The Death Pyramid didn't look like its name.
From the outside, it looked like a mistake — a massive stone structure rising out of the earth at a wrong angle, like something had pushed it up from below and never finished the job. The stone was black. Not dark grey, not charcoal — *black*, the kind that swallowed light instead of reflecting it. No markings. No doors, just an opening carved into the base that led straight down into darkness.
The air around it felt different too. Heavier. Like the atmosphere itself was warning us.
I stood at the entrance and said nothing.
"Floor three," Max said, adjusting the strap on his sword. "Maybe four if things go well. We take what we can, we leave while we're ahead."
Lecia was quiet beside him. She kept glancing at the opening, then away, then back again.
"The lower floors should be clear," Maya said. She wasn't looking at the pyramid. She was looking at her own hands, running through something in her head. "The high-rank teams will have pushed through already. Most of what's left will be stragglers."
"Exactly." Max turned to me. "You stay behind us, Arthur. If something gets past us — and it won't — you move to the wall and you wait. Understood?"
"Understood," I said.
He nodded and walked in.
I followed.
*Just watch. Learn. Come back alive.*
I repeated it to myself as the darkness swallowed us whole.
---
The first floor was exactly what Max had promised.
Small creatures — knee-height, red-skinned, fast but completely disorganized. They came at us the moment we stepped off the entrance ramp, maybe a dozen of them, shrieking in a pitch that made my ears ring.
I had exactly enough time to take one step backward before Max was already moving.
He was fast. Faster than I'd expected from watching him in the assembly hall. His sword moved in short, controlled arcs — no wasted motion, no theatrics — and the creatures dropped one after another like he was doing something simple and mechanical.
Lecia had her hands raised, a faint golden light spreading from her palms across Max's shoulders.
Maya didn't move at all until one creature broke left and tried to flank. Then her hand came up, a pulse of force left her fingers, and the creature hit the wall hard enough to leave a mark.
Twelve seconds. Maybe less.
Silence.
Max rolled his shoulder and glanced back at me. "Still breathing?"
"Still breathing," I confirmed.
He grinned and kept walking.
---
The second floor was longer but not harder. The creatures were bigger — waist-height now, with claws instead of teeth — but they moved the same way, in straight lines, with no coordination. Max and Maya had developed a rhythm I could actually follow by now: he drew them in, she controlled the edges, Lecia kept the energy flowing between them.
I watched from the back and tried to memorize what I was seeing.
*He leads with his left shoulder to bait the lunge. She holds her cast until the last second so they can't dodge. Lecia's support magic has a range — she stays within four steps of Max, always.*
They were good. Better than I'd understood from a distance.
And I was still completely useless.
The thought sat in my chest the whole time we crossed the second floor, quiet and heavy.
---
The third floor changed the texture of things.
The creatures here were different — hybrid types, wrong in ways that took a moment to register. Some had the body of a frog but wings that spread twice their width. Others walked upright on sheep's legs with the upper bodies of something vaguely human and a single horn splitting their skull.
They didn't charge in straight lines.
The winged ones hit from above. The horned ones moved in pairs, circling before they committed. For the first time, I saw Max take a step backward. I saw Maya's casting speed increase. I saw Lecia's glow spread wider, pushing harder.
The fight lasted four minutes instead of thirty seconds.
When it was over, Lecia let out a breath she'd clearly been holding for a long time.
"They're getting smarter," Maya said quietly.
"Floor four," Max said. It wasn't a question.
Maya looked at him for a moment. "Floor four."
---
I don't know why I decided to actually fight on the fourth floor.
Maybe it was watching them for three floors straight. Maybe it was the sword Max had handed me outside the entrance — a spare, plain, nothing special — that I'd been carrying without using. Maybe it was just that standing against the wall watching other people risk their lives while I contributed nothing had started to feel worse than the alternative.
"I want to try," I told Max when we reached the entrance to floor four.
He looked at me the way adults look at children who ask to help carry heavy boxes. Weighing it.
"Behind Maya," he said finally. "You move when she moves. You cover her blind spots. If something gets past her guard, you slow it down — you don't have to stop it, just buy her a second. Can you do that?"
"Yes," I said.
He handed me a second blade — shorter, better balanced than the first.
I took it.
---
Floor four was harder.
The creatures were larger than anything we'd faced before, with armor-like plating across their backs and shoulders that turned aside anything that hit it straight on. Max spent the first minute just testing angles, looking for gaps. Maya's force pulses pushed them back instead of dropping them. Lecia was working constantly.
I stayed behind Maya and watched her blind spots the way Max had told me.
Twice, something got past her guard.
The first time, I stepped between it and her and swung. The blade glanced off the plating and my arms rang from the impact. It wasn't elegant. But Maya had already turned by the time it recovered, and a pulse of force took it off its feet.
"Good," she said.
Just that. But I felt it.
The second time went worse — the creature was faster than I expected, and I caught a glancing blow across my ribs that left me winded against the wall. Nothing broken. But I tasted blood in my mouth and my vision blurred for a second.
*210 HP,* I thought, blinking. *That cost me something.*
I pushed off the wall and got back into position.
When the fourth floor cleared, we stood in the quiet for a moment — all four of us breathing harder than we'd been at the start, nobody saying anything.
Then Max looked at the passage to floor five.
"We could stop here," Lecia said.
"The mana cost is still manageable," Maya said. She didn't say *yes* or *no*. She just gave Max the information.
Max looked at me.
I looked at the passage.
*Don't think about it too hard. Just watch. Learn. Come back alive.*
"Your call," I said.
He thought for three seconds.
"Floor five," he said. "We assess at the entrance and pull back if the level's wrong. Agreed?"
No one disagreed.
We walked in.
---
The moment we stepped onto floor five, the panel appeared.
Not a flicker. Not a pulse. It opened fully, the way it had in the Meadow of Demise — bright red bars, numbers, the works — and a message appeared at the center:
*[A dynamic value has been detected. Do you want to modify it?]*
*[Yes] / [No]*
I stared at it.
Around me, the others had gone still. I could hear them — Max's breathing, the faint hum of Maya's mana — but I couldn't see the panel. They couldn't see it.
*This again.*
Last time, I'd been dying. Two HP left, body torn apart, using the last of my breath to say a random number.
This time I was standing on my own two feet, intact, with options.
*Is this smart?*
I didn't know. I didn't know what value it had found. I didn't know what modifying it would cost. Last time it had saved my life and then the value went back to normal within hours. But I also didn't know what would happen if I used it here, in the middle of a dungeon, surrounded by people who didn't know what I was carrying.
*If I say no and something goes wrong on this floor — if Max takes a hit he can't recover from, if Lecia runs out of mana, if we get into something we can't handle —*
I pressed *Yes*.
*[Enter the new value (V = ...)]*
"Four thousand," I said, low enough that only I could hear it.
*[Please wait…]*
The bar at the bottom started filling.
*45%.*
And then the floor erupted.
---
They came from the ceiling.
Elite-ranked, from the look of them — bigger than anything on floor four, moving with an intentionality that the lower floors hadn't had. Not charging. *Hunting.* Three of them dropped from above and the fourth came through the passage we'd entered from, cutting off the exit.
Max spun to meet the one behind us and caught a strike he wasn't ready for — the creature's arm came down like a hammer and hit him across the shoulder, and he went into the wall hard. The impact sound was wrong. Too solid. He slid down and didn't get up immediately.
"MAX—" Lecia's voice broke.
*60%.*
Maya was already moving, putting herself between the creatures and Max's position on the floor. Two of them turned toward her. She started casting, fast and controlled, but there were two of them and she was burning through mana she'd already spent on four floors.
I moved without thinking.
The creature closest to me turned at the sound of my footsteps and swung. I ducked under it — barely — and drove the shorter blade into the gap between its arm and its torso where the plating didn't cover.
It didn't go deep enough. The creature grabbed my arm.
*80%.*
It lifted me off the ground.
I couldn't breathe. My vision started to go dark at the edges. Behind me I could hear Maya's casting, Lecia screaming Max's name, the sound of stone cracking under something heavy.
*Come on.*
*90%.*
The creature drew its arm back.
*[Value modified. ATK: 4000 / 216]*
The change hit like cold water.
Not warmth this time — not the strange relief from the Meadow of Demise. This was sharp and electric, like every muscle in my body had been replaced with something that didn't belong there. My arm in the creature's grip stopped feeling weak. My vision cleared.
I drove the blade into the gap again.
This time it went through.
The creature dropped me.
I landed, found my footing, and didn't stop moving.
---
I don't have a clean way to describe what the next few minutes felt like.
I've never fought before. I didn't fight in my old world — I spent seventeen years in a hospital, I had no coordination, no training, nothing. But with 4000 ATK running through a body that was still technically mine, none of that seemed to matter. The blade moved and things stopped.
One strike to the joint. One strike to the exposed underside of the arm. The plating that had turned aside everything on floor four meant nothing.
The creatures fell.
When the last one dropped, I was standing in the middle of the floor with blood that wasn't mine on my hands and my chest heaving and three people staring at me.
Lecia had gotten Max upright against the wall. He was conscious — one hand pressed to his shoulder, breathing controlled but careful. His eyes were fixed on me.
Maya hadn't moved. She was looking at her own casting hand, then at me, then back at her hand, like she was trying to reconcile two things that didn't fit together.
The panel updated quietly in front of me.
*[ATK: 4000 / 216]*
Then, before I could process anything —
A new message appeared.
Not the usual format. The text was different — smaller, more fragmented, like something that had been written in a hurry or hadn't fully loaded:
*[WARNING: Sustained value modification detected. Structural instability at 34%. Recommend immediate—]*
The message cut off.
The panel flickered once.
Then it went completely dark.
Not minimized. Not closed.
*Dark.*
I tapped the air where it had been. Nothing. I tried to pull it up the way I had on the hospital bed, the way it had just appeared on its own a minute ago.
Nothing.
*RedEngine* — completely silent.
"Arthur."
I turned. Max was watching me from the wall, his expression unreadable.
"What," he said slowly, "was that?"
I opened my mouth.
And from the passage ahead — the one leading to floor six — came a sound.
Low. Rhythmic. Getting closer.
Lecia grabbed her brother's arm.
Maya had already turned toward the sound, one hand raised, mana running low and expression telling me everything I needed to know about what that sound meant.
I looked at the dark space where the panel used to be.
*Come back alive,* I'd told myself.
I tightened my grip on the blade.
*Working on it.*
[End of Chapter 4]