Dominic checked the supplies one more time before making the call.
Buff plants: they had a steady supply of Snow Lime, Stoic Garlic, and dungeon grown sweet potatoes. Recovery options: Sympathy Enoki, Weeping Onion, and Relaxing Shiitake were abundant, as Phong had literally forced them to bring extra just in case. Utility plants: Alerting Carrots, Arrogant Ginger, Bright Sunflower Seed, Watering Oyster Mushroom. Emergency food: they had rations packs and several pounds of moletatoes.
And most importantly, the Overdrive panic button in the form of Berserking Strawberries.
Dominic had them check their gears one last time, making sure they were ready for the dive ahead.
Then he looked at the gate again and said, "We go."
Nobody argued, as they all understood exactly why Dominic made that choice.
Emma had been right. If they wanted to protect the people waiting behind them, if they wanted the strength to stand beside Phong when the world's powers finally came prying at the secret of the garden, then they needed more than loyalty and good intentions. They needed leverage: fame, influence, weight heavy enough that no one could quietly uproot them.
And Floor 3, the New Frontier, was exactly that.
If Floor 2 was the main battle field, then Floor 3 was the old wild west.
Filled to the brim with danger, as well as life changing riches and opportunity. The reason why the Chinese had stacked bodies to put Yue Ting firmly there, the reason why the reckless Vietnamese had been charging headfirst toward the nearest gate to floor 3 like maniacs. And the Russians... Vodka flowed in their body like blood, so of course they were fearless.
And so...
Team Nemean stepped through the golden gate.
Behind it waited the spiral staircase.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the dungeon changed.
The deep, layered, complex eco system they were used to was suddenly... gone. Total, complete absence filled every nooks and crannies of the void with darkness. No sounds, no smells, nothing. The only things they could sense were the dim light emitted by the stairs, and the cold of stones handrails. But even the stones here were wrong, like an AI was trying it best to replicate what it thought was the feeling of stone through words and memories alone.
The staircase twisted downward through absolute nothing.
Around them was the Void.
True emptiness, a darkness deeper than their ocean and thicker than tar, as if everything that should exist between one floor and the next had been hollowed out and denied. It was not a space you could measure. It was truly, utterly nothing, vast and still, with only the staircase behind the gate allowed to remain.
Jake stared out at it once and immediately looked back at the steps. His head spun, as if something was trying to force its way into his brain.
"Nope."
Joanne swallowed. "That feels wrong."
Emma's voice stayed low. "If this is wrong, then try your best to not fall into that."
No one laughed.
Even Dominic kept his eyes ahead more than anywhere else.
The spiral seemed to go on longer than it should have. Time felt wrong in it, distance too. The team moved carefully, close enough that no one could lose the others, quiet except for the measured sounds of steps and breath. The descent was torturous. The lack of almost all stimulations to the senses made it felt like a cruel joke, like the white room torture compressed into the only viable mean of traversing the dungeon.
Alex felt the Void at the edges of her senses and hated it instantly. Her psychic constructs could lock onto enemies, space, pressure, sometimes even hostile intent if she squinted hard enough. This was none of those things. This was nothing at all. Nothing yet somehow carried crushing weight on everyone mental, slowly edging them toward insanity.
Jack touched one of the steps once with his fingertips and said nothing after, which was worse than if he had cursed.
At last, the staircase ended.
The team stepped out onto Floor 3.
A canyon stretched before them.
At first glance it looked simple.
Then their eyes adjusted to the new surrounding, and the details came.
That was when it became wrong.
The rock was obsidian black, not rough and natural like a mountain should be, but smooth, too smooth to be natural. The canyon walls rose in hard, polished surfaces that caught light and returned it with dim reflections. Not clean mirrors, more like those copper mirrors Alex had seen in one of Phong's period drama. Yet, they were close enough that movement danced across them in warped shadows. It made the whole place feel watched by its own reflection...
The ground was dark too, though less polished, and broken here and there by long cracks like old scars split across glass.
Nobody rushed forward.
Dominic raised a hand, and the team spread with care.
Jack stepped toward one of the black walls and pressed a palm against it. He frowned once, then more deeply as sweat started to gather near his brows.
"That's bad," he said.
Dominic glanced over. "How bad."
Jack kept his hand there another second, as if trying again through sheer stubbornness. Then, maybe he had realized his mana were better off used in a different way, he pulled away from the rock.
"My Stone Warden abilities can't control this."
That got everyone's attention fast.
Jack had shaped cave walls, battlegrounds, fortifications, choke points, anything with enough honest stone in it. If he said he could not move this, then it meant their Stone Warden just had half of his kit rendered useless by the canyon.
Joanne stared at the canyon walls. "That is deeply rude."
Emma looked around more carefully now. "So the terrain itself is outside your kit."
Jack nodded once. "Yeah."
Alex narrowed her eyes at the polished black surfaces. "Then we assume the worst."
"It could just be weird," Jake muttered.
"Doesn't make it any better," Camille said quietly.
Dominic gestured forward. "Scout."
Séline and Camille moved at once.
They slipped ahead into the canyon, moving through the rocky, reflective terrain with tensive care. The rest of the team held position and watched their lines, every second stretching longer in the strange stillness of Floor 3.
There was no wind.
No distant monster cry.
Only silence and the faint, wrong feeling of those black walls reflecting them back.
When Séline and Camille returned, both were moving faster than before.
Something had changed in their faces. It wasn't really panic, not that level yet at least, but there was indeed some fear there.
Dominic saw it first. "Report."
Séline exhaled once before answering. "There are sculptures ahead."
Camille's jaw was tight. "Stone heads."
Jake blinked. "What kind of heads."
"All kinds," Séline said.
That was bad enough.
Then she went on.
"Goat heads like the trolls. Goblins. Human divers." Her voice stayed controlled, but only just. "Different species. Different sizes. Scattered through the canyon."
Camille looked back the way they had come, as if she still did not trust the memory of it. "They are too lifelike."
A quiet settled over the team.
Emma's voice came out lower than usual. "Statues."
Séline shook her head.
"That's what I thought at first."
Camille finished for her.
"The expressions are all the same."
Dominic did not interrupt.
Camille's eyes lifted to meet his.
"Absolute horror."
Nobody spoke for a moment after that.
The polished canyon walls threw back their shapes in dark reflections, and somewhere ahead, deeper in Floor 3, waited a field of stone faces twisted into the last moment of terror.
Alex's hand drifted toward her side without thinking.
Emma stood very still.
Jack looked at the obsidian underfoot as if he suddenly trusted it even less than before.
Dominic took one slow breath, eyes on the path ahead.
Then Team Nemean moved forward into the canyon.
Jake went ahead this time.
It made sense. Out of all of them, he had the best mobility for peeking into a bad situation and getting back out before that situation decided it hated him personally. Rift Striker II was built for exactly that kind of ugly scouting.
So while the rest of Team Nemean held position among the black canyon walls and the scattered stone heads, Jake slipped forward alone.
The obsidian made everything worse.
Every step reflected wrong. Every angle seemed to offer sight and hide it at the same time. Even sound felt thin here, as if the canyon swallowed it before it could properly travel.
Jake moved anyway.
He reached the next bend and leaned just enough to look past it.
Then he froze.
A group of monsters had gathered in the widening of the canyon beyond.
At first glance, Jake's brain rejected what he was seeing.
Humanoid bodies.
Not fully human, but close enough in shape to trigger the instinctive wrongness of it. Arms. Legs. Torsos bent at familiar angles.
And on top of those bodies, where heads should have been, were spiders.
Not spider-headed, not humanoid spider folk like the Ettercap in DnD.
These things had a Whole. Freaking. Spider for a head.
Their bodies sat where skulls should be, bloated and dark, pulsating with liquid running through half translucent veins while their legs hooked down into the necks beneath them like cruel fingers sunk into meat. Each movement of those legs made the humanoid body twitch and shift in perfect response.
Jake felt his skin crawl.
Worse, they were on a hunt.
In the middle of them was a Greencap bunny soldier.
Alive.
Or at least, still breathing for now.
He had clearly fought. His little armored body was scuffed and bloodied, one ear torn, one knee down, his tail was tattered. He held a short blade in both paws and was still trying to face the ring of monsters closing around him, trying his best to uphold the Greencap chivalrous tradition. He was shaking, his eyes widen as impending doom weighed on his pounding heart.
Jake's hand tightened on his dagger, he assess the situation, gauging the distance between him and the clearing.
Too far.
Too many.
He knew it instantly. He couldn't have made it even if he tried. And then, it didn't take a genius to figure out at the very first glance he would not be able to escape.
Then one of the spider-things lunged.
There was no captain insight. This was one of the rank-and-file knights, smaller, younger maybe. He slashed once and took off two spider legs, then he kicked the thing hard enough for gooey black spider juice to spurt all over his face. But another monster caught his arm, another his side, and the first spider-headed thing clamped onto his face.
The bunny screamed.
And his head turned to stone.
It happened fast. too fast for Jake to even count from 1 to 2.
A crawling gray spread from face to ears to neck in one nightmare rush, freezing expression and flesh together. Absolute terror locked into the features. The scream stopped because stone could not carry it.
Then another of the monsters stepped in.
With one brutal, practiced motion, it cut the petrified head clean off.
Jake felt his stomach twist.
The stone bunny head, missing its left ear, hit the black ground and rolled once.
Before the body could even finish collapsing, one of the spiders detached from its own humanoid host, leaped, and landed on the open neck.
Its legs drove down into the body, piercing the neck in one clean motion.
The Greencap knight's corpse jerked in a way almost like a puppet got its strings attached against.
Its joints cracked, its bones made a creaking sounds almost like they were grinding against each other. Then, it started to move.
The movements were wrong, stiffs and in sudden staccato burst instead of fluid and swift motion. Yet, the corpse was indeed moving however the spider wanted.
Jake was gone before the last twitch settled.
He rift-stepped back the way he came, fast enough that the canyon walls blurred wrong around him, and reached the group with his breath sharper than when he had left.
Dominic saw his face and knew at once this was bad.
"What."
Jake bent once, hands on his knees, then straightened.
"There are monsters ahead," he said. "Spider things. Humanoid bodies, spider heads, except the spiders are actually riding the bodies."
No one interrupted despite how ridiculous his story sounded. They were divers. Worse. They belonged in Phong's circle. They might be among the few who truly knew how ridiculous the dungeon could get.
Jake kept going, voice flatter now because horror was easier to say if he sounded angry instead of shaken.
"They had a Greencap bunny surrounded." His jaw clenched. "I watched them petrify his head, cut it off, and stick a spider on the neck. The body got back up."
A beat of silence.
Then Joanne said, "No."
Jack's expression darkened immediately.
Emma swore under her breath.
Jake pointed back the way he came. "Arachnid body snatchers. That's what I'm calling them."
"That is disgusting," Janet said.
"It is also accurate," Camille added.
As if summoned by the act of naming them, the enemies came.
The sound reached them first.
Skittering.
Too many feet against black stone.
Then shapes rounded the canyon bend and rushed down toward Team Nemean in a jerking, terrible wave.
Some were full spider-headed divers like Jake described, still wearing their Amazon Choice armor with clear patches of rust. Others wore the frames of what had clearly once been dungeon creatures. One moved with the compact, wrong gait of a Greencap bunny body forced into humanlike stride by something that should not have fit there at all.
Janet's reaction was immediate.
She drew out her recording setup and started capturing the monsters as they advanced.
Jake shot her a look. "Now?"
She did not blink. "Yes now. Information worth a lot these day. If we want the fame, the influence, then we record."
Emma, somehow not even surprised, muttered, "Respectfully deranged."
"That's its own reputation," Janet replied.
The first arachnid body snatcher hit their line.
That ended the conversation.
Dominic took one look at the canyon, the approaching horde, the lack of any defensible hold nearby, and made the call fast.
"Fend them off and retreat to the gate."
No one argued.
He did not need to explain it. The canyon was empty and smooth all around, there was no foothold worth fighting for like the Wraith Fort, no place worth defending to make a base. And most importantly, not a single soul in the team wanted to be buried by a horde of arachnid body snatchers.
Jack glanced once at the obsidian walls he could not control and grimaced. "Agreed."
Emma was already summoning her blades. "So we call this an espionage mission?"
Dominic nodded once. "Yes. So move."
The waves of spiders crashed onto them with the full force of body horror and fate worse than death.
Alex met the first wave with psychic force, spears and blades punching gaps into the charge. Dominic crashed into the side of the line like a human cannonball, knocking dozens off the mountainous trail and into the valley below. Janet stayed on the ground, as she didn't trust the canyon walls to their side. Losing her flight was detrimental to her kit, so Dominic assigned her the duty to protect Emma without even having to vocalize it.
Alexei rammed his shields into the body snatchers formation, knocking one after another down before stabbing them with his sword.
Joanne used spells exactly the way the bunny captain had told her. She refrained from aiming her spells just to do as much damage as possible, and thought about area denial as well. She cut off several advancing lines with her spells, relieving a lot of pressure for the frontline tanks.
Jack cursed the useless obsidian and adapted. He fell back toward the rear, standing on the opposite side of Janet, with Emma safely stood between them.
Séline, Camille, and Jake became the trident again.
Losing Jack ability to create and manipulate terrains as the glue, teamwork was harder, as they could no longer bounce off stone pillars to attack from otherwise impossible angles. And so, the lack of flashy tactics force the three to fall back and rely on the basics. They made a small triangle formation, with Camille in the back and Séline and Jake on the two sides.
Still, the body snatchers were relentless.
They did not fear.
They did not hesitate.
Wounded bodies kept moving until torn apart enough to stop. Spiders leaped from ruined hosts when openings appeared, trying to hook into fresh flesh, fresh necks, fresh lives. Some tried to attach themselves to Alexei or Dominic in hope of petrifying their head, but Alex made sure the only thing waiting for them was a psychic arrow.
Alexei kept kicking the ruined bodies off the cliffs, denying the arachnid body snatchers of the most valuable resources.
Step by bloody step, Team Nemean fought backward toward the golden gate.
Halfway there, Jake cut down another spider-rider and shouted, "How many of these things are there?"
"Don't know," Joanne answered, blasting a charge lane open with lightning, "but... what are those?"
Then something moved in the distance.
A skittering shape across the canyon wall.
Then another.
Then several.
Everyone saw them at once.
Cockroaches.
Each the size of a minivan.
Their carapaces shone with an oily black-brown slickness under the eerie light, and their bodies moved with that same awful insect speed that made size feel even more wrong. But the worst part was the front.
Instead of proper mandibles, half their bodies split open like mouths.
The whole front section peeled apart into layered jaws lined with rows and rows of leveled maulers, just like human teeth.
Too many, far too many cockroaches swarmed them from behind.
For a second, even the body snatchers seemed less urgent than that new shape of horror sliding through the canyon dark.
Jake stopped mid-breath.
Emma's song faltered for one dangerous beat.
Dominic looked at the skittering giants, then at the still-closing spider-things, and the situation got worse in a single heartbeat.
Because now there were two swarms.
And Team Nemean was caught between them.