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I had only what my eyes could tell me, and my eyes told me exactly one guard, sword already drawn, blocking the passage we needed.

Corian didn't slow. He closed the distance in three strides and drove his shoulder into the man's chest before the sword had finished clearing its sheath, both of them going down hard against the tunnel wall in a tangle of limbs that ended, mercifully, with Corian on top and the guard's head connecting with stone hard enough to end any resistance.

"Move," Corian said, already back on his feet, blood running from a split lip he hadn't stopped to notice.

Ashter kept pace at Halver's heel as we ran, too heavy and too solid for anyone to have carried him even if we'd had the arms to spare, and whatever holding this shape for so long had cost him showed plainly in the stiff, deliberate way he moved, slower than the quick, low glide he usually managed, but moving all the same.

We moved.

The operation didn't search room by room. I understood that within the first few minutes, watching how fast the response organized itself, voices calling coordinates to each other in short, clipped phrases that had nothing amateur about them. Someone in charge down here understood exactly what it meant for five strangers to leave with whatever we'd taken, and that someone had decided the fastest solution wasn't hunting us through the tunnels.

It was sealing every way out and letting us run straight into the men waiting at each one.

"They're not chasing," I said, catching up to Corian's shoulder. "They're funneling."

"Then we don't take the route we scouted in on."

"Halver, the side tunnel," Corian said. "The one you marked earlier. Can you find it blind?"

"I can find it. Getting there's the problem."

I would have known the answer to that a week ago without asking, some quiet certainty built from feeling every mind in the vicinity and mapping their positions like pieces on a board. Now I had only guesswork stacked on top of guesswork, Halver's memory of a tunnel he'd scouted once, hours ago, under entirely different circumstances, and whatever instinct the rest of us could scrape together between exhausted breaths.

The passage ahead of us narrowed and split, and the sound of boots against stone came from both directions now, close enough that whatever choice we made in the next three seconds was the only choice we were going to get.

"Left," Halver said. "It curves back toward the chimney I found yesterday. Steep, but it climbs."

We went left.

The next stretch passed in tense, hurried silence, all of us listening hard for sounds that used to arrive as something closer to certainty and now only ever came as noise, footsteps that might belong to pursuit or might belong to nothing at all. I found myself flinching at echoes twice in the space of thirty seconds, my own nerves stretched thin enough that ordinary cave sounds had started reading as threats before my mind caught up to correct the mistake.

"You're jumping at everything," Alex said, low, falling into step beside me.

"I'm used to knowing before I have to jump."

"Yeah." He didn't offer anything else past that, which somehow made it easier to hear than sympathy would have. "Me too."

The first real fight found us less than a minute later, three guards spilling out of a side passage with weapons already drawn, and everything after that happened too fast to process in anything but fragments.

Alex peeled off toward the rear the instant the guards appeared, watching the passage behind us for the second wave he was certain would follow the first, which left the three of them to the rest of us. Ashter pressed himself flat against the wall near Halver's feet, too slow and too small in this state to do anything but stay out from underfoot, low growl building in his chest at every guard who came within reach of Jade.

Corian took the first two at once, moving with the same measured aggression I'd watched him bring to a hundred sparring sessions, except now there was no shield waiting behind him if his timing slipped even once. He caught the first guard's wrist and turned the man's own momentum against him, slamming him face-first into the tunnel wall, and pivoted just fast enough to catch the second guard's blade on his forearm rather than his throat, a shallow cut opening along the skin that he didn't so much as glance at.

That left the third guard to me.

A blade came at me from the right, and I met it with nothing but the flat parry my old drill instructor had beaten into me a decade ago, back before I'd ever manifested an ability worth relying on instead. My whole body remembered the motion even though my mind hadn't touched it in years, muscle memory older than my ability and, in this exact moment, considerably more useful.

The guard facing me was built like a door, twice my width through the shoulders, and he came at me like a man who'd never once needed technique because size had always been argument enough. I gave ground on purpose, twice, letting him think the retreat meant something it didn't, and when he overcommitted on the third swing I stepped inside his reach instead of away from it, driving my elbow into his ribs hard enough to fold him forward.

It wasn't enough. He recovered faster than I expected, backhanding me across the jaw with enough force to put stars behind my eyes, and I went down hard against the tunnel wall with his blade already swinging back around for a finish I wasn't going to have time to block.

"Now," Halver said, sharp, from somewhere close.

I moved on the word before I'd consciously understood the opening, dropping low and driving forward into the man's exposed knee with everything I had left. He went down screaming, and Halver's boot finished what my strike started, and the two of us stood over him breathing hard while a few feet away, Corian finished folding the second guard's arm at an angle it wasn't built to bend and left him crumpled against the wall beside his friend.

"How did you see that," I asked, still catching my breath.

"His weight shifted before the swing. He always would have overcommitted right there." Halver adjusted his grip on Jade, checking her with a fast, worried glance before his eyes came back to me. "You'd have caught it too."