The guard rotation had a gap between the first and second hour.
Esper Maevin was at the eastern edge – upright, more or less, in the way people were upright at 1 am when they had been expecting nothing for two hours. His attention was outward. Checking for things coming in.
Not checking for things going out.
Nobody left a dungeon camp voluntarily.
Nobody normal.
Sera moved past him without a sound, quickly, when a chilly passing breeze had made him sneeze.
The plain was dark between the fires and the forest edge. She checked behind her once – camp quiet, fires low, wrong stars above – and let herself move.
The hippogriff mana channeled down through her core into her legs and feet. She rolled her ankles, flexing them, testing the weight of the mana thrumming through her muscles and ligaments. And then, after jumping lightly in place for a few beats, she took off running.
Not the calculated bolt that she had done to save Yuria, not the measured pace with Violet and Hibiscus, truly running, as fast as she could. Calves pushing, thighs tensing with each step, testing the speed she had before in Ratiora. She was off in a blur, footsteps quick and light, flying through the grassy plain in light tat tat tat motions. The grass yielding softly below her, the stars yawning above her, blurring as she felt the wind pass through her hair, her heart thumping noisily in her veins, and her lungs gasping as she pushed herself as fast as she could.
Elated.
She had missed this feeling.
The feeling when she had run across the grasses of Ratiora, feet pounding, legs pumping, traveling the far distance on just her body, pack on her back, Salome at her side. Usually returning from a mission. Body in motion. Free.
Well, free for a moment.
She slowed before the tree line.
Hands on her knees, Sera breathed gulping breaths until her thundering heartbeat relaxed to a comfortable pace; and stood up and rolled her shoulders.
She looked at the dark between the trees.
Pulled one dagger out. Drew the blade lightly across her right palm.
The blood welled up slowly. It dripped down her raised forearm, she let the scent carry into the forest air.
An invitation.
She went in.
The canopy closed overhead. The wrong stars disappeared. The two moons became suggestions of light through the branches. The ambient mana thickening.
The beast in her chest lunged forward, catching a scent.
She felt the pack before she heard them.
Six signatures. Moving parallel to her position, twenty meters east, adjusting as she adjusted. Watching her every step, calculating. They had her mana signature and now they had her blood and they were coming.
She stopped.
Let them come to her.
The first one materialized from the dark – large, twice the size of an Earth wolf, mana running through its coat giving it a faint shimmering luminescence. It stopped ten feet away. Yellow eyes. Assessing. Opened its mouth revealing large and dangerous canine teeth.
The thing in Sera went very still and bared its teeth back.
The direwolf's ears flattened.
Well, she and the entity thought. Time for dinner.
She pulled out her second dagger.
The rest of the pack emerged from the trees.
And the thing in her – the thing she kept carefully managed, carefully positioned, not looking too directly at its face and suppressed behind professional warmth and appropriate maneuvering – came loose.
Just a little. She released her hold.
The leash given one notch of slack.
The beast inside her began to frenzy. She felt herself frenzy too, her lip unconsciously lifting into a smile. It felt good, a little, to let herself and the thing inside her release. Finally unclenching some of the tension that coiled in her gut since the beast had awakened in the cave.
The first dire wolf came fast and low.
Sera was ready. When it lunged, jaws snapping, she didn't hesitate. Shoved her arm into its open maw, let its fangs snap around her arm, ignored the damage, the increasing rampage inside her already dampening the pain, and shoved her dagger sharply through the wolf's palate into the brain. Yanked her arm out, wet and viscous, dripping with a combination of her blood, the monster's blood, and a bit of brain matter. Pulled out the vessel the same time she pulled out her arm and stored it in her core with a familiar ease. The wolf fell dead with a thud.
More.
Turned to look at the rest of the pack with hungry eyes.
They were tense now, warily, watching, leader culled in an instant. Didn't expect her to accept the damage.
A wiser, daytime Sera probably would have been more careful. Taken less risk – calculated that the discrepancy of injury might be of concern to her when she returned to the raid force.
She didn't care. At this moment, she could hardly care at all.
She was tired of that, the restraint, the measured responses, the careful containment that had marked her years on Earth.
Here, in the dungeon, with only monsters around her, she felt a brief momentary thrill of freedom. It was just her, the monsters, and the killing – god, she had missed this feeling. Even better than Ratiora. Because on her home planet, her culling had been in the name of the King, vessels denied for her consumption, relying solely on her Instructor's pleasure.
Here, she was alone, alone again with death – but this time, with the eating too.
Her Instructor's rules echoed faintly through her consciousness. Sera acknowledged, right now, she wasn't acting exactly like herself, but what really, was herself? The clenched fist – contained and always calculating her survival? Or this one? Open palm – slightly risky, a little elated? Rather hungry? The thoughts dissipated as fast as they came when she felt a prickly, irresistible scent of fear, rich with mana, reach her nostrils
A shiver traveled up her spine, her eyes flashed dangerously in the low light, locking onto the nearest dire wolf.
"Good," the entity said out loud, Sera's voice clear in the dark, a thin ray of moonlight illuminated her face from above.
"Be afraid."
The dire wolf stiffened and growled, carefully prowling around her, keeping careful distance. But, in its fear, it misjudged a step and Sera was already on it, her body and daggers coming from above in a split second, before a blade stabbed through its neck with a sickeningly easy sound. She tore the dagger sideways through the flesh, the wolf's head half decapitated and body crumpling before lunging towards the third one. The beast inside her swallowed the fresh vessel into her core in tandem.
The pack adjusted. Flanked her. Used the trees the way pack hunters used cover – coordinated, furious, cutting off angles.
It didn't matter.
She had fought things on Ratiora that made six direwolves look like a courtesy.
Somewhere between the third and fourth she stopped using only the daggers.
It wasn't a decision. More like – the leash already loose, the beast already present, and Sera was living.
The fourth one came fast and her body made a calculation that she wanted to feel flesh against her teeth. Her fangs had sharpened, she noted, distantly – feeling slightly more integrated with the monster inside her. She felt them against her lip. Plunged her daggers into the furred, muscled body for purchase, opened her mouth, and buried her fangs through the fur into the wolf's throat.
The fur was coarse. The mana dense and alive underneath.
She didn't examine it. Burrowed her face into the hide and bit down as hard as she could, struggling through the thick, mangy coat, until she felt flesh tear between her teeth and blood spray violently from the open wound.
It only tasted good.
Drained the fourth of its life, stored the vessel, licked her lips, dark red dripped off her chin – ready for more. The fifth and sixth came simultaneously. Sera let out a giddy laugh, fangs stained pink, eyes wide.
And then, the stars shifted fractionally, and there were six shapes on the forest floor.
Patted her stomach, counted the vessels stored securely in her core – dense, warm, entirely hers.
The entity inside her purred. She purred too.
Something in her was changing. She wasn't sure what it was yet. But this strange feeling of aliveness in her was growing. Something inside her cautioned her, but she couldn't take it back. Didn't want to take it back.
Sera sheathed her daggers, stood there for a long time, and then quietly turned, and walked slowly back to camp.
Two full moons illuminating her way home.
✦ ♡ ✦
The interface woke everyone up on the third hour.
Not gently. The blue light cut across closed eyelids, pulling people from sleep whether they wanted it or not – the System indifferent to human rest schedules. Across the camp, Sera heard the collective rustle of people sitting up in their bedrolls, murmuring about the new update.
< Dungeon Quest >
Defeat the golems. 5/5
Defeat the High Priest of the Catalogue. 0/1
Defeat ???
Defeat ???
The second mission resolved into a boss name – meaning the scouts had found something.
Murmurs moved through the camp. Nobody knew what a High Priest of the Catalogue was. A title – clearly. A humanoid monster, possibly.
Something old, Sera thought, reading the title in the blue light. Something the System had found rather than built. Probably stole it from a failed world. She closed her eyes – let her consciousness drift back to sleep.
The scouts returned two hours later at five, at first light, moving fast through the perimeter and reporting directly to Joel and Rena. She watched from across the camp, reading the body language – not alarm, not retreat. Just the energy of people who had found something and were describing it accurately, tired from the search.
A white marble temple buried in the middle of a jungle terrain. Dense canopy. Overgrown stone. Tentacled monsters hidden in the foliage. A green-haired esper named Arten had stepped one foot on the first stair to the temple and then the blue interface had updated across their vision – along with an unearthly, quaking howl. They had quickly departed back to the raid.
After breakfast, the raid broke camp.
✦ ♡ ✦
The plains ended three hours into the march.
Not suddenly – gradually, the grass thickening into undergrowth, the undergrowth rising into trees, the trees closing overhead until the dungeon's wrong-blue sky disappeared entirely and the jungle and a strange, pungent humidity took its place. Dense. Emerald green. Alive and thrumming with insects, creatures, and other dangerous things hidden in the flora.
Not the temperate forest Sera had found toward the east. This one was a rainforest.
The formation adjusted with a quick gesture from Rena. Tighter. The open field tactics of the golem fight were useless here – sight lines shortened to meters, the ground root-crossed and uneven, wet in some places, soft in others, flanking opportunities everywhere. Arlen called adjustments in a low voice and the teams responded.
Sera threaded her mana tendrils forward as she walked.
Twenty meters into the undergrowth. Thirty. Finding the small creatures moving through the roots and branches that the frontline espers had culled as they trudged forward – dungeon wildlife, low mana density, nothing that would trouble the formation as long as their numbers were managed. She reached for one of the carcasses – vessel warm but fading.
Pulled it into her core and swallowed.
Brief euphoria and then – nothing.
No alert. No heavy calloused hand of the System arrived to force her head into submission. The vessel processed cleanly in her core the way the direwolves the night before had processed – quietly, completely, without the backlash or rebound she had expected. She waited.
The System's attention was elsewhere. On the quest. On the formation. On whatever waited ahead in the green.
She pulled another into herself. Passed by the corpse of a large man-eating flower, the size of a bear, culled by an esper leading the front.
Nothing again.
Last night returned to her thoughts as she walked.
The six direwolves on the forest floor. The vessels ingested one by one on the walk home – each one eaten cleanly. She had braced for the System, the beast ready with its palms open – ready to hide what they would swallow. Her tendrils were buried into the grasses – ready to pull mana from the environment, what the System would inevitably request to equalize the consequence. But with each swallow of a direwolf's vessel, nothing had happened.
No alerts. Just a flicker and a sudden drop in the countdown on her debuff. Sera's eyes had widened in understanding.
A loophole.
She had known about the gates since the subway break. Had known what was inside them. Had never been in one – her earliest memory, awakening in a cell, chained and cold, arriving only after Ratiora had already passed its own Great Filter. The monsters and invaders she had fought were all on Ratiora's surface. Never inside System infrastructure.
She hadn't known the System's attention inside a dungeon was structured differently from its attention outside one – focused on quest mechanics, on monster behavior, on the gate's internal logic rather than the broader world.
She hadn't avoided gates out of ignorance. She had avoided them because monsters seemed like a reliable way to be noticed – gates were government monitored, guild sanctioned, logged. The last thing she had needed in her first years on Earth was to be seen consuming vessels inside one. And the punishment, the System's consequence when she had drained that man in that apartment, had been a heavy and painful enough deterrent.
She had never connected it.
But it made sense, the dungeons were a System construct designed to push a world's evolution to the next step. Next steps meant the System would allow a higher tolerance to abnormalities inside the construct, not outside.
The thought sat in her interiority without moving. Not just sadness exactly. Not only anger. Something quieter. If she had known – she lamented.
She had been rationing for four years. Fifteen minute sessions. Desperate sips. The careful management of a hunger that could have been fed better inside any one of the gates that had been active on this world since she arrived.
She could have been an esper instead – with legitimate gate access. Some of her suffering these past years was from ignorance. Her hands clenched into fists.
And then she let the thought go.
It didn't change anything. She was here now.
What mattered was the jungle ahead. And burning her debuff timer as much as possible while she was in this gate. The vessels were accumulating. Her core and the beast hungrily digesting every vessel from every culled monster. The timer was ticking down – by hours for some creatures, days with others, but consistently down with each one. Felt her capacity rise as each one settled in her core.
The dungeon didn't care and the System wasn't watching.
She checked her debuff.
< Dimensional Transfer Debuff >
A post-Filter evolution has defied the System.
Capacity throttled.
All stats halved.
Time left: 5,076:44:21s
She read it twice.
Two hundred and eleven days left. Roughly.
After the hippogriff, she had checked it at 6,444. The direwolves had taken six weeks off that number – one week per wolf, each vessel flourishing and dense, more vibrant, inside the dungeon ecosystem. And the jungle culls she'd been accumulating steadily since dawn – small creatures, big and small – the timer dropping in steady increments with every carcass.
She had burned fifty-seven days off her timer in less than twenty-four hours.
Four years of rationing. Fifteen minute sessions. Desperate careful sips.
And now – one night and one morning.
She let the math sit without examining what it meant. It didn't help to look at it directly. When peered too close, an ugly, festering sensation boiled in her gut. What mattered was forward – the jungle ahead, the High Priest of the Catalogue waiting in its temple, the vessels accumulating with every step.
What would she do when the debuff was gone. She stared at the dense canopy ahead, lips set in a straight and stiff line, steadily trudging forward with her pack.
Well…what couldn't she do?