The tower's interior swallowed sound strangely, smoke thickening with every step deeper into its collapsing structure, and Kane pressed forward through the haze with Garrick close behind him, both of them tracking Thackeray's retreat through the confusing tangle of half-collapsed corridors and debris-choked stairwells, the chaos of the battle outside already beginning to resolve itself in Vale's favor behind them.
"He knows this place," Garrick said, coughing against the smoke, his wounded arm cradled carefully against his chest even as he kept pace with Kane's determined stride. "Every hidden passage, every collapsed section, every place a pursuer might lose their footing in the dark. We're hunting him on ground he's had decades to memorize."
"Then we stop thinking like hunters," Kane s
