“You are impressive,” he said calmly, voice smooth despite the violence. “But you bleed. If you bleed, you can die. If you die, you can serve me.”

  I laughed then. Part of it was because I wanted to taunt him. Part of it was because I couldn’t keep the grin off my face any longer. I never felt so alive as when I was in battle. The only words I had for him were, “Of course I bleed. Blood is life.”

  My real answer came with action. Here Not Here twisted space as I lunged, the naginata flashing toward his neck. He caught the blade bare-handed, metal shrieking as his grip stopped it cold. Pain shot through my arms as he wrenched, forcing me to release the weapon. He drove a knee into my gut that folded me in half.

  I hit the ground hard, rolling even as Wayfinder appeared back in my hands, and came up casting Primordial Surge again, this time focused inward and tight. Chaos and creation flared around me, bolstering my body and tearing at his. The vampire snarled as the spell hit, spiritual damage burning through defenses that pure physical force hadn’t touched. I followed with Lightning Arc Mastery, chaining crackling bolts into his chest and driving him back step by step.

  He laughed as he retreated, blood steaming where it hit the ground. “Good,” he said. “It has been too long since I fought something that could hurt me. I missed it.”

  The remaining ghouls rushed in again, trying to capitalize on the opening. I turned my back on the vampire for a heartbeat and unleashed My Friends Sing My Praises, the magic wrapping me in a resonant harmony that bolstered my strength and eroded theirs. Something about the fog was disrupting, even dispelling my buffs, but that only gave me more opportunities to recast them. I tore through them in a brutal sequence, blade, lightning, and raw momentum reducing the last of the pack to nothing.

  When I turned back to face their master, Noomis was already on me. His claws raked my chest, tearing deep, and I felt his magic trying to latch on to my life force. Trailblazer’s Aura flared harder, draining just enough of his regenerative edge to matter. I answered with a thrust of Wayfinder straight through his abdomen, lightning detonating inside him as I poured everything I had into the strike.

  He staggered, surprised more than hurt, and that was enough. I followed with a spinning cut that took his head clean off, the blade passing through with a sound like tearing silk. The body fell, still twitching, until I crushed the skull underfoot and felt the animating force disperse. Even then, he wasn’t fully dead. The blood of his victims flowed in his veins and would slowly restore him… if I allowed it. But blood was mine.

  I knelt and shoved my now-gloveless hand into the ruin which had been his throat. The instant the blood hit my skin, I felt it. A corrupted innocence buried in an ancient despair. I burned away the impurities and drew the power of the blood into me. A flashing notification appeared in the corner of my eye, but I didn’t want to be bothered with it now. This felt right, so I went with it.

  Silence fell over the hills, broken only by my breathing and the distant sigh of fog retreating once again, seemingly giving up the fight. I stood amid the wreckage, bloodied but unbroken, and felt the dungeon register the victory. The floor wasn’t done with me yet, but for this moment, I had survived.

  Silence never truly settled after the fight. It only thinned, the way the fog had, as though preparing to reveal something worse underneath. I straightened slowly, forcing myself not to chase the rush of victory, and let my senses stretch outward again. That was when I noticed movement that hadn’t been part of the attack pattern, shapes that had not rushed me or tested my defenses.

  Farther down the slope, beyond a line of broken stone and skeletal trees, figures were being herded through the gloom. They moved in a long, uneven column, shackled together by chains that glowed faintly with necrotic runes. Each step looked heavy, not from exhaustion alone, but from the magic pressing them forward whether they wanted to move or not.

  I didn’t approach. I didn’t need to. Spirit Sight told me everything I needed to know.

  There were humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, and a few shapes I didn’t immediately recognize—all alive, all terrified, all wrapped in a dull haze of suppression that crushed resistance before it could even form. Their auras flickered weakly, smothered under layers of magic that twisted life affinity into the stench of undeath, and which in turn leeched will and hope with every step they took.

  Undead flanked them on both sides, not ghouls this time, but something leaner and crueler. Tall sentinels with elongated limbs and hollow eyes marched in lockstep, weapons held low but ready, their attention focused entirely on their captives. Above them drifted incorporeal shapes like tattered cloaks caught in an unseen wind, watchers rather than fighters, present only to ensure no one escaped.

  I clenched my jaw and forced myself to stay still.

  This was not a battlefield problem. This was not something I could solve by charging in with lightning and steel. The number of undead moving in the distance was already greater than what I had just fought, and more importantly, they were organized. Whatever commanded this floor was not simply throwing monsters at intruders. It was harvesting.

  Or rather, that was what it wanted me to believe. There was no doubt that this was a trap. The only question was, how many layers were there to the trap? Clearly, the Hall of Nightmares wasn’t meant to be cleared quickly. It was meant to break people over time.

  I let the fog roll back in around me and took a slow step backward, committing every detail to memory. Faces. Chains. The direction they were being forced to march. I didn’t intervene, not because I didn’t want to, but because charging in blindly would doom them as surely as leaving them for the moment.

  Completion: 4%

  Chapter Sixty: Obvious but Unavoidable

  The fog closed in again as I followed the caravan, but it wasn’t the same blinding blanket as before. This fog moved with intent, clinging low to the ground and curling around the distant line of chained figures like a burial shroud being lovingly arranged. It slid into hollows and pooled in depressions, leaving higher ground bare just long enough to tempt movement before swallowing it again. The night countryside had grown uglier here, the land broken by shallow ravines, sinkholes masked by weeds, and the rotting skeletons of orchards whose trees leaned together like conspirators. Somewhere ahead, chains dragged and clinked in a slow, muffled rhythm, and I matched my pace to it like a hunter counting heartbeats.

  Assassin’s Veil wrapped me in absence, but it was anything but effortless. Every step, every breath, required me to feed extra mana into the spell or feel it thin around the edges. The same was true for Area Flight and the other buffs that I kept up. The drain on my mana was noticeable, but for the moment, my regeneration was high enough to keep up with it.

  I could sense the dungeon testing my Veil, probing for weaknesses, creating pockets where my lack of presence felt louder than sound. In those thin spots, the fog would hesitate, part around nothing, or swirl as if confused, and I was forced to alter my path constantly to avoid drawing attention. But dungeons didn’t attack simply to kill, or at least this one didn’t. There was a higher intelligence, a design behind it. I knew from experience that the Endless Dungeon, an aspect of the Ways, used the challenges inside the dungeon to promote growth.

  And I was growing like a weed. Each of the spells I was keeping active were increasing at a significant rate.

  My Friends Sing My Praises—My Enemies Dread the Sound (Epic 17%) >> 23%

  Celestial Restoration (Epic 68%) >> 72%

  Area Flight (Epic 25%) >> 31%

  Team Builder’s Physical Buff (Epic 2%) >> 10%

  I also cast Clean repeatedly, because the place left a stink on me that I truly wanted to remove. It was enough to push the spell closer to epic tier, but that would have to wait.

  The first ambush came without sight or sound. The ground beneath me vibrated in a way that had nothing to do with my movement, a subtle tremor that ran ahead of my next step. I froze mid-stride, weight balanced perfectly, and felt the prediction lock in. Graveshiver hounds burst from the fog a heartbeat later, skeletal forms stretched long and lean, their ribcages hollowed into chimes that rattled softly as they moved. They didn’t look at me. They listened to the earth, adjusting their angles as if my footsteps were already written into the dirt. Clearly invisibility wasn’t going to work with them.

  I shifted with Here Not Here, letting space slide just enough that their lunges tore through where I would have been. Wayfinder flickered into my hands. I planted the blade into the ground, lightning running down its length and into the soil, and felt the surge travel outward through vibration channels I hadn’t known were there. The hounds convulsed as their internal chimes shattered, bone fragments rattling themselves apart as their animating force lost its rhythm. I crushed the last one underfoot without lifting my heel more than an inch above it, careful not to broadcast my position again.

  I hadn’t taken three more steps before the tremor wights made their move. They rose from the earth, emaciated forms unfolding from shallow graves, earless skulls tilted as finger-bone spurs pressed into the dirt. I could feel them reading me, mapping my weight distribution, predicting where I would be rather than where I was. I couldn’t outrun that, so I disrupted it. I triggered Blip, skipping a heartbeat forward in time, and their synchronized lunge struck empty ground. When I reappeared, I drove Wayfinder through the nearest wight’s spine and discharged infused lightning directly into the wound, burning the animating force away instead of wasting effort on flesh that didn’t matter.

  The cost was time. Every engagement slowed me, and the caravan’s distant chain rhythm crept farther ahead. I pushed forward and took to the air, rising just above the fog to regain ground, and immediately understood my mistake. The fog thinned overhead, stretching into ragged banners that exposed a darker sky, and something rose to meet me. Wail-borne banshees drifted upward like torn veils, mouths open in silent screams that scraped against my spirit. Hunger ghosts followed, amorphous shapes that pressed inward as if my life force were a beacon. I felt a pull against my soul and the shimmer of the upgraded Halo of Immortality. It didn’t activate, thankfully, as it hadn’t needed to. But it was clear there had been the potential for the keening sound of their wails to cut through my mortal soul.

  Their touch bypassed physicality entirely. Force constructs slipped through them like mist, and Wayfinder cut nothing but cold air. I answered with Spirit Singing, the sound vibrating through the spiritual layer that was their ground, and I felt the incorporeal creatures recoil as coherence snapped into place. For a heartbeat, they were there, and I struck with Primordial Surge in tight, controlled pulses that burned through spirit as if it were form. Lightning followed, infused with life mana, arcs biting deep into the forces that animated them.

  A banshee’s scream hit me full-on, a psychic shriek that warped my equilibrium and made the world tilt. I triggered Blip on instinct, skipping the worst of it, and reappeared inside the fog where sound and sight meant less. I forced myself back to the ground, moving low and controlled, accepting the slower pace rather than risking another aerial ambush. The incorporeal monsters lingered above, frustrated but patient, while the ground predators reorganized below.

  By the time I settled into a new rhythm, my mana regeneration was fully committed to sustaining my invisibility, my muscles were tight with repeated micro-adjustments, and the caravan had gained more distance than I would’ve liked. I was quickly coming to the conclusion that this floor wasn’t trying to overwhelm me with raw power. It was bleeding me, one prediction, one ambush, one forced choice at a time. I kept moving anyway, because stopping wasn’t an option, even as I realized with cold clarity that the Hall of Nightmares was designed to punish exactly this kind of pursuit.

  Completion: 20%

  The land sagged into a wide basin as I pushed forward, the hills giving way to a sunken sprawl of mud and ruin. Dead trees jutted from the earth like spears thrown and forgotten, their bark peeled away to reveal pale, rotting cores. Broken stonework lay half submerged in black water, suggesting a town that had been swallowed slowly. The fog pressed lower here, heavy enough that visibility collapsed to a few body-lengths, forcing everything to happen up close and without warning.

  I felt the shift in the hairs on the back of my neck. The dungeon’s attention thickened, less curious now and more intent, and the ground trembled under a weight that had nothing to do with subtlety. Shapes loomed out of the fog without warning, massive silhouettes resolving into towering constructs of corpse parts chained together with necrotic tendons. They were grotesque beyond description. Multiple torsos fused into a single mass, limbs mismatched and overlapping, rotting ribcages layered like armor plates.

  The first beast, Identified as an ossuary titan, slammed into me with the force of a landslide. I brought Wayfinder up in a heavy axe configuration and caught the blow, but the impact drove me knee-deep into the mud. Pain flared through my arms as raw mass overwhelmed technique, and I felt the unpleasant truth settle in. This monstrosity was stronger than me. It certainly wasn’t faster or smarter, but it was heavier, and willing to use that weight to its advantage.

  I wrenched myself free and shifted space with Here Not Here as a second titan crashed down where I’d been. The axe bit deep into its side as I countered, cleaving through layers of stitched flesh and bone. The severed mass tore free and hit the ground, and then it moved. Fingers clawed, a jaw snapped, and a partial torso dragged itself forward as if nothing vital had been lost. Cutting them apart was useless. They didn’t care what was missing, and I was only making more work for myself.

  So I changed tactics. Force constructs snapped into existence around me like braces, redirecting blows just enough to keep me from being crushed outright. I let one titan grab me, felt ribs creak under the pressure, and drove a Thermite Dart straight into the knot of necrotic sinew at its core. Fire ate inward with hungry persistence, and I followed with Acid Arrow to keep the destruction going when flame alone wasn’t enough.

  Both those spells were weak, still rare tier, but they were easy to cast. I forced my mana into them rather than relying on the system, channeling both into an endless stream of destruction. It wasn’t efficient by any means, but I was determined to brute-force my spell growth. Besides, the more I learned about how to work magic without the strict constraints of the system, the better.

  Another titan barreled into me from the side, its combined limbs hammering down in a flurry of brute impacts. I took the hits, Trailblazer’s Aura flaring as I pushed into it. The aura gnawed at the necrotic energy binding the corpse mass together, slowing the effect just enough to matter. I brought Wayfinder around in a brutal arc, using the axe head like a wrecking ball to pulverize a rib cage cluster into fragments too small to reassemble.

  Mud and gore coated everything. I was breathing hard now, blood running freely from half a dozen wounds, and Celestial Restoration flared again and again as I refused to let the damage slow me. Healing washed through me in waves, closing gashes and setting cracked bones even as more blows landed. I stopped trying to avoid pain entirely and focused on ending each exchange as quickly as possible. Every second mattered. My pain didn’t. The caravan was still moving, and I needed to catch up.

  I cast Cone of Winter’s Debuff into the heart of the nearest titan, frost racing through its mass and locking sections mid-motion. The effect didn’t kill it, but it stiffened enough that I could exploit it. I drove thermite into the frozen joints, heat and cold tearing at each other until the structure failed catastrophically. The titan collapsed into a heap of inert fragments, its animating force finally unable to bridge the gaps.

  The last one fought harder, battering me across the basin and into the ruins. Stone shattered as I hit a half-buried wall, and for a moment the world rang. I forced myself up and leaned into Here Not Here again, blinking through a crushing blow that would have pulped me. Trailblazer’s Aura burned brighter as I closed the distance, suppressing the necrotic surge long enough for me to finish it the only way that worked—obliteration. I poured raw force wrapped in lightning into its core until nothing recognizable remained.

  When the echoes finally died, I stood alone in the basin, soaked in mud and blood, my mana reserves low but stable. The fog crept back in, cautious now, as if the floor were reconsidering its approach to the force of nature that had torn through its denizens. My body ached in places I hadn’t known could ache, and my regeneration lagged under the strain. Still, I was making progress.

  Completion: 44%

  I wiped my face with the back of my hand and started forward again, until I realized just how much muck was still on me. I cast Clean again, sighing as my battle-worn armor became pristinely clean and my skin felt fresh. The caravan was farther ahead now, and the dungeon had made its point. This was no longer harassment. It was attrition.

  The wind rose without warning, a deliberate escalation meant to sap my resolve. Fog that had clung low to the ground tore free and spiraled upward into twisting columns, the night sky pressing down until it felt close enough to touch. The countryside flattened into a wide, open stretch of dead earth where there was nowhere to hide, only space to be crossed or die in. The chains ahead went silent all at once, and that told me everything I needed to know. Whatever was coming had made the caravan stop in its tracks.

  The storm announced itself by tearing at my defenses. Bone fragments screamed past in a whirling wall, shards from beasts, people, and things I did not recognize, each piece etched with necrotic residue that ate at magic as much as matter. Blood mist threaded through the vortex like veins, clinging to everything it touched and carrying a weight of curse and disease that made my skin crawl. The thing moved like a sentient hurricane, changing direction instinctively and surging toward me in a roaring spiral. Identify flickered just long enough to name it a crimson vortex before the pressure drowned everything else out.