From afar, Bulk saw it first: a single point of light crawling across the flagstones like a living ember dragged by an invisible hand. It moved with deliberate, unnatural patience, sliding toward them from the far right of the corridor, hugging the black stone as though the dungeon itself had decided to come collect its due. The big man narrowed his eyes, the heavy plates of his armor creaking as he leaned forward, squinting through the haze of suppression that already thickened the air like wet wool in his lungs. The light grew clearer with every heartbeat, circular, bright orange, the hue of molten iron fresh from the forge. Its edges weren't smooth; they flickered and pulsed with inner life.
"Huh, Captain?" Bulk's low rumble carried forward, edged with the fatigue that had been gnawing at him since they'd crossed onto this floor. His voice echoed too loudly in the unnatural quiet, the Neutralizer's constant hum now sounding strained, almost plaintive, like a beast fighting a losing battle against a stronger predator.
Rate shifted his attention without hurry, the captain's cloak whispering against his boots as he turned his head toward the approaching glow. His eyes, those cold, telescopic lenses of augmented perception contracted with a soft mechanical click only he could hear. The circle resolved in his vision: not merely light, but a perfect ring of inscribed magic sigils, each rune burning with malignant precision. Violet and amber threads wove through the orange circumference, forming a lattice that should have been anchored to the stone, immobile, eternal. Yet here it was, gliding forward as if the floor itself had become liquid beneath it, undisturbed, untriggered by any physical contact.
In all my years of living, Rate thought, the internal calculus clicking through his mind with clinical detachment, I've never witnessed such a possibility. What was supposed to be stationary and fixed is permeating in singularity. Whoever made this… someone has bypassed the higher tiers of magic creation. Not a dungeon architect. A god playing with restraints. The realization settled in him like a fresh blade against the ribs cold, sharp, and promising complications. Traps did not move. Traps waited. This one lurks.
The orange circle was closer now, gaining speed in that same inexorable slide, its sigils brightening as if tasting their proximity. The air around it shimmered with heat distortion, carrying the faint scent of scorched metal and something sweeter, almost floral, like rot hidden beneath perfume.
"Captain!" Bulk called out again, louder this time, urgency cracking through his gravelly tone. He swung the Neutralizer forward, its pointed tip sweeping in frantic arcs, amber runes flaring desperately against the suppression. The device stuttered in his grip, the power core inside flickering like a heart skipping beats. "It's coming right at us, some kind of patrol ward. Neutralizer's barely registering it!"
Rolan, bound and gagged three paces back, felt the shift ripple through the squad like a tremor in the stone. The rune-etched rope bit deeper into the corners of his mouth, forcing his jaw into a permanent, grotesque gape that stretched his split lips and swollen tongue. Blood, old and fresh coated the inside of his ruined mouth, metallic and warm, dribbling down his chin in thin, sticky threads. Every breath through the forced opening came wet and ragged, a constant wet rasp that reminded him he was still meat, still alive, still theirs. His left eye, the crooked slit leaking crimson, blurred the world into a haze of pain. The right was swollen nearly shut. His ribs grated with every lurching step, the dark-energy grafts Rate had forced into his shattered body holding him together like rusted wire on broken porcelain.
Move, he thought through the red fog, let it take them. Let it take me. Suicide had failed once. Maybe the dungeon would finish what Camilla's fingers had interrupted. The orange light crawled closer, and for the first time since the first floor, a thin thread of something like hope twisted in his gut sharp, poisonous, useless. He tried to shift his bound wrists, the rope burning against raw skin, but Quinn's gauntleted hand rested heavy on his shoulder, a silent promise of restraint.
Camilla stood beside him, her skipping step halted for once. She hadn't spoken since Quinn had hauled her off him earlier, but her body thrummed with barely contained glee. The hood of her cloak cast her face in shadow, yet Rolan could feel her single visible eye on him, that wet, delighted grin still curving beneath the fabric. She leaned in just enough that her hidden buckles clinked softly against her side, the sound intimate, mocking. Bite me, her earlier whisper echoed in his memory. Bite me… bite me… The rope kept his mouth open, but the memory of her fingers playful, invasive, tasting of his own blood made his stomach twist.
Rate stepped forward with that predator's looseness, cloak parting just enough to reveal the pale line of his jaw. He stopped a mere five paces from the advancing circle, right hand slipping inside his cloak. From the folds of dark fabric, two solid tentacles of raw dark energy erupted thick, roiling coils of midnight laced with veins of sullen crimson, writhing like living serpents birthed from his palm. They flexed and coiled, hungry, the air around them warping with the stench of ozone and charred flesh. Rate's gaze never left the trap. His face remained carved from indifference, but his mind raced ahead, dissecting the anomaly, calculating vectors, probabilities, the cost of failure.
The orange circle was ten feet away now, its sigils flaring brighter, the floor beneath it rippling faintly as if the stone were breathing in anticipation.
Rate struck.
The tentacles lashed forward in perfect unison, a blur of dark force that slammed into the heart of the moving trap with surgical violence. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then white electrical lines spiderwebbed outward from the point of impact crackling, brilliant, racing across the sigils like fractures in glass. The orange light screamed, a soundless pressure that made Rolan's eardrums throb. The explosion followed instantly: a massive bloom of force that detonated outward in a perfect sphere, white-hot at the core and fading to searing amber at the edges. The shockwave slammed into the squad like a god's open palm.
Rolan was lifted clean off his feet. The world inverted stone floor becoming ceiling, pain exploding anew through his rebuilt face and crushed ribs. His bound hands flailed uselessly, the rope cutting deeper as he tumbled through the air. For one suspended moment, he thought the blast might simply end him: spine snapping against the far wall. Then Quinn moved. The gauntleted enforcer was already there, a machine of plated inevitability, one arm shooting out to snatch Rolan mid-flight. Metal fingers clamped around the prisoner's collar with bone-jarring force, yanking him back down. Rolan hit the flagstones hard on his knees, breath exploding from his forced-open mouth in a spray of bloody mist. Quinn's grip held him upright, steady as iron, the dried streaks of earlier blood on his armor now joined by fresh flecks from Rolan's lips.
White smoke plumed around them in lazy, choking coils, carrying the reek of scorched ozone and wet grave soil, the same graveyard smell the Neutralizer had left in its wake earlier, but thicker now, cloying. The corridor walls glistened with fresh condensation, black stone sweating as if the dungeon had broken a fever.
"What was that?" Bulk rumbled, already swinging the Neutralizer up again, his massive frame braced against the lingering pressure of the blast. The device's tip flickered weakly, amber runes sputtering like dying stars.
Rate stood at the center of the dissipating smoke, tentacles retracting into his cloak with a wet, sucking sound. His posture hadn't changed loose, coiled, untouched. "That trap just triggered several others in the area," he said, voice flat and precise, already scanning the corridor ahead and behind. "We can't keep standing here. We have to move."
"Captain just made something go boom!" Camilla chirped from behind Rolan, her voice lilting with that same singsong delight, hood slipping back just enough to reveal the full curve of her grin. She bounced once on her toes, cloak swirling, metal boots clinking like tiny bells of mischief.
Rate turned toward her with the slow, deliberate motion of a blade being drawn. His eyes locked on hers, cold and absolute. "Not another word from you," he said, each syllable carved from ice. "This should be your last for the moment."
Camilla's smile faltered not from fear, but from the sudden leash. She immediately seized into silence, ducking her head and pulling the hood forward until her face vanished completely in shadow. Only the faint tremble of her shoulders betrayed the excitement still coiled inside her, like a spring wound too tight.
The silence that followed lasted less than three heartbeats.
Then the outbursts began.
Scattered explosions rippled behind them sharp, wet pops and rolling booms that echoed down the corridor like distant artillery. Not the clean detonation of the first trap, but something messier: plumes of thick black smoke billowing upward, laced with iridescent spores that drifted lazily on the heavy air, glittering faintly before they began to settle. Spectral fog rolled in next, pale and ghostly, carrying whispers that might have been voices or might have been the dungeon laughing. The suppression magic surged in response, heavier now, pressing down on lungs and limbs like an invisible hand squeezing the life from a bellows. Rolan felt it worst his already shattered body sagging further, the dark-energy grafts in his face and ribs burning hotter, fighting against the drain. Bulk's shoulders slumped visibly, the Neutralizer's hum dropping to a labored drone. Even Quinn's mechanical precision slowed by a fraction, his gauntlets flexing once as if testing for weakness.
Rate turned to Bulk without hesitation. "Isn't there a way to get the Neutralizer to stabilize?"
"I'm trying, Captain," Bulk grunted, thick fingers already working over the device's rune-etched housing. "I tend to imprint new runes on the fly, but the core matrix isn't coordinating, suppression's eating the calibrations faster than I can carve them." Sweat beaded on the big man's brow despite the cooling air, his breath coming in heavier pulls.
"There's no time for that," Rate cut in, the words sharp as a scalpel. "We're in haste. What about the backup cores?"
Bulk shook his head, massive frame shifting under the reinforced box strapped to his back. "I've tried that, but they're all reacting the same, Captain. Overloading the moment they sync. It's like the dungeon's tuned to the exact frequency of our tech, disrupting it from the inside."
Rate's face showed a rare flicker of distaste, a tightening at the corners of his mouth, the ghost of irritation that never quite became anger. "Give it to me." He thrust his left hand forward, palm up, the motion efficient and unyielding.
Bulk hesitated only a fraction of a second before handing over the massive artifact. The reinforced box felt heavier than it should, the weight of failing magitech and the dungeon's malice combined. Rate took it in his left hand, then smoothly passed it to his right, the dark-energy tentacles already stirring faintly beneath his cloak in anticipation. He poured power into the device without ceremony raw, midnight-dark energy flooding the crystal matrices and rune lattices. The Neutralizer drank it greedily at first, amber glow flaring bright, then brighter, the entire housing lighting up from within like a lantern filled with captured lightning. But cracks began to spiderweb across the alchemical steel almost immediately, fine lines glowing with overflow, the power core stuttering and whining under the strain. Excess energy leaked out in thin, black tendrils that hissed against the stone floor.
"Captain!" Bulk tried, voice rising in warning. "I don't think you..."
"There's no time to worry about that now," Rate said, tone stoic and final, eyes already fixed on the corridor ahead where the smoke and spores still swirled. He adjusted his grip, the cracks widening with audible pops.
Then he slammed the tip of the Neutralizer down into the flagstones.
A wide ring of energy erupted outward from the point of impact brilliant, searing white laced with veins of deep violet and sullen crimson. It spread like liquid fire across the floor, racing forward in a surging wave that devoured the lingering smoke, the spores, the spectral fog. The corridor ahead lit up in violent illumination, every black stone wall and ceiling rune flaring into sudden, painful visibility. Violet traps winked out in rapid succession, dissolving into harmless sparks that smelled of scorched ozone and wet grave soil. The suppression recoiled visibly, the air lightening for the first time since they'd descended, though the cracks in the Neutralizer's housing widened further, threatening to shatter the artifact entirely.
The corridor was engulfed with light.
The sixth floor hummed with a different kind of silence than the dungeon's lower levels. Here, the air carried the faint ozone tang of overworked crystal matrices and the sweeter, herbal bite of Agatha's favorite incense something Seth had long ago learned to tolerate because it kept her from hexing the ventilation ducts.
The control room door split open with a soft hydraulic sigh, two black panels gliding apart like obedient eyelids. Agatha stepped through as casually as if she had just stepped out of a bath, one bare foot then the other padding across the cool obsidian floor tiles. She wore a black lingerie dress that clung to her like liquid shadow, its hem brushing just below her knees in a lazy drape of silk and lace. Over it she had thrown a wine-colored robe left loosely belted, the fabric whispering against her thighs with every step. A matching wine towel was twisted turban-style around her dark hair, still damp from whatever ritual cleansing she had performed earlier. In her left hand she balanced a wide porcelain plate piled with thick slices of grilled meat venison and wyvern flank, glistening with spiced oil and dark sauce that dripped in slow, savory beads. A single silver fork rested beside the meat like a tiny scepter.
She crossed the room without hurry, hips swaying in that absent, feline rhythm only grand witches seemed to possess. The control system waited at the far end: Seth's personal operator chair, a high-backed throne of matte-black alloy and glowing rune-inlaid leather. The seat was still warm from his last session, though he had not been here in hours. Agatha had claimed it anyway. It had become a habit her little rebellion against the cold precision of his machines. She dropped into it with a contented sigh, the robe parting just enough to reveal the smooth line of her thigh as she crossed her legs. The plate settled on her lap, and she speared the first piece of meat with the fork.
The wall of monitors flared to life around her in a semicircle of cold blue light. Twelve separate angles of the second floor blinked into focus, each feed crystal-clear despite the dungeon's growing suppression field. The images showed the same grim procession she had been half-watching for the last twenty minutes: five figures moving through the black-stone corridor like insects crawling across wet obsidian. The big one Bulk, still led with that ridiculous Neutralizer strapped across his back, its amber tip sweeping in tired arcs. Rate walked beside him, cloak whispering, eyes never still. Behind them limped the prisoner, Rolan, now grotesquely gagged and bound with rune-etched rope, his ruined face a mask of blood and fury. Camilla skipped at his side like a child on a picnic, and Quinn brought up the rear, mechanical and blood-streaked.
Agatha chewed slowly, savoring the smoky char and the sweet heat of the sauce. The meat was still warm, juices running over her tongue. On the central monitor she saw the exact moment Quinn had finished tightening the rope around Rolan's head; the prisoner's jaw was forced open in a permanent, snarling gape. Camilla had been giggling again, Agatha could almost hear it through the silent feed.
"They're still going?" she murmured around the fork. She swallowed, licked a drop of sauce from her lower lip, and tilted her head. "They mustn't be ordinary, then." Another slice of meat, another thoughtful chew. "They'd better be entertaining. And not get on my nerves."
She leaned forward, elbows on the armrests, eyes flicking from screen to screen. Different angles showed the same corridor from above, from the side, from low and predatory. Violet runes still pulsed in the ground, but weaker now, dying one by one as the Neutralizer drank them dry. The group's formation had tightened after whatever scuffle had just happened. Rolan's limp was worse. Camilla's smile never dimmed.
Agatha's gaze narrowed with professional interest. These were no common adventurers blundering through Seth's creation. Their mana signatures if she could even read them properly through the monitors felt… layered. Old. Dangerous. The kind of power that made a dungeon's traps feel almost polite by comparison.
"Aid?" she called, voice light but carrying that unmistakable edge of command only a grand witch could manage.
The AI assistant answered instantly, its calm synthetic tenor blooming from hidden speakers woven into the ceiling. "Yes, Agatha?"
She gestured at the wall of screens with the fork, sauce dripping onto the polished armrest. "Can you… you know… display and detect their mana and energy flow? I can't appraise them properly through this." She waved the utensil again, as though the monitors themselves were the problem. "It's all just warm portraits."
A brief pause barely a heartbeat, but Agatha noticed it the way a predator notices a rabbit's hesitation.
"Failed to process your request," Aid replied with flawless politeness. "Such mechanisms have not been installed to the system."
Agatha sighed, long and theatrical, letting her head fall back against the chair. The towel turban shifted slightly. "Seems that's one of the few things you can't do. Yet." She straightened, a small, wicked smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Fine. I have to find out my own way."
She set the plate on the console ledge, sauce still gleaming on the rim, and extended her left arm to the side with the lazy confidence of someone who had leveled mountains for less. Purple sigils ignited in the air before her palm perfect circles of glowing script that spun like living clockwork. A second ring of sigils bloomed two feet away, larger, twisting faster. The air between them crackled, then tore open with a wet pop of displaced magic. From the rift stepped a lesser imp: a round, blackish ball of a creature no taller than half a foot, tiny membranous wings fluttering uselessly at its sides. One enormous eyeball dominated its entire body, glistening and bloodshot, pupil dilating as it took in the control room. The imp hovered in place, waiting.
Agatha studied it with the fond exasperation of a woman inspecting a slightly disappointing familiar. "You'll do," she told it. With her free hand she flicked open a storage portal beside her chair another violet ring that yawned like a hungry mouth. From within she drew a mirror wrapped in sacred white cloth embroidered with protective runes that shimmered faintly gold. The fabric smelled of old incense and dried blood. She began unwrapping it slowly, reverently, as though the mirror itself might bite if rushed.
"Aid," she said without looking up, "can you take this imp to the floor where the descendants are? Follow their every move. Every twitch. I want to see what they really are."
"Affirmative," the AI answered. From the ceiling a tactical machine gripper descended on silent servos sleek black alloy, padded claws gleaming under the monitor glow. The gripper closed gently around the imp's round body, careful not to crush the delicate wings. The creature gave a single, indignant squeak, but otherwise submitted. The arm retracted, carrying its tiny passenger toward a service hatch that hissed open in the far wall.
Agatha finished unwrapping the mirror. The glass was ancient, its surface dark as pooled ink and framed in blackened silver etched with spiraling wards. She held it up with both hands, thumbs resting on the cool metal. Then she poured mana into it.
Power flowed from her fingertips in visible violet threads, sinking into the mirror's surface. For a heartbeat the glass stayed black and stubborn. Then it flared once, sharply and the link snapped into place. The mirror's surface rippled like water, and suddenly Agatha was no longer staring at her own reflection. She was staring through the imp's single enormous eye.
The view lurched as the gripper carried the creature through the service conduits and dropped it onto the second floor. The perspective shifted: black flagstones rushing up, then the low hum of the Neutralizer growing louder, the metallic clink of Camilla's hidden metal buckles, the wet rasp of Rolan's breathing through his forced-open mouth. The imp scuttled along the ceiling now, silent and unseen, its gigantic pupil drinking in every detail. Agatha could see the dried blood on Quinn's gauntlets. She could see the way Rate's cloak moved like liquid night. She could see Camilla's smile widen as she leaned in toward the prisoner again, whispering something that made Rolan's bound shoulders tense.
Agatha's lips parted slightly. Her breathing had slowed, deepening with fascination. The meat on her plate was forgotten. This was better than any monitor. This was raw. Immediate. She could almost taste the suppression magic thickening the air down there, could feel the way the dungeon itself seemed to lean in, curious about these intruders who refused to break.
She adjusted her grip on the mirror, tilting it so the imp's eye panned slowly across the formation. Bulk's broad back, the Neutralizer's amber tip flaring against stronger violet lattices. Rate's clinical scan of the corridor ahead. Camilla's fingers still glistening with Rolan's blood. The prisoner's eyes half-swollen, leaking crimson burning with a hatred so pure it made Agatha's own pulse quicken in appreciation.
At the end of it, she made a smirk on her face.