Eryndra hit the first line of lean silhouettes with the force of a collapsing building. She drove her shoulder into the chest of the nearest creature, imploding its ribcage with a wet, sickening crunch that echoed off the crystal walls. The creature folded in half, limbs twitching, and she used its collapsing bulk as a step to launch herself toward the next target. To the left, Truman straightened his cuffs. A cluster of the bulkier beasts lumbered out of the milky trenches, their flat teeth grinding as they raised clubs of crystallized bone.
"So many for just me? I might blush," Truman stated, his tone clipped and formal. He raised a single hand, palm flat. "Fundamental Magic, Fission: Mini Lass."
A tiny sphere of unstable light detached from his palm. It drifted lazily for a fraction of a second before accelerating into a streak of white violence. It struck the center beast. The detonation was a contained sphere of absolute silence followed by a roar that shook dust from the high ceiling. The trench evaporated in a hiss of superheated steam, and the monsters ceased to exist, replaced by a crater of glassed stone.
Truman turned his head, optical sensors fixing on Lynder. "Bang! One shot, four kills. Can you do better, Guildmaster?"
"Crude," Lynder scoffed. "You waste energy on heat and noise. Watch."
Three winged variants detached from the high pillars, diving in a silent, synchronized V-formation toward the Guildmaster. Their claws glistened, wet with corrosive fluids that steamed in the open air.
Lynder flicked his wrist, angling mana stone of his ring upward. "Ancient Arcane Magic: Castration."
Behind the line, Roy struggled to contain a laugh.
A single point of violet light formed at the gem of Lynder's ring, quickly condensing into a blinding violet needle. Lynder punched his fist forward three times in rapid succession.
Three beams, thin as wire, flashed out instantly, boosted by precise pulses from Lynder's ring. Each shot burned silently through the skulls of the diving monsters, dropping their cauterized corpses to slide to a halt at Lynder's feet.
Lynder flicked a bit of dust off his sleeve, looking entirely too pleased with himself. "Consider that a gentle reminder of what real technique looks like," he said, tone smooth, almost conversational. "Precision has an elegance that raw destruction simply lacks."
"Speed gets results," Truman countered bluntly, already turning his optical sensors toward the next wave emerging from the darkness.
Roy stepped irritably over a twitching limb. "Can you two stop measuring dicks? We're on a schedule."
FDR tilted his head slightly. "Their competitive instincts do appear fully engaged."
From the shadows near the elevator shaft, a stealth-variant of this floor's beasts slipped free, sleek and translucent, like a mantis sculpted from glass, and it bypassed the frontline by crawling rapidly along the ceiling.
Takara caught the faint shimmer in the corner of her eye. She spun sharply, gauntlets blazing with runes. "Behind us!" she shouted, voice sharp with urgency.
The creature lunged forward, mandibles snapping viciously toward Rava's exposed neck.
The creature's path ended abruptly as JFK intercepted it mid-air with a perfectly executed mechanical strike, delivered with a forceful crunch of bone. Its jaw shattered audibly, spinning the limp body into a pillar, where it collapsed with its neck twisted grotesquely.
In the ensuing stillness, with meticulous calm, JFK checked on the kids to see if they were safe. His optical sensors then fixed coldly on Lynder. "I thought you assured us they were safe, Guildmaster? Perhaps Truman would have made a more reliable perimeter. Your 'precision' seems to have gaps."
Rather than appearing annoyed, Lynder allowed himself a faint, indulgent smile. One slender finger pointed toward the stone beneath JFK's polished shoes. "Look down," he said calmly.
Etched faintly into the stone, encircling Takara and the kids, a dense array of nearly invisible shadow runes pulsed with a quiet, menacing rhythm.
"If it had moved an inch further," Lynder explained with the gentle cadence of a patient teacher, "the trap would've neatly severed its legs at the knees. You simply saved me some mana."
A brief pause followed as JFK's sensors flickered, verifying Lynder's claim. Then came a short, mechanical chuckle. "Point taken."
"Enough," Roy interjected firmly, stepping past them. "Clear the sector."
Eryndra barreled through the frontline like a storm set loose, battering aside each foe that stepped too close, while Truman, a few paces behind, methodically evaporated whole clusters with contained eruptions of silent light. The remnants, trying desperately to regroup, Lynder picked off in quick succession, thin lines of energy slipping between Truman's detonations, leaving smoldering cauterized flesh. When a break opened before them, an archway loomed grotesquely in stone, carved with a face locked mid-scream. Roy's frown deepened, suspicion creasing his forehead.
As stone doors shuddered apart, air thick with crystalline dust, a hulking shape emerged, spires of jagged crystal framing a core of shifting, milky fluid suspended unnaturally, each step trailing viscous puddles that seeped slowly across the floor. Eryndra stepped forward with a quiet word that vanished beneath the creature's gurgling roar. As its massive fist swung toward her, crystalline spikes glinted sharply, fluid sloshing with sickening weight. Her palm rose to meet it, the stone beneath her feet cracking from the impact.
"Boring," she muttered flatly, grip tightening, splintering cracks threading rapidly up the crystal limb until shards scattered violently, raining around her like broken glass.
Before the creature could wrench away, stumbling slightly from the sudden imbalance, she pressed forward into the gap, fingers driving deep into the milky center of its chest where the crystal core pulsed frantically. A wet sound followed the flex of her arm, crystal heart torn free amidst a cascade of thick fluid and jagged fragments, the golem's final movements stuttering into convulsions as the chamber echoed with Eryndra's impatient exhale.
The golem's shriek rolled through the chamber as Eryndra pivoted on her heel, the crystal heart still clutched in her fist while the stolen momentum carried her into the follow-through. When the core smashed back into the creature's face, the impact ruptured the air itself, fragments of crystal and thick fluid spraying outward before gravity reclaimed them, leaving the ruined body sagging into an uneven sprawl at her feet.
"Done," Eryndra said as she turned away, the word already losing relevance as her attention shifted forward.
From somewhere behind her, Lynder exhaled through his nose, irritation slipping past his usual restraint while his gaze lingered on the wreckage. "Excessive."
"We are in a hurry, no?" Eryndra responded flatly.
Roy, stepping around the spreading residue, slowed near the far wall where a rough-cut passage spiraled downward, its stone sides carved straight from the bedrock and vanishing into depth without any hint of rail or lantern. As he tested the first step, the air thickened around him, the dry dust of the chamber giving way to a damp, organic heaviness that crept into his lungs and pulled a grimace from his face.
Pressure yielded under his foot, the surface responding with an unpleasant softness that refused to behave like stone.
"If this floor starts digesting us," Roy muttered, weight shifting back as he tested the next step, "I'm going back up."
Close behind, Truman's optical sensors tracked upward, fixing on clusters of softly pulsing sacs embedded along the ceiling, each glow diffused through layers of translucent membrane. The scan lingered longer than necessary before his voice followed, even and clipped.
"Organic resin, Captain," Truman said. "Disgusting, yes. Hazardous? Unlikely."
After a brief pause, during which the sacs continued their slow, obscene rhythm, his sensors narrowed.
"Though I am detecting exceptionally high concentrations of… filth. Pure filth."
With every turn of the spiral, the air thickened, clinging damply to skin and armor, until even breathing felt like pushing through a membrane rather than space.
Eryndra slowed, her foot hovering a fraction longer before committing to the next step, while the stone beneath it gave just enough to register as potentially dangerous. Whatever lay below responded to weight rather than sound, the faint compression spreading outward in subtle ripples that vanished before the eye could settle on them.
By the time the stairs leveled out, the walls had lost their edges, surfaces rounding and sagging as the passage widened. Shapes stirred where the opening spilled into a broader chamber, not rushing, not encircling, but easing free of the resinous dark as if unpeeling themselves from the space they occupied.
They gathered gradually, bodies stretched thin and translucent, joints folding in deliberate sequences that suggested intention rather than anatomy, clustered bone heads knocking softly together as they adjusted their spacing. The pressure of their attention settled inward, quiet and watchful, the sensation of being measured pressing against the group without yet turning hostile.
Truman stepped forward, posture already squaring as his gaze swept the chamber. "I'll take this floor," he said, voice crisp with certainty. "I am the fastest option, after all."
Eryndra gave a short scoff, the sound dismissive rather than heated, her eyes never leaving the shapes ahead. "That's an assumption."
From behind an irregular forest of stalagmites, a massive swarm of armored variants cascaded outward, bodies heavier, movements louder, thick chitinous plating grinding against itself as they surged forward. Their roar filled the space, raw and blunt, reverberating through the softened walls.
"Allow me to demonstrate," he said, palm already opening. "Fission: Mass Lass."
"Eh, two out of ten," Roy called over the fading echoes. "You could've done better, Truman."
Dozens of tiny, blazing spheres bloomed from his hand, each crackling with contained violence, arcing vapor trails toward one another as though eager for proximity. With a sharp thrust, he sent them forward in a wide sweep, the cluster fanning out before collapsing inward on the advancing swarm.
The chamber erupted into a storm of sharp reports, a rapid succession of concussive pops and bangs as the creatures vanished into superheated plasma. Shockwaves rippled outward, shredding what remained into fragments and hurling the debris back into the resin trenches, the floor absorbing the impact with a sluggish recoil.
When the noise finally collapsed in on itself, Truman turned and spread his arms toward the group, posture open and unmistakably pleased. "Not bad, huh?" he said. "Just thought of that."
Thunderous clapping burst from above his shoulder. Orden hovered there, eyes wide, hands striking together with unrestrained enthusiasm. "Glorious!"
A genuine laugh slipped out of Truman as he looked back over the scorched chamber. "At least I have one fan."
Eryndra walked past the scorched floor, expression unimpressed. "That was loud," she said flatly. "And you got goo on my feet."
Truman straightened, composure snapping back into place. "Collateral damage is the price of freedom."
Shadows stirred faintly around Lynder as he drew in a measured breath, mana already beginning to coalesce. "I insist I take the next sector."
Roy stepped between them before the tension could settle, palms raised in surrender. "No. We clear the floors together. What is wrong with you two?"
Lynder pointed without looking. "He started it."
"I finished it," Truman corrected.
"Takara," Roy called back, "keep the kids in the middle. If these two idiots blow up the tunnel, I want you ready to shield."
"On it," Takara said, her gauntlets humming as she guided Orin, Rava, and Andri forward.
Orin kept staring at the scorched patch where Truman had erased the last pack, eyes huge. "That was… very bright," he whispered.
Rava leaned in close enough to make it personal. "Don't get any ideas," he hissed, hauling Orin along before the boy could start worshiping the crater.
Deeper in, the tunnel began to pinch, resin sweating from the walls in thick cords that hardened into ridges as they brushed past, and the floor markers started flicking by fast enough to blur. 152, then 153, then 154, each sector rolling into the next while anything that tried to intercept them got flattened in passing, which left Roy keeping pace through momentum and spite until his breathing turned loud enough that Takara shot him a quick glance, ready to catch him if he ate stone.
Ahead, Truman's head angled as his sensors worked the narrowing passage, and when the next marker came into view he spoke without slowing. "Floor 155," he announced crisply. "Path narrows ahead. Blockage detected."
Around the bend, the blockage answered for itself, a wall of calcified bone threaded through tendon-like webbing that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic heartbeat, as if the tunnel had grown a throat and decided to be rude about it.
Lynder lifted his hand, shadows already gathering at his fingertips. "I can burn it," he offered.
"I can remove it," Truman countered, a new orb forming as though he'd been hoping for an excuse.
Eryndra pushed between them with the patience of a wrecking ball. "Move," she said, and then the argument stopped being theoretical.
Gripping a protruding rib, she planted her feet and heaved, and the wall tore with a wet sound that made the kids flinch as a jagged hole opened straight through the obstruction. Debris hit the ground in a messy pile, then got kicked aside like it had never mattered.
"There," she said, brushing her hands together. "Solved. No mana required."
Roy stepped through first, chuckling. "That's why Eryndra is best girl."
Takara snapped her head toward him, scandalized on principle and for reasons she refused to unpack out loud. "Roy! Don't say that!"
Judgment passed between Truman and Lynder in a single glance before they followed, and the descent resumed, uglier now, heat building as the resin walls gave way to black stone veined with red. The monsters shifted with it, brutes replacing skittering ambushers, and the fighting became the kind that demanded pace and pressure instead of cleverness, which meant sprinting, cutting, sprinting again until Roy finally staggered into a brief pocket of space and bent forward with his hands on his knees.
FDR turned slightly, voice calm in a way that felt unfair. "JFK, requesting Data Link."
"Confirmed," JFK replied, and his eyes dimmed as his head drooped, posture slackening as though someone had stolen half his thoughts.
Roy sucked in another breath and managed, "That is unsettling," while Takara hovered close to the kids, one hand raised as if she could keep the dungeon honest.
Crouching, FDR began sketching runic symbols on the ground around Roy, Takara, and the Trio, and the first attempts failed so quickly they looked like mistakes rather than spells. Another set followed, then another, each one collapsing in on itself until, on the next pass, the marks held, glowing with a harsher geometry that didn't resemble anything Takara had ever used.
"Ah," FDR murmured as he rose. "I have it now. New technique created."
The runes locked, and Roy felt the shift before he could brace, his body sliding smoothly into position around FDR as Takara and the kids were pulled with him, five bodies arranged into formation as if the floor itself had decided where they belonged.
"Forgotten Tongues: Anti-Gravity," FDR said, and the formation lifted a few inches, just enough to make Orin's hands twitch uselessly in the air.
Before anyone could argue, the second line dropped with the same calm, and it felt worse, not painful, just wrong in a way Lynder had warned people about.
"Forgotten Scripts: Entanglement."
Wicked-looking runes streamed up from the floor and wrapped the five of them, binding the formation into a single moving shape, and only then did Lynder's composure crack as he took a half-step back, eyes wide.
"B-both lines," he stammered, voice tight. "Of the forgotten branch?"
JFK's eyes brightened again as he came back online, head lifting slowly as if waking from a nap he hadn't agreed to take.
"With this we can blaze our way down," FDR said, and Roy straightened like someone had just injected him with pure caffeine and bad ideas.
"What's it called?" Roy demanded, grinning hard. "Tell me you named it something cool."
FDR considered for a beat. "Hmm. Perhaps… Fireside Ascent."
"Yes!" Roy shouted. "Truman, you could learn from him."
Truman didn't bother responding, which somehow made it funnier, and then the dungeon stopped being a slog and turned into a runway. The Presidroids and Eryndra sprinted without hesitation, wrecking whatever tried to stand in their way, while Lynder rode alongside on streams of shadow, and Roy, Takara, and the kids laughed and yelled as they were carried, because the speed was obscene and the floors blurred into a single rushing descent.
When the passage finally opened, it did so into a larger boss chamber than the usual sectors, heat rolling out in a heavy wave, and something waited in the center as though gravity had decided to avert its eyes. A floating mass of eyes and tentacles hovered within a barrier of spinning void-orbs, each orb chewing at the air.
Lynder's voice went low. "Watai," he said. "Observer class. Nasty magic resistance." A brief pause, then the faintest curl at the corner of his mouth. "They taste delicious, as well."
"I have a solution," Truman said, and when his hand rose he already had the pulse contained, a small, unstable sphere gathering above his palm with that same compact violence he'd been so smug about earlier. "Fission: Little Girl," he added, voice clipped, and the orb left his hand in a clean, shallow arc toward the Watai's barrier.
The detonation imploded instead of blooming, compressing the air into a tight sphere that dragged the spinning void-orbs inward as if they suddenly remembered gravity, and when the singularity snapped shut the orbs popped out of existence in a blink. The Watai sagged, dropping to the floor in a heavy, stunned slump, its mass of eyes blinking out of sync like it was trying to remember how to be a creature.
Lynder moved before it could recover, the ring on his hand flaring with a sharp, surgical glow as his voice cut clean through the lingering hush. "Castration: Light Guillotine."
Blades of light stacked into being, seven broad planes forming one after another in a tight vertical line, then dropping as a single descending sweep. Tentacles fell away in one brutal pass, severed cleanly, the barrier-less body shuddering as it tried to pull itself together and failed.
Eryndra ended the argument with her boot, stepping in and driving down hard enough to cave the central eye, the thing popping wetly under the impact as the rest of the mass went slack.
Roy exhaled, the sound halfway to a laugh and halfway to exhaustion. "Teamwork," he said dryly. "Sort of."
His gaze tracked to the next tunnel as it spiraled away into dark, the drop steep enough to make the heat roll up from below, and when he spoke again the words carried urgency instead of swagger. "We need to move faster," Roy said. "Truman, Lynder, you two think you can manage that without trying to kill each other before we hit the real fight?"
Truman's head turned slightly, sensors settling on Lynder with a cool, practiced disdain. "I harbor no ill will toward the organic spellcaster," he said. "His methods are simply… antique."
Lynder bristled, the shadows around him twitching like they took offense on his behalf. "Antique?" he said, sharp and insulted. "I was mastering these arts while your 'concept' was still ore in the ground."
Truman didn't even look impressed, which somehow made it worse. "And yet," he said, tone perfectly even, "I'm the one that shines."
Roy groaned, already stepping toward the tunnel. "Walk," he muttered. "Just walk."