The golden light burned away the undercroft's shadows, revealing intricate baybayin carvings that pulsed like living veins across the ancient stones. Elias staggered back as the light seared his corrupted arm, the gold veins withering like burned roots beneath his skin. The Spanish pistol fell from his numb fingers, its baybayin engravings glowing white-hot against the floor.

Lira reached for him, but the twelfth skeleton moved between them, its bony fingers closing around her wrist with surprising gentleness. Up close, she could see faint remnants of tattoos etched into its bones—the same markings that now glowed on her collarbone.

"The pact requires balance," it whispered through the nail in its eye socket. "Eleven gave their lives to hold the door. One more must choose to stand watch."

Across the chamber, the remaining Fingers convulsed as the light touched them. Pinky's elongated limbs snapped like dry twigs, its single black eye rolling back to reveal the face of a young girl beneath—the original victim used to create this abomination. Ringfinger's stitched-together mouths screamed in unison as golden thread unraveled from their seams, releasing trapped fragments of souls that dissipated like smoke.

Only Middlefinger resisted. The massive creature roared, its stitched flesh bubbling as it charged toward the twelfth skeleton.

Father Mateo, slumped against the wall with blood trickling from his lips, raised a trembling hand. "The key—use the—"

Elias snatched up the iron key just as Middlefinger lunged. He drove it into the creature's chest, feeling the metal grow scalding hot as its teeth transformed into the baybayin symbol for release.

Middlefinger froze. Its many stolen eyes widened as golden light erupted from its seams. For one terrible moment, Elias saw all the people whose parts had been taken—a fisherman, a mother, a street vendor—their faces flashing across the creature's patchwork skin before it burst apart in a shower of light and rotting cloth.

The twelfth skeleton tightened its grip on Lira's wrist. "You carry the first guardian's blood. You know what must be done."

Another memory flooded Lira's mind—this time of her grandmother kneeling before a small home altar, whispering the lullaby while polishing a single silver nail wrapped in sinamay cloth. "When the bells toll true," the old woman had said, "you must be ready to pay the price."

Elias grabbed Lira's other arm. "Don't listen to it! There's another way—"

The twelfth skeleton turned its hollow gaze on him. "There is. You carry the Vessel. Its hunger can be turned against the older darkness... if one becomes its new anchor."

Father Mateo coughed blood as he struggled to rise. "The Church's records... they never mentioned an older evil. What exactly did the Hollow King contain?"

The skeletons suspended around them shuddered in their bonds. The twelfth skeleton's voice dropped to a whisper.

"The first hunger. The thing that taught men how to fear the dark."

Outside, the five bells tolled again—but now their tones harmonized into the same melody as Lira's lullaby. The ground trembled as something far beneath Manila stirred in response.

Lira looked from the twelfth skeleton to Elias, then down at her glowing wound. The baybayin symbols had spread to her shoulder now, forming a complete phrase:

"The keeper stands when all others fall."

She knew what she had to do.