Mia
It was a quiet, standard afternoon at the Hostess.
Mia Grand stood behind the counter, polishing a wooden mug with the steady, unconscious rhythm of someone who had repeated the same motion ten thousand times. Out on the tavern floor, a few local merchants were finishing their late lunches. Weaving between their tables was Anya, displaying her usual, spectacular brand of clumsiness.
Clatter.
A stack of plates wobbled dangerously in the catgirl's hands. She barely caught them, bumping her hip into a chair in the process. "S-Sorry, nya! I've got it! I'm totally fine!" Anya squeaked, her tail fluffing up as she tried to recover her dignity with double the vigor, which only brought her closer to tripping again.
Mia shook her head, a heavy sigh ruffling her bangs. Good thing the plates and pots are wood, she thought dryly. If I'd bought glass, that girl would have put me in a vicious cycle of debt just replacing the inventory.
Ding-a-ling.
The bell above the door chimed, slicing through the afternoon lull.
Anya perked up, her ears swiveling forward. She took one look at the figure stepping through the door and immediately bristled, planting her hands on her hips. "Hey, nya! We only serve proper folk right now. Adventurers come back in the evenin'—"
"Stand down, Anya," Mia intervened, her loud voice cutting across the room before the catgirl could shoo him out.
Mia tossed her cloth aside and planted her massive hands on the counter, taking a long, evaluating look at the boy standing in the doorway.
Max.
He was covered in a layer of grime that could only be earned deep underground. Ash, dust, and dried monster blood flaked off his dark armor, making him look like he'd just climbed out of a war zone. But beneath the filth, his posture was entirely different from a week ago. He wasn't hunched. He wasn't looking over his shoulder like a cornered rabbit. He stood straight, an undercurrent of deep, humming satisfaction radiating from him despite the obvious physical exhaustion.
"Look like a stray dog that rolled in an ash pit," Mia grunted, pointing a thick finger toward the back stairs. "Washroom's up there. Go bathe first. Ye're not sittin' in my chairs lookin' like a walkin' mudslide."
Max blinked, looking down at his soiled clothes, then grinned—a genuine, unbothered expression.
"Thanks, Mama Mia."
The words came out before he'd thought about them. Something about the gruff efficiency of her care — the pointed finger, the complete lack of fuss — had bypassed his filter entirely. It reminded him of Stella. River Village. It felt like a lifetime ago.
He caught himself half a second too late, a flicker of realisation crossing his face.
Mia raised one eyebrow at him. Looked at the expression. Read it the way she read everything — quickly and without comment.
She said nothing. Just pointed at the stairs again.
Without a word of protest, he headed upstairs.
Anya watched him go, her eyes narrowing as she finally recognized the familia crest beneath the ash. "Mama, he's one of hers, nya. Must be a new one. Why are you cookin' for him?"
"I said stand down, Anya," Mia replied, already turning toward the kitchen. "I want to talk to him. Keep watch."
Anya huffed, crossing her arms with a pout, and went back to clumsily stacking dishes while keeping a watchful eye on the entrance.
Mia set the mug down and moved to the kitchen. As her hands found the familiar rhythm of the stove — the heavy skillet, the cut of meat, the smell of fat beginning to render — her mind drifted back to the week before.
She remembered the night he first arrived clearly. The stumble in from the street, nearly out of energy, the particular pallor of someone who had been running for a long time and had only just stopped. Her instincts flared immediately as she took in the situation. Someone was hunting him. And so, she'd let him in without asking questions. That was the rule of the Hostess. You trusted her roof, she kept you safe.
Then Freya walked in.
That smile. That terrible, beautiful, completely unbothered smile.
Mia made her position very clear at the door, as she always did with uninvited goddesses who arrived with expectations. Freya accepted the terms with the gracious patience of someone who intended to get exactly what she wanted regardless. Mia went upstairs to check on the boy — ensure he was decent, ensure nothing in his state posed a problem — and found him transformed.
Not just the hair, though that was striking enough. Royal blue where it had been dark before, features softened from the aristocratic severity he'd worn like a mask when he stumbled in. What she'd seen in the street was a child shaped by the wrong kind of pressure — too much, too fast, forced into a form that didn't fit. What was sleeping in the bed looked more like what he was supposed to be. Someone in the early stages of becoming themselves.
She allowed Freya to stand in the doorway. Nothing more.
Dawn came. The goddess descended. And then the boy appeared, looked at the piggy standing in her tavern, and challenged him to a duel before he had so much as a Falna to his name.
Mia saw many things in her life. She fought things that made Level 5 adventurers hesitate. She watched the greatest Familias in history fall, and her own rise to fill the vacuum. She stood at the front of it through both. Even now, semi-retired, she ensured her past didn't shackle her. But still — that specific, completely unearned, utterly calm challenge from an unknown boy — had genuinely surprised her.
Not because of the audacity. Audacity was common. Because of the steadiness. No bravado in his voice. No performance. Just a boy who had looked at the Warlord and made a practical assessment.
She started paying attention after that. Trent's reports from Folkvangr had reached her through the usual channels — the old dwarf could never fully hide his nostalgia when something reminded him of better days, and he practically glowed talking about the boy's progress. She would have dismissed it as a retired captain's wishful thinking if she hadn't seen it herself. The earnestness in his eyes was genuine. Trent didn't manufacture emotion.
The meat hit the skillet. The smell rose. Mia let the rhythm of the cooking settle around her.
Whoever he is, she thought, he's something. Just not sure what yet.
Half an hour later, Max descended the stairs. He was scrubbed clean, his wet blue hair pushed back, wearing a simple, sturdy set of spare clothes. He glanced at his reflection in a wall mirror, gave a quick nod to himself, and walked up to the counter.
Mia didn't lead him to the main dining floor. She stepped out from behind the counter and guided him into the private staff room off to the side.
Once inside the quiet, private space, she set a massive bowl of steaming, rich stew and fresh bread on the table. Max sat down with a heavy sigh of relief. He reached into his shirt, pulled out Kairu, and set the slime on the table, breaking off a piece of bread for the ooze before picking up his own spoon.
Max took a bite of the stew, closed his eyes, and let out a long, blissful groan. The savory, impossibly deep flavor flooded his senses, chasing away the metallic tang of the Dungeon. He ate eagerly, the tension in his shoulders finally bleeding away.
Mia leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. She looked at the blue ooze curiously. She knew he had it a week ago but hadn't thought much of it— assuming it to be a novelty pet.
But seeing it up close now, her veteran instincts tingled. She could feel a faint, structured aura radiating around the little puddle. It didn't feel like a monster; it felt like a strong opponent. She watched the boy and the slime eat, taking in their seamless, quiet coordination.
They did somethin' big in the Dungeon today, she knew instantly.
Seeing that Max had demolished half the bowl, she finally spoke up.
"So," Mia asked, a curious edge to her gruff tone. "Did ye actually make her give the ooze a Falna?"
She didn't remember anyone, not even in the peak days of the Zeus and Hera Familias, possessing a familiar like this, let alone claiming to have officially tamed one.
Max swallowed his food and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I wouldn't put it like that. It was more of a... mutually beneficial deal."
He let the older woman observe Kairu. Obviously sensing the attention, the slime puffed up, basking in the spotlight. Kairu extruded two tiny pseudopods, molding them into little fists, and began striking various flexing poses.
Mia couldn't help it; a genuine bark of laughter escaped her.
After a moment of letting his familiar show off, Max leaned back in his chair. The casual air faded just a fraction, replaced by something sharper. "What can I do for you, Mama Mia?"
His voice was polite, but Mia understood. He was directly asking for her real intention in pulling him aside.
"Nothin' much," Mia replied, keeping her single eye fixed on him. "I just want to know who ye truly are. Ye're behavin' quite contrary to how I expected. From a kid who had the gall to challenge the piggy for a duel while unblessed, ye are much calmer than I thought ye'd be."
Max raised an eyebrow at that. Was she expecting me to go in charging and get wrecked? Does she think I'm some kind of meathead? The thought amused him to no end.
"If you were expecting a hothead, sorry to disappoint," Max said, a lazy, Devilish smirk touching his lips. "I just want an adventure. And I'm certainly having one by joining the Familia." He paused, looking down at his cup as if reflecting on the colorful personalities he'd met in Folkvangr. "Though it seems my bad luck with elves has followed me from the outside world right into the Familia as well."
Mia stared at him for a second, catching the specific exasperation in his tone. An amused smile cracked her gruff exterior. "I hope that doesn't have to do with a certain Light Elf?"
Max gave a weary, exaggerated nod. "You know him?"
Deciding this was the perfect moment to flip the script, Max leaned forward, resting his chin on his hands. "Were you an adventurer before starting this shop?"
Mia raised a questioning eyebrow. "What makes ye ask that?"
"I mean, I felt a kind of familiarity between you and Lady Freya that first night," Max reasoned, ticking the points off on his fingers. "Not to mention your lack of shock when I challenged Ottar. Most civilians would have yelled their minds out. But the dead giveaway was this."
He pointed to the half-empty bowl of stew.
"The food in Folkvangr's mess hall tastes suspiciously similar to this piece of heaven. You taught their cooks, didn't you?"
Mia's eye widened slightly. She had to admit, the boy had incredible perception. To tie a humble tavern owner back to the strongest Familia in the city based on a bowl of stew and a lack of panic was sharp.
With a begrudgingly impressed look, she answered, "Aye, we go way back. Which is irrelevant right now." She waved a hand, steering the conversation firmly back to him. "Comin' to you... weren't ye on yer firs' dive? How's the Dungeon treatin' ya?"
Max knew when a door was being shut. He accepted the deflection gracefully and answered with genuine enthusiasm.
"It was, in a word, exhilarating," Max said, his eyes lighting up as the adrenaline of the Middle Floors briefly resurfaced. "I'm eager to go back soon."
Mia nodded, recognizing the authentic adventurer's spark.
Taking the opening, Max tried to press his luck, firing off a few casual questions about her time in the Dungeon, hoping to extract stories the same way he had with Hogni.
But Mia was not Hogni.
"Enough words out of yer mouth," she barked, shutting the interrogation down immediately. She stood up, smoothing her apron. "Go on, get out. The pub is gettin' busy."
She gestured toward the door leading to the main floor. Through the gap, Max could see the Hostess filling up with the early evening crowd. Anya was rushing between tables, clumsily dropping a spoon, loudly apologizing, and darting away to grab another.
Max smiled at the sight. Looking closely at her features—the sand-colored hair, the golden cat eyes—a realization finally clicked.
Right. That's Anya Fromel. Allen's sister. The family resemblance in the temper and the volume is uncanny.
Setting the lore aside, Max agreed with Mia's dismissal. "Fair enough. Keep your secrets. I'll get my answers next time."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of Valis coins, moving to set them on the table.
Mia held up a massive hand, her expression stern. "Put that away. It's not needed. Consider it a celebration for survivin' yer successful dive."
Max wasn't put off, though. He was not a charity case, especially when he was just paid. He slammed the stack of coins firmly onto the wooden table anyway.
"I don't know if I'll have this much money next time I drop in," Max said with a cheeky, unrepentant smile, scooping Kairu up onto his shoulder. "So I'm pre-paying!"
Before Mia could reach over the table and box his ears for ignoring her hospitality, Max bolted. He slipped out of the staff room, dashed through the crowded tavern, and literally ran out the front door into the fading Orario sunset, leaving a very amused dwarven woman shaking her head in his wake.
-◈ -
Max
As he stepped out of the Hostess, his magic senses tingled, and before he could react, he walked squarely into a wall of muscle that seemed to materialize from the alley's shadows.
He stumbled back a step. Ottar simply stood there, looking entirely unbothered, as though a teenager hadn't just bounced off his chest like a thrown pebble.
"Max," the Warlord greeted, his deep voice carrying a calm, rumbling resonance. He gave a single, firm nod toward the center of the city. "Lady Freya is waiting for you. Come."
Max adjusted his collar, making sure Kairu was still tucked securely, and fell into step as Ottar turned and walked without waiting for an answer. The evening streets were alive with the usual post-dive crowd — adventurers comparing hauls, merchants packing up stalls, the distant clatter of the Dungeon's commerce bleeding into the city's bloodstream — but none of it seemed to register for the man walking ahead of him. Ottar moved through Orario the way a river moved through rock: not around, simply through, and the crowd adjusted accordingly.
Max followed in the wake he left, suppressing a wry grin the whole way. I wonder how Hedin is going to react to this. I was expressly forbidden from visiting Babel, and here Ottar is, personally escorting me past the restriction. Classic Freya Familia communication.
Babel swallowed them whole once they were inside — the roar of the main concourse, the crowded return from the Dungeon, the layered noise of the commercial floors rising and falling above them — but Ottar moved through it all like a man who had walked this route a thousand times. He led Max past the concourse entirely, navigating to a heavily guarded elevator tucked into the far corner of the ground floor. Once inside, Ottar pulled a lever and pressed a rune-carved stone into its housing, and the lift woke up around them — a deep, thrumming vibration that Max felt in his boots — before beginning its smooth ascent.
The noise of the lower floors fell away quickly. In its place, a gradual quiet settled that made the hum of the elevator feel more pronounced, more deliberate. Max kept his eyes on the floor indicators ticking steadily upward, burning with questions about the security architecture built into the lift. It reminded him of the access fobs back in his world — different in every way except the principle, and he wanted to understand all of it. One glance at Ottar's profile was enough to table it indefinitely.
When the heavy doors finally parted at the pinnacle of Babel, Max stepped out into silence.
The space brought Freya's sanctum in Folkvangr immediately to mind — and then quietly surpassed it. The elevator had opened into a small central foyer with the suite wrapped around it on all sides in a full, unbroken ring. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, and then it clicked: there was no wall, anywhere in this suite, that didn't face outward. No obstructions. No blind spots. Just Orario, spread in every direction beneath the tower, the city's lights beginning to answer the fading sky.
Of course, he thought. She could watch the entire city from up here.
Ottar gestured toward a set of ornate doors at the far end of the foyer — brief, final, and with no indication he intended to follow. Knowing who was waiting for him, Max pushed them open and stepped through alone.
The lounge beyond was bathed in the warm glow of magical lamps, the light soft and unhurried, carrying with it the quiet scent of something floral and cool. Velvet and carved wood, everything exactly where it should be.
And there, sitting on a couch at its center in her signature red and black dress, was Freya.
She wasn't wearing the distant, composed mask of a deity receiving a subject. She was wearing a warm, genuine smile that reached her silver eyes, curiosity sitting openly in her expression without any attempt to hide it.
"Welcome, Max," she said, her voice like the first note of a song you already know. "I hope your dungeon dive was everything you expected?"
Seeing her made the last of the tension from the past forty-eight hours drain quietly away. He strolled over and dropped onto the couch opposite her, leaning back, settling in with the easy comfort of coming home.
"I would dare say," he said, with a small smile, "it was far beyond my expectations, Lady Freya."
Freya's smile deepened at that — just slightly, the way someone's does when they get exactly the answer they were hoping for.
-◈ -
Freya
She would have been content to listen to him speak for hours. There was a particular pleasure in watching Max narrate — the way he chose his words carefully, the way his hands moved when a memory was still fresh enough to make him forget himself. But she could do better than secondhand narration.
She could watch it herself.
"Lie down," she said softly. "Let me update your Falna first."
She caught the brief flicker of surprise crossing his face but he complied without argument, removing his chestplate and settling onto the couch with his back to her. Freya rose, pricked her fingertip, and let a single drop of ichor fall onto his skin.
A brilliant gold swallowed her completely — not the warm amber of the lamps, not the pale luminescence of a standard update, but something radiant and alive, pressing hard against her perception like a physical weight. She stood very still inside it. In all her years of updating Falna, she had never been struck blind by one.
As her perception adjusted the room disappeared, the chaos resolved into structure. Woven through the golden glow were three distinct focal points — knots of concentrated Excelia burning like compressed suns, feats so significant the system had refused to tally them as ambient experience and had preserved them whole instead. They demanded she look directly at what had been achieved.
She reached for the first knot, and the Falna swept her in.
Floors 1 through 8 blurred past in a compressed rush — impressions more than images, the flash of his blade and the crimson pulse of his magic threading through corridors that would have been a genuine trial for most first-dives.
She watched carefully, tracking the Excelia as it flowed into him after each kill. Something intercepted it every time. The energy was caught, stretched, and reshaped into something denser before it finally settled — not absorbed but forced in, as though his soul were being made to accommodate more than it had held before. Lux Tenebris. She could see the process but not yet the mechanism. She filed it and kept watching.
Then, at the threshold of Floor 8, the sensation transmitted through the Falna hit her like a struck chord.
It wasn't distant or clinical. It arrived in his body — a sharp sting tracing his spine that she felt echo through her own, heat spiking hard before settling into a heavy, rhythmic throb. His demonic power stirring awake beneath it, stretching, physically making room for more than it had held before.
She held the echo a moment longer than necessary, turning it over carefully. Not a passive multiplier, she thought. An active expansion. Each floor demands its toll — and pays it back with interest. The depth itself was the trigger, not the kills alone. The oppressive pressure of going deeper was what woke the skill.
She decided to ask about it later and pressed forward into the first true feat.
The smell arrived before anything visual — decay, copper, and sulfur, thick enough to register even through memory. Then came the silence where there should have been noise, and she felt Max's gut tighten in response. The central cavern assembled itself around her, and Freya went still.
Broken chitin. Torn leather. Shattered shields and empty boots scattered across the stone. In the center of it all, a Killer Ant twice its natural size — its chitin bruised violet with forced evolution — was methodically consuming a magic stone from the pocket of someone who had carried it there.
What she felt emanating from Max wasn't his demonic nature reacting. It was something quieter and entirely human: a cold, settling grief with nowhere particular to go. She saw Kairu flow upward and press against his neck in response. Then the grief burst — not suppressed, but transmuted. He moved.
She almost missed the beginning of it. One moment he was behind a stone pillar; the next he was simply elsewhere — not running, not leaping, just absent from one point and present in another. The outer circle of ants collapsed before any of them registered that something had entered the room. He appeared above the Champion, drove his rapier through the base of its skull, and fed a lethal current of electricity down the blade for good measure.
Freya turned the movement over in her mind when the memory concluded. It hadn't registered as high Agility stats usually did — the physical blur and momentum of a body operating at its ceiling. The Falna had categorized this as something else entirely. Magical propulsion. A spatial technique. She had blessed many adventurers over the years and had never seen it used like this. She filed it for later and let the Falna carry her forward to the second knot.
The next few floors blurred past and slowed at Floor 12 — a sprawling cavern lost in mist, two Infant Dragons dismantling a population of Silverbacks with the unhurried efficiency of things that had no natural predators here. One dragon's tail caught a Silverback and sent the massive ape spinning into a chasm without the beast even breaking stride.
Then Max's gaze found the glitter behind them, and Freya felt the laughter building in his chest — a genuine, slightly helpless amusement at finding a dragon hoard defended by actual dragons in an actual dungeon. She felt the decision to enter the fight form before any sensible thought had finished, and something tugged at her attention: what was it about this specific sight that made him laugh rather than calculate?
She had seen adventurers react to dragon hoards with greed, with fear, occasionally with awe. Not with the particular delight of someone recognising an old joke finally proved true. She added it to her questions and let the memory run.
What followed was nothing like the cold efficiency of Floor 9. It was chaotic and joyful and violently effective all at once — an inverted crystalline barrier absorbing searing dragonfire, a torrential wall of blue flame erasing a cluster of Silverbacks, that spatial displacement flickering through the mist again and again, keeping him ahead of things that should have been much faster than him.
Through the Falna's echo she tasted his adrenaline, felt the uncomplicated pleasure of a hard problem being solved at speed, and found herself leaning forward without noticing. An enticing thought followed: he was doing this at Level 1. What would he be capable of at Level 4? At Level 6?
Then, abruptly, the vision went dark.
Freya pushed against the current of the Falna instinctively, trying to return — to see what had become of the hoard after the dragons fell, to understand the gap. The system denied her flatly.
Whatever had happened between the dragon fight and the next corridor had been sealed from her view. Deliberate, she decided. Not a recording failure. Something had been set aside. She let the Falna pull her toward the final knot — the brightest by a considerable margin — and went in.
The scene opened on Floor 14. The entrance corridor, stone walls close on either side.
She had known about the Evilus tracking operation since he came to Orario. She had known they wanted him. She had not known they had mobilized a twenty-four-person ambush party and positioned them above the Middle Floors to intercept a fresh Level 1 or Level 2 according to them on his first solo dive.
When the hostile signatures closed in, a rare, genuine tension moved through her. It is a blessing Hogni agreed to shadow him, she thought, watching the formation take shape. She watched the memory intently, fully expecting Hogni's intervention at any moment.
But Hogni never moved.
She had not expected Max to prepare the room beforehand.
She watched in absolute silence as the memory showed him mapping the corridor — overlapping trap circles, false patterns laid meticulously over real ones, throwing knives positioned with a precision she had no easy explanation for. Veteran Level 4 adventurers had built defensive positions with less care than this.
The patience alone was remarkable. Most boys his age could not hold this kind of predatory stillness before a fight they knew was coming. Where does a thirteen-year-old learn to think like this?
No answer came as she watched the formation approach and fell apart in the first thirty seconds. Freya felt a quiet, settled satisfaction as the prepared ground did its work. Then the tamers adapted — sacrificing their own monsters without hesitation to systematically clear what traps remained — and she revised her assessment upward. A competent commander. A real test.
Then the black mist poured out of him, and her analytical thinking stopped entirely.
Chantless. Instantaneous. Environmental manipulation on a scale that blanketed the entire corridor in seconds, turning a room where he was outnumbered into one where he was the only thing that could see. She felt the full implication of it settle over her. This wasn't desperate improvisation.
This was a prepared weapon, deployed at precisely the right moment, by a boy who had correctly identified that the fight needed to change registers entirely. She filed the terrifying versatility of it in silence and watched him work inside the dark.
There was no rage. Nothing wasted. He moved through the blind corridor with quiet, surgical deliberation — slipping between enemies who couldn't orient themselves, removing each one in turn with the calm of someone who had already decided the outcome and was simply executing the steps. He wasn't fighting the room. He was solving it.
A profound, shuddering thrill moved through Freya's physical body on the bed. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, her fingernails pressing into her own skin as the euphoria of watching him work crested and broke over her. He doesn't need saving, she realised, her breath unsteady. He is the real monster in the dark.
Then Dorian broke it.
She watched the leader force his way free of the illusion — a self-inflicted cut, pain overriding the false perception — and his voice cut through the mist like a blade, giving the surviving fighters the same escape. The remaining adventurers oriented themselves in seconds. The tactical advantage inverted.
She watched Max register the loss and shift without hesitation, the PoD Armor darkening around him as he pulled his awareness inward and committed everything to offense instead. The fight became a different thing — faster, more dangerous, the margin between them narrowing as Dorian activated the curse and the greatsword's energy changed quality entirely.
She watched the cursed blade cut through the PoD coating. Watched the thin line open across his shirt. Saw exactly — exactly — how close that steel had come. Her hand moved toward Max before she caught herself and pressed it flat against the bed instead. He is sitting in front of you, unharmed, she told herself. Just continue.
Then the wings opened, and Freya went completely still.
She had seen them before, in the quiet of her chambers — understood them abstractly as something beautiful, something that belonged to his lineage. But seeing them open in a dungeon corridor, in the middle of a frantic duel against a cursed Level 3 blade, was an entirely different thing.
He banked and spiralled in a space with no business fitting aerial combat, dismantling thirty tracking blades with the ease of something that had simply found the medium it was built for. The cramped stone corridor had become his domain. Not adapted to. Claimed. That was him, fully expressed, and the Status sheet had not prepared her for what it looked like in motion.
His Radial Burst ended Dorian. Clean. Absolute. A void where a chest had been. Good, she thought quietly. Very good.
Then, from the shadows of the aftermath, a figure stepped out.
Freya recognised the motion before the shape fully appeared. A highly skilled assassin, moving toward Max at high speed. Freya's eyes narrowed, as they closed in. Level 5. At minimum.
She watched Max's automated awareness fail to register it in time. Watched the trajectory of the strike close on his throat with the calm certainty of something that had already ended. Watched what should have been a clean, unavoidable decapitation become — at the last possible fraction of a second, measured in millimetres — a graze along his cheek as Hogni's tackle redirected the blade at the cost of his shadow position entirely.
Max's blood. Real blood. Drawn for the first time.
She watched him stand in the aftermath, the adrenaline crashing. Saw his hand come away red. Watched him look at it for a long moment — not in shock, but with the focused attention of someone reading a message written specifically for them — before his jaw set and the cold thinking returned behind his eyes.
In the suite, Freya felt the corner of her mouth curve into something slow and private and considerably more possessive than warm. You read it correctly, she thought. Good. Let it teach you. You have ceilings left to break.
A pang of genuine regret struck her then, directed entirely at herself. Hogni had returned earlier that day, requesting a status update. She had granted it, noted his extraordinary growth with mild interest, and dismissed him without taking his report — dead set on watching Max's dive to ask the questions she should have asked.
The Level 5 in the shadows had clearly been the source of Hogni's unusual Excelia gains, and she had sent him away without learning a single detail about the encounter. Foolish, she thought. I assumed. I shouldn't have. Hogni had earned himself a very thorough interrogation upon his next appearance.
She expected the memory to end there. The ambush was concluded. The lesson had been delivered.
But it didn't end.
The replay pushed forward and the images accelerated into a disorienting blur — vast caverns, ancient petrified forests, the relentless press towards the end in their full, suffocating weight. She caught details surfacing and submerging too quickly to hold, and through it all, flashes of crimson spiking through the connection at irregular intervals.
This time, she didn't push against the current. She let the Falna carry her where it wanted to go.
It took her to a corridor on Floor 15.
The sensation hit before the visual fully resolved — that same sharp sting tracing the spine, the same aggressive heat spiking before settling into a heavy throb. His demonic power stirring awake again, stretching, demanding room. Freya went still as the recognition landed.
Floor 8. Floor 15. Seven floors apart, to the precise threshold.
She turned it over carefully. A fixed interval. Not triggered by accumulated kills or time spent — by depth, by the specific pressure of crossing a floor boundary at the right distance from the last activation. Lux Tenebris wasn't random. It was structured. A seven-floor cycle, each activation demanding its toll and returning it with interest.
She nodded slowly, a quiet satisfaction settling over her. That's what you went down there to test, wasn't it? Two days of diving, Floor 15 reached and confirmed, the pattern identified. Good depth for a first solo dive. Exceptional, even. She had assumed that was the shape of it — go deep enough to trigger the skill twice, map the interval, return with the data.
She was wrong.
Once the Lux Tenebris activation passed and Max recovered, the memory showed her what came next — and Freya found herself very still for an entirely different reason.
Hogni was standing beside him.
Not in the shadows. Not at a careful distance with his presence carefully concealed. Beside him, in plain corridor light, in a posture that suggested the two of them had reached some kind of operational understanding that her most reclusive, socially impossible executive had absolutely no business reaching with anyone, let alone a Level 1 adventurer on his first solo dive.
The jig being up explained why Hogni had abandoned his shadow position. It did not explain why he was standing there like that. She knew the Dark Elf King. She knew what it cost him to occupy the same visible space as another person without his armour of distance and silence firmly in place. Whatever had passed between them on Floor 14 had been enough to produce something she was genuinely uncertain she had ever seen from Hogni before.
She wanted very much to know how.
The Excelia compressed again as the Falna pushed forward — the blur accelerating through whatever followed, giving her impressions rather than detail, the vast wooden architecture of the deeper tree labyrinth rushing past until it finally anchored at the unmistakable threshold of Floor 22. The entrance. And then the return — the long climb back up, the Falna recording it in fast-forward, until the light of Babel swallowed the memory entirely.
Freya was quiet for a moment. Simply quiet — sitting with the fact that he had not stopped at Floor 15 once the pattern was confirmed. Had not treated the data as sufficient and turned back. Had kept going, with Hogni openly beside him and Lux Tenebris having just torn him open from the inside, all the way to the entrance of Floor 22 before finally turning around.
On his first dive. In forty-eight hours.
She let that sit as long as it needed to.
Then she withdrew from the visual memories entirely, letting the Falna's light shift from narrative to arithmetic — the underlying numbers, the true measure of what forty-eight hours in the Dungeon had made of him. She moved to the raw data with the calm precision of someone who had done this ten thousand times, ready to catalogue his growth.
She reached his Status and read it.
And what she read made her eyes almost bug out.
---
Status:
Maximus Stilbon
Freya Familia
Devil (Low Class)
Level 1*
[*Notice: Level Up available.]
--> Devil in a Dungeon <--
AN:
I was done with the draft long ago, but was trying to coax everything to align instead of doing their own thing, hehe. Coming to the chapter, it's one hell of a chapter as we see Mia and Anya properly introduced and get to see what Mia was thinking and Anya's clumsiness.
And Max enjoying every moment on his way to Babel imagining the outrage on Hedin's face. Man I swear Max is slowly becoming a Hedin hater. I remember mentioning him learning from Hedin as one of the reasons for him joining Freya. Oh the irony.
I will do my best to write the next chapter today, folks. But honestly I'm so drained trying to get this chapter in order. But I promise the next chapter will be true reveal of Max's Status along with the juicy stuff that comes with most Level Ups, Developmental Abilities!
Ashley won the offer on the Unique Aspect. And I got the addition. We will get there soon.
As always, don't forget to share your thoughts on the story in a review/comment.
If you'd like to read 7 chapters ahead, support my work, or commission a story idea, visit p.a.t.r.e.o.n.c.o.m/b3smash.
Please note that the chapters are early access only, they will be eventually released here as well.
There won't be an update on Tuesday unless I have time to write as I'll be out of town for my mother's Eye Treatment. So the next update will be on Friday.
Ben, Out.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.