Dane – The 22nd Floor

  Dane stepped out of the teleportation portal, the flickering light behind him dissolving into static air. The stench hit him first. It was a mix of blood, scorched rock, and the faint, metallic tang of magic. He blinked into the half-light of the 22nd floor, and there it was: the remnants of the Tunnel King's lair. Two empty chests lined the crumbling walls, cracked open like dry husks. Shadows played across the stone, each one tugging at the edge of his fraying nerves.

  He had no time to appreciate the grim familiarity.

  His boots clacked on the floor as he moved forward, every muscle in his body coiled with urgency. The girls, Ada and Amelia, were somewhere ahead. Alive, hopefully. With the shadow man's sudden disappearance, Dane's gut twisted with dread. It wasn't just that the enemy had vanished. It was how it happened. The man disappeared without a trace. Dane had no means to track a rogue type, and he got the feeling that he was still being watched.

  A jolt sparked through the slave bond. It felt like a scream muffled underwater. A surge of pain, panic, and something else. Desperation. He broke into a run.

  Ada & Amelia – The Beginning of Floor 22

  Ada regained consciousness with a groan, the dull ache in her chest rising to a crescendo of pain. Her left leg and arm were crushed beneath a jagged slab of stone, purple and black bruises already spreading like ink beneath her skin. She tried to sit up but immediately turned her head, spotting Amelia slumped beside her, looking far worse.

  Blood matted Amelia's silver-blonde hair, and her left eye was swollen shut. Her once-elegant robes were in tatters, soaked in sweat, and something darker. Ada bit back a sob and raised her hand, casting Minor Heal repeatedly until the raw magic scraped at her nerves. It wasn't enough.

  The bones would never set properly. Amelia would live, but she'd carry the disfigurement for the rest of her life. Ada had done everything she could, but the jagged scars carved across Amelia's face whispered a different truth. Dane had saved them. His quick thinking, his reckless desperation. They would've been red smears on the dungeon floor if he hadn't ripped them out of that battle with his last ounce of power. They weren't supposed to survive. But Dane made survival look like rebellion. That's why Ada followed him. That's why she'd throw herself into his half-baked schemes. Because when Dane moved, fate bent in strange ways. They weren't just escaping slavery anymore. Dane was waging war on the empire itself.

  "Get up, Amelia. We can't stay here," Ada said, voice hoarse but firm.

  "Five more minutes," Amelia mumbled, her voice less stuck-up noble and more teenager trying to get a few more minutes of sleep.

  Ada growled and shook her. "Wake up! We need to find Dane."

  At the mention of his name, Amelia bolted upright like she'd been struck by lightning, panic etched in her lone visible eye.

  "What are you waiting for?" she snapped, already trying to stand despite her injuries.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Together, they hobbled forward, limping through the graveyard the 22nd floor had become. Monster corpses lay scattered like broken dolls, their twisted forms half-buried in the rubble. The air was thick with death. No fresh sounds of skittering claws or snarls in the dark. Just silence.

  They encountered a few lingering spectres, echo-shadows of monsters long dead. Amelia had formal training, and her instructors warned her that the souls could linger if the bodies weren't burned, refusing to cross into the astral. Eventually, they'd rot into undeath and rise again, animated by bitterness and forgotten pain. Amelia burned the corpses where she could, sending the souls screaming upward in flickers of white flame. The Dungeon would recycle them, but at least they wouldn't suffer. Neither woman said it aloud, but they both knew: if they didn't find Dane soon, they might be the next ones left behind to rot.

  A mighty husk of a corpse lay in the hall, a huge wolf, half rotten, the muscles and pelt slumping off in places; it was so big that it could be mistaken for a bear. The beast lay headless, but its pelt was resistant to flame. Amelia frantically tried to light a spark with some of the quartz Ada had lent her, but it was useless. The monster began contorting its lifeless body, bending and snapping in ways that made the girls dread.

  They knew that they had to hide. Their only hope was that the headless beast couldn't track them. The wolf looked like the king of the abyss wolves. And the abyss wolves relied heavily on their snouts to sniff out prey. Ada used Identify and was stunned to see that the monster, which should have only been in the mid-forties, was.

  Corpse of the King: LVL 105: Recommended course of action: Run

  Amelia and Ada huddled in a crevice they found in the cave wall. Each breath they took was shaky. Their ragged breaths echoed in the crevice, fogging the cold stone with damp fear.

  Dane – The 22nd Floor

  Exhaustion clung to Dane, but he carved through the undead with a fury he hadn't known he was capable of. In times like these, he was angry at the system for not giving him any more information about the world. He would have been burning the corpses as he killed them had he known that they would become undead.

  The mobs that he should be able to cut through easily had leveled up in their death. Ada had been through a tutorial, but he wondered why she had never warned him about burning the dead. Why do I have to fly in the dark so much, he thought. The elves who handled his education only taught him the basics and told him he would need to be briefed on mission specifics when he went to his unit. Maybe the Tutorial worked on a similar approach. Too bad his unit had been the fucking mines.

  The extra levels that the moles and wolves gained in their resurrection worked wonders in restoring the cosmic energy he had lost from the debuff the system gave him, stealing his EXP when he activated time magic.

  His body was still not used to the slowed movement speed, but he was trudging along. Strangely, his milestone skills hadn't vanished, even though he'd lost two full sets of levels. That shouldn't be possible. His body yearned for the lost EXP from each monster he was tearing through the mobs. The pickaxe worked, but not fast enough. He drew his boarding axe, still stained with memories of the commander. He hated the thing. But he needed raw power now. He could have used the bone knives he had made, but their quality was cheap and would fail him at the wrong time. They weren't good for much now, but the bone knives could still serve one purpose: poison delivery. If only he had poison.

  For now, he could tornado through his enemies with an ax in each hand like the Black Whirlwind. He had already made back fourteen levels slaughtering all monsters for the second time. Some corpses still dripped from their watery graves, those with a water affinity, he syphoned their magic to top off his MP.

  Another tug snapped through the slave bond. This time, it was stronger and sharper. Terror. Damp air. Ada was hiding somewhere, trembling. Whatever had her scared was closing in.

  Dane began to cycle the meteorite skill and shot off in the direction he felt the tugging. The caves' walls began to blur, and the undead shattered like bugs on a windshield as Dane ran straight through them. He couldn't lose Ada.