The first pixie made everyone stop.
At first glance, it looked like a little girl: Small, barefoot, bare skin, and thin limbs. Then, the wrongness sank in.
Her body, from the neck down, was smooth like polished porcelain. No nipples. No navel. No sign of anything human beneath the shape. She was not naked in the way a child was naked. She was naked in the way a doll was naked. A thing wearing the idea of a little girl's body without understanding what a body should have.
Her hair hung in a wild, filthy mess, like it had been cut by claws and left to rot. Her face was almost human, right until the eyes. Large compound eyes bulged where normal eyes should have been, black and wet and faceted, turning in tiny jerks as she scanned each member of Team Nemean.
Then Dominic's eyes went lower.
Behind the pixie lay a corpse. Old enough to stink. Fresh enough to still be meat. It had been chewed in places. Not cleanly. Not by a beast trying to hunt. The flesh was ragged and torn away in bites, as if something small had knelt over it and eaten without patience.
The worker pixie looked at them. Then screamed.
Rotting bits of meat clung to her teeth as the sound ripped out of her throat, high and sharp enough to stab through the whole ruin. It was not a warning cry in any normal sense. It sounded more like glass scraping against glass, like rage and hunger squeezed through a child's voice.
Dominic's face twisted at once.
"Jesus Christ," he muttered. "I already hate dungeon pixies."
He had barely finished the sentence when movement broke out in the broken buildings around them. More shapes. Faster ones.
And somehow, those were worse.
Soldier pixies dropped from the broken upper windows and glided down from cracked rooftops, wings buzzing with a harsh insect rattle. They were larger than the worker, though not by much, their bodies built on the same wrong little-girl frame. But from their backs came wings like those of dragonflies, long, thin, clear, and twitching with violent speed.
Their mouths were worse still. Each one had fangs too large for its face. Thick, long, white, curved too far. The teeth were so oversized that the creatures had to part their jaws wider than seemed possible, enough that it looked like they were slightly dislocating them just to let the fangs protrude fully.
Jake grimaced. "Nope."
Joanne lifted a hand, already gathering mana at her fingertip. "That is deeply upsetting."
"Dragonfly soldiers," Jack said quietly, eyes tracking the ruin above them. "Of course."
The worker pixie did not stay. The moment the soldiers appeared, she darted away into another section of the ruin, scrambling over broken stone with jerky, insect-fast movement. She vanished through a cracked wall opening, likely heading straight back to the nest.
Emma clicked her tongue softly. "She's calling the rest."
"That scream probably did that already," Janet said.
Dominic rolled one shoulder and stepped forward half a pace, staring at the soldier pixies with the deep offense of a man who had wanted a safer route and instead found this. He had joked about not liking what the dungeon would do to Tinker Bell. Now he looked like he regretted ever invoking the name.
The pixies spread out across the broken street between the dead concrete houses. More movement flickered deeper in the ruin. Shadows in shattered windows. Buzzing wings behind warped frames. Little silhouettes crouched on rooftops beside the strange metal orbs and ringed devices that still crowned the old houses.
They were being watched. Measured. Encircled.
Alex did not waste time wondering why dungeon pixies gathered rotten flesh. She did not care why the workers scavenged carrion or why their soldiers had dragonfly wings or whether there was some system logic behind any of it.
Right now, all she cared about was the thing that mattered most. The fight.
She stepped forward and drew the psychic Dragon Slayer into being. It formed in her hand with a pulse of pale force, a heavy slab of a sword, brutal and oversized, clunky by design. It lacked the clean elegance of her old rapier. That was the point. Phong had been right. She needed a true heavy hitter, something with weight, something that could force the issue instead of dancing around it.
The moment the massive blade settled into her grip, the rest of her constructs fanned out around her: a spear, a vajra, two bows, two shields.
They floated in ready positions, forming the frame of her control like a private little army centered around her body. The rapier no longer appeared. The Dragon Slayer had taken its place in her usual setup.
One of the soldier pixies hissed at her, jaw opening too wide.
Alex only tightened her grip. Behind her, the rest of Team Nemean moved into place almost at once.
Dominic planted his feet near the front, eyes fixed on the nearest cluster of pixies. He rolled his neck once, already settling into the heavy, forward pressure that came before one of his fights.
Janet slid slightly to the side where she could watch more angles at once. Her hand brushed her weapon and her eyes moved fast, already reading lines of movement, entry points, weak spots in the ruined street.
Jake and Jack split naturally without a word. Jake drifted toward the flank where he had room to move if the fight broke wide. Jack watched the ground and walls, reading terrain the way only he could, already judging what broken concrete, half-collapsed corners, and narrow gaps might be turned into choke points.
Joanne lifted her finger and a small knot of lightning crackled into life above it. Not unleashed yet. Just waiting. Her expression had gone very still, the way it always did when she was about to become dangerous.
Emma drew in a breath and centered herself, her presence settling into that strange, poised calm that came before her class unfolded. Beside her, Séline and Camille shifted into the easy, practiced readiness of two people who had fought beside each other for too long to need to speak.
Alexei stepped where he could best support the line, broad shoulders squared, face still carrying faint signs of what three days with fire chickens had done to his dignity. Even so, when the time came to fight, he looked exactly like what he was. A wall with a pulse.
The buzzing rose. More soldier pixies appeared.
One landed upside down on the side of a wall and skittered sideways, head tilted so far it almost lay flat on its shoulder. Another hovered low over the corpse, fangs wet, eyes fixed on the humans who had interrupted its meal. A third clicked its teeth together in quick little snaps, the sound far too eager.
Dominic let out a breath through his nose.
"Ugly fight," he said.
Nobody disagreed. Because this was not going to be clean. Not the kind of fight with room to breathe, room to reposition, room to make mistakes. The ruin was too tight, the enemy too fast, and the nest too close.
Alex lifted the Dragon Slayer. The psychic blade hummed.
Her spear drifted higher over one shoulder. The vajra held near her blind side. Two bows angled outward to cover range. The two shields floated low and close, ready to intercept or slam.
The fight turned ugly faster than any of them wanted.
That was the problem with going into a new ruin full of unknown monsters. No matter how strong Team Nemean had become, no matter how much they trained, leveled, and learned to fight together, the dungeon always found new ways to remind them of one truth.
Levels and stats were absolute. But they were not everything. The same way humans could punch above their weight with skills, tactics, and teamwork, the dungeon's creatures could do the same. And the pixies did.
The first time Dominic smashed one of the soldier pixies out of the air, he thought they had a good read on the fight. Then the corpse split.
Not metaphorically. The thing literally split into three.
One version burst outward in pale light, tiny body wrapped in a glow that felt holy, regal, almost sacred if one ignored the fangs and compound eyes. Another version peeled away in writhing shadow, its little face twisted with pure malice and bloodlust. The third landed lightly with no aura of menace at all, calm and unnerving, its hands already forming shields of protective magic.
Three bodies. Three minds. Three different roles. And they moved independently.
"Of course they do," Joanne hissed, lightning snapping from her fingertip as she blasted the holy one back into a broken wall.
The shadow version was already gone. It vanished into a crack of darkness and reappeared near Emma, fangs open wide.
Alexei got there first. He stepped in, took the hit on armor and shoulder, and drove the little monster into the ground with enough force to crack the pavement beneath it.
"Watch the sneaks!" he barked.
More pixies split. And soon the ruin became a nightmare of motion.
Holy pixies raining down light and punishment magic from rooftops. Shadow pixies sliding through blind spots, windows, collapsed doorways, any patch of darkness they could use to strike from bad angles. Defense pixies hovering behind them, calm and collected, layering barriers and protection over the others.
Jack saved them from getting buried under sheer numbers. The Stone Warden planted his feet and turned the ruin itself into a weapon. Concrete slabs rose. Broken walls shifted. Choke points narrowed. Attack angles vanished. In a matter of seconds, he had cut off three quarters of the pixies' approach lines and forced the fight into tighter lanes Team Nemean could actually hold.
Without that, they would have been swarmed. Yet even with it, the pressure stayed constant.
Even with it, the pressure stayed constant.
Jake and Janet moved like needles through the gaps Jack created, taking openings the moment they appeared. Joanne turned cracked alleys into kill zones with lightning. Emma tried to keep buffs up where she could, but the pace of the fight gave her little room to breathe. Dominic was everywhere the line shook. Camille and Séline cut down the versions that got too close, the twins moving with their usual lethal rhythm.
And Alex fought at the center, frustrated.
The Dragon Slayer carved huge arcs through the air as she swung, breaking pixies apart in brutal, heavy-looking strikes.
Keyword, looking.
That was the problem. She could mimic the shape. She could mimic the size. But the true heft still was not there. Not really.
The giant psychic slab sword should have felt like it dragged the air behind it, like each swing carried the weight of a falling wall. Instead, it felt too clean, too controlled, too light for what it was trying to be.
Alex remembered exactly when she had almost gotten it right. The obsidian canyon. Berserking Strawberry in her system. Emma juiced up on her own buffs and Weeping Onion. Stats pushed into absurd territory. For a brief moment back then, her constructs had felt real weight. True mass. Like the world had to accept them as solid. Now, without that flood of raw stat increase, the feeling slipped through her fingers again.
She swung anyway, cursing under her breath as the Dragon Slayer scattered a holy pixie and a defense pixie in one blow. Still not enough. Because that was the other problem Alex solved almost at once.
The pixies were not merely splitting for flexibility. They were anchoring themselves.
The first one they thought they killed reformed. Not from nothing, but from the surviving version still nearby. The shadow body shuddered, light spilled from it, and the holy and defense copies started rebuilding in a rush of magic and flesh.
Alex saw it once. Then twice. And that was enough.
"We have to kill all three in under a minute!" she shouted. "If one survives, the rest regenerate!"
That changed the fight. Now every split body became a timer. Now every engagement became a brutal little burst of priority targeting. Kill the holy version. Catch the shadow one before it slipped away. Break the defense copy before it stalled long enough for the others to come back.
Alex doubted the regeneration was free. The pixies had to be burning mana or vitality to do it. But there were too many of them, and Team Nemean was in their territory. Trying to outlast that kind of attrition inside the ruin would be suicide.
Alexei took hit after hit meant for the others. He became the anchor under the storm.
The shadow variants loved him least because he kept ruining their kills. Every time one slipped through a gap or crawled along a blind wall trying to tear into Emma or Joanne or one of the others, Alexei was there. Shield up, body in the way, sword swinging after he took the hit. He bled for it, but he held.
Jack stayed the quiet hero of the whole retreat. Every time the pixies tried to widen the fight again, he bent the battlefield back into shape. Fallen beams. concrete shards. walls half collapsed and ready to drop. He made the ruin say no on his behalf.
Dominic saw the shape of the fight before the others did. Or maybe he just accepted it first. They were winning exchanges. But they were losing the field. Too many enemies. Too much room for the nest to keep feeding bodies into the fight. Too many unknowns deeper in the ruin.
So he made the call.
"Back out!" he shouted. "Slowly! Stay tight!"
Nobody argued. That was another reason they survived as long as they did. When Dominic made a call in battle, people moved.
Team Nemean gave ground step by step. Jack sealed lanes as they withdrew. Alex and Séline handled the heaviest pressure at the front edge of retreat, smashing apart whatever threatened to close too fast. Alexei guarded the middle and rear, still taking the worst of the shadow ambushes. Emma, Joanne, Janet, Jake, and Camille worked the spaces in between, turning pursuit into punishment whenever the pixies got greedy. Emma, Joanne, Janet, Jake, and Camille worked the spaces in between, turning pursuit into punishment whenever the pixies got greedy.
They gave up the dead streets of the outer ruin one block at a time, then they saw the structure. It stood apart from the rest of the city remains, larger and better preserved, built from pale material that looked almost metallic under the dungeon light. Frost clung to its surface in thin, unnatural lines. The whole place gave off the feel of a cryo-tomb, high-tech and ceremonial at once.
A sign stood near the entrance, etched in a language none of them could read.
On either side of the main gate stood statues. Dog-headed angels. Tall, elegant, and ominous. Each one of them held a weapon pointed downward in formal stillness, their canine faces expressionless and severe. Sacred guardians, maybe. Executioners, maybe. The difference felt small.
Even in retreat, the place made the skin on Dominic's arms tighten.
"Ominous," Jake muttered.
"Very," Janet said.
Then Emma noticed the important part. The pixies had slowed. Not much. But enough.
They hovered at a distance from the tomb. Holy ones circling high. Shadow ones clinging to broken walls and peering from cracks. Defense ones lingering behind them like handlers. They were wary.
Emma's eyes sharpened. "They don't like this place."
Dominic glanced once at her, then at the tomb, then back at the pixies.
Emma pointed. "Look at them. They're not committing."
Joanne grimaced. "So the haunted freezer mausoleum is the safer option."
"Yes," Emma said.
"That says a lot about this ruin," Jack muttered.
Dominic made the call instantly.
"We go in. Rest. Regroup. Now."
The main gate was sealed. Or... more like had been.
Séline stepped forward before anyone else could volunteer, rolled one shoulder, and looked at the entrance with the kind of expression she usually reserved for things that offended her personally.
"Move."
The others moved.
She drove one fist into the gate. The impact boomed through the square like a cannon shot. Metal and stone screamed. Frost cracked outward in white veins. Then the entire sealed entrance buckled inward and tore open under the force of her punch.
Cold air spilled out. Ancient. Dry. And wrong.
Dominic did not waste the opening. "Inside!"
Team Nemean crossed the threshold together, battered, breathing hard, and still ready for another ugly surprise if the dungeon decided to give them one.
Behind them, the pixies stopped at the edge of the tomb's shadow. None followed. Not yet anyway.
And that alone was enough to tell everyone inside that whatever waited deeper in the cryo-tomb, even the dungeon pixies wanted no part of it.