The moment Samantha's boots hit the cold, damp stone of the lower abyssal tier, her senses expanded.
The environment was suffocatingly dark—a pitch-black that would blind and disorient an untrained student.
For Samantha, however, the void felt strangely familiar.
Water dripped in rhythm somewhere deep within the rock face, each drop echoing like a miniature hammer strike in the silence.
She sank into a low posture, her breathing slowing to a faint, rhythmic whisper.
Moving silently, she glided along the shadow line of the damp stone wall, slipping past a pair of heavy, four-legged automated tracking sentinels.
Their obsidian-plated carapaces whirred softly as they swept the main corridor in narrow arcs of red diagnostic light.
Every time a beam passed over her position, she blended seamlessly into the recess of the jagged rock, her dark spear drawing in the ambient glare and reflecting nothing.
