Jake walked to one of the fallen, altered soldiers and crouched beside the body, studying what was visible now that the immediate threat had resolved.

The uniform’s fabric was unmistakable at close range, the techniques belonging to a manufacturing tradition this world didn’t possess.

The skin’s altered color was uniform to the point of suggesting chemical or magical saturation rather than genetic modification. The cut ears had healed cleanly, old scars rather than recent wounds.

Whatever had been done to these people had been done long enough ago that their bodies had accepted it.

"How long has this dungeon been here?" Jake asked, glancing towards the Solhani sisters.

"The oldest record we found mentioned it approximately four hundred years ago," Ankerita said from nearby.

"Before the obscuring started."

"Four hundred years," Jake said.

He looked at the altered soldier’s face, at the features underneath the modifications that retained enough structure to confirm what they’d been before the changes, and felt the particular cold feeling of a question that didn’t have a comfortable answer.

"Someone has been bringing people from our world here for at least four hundred years and doing this to them."

It was the only reasonable logic. Considering these gods, it wasn’t impossible for them.

Jolthar felt his anger raising, thinking to what extent these gods would go for their entertainment.

Their twisted desires had stripped humans of their dignity, reducing them to nothing more than objects of entertainment.

The ground floor offered no response to that.

The doorway at the far end waited with the darkness of whatever came next beyond it, and the system updated with the patient precision of something that tracked progress regardless of what the progress revealed.

[ GROUND FLOOR: CLEARED ]

[ COMMAND CRYSTAL NETWORK: FIRST SQUAD ELIMINATED ]

[ FLOORS REMAINING: UNKNOWN - STRUCTURE DOES NOT CONFIRM TO STANDARD DUNGEON ARCHITECTURE ]

[ NOTE: WARLOCK ABILITY BRANCH NOW PARTIALLY INTEGRATED - CONTINUED USE WILL ACCELERATE DEVELOPMENT ]

[ MANA SIGHT ACTIVE - RECOMMEND MAINTAINING FOR STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SUBSEQUENT FLOORS ]

Jake stood and looked at the doorway.

Four hundred years of this. An entire military structure built from a tradition that shouldn’t exist here, staffed by soldiers who had been people before something decided they would be more useful as something else, armed with weapons that belonged in a world none of them were supposed to be in anymore.

And somewhere deeper in this structure, a divine artifact old enough that it predated the current covenant system, placed here by an entity whose identity the system couldn’t determine from available evidence.

The two things connected in Jake’s mind with the slow, solid certainty of pieces finding each other rather than being forced together.

"We go deeper," Jake said and moved toward the doorway with his Mana Sight active and his shadow serpents reforming in the infused darkness around him, their mana-touched scales casting faint light across the ground floor’s floor as the group fell in behind him.

*

Beyond the doorway lay a long corridor that extended straight ahead before disappearing around a corner. The unsettling part was not its length but its perfection.

Stone buildings always carried small flaws. Walls shifted slightly over time. Corners were never completely exact.

This place had none of those imperfections.

The walls, floor, and ceiling met at flawless right angles, as though they had been measured and cut by some impossible precision.

The result was deeply unnatural, giving the corridor a cold and mechanical quality that felt entirely out of place within the ancient structure.

Jake kept his Mana Sight active and let it read the structure around them as they moved, the ability painting the corridor’s composition in layers of perception that normal vision didn’t access.

The walls held traces of mana distribution that suggested the building material itself had been treated, saturated with something that dampened external magical sensing and explained why the dungeon had been so difficult to analyze from outside its perimeter.

Whatever had built this place had understood that magical detection was a threat and had engineered against it before anyone in this world had developed the detection methods it was defending against.

Four hundred years ahead of the current state of magical development. Or from somewhere that had developed in a completely different direction.

Maureen was moving in the second position behind Jake, her eyes reading the corridor with the tactical attention she brought to enclosed spaces.

"Chokepoint design," she said quietly, her voice not carrying past the immediate group.

"Straight corridors with controlled turns limit the effectiveness of area abilities and force whatever’s coming through them into predictable positions. Whoever built this understood siege defense."

"They understood considerably more than siege defense," Maudlina said from further back. She was still processing what they had encountered. This level of mechanism was completely new to her and the rest of the members too, except for Jake and Ankerita.

"The weapons those soldiers carried - the projectile weapons - they’re designed around physics rather than magic. Consistent velocity, predictable trajectories, effective against magical barriers because barriers are built to deflect magical force and kinetic force in sufficient volume behaves differently from how barrier-makers have historically needed to account for."

"They knew about barriers before building the weapons," Ankerita said.

"Or they built the weapons first and built the soldiers second, specifically to use them against barrier-users," Maudlina said, and that particular ordering of events sat in the corridor’s air with an unpleasantness that nobody addressed directly.

The corridor turned and opened into a space that took a moment to parse.

It was large enough that Jake’s enhanced vision reached its limits before finding the far wall, the ceiling above them high enough that the lighting panels there were reduced to pale rectangles of illumination at a distance that made them functionally dim.

The space was organized - not the chaotic arrangement of a barracks that had grown around the needs of its inhabitants, but the deliberate organization of something planned before it was built, rows of identical structures arranged in a grid pattern that extended into the dimness in multiple directions.