Round 210 Transcript

At dark corridor in New York high rise penthouse suite, the pressure shifts from waiting to immediate risk. The ward answers the party's presence with a fresh pulse through the stone and no one can mistake it for safety. The nearest sign of danger is now structural collapse imminent. Someone has to answer that change now.

Halie braces her shoulder against the groaning door, feeling the wardstone pulse like a diseased heart through the wood—as if it knows they're trapped here with nowhere to run. Her burned hands scream protest but she ignores them—every second counts. "How long can you hold that thing off?" she calls over her shoulder, voice tight with effort and something else she won't name. "Because this door won't last much longer."

She shifts her stance, trying to find better leverage against the slick floor coated in spilled lube and rising water from burst pipes. The mirror she's using as a brace slides an inch—she grits her teeth and throws her weight forward again. Jeane's channeling makes the walls shake with each pulse, and something massive is shifting in the darkness beyond the corridor they just fled down. Hera's hyperventilating behind her, and Silra's boots are too loud on the wet floor as she moves toward that blackness like a moth to flame. This is wrong. All of it. Trapped in a collapsing building with some eldritch horror's sex dungeon, using bondage gear as improvised barricades while wardstone energy seeps through cracks like poison gas. Her vows scream at her but the need to protect Hera—fuck, she can't even think about that now. "Move your asses," Halie snarls, because that's all there is left when the world's ending and your hands are burned and every instinct screams at you to run instead of stand here like a fucking shield.