"Marcus, if you're wrong about that, I'll personally end you," Sylvie said.
"I wouldn't want that either," Marcus replied, continuing forward.
They'd lost track of the Fractured Wolves somewhere between twelve and fifteen.
After that, the battles blurred into one endless sequence — split fur, white eyes, mana-crack weakness, the same choreography with slight variations. The group had learned its rhythm. Whether that was skill or unsettling familiarity, no one had the energy to decide.
What they hadn't learned the rhythm of was the ground.
No warning.
No sound.
The floor opened around Jones' legs, and something clamped onto him with the grip of a thing that had been lurking in the dark under the stone.
"GAH—"
"Jones!"
He sank to his waist before he caught himself on the rim of the hole with both arms, and even then the thing pulling from below had more weight behind it than his upper body alone could contest.
The stone crumbled at his elbows.
He was losing.
Nia grabbed his arms and pulled.
The thing below held.
For three full seconds, Jones existed in both worlds — tunnel floor and whatever was below it — while Nia and the thing that had him conducted a disagreement about his future.
Then Nia leaned back with everything she had, and Jones came free with a tearing sound that turned out to be his clothing ripping off as well as some skin from his waist.
He landed on his back on the tunnel floor, gasping.
The thing appeared a moment later.
It was medium-sized, height closing on a person's waist, sporting claws made for tearing through stone and anything softer. Its brown, coarse fur looked less like fur and more like overlapping armor plates.
Its eyes were pure white, like those of the Fractured Wolves—no iris, no pupils, nothing to reveal what it was watching, just that unsettling glow behind the white that made it clear it was fixated on something.
"A compound crawler!" Henry exclaimed, spotting the creature.
The compound crawler found Jones immediately and lunged.
He raised the shield with one hand, bracing for impact.
The claws slammed into it with a sound like a pick striking stone, and the jolt shot up his arm into the shoulder that had already endured the Queen fight and wasn't too happy about it.
Then-
"Venia behind you," Ares called as he spotted the ground cracking.
"Huh!"
A second one came up on Venia's left.
She spun around and fired both pistols, but it was already in motion before the first shot left the barrel, slipping to the side with lightning-fast reflexes.
Both bullets struck stone.
Shot after shot followed, yet the crawler dodged every single one.
"It's dodging all my shots," she said.
"I noticed," Sylvie replied, already pulling back a conjured arrow. Her eyes followed the oncoming crawler for two seconds before she let it fly.
The crawler retreated before the arrow landed.
She tried again, but it slipped away, just like it had from Venia.
"They're too fast," Sylvie muttered.
"Ugh. I can't land a hit—their reflexes are insane," Ares said, blocking a swipe from the crawler's claws aimed at his face. Then came a blow to the gut that knocked him to the ground. The crawler pounced on him instantly, claws extended and ready to finish Ares, but he blocked it with his sword.
'Its too strong.'
He could barely hold it back.
Then—
"BASH." Jones drove his shield into the Crawler's head, sending it hard into the wall. It crumpled, shook, and began pulling itself upright.
"Thought you hated saying that," Ares said, getting to his feet.
"I still do," Jones said, eyes on the Crawler. "Keeping calm through all this."
Marcus, seizing the moment, dashed toward the recovering Crawler from its blind side, but his strike met the hard outer fur and bounced — the plates were too dense to penetrate without finding a gap first.
The crawler, having gotten its momentum and steadiness, swing its claws to Marcus. Marcus dodged before the strike could impact.
""Their reaction time drops when they take a hit," Marcus said. "After Jones's impact it was slower to track. If we land one solid strike, we get a window."
"Easy to say," Ares muttered.
He moved on the first Crawler again.
His blade caught stone where it had been half a second earlier — it had gone under, the floor rippling faintly beneath his feet, repositioning in the dark beneath the stone.
He had no way to follow it.
The crawler had gone under.
The floor rippled faintly beneath his feet — it was moving below him, repositioning, and he had no way to track it.
It came up behind him.
He turned too late. The claws opened a line across his forearm before he pulled back.
"Henry, try using the same tactic you used for those wolves," Ares said.
"I know. You don't have to tell me."
Henry raised his hand, creating a sustained flare — the same narrow light-source he'd used before, and held it above head height and angled down.
The light hit the tunnel floor in a broad spread. The effect on the Crawlers was immediate and total.
Both Crawlers stopped.
Light was a very new thing for them being inside the second floor, where darkness loomed large. Its white eyes caught the flare and reflected it back far too brightly, and the Crawlers made a sound that had no real equivalent.
KERGH.
One of them shook its head violently, disoriented.
Nia hit it.
With an open-handed, full-force strike to its side, the Crawler lurched sideways and slammed into the tunnel wall.
In the brief half-second its reaction lagged from the impact, Jones was already on it, driving the shield down hard.
SLAM.
It didn't get back up.
The second one tried to burrow underground.
It only got halfway before Ares slammed his sword into the spot where body met floor, trapping it mid-transition. Stuck in place, the Crawler couldn't finish either move before Sylvie's arrow pierced the back of its skull.
Silence settled over the tunnel.
Henry let the flare fade out.
Jones glanced at the tear in his pants, then down at his waist, which had its own unspoken commentary on the last thirty seconds.
"I almost became lunch," he said.
"Almost," Venia said.
"That's not as comforting as you think it is."
The fight, like the Fractured wolves, came short, no casualties except for Jones. And so they kept moving.
"Jones," Ares asked. "How bad?"
"Nothing that puts me down," Jones said, carefully stretching his back — his face immediately contradicting the statement.
"Don't act confident for our sake," Sylvie said.
"I'm not." He rolled his shoulder once and stopped. "I'm acting confident for mine."
They kept moving.
...
They moved faster after that.
Not because the tunnel demanded it, but because standing still in a floor that hid things beneath it had become a specific type of unpleasant.
The scenery shifted as they went deeper.
The second floor had been smooth and deliberate since they'd come down the spiral stairs, but the farther they went, the more purposeful it felt.
The wall patterns, the details they had barely noticed on the way down now appeared again here.
Larger.
More intricate.
Marcus could tell something was different, these patterns, they were not here for decoration. something more.
Ares and Henry could grasp this as well.
"This floor gets more deliberate the closer we get," Marcus said. Not for the first time.
"You said that," Sylvie told him.
"I say it again because the closer we get, the more specific it looks."
Then bodies began to appear again. This time, the group remained unfazed by this, they expected this and kept going.
The bodies weren't clustered like on the first floor. this time they were scattered, each marking how far someone had gotten before the floor decided they'd gone far enough.
"Two here, one farther ahead, three bunched together where something must have caught them moving as a group and taken them out easily."
"We're getting closer."
By the time tunnel opened, there were sixteen in total.
The opening wasn't subtle—the tunnel just ended, giving way to a chamber so wide the far wall took a moment to spot in the flat bioluminescent glow.
The ceiling rose higher than anything on floor two so far the same geometric wall patterns now blown up to a scale that made the tunnel versions look like rough drafts.
The stone floor was smooth and unmarked.
At the center, nothing.
No boss.
No waiting creature.
No sound of breathing.
Those ready for a fight now looked around in confusion.
"Where's the boss?" Jones asked.
Nobody answered, because nobody had an answer.
Ares moved into the chamber first, sword up, and the group followed with the careful spacing.
He scanned the room.
The bioluminescence here was dimmer than in the tunnel, concentrated at the upper wall edges, leaving the chamber's center in a shadow that was deeper than the room's size warranted.
The warmth in his chest shifted.
Not louder.
Not urgent.
Alert.
Ares stopped walking.
The Fragment that had been steady since the Queen fell — a background presence, low and consistent now felt it endangered by something.
Not the warmth of something stable.
"There," Henry said quietly.
At the far end of the chamber, against the wall.
A figure stood lazily.
Standing still, watching them with lazy eyes, clearly looking tire but he moved entirely different.
It was still identifiable as a person, like a ruin is still identifiable as a building — the shape remained, but the substance had changed. The scales had crept farther than before, swallowing most of the face. Only the posture, the height, and a single eye with its original color hinted at the human form beneath. His ember eyes assessed the new group.
That eye was watching Ares specifically.
"More victims," the figure said.
The voice carried two registers simultaneously — one human, one something that had moved in beneath the human and was using it as a surface.
Calm.
Unbothered.
He stepped away from the wall and moved toward them at an unhurried pace, his face smeared with dried blood that had stopped looking like anything that required acknowledgment.
"Who are you?" Ares said. His voice was level.
The figure looked at him.
"Why would I name myself to corpses." A pause. "But since you've asked — Subject 19." The single human eye held on Ares without moving.
"And you're Subject 148.
I've known since the first floor.
The thing you're carrying has a signal. It's been the loudest thing on this floor since you came down the stairs."
Ares's grip on the sword tightened.
"The Fragment," Ares said.
"Whatever you want to call it."
Subject 19 stopped walking.
He was close enough now that the two registers of his voice arrived without any delay between them.
"The version inside me recognized it the moment you entered floor two. I've been waiting here since."
His gaze moved across the rest of the group again — brief, dismissive — and came back to Ares.
"The others are secondary."
Jones shifted his shield.
Venia's hand moved to her pistol.
Subject 19 didn't look at either of them.
"Secondary doesn't mean safe," he added, as if reading the movement without needing to see it.
"Where's the floor boss?" Marcus asked from the edge of the group while gripping his daggers, his voice holding the steady calm of someone gathering facts, not making small talk.
Subject 19 looked his way.
Then, for the first time, he smiled — a gesture that sat strangely on a face that was hardly a face anymore.
"Already taken care of," he said.