Morning came gray and damp over Croak Wood.
The camp did not wake the way Camp Stymphalian did. No lazy chatter. No Rico. No smell of breakfast dragging people out of their bedrolls. Here, the Tortura rose in quiet motions, checking the woods, checking the totem, checking whether the night had truly ended and not merely changed shape.
Team Nemean looked much the same.
Alex was still asleep, the backlash from the Berserking Strawberry not yet done with her. Even in rest, her body held tension, like some part of her still wanted to get up and continue fighting something far above her class. Séline had it worse in a different way. The woman who had driven cà rồng off with the borrowed might of dǒu was dead to the world, pale and spent, one hand still faintly clenched as if some memory of those spinning sword formations had not yet left her muscles.
Dominic stepped out of the tent first. Janet followed a second later.
The Tortura chieftain was already waiting by the central fire, tall and composed, as if bosses from lower floors and secrets of the Nine were not the sort of things that shattered ordinary sleep.
Dominic did not waste time.
"What was that thing," he asked. "Cà rồng. The stretched Tortura. The statue. The phantom. I need answers."
The chieftain studied him for a long moment, measuring. Then the old Tortura sighed.
"I speak," he said, "only if your camp agrees."
Dominic frowned. "Agrees to what."
"The old ones." The chieftain's hand moved in a slow gesture, not toward the younger warriors but somewhere behind them, toward memory, toward decline. "Your Camp Orthrus. Nursing ground. Resting ground. For warriors who fall from grace."
Dominic's jaw tightened.
It was not that he disliked the idea. Phong would have heard the request out. Probably agreed if the cost was fair and the politics made sense. But Phong was not here. Camp Orthrus was not Dominic's to promise away. And promising something on another man's behalf, especially when that man had turned a half-dead outpost into a functioning community through sheer stubbornness and trust, sat wrong with him.
He hesitated. That was when Alex came out of the tent.
Not gracefully. She still looked rough from the Strawberry penalty, skin pale, movements slower than usual, expression annoyed at the whole concept of weakness. But she was awake, and awake Alex was still Alex.
She took one look at Dominic's face, then at the chieftain, and pieced enough together at once.
"Agreed," she said.
Dominic turned. "Alex."
She cut him off with a glance. "Phong would do the same."
That was the problem. Dominic knew she was right.
Not carelessly. Not without details. But if Phong knew what they had run into here, knew that this request came tied to cursed old warriors and a lower-floor predator that hunted them across exile, he would not leave the Tortura hanging on a technicality.
Alex folded her arms, ignoring how stiff the motion clearly felt. "You know he would."
Dominic exhaled once through his nose. Then nodded.
The chieftain accepted that with the solemn weight of someone hearing a pact, not just permission. Only then did he begin.
"We are not from here," he said.
That line alone made the camp seem to quiet around them.
"We are native to the Ninth Floor. A place called the Dry Sea."
Joanne, now awake enough to listen from just outside the tent, muttered, "Of course it's called something horrible."
The chieftain went on. "In the Dry Sea, darkness kills."
Not metaphor. Not fear. Not poetic exaggeration. The way he said it made the truth plain. Darkness itself was an active threat there, the kind of law you built culture around or died under.
He gestured toward the totem. "Statues of gods like this are the only safe places."
Dominic's eyes flicked to the turtle statue with fresh understanding.
The chieftain's face hardened a little. "We were once faithful of the Titan of Ninth Floor."
He did not say the Titan's name. Maybe he could not. Maybe he would not.
"But we angered our god." That answer carried old shame. "Punishment came. Exile to Floor Three. And a curse."
Now the pieces started falling into place too fast.
"One of the things from Ninth Floor darkness followed us," the chieftain said. "Cà rồng."
Emma, listening from the back, narrowed her eyes. "Followed on its own?"
The chieftain gave the slightest shake of his head. "Not without leave. It likely got permission from one Titan."
That was almost worse. Because it meant some floor boss, some Pillar or Titan lower in the dungeon, had let a level eighty-two boss wander upward into Floor 3 to torment an exiled people.
Alex's mouth hardened.
The chieftain continued, voice flat now with facts too old to dramatize. "The curse of our Ninth Floor Titan is why we fall from grace."
There it was. The thing the old Tortura on Floor 2 had lived under. The thing the younger warriors here still feared.
"As age takes us, levels bleed away."
Dominic's grip tightened slightly on Eyeless Heaven.
"When we fall below level fifty, we can no longer resist cà rồng's skills."
The image of the stretched, shell-less Tortura from the night before flashed back into everyone's head at once.
The chieftain did not spare them. "That is when we become werdigo."
Silence. No one interrupted him now.
"That is why we banish those who fall from grace to Floor Two." He looked toward the direction they had come from, through ruin and gate and lake and camp. "Cruel mercy is still mercy. Cà rồng will not chase to higher floors if it wishes to avoid angering the Sky Emperor."
That line settled into Dominic like a stone.
So that was it. The exiles near Camp Orthrus were not merely retired old warriors cast out by a harsh people. They were sent away to save the rest of the tribe and to save themselves from becoming both prey and weapon simultaneously.
Below them, a cursed homeland. Above them, a border even lower-floor horrors hesitated to cross. And in the middle, Floor 3, where the prime of the Tortura still stood guard around old secrets and older grief.
Dominic looked at the chieftain and saw him differently now. Not just as a leader of archers in a redwood camp, but as the head of a people balancing reverence, exile, and slow decline under a god's punishment.
Behind him, Janet had gone very still. Joanne looked like she wanted to swear and ask ten questions at once. Emma's face had gone into that sharp, cool shape she wore when she was rearranging political truths in her head. Alex just looked tired and vindicated at once, as if the dungeon had once again proven that every "monster faction" came with enough pain to shame human simplicity.
From inside the tent, Séline shifted but did not wake.
Dominic held the silence for a moment longer. Then he understood one thing with perfect clarity.
The Tortura had not asked for a nursing home because they were sentimental. They asked because they were running out of merciful places to send the old. And Camp Orthrus, by sheer accident and Phong's absurd life, had become one.
The chieftain said nothing more after that. He did not need to.
The woods beyond the camp creaked softly in the daylight, far less threatening than they had in the night, but no one in Team Nemean made the mistake of thinking Croak Wood was less dangerous now that they understood it better. If anything, it felt worse.
Dominic asked the chieftain for permission to stay one more night.
Not for himself; for Alex and Séline.
Alex still had the last of the Berserking Strawberry weakness dragging at her body, and Séline looked like the borrowed touch of dǒu had hollowed her out and only then left her standing. Pushing on today would have been stupid.
The chieftain agreed without making them work for it. That alone said something.
Not trust yet, at least not fully. But enough respect after the night before.
With that settled, Dominic looked over the team and made the next call.
"Other than Emma, Séline, and Alex," he said, "we earn our meal."
Jake raised a brow. "That sounds suspicious."
"Hunt with the Tortura," Dominic said.
That got the point across fast. Nobody there was dumb enough to miss the real reason. Yes, it would earn them food. Yes, it would be the decent thing to do after the Tortura sheltered them and nearly got dragged into cà rồng's mess because of them. But more than that, Dominic wanted them moving through Croak Wood with guides while the guides were still willing.
He still meant to progress deeper into Floor 3. And doing that blind in a forest that moved at night and whispered in your lover's voice would be beyond stupid.
Emma nodded first. "Good call."
Joanne stretched and sighed. "I hate that this is smart."
Jake looked toward the woods and grimaced. "If I get eaten by a tree, I'm haunting all of you."
"You'd finally be useful as a ranged scout," Jack said.
That got a weak laugh and loosened the mood just enough.
So they went.
The Tortura did not take them on some great heroic hunt either. They took them the proper way — quietly, patiently — like people teaching children how not to die in a place that had already outlived more mistakes than they could count. They showed Team Nemean how to move through Croak Wood without offending it. How to listen for the difference between ordinary creaking and the false croak that meant something was shifting too close. How to read the forest floor where roots had dragged during the night. How to tell which patches of bark had been rubbed smooth by slithering movement and which had been scarred by something hunting between the trunks.
Most important of all, they taught them how not to get lost. Because Croak Wood did not stay still.
Each night the trees moved. Each morning the forest was different. Landmarks that looked reliable in daylight could drag themselves half a mile away by dawn. What felt like a safe route one evening could become a wall of trunks and root tangles the next morning. The Tortura did not navigate by memory alone. They had a trick for that.
The root of truth.
One of the older Tortura hunters knelt beside a giant redwood-like trunk and pulled away loose soil near the base. Hidden inside the broader root mass, partly tucked into the stump, was a smaller root. Harder. Straighter. Strange in a way the others were not.
He tapped it with one claw and looked up at Team Nemean.
"This one," he said, "always points north."
Jake crouched beside it. "Always?"
The Tortura nodded.
Jack lowered himself near the stump and studied the angle. "So the trees know direction through this?"
The Tortura gave him an approving glance.
"Yes. We think they use true root to travel. To avoid colliding when they move."
That made gross sense. A whole forest of slithering trees had to have some way not to turn itself into a wooden pileup every night. The root of truth gave them that.
Then the hunter showed them something even more useful. He drew a stone knife and struck the smaller root. Not hard enough to fully severe it, just enough to damage.
The change was immediate.
The whole giant tree gave one long, groaning creak and then went still in a way that felt unnatural after what Team Nemean now knew about Croak Wood.
The Tortura rose and dusted his hands off.
"Break true root," he said, "tree stops moving. Until root grows back."
Dominic's eyes sharpened at once. That was not just navigation, that was full on terrain control.
The Tortura had built their villages, platforms, and homes around that truth. They picked the trees they liked, broke their roots of truth, and anchored their structures there. That was why the trees in the village stayed still while the rest of Croak Wood slithered in the dark.
Joanne let out a low whistle. "That is insanely useful."
"It's also terrifying," Janet said.
"Those two things go together in dungeon biology," Camille replied.
The hunt itself almost became secondary to the lesson. They moved with Tortura archers through shifting lanes between the trunks, watched how they climbed, how they paused, how they never trusted the quiet for long. Every step deeper into Croak Wood felt less random and more like entering a place with rules written into bark and root instead of stone.
By the time the light started to tilt again and the hunting bands turned back toward camp with fresh kills slung over shoulders and backs, Team Nemean had not only earned their meal, they had earned a map.
Not on paper. In the body. The kind that mattered more in places like this.
And as they walked back beneath the giant trunks of Croak Wood, each of them understood the same thing Dominic had understood from the start. If they meant to survive Floor 3, then this was how it would happen. Not by barging forward. By learning how the land itself wanted to kill them first.
Dinner felt quieter that night. Not because the Tortura feast lacked life. There was still the crackle of fire, the smell of roasted game, the low murmur of a people who had survived another night under curse and forest and hunger. But Team Nemean had seen too much in too little time. The cryo-tomb. The other Dominic. The Soerai. Cà rồng. The phantom in the turtle totem.
So when Séline finally spoke, everyone listened. She sat wrapped in a blanket near the fire, still pale from what the phantom had drawn out of her. Camille stayed close, silent and watchful in that way of hers that always said more than words. Séline stared into the flames for a long moment before she began.
"What I borrowed last night," she said, voice quieter than usual, "was not the true dǒu secret."
That got Dominic's attention at once.
Séline lifted one hand and rubbed her temple. "The phantom. The statue. Even that was only a copy."
Joanne frowned. "A copy."
Séline nodded. "Someone saw the real thing. Or touched it. Or survived standing near it long enough to understand a fragment. Then they interpreted what they saw and carved that interpretation into the statue."
She looked toward the turtle totem at the center of the village.
"The Tortura fed it with faith. With prayer. With generations of belief." Her eyes lowered again. "That was enough to let the phantom last for years after the one who made the copy died."
Nobody spoke over her.
Because the idea sat wrong and right at the same time.
A secret so large that even a carved understanding of it could still move, still choose, still lend out power across generations.
Then Séline said the part that made even the Tortura nearest the fire go still.
"The dǒu secret," she murmured, "and probably all of the Nine... they are not things the dungeon made."
Emma's eyes narrowed. "Then what are they."
Séline looked up.
"They are human answer."
The fire popped.
Somewhere in the trees beyond camp, Croak Wood creaked low and distant.
And in the silence that followed, she told them what she had seen in the drifting half-dream left behind by the phantom.
Not a full memory, not even something as clear as what Dominic received from the other him.
Just a glimpse. A vision. A shard of something broken eons before.
She had seen a humanoid figure standing on the last floor of the dungeon.
Not Floor 3. Not Floor 9. The final floor, the deepest the dungeon went, the destination that all of mankind bet their hope on, the end of this global madness.
The system had shown its level as nothing but question marks, just like that of a floor boss. Too high. Too far beyond her. Even thinking about it made her skin prickle.
That figure stood before a giant gate. Not one of the gold descent gates with the cloaked figure. Something bigger. Final. Like the mouth of an ending.
Then the figure disintegrated.
It turned itself into a massive flame... by choice.
The fire did not spread outward first. It burned inward and downward, until a single character was engraved into the ground itself. The shape kept shifting in her memory. Every time she tried to hold it still, it changed. But no matter what form it took, the meaning remained the same:
Fighting. Dǒu.
"The dungeon hated it," Séline said softly.
That line made Alex lift her eyes from her bowl.
Séline's face was distant, like she was not looking at the fire anymore but at something far deeper than it.
"I could feel it," she said. "The dungeon shook. It groaned." Her fingers tightened around the blanket. "Like a criminal being branded with hot iron."
Nobody touched their food after that.
Because if she was right, then the Nine were not loots, not artifacts, not tricks left in some ancient ruin.
They were wounds.
Wounds humans had carved into the dungeon itself.
Jack let out a long breath and rubbed his face.
"So what," he said. "We have to get to Floor 13 to find dǒu for real."
Alex shook her head before Séline could.
"Not necessarily."
Jack looked over.
"Shifting," Alex said.
Right.
The same cursed mechanism that kept tearing the dungeon's geography apart and stitching it back wrong. The same thing that split biomes across floors, moved regions, and made maps die young.
Séline sat up a little straighter despite the fatigue.
"That might be the reason Shifting exists at all," she said.
That made Dominic frown.
Séline continued, gaining force as the idea settled into shape.
"If the Nine are answers against the dungeon, then the dungeon cannot afford to let them gather in one place." She looked around the fire. "So it shifts. It shuffles. It keeps itself separated."
Emma leaned back slightly, expression sharpening.
"You think the dungeon is defending itself."
"Yes."
Jake laughed once, without humor. "That is awful."
"That is logical," Emma corrected.
Janet was quiet for a while after that.
Then she asked the question none of them wanted to touch and all of them had already begun thinking.
"If we gathered all nine," she said, "and brought them to Floor 13..." Her eyes moved from Séline to Dominic to the dark forest around them. "Could we end the dungeon?"
No one answered.
Not because they did not care. Because the question was too large, too hopeful.
Too dangerous.
Could life return to normal after that? Could the gates close? Could the war end? Could the dead stay dead and the living stop shaping themselves around floors and monsters and system messages?
The fire crackled. Nobody gave Janet a lie to hold.
At last, Dominic spoke.
"I think Séline's right."
Everyone looked at him. Dominic's hand rested on Eyeless Heaven, propped beside him against a log. The shield's mask-face caught the firelight and gave nothing back.
"In the memories from the other me," he said, voice low, "there was no Shifting."
That alone made the air feel colder.
"No dungeon diving, no slow adaptation, no years of people trying to live around it." He looked into the fire. "The dungeon came for war. Straight from the start."
He did not need to dress it up.
They had already seen enough through his grief and his telling to know what he meant.
"The floor bosses led armies out," Dominic said. "They marched out of the dungeon and invaded that Earth."
No one at the fire had a joke left after that.
Because it meant their world, brutal and absurd and unfair as it was, might actually be the kinder version. A dungeon that shifted and scattered and played slow. A dungeon that had chosen siege and infiltration over immediate conquest.
Or maybe, as Séline now suggested, a dungeon forced into that shape because human answers had already wounded it badly enough once before.
The thought sat between them through the rest of dinner.
Not comforting or clean. But real.
And as the Tortura fires burned low beneath the moving shadows of Croak Wood, Team Nemean sat with the shape of a possibility they were not ready to name aloud.
That the dungeon was not only a prison. Not only a battlefield. But something that could bleed.