They left camp at first light, the false dawn finally giving way to the dungeon's version of morning: pale, shadowless, and utterly indifferent to what waited above.
The stairwell to floor twenty-nine sat half-buried in a wall of black stone at the far end of the lake's clearing, easy to miss unless you already knew it was there.
Ethan had scouted it the night before, after Lyris vanished back into the water. A narrow archway, no door, just a throat of darkness leading upward.
"Comforting," Kael muttered, echoing Gareth's word from the night before. "Really feels like a place good things happen."
"Nowhere in this dungeon feels like that," Serena said, checking the straps on her pack one final time. "Get used to it."
They climbed in silence for the first three floors. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, familiar territory, cleared paths, monsters that behaved the way monsters were supposed to behave.
Predictable. Manageable.
