Chapter 103: Chapter 103: Floor 14: The Village Where Men Vanish I

White light set James and Finn down in the Hale Estate basement, and the floor was done, but neither of them treated it like a win for long.

James checked the rewards out of habit while Finn racked his axe.

[FLOOR 13 — REWARDS CONFIRMED] [EXP: 6,385/13,000] [TOWER CREDITS: 42,215 TC]

There was no level-up to read through, just the bar sitting a little closer to nineteen, and he closed the window. Floor 13 had answered his class and made him fight for every kill, and the only thing that mattered now was the unlock waiting behind it.

"Fourteen’s the last one," Finn said while he pulled his gloves off. "After this, Fifteen’s open to us. Same floor that killed the first party that reached it."

"I know."

He did not need it explained again. They agreed to take three days before entering Floor 14, because going straight back in tired and underprepared was a good way to make the gap worse instead of better, and three days gave them time to rest, repair, and keep looking for the people they still did not have.

The three days did not give them a team, and they made the Floor 15 problem worse instead.

James spent the time resting, repairing the wear on his A-rank gear, and training lightly in the rented facility where he could work the python unseen. Finn did the same from the estate. They both kept searching, and it went the way it had before. The strong candidates wanted a title and a guaranteed cut, the cheap ones were too weak for where Team Zero already stood, and a good number of the rest stopped answering the moment Floor 15 came up.

The reason they stopped answering got a name on the second day.

The Floor 15 wipe had stayed at the top of the Challenger feeds the whole time, and on the second day the coalition that lost the party released what its scouts had pulled from the run before the team died. The update ran on every feed within the hour.

[FLOOR 15 WIPE UPDATE] [CONFIRMED ENEMY TYPE: DARK KNIGHT] [FIRST RAID PARTY ELIMINATED] [ENTRY REQUIREMENT: FLOOR 14 CLEAR REQUIRED]

James read it at home, and his phone was buzzing with Finn’s message before he had finished.

A Dark Knight. Single named enemy. That’s a boss-type, not a subjugation count.

I saw it, James sent back.

It killed a full party on its own. Floor 15 isn’t unknown danger anymore. It’s a known thing that already won once.

The naming changed the shape of the problem. An unknown floor was something they could walk into carefully and adapt to, the way they had adapted to the skeletons. A boss-type that had already wiped a full guild-grade party was a wall, and walking up to that wall with three random strangers filling the team was a worse idea than it had been a week ago. They still had to clear Floor 14 before any of it mattered, but the thing waiting past it now had a name, and the name had a body count.

By the end of the third day they still had no permanent third member, and they decided to enter Floor 14 anyway.

"I don’t like going in as two with a Dark Knight sitting one floor up," Finn said when James arrived at the estate on the third evening. "But waiting another week doesn’t put a better team in the room. It just burns days off the Blood Writ."

"Then we clear Fourteen and worry about the Knight when we can actually reach it," James said. "We go in as two and let the System fill the rest."

Finn didn’t argue, because there was nothing to argue. He pushed off the wall and stepped onto the platform, and James moved up beside him while Finn opened the Floor 14 entry prompt.

The light folded around them.

The Waiting Room resolved into grey, and three Challengers were already standing in it.

The recognition came, but it came careful this time. The tall woman with a longbow across her back went still when she placed their faces, and the reaction on all three of them was less excitement than calculation, the look of people working out whether being paired with Team Zero was a gift or a way to get pulled somewhere they did not want to go. Everyone knew the names now. Everyone also knew about the Floor 15 wipe, and the two facts sat badly together.

The shortest of the three, a young man with a one-handed mace and a buckler, decided to cover the nerves with confidence anyway.

"Lucky us," he said. "Team Zero on a Floor 14 run. We’ve basically already cleared it."

"Floor 14 is the last gate before Floor 15," Finn said, level and flat. "If you’re standing here thinking luck clears floors, leave now and let the System pull someone who won’t get killed believing it."

The mace user’s grin faded.

James studied the three of them while Finn let the silence do its work. "Classes," he said.

The woman with the longbow answered first. "Ranger. Long-range, some tracking."

"Mace and shield," the short one said, quieter now. "Frontline."

"Water mage," the third said, a lean man with a focus stone set into a bracer. "Control and healing, mostly."

It was enough of a spread to make a floor workable, which was all James needed from random teammates, and none of them carried the weight of someone he would put a permanent seat behind. He gave a short nod and let it go, because none of them, himself included, knew what Floor 14 was going to ask for.

The transport took them, and Floor 14 was not a battlefield.

They came down on a muddy road at the edge of a village, with grey sky overhead and a cold that sat in the air without wind to move it. Thin mist hung low across the fields and curled along the ground between the houses ahead. The village itself looked lived-in but wrong, like a place where everyone was holding their breath, and James felt the difference from the first second because there were no enemies in sight and the System had not given him a number to fight.

The notification confirmed it. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

[FLOOR 14 — INVESTIGATION] [OBJECTIVE: INVESTIGATE WHY THE MEN OF THE VILLAGE ARE DISAPPEARING] [FAILURE CONDITION: UNKNOWN]

The mood shifted across the whole group at once. The mace user looked at the message and then at the quiet houses like he had been handed the wrong script.

"Investigation," the ranger said. "Not subjugation."

Finn looked toward the village with his jaw set. "Worse than a number. A number you can plan around. This one, we don’t even know what’s hunting yet."

"And the failure condition’s hidden," James said. "We don’t know what danger looks like here, which means we treat everything like it could be it."

He started toward the village, and the others fell in behind him.

The village was functional on the surface and hollow underneath.

The fields along the approach were half-worked, with rows started and abandoned partway down and tools left leaning against fences as if whoever held them had set them down and never come back. A cart sat beside a shed with one wheel off and nobody fixing it. As the team moved up the main path, doors that had been cracked open eased shut, and faces pulled back from windows when James looked toward them.

The thing that stood out was who was missing. There were women at the windows, old men hunched on porches who would not meet anyone’s eyes, and children moving between the houses, but almost no healthy adult men anywhere, and the gap where they should have been hung over the whole place.

A woman stopped them near the open ground at the village center, where a well sat across from a low building that might have been an inn. She was middle-aged, with her sleeves pushed up and her hands red from work, and she looked them over with the wariness of someone who had learned that strangers usually meant trouble.

"You’re not from here," she said. "Are you travelers, or guards, or did the Saintess send you?"

James let Finn take it, because a Necromancer asking a frightened village about its missing men was a worse first impression than a blunt Berserker doing the same.

"Travelers," Finn said. "Passing through. We heard the village was having trouble. Men going missing."

The woman’s expression tightened. The answers that came out of her after that did not line up. She said some of the men had gone out for work and simply never came back. When Finn pressed, she said maybe the forest had taken them, the way the forest sometimes did. Then she said the Saintess was protecting what was left of the village, and that outsiders should be careful asking questions that might trouble her blessing.

Behind James, the mace user shifted his weight, and the ranger’s eyes moved across the closed doors. None of them had gotten a clean answer out of a single thing the woman said.

They split the work once the woman went back inside, because two questions were running at once and chasing both together would only waste the daylight.

"You take the shrine," Finn said quietly. "That symbol put a face on you the second you looked at it, so it’s yours to read. I’ll work the village. Missing men, families, last places anyone saw them."

"Take the ranger and the water mage," James said. "Houses and tracks are their work more than mine. I’ll keep the mace with me, in case the shrine turns into something."

Finn nodded and took the two casters back toward the lived-in part of the village, and James turned the other way, up the path toward the clean stone of the shrine, with the mace user falling in behind him.