The ache in his ribs had downgraded from "still angry" to "filing a complaint" by the time Finn opened his eyes.

He didn’t move at first. He had learned, in the small academy of having his arse handed to him by an integrated planet, that the first minute after waking was the cheapest information you’d ever get.

You lay still and you listened, and the world told you what had changed while you weren’t paying attention.

A slow drip somewhere off to the left. The hush of his own breathing. Nyx’s, beside him, fractionally slower than his.

Nothing had crept up on them. Nothing had crept up on the cavern. The fissure they’d retreated through was still slumped peacefully behind a half-collapse of stone, the kind that read at a glance as inert geography rather than an entrance.

He let himself sit up.

Nyx was already awake. Of course she was. She was sitting cross-legged on top of his rolled-up rucksack, and she had her chin propped on the heel of her hand.

The grey hoodie swallowed her down to mid-thigh. The hood was up. Beneath it, two crimson points watched him with deep, settled patience.

"Good morning, Bearer."

"Is it morning?"

"It is the time at which you have stopped sleeping. That seems to me a serviceable definition."

He huffed a laugh and instantly regretted it. "How long was I out?"

"Six hours, perhaps. Long enough that I had begun to entertain the possibility you had simply given up on the project."

"The project being..."

"Breathing."

He levered himself upright by stages, testing each joint as he went.

Knee, fine, better than fine, the click she’d put back into place felt cleaner than it had any business feeling.

Ribs, sulky but functional. The bruising along his hip had gone the colour of an old plum and didn’t hurt unless he thought about it, so he stopped thinking about it.

His status hovered when he prodded for it.

[Finn Morrow — Level 14]

[Stats]

Strength: 14

Agility: 27

Endurance: 28.5

Perception: 15

Intelligence: 16.5

Willpower: 15

[Stat Points Available: 0]

[Nyx Sanguina — Level 14]

[Stats]

Strength: 12

Agility: 19

Endurance: 21

Perception: 14

Intelligence: 25

Willpower: 21

[Stat Points Available: 0]

He’d spent everything before going to sleep. Part into Nyx’s Endurance, another part into her Strength, the rest pushed into Agility.

He still hadn’t bumped her Strength past anything that would make a fighter sneer, but it was no longer the kind of number that suggested she might lose an arm wrestle against a child.

The bond panel sat below, unchanged.

[Bond: Nyx Sanguina]

[Bond Level: 1]

He sighed at it.

’You sigh a great deal at that little notice, Bearer.’

’It’s a stubborn one.’

’Then perhaps it requires a less clinical approach.’

He felt heat climb the back of his neck and refused, on principle, to dignify it with a thought. She made a small pleased sound anyway, which suggested the bond was less of a one-way pipe than he liked to pretend.

He turned to the loot.

It sat in a tidy line on a flat piece of stone Nyx had cleared for the purpose.

The Glutton’s Gullet Stone, a fist-sized lump of something dense and faintly green, warm to the touch, went straight into his pack on the grounds that he had no idea what it did.

The Acid-Etched Chitin, three plates of dark, pitted hide, joined the Verge-Touched Hide in the crafting pocket. Maybe someday they’d find a Artificer who would be willing to work with them.

The Hollow Fang Necklace was the interesting one.

[Hollow Fang Necklace]

[Grade: D]

[A necklace carved from the fang of a labyrinth predator. Grants +5 Perception to the wearer.]

He’d already swapped the Hunter’s Bone Necklace off in the night. The Hollow Fang now hung against his collarbone, and the world felt, fractionally, louder. Not in the ears. Behind them.

As though a door he hadn’t known was closed had been propped open a finger’s width.

The Hunter’s Bone Necklace, he’d held out across the sleeping bag.

Nyx had taken it without comment and tied it around her own throat. It looked deeply wrong on her, a piece of cheap, ugly bone hung over a stretch of pale skin that did not deserve it, and she had touched it once with her fingertips and given him a look that he had not been able to read.

She was wearing it still.

"Right." He rolled his shoulders. "Let’s not give the next floor time to draw breath."

"How splendidly aggressive of you, Bearer."

"You like it?"

"I do."

☼☼☼

The portal was waiting where they had left it, which Finn registered as both reassuring and faintly insulting. He’d half-hoped it might have wandered off in the night. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He stepped up to the shimmer. The text manifested.

[Floor 3 Cleared. Select destination:]

[→ Descend to Floor 4]

[→ Return to Surface]

He looked sideways at Nyx. She was watching the portal with the carefully neutral expression of a person who was not going to be the one to suggest leaving.

"Down."

"Down," she agreed, and slipped her hand around his elbow as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

He did not comment.

The light took them.

It was different this time. The tug behind his navel had become almost familiar, but the descent itself felt longer, a slow falling-through rather than a flicker. Pressure built in his ears the way it did in lifts. The dark behind his eyelids went, briefly, very cold.

Then his feet found stone.

He opened his eyes.

He closed them again. Opened them once more, because he wasn’t sure his brain had agreed with what they’d shown it the first time.

They were standing in water.

Not deep, ankle-height, barely, but it stretched in every direction, a vast, perfectly still sheet of dark water that reflected the ceiling above like black glass. The cavern was enormous, wider than any floor they’d seen, its walls curving away into distant shadow.

The ceiling was low. Uncomfortably low. Seven feet, maybe eight. Finn could have reached up and pressed his palm flat to the stone without fully extending his arm.

And from that ceiling hung something that made the hair on his forearms rise.

Roots.

Thousands of them. Pale, slender tendrils that dangled from the rock like the fingers of drowned hands, their tips just barely touching the water’s surface.

They were not ashwood, the colour was wrong, white instead of grey, and where they met the water, faint circles of bioluminescence rippled outward in slow, concentric rings.

The light they cast was blue-white. Cold. Beautiful in a way that made Finn’s stomach tighten, because nothing in a dungeon was beautiful without a reason.

Nyx had gone very still beside him.

’Bearer.’

’Yeah. I see them.’

’They are not roots.’

He looked again.

She was right.

The tendrils were moving. Not swaying, there was no wind, no current. They were contracting and extending slowly, like the cilia of some vast organism lining the ceiling of its own throat.

"We’re inside something," Finn said quietly.

"Or beneath it." Nyx’s crimson eyes tracked the pulsing tendrils above. "The water. Can you feel it?"

He could. Now that she’d drawn his attention to it, the water around his ankles was not cold. It was warm, almost body-temperature, and it carried a faint vibration through the soles of his shoes.

A notification bloomed at the edge of his vision.

[FLOOR 4 — THE DROWNING GARDEN]

[Environmental Hazard: Rising Tide]

[Water level will increase incrementally. Rate of increase accelerates over time.] [Reach the Floor Boss before full submersion.]

[Current Depth: 0.2m]

He read it twice.

"It’s a timer floor," he said. "The water rises. If we don’t find the boss and kill it before the room fills, we drown."

"Bearer."

"Yeah?"

"I cannot swim."