggers are gone, ripped from my numb fingers.

My lungs are on fire. They are screaming, begging, collapsing. The pressure is immense.

This is it. I am sorry, Kizawa. I am sorry, Grandpa.

I am done.

Just as the blackness behind my eyes begins to feel warm and inviting, just as I am about to open my mouth and breathe in the cold, final death of the water-

A light.

It is not Kizawa's blue. Not Yogawa's fire. Not my gold.

It is a faint, sickly, pale green glow, shining up from the... the bottom?

It is a direction. It is up.

With the last, ragged shred of my will, I kick. My legs are lead. I pull. My arms are water. But I move.

I fight the current, a salmon swimming up a waterfall of pure ice. The green glow becomes a destination.

My lungs are about to burst. Black spots dance in my vision, threatening to overwhelm the green.

A hand closes on the collar of my kimono.

It is a familiar, iron grip. Kizawa.

He hauls me upward with a single, desperate surge of strength. My head breaks the surface.

I inhale.

It is not an inhale. It is a ragged, wet, desperate shriek of air and water. I cough, I choke, I heave, but it is air. Sweet, cold, still air.

The roar is gone.

The chaos is gone.

I am floating in a vast, cold, and utterly silent lake.

"I... have... you," Kizawa gasps beside me. He is treading water, his own breath coming in ragged pants, but he is holding me up. "Just... breathe. Mizuki. Breathe."

I try. I cough up what feels like a gallon of icy water, the taste of rust and stone on my tongue.

"The... others?" I manage, my voice a raw whisper.

"Here!" Hachiro's voice booms, and it echoes.

The sound bounces off unseen walls, coming back to us a dozen times.

Here... here... here...

"By the Archives," Yogawa whispers, and his voice, too, echoes. "Look. Just... look."

I turn my head, my soaked silver hair clinging to my face.

We are not in a tunnel. We are not in a sewer.

We are in a cavern.

A cavern so vast it dwarfs any building I have ever seen. The "lake" we are in is miles across, its far shores lost in the distance. The ceiling is so high it is its own sky, a canopy of stone arches and dripping stalactites that look like the teeth of a sleeping god.

And it is lit.

The pale green light I saw is everywhere. It comes from massive, plate-sized fungi growing in clusters along the walls, from an glowing, phosphorescent moss that carpets the rocky shores, and from tiny, floating spores that drift in the air like silent, green snow.

The entire, massive, impossible space is bathed in a ghostly, alien, and beautiful green-blue light.

"It is... the Under-Roads," Erima breathes. She is already on a rocky shore twenty feet away, wringing the water from her long black hair, her bow safely in her hand. "My grandmother... she told stories. A world beneath the world. Where the spirits walk."

Hachiro is already on the same shore, lying on his back and looking up at the fungal sky, his chest heaving. "It is... pretty," he pants. "I still... feel sick."

The raft is gone. Probably shattered in the fall, or lost in the lake. My daggers are at the bottom.

Yogawa is clinging to a piece of wreckage-a splintered plank-paddling weakly toward the shore. He looks small and broken, his grimoire clutched to his chest, his arrogance washed away by the fall.

Kizawa tows me to the bank. My feet touch solid rock, and I crawl out of the icy water, collapsing onto the glowing moss. It is cold, but surprisingly soft.

I lie there, shaking, soaked, and weaponless. The five of us are scattered on this alien shore, a collection of broken, half-drowned rats.

We are alive. We are victorious against the Heart.

But we are no longer in Tokyo. We are not in any human city. We are in a place that is not supposed to exist, a place of myth, miles beneath the surface.

Yogawa pulls himself onto the shore and coughs up a truly impressive amount of water. He looks at the glowing fungi, at the vast, silent lake, at the impossible sky of stone.

"We are not in a sewer," he whispers, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and awe. "We are in the veins. The spirit veins... of the earth."

He looks at us, his eyes wide in the green light.

"We are so, so lost."