The Dungeon. Middle Floors. Floor Thirteen.
Through a broad, staircase-like passage formed by naturally stacked slabs of enormous rock, the view opened wide.
Gray boulders lay scattered in every direction. The stone that made up the walls, floor, and ceiling stretched outward in a single unbroken sheet, and a faint moisture hung in the air, carrying with it a suffocating weight. Looking out across the scene, you could almost believe you were standing in a natural cavern cut into a mountainside, and anyone who didn't know better might have taken it for exactly that.
But what lay before Leon and his companions was no natural landscape. This was Floor Thirteen of the Dungeon, the threshold of the Middle Floors, the line Adventurers passed down in whispered warnings as the first death zone.
The sight drew quiet gasps from those setting foot here for the first time.
"So this is the Middle Floors..." Leon said, his voice low but sharp in the open passage. "The Dungeon really is something else."
"It's hard to believe," Jeanne said softly, her gaze heavy. "This is what the Dungeon is capable of."
"The reference materials describe the terrain down here in detail," Rose added, glancing around with a slight frown, "but reading about it and standing in it are two different things." She paused. "And have you noticed? The light sources here are far dimmer and more scattered than on the upper floors. Visibility is severely limited."
"Hm?"
Now that Rose mentioned it, the others saw it too. The phosphorescent glow of the Middle Floors was muted, as though filtered through gauze, casting everything in a hazy half-light that made the unknown feel that much more dangerous.
Leon tilted his hood back slightly, his sharp eyes tracing the single road of carved rock that cut straight through the massive stone shelf and stretched into endless darkness ahead. The Adventurer column was moving along it with careful, measured steps.
He'd never seen a corridor this long and this straight. Nothing but raw stone and cave structure, running forward without a single turn. Even straining his vision, the far end vanished into blackness, swallowed whole.
"Leon," Jeanne said, her voice carrying the cool edge of tactical assessment. "From here on, the connecting passages between chambers are abnormally long. That means..."
Her tone darkened a shade.
"If we run into monsters in a narrow corridor like this, we'll be fighting on the worst possible terrain. Especially since Floor Thirteen introduces Hellhounds, and they specialize in ranged fire attacks. If we get caught in the middle of a passage with those things closing in from both sides... the consequences speak for themselves."
When Adventurer squads fought in the Dungeon, the standard practice was to engage in the open chambers. The logic was simple: the spacious halls gave a party room to leverage their numbers, coordinate roles, and take monsters down as a unit. That was the whole point of teaming up - covering each other's weaknesses and fighting as something greater than the sum of its parts. Corridor combat was always the last resort.
But the Middle Floors threw all of that out the window.
The punishing length of these passages meant far more time spent exposed, and the odds of encountering monsters mid-corridor shot up exponentially. If you met something in the narrows, the cramped space strangled movement, shattered coordination, and left you ripe for swarming, flanking, or getting pinched from both ends.
"The handbook is clear on this," Rose chimed in, her voice gentle but precise. "Floor Thirteen's defining feature is these abnormally long connecting passages. To maintain combat safety, the first priority is reaching the nearest chamber as quickly as possible."
Leon, Laurier, and Aura all nodded, their expressions serious.
"Figures," Leon said with a sigh. "The Middle Floors and the upper floors might as well be different worlds. More space, sure, but way more lethal too."
He paused, eyes sweeping the nerve-wracking length of the corridor ahead.
"Bottom line: picking a fight with monsters in a place like this is a terrible idea."
They kept their voices low as they walked, picking up the pace to stay tight with the column ahead, every step deliberate, tension coiled in their shoulders.
That was when Aura spoke up from behind Leon, her voice cutting in without preamble.
"That's not even the worst of it. Beyond the terrain, the Middle Floors have another nasty surprise. Look over there."
Every head turned to follow her finger, and every heart climbed into every throat.
Along the shadowed edges of the corridor walls, half-hidden in the gloom, vertical shafts gaped open like dark wells, plunging straight down into nothing.
Everyone who'd studied the Dungeon reference materials recognized them instantly.
Pitfall traps. Drops to deeper floors.
The sight of those yawning mouths in the rock drained color from more than a few faces. The bold Amazon woman instinctively edged away from the wall.
"These corridors are bad enough on their own," Jeanne said, lips pressed thin, brow furrowed, her fingers settling unconsciously on the hilt at her hip. "Add ambush traps on both sides and the danger here isn't even in the same league as the upper floors."
Seeing the tension on her face, Leon reached over and gave her shoulder a light pat, his voice steady.
"Don't wind yourself too tight. We're just not used to it yet. A few more trips down here, some experience under our belts, and we'll have the Middle Floors figured out soon enough."
...
With a force this large, the pace couldn't match a small party's speed. But nobody complained. In the Middle Floors, where danger lurked in every shadow, the solid reassurance of numbers was a shield no small team could replicate.
Boots and greaves crunched over loose stone, the monotonous rhythm echoing through the dead-silent corridor and pressing down on the mood.
Time slipped past. Out of habit, Leon pulled his brass pocket watch from beneath his cloak and glanced at it. Under his hood, his brow creased hard. Without anyone noticing, they'd been marching for over half an hour.
"Strange..." he muttered, a nameless unease crawling up his spine.
"You feel it too?" Jeanne stopped almost in the same breath he did, stepping close, her voice barely a whisper.
"Yeah."
Leon answered low, then without breaking stride flashed a rapid series of hand signals back to Aura, Rose, and the others.
The order passed in silence. The Hart Familia's eyes sharpened as one, muscles coiling tight, hands quietly closing around weapons. Combat-ready.
The subtle shift in atmosphere spread outward like a ripple. One by one, the more experienced Adventurers in the column picked up on the eerie quiet.
Half an hour of marching and not a single monster. What should have been a stroke of luck now sat on everyone's chest like a stone.
Glances darted between Adventurers, quick and wordless. Without a syllable spoken, every person in the formation had ratcheted their alert to maximum. The air felt solid enough to crack.
"Ha ha!"
Alise stood with her hands on her hips, head thrown back, and let out her usual bright, booming laugh, which to everyone else's ears sounded spectacularly ill-timed.
"Could it be the Dungeon sensed the might of the Astraea Familia and scared the monsters out of spawning? Ohohoho! What a smooth trip this has been!"
Kaguya stopped mid-step, pressed a hand to her forehead, and let out a long, deep sigh.
"Captain... are you completely immune to reading a room?"
Lyra's mouth curved into her trademark smirk, the short blade in her hand dancing between her fingers like a silver butterfly.
"Well, it's Alise. As captain, all she needs to focus on is charging headfirst into whatever's in front of her and cutting it down."
She dragged the words out, teasing. "The boring stuff like reading the situation and anticipating danger? That's what the rest of us are for."
Listening to her friends, Ryu adjusted her mask slightly, her cool gaze fixed on Alise's utterly carefree back.
"Alise, are you an idiot?" she said, quiet and flat. "Everyone else has noticed something is wrong. This silence... it's a textbook sign that a Monster Party is about to hit."
"Huh? Wait, what?"
The red-haired swordswoman blinked, bewildered, and only then thought to look back at the column behind her. She even blurted out:
"It's not... actually going to be that bad, is it?"
Her question was a cup of ice water dropped into a boiling pot.
What greeted her eyes as she turned was this: the entire force had already gone to battle stations. Every Adventurer, regardless of Level, had silently locked into their tightest defensive or offensive stance. Weapons gleamed. Magic swirled at fingertips. Eyes swept the corridor walls with the focus of hawks scanning for prey, and the air was thick with killing intent.
Every Adventurer who'd made it to the Middle Floors, even a Level 1, was a hardened veteran by definition. They knew better than anyone that monster spawn rates and density down here dwarfed the upper floors. A corridor this long, this much time passed, and not a single encounter? What kind of Orario joke was that? This wasn't luck. This was the dead calm before the storm.
When something was this wrong, something was coming. In a Dungeon built on malice and the unknown, silence this absolute was the most terrifying omen of all.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!!!
As if answering Alise's innocent question and every taut nerve in the column, a barrage of fracturing stone exploded from deep within the walls on both sides. The sound layered on itself, and the entire corridor groaned and shuddered.
Standing at the rear of the formation, where the crawling dread on the back of his neck had been screaming for minutes, Leon sighed with weary resignation.
"Of course. You jinx it, you get it."
Before his words finished leaving his mouth, the Hart Familia snapped into combat formation around Aura with the precision of a well-oiled machine, locked and ready.
Around them, the other squads showed they'd earned every bit of their veteran status - combat deployments completed almost simultaneously, reactions sharp, coordination seamless, the polish of Adventurers who'd survived long enough to know what mattered.
"That kind of snap response..." Jeanne breathed, watching the other teams fall into place. "These really are veteran Adventurers." Some of the worry she'd carried about the expedition eased, just a fraction.
Up ahead, at the Astraea Familia's position, the girls stared at the dense web of cracks spreading across both walls. Kaguya's composure finally cracked, her delicate features twisting.
"Alise, can you please shut your jinxing mouth for once?!"