The sound was wrong from the start.
Not the growl of something animal. Not the heavy footfall of the creatures we'd been fighting for four floors. This was something else — a low, wet drag, like something being pulled across stone against its will. Rhythmic. Patient.
Getting closer.
"Formation," Maya said. Her voice was flat. She'd already moved — stepped away from the wall, put herself between the sound and the rest of us, one hand raised with mana burning dim and unsteady after four floors of constant use.
Max pushed off the wall with a grunt. His shoulder was bad — I could see it in the way he held the arm, slightly forward, not trusting it. He still raised his sword.
Lecia moved to his left. No golden light this time. Her hands were shaking.
I raised the shorter blade and tried to remember how to breathe.
The sound stopped.
For three seconds, the sixth floor was completely silent.
Then the darkness moved.
---
I don't have a good word for what came out of it.
It was white — not bright, not clean, the colorless white of something that had never needed to survive in the light. The shape kept shifting, contracting and expanding like it was breathing, but there was no breath. No mouth. Just two points of pale light where eyes might have been, and a movement through the air that felt less like walking and more like *deciding to be somewhere else.*
A ghost-type. I'd never seen one. I hadn't known they existed until the words surfaced in my head like a memory that wasn't mine.
*Ghost-type. Possession class. Physical attacks pass through. Cannot be stopped by conventional force.*
*Great,* I thought. *That's great.*
Max lunged first.
The blade went through the creature like it wasn't there. He stumbled through the other side, caught himself, spun — and the creature turned toward Lecia.
"Stay back—" Max started.
What happened next was too fast and too wrong for my brain to process in the moment. I reconstructed it afterward, in the dark, over and over, the way you reconstruct a nightmare after waking.
The creature didn't attack Lecia.
It went *into* her.
One moment she was standing with her hands raised, shaking, trying to summon something, anything — and the next her body snapped rigid like every muscle had locked at once. Her feet left the ground. Not jumped — *lifted*, straight up, pulled by something that wasn't there.
"Lecia—"
Her head turned.
Not the way heads turn. Not a rotation. A *twist*, slow and deliberate, degrees past where it should have been able to go, the tendons in her neck pulling taut and visible under the skin. Her spine curved backward. Her arms came forward at angles that had no anatomical permission, the joints grinding audibly in the silence of the floor.
She was still conscious.
That was the worst part.
Her eyes were open — her eyes, not the pale light of the thing inside her — and they were fixed on Max with an expression I don't have language for. Not pain. Past pain. Something on the other side of pain that was just pure, distilled *awareness* of what was happening to her body and the complete inability to stop it.
She didn't scream.
She couldn't.
The sound that came out of her wasn't a scream — it was the sound a body makes when it's being unmade against its will. A wet tearing. A series of sharp reports from joints that had never been asked to bend this way.
Her body completed the rotation.
And then it was over.
The creature drifted back out of what remained. The pale light in its center had brightened.
Max didn't move for two full seconds.
Then the sound that came out of him wasn't anything I'd call a scream either. It was lower than that. More fundamental. The kind of sound that lives below language, in the part of a person that predates words entirely.
He hit his knees.
---
I couldn't breathe.
My body had locked up somewhere between the moment her feet left the ground and whatever had happened after, and I was standing with the blade raised and my lungs refusing to function and the creature already drifting — toward Maya.
"Maya." My voice came out wrong. Too high. "Maya, it's—"
She knew.
I don't know how much mana she had left. Not enough — I could see it in the trembling of her raised hand, in the way the cast kept stuttering, the light forming and collapsing and forming again. She was burning through reserves she didn't have.
The creature slowed.
The force pulses were working — not stopping it, but slowing it, keeping it at distance, buying seconds.
Maya's hand was shaking so badly she could barely aim.
She bought us twelve seconds. Maybe fifteen.
Then her mana ran out.
The casting died. Her arm dropped.
The creature crossed the remaining distance in less than a heartbeat.
I moved — I don't know what I thought I was going to do, I had no ATK boost, no RedEngine, nothing — and something hit me from the side with the force of a falling wall. One of the other creatures, a different type, one I hadn't been tracking — it had come up from behind while everything else was happening. The impact sent me into the wall hard enough to blank my vision for a moment.
When I could see again, Maya was on her knees.
The ghost hadn't gone into her.
Another creature had come through the passage on the left — the one I'd seen in my peripheral vision and not registered, the one that had been waiting — and it struck her from behind while she was already empty, already spent. A hybrid, enormous, with the body of something bovine and arms that ended wrong, carrying something heavy.
It was very fast and very final.
I looked away.
I don't know why I describe this at all. I don't want to. But it happened, and Maya deserved more than silence.
She'd held that creature back for fifteen seconds with nothing left in her body. She deserved more than a paragraph. She deserved more than anything I can give her here.
---
The panel appeared.
Not RedEngine — just the base display, flickering, unstable.
*[HP: 102 / 210]*
I hadn't noticed the damage accumulating. The hit from the wall, something before that on the fifth floor, the impact of the creature's arm — it had been adding up.
I tried to pull up RedEngine.
Nothing.
I tried again.
The panel flickered and went dark.
*"[WARNING: Structural instability at 34%—]"*
The message from floor five. The one I hadn't finished reading.
*I didn't finish reading it.*
The thought landed somewhere in my chest like a stone dropping into water.
*I pressed Yes without reading it. I saw [Yes] / [No] and I pressed Yes because that's what I always do, because it's always saved me before, and I didn't stop to read the warning, and now—*
"Arthur."
Max's voice.
I turned. He was upright — somehow, somehow upright — his sword still in his good hand, his body in a state that shouldn't have been able to stand. His eyes were on the creature that had drifted back to the center of the floor, the pale light in its core brighter than it had been. Feeding.
Around us, more sounds in the dark.
The others had heard.
"Run," Max said.
"I'm not—"
"*Run.*" His voice cracked on the word. Not with weakness. With something else. "I'll give you time. Go."
"Max, if I leave you here you'll—"
"I know." He said it simply. Like he'd already finished that calculation and accepted the answer. "I know what happens. Go anyway."
I couldn't make my legs move.
"We made a mistake," he said. "All of us. We voted to keep going — you didn't drag us here, Arthur, we walked in ourselves." He adjusted his grip on the sword. His shoulder was visibly wrong. "I'm asking you to carry that. I'm asking you to go out there and carry it. That's all I'm asking."
The sounds in the dark were getting louder.
"There's nothing you can do here," he said. "Your system is down. Your stats are baseline. If you stay, you die, and then nobody carries it. You understand me?"
I understood him.
I hated that I understood him.
"Go," he said. "Now, Arthur. *Go.*"
I ran.
---
I don't remember the floors between the sixth and the exit.
I remember the light changing — the darkness of the upper floors giving way to the grey dimness of the middle floors, then the torchlight of the first floor, then the pale daylight of the entrance ramp. I remember my legs giving out somewhere and catching myself on the wall. I remember tasting blood.
I was outside before I understood I was outside.
The air hit me — cold, clean, the same air that had felt like a gift when I'd walked through Avalon's streets that morning — and I sat down on the stone steps at the base of the pyramid and stared at nothing.
The panel was still dark.
*[HP: 94 / 210]*
Something had hit me on the way out and I hadn't noticed.
Three other adventurers came down the steps a few minutes later — high-rank, their armor the kind that came from years of use. One of them stopped when he saw me.
"You came from inside? Where's your team?"
I looked up at him.
"Floor six," I said. "There's a ghost-type with possession capability. My team—" The words stopped working for a moment. "My team didn't make it."
His expression changed. "How many in your party?"
"Three. There might still be—" I couldn't finish that sentence either.
He exchanged a look with the others. Then he turned back to me.
"Stay here."
They went in.
---
I sat on the steps and waited.
I tried RedEngine seventeen times. Counted. The panel wouldn't open. The space where it usually sat in the corner of my vision was dark and stayed dark, like a window that had been bricked over.
*Structural instability at 34%.*
*What happens at 100%?*
I didn't know. I'd never asked. I'd never thought to ask because it had always come back before, always responded eventually, always been there when I needed it.
*I pressed Yes without reading the warning.*
The adventurers came back after twenty minutes.
I knew from their faces before anyone said anything.
The one who'd spoken to me before stepped forward. He was holding something behind his back, and the deliberateness of it — the careful way he was keeping it out of my line of sight — told me what it was before I saw it.
He brought his hand forward.
I looked.
I looked away.
"We couldn't recover the others," he said quietly. "I'm sorry. We brought what we could find of your friend because he deserved better than being left in there." A pause. "We'll see to the burial ourselves. You don't have to—"
"His name was Max," I said.
The adventurer was quiet for a moment.
"Max," he repeated.
I stood up. My legs held, barely.
"There's going to be a legal review," the adventurer said. "Your team exceeded the boundary on your registration card. That'll go to the guild tribunal. You should present yourself voluntarily — it goes better that way."
I nodded.
I wasn't really processing the words. I was processing Max's voice.
*I'm asking you to carry that.*
I looked at the pyramid one last time.
The black stone swallowed the light the same way it always had. Patient. Indifferent. Like nothing that happened inside it mattered to the structure itself.
Three people had walked into that place because I'd wanted to keep going.
Two votes, technically. Max had cast the deciding one. He'd told me that himself, at the end.
But I'd wanted to go. I'd felt the power in my arms and I'd wanted to go, and I'd pressed *Yes* on a warning I hadn't read, and I'd said *your call* to Max when he looked at me, and I'd known — somewhere, I'd known — that my answer was already showing on my face.
*I wanted to see how far we could go.*
I turned away from the pyramid and started walking.
The panel stayed dark.
Every step back toward the city felt heavier than the last.
[End of Chapter 5]