Roy was halfway through arguing with Orin about not allowing him to trim the edges of his compression shorts for extra speed when Eisenhower's voice sliced into his ear.
"Captain. Status update on Lady Zehrina."
The name alone yanked Roy's attention away from the conversation. "Alright, lay it on me."
"She is refining," Eisenhower said, tone flat as ever. "When she does speak, she cuts off the instant meaning is delivered. She is shaving herself down to pure function."
Roy frowned, then huffed a humorless laugh. "So she's filing off the personality again. Nice."
"There is another point." Eisenhower continued without pause. "Her use of the Navi'N has shifted. Construct shapes I have never recorded. New attack patterns. Wider damage zones...and considerably higher attack potency."
Interest overrode the lingering annoyance as Roy straightened. "You're telling me she unlocked new tricks and I'm not there to watch? That feels like a personal attack."
"I have recordings of all engagements. You may review the footage once you arrive."
"Good." Roy let the word hang for a second. "What else?"
A small pause followed, the kind that meant Eisenhower was choosing his words with surgical care.
"She is answering less often," he said at last. "I repeated direct questions multiple times and she let them pass. Observation suggests she is delegating everything that does not directly affect killing efficiency to instinct. It is not panic, at least I don't think so. It is… reduction."
Roy's joking edge thinned. "Yeah. That tracks with the 'bad version' of her focus."
He tapped his thumb to switch comm channels. "Zehrina. Talk to me for a second."
"Mid-fight. Later."
The line dropped dead.
Eryndra, who had been glaring murderous holes into empty air, whipped around so fast her hair cracked like a whip. "She just hung up on you?"
Roy lifted both palms in surrender. "That is exactly what happened."
"Next time I see her, I'm snapping her arm," Eryndra snarled, already radiating heat.
"Tell her that," Roy said with a lazy shrug.
The public channel popped open. "HEY, ZEHRINA! NEXT TIME I SEE YOU, I'M BREAKING YOUR ARM!"
"Try it," came the cool, clipped reply before Zehrina vanished from the channel again.
Half a second of silence before Eryndra launched herself toward the central shaft as if she intended to free-fall all the way to Floor 279.
The three Presidroids converged in perfect sync. FDR wrapped both arms around her middle, JFK clamped onto her waist from the side, and Truman locked his grip around her upper arms. Boots screeched across metal while she dragged all three of them a dozen feet without slowing.
Leaning against the wall with hands tucked into his sleeves, Orden watched without expression, though faint amusement glinted in his eyes. Beside him, Orin cackled like a hyena.
"She's going to hurl them into the shaft," Orin managed between laughs.
"She might," Orden answered, utterly mild.
Roy let his head fall back for a second, eyes closed, then looked at Orden again. "Orden. Please."
A tiny twist of two fingers was all it took. Eryndra froze mid-lunge, muscles straining against invisible bonds. She hovered there for several long seconds, growling low in her throat, before finally exhaling and letting her shoulders drop. Orden released the hold and the Presidroids eased off in the same instant.
Crisis averted, Roy swept his gaze across the nearby crew. "Alright. Fun's over. Zehrina's carving herself into combat mode and ignoring calls. Eisenhower says the floor she's on looks like a war crime in progress. So we stop strolling."
He tapped the comm again. "Serenity, get the elevator ready. We're done doing this floor by floor."
The nearest crew drifted in without needing to be summoned.
Roy let his eyes run over them once more. "If anyone wants to tap out and wait somewhere sane, now's the time."
Rava tightened the straps on his newly acquired casting glove and shook his head. "Nope, stop asking a hundred times an hour."
Andri finished buckling her gauntlet. "Staying."
Roy's gaze shifted to Orin.
Grinning wide, Orin bounced on the balls of his feet. "If you're throwing yourself into the worst floors in the dungeon, obviously I'm coming."
"Thought so," Roy said, the corner of his mouth lifting.
Eryndra had stopped straining, but violence still thrummed under her skin like a live wire. Roy hooked a thumb her direction. "You'll get your chance to swing at something that deserves it."
The Presidroids fell in behind them, loose, but aligned all the same.
Truman rolled his shoulders until metal clicked. "Point me at something I'm allowed to overkill."
Roy jerked his chin toward the open shaft. "Elevator's waiting. If Zehrina's down there trying to solo the everything, we should probably go talk her out of it."
Already moving, Eryndra headed for the shaft in a fast, tightly controlled walk that still looked one heartbeat away from a dead sprint.
The others had already begun drifting toward the central shaft by the time Roy wrapped up his words. Edging up to the rim, Roy tapped his comm unit with the side of his thumb. "Serenity, can the elevator reach Team Two's location without issue?"
Her voice cut through clean and immediate. "Not without extreme risk. Down to Floor 150, the descent stays locked in safe parameters: full structural bracing, even velocity, stops you can set your watch by."
But then she layered on the rest, her tone dipping just a fraction toward the mechanical equivalent of a wince. "Anything past 150, and you're riding raw shaft—"
"Ha!" Roy interrupted with an awkward laugh.
"...Anyway..." Serenity continued, "no complete decks, just the raw support structure. I didn't think anyone would punch through to those levels this fast, so the bones down there... they're still growing in."
For a moment, Roy hung there at the edge, eyes tracing the black maw that funneled straight down into nothing. "Meaning from 151 on, it's all 'cross your fingers and hope the stone doesn't decide to chew today'?"
Serenity let the pause stretch, then matched his dry edge. "You could call it 'navigable under duress.' Point stands, though, drop to 150, then switch to boots and grit for the haul."
Over by the group, Eryndra worked her shoulders in a slow roll, joints popping loose like she was shaking off rust from a fight that hadn't started yet. "Fine by me. Those depths have been dodging me long enough, they owe me some real work."
Roy gave a single nod. "150 it is. We'll claw the rest manual-style."
"Copy that," came Serenity's acknowledgment, crisp as a relay switch.
Right on cue, the lights along the edge warmed to a fuller burn, chasing shadows back a handspan or two. With a quick tilt of his head toward the platform, Roy waved them forward. "Load in. No dawdling."
One by one, they crossed over, boots ringing faint against the metal. FDR slotted in at Roy's elbow. Back in the thicker cluster toward the middle, Rava and Andri hung close, their faces carrying that tight-jawed mix of resolve and the low boil of nerves that came with knowing you'd signed up for the drop. Orin, though, wore his version of the same with a grin tugging at the corners, like the risk was just another flavor of the chaos he chased.
"Hit it, Serenity," Roy said, voice pitched low over the building rumble.
The platform answered with a lurch that settled into a silk-smooth plunge, feeding them headfirst into the dungeon's gullet where the air turned from breathable to something you had to push through.
As they sank, walls of rough-hewn stone streaked upward in broad vertical slabs, interrupted now and then by the jagged black gaps of side passages and forgotten landings that blurred into irrelevance up above. Every few dozen meters, mana lamps recessed into the rock face flickered past, hurling narrow bands of ghost-pale illumination that washed across cheeks and foreheads before the shadows swallowed them whole again. Deeper they went, and the atmosphere shifted, thickening with a damp heaviness that pressed in from all sides. Dungeon mana saturating the shaft like the crush of water miles below the waves, making every inhale feel borrowed.
Hooking his elbows over the safety rail, Orin craned out and down, squinting into the endless black. "If I timed a straight drop right now, just me and gravity, I'd nail the landing clean as a coin toss."
Rava kept his eyes fixed ahead, not wasting the glance. "You bail, and Eryndra's got you mid-air by the collar, then plants your ass through the next ten levels like a meteor."
A twitch pulled at the corner of Eryndra's mouth, half-smirk, half-threat. "Save us the cleanup, Orin, don't make me prove it."
Bolted plaques marking the depths whipped by in sequence. Floor 120 flickering green, then 130 in a haze of blue, 140 hanging longer like it wanted to be remembered, each one sliding past to hammer home the truth. The surface, with its open sky and thin air, was already a memory stacked too many layers up to feel real.
"Floor 150 coming up," Serenity's voice broke in, steady amid the rush. "Throttling back velocity now."
The underlying hum dialed down from a growl to a murmur, the platform's slide turning languid before it nosed sideways into a gaping recess carved from the shaft wall. A faint scrape of metal on unyielding stone, and then the whole rig locked home with a resonant thud that echoed off into the chamber beyond.
What welcomed them was a gutted expanse ringed by pillars that thrust up like the cracked spine of some colossal beast left to rot. Tall, splintered things veined with old fractures, leaning in toward the center as if the dungeon itself had tried to fold and failed. Scattered islands of flooring held on amid the chaos, stubborn patches of solid rock lashed together by whatever stubborn masonry the builders had scraped in before the mana storms hit. Weaving through it all ran a snarl of trenches and knee-deep basins, some brimming with a sluggish, milk-white sludge that bubbled now and then, others armored in blades of milky crystal that caught the dim and threw it back fractured and wrong. In that first suspended moment, after the echo died, the place held utterly still, like it was listening.
Truman eased up to the platform's lip, his gaze raking the open space in slow arcs, picking at shadows. "Holding too damn quiet out there," he muttered, the words barely carrying over the settling creak of cooling metal.
Quiet never lasted in places like this. It cracked open from the pillar bases first, where lean silhouettes peeled free from the stone, figures all wrong in the joints, limbs folding out at angles that didn't belong on anything born, their eye clusters winking to life in the half-light like scattered embers stirring in ash. Out toward the far pits, bulkier forms lumbered up from the murk, hauling wet hides and dragging chains of muscle until their blunt heads canted around, deliberate and heavy, every mismatched stare locking onto the glow of the elevator like it had delivered the main course of it's final supper.
Rava's hands balled at his hips, knuckles standing out bone-white against the leather. "I can feel it from here...those things could kill me before I so much as moved," he said, his voice so faint everyone could barely hear him.
Andri managed a single hard swallow, her boot scraping back a fraction until JFK's solid frame bumped up against her shoulder, a wall she hadn't asked for but leaned into anyway. "Maybe agreeing to come down was a mistake."
From the cluster, Lynder's laugh rolled out low and unhurried, cutting the edge without trying too hard, he gathered his hair back in a loose sweep, twisting it into a tail that hung down his back. "Easy now, you lot. Tuck in behind me, I am still a guildmaster, remember? You're wrapped safer than you ever felt scraping Floor One clean."
Roy let his eyes track the lay of it all in one unhurried sweep, from the nearest monsters testing their claws on crystal to the lumbering reserves still shaking off the sludge, before he pushed forward to the platform's ragged edge, boots planted wide.
Standard words for a standard mess, delivered evenly. "Takara, you stay with Orin, Andri and Rava. Guard them like your life depended on it. The rest of you...rip this level down to gravel and bone."
"I am here for support!" Takara said, layer after layer of runes forming over her armor and body.
Leading the breach without a word, Eryndra stepped off into open air and slammed down onto weathered tile that buckled and crazed under the impact. From there she coiled low to the ground and exploded straight into the skimpiest stretch of the gathering line, where the lean ones thought they had numbers.
Truman and JFK peeled off right after, fanning wide to left and right in carving sweeps that boxed out any hope of a wraparound rush. FDR, true to form, rooted himself at Roy's heel, head on a swivel between the unfolding snarl of claws and the deeper pockets of gloom that might spit surprises.
Down here, the floor didn't stand a chance, it shuddered awake straight into the teeth of its own ending.