At dawn, a new bounty on the board outside the Undercroft appeared.

I saw it at 6:04 AM. Permit held, Mira two feet away from me also observing the same board in the analytical mode she always used.

It was pretty simple at face value. Floor 4 clearing bounty — Ashveil Undercroft, lower sector. Target classification — Ironwall Sentinel. Bounty — 200 gold, with 180 EXP bonus in addition to kill rate. Recommended ranking — B rank and up.

Recommended ranking B and up.

I was C-rank, with STR 18.

"You’re reading it," Mira remarked, without turning her head around.

"I’m reading it."

"You’re going to sign it."

"I’m thinking about it."

"You did that when you were D-rank with STR 12 for the Floor 3 bounty."

"And I cleared the Floor 3 bounty."

She turned towards me and met my eyes, the flat stare. "Floor 4 Sentinel is another class of creature. This isn’t a patrolling beastie. This one’s guardian — stationed spot, area control, reacting to sound and movement together. The recommended B rank exists for a reason."

"All the recommended warnings are there for good reasons. It just doesn’t mean that they are tailored to someone who knows how to use a wiki page and Pattern Recognition II."

She was silent for a second.

"But I would like to run it with you," she said.

I looked at her.

"It’s a fixed-position guardian class that benefits most from backline INT scaling," she said. "It won’t move. I’ll be able to position myself at maximum crossbow range and sustain damage while you take care of positioning and the weak spot. Two people with prior knowledge against a dungeon guardian that has never met either of us." She stopped speaking.

And she was right. The math did add up.

"It’s Floor 4. You’re Unclassified."

"You were D-rank on Floor 3."

"Good point."

We signed the contract.

The Floor 4 contract administrator was a different person compared to the Floor 3 one — he was younger, more open-minded about life and not yet experienced enough to feel apathetic towards the difference between someone’s rank and their permit request.

He looked at my C-rank. He looked at Mira’s Unclassified. He looked at the Floor 4 contract form.

"Party registration?" he asked.

"Two," I replied.

He jotted it down as if he’d made the decision that this wasn’t going to be his paperwork problem if something went wrong. Stamped both permits. Handed them to us.

We continued downward.

The fourth floor was like the third, except more so than the third was like the second. More difficult, sure, but also different architecturally. The rock took on a darker coloration, verging toward black, and the runes were now an unappealing shade of amber. The air seemed thicker, and sound traveled differently — flatter, with no echo, meaning that the Sentinel’s sound-response would have to account for that in its pattern recognition.

Might come in handy later.

"Layout," Mira muttered as we worked our way through the entrance tunnel.

"One main room, three entrance tunnels, sentinel in the middle. Fixed position means that the sentinel will rotate on a central axis; one-eighty degree frontal arc, blind spot right behind it, but the rotation is faster than indicated in the wiki article. Sound will trigger a tracking response. Movement in the frontal arc will trigger an attack response, and both simultaneously will trigger an area effect."

"Meaning we don’t trigger both at once."

"Right."

"You move, I stay still. I fire, you’re already repositioned."

"Yep."

She nodded. We kept moving.

The Sentinel was exactly where it had been listed on the wiki.

This is one of the reasons why guardians were more theoretically manageable. They didn’t patrol, they didn’t change, they were part of the architecture as much as anything else. This one was eight feet of stone-plated layers and ambient magic, set within the central dais of the room, facing the main hallway.

We’d entered from the left approach.

I threw up my hand. We stopped.

The room was around sixty feet in diameter. The Sentinel’s arc of attack faced the front door, covering forty degrees on either side of the entry point. Our left approach fell fifteen degrees outside of his attack pattern.

But just barely.

"What’s the range on the crossbow?"

"Optimal is sixty-five feet, eighty feet effective. The dais elevates the sentinel; I have to factor that into my calculations."

"Go ahead and take position. Wait for me to draw the pivot."

She looked at me. "Manual draw?"

"I’m going to do it manually."

"STR 18."

"STR 18, AGI 23, Pattern Recognition II, and all of the information from the wiki about the pivot mechanics of the Sentinel."

A pause.

"Don’t die," she said.

"I’m working on it."

I entered the chamber from below, moving to my left, and remained out of the front arc, heading for the blind spot at the back. The Sentinel wouldn’t engage with anything it detected outside its sensor range; I had twenty feet in which to move safely before triggering the audio sensors.

Eighteen feet.

Fifteen.

I paused at twelve feet and fitted an arrow to my bowstring.

The critical hit location on an Ironwall Sentinel was the rune node in the center of its pivot structure. If I hit the node, the Sentinel would lock into place, rendering it stationary. According to the wiki, the node was exposed when the Sentinel pivoted through the first thirty degrees.

I needed the Sentinel to pivot.

And therefore, I needed to enter the front arc.

The Sentinel reacted immediately — the tracking system activated; the frontal arc turned to face me. I turned left aggressively, remaining in front of the arc, and drew out the pivot point until it almost triggered the attack reaction threshold.

Rotation of twenty-two degrees — node revealed.

I stopped moving.

So did the Sentinel.

It wasn’t thirty degrees yet.

Eight more degrees to go.

I took a step to the right, moving back toward the center of the frontal arc.

The Sentinel pivoted back again.

Total rotation of twenty-nine degrees — maximum node exposure.

Now, I remained absolutely still.

The Sentinel remained still.

Twenty-nine degrees — one short of the threshold.

Behind me, at the entrance, I heard the sound of the crossbow mechanism activating — Mira reading the geometry, calculating the angle fall from the dais elevation and determining her shot.

She released the shot.

It hit the rune node on the base of the pivot point with a sharp crack in the heavy air. The Sentinel jerked — pivot mechanism locking during the rotation, frontal arc fixed at twenty-nine degrees and the area effect reaction triggering with no targets in its range since neither of us were within the radius anymore.

---

ENEMY ANALYSIS — IRONWALL SENTINEL

Pivot: LOCKED

Arc: FIXED — 29 degrees offset from main attack

Threat level: REDUCED — mobile threat nullified

Weak point secondary: Upper rune cluster — accessible, defenseless

Recommendation: Continued ranged damage to upper runes

---

I had drawn my bow and fired on the upper runes as the enemy analysis window completed.

---

*+180 EXP — Ironwall Sentinel (Weak Point Kill — Cooperative)*

BOUNTY COMPLETE

---

The pieces of the Ironwall Sentinel dropped away from the dais one by one, rune lines breaking apart the stone plate, residual energy draining away.

I lowered the bow.

Mira entered through the passageway, crossbow slung easily across her body, examining the fallen enemy with an analytical look on her face.

"The drop angle was four degrees off what the wiki estimated," she noted. "Actual height of the dais in the chamber is somewhat taller than the estimate provided."

"I’ll make note of that."

"Do you keep notes?"

"I have a system."

She nearly smiled. Just barely didn’t. "We should make sure that approach passages are clear before moving forward. Secondary enemies spawn around twelve minutes after a guardian defeat."

"Got it."

"I know you got it."

We split up — she went right, I went left, and we took down all of the secondary spawns in just over nine minutes. Four Deepcrawlers between us, nothing fancy or difficult, and easily taken down using regular tactics.

The bounty mark was flashing on the dais when we reconvened in the main chamber.

I grabbed mine.

---

*+55 EXP — Deepcrawler x2 (Weak Point Kill)*

---

Mira collected her bounty from the right passage.

Now we could get back to the surface.

It was warm upon reaching the surface at 9:23 AM — warmer than anyone would have expected after spending time in the dungeons. Ashveil in the morning — the markets were now open, permits in queue for processing, and the Undercroft clerk was working the day shift.

Our completed mission form was processed by the bounty clerk at the guild without fanfare or excitement. Two hundred gold, evenly distributed. We received extra experience points upon killing the targets.

Mira checked her share of the gold.

"Floor 4 possible."

"Floor 4 possible."

"Your Strength stat is still terrible."

"My Strength stat is eighteen."

"For Floor 4, that is still terrible."

"I have to push STR," I told her.

"You have to push STR," she repeated.

We returned to the Broken Crown by ten o’clock. Sena brought out two cups without prompting, indicating she’d added Mira into the standing system. No idea when.

I was still working on the wiki, Vorn’s Flag 3, and it was still churning along, hitting 41 percent now. Mira put her cup down, saying flatly:

"Vorn’s Flag 3 is a person."

I glanced up.

"The generation pattern changed during the night." She had her own wiki open and an overlay glowing faintly behind her eyes. "Not a strategy flag, not a contingency plan. Same data structure as Flags 1 and 2 — target-type architecture. He’s spotted a new primary target."

"Who?"

"Still running." She stared me down. "But there’s been a contact log. Single entry — initial contact, afternoon yesterday. Location: cloth district of Ashveil."

Cloth district.

I did it quickly. Cloth district, afternoon yesterday, new target, single contact entry.

Four people regularly appeared in the cloth district I’d cataloged within the last month. Three were merchants. One was not.

"Lyra works in the cloth district," I said.

"Corruption is at zero," Mira said. "She’s not our target."

"Who else?"

Mira remained silent. Reading something I wasn’t able to see.

"The contact record has a relationship tag," she said hesitantly. "Initial generation. Twelve points of value from one contact." She fixed me with a look. "Name is still redacted, but not the role tag."

"What does the role tag say."

She continued staring into my eyes.

"Merchant. Female. Cloth district, north end stall." A pause. "That north end stall belongs to a civilian known as Sera. She has been operating it for six years. She’s got no guild allegiance, no adventurer rank, no combat flags." A long pause. "She’s a civilian, Kai. There are no mechanics. There is no corruption meter. There is no relationship overlay."

I had understood her even before she had completed her sentence.

If she didn’t have any corruption meter, she was not protected by the game. If there were no overlays, there was no flag system for Vorn trying to gain her trust.

She was out of my UI reach completely.

There would be no stats to analyze, no corruption levels to lower, nothing to reset.

Vorn didn’t discover a new game character.

He discovered a real person.

---

VORN — FLAG UPDATE

Flag 3: generating — 41%

New data: Target architecture confirmed — CIVILIAN CLASS

Civilian target: No corruption meter / No relationship overlay / No flag system

Contact log: 1 entry — cloth district, north end, yesterday PM

Relationship generation: 12 points — untracked by standard UI

Counter options: SIGNIFICANTLY LIMITED

Kai alert: URGENT

---

I stared at the alert window for what seemed like forever.

Then I put my cup down and stood up.

"I have to go to the cloth district," I said.

Mira was on her feet before me.