Floors one and two gave them nothing to fight.
The bound dead stood aside in every passage, watching with amber eyes as the formation moved through. Maren walked beside Kael and spoke quietly — pointing out architectural details, identifying the civilization that had built this place from the stonework and the fixture designs, building a picture of something that had existed here before the Church had existed to decide what was holy.
"Physicians," Maren said in the second floor corridor, touching a carved relief on the wall — figures bent over other figures in postures of healing. "This was a medical complex. The catacombs were the long-term care facility." A pause. "The people bound here — they died here. Being treated."
Kael looked at the carved figures. "The dungeon master bound them where they died."
"Yes." Maren's voice was very even. "It found a place full of the recently dead and the dying and it settled here and fed for three hundred years." A pause that carried something sharp beneath its evenness. "I find that personally offensive."
"I know," Kael said.
They went deeper.
Floor three was different.
The corridor architecture ended at the floor two descent and gave way to something that the dungeon master had clearly shaped itself — rough-hewn passages that branched and rejoined in patterns that felt deliberately disorienting, the walls oozing a damp luminescence that was neither helpful nor comfortable. The bound dead did not come this deep.
And the creatures here were not bound dead.
They were the dungeon master's own constructs — things built from the ambient death energy of three centuries of feeding, given shape by whatever passed for will in a pre-System dungeon intelligence. They didn't register in Death Sense as creatures at all. They registered as concentrations of energy that happened to be mobile.
The first one came from the ceiling.
It was large and dark and had too many limbs arranged in a configuration that suggested the dungeon master had a general concept of limbs but had not been particularly committed to the specifics. It dropped onto two of Kael's crawlers and simply absorbed them — the crawlers' raised forms dissolving into the thing's mass as if they'd never existed.
[2 CAVE CRAWLERS — DESTROYED — ABSORBED]
[NOTE: ENTITY IS CONSUMING UNDEAD ENERGY]
[WARNING: STANDARD RAISE WILL NOT WORK ON THIS FLOOR]
Kael stared at the notification.
The thing turned toward him. It moved like water moving uphill — wrong in a way that bypassed the brain and went directly to the instincts.
"It eats death energy," Sera said from behind the troll. Her voice was level. Her hand was on her blade. "Your minions are death energy."
"I know."
"So your entire formation is—"
"I know." He thought fast. The thing was between him and the passage forward. It had absorbed two crawlers in under three seconds. Sending more minions at it was feeding it.
He looked at Maren.
Maren was already moving — not toward the construct but to the wall, pressing one desiccated hand against the stone, and Kael felt through the Sovereign bond the particular quality of Maren's Level 35 power doing something he didn't have a name for. Not Death Domain. Not any skill he recognized.
Something older.
The construct stopped moving.
Not paralyzed — confused. It turned toward Maren with the blind attention of something drawn to a larger source of what it fed on. Maren was radiating death energy with the deliberate excess of someone opening a wound to draw a predator away from something more vulnerable.
"Go," Maren said. Very calmly. "I will manage this."
"It'll absorb—"
"It will try." A pause. "I have seventeen years of accumulated dungeon energy and the knowledge of exactly how entities like this feed. It will try." Another pause. "Go."
Kael went.
He pulled the formation tight — troll, Daren, Thresh, wraiths, wolf, the remaining crawlers and beetles — and moved fast through the passage while Maren held the construct's attention. Through the Sovereign bond he could feel what was happening behind him — a contest of will and energy between a Lich who had spent seventeen years becoming something extraordinary and a dungeon construct that had spent three hundred years eating everything in reach.
It was not a comfortable feeling.
He was at the floor three descent before Maren rejoined him, moving quickly, the grey-haired disguise abandoned entirely down here — the real face, the real form, moving with a precision and speed that the disguise had softened.
"Well?" Kael said.
"It learned," Maren said. "Quickly. I would not try that approach twice." A pause. "I also learned. I know how they feed now." It looked at the descent ahead. "The fourth floor will have more of them. We need a different approach."
"What approach?"
Maren looked at him. "You," it said. "Not your minions. Not me. The constructs feed on death energy — but Death's Chosen is not death energy. You are the source of death energy. The space between." A pause. "I believe you are the one thing in this dungeon that construct cannot absorb."
"You believe."
"Reasonably confidently believe."
"That's not the same as—"
"No," Maren agreed. "It is not."
Kael looked at the descent.
He looked at his formation — reduced now, seventeen minions instead of nineteen, the two destroyed crawlers unrecoverable. He looked at the notification still sitting in his vision about standard raises not working on floor three.
He looked at his right hand.
Death Touch. Death's Grasp. Death Domain.
He was not a fighter. He was a commander. But a commander who had run out of troops that his enemy couldn't eat needed to become something else.
"Keep the formation back on floor four," he said. "Send them in only when I identify something they can fight without being absorbed." He flexed his right hand. "I'll handle the constructs."
Sera was writing. "Kael."
"Yes."
"Your HP at Level 20 is approximately fourteen hundred. Floor four constructs will likely be stronger than floor three." She looked up from the notebook. "One mistake."
"I know."
"I'm noting it for the record," she said. "Not to stop you." She looked back down. "Try not to make mistakes."
He went down to floor four.