Dominic realized the shield was his.
Not in the metaphorical sense. Not in the vague, symbolic way a relic sometimes "chose" someone.
The moment the memories settled enough for him to breathe through them, a system prompt flickered in the corner of his vision and refused to be ignored.
Eyeless Heaven
Ownership transferred.
And beneath that, another line.
Skill acquired: God's Roar Canon
Dominic read the names out loud because the rest of the team needed to hear them too. But the words tasted bitter in his mouth. Not because the shield was weak. Not because the skill sounded ridiculous. Because he knew what those names had cost the man who first carried them.
He looked down at Eyeless Heaven in his hands. The tower shield felt heavy in the right way. Old. Earned. The carved mask face on it remained unreadable, the eye and mouth slits dark and still now, as if waiting to be struck awake.
Jake exhaled first. "So we're just doing this now. We're inheriting dead alternate-selves' gear."
"No time loop," Dominic said quietly.
That made several of them look up. He rubbed one hand over his face and forced himself to explain through the exhaustion.
"The Earth I saw wasn't ours. Not even close." His voice stayed rough. "The tech was different. Their whole development path was different. Their cities. Their power systems. They used cosmic energy. Those devices on the rooftops outside were basically cosmic batteries." He looked at the murals, then back to the team. "Too different. This isn't a loop. Not ours."
That eased something in the room. Not everything. But enough.
Enough for Jake to stop looking like existence itself had become an insult. Enough for Jack's shoulders to lower a little. Enough for Joanne to mutter, "Good. I would've hated the loop thing."
Emma leaned against one of the tomb walls and closed her eyes for a second. "Parallel worlds is still bad."
"Less personally insulting," Jake said.
Camille, quiet as ever, gave the smallest nod. That was as close to comfort as the tomb was going to offer. The team slept in shifts after that. Or tried to. The cryo-tomb stayed cold and silent around them, and even with the immediate horror dulled by exhaustion, none of them rested easily. But one thing did not go unnoticed.
That night, Janet stayed close to Dominic. Closer than usual even for a married woman sleeping in a dungeon beside the man she loved. She did not make a scene of it. Did not speak much. Just stayed within reach, as if some part of her feared that if she looked away too long, he might split into another version and vanish into some other war-torn world she could not follow.
Dominic understood. He did not tell her not to.
At dawn, he rose first. The tomb's pale light made the bronze face of Eyeless Heaven look almost alive. Dominic picked the shield up and felt the weight settle into his arm like it had always meant to be there. Not natural yet. Not familiar yet. But right.
He looked at the weapon for a long moment. Then made a vow quietly enough that no one else heard it. He would protect his team. He would protect this world. And somehow, in doing that, he would carry the regret the other Dominic died with instead of letting it rot in a dead tomb.
When the others were fully up and moving, Alex made the next call. "We use the tomb."
Dominic looked over.
Alex folded her arms and nodded toward the entrance where the pixies still hovered in wary patterns outside. "As a safe zone. We pull them here. Farm them in controlled fights. Retreat back inside when needed."
Emma followed at once. "Until the nest decides we're too expensive to treat as prey."
Jack's eyes moved over the entrance angles and the choke points around the broken gate. "That can work."
Joanne grinned. "So our plan is to become an infestation problem."
Jake shrugged. "I've had worse plans."
Dominic took one glance at the chamber, the entrance, the team, then nodded. So they did exactly that. The day became a cycle of violence and adaptation.
They would push out from the tomb, draw pixies into controlled lanes, kill what they could, then fall back inside before the swarm could widen the field too much. The pixies hated the tomb enough to hesitate at the threshold every time. That hesitation became Team Nemean's advantage.
Dominic tested God's Roar Canon the first time a cluster of holy variants hung too far back for him to reach. He braced Eyeless Heaven. Punched the back of it the way memory told him to. The carved mask on the front lit from within, pale gold flooding into the eye and mouth slits, and then a beam of raw destruction erupted outward with enough force to rip through the ruin street and vaporize two pixies cleanly while blasting a third into wet ruin against a wall.
The recoil ran up Dominic's arm. The grin that spread over his face was immediate.
"Oh," he said. Then, more honestly. "Oh, I love this!"
Jake stared. "You finally got range."
Dominic looked genuinely delighted for the first time since midnight. "I finally got range!"
It was perfect for him. His class had always lacked that option. He was a breaker, a pressure wall, a close-range hammer. Eyeless Heaven gave him reach without changing who he was.
Alex started using Bai Hu's storm too. She had delayed long enough. Now, with a safe retreat point behind them and a steady farm in front of them, she began testing Tigerphoon properly. The skill turned on around her in a whirling local storm, a violent radius centered on her body. Pixies that entered it were torn apart so fast the others immediately started trying to avoid her zone altogether.
She became, in Jake's words, "a human pixie-blender."
Not a bad result. Still, Alex was not fully satisfied. Because the storm altered air flow too much. Sometimes when she tried to use her bows inside it, her own arrow tracks shifted. Not enough to ruin everything. Enough to annoy someone with her standards.
"It messes with my shots," she muttered after one arrow curved just slightly off the clean line she wanted.
Joanne looked at the shredded pixies around her and deadpanned, "Tragic."
Alex ignored her.
Jack made the next improvement. He raised makeshift front walls from broken ruin stone and anchored them into useful angles for Alexei. That gave the paladin better coverage, cleaner lines, and safer lanes to intercept the shadow pixies that kept trying to slip in low and nasty.
Those same walls became tools for the others too. Séline, Camille, and Jake started using them to their advantage, vaulting, sliding, and cutting off the variants Dominic, Alex, Janet, and Joanne could not catch cleanly. Shadow copies that slipped. Defense copies that hung too far off center. Holy ones trying to kite from above. The mobile trio turned Jack's rough battlefield architecture into a hunting ground.
Emma stayed behind in the tomb for most of it. She wasn't idle, though. Never idle. She sang to buff them until her mana ran dry, then rested just long enough to recover, then did it again. Over and over through the day. Her songs layered strength, dexterity, and constitution into the team in timed waves, making each push sharper and each retreat less desperate.
By the end of the day, the kills had piled high enough for the system to answer.
Levels climbed. Alex and Emma reached 37. Dominic and Janet hit 38. Jake, Jack, Joanne, Séline, and Camille all rose to 36, each of them now just shy of gaining another level.
The tomb, once a place of dread, had become a grinder. A temporary school of war. And when night began to creep back into the cold lines of the ruin, Team Nemean returned once more to the cryo-tomb entrance battered, filthy, stronger, and just a little more dangerous than they had been that morning.
Team Nemean spent the next three days turning the pixie ruin into a lesson in attrition. At first, the hive had answered every loss with more bodies. Worker pixies screamed from the deeper blocks. Soldier pixies split into holy, shadow, and defense forms the moment they were pressured. They came from rooftops, broken windows, underground cracks, and alley shadows as if the whole dead city had been built to birth more of them.
But Team Nemean stopped treating the ruin like prey territory. They turned it into a butcher's lane. Every time the pixies pushed too hard, Dominic blasted them apart with God's Roar Canon. Alex carved through their lines with Dragon Slayer in one hand and a storm howling around her. Jack kept shaping the battlefield into something smaller, tighter, crueler. Emma's songs rose and fell with perfect timing. Joanne's lightning punished every cluster. Janet picked off mistakes. Jake, Séline, and Camille cut down anything that slipped through.
By the dawn of the fourth day since Dominic met the other him, the hive had finally made the calculation every predator made when a meal bit back too hard. They were not worth the casualties.
The pixies did not stop existing. They just stopped contesting the outer blocks. That was enough. So, Team Nemean pushed deeper into the ruin at last.
The city skeleton stretched farther than they had thought. More concrete houses. More strange roof batteries. More dead streets from a world that had drawn power from the stars. And at the far end of it, half hidden behind cracked walls and a slope of broken stone, they found it.
The gate. Golden and tall. Ancient in the same way all the gates were ancient, as if they had not been built but declared into existence. And on the door, etched into the metal, was the same hooded figure.
Dominic stared at it for a long second. Then muttered, "That king in yellow looking bastard really does look like the gray one from the tomb."
No one laughed. Because he was right.
The silhouette was not exact. It never was. But the shape of it, the drape of the hood, the way the figure stood like it belonged at the center of things, it was close enough to tighten every nerve in the body.
Emma folded her arms. "I hate that connection."
Jake looked at the carving and grimaced. "I hate that he's probably right."
Alex stepped forward first. "Either way, we're not turning back."
Nobody argued. They opened the gate and descended.
This time, Floor 3 did not greet them with black obsidian canyon and the memory of body-snatching spiders. Instead, it greeted them with a forest. A vast one.
The trees rose so high their crowns vanished into the dim far-above like the tops of redwoods lost in fog. Their trunks were broad enough that five men linking arms might not reach around one. The forest floor was cooler here, layered with fallen needles, old roots, and stretches of moss that swallowed sound. Light filtered down in red-brown shafts through impossible height, giving the whole place a quiet that felt old and watchful.
Then they saw the watchtowers: Treehouses, not crude platforms, but built structures worked into the giant trunks with ladders, balconies, and lookout nests. On top of one, archers watched them from the shadows between branches.
Tortura. But not the exiles from near Camp Orthrus. These ones looked younger. Harder. Straighter in the back and sharper in the eyes. Their bows were strung tight and held with the easy confidence of warriors still in their prime. Their levels, when the system gave them, were all fifty-five and above.
Jake let out a low whistle. "Yeah. Those are not retired grandpas."
The nearest Tortura did not lower his bow. Neither did the others.
So Alex stepped forward and slowly raised her hand. In it was the emblem the old Tortura on Floor 2 had given them. A sign of peace, roughly carved but clear enough to mean something to those who knew it.
The effect was immediate. The archers on the platforms shifted. Not relaxed, not fully, but enough. One called down in a language Team Nemean did not know. Another answered from higher in the trees. A third disappeared into the branches, likely to bring word inward.
After a tense minute, a rope ladder dropped from the nearest platform: Permission.
Dominic exhaled quietly. "Good enough."
They were led into the Tortura camp after that. It was built high and low at once, spread between the giant trunks and the ground below. Walkways linked treehouses overhead. Platforms held drying racks, fletching stations, and sleeping nests. On the ground, there were cookfires and gathering circles ringed with polished stone. The whole place felt lived in, old, and stubbornly alive in the middle of a floor that had already tried to kill them twice through two different routes.
At the heart of the camp stood a totem.
A turtle carved from dark wood and fitted with old beads, feathers, bone, and strips of shell. Firelight danced over its face. Around it, young Tortura danced under the evening glow of the campfire, stepping in rhythms older than the dungeon path Team Nemean had taken to reach them. It was not a celebration exactly. More a ritual of continuity. Of memory. Of people who still knew who they were.
Team Nemean waited by the edge of the circle until the chieftain approached.
He was broad for a Tortura, older than the warriors on the towers but not yet fallen from grace like the exiles below. His shell bore scars. His bow was taller than Joanne. Around his neck hung carved tokens that likely meant rank, war, or both.
He spoke first to Alex, which did not surprise anyone. Alex had the emblem. Alex carried the weight of first contact more naturally than most. Alex also had the kind of face people took seriously when discussing matters that might turn into blood.
The two of them spoke for a while with the help of gestures, repeated names, and enough shared context to make meaning from fragments. Emma stepped in once or twice where diplomacy needed softer edges. Dominic stayed quiet and visible, the way a leader did when another leader in his group had the floor.
At last, the chieftain's eyes moved over the rest of Team Nemean. Then to the distant direction of Floor 2, as if he could somehow see through earth and root toward Camp Orthrus.
He said something else, longer this time. Alex listened, asked one short question, then nodded.
When she turned back to the group, her expression was thoughtful. "He wants to meet Phong."
That got immediate reactions.
Jake blinked. "Of course he does."
Emma's mouth twitched. "Everyone eventually does."
Alex ignored them and continued. "The old Tortura on Floor 2 told them about Camp Orthrus. About the perimeter. The defenses. The relative safety."
Dominic caught it first. "Retirement."
Alex nodded. "The chieftain wants to discuss using part of Camp Orthrus as a nursing home for their senior warriors."
For a second, no one said anything. Then Joanne looked around the giant forest camp, the watchtowers, the dancing children, the scarred archers in their prime, and muttered, "You know what, that makes perfect sense."
It did.
Team Nemean had come looking for a safer route into Floor 3. Instead, once again, they had found another people with history, structure, and needs that could be bargained with. Another alliance waiting to happen.
And as the firelight flickered over the turtle totem and the Tortura youths danced beneath the towering redwood-like trees, Alex looked toward the darkness beyond camp and thought of Phong. Because somehow, even down here, even on a floor he had not stepped onto yet, the world kept making room for the farmer.