Leon approached, golden light gathering at his palm. "Hold still."

  The healing magic spilled over John, sliding across his clothes and skin, searching for injuries. It found nothing. The golden sheen scattered, drifting away.

  Leon's brows furrowed. His eyes met John's.

  John shrugged.

  Leon didn't speak for a long moment. He studied John's hands, his breathing, the way he stood. "No tremor. Heart steady." His eyes narrowed. "You've been down here for hours. You should be collapsing."

  "I didn't get hit," John said. "That helps."

  Lia’s staff lowered. "Not even skill strain?"

  "Don't have any worth using yet."

  Heavy boots echoed through the chamber. Erin appeared, helmet tucked under her arm, frost still crackling in her braided hair. Marcus followed, his massive hammer trailing heat shimmer.

  Both stopped when they saw the carnage.

  Erin whistled low. "Damn, kid. You're tougher than you look."

  "Or the luckiest bastard alive," Marcus rumbled.

  John exhaled slowly. "I don't feel lucky."

  "Yet you are." Leon's voice was quiet. "A Rank One shouldn't survive minutes in an overflow of this strength. You should be dead a hundred times over."

  "I almost was. Multiple times." John paused, knowing this would make things worse. "I'm Level 40 now."

  Lia's staff clattered against stone.

  Something flickered in Leon's eyes. "That..." He stopped. Started again. "That actually makes it considerably worse."

  "How?" Marcus demanded.

  "Because that's twenty-seven levels. In hours. That is madness."

  John thought of the desperate Brood Queen fight, of the endless spawn, of corridors painted with violence.

  "Rude."

  The silence stretched.

  "We'll discuss this later. In detail. For now—" Leon turned toward the red-lit corridor. "We have an overflow to end."

  John smiled faintly, grateful for the reprieve.

  Where John had crept through oppressive darkness, every shadow a potential threat, Leon simply walked. The air around him hummed with power, and the corruption coating the walls actually recoiled from his presence, nerve-like filaments pulling back.

  The overflow haze, that psychic pressure that gnawed at the edges of sanity, lessened in his wake.

  Behind them, Erin and Marcus moved efficiently. Erin's fingers traced patterns in the air, and crystalline spears materialized from nothing, each one finding a target. Marcus's hammer came down once, and the shockwave alone pulverized everything in a ten-foot radius.

  John kept pace a safe distance from the carnage, Moonfang loose at his side. Every time he spotted movement, it was already dead.

  After the eighth skirmish where he didn't even raise his sword, he sighed. "So... are they going to leave any for us?"

  Erin glanced over her shoulder, eyebrows raised. “You would risk for nothing?"

  Before he could answer, her eyes narrowed at something in the shadows. She vanished in a blur of light, followed by the sound of ice shattering and a creature's death shriek.

  "What did she mean by that?" John asked.

  Lia's expression shifted. “You don’t know...” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "You don't gain experience near someone of their Rank," she explained. "The difference is too great. The world thinks you're inconsequential by comparison."

  John groaned. "They kill-steal by existing?"

  "More or less." Lia's mouth twitched. "That's why Garren guards me. To make sure I can earn my way without being overshadowed."

  "Right," John muttered. "I definitely knew that."

  He watched as lightning and ice tore through the next pack of spawn before they could even close the distance.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  John's stomach growled loud enough to echo.

  Lia glanced over, a small smile tugging at her lips despite everything. Without a word, she reached into her spatial ring and produced a wrapped bundle. Travel bread, dried meat, hard cheese. "Here. Can't have you collapsing from hunger after surviving everything else."

  "Thanks." John took it gratefully, tearing into the food with barely restrained desperation. He hadn't realized how hollow he felt until the first bite hit his stomach.

  As he ate, he caught Lia watching him.

  "You killed a Gluttonous Brood," she said quietly. "Alone. Do you understand how insane that is?"

  John shrugged. "Felt pretty necessary at the time."

  "Even survivors of Brood attacks are traumatized. Their psychic wounds take weeks to heal. They have nightmares." She studied him intently. "You're eating cheese like it's a normal day."

  "It's really good cheese." He examined it. "Where'd you get this?"

  "John."

  He met her eyes. "What do you want me to say? That I'm upset?"

  "I just—" She stopped, frustrated. "How did you even know how to kill it? The Brood's anatomy isn't common knowledge."

  John ate the last of the cheese to buy some time. “I just kept stabbing its eyes. Seemed to work.”

  Lia stared at him. "That would just make it mad. The nerve cluster at the base of the skull? Between the two brain cavities?" Her voice rose slightly. "That's not a 'soft spot' you stumble onto. It's hidden behind reinforced chitin. You'd have to know exactly where to strike."

  John thought about game wikis, strategy guides, his hundreds of runs. "I told you I read lots of books."

  "What books?"

  "Old ones. My mentor collected them."

  Lia's eyes narrowed. "Your mentor taught you to fight like that with books?"

  "Among other things." John took another bite of bread, hoping she'd drop it.

  She didn't. "What was your mentor's name?"

  He opened his mouth to lie, but Leon's voice echoed down the corridor. "Move out. We're not done yet."

  John had never been more grateful for a dungeon crawl in his life.

  The descent turned into a blur of motion and darkness. Before John fully registered the change, they'd reached the final floor.

  The air here was different. Heavy. Dead. Like breathing inside a tomb that had been sealed for centuries. The corruption wasn't just present, it coated his tongue, thick and rancid.

  And the smell. God, the smell.

  Erin's spectral eyes converged ahead, their light flickering. She stopped mid-step.

  "There's something here," she said quietly. "Something wrong."

  A star burned into the stone.

  As they drew closer, the markings became clear. Hand-drawn, uneven, half-scrawled with desperate haste. The sigils spiraled inward, forming the unmistakable pattern of a summoning seal, corrupted by streaks of black wax and dried blood.

  At the center lay the remains of a man.

  His robes were shredded, soaked through with ritual gore. His arms were crossed wrong, broken at the joints to complete the final glyphs. Runes had been carved into his flesh, their edges jagged and amateur, as if done by his own failing hands.

  Lia's hand flew to her mouth. "By the Saints..."

  Leon crouched beside the body. "A ritualist." He traced one of the blackened lines with a gloved finger. "But this... This isn't any school I know."

  John didn't move closer. He didn't need to.

  The pattern was burned into his memory. Every jagged curve, every corrupted spiral. He'd seen it in loading screens, in boss arenas, painted across the walls of late-game dungeons.

  The Song of Endings.

  "This hid the dungeon," Leon said, still studying the sigils. "Masked the mana bleed. Made it invisible until it was too late and the Mother broke loose."

  Lia traced the lines in the air, lips moving silently as she mapped the ritual's logic. "It's too precise for a hedge cultist. Maybe a dropout from the Academy?"

  Leon shook his head. "No Academy dropout could sustain this. This required tremendous focus. Discipline. Look at the positioning." Leon pointed to the corpse's twisted limbs. "He didn't just die performing the ritual. He became part of it. The final component."

  Leon stared at the ritual in silence, his eyes tracing the spiraling pattern inward to where the corpse lay broken and purposeful. Then his gaze lifted to the massive boss door looming ahead, its surface pulsing with corrupted mana.

  "It's reaching for something," he said quietly. He looked back at the sigils. "If we clear the dungeon and collapse the overflow, this disappears with it. All evidence gone."

  Erin's head snapped up. "You want to leave it?" Disbelief colored her voice. "My lord, this is—"

  "I'm aware." Leon's tone was flat. "But this dungeon is barely Rank 2. Low-tier. Yet someone invested months, perhaps years, into hiding it." He gestured at the careful positioning of the body, the precise spiral of sigils. "This isn't the work of some eccentric loner who hated Greyford."

  "Then what is it?" Marcus asked, hammer shifting uneasily in his grip.

  "Organized. Deliberate. Which means this may not be the first hidden dungeon. Or the last."

  Lia shook her head. "But if we leave this intact—"

  "We ward it," Leon interrupted. "Post guards. But we need answers. Who taught this man? Where did he learn? How many others are out there, right now, doing the same thing?" He looked at each of them. "If we destroy this, we blind ourselves to a threat we don't understand."

  "And if the ward fails?" Erin pressed. "If whatever this was reaching for decides to reach back?"

  "Then we deal with it. But we can't fight an enemy we can't see. We must find out more."

  Silence fell, broken only by the distant pulse of the dungeon's corrupted heart.

  John stood apart from the debate, staring at the ritual's core. This wasn’t the source of the Carrion Mother.

  And yet…

  In the game these rituals weren’t discovered until much later. They were part of the endgame reveal, as the starting area became a nightmare. Dungeons overflowed everywhere.

  What if that could be stopped?

  For a moment, John allowed himself to hope.