Max
Rivira
As they reached the end of the corridor to Floor 18, the first thing that caught Max's attention wasn't the walled adventurer town or the large tree that made the floor home. No, it was the light.
He took the final step and stopped.
The ceiling soared impossibly high above him — white crystals blazing at the center with a cold brilliance that genuinely fooled his skin into thinking it was afternoon sun, ringed outward by blue that deepened and faded like a painted sky toward dusk. And it moved. Slowly, the way real sunlight moves across a room if you're patient enough to watch it. The dungeon hadn't just put crystals in its ceiling.
It had built a sky.
Max tilted his head back and stared at it for a long moment, genuinely caught. Not overwhelmed — just the way you're caught by something beautiful when you weren't braced for it.
On his shoulder, Kairu pulsed with a slow, wondering rhythm. Max understood the feeling entirely.
Below that false sky, a vast forest spread outward from the base of the stairs spreading into dark trunks, pale canopies, and between the roots, blue crystals of every size catching the overhead glow and scattering it through the undergrowth until the whole forest floor shimmered like shallow water over a sunlit riverbed.
Beyond the treeline, a great lake stretched wide and still, holding a near-perfect mirror of the crystal sky above it. The false sun doubled in the water, making the floor feel twice its size.
And on the eastern cliff face, rising two hundred meters above the lake was Rivira.
Smaller than he'd imagined. Compact in the way things are compact when built purely for survival, with nothing left over for anything else.
He felt Hogni's presence peel away quietly behind him.
"I'll watch from a distance," the Dark Elf said. No affectation. Just the steady voice he used when he meant something. "Explore freely. But don't wander past the forest edge alone."
"Understood," Max said, without turning around.
By the time he glanced back, Hogni was already gone — merged into the treeline as if the forest had simply decided to include him. Max watched the empty space for a moment, feeling the warmth of it without naming it, then turned back to Rivira and kept walking.
-◈ -
The approach to the town itself was less majestic than the view from the stairs.
A wooden palisade ringed the perimeter, sturdy logs sharpened into points leaning outward like they meant it. Max looked at them and felt something between amusement and genuine respect for the audacity. Against goblins, sure. Against the kind of things the dungeon could drop on this floor without warning, a wooden wall was less a defence and more of a paper ready to be torn down.
Above the main gate hung a plank of wood with RIVIRA burned into it in thick dark strokes. Beneath the name, scratched in newer rougher carving, was a number. Triple digits. He couldn't read the exact figure through the weathering, but the point was clear enough. This town had been knocked flat and rebuilt more times than most surface settlements had seen monsters, and every time someone had climbed back up with timber and stubbornness and started again.
Max stood at the gate for a moment just looking at that number.
Resilience or stubbornness. In the dungeon, those are the same word.
While the gate itself stood wide open. No guards, no toll, no ceremony. Just a warm dark gap in the palisade that swallowed the path ahead, an open invitation to anyone who'd survived seventeen floors to get here. Max checked his collar, made sure Kairu was fully tucked beneath his shirt and the lip of his armour, and stepped through.
The quiet of the forest died as he took his first step in.
Inside, Rivira was alive in the specific pressurised way of a space holding far more than it was built for. The street was narrow and mud-packed and absolutely full. Adventurers of every race and build moved through it with the practiced density of people who had long since stopped apologising for taking up space. Humans, dwarves, beastkin, elves, the occasional figure that didn't fit neatly into any of those categories. All of them wearing the same look, that particular combination of alertness and exhaustion that only came from being deep in a dive.
Voices tangled in a dozen accents. Someone was haggling loudly over a healing potion. Someone else was delivering a personal grievance about Floor 17 drop rates to no one in particular.
As Max walked, the supply shop was the first thing to hit his senses. The sharp clean smell of potions cutting through the woodsmoke and the considerably less clean smell of people who had been underground for a while. Max paused at the entrance just long enough to take it in, and felt something settle quietly in his chest. Floor 18. I'm actually here.
He moved deeper into the street.
Eyes found him almost immediately. The reflexive assessment of people whose survival had trained them to notice new arrivals first. Max felt it the way you feel weather changing, that low peripheral awareness of being catalogued. He didn't tense. He let his own gaze move naturally, returning the assessment without making anything of it. Solo figure, mid-dive, no Familia crest, unusual armour. Nobody approached. After a moment the interest dissolved back into the noise.
Good, he thought. I'd rather not.
-◈ -
The inn was the first establishment he found. Low ceiling, beds stacked in rows, no privacy to speak of, the smell of old stone and older exhaustion ground into every surface. The kind of place where you slept with one hand on your knife and were grateful for a horizontal surface. He stood in the doorway, took it in, and noted it without enthusiasm.
The restaurant was next, if the word was willing to stretch that far. Four tables. A woman behind the counter with a cleaver and the expression of someone deciding whether the nearest customer was worth her time. Two options on the menu, both involving meat, neither explaining itself further.
He remembered Hogni mentioning the stew. He glanced at the bubbling pot, at the price scratched below it, and kept walking. He had his own rations and a perfectly good forest waiting for him once he was done here.
The pub he found on the second pass, wedged between supply stores like it had always been there and always intended to stay. Rough-hewn tables visible through the open door, the smell of something fermented drifting into the street with the confidence of a place that knew its own value. Inside, the noise was already at the volume that could tip either way in the next few minutes. A group of beastkin in the far corner were laughing hard enough that one had knocked over his cup without noticing. Two humans near the entrance were having a conversation with the controlled intensity of something about to become an argument. A lone dwarf at the bar was drinking with the focused dedication of a professional.
Max stood in the doorway long enough to read the room. Everyone who made it here earned a drink, he thought, with something almost like warmth for the whole exhausted, half-drunk lot of them. Then he moved on.
The stores took more time and deserved it.
More of them than the street's first impression suggested. Not just the three main supply shops but smaller stalls fitted into every available gap, selling everything from weapon repair kits and rope bundles to things that occupied the grey space between exotic and where exactly did this come from. He moved through them slowly, hands in his pockets, not touching anything. An unlabelled vial with something that caught the light wrong. A blade with markings in a script he didn't recognise. A sealed scroll that gave off a faint low vibration when he passed within arm's reach.
Inside the armour, Kairu pulsed once. Quiet, curious, the same low vibration mirroring back at him.
You feel it too, huh, Max thought.
He didn't pick anything up. Just filed it alongside his memory of Freya getting the Status Snitch to overwrite Bell's falna from here, and felt the logic click properly into place. Of course. The Guild's reach ended at the dungeon entrance. Below that was everything was technically unclaimed, which meant available at the right price with no paperwork following anyone home. What couldn't be sold in Orario continued its career quietly down here, and nobody wrote a report because there was nobody to send it to.
He also noticed, moving through the stores, that not a single one carried a Familia emblem. Not one. On the surface that would be strange. Familias marked everything, reputation and commerce being entirely inseparable up there. Down here the omission must be deliberate. Whatever crossed hands in Rivira stayed in Rivira, and nobody's gods needed their names formally attached to it.
Smart, he thought. And annoying, if you're trying to trace anything.
He was halfway through his second circuit when the quality of the attention on him changed.
Not the idle assessment from earlier. Something heavier. More patient. He caught it at the edge of his peripheral vision — two figures near the weapon rack of the largest supply store, making a careful performance of examining a short sword that neither of them had any real interest in. Their eyes kept moving. To his armour. To the storage pouch at his hip. Back to his face to check the status of things.
Max turned his head and looked at them directly.
Not threatening. Not a warning. Just looked, with the quiet quality of someone who had already run the calculation and found the conclusion mildly entertaining. And then, because he couldn't help it, he smiled. Small. Friendly. The kind of smile that said I see you, I've counted the exits, and I'm curious what you're going to decide.
He watched the math change behind their eyes in real time. The reassessment. The rapid arrival at an answer they didn't like. The shorter one looked away first, the other followed a beat later, and both of them found somewhere else to be with a speed that was almost impressive.
Max watched them go.
Rivira, he thought, with something close to affection. Where everyone minds their own business until they see something worth not minding.
-◈ -
He was on his last pass through the street when something on the wall behind the exchange counter stopped him.
A board. Worn at the edges, layered with weeks of posted notices. Supply requests, dive team formations seeking members, the usual. But the top section was different. Pinned with more care than anything else was the Guild's blacklist. Wanted figures. Vigilante advisories. Each entry carried a rough sketch and a level notation in the particular red ink the Guild reserved for things it wanted taken seriously.
Max's eyes moved down the list with the idle habit of someone who catalogued everything.
And stopped.
Third entry from the top.
The sketch was rough, dungeon-floor art always was, but the silhouette was immediately familiar. That posture. The particular hair color. The name beside it read Valletta Grede, Executive, Thanatos Familia. And below the name, in the Guild's red advisory text: Level 5. Do not engage without Level 5 support in party. Approach strongly discouraged.
He'd had a brush with her a few hours ago.
Max stood with that for a long moment. The town's noise carried on around him and none of it quite registered. Level 5. An executive of Thanatos Familia operating in the middle floors, with a wanted poster up in the only settlement in range and nobody here remotely equipped to act on it. The Guild had posted the advisory. The Guild's red ink was on the board. And the board was sitting in a town below the Guild's jurisdiction, being read by people who mostly couldn't do anything about it.
The number settled in his chest with the specific gravity of something that mattered.
Good thing Hogni was with me, he thought. That was the first thing, and it arrived with genuine feeling behind it. If he'd been alone on those stairs — no Dark Elf presence behind him, no weight of the Freya Familia name hovering at his shoulder — he genuinely couldn't imagine how that encounter would have ended.
Then a second thought arrived, quieter and colder than the other. He'd taken a good chunk of Rudra Familia in the ambush. He hoped that would be enough to deter further attempts. If not — he felt the smirk arrive before the thought finished — he'd be ready.
Coming back to the present, Max realised he needed to go through the Guild blacklist properly. Not now, not standing in front of the exchange counter with the heavyset man watching him from the corner of his eye — but soon.
He committed Valletta's sketch to memory with the careful precision he gave to things he might need later, and walked away from the board.
-◈ -
He did one final loop of the street, unhurried, letting the last impressions settle. Rivira was functional. Profitable for the right people. Built with the pure distilled logic of survival and nothing wasted beyond that. Admirable, in its way. But also, if he was being honest, a little underwhelming. The anime had made it feel larger somehow, more vivid. The reality was narrower, louder, and smelled considerably worse.
He could work with that. Once he had his own base built, he could ignore most of what Rivira actually was and use what it offered without pretending it was more than it was.
What it offered, though, was genuinely interesting when you looked at it properly.
Not just supplies and an overpriced exchange booth. The town sat at the exact point where most rookie adventurers ran out of ambition and turned back. Which meant it also sat at the exact point where the most desperate ones showed up — people who had pushed further than they should have, burned through their supplies, and needed to surface fast. That kind of desperation had value if you were positioned correctly to meet it. A Familia with a proper outpost here wouldn't just be serving their own dive teams. They'd be the first port of call for every adventurer on the floor who needed something urgently enough not to negotiate.
And the bigger question still bothered him. No major Familia had a permanent outpost here. Not Loki, not Ganesha, not Freya. He knew the reasons — communication devices didn't work below the entrance threshold, the dungeon's ambient magic killing whatever signal they relied on, and there was the matter of Rivira's unspoken rule about autonomy, the general understanding that no one organisation got to plant a flag here and call it authority. The problems were real. The reasons were logical.
What he couldn't understand was why nobody had found the obvious answer.
Two or three Level 3s. That was all it took. Not executives, not high-value members — just reliable people at a level where Floor 18 wasn't a serious threat, focused entirely on serving the Familia. One managing pre-staged supplies, one medical/potions, one for security and information. Rotate them every few weeks. Stage supplies here so dive teams could travel light all the way to Floor 18, resupply, and push deeper without burning out before they even reached the floors that mattered. A proper rest point that actually belonged to the Familia rather than a mud-packed inn with stacked beds and the smell of other people's bad decisions.
And beyond the logistics, a permanent presence meant knowing who was diving, how deep, what was moving through the exchange booths and the back shelves of stores with no emblems on them. It would even push their own members deeper. Give someone a warm meal, a safe corner, and a familiar face on Floor 18, and suddenly Floor 22 started looking considerably less unreasonable.
The training value alone was absurd on top of that. The dungeon repaired itself. Every wall monsters broke, every corridor they carved through — rebuilt on its own schedule, no maintenance request, no repair budget. A Familia could run their people through these floors indefinitely and the dungeon would keep resetting without charging anyone for the privilege. An endless self-maintaining sparring ground that also paid out in magic stones and drop items if you go up or down. The economics of it were almost offensive in how straightforward they were.
The first Familia to put down real roots here wouldn't just own the supply layer. They'd own the information layer of the entire Middle Floor.
He needed to pitch it to Freya properly. Not as a casual suggestion — as an investment with a mapped return, numbers and rotation schedules and the full value laid out before she could redirect the conversation.
Then a quieter thought arrived, and he felt the corner of his mouth pull upward despite himself.
None of that applies to me, of course.
He could teleport here. Directly. No seventeen-floor commute, no supply weight, no rotation schedule. Just an anchor in the wall of a cave nobody else knew existed and a door that only opened for him. While every other Familia was working out the logistics of stationing people here, he could be standing on Floor 18 before they'd finished lacing their boots.
If only I could commercialise that, he thought, with genuine wistfulness. I'd retire before I levelled up.
He shook his head at the rest of the ideas still arriving with genuine reluctance.
Stop. Scouting. Not building an empire today.
He took one last look at the street, at the stubborn little town with its triple-digit rebuild count and its open gates and its board full of warnings nobody could act on, and felt something settle in him.
Good enough, he thought. Now let's find somewhere that's actually mine.
He turned toward the treeline and walked.
The forest swallowed the noise of Rivira within fifty steps.
Not gradually — it just stopped, the way sound stops when a door closes properly. The mud-packed street, the haggling, the dwarf and his professional drinking — all of it reduced to a faint murmur behind him, and then nothing. Ahead, the pale blue light filtered down through the canopy in shifting columns, and the ground softened underfoot, and the floor became something else entirely. Quieter. More itself.
Max let out a slow breath and felt his shoulders drop half an inch.
Better.
He started placing magic circles as he walked, pressing sigils into root faces and rock outcroppings at measured intervals, building the network outward from Rivira's perimeter. The work came easily here, more responsive than the upper floors, each node settling into place with the clean finality of something slotting into a groove made for it. He didn't rush it. He moved through the forest with the unhurried attention of someone doing two things at once and doing both properly — the circles with his hands, and with everything else, searching.
The great tree drew him before he'd fully decided to go toward it.
Up close it was something that resisted accurate description, which was itself a kind of description. Hundreds of meters of trunk rising straight and certain into the crystal light above, its canopy dissolving somewhere up there into the general glow, its roots wider than Rivira's buildings and considerably more permanent-looking. It had the specific quality of something that had been here before the floor had a number assigned to it and would be here after the number stopped mattering.
Max stood at the base of it and looked up.
The thought arrived the way his worst ideas always did — with complete confidence and no supporting logic whatsoever.
Hideout. Up there.
He considered it seriously. He gave it the full four seconds it deserved. A platform in the canopy, wards woven into the branches, a view of the entire floor laid out below like a map of itself.
Spectacular. Completely impractical. Exposed on every side, impossible to resupply quietly, visible from half the floor on a clear crystal day.
Maybe someday, he decided. Just for the aesthetic. Just to say I did.
He filed it away with genuine fondness and walked around to the far side of the tree, where the cliff edge gave way to the unoccupied stretch of the floor — no Rivira foot traffic, no adventurers filtering through on their way somewhere else. Just the forest running thick toward the lake, the crystal light doing its slow afternoon shift through the canopy, and the particular stillness of somewhere that had been left alone long enough to settle into itself.
He stood at the tree's edge and looked out over it. Forest on three sides, the main lake visible through the trees to the left, the cliff at his back. Dense enough that anything built in the middle of it would be invisible from the tree. Invisible from the lake. Invisible from anywhere, really, if you added the right wards on top.
Here, he thought. Somewhere in here.
He moved into the forest properly, taking his time, reading the ground the way Hogni had taught him without meaning to — not looking for threats, but for geometry. The way the trees grew, the way the light moved, the places where the roots formed natural walls and the ground levelled out and the undergrowth thinned just enough to make a space without advertising it.
Then he found the cave almost by accident.
Half-hidden behind a cluster of root formations, easy to walk past if your eyes were at the wrong height, easy to overlook even if they weren't. The mouth was narrow enough to read as a gap in the rock rather than an entrance. Max stopped, looked at it for a moment, then looked at Kairu.
The slime pulsed once. Interested.
He checked it carefully before going in — no occupation, no recent scent of anything that lived here, no signs of use. The cave ran back about twelve meters before opening into a natural chamber, ceiling high enough to stand in comfortably, floor reasonably flat, a narrow secondary passage in the far wall that dead-ended after three meters. He stood in the centre and turned a slow circle.
Super villain, his brain offered, with immediate and absolute conviction. This is objectively a super villain's cave.
The stone walls. The single defensible entrance. The complete absence of anyone or anything within a significant radius. He felt the grin arrive before he'd made any decision about it.
Then he walked back outside and found, through a gap in the root formations fifteen meters from the cave mouth, a secondary pool. Small, dark, still, ringed with reeds that barely moved. Private. Invisible from the main lake. The kind of spot you could bathe in or sit beside or simply exist near without anyone ever knowing you were there.
No one would suspect a thing, he thought. Come out of a cave, clearly been there the whole time. Perfect.
He nodded to himself and got to work.
The wards went down in proper layers — fifty meters out in every direction, covering both the cave and the pool within the same perimeter. The outermost layer passive concealment, the kind that made wandering eyes and any wandering monsters feel a gentle, sourceless urge to be elsewhere. Inside that, a proximity alert keyed directly to his awareness. Inside that, a hard barrier requiring his mana signature to pass silently. He worked in focused silence and the sigils went in cleanly, each one settling into rock and root as if it had been waiting for exactly this.
The teleport anchor went into the inner wall at knee height. Invisible, keyed exclusively to his mana. No visible approach, no traceable entry.
Then the interior. He marked out the layout with magical lines first — cot here, storage shelf cut from the wall there, light source positioned so it wouldn't bleed past the wards. The secondary passage became a sealed storage alcove with a pressure seal keyed to Kairu's resonance frequency. A two-key system for anything that mattered.
He was still working on the alcove seal when he heard the low focused pulse from the direction of the entrance and turned around.
A door?
Dense grey-blue slime, hardened to something close to ironwood, fitted in the cave entrance frame with an accuracy that had no business existing from a creature without hands. Not rough — precise. The surface smooth except for the overlapping dragon scales pressed into it, each edge clean, the whole thing carrying a faint iridescent sheen where the crystal light from outside caught it. Not Max's armour pattern, which was angular and deliberate. Something older-feeling. Something that looked like it had a history even though that history was approximately forty minutes old.
The pauldron had thinned slightly at the shoulder. Kairu had given material for this. Quietly taken from himself to build something for the space they were making together.
Max looked at the door for a long moment.
"You've been holding that out on me," he said.
Ki~ Modest. Deeply pleased with himself.
He pressed his palm to the surface, keyed his mana in slowly, felt it accept the signature and lock around it. Tested it without the key — immovable. With the key it swung silently, perfectly balanced.
He stepped back and looked at all of it. The wards humming at the edges of his awareness. The anchor invisible in the inner wall. The magical layout waiting to become a real room. Kairu's door with its dragon scales catching the pale blue light.
This is mine.
Not assigned. Not lent. His. A door only he and Kairu could open, fifty meters of his own magic standing between it and the rest of the world, a private lake visible through the gap in the roots outside.
He gave it one last satisfied look, closed the door, and walked back through the blue-lit forest toward Rivira.
-◈ -
Hogni
He was waiting near the exit corridor when Max emerged from the treeline — or rather, Hogni materialised from the shadows of the cliff face with the composed deliberateness of someone who had been watching the approach for some time and had decided to make an entrance of it. He had found a hood somewhere in the hours they'd been here, deep grey fabric pulled forward to shadow his face, and he'd arranged himself with the unconscious dignity of a man who had decided that if he was going to be standing in the dark, he was going to stand in it properly.
Max looked at him. Looked at the hood. Looked at the pose.
Very dramatic, he thought, and said nothing.
"R-ready to go back?" Hogni asked. Whatever authority the entrance had been building came apart slightly on the stutter. He glanced upward at the crystal sky, which had cycled through to something close to noon — the central white blazing at its fullest, the blue rings brightened to something that genuinely felt like a high summer afternoon. "It has been several hours."
Max shook his head and dropped to the ground cross-legged, already pulling his pack around. "It's only noon. Sit down."
Hogni blinked. "I — we should be —"
"Hogni." Max looked up at him. "When did you last eat?"
A pause. The kind that answered the question without needing to.
"Sit down," Max said again, not unkindly.
He had the small camp stove assembled by the time Hogni lowered himself to the ground across from him, with the careful, slightly bewildered manner of someone who had not expected the afternoon to go this direction. Max laid out what he'd brought — dried meats, wrapped bread, the marshmallows he'd bought on impulse and did not regret, the components for a proper stew. The canteen went between them.
The small fire caught. The smell of it changed the air immediately — warm and domestic and entirely out of place on Floor 18 in the way that made it feel more significant, not less.
Hogni watched him work in silence. He'd started to say something twice — Max could see it in the shift of his hood, the slight set of his shoulders — before thinking better of it both times. The objection about his own supplies. The reminder that he hadn't asked for this. Neither came out, and eventually Hogni simply accepted the bowl placed in his hands with the quiet dignity of someone choosing not to make a point of something.
He took a careful sip. Said nothing.
Took another.
Max skewered a marshmallow, held it over the flame, and watched it brown. "So how'd you end up in Orario?"
The hood turned toward him. "...That is a long story."
"We're eating stew on Floor 18 with a crystal sun overhead," Max said. "I think we have time."
Something loosened in the set of Hogni's shoulders. Not much. Just enough.
Then he started talking.
"We were — very evenly matched," Hogni said, with something that was almost dry. Almost. "It was not a short fight."
Max glanced up at him. The hood was back now, fully fallen, and Hogni's expression carried the particular stillness of someone revisiting something they had examined enough times to no longer flinch at.
"How long?" Max asked.
"Three days."
He said it simply, without elaboration, and somehow that was worse than elaboration would have been. Three days while their armies tore each other apart in the forest below, and the two kings fought on a separate plane of it entirely — not for survival, not for territory anymore, but for the older and more stubborn reason. To finish it. To be the one who finished it.
"And then?" Max asked.
"And then we found out."
Hogni was quiet for a moment. The fire had burned low, and neither of them moved to tend it.
Their lady had spoken to them before. Separately, quietly, in the way she did things — finding the space between words where the real question lived and asking it without asking it. She had found them both in their own private silences and asked, simply, whether this was the life they would have chosen. Not whether they were willing to continue it. Whether they would have chosen it, if choosing had ever been offered.
Neither of them had answered. But she had heard the answer anyway.
And so she moved. A word here, a misunderstanding carefully encouraged there, the specific pressure applied to the specific fractures that were already there. Not manufactured — only revealed, the way you reveal a crack in stone that was always going to give. She had simply ensured it gave now, completely, in a way that left nothing unresolved.
Not out of malice. The opposite of malice, though it had not felt that way immediately upon understanding it.
She freed them.
Hogni was quiet for a long moment after he said that. Not uncomfortable with it — thoughtful. The way you are thoughtful about something that required years to fully understand and now simply sits in you as fact.
"We were kings," he said. "Of an island at the edge of a desert that nobody else wanted. Of a conflict that had outlived every reason it began. There was no life outside of it. No future past the next season of fighting. And she saw that." A pause. "She decided we deserved better. Even if we would not have chosen better ourselves."
Too involved in his tale, Hogni finally turned —
Max had been quietly packing the camp stove back into his pack while Hogni talked. Canteen capped. Food wrapped. Done slowly, carefully, without any sound that might break the current of it, because Hogni was fully inside the memory — leaning forward slightly, his hood fallen back, his hands making small unconscious gestures as he described his first impression of the goddess, the specific quality of that moment, the way something in him had simply —
Max stood up with his pack.
Took a step toward the corridor.
"— and that," he said, as they crossed the threshold into the connecting passage to Floor 19 and the crystal light of Floor 18 gave way to the darker stone of the descending corridor, "is how I joined the Familia."
Hogni nodded, satisfied he had managed the whole tale without his personality interrupting it, for one full second.
Then stopped.
The instinct hit before the conscious thought did. They were going down. The passage was heading deeper. The air was already changing, carrying the particular weight of floors that took adventurers more seriously.
He stopped so abruptly it was almost a stumble. Turned.
"You shouldn't go deeper, Maximus."
The stutter was gone. The careful timidity was gone. The slight diffidence that Hogni wore like a second hood most of the time — gone. What remained was a voice that had commanded people in places far more dangerous than this, low and level and carrying the specific gravity of someone who was not making a suggestion.
-◈ -
Max
He paused and looked at him for a moment, then reached up and rubbed the back of his neck.
"You asked about my magic earlier," he said sheepishly. "Well. This isn't exactly the one you asked about, but it's related. So — here."
He held out his hand.
A sheet of parchment materialised from nothing, crisp and clean, settling into his palm with the quiet certainty of something created. Hogni's eyes tracked it with the sharp attention of someone who had spent decades reading the significance of unexpected things.
"My species has many magics," Max said, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. "And this is one of the important ones: Contracts. We can form them with other races — binding agreements to complete a task in exchange for something of value. When the contract succeeds, both parties benefit and our magic and standing grows stronger for it." He paused. "It's the core of what we are, functionally."
Hogni's expression had shifted into the specific careful stillness of someone processing new information and not yet deciding what to do with it. The question was already forming behind his eyes.
Max raised a hand before it could arrive. "Don't ask me to explain the full mechanics. It's genuinely strange and I'm not entirely certain I understand all of it myself." He said it with the easy honesty of someone comfortable admitting the edges of their own knowledge. "What I know is that it works, and I want to try it with you. We're here, the conditions are right, and I don't know when I'll have an opportunity like this again."
He paused.
"Not to mention," he added, at a volume that was technically under his breath but not particularly committed to it, "rubbing it in that stupid Hedin's face when this works."
Hogni heard it. His expression shifted — something between offended dignity and the involuntary flicker of someone who found that funnier than they wanted to.
Max pressed on before the moment could be examined.
"The terms are simple. I will run ahead. I won't engage with anything — I focus entirely on evasion and escape, not fighting. Every monster between here and where you find me is yours. You fight, you clear, you catch up." He met Hogni's eyes steadily.
"I know what you're thinking. But I'm not asking you to let me run unprotected. If I get cornered, you'll reach me before it becomes serious — and if I get caught in a trap, I can hold long enough for you to arrive. I can defend myself for a short time. I just won't be engaging offensively."
He let a beat pass.
"Unless Valletta shows up again," he added. "In which case, all bets are off and I will run back."
Hogni made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh but landed somewhere between the two. The tension in his jaw had loosened, fractionally.
"As for what you get out of it," Max continued, "all the excelia from every kill goes to you. Every drop item. Everything. I take the magic stones only." He glanced toward his pauldron. "And you don't even need to worry about the cleanup."
Ki~ said Kairu, brightly, and launched himself from the pauldron to Hogni's shoulder with the calm confidence of a creature that had already decided this was where he lived now.
Hogni looked at the slime on his shoulder. The slime looked back. Neither blinked, for different reasons.
"And I promise," Max said, more quietly now, "I won't push past what I can handle. When I'm tired, we come back. No argument, no negotiation. That's part of the terms."
Silence.
Hogni looked at the parchment. At Max. At the corridor descending ahead of them. He turned it over in his mind the way he turned everything over — carefully, without rushing, giving it the weight it was owed.
This is beyond foolish, he thought. He is a Level 1 proposing to run ahead of me into floors that have killed experienced adventurers.
But.
The boy had walked into the entrance of Floor 19 without Abnormal Resistance. He had come through seventeen floors without a visible scratch — and that cut on his cheek from earlier had simply stopped being there at some point, which Hogni had noted and filed and not yet found a satisfactory explanation for. He moved differently from any Level 1 Hogni had encountered. He thought differently. He planned differently. He spent the last several hours being consistently, quietly surprising in ways that didn't fit the category he was supposed to occupy.
And beyond all of that — Hogni's funds were what they were. His growth had been flat. The excelia from a clean sweep between Floor 19 and 22 would be more than he'd accumulated in weeks of surface rotations. And when Max returned to the Familia and described the dive, the account of Hogni's efforts would reach the Mistress. That thought settled something in him that he chose not to examine too closely.
He exhaled slowly.
"...You are," he said, "the most unreasonable person I have met in this city."
"Is that a yes?" Max asked.
Hogni looked at him for one more long moment. Then he reached out and clasped the offered hand.
"It is," he said.
Max broke into a genuine grin — wide and unguarded — and pressed the parchment between their joined hands. The contract formed with the clean precision of something that had been waiting for exactly this agreement. And then it took effect.
A faint golden glow spread from the parchment, quiet and warm, washing briefly over both of them and the slime between them. It faded in seconds, leaving nothing visible behind — just the settled feeling of something properly bound, something that had locked into place.
Ki~! said Kairu, with the unbridled enthusiasm of a creature that had been waiting for this moment and found it exceeded expectations.
Hogni looked down at his own hand. Then at the corridor. Then at Max, whose smile had taken on a quality that Hogni had learned, over the past several hours, to be moderately suspicious of.
"For extra motivation," Max said, as his smile widened — "try to find me before I get bored."
Hogni opened his mouth.
His vision went dark.
Not threatening — just sudden, and complete, and entirely without handholds. The slime conformed to every edge with the patient thoroughness of something that had done this before and intended to do it properly. He pushed once. Twice. His grip slipped from the slime's gelatinous surface.
From somewhere ahead—
"Let the dungeon hide and seek begin!"
Max's voice. Bright. Delighted. Fading fast.
-◈ -
Hogni
He stood in the entrance corridor of Floor 19 with Kairu over his eyes, his new contract active, and the profound specific silence of someone who had just shaken hands with a person he perhaps should have negotiated with more carefully.
He could imagine it perfectly — the dramatic pose, the coat catching the air, the absolute unnecessary theatrical commitment of a thirteen-year-old who had been waiting to say that line.
Then the footsteps vanished, swallowed whole by the dungeon, and there was nothing.
A minute passed. Then the hold loosened, the cool weight redistributed back to his shoulder, and Hogni could see again.
Floor 19 stretched ahead of him. Dark, wide, already murmuring with the sounds of things that lived here and hadn't yet decided what to make of him.
Kairu chirped once — Ki~ — and looked forward with the bright attention of something ready to get started.
Hogni straightened his hood. Settled his hand on his hilt. Looked at the dungeon ahead with the long-suffering expression of a man who had just understood the full scope of what he'd agreed to.
For the Abyss. Hogni paused for a moment as a happy smile came to his face. And, he admitted quietly, for the boy.
And started moving.
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
Not too proud of how this chapter turned out, not just because of the word count at 6.8k, but also the scenes are a bit of a struggle to write especially the Rivira ones. After that it was a breeze with Max being his normal self and making himself a dark lair in a dungeon cave.
As you know from the last AN, this chapter was supposed to end with Max finishing his dungeon dive, which includes 2 more scenes, but I thought that would be too long and mess with the immersion. Next chapter will surely end the Dive & Arc though and we will get back to surface where the real fun begins.
Max's falna update ;)
I frankly have big things planned for it and it's gonna be one of the most ridiculous falna updates you would see imo.
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