I kept the sword wrapped against my ribs and moved like a shadow through the early crowds. No one saw the cloth move under my cloak. No one cared about the hands in their pockets unless those hands were empty. I had one thing to do. Learn the reach of the blade and turn what I found into coin.
The Spire's gate admitted me the same way it always had, with a hollow clack and a sigh. The offhand chatter of seasoned delvers did not touch me. I walked past the board where bounties were posted and past teams arguing about routes. Most people never went deeper than one hundred fifty. The clearance was practical. Past that line the floors grew strange, and the kind of danger that required more than courage began to show up.
I had heard the legends. A Floorwalker once climbed to fifteen thousand two hundred fifty. Then he vanished. People whispered different endings. Some said he had become one with the dungeon. Some said he had been swallowed by his own ambition. No one knew for sure how deep the Spire went. That uncertainty kept the markets bustling and the fools hungry.
I chose floor five because it was a step beyond what most solo rookies dared and because I needed crystals worth more than the scraps the alleys offered. I wanted tests, not spectacle. I wanted to know how far I could press before the world pushed back harder.
The gate door sighed shut behind me and the light changed. Floor five smelled of iron and crushed crystal. The floor was an exhalation of jagged geometry. Low stalagmites reflected my lantern like black teeth. Pools of slow, viscous liquid gathered in hollows and spat when my boots splashed through them. The map the guild gave me stopped making sense in places and the runes on the walls felt older, like writing carved by hands that forgot what mercy meant.
I walked until the usual threats seemed too obvious. That was always the trick. The dungeon learned when you expected patterns and then punished predictable feet. I moved toward an echo of sound, a scratching and slither that suggested teeth and a hundred small, hungry legs.
The first thing to show itself was a cluster of Skewerlings. They were the size of hounds but ragged and long limbed. Their backs bore bony spines that snapped and rattled like broken pins. They moved in packs, a shifting wall of teeth and motion. One burst from behind a jagged pillar and launched at my throat.
I rolled as it passed, the air cutting a wind along my ear. I swung Kuraihane in a short arc and the blade met resistance, thick sinew and bone. The sword sank partway, pulled, and freed itself with a sound like paper tearing. The Skewerling collapsed in a spray of crimson and crystal dust. The next lunged, jaws split open with a wet hunger. I ducked under the bite, planted my foot, and drove the blade upward. The creature's spine cracked where the sword met bone and it folded in on itself.
They came faster, waves of them, teeth and claws and frantic motion. I did not think about each strike. I reacted. Kuraihane was heavy enough to drive through scales but light enough to turn with my wrist. Each kill felt like practice and also like confession. I cut and moved, cut and moved. When the last Skewerling in that clump fell, I was breathing hard and my cloak was spattered with dark flecks that caught the light.
I took the cores then. Small, dull crystals embedded in the hearts of those beasts. They were not rare. They were not going to pay for a house. Still they were something. Something you could trade in at the guild for bread and a night off the streets.
I pushed deeper.
A sound like grinding stone preceded the next threat. From a fissure in the wall came a thing with a shell of layered crystal plates that overlapped like carved shields. A Gulletcrab crawled out, the edges of its carapace yellowed with the crust of old wounds. Its mandibles clicked and it sprayed a cloud of fine crystal dust that stung my eyes. The ground around its legs was slick with a faint, oily secretion that glimmered with runic residue.
I circled wide, testing its reach. It lunged and I sidestepped. Kuraihane bit into the joint beneath one of its legs and the creature howled a noise that was half grievance and half alarm. Its shell was tougher than the Skewerlings. I had to aim for seams and soft spots and keep moving. I slashed at its underbelly until it folded and the runes in its shell went dull. When it died the dust it had coughed up settled like snow around my boots.
By then the floor had noticed me. The walls throbbed. Small, slim lanternflowers in cracked niches leached light and spat it in pulses. The air tasted of copper and old frost. From above a shadow fell and a flock of Thornsprites descended. They were like shards of glass in the shape of birds, wings ringing against the air with a metallic trill. They dove in serried formation, aiming for my eyes, my hands, any slit of bare skin they could find.
I crouched behind a boulder and let one clip by. Kuraihane flashed out and I sent a blade arc through the first sprite. It exploded into a constellation of glittering shards and a tiny core rolled past my boot. Another came and another. I moved in a spiral, using the boulder as cover and the sword as answer. Each time the Thornsprites met the edge of Kuraihane they shattered and left behind tiny, needlelike crystals that pricked at my boots. My arms burned from the motion. Each strike took a little more from me and gave a little more back in the form of crystals clinking into my palm.
After the sprites, the floor offered a challenge that made the last fights look kindly. A stone slab the size of a cart shifted and folded like a sleeping animal and gave rise to a Colossuspine. It was a vertical wall of vertebrae and glass, teeth set along its ridge, and it moved with a lurching rhythm that shook the ground. Each step was a small quake. Each breath drove hot air across the chamber that felt like the exhale of a furnace.
Its mouth opened in a cavernous gape and a host of little spined larvae spilled forth, swarming around my boots. I ducked under the nearest arc of vertebra and ran along the flank of the beast, seeking the joint beneath its ribs. The Colossuspine's plates were thick and singing with runic light. I could not force a strike through that armor. Instead I used the momentum of my steps and the leverage of my blade. I found a seam and drove the edge of Kuraihane into it. The sound when metal met rune was not like anything I had heard before. It was a keening that made my teeth ache.
The Colossuspine roared and the chamber grew cloudy with dust. The larvae clung to my boots and I shook them off with kicks and cuts until my legs were ringed with tiny cores like a bracelet. Then the beast reeled and fell in a slow, collapsing tumble. The ribs crashed down and gave me a moment to breathe and to look at what I had taken.
By the time I stopped the air around me was thick with the remnants of kills. My breathing came in hot pulls. My shirt was torn along the shoulder. My hands ached. My palms smelled of iron and old smoke. I gathered the crystals carefully. Some were clear and sparkled like good coins. Some were dull and cracked. All of them had worth.
I counted while the adrenaline left me. Fourteen cores. Not one of them rare. Not one a relic. Just honest floor five currency. Enough to make my pockets honest for a while.
I walked the path back toward the gate the way I had come, feet sure now where they had been hesitant earlier. The dungeon watched me go. The walls pulsed as if annoyed. I kept my hood low and my steps measured. Kuraihane still hummed, quiet and content with the work it had done. I did not test it beyond what I needed. I had no interest in drawing attention I could not handle.
At the guild the clerk glanced at the haul and then at me. His face gave nothing away beyond the practiced apathy of someone who had seen too many hands and too many stories. He scanned the cores, catalogued them, and then tapped the screen.
"Standard cores from Five," he said casually. "You went solo. Smart or foolish depending on the answers."
"How much," I asked.
He gave me the number without ceremony.
"Sixty two thousand two hundred Veilmarks."
Not a fortune. Not a ruinous sum that would buy a house in the middle ring. Not market-changing. Still it was heavy in my hand. It was more than I had in weeks. It was more than a full belly and a locked room for a night.
I left a fraction of the coins with the clerk to pay the guild fees and taxes. The rest I kept, the small mountain of Veilmarks cradled inside a pouch. I thought about pockets of safety and not wanting to sleep in the slums with a sword under my cloak. I thought about the price of an anonymous life, about cottages and shutters and the stupid luxury of a bed that did not sag.
I walked to the Emberlight Rest because the memory of warmth in a bed was a pull that outmatched most prudence. The clerk at the inn took one look at my face, perhaps at the blood on my sleeves, and did not bother with questions. He took the coins and slid me a key as if this was the most mundane business in the world.
My room was small and smelled of fresh linen. I locked the door and set Kuraihane on a crate at the foot of the bed. I slid into a hot bath the inn provided and let the water sluice the dust and sweat from my skin. The heat made me ache less. It also made me aware of how raw I still felt under the surface.
They brought me a hot meal that evening and I ate like I had not known what a full plate meant for years. There was a bowl of thick root stew rich with marrow and dusk yams, a slab of warm flatbread torn and dipped, and a small portion of preserved glowfruit for dessert. Each bite tasted of the world I had only glimpsed before as someone who fought for scraps. The stew was salted just right. The bread had a crust that flaked on my tongue. The glowfruit was sweet in a way that made my eyes water.
I ate until my hands trembled and then lay back on the bed and let the warmth of the meal and the bath sink into me. For the first time in a long time the thought of sleep did not carry the same sharpened edge. I could rest without imagining thieves in the rafters or claws scraping the door.
The night was thin and good. I slept and dreamed, but not of monster halls. I dreamed of a window in a house where the light came in and did not kill any part of me with its brightness. I dreamed of a table and a chair with no one needing to ask me what I owed them.
In the morning I woke to the smell of baking and the distant clink of cups. For the first time in years I ate a hot breakfast at a table where no one judged the guest by the state of their soles. The food was simple. A sunleaf omelette folded around smoked crystal shrooms and dusk cheese. Toast slathered with honey. A small cup of emberspiced tea that tightened the eyes awake.
I left the inn with the pouch of Veilmarks sewn into my cloak and Kuraihane still waiting under cloth. I had coin to live on for a little while. Not enough to buy a house. Not nearly. But enough to buy a night and a belly and a warmth that was mine for the span of a day.
The Spire rose behind me like an accusation and the market ran on with its noisy life. I walked through it feeling both fuller and poorer than I had at dawn. The crystals fit into the guild vault and into the economy of the city like any other commodity. They were not relics. They were labor that had been packed into gem and sold. That was how the world turned.
And for now that was enough.