The atmosphere at the base of Nexus Delta-04 wasn’t grim. It felt more like the exciting pre-game jitter of a high-stakes sporting event.

  “Everyone has their new toys?” Leoric shouted over the wind, bustling around like a frantic mother adjusting collars. He was checking seals on armor plates, slapping rune-wards onto pauldrons, and handing out vials of glowing blue liquid. “Remember! The [Void-Scale] plating on the chest piece is Tier 6! We found out it’s almost impossible to wear anything higher than one Tier above your own so it’ll have to do. It’s heavier than standard mythril but disperses magical impact by a significant amount. You probably won’t even need to dodge area-of-effect spells of anything Tier 5 or lower; just tank them. Trust me, the armor can take it!”

  I adjusted the bracer on my left arm. It was forged from severed pieces of the carapace of Zareth’s Tier 8 Void Beast — The Abyssal Ravager. Even with Leoric’s crafting skill maxed out, he could only shape the material into basic forms. But a basic form made of Tier 8 monster-part was practically indestructible on this planet.

  “We are ready, little brother,” Rexxar laughed, swinging a new axe that seemed to absorb the sunlight around it. “This weapon… it sings of hunger! It demands snacks! I shall name it… the Fang of Friendship!”

  “Friendship?” Silas muttered, fading in and out of visibility as he tested his stealth field. “Doesn’t sound very menacing.”

  “HA, but it is a great name for the children’s stories!” Rexxar replied.

  The team was assembled. Myself, Anna, Lucas, Freja, Silas, Rexxar, and Nyx.

  “So,” I said, gathering them near the portal casually. “Like we discussed back at base. This is a reconnaissance raid. I cleared up to Floor 50 before, but I speed-ran it for the checkpoints. We ignored the ecosystem. We ignored the details on the expected loot. Today, we map it properly.”

  “And the threat level?” Lucas asked, testing the weight of his massive shield — a tower of black chitin that hummed with defensive resonance. He looked eager, like a kid with a new toy he was allowed to smash things with. His posture was loose, relaxed but still sharp and focused — the Zenith resort had truly done wonders for his accumulated stress.

  “Floors 1-40 will be a warmup for this group,” I estimated. “We agreed on the rotation, everyone is on the same page, right? Anna will then join the clearing after floor 40, whenever she is needed, while I keep looking out. It’ll give you a chance to sync your new skills without too much pressure. But once we pass 45, the scaling changes.”

  “We can handle it,” Anna said, checking her bowstring. “I didn’t spend a year in a hyperbolic time chamber just to be a spectator.”

  “True,” I grinned. “I intend for you guys to face anything that comes up unless it is absolutely necessary I or my Anima intervene. Feel free to show off what you’ve learned. Also, I brought snacks.”

  “Snacks?” Silas piped up, appearing fully now. “Void-nut clusters? The ones with the caramelized star-honey?”

  “Maybe.”

  We stepped into the portal.

  Nexus Delta-04 was known as the [Crystalline Spire]. The theme of the Tower was Resonance and Earth.

  Floors 1-30 passed in a blur of shattered crystal and laughing adventurers.

  The environment was stunning — vast subterranean caverns where the stalactites were glowing mana-crystals the size of buses. Rivers of liquid mercury flowed uphill, creating mesmerizing mirror-falls that refracted light into rainbow arcs. The air smelled of ozone, old stone, and rock candy.

  The enemies here were construct-based: Golems made of amethyst that regenerated by absorbing ambient mana, spiders woven from spun glass that spat webbings of crystallized light, and floating geo-sentries that fired lasers.

  We moved like a thresher.

  Lucas shattered Golems with single swings, with Rexxar laughing every time they exploded into showers of gems. “You have gotten strong, human! Look at all this sparkly confetti! I shall take some for my mane!”

  Silas assassinated entire patrols before they even registered a threat, moving like a blur of smoke through the crystalline lattice.

  I walked behind them with Anna, enjoying the show and analyzing their growth.

  “Look at Freja,” I pointed out quietly as the Storm-Caller summoned a localized thundercloud to zap a crystal bat. The lightning wasn’t jagged; it was liquid, flowing through the air. “She’s using the mana-recoil to propel her hammer swing. That’s new. Kinetic storage.”

  “She told me she learned a technique at Zenith,” Anna nodded approvingly. “Momentum redirection. Very versatile. Also very flashy. Even though she denies it, I think she really likes flashy.”

  “Flashy is good for morale,” I said, crunching on a void-nut cluster. “As long as she doesn’t fry our eyebrows. She has a habit of ‘accidentally’ creating ozone around people who annoy her.”

  Floor 40: The Hall of Whispering Stone.

  This was where the difficulty spike usually occurred. The cavern opened up into a massive, echoing hall where the floor was polished obsidian mirrors that reflected your worst memories back at you — a psychological attack embedded in the terrain.

  The enemies changed.

  Instead of mindless constructs, we faced Crystal-Knights. Humanoid, fast, wielding lances of sharpened diamond. They moved in squads, using tactics. They didn’t just charge; they flanked, used covering fire, and retreated when wounded to heal.

  “My turn,” Lucas said, stepping forward. His shield slammed into the ground with a resounding thud. A wave of golden mana expanded, forming a semi-translucent dome around the group. It pulsed with the rhythmic solidity of a mountain heartbeat. “Hold the line.”

  A squad of twenty Crystal-Knights charged, their sabatons ringing on the glass floor like wind chimes from hell.

  Silas moved next.

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  His movement was much more fluid than before. His training at the Zenith — combining his natural Shadow Affinity with the Frost Affinity he had picked up from living with the wyverns — had mutated his own mana into something… colder.

  He emerged from the shadow of a stalagmite, his daggers glowing with a sickly, frost-blue light.

  “Frozen Shadow,” Silas whispered.

  He struck. A burst of black ice exploded outward. It wasn’t just an extremely low temperature; it was a conceptual chill that froze movement vectors. The lead high Tier 5 knights slowed instantly, their crystal joints rimed with frost. Silas danced through them, tapping armor weak points with surgical precision. Every tap left a patch of brittle ice that cracked under stress.

  “That’s impressive,” Anna commented quietly. “He’s using the shadow to suck the heat out instantly. Thermal shock to make the armor brittle before the kinetic impact. Smart.”

  Freja launched herself from behind Lucas’ shield.

  If Silas was a scalpel, Freja was an airstrike.

  She was a blur of static. Her recently evolved movement skill [Storm-Path] allowed her to ride the lightning she generated. She appeared above the frozen knights, her hammer raised, crackling with enough voltage to power a small town.

  It wasn’t just physical strength. She channeled the full might of the bloodline legacy she had uncovered.

  “Mjolnir’s Wrath!” she yelled, pure joy in her voice.

  She slammed the ground.

  A shockwave of blue lightning and kinetic force pulverized the center of the formation. The knights Silas had frozen shattered into millions of sparkling shards.

  “Incoming flank,” Anna noted lazily, not even reaching for her bow. She trusted her team.

  Six Crystal-Lancers tried to circle around, their diamond tips glowing red with piercing mana. They thought they found a weak spot in our formation’s side.

  Lucas didn’t even turn his head. He just… expanded.

  His shield-wall didn’t stay static. He rushed forward with surprising speed for a tank, his barrier moving with him like a bulldozer made of holy light.

  “Charge!”

  He collided with the lancers. The impact sound was deafening. But Lucas didn’t budge an inch. His mythic armor absorbed the kinetic energy from his shield, converted it into golden light, and blasted it back outward. The lancers were thrown fifty feet backward, their formation broken, limbs scattering like thrown toys.

  “All yours, Silas,” Lucas grunted, dusting off his shoulder casually.

  Silas was already there. He decapitated three before they hit the ground, his daggers moving faster than sound.

  I clapped from my vantage point. “Nice! Lucas, good angling on the shield bash! Freja, maybe a little less shouting next time, you almost deafened Silas!”

  “Can’t hear you!” Freja yelled back, grinning. “Too much thunder!”

  “They’re having fun,” Anna noted.

  “It’s good to see,” I agreed. “War is terrible. This? This is more like it.”

  We reached Floor 45.

  The Guardian Room.

  This wasn’t a knight.

  It was a Diamond-Back Wyrm. A serpentine construct easily two hundred feet long, coiled around a pillar of pure mana. Its scales were harder than mythril. Its eyes burned with concentrated laser focus. It radiated a solid mid Tier 7 pressure.

  “Regeneration mechanics,” Jeeves warned through the comms. “Crystalline Reformation. Preliminary observations predict it will instantly regenerate unless you shatter the Core in its head.”

  “I’ve got it,” Anna said, stepping forward.

  “Backup strategy,” I reminded them calmly. “You already know what to do. Just make sure to watch out for the tail swipes. Keep it tight. And remember, proceed as if I am not here, I won’t always be there to heal you.”

  The team moved like a single organism.

  Lucas charged, drawing the beast’s attention with a shout that pulsed with Challenging mana. “Hey, ugly! Over here! Your matriarch was a geologist!”

  The Wyrm roared, a sound of grinding glass, and spat a beam of focused light directly at him.

  Lucas caught it on his shield. He groaned, his boots digging trenches in the obsidian floor, but the barrier held. The beam refracted, painting the cavern walls in disco lights.

  “Shiny!” Rexxar laughed.

  “Freja!”

  Freja launched herself. She didn’t attack the head; she attacked the floor.

  She slammed her hammer into the obsidian pillar the Wyrm was coiled around. Lightning surged through the conductive stone.

  The Wyrm shrieked as gigawatts of electricity fried its sensory lattice. It flailed, momentarily stunned.

  Silas appeared on its back, driving frost-daggers into the gaps in its scales to slow its regeneration. “Cooling down the systems!” he quipped.

  Anna stood perfectly still two hundred yards away. She drew the [Final Word]. The air around her stilled. Time seemed to slow just for her.

  She didn’t aim at the head. She aimed at the space where the head would be.

  “Edict: Final Decision,” she whispered.

  She released.

  The arrow wasn’t just fast; it was instantaneous. It streaked through the air, ignoring friction, ignoring gravity. It was a line drawn in reality.

  The Wyrm tried to dodge, moving its head left.

  The arrow curved at a right angle — an impossible, jagged turn that defied physics — and punched through the monster’s eye.

  It pierced the Core deep inside the skull.

  Time seemed to stutter.

  The Wyrm froze mid-thrash.

  Cracks spiderwebbed from the impact point.

  With a sound like a chandelier dropping from orbit, the Guardian shattered. Millions of diamond fragments rained down on the team.

  Lucas lowered his shield, grinning.

  “Clean,” he called out.

  I clapped, descending from the ridge.

  “Impressive. Textbook coordination. You managed to take down a mid Tier 7 boss without burning any major cooldowns or artifacts. Lucas, your mana efficiency is up 20% at least. Freja, your targeting is tighter.”

  “It’s also the gear,” Silas said, patting his Void-Scale armor. “I took a tail-whip graze earlier and didn’t even feel it. This stuff absorbs impact like a sponge.”

  “And the training,” Freja added, breathless but exhilarated. “My recovery rate is insane. I’m already back to 85% mana.”

  I looked at the pile of diamond dust.

  “Time for the loot,” I said. “The core fragment should be in there. We can use it to upgrade the tower base city’s defense grid.”

  Rexxar dug through the rubble. “Got the shiny rock!”

  I looked at the glowing portal leading to Floor 46.

  The air coming from it was different. Thicker. Heavier.

  “Alright,” I said, my tone shifting slightly. “Fun’s over. Floor 46 to 50 is where the elite mobs start spawning. And if we hit Floor 51… we’re entering uncharted territory. Tier 8 scaling soon after that.”

  I stepped to the front.

  “My turn to lead. Anna, on my six. Everyone else, tighten formation. We’re going deep. And remember our training, if Anna says we do something we instantly follow, assume she knows something we don’t. Let’s go.”

  The group fell in behind me, confidence high. We weren’t just survivors scrambling for scraps anymore. We were predators inspecting and exploring our new territory.

  “I bet Floor 100 has a gift shop,” Silas whispered to Freja.

  “If it doesn’t,” Freja whispered back, “we’ll throw a riot.”

  I smirked.

  “Let’s find out.”

  I stepped into the light of the upper floors.