The push from Fort Erymanthian to the ruin was only four miles.
In the Obsidian Canyon, four miles was enough to become a campaign.
With Phong's support, team Nemean had stepped into the canyon and showed both the body snatcher spiders and the mouth cockroaches from hell how much they have improved.
The difference showed immediately.
Alex moved at the front like a disaster. Bai Hu's storm whirled around her, and with the condensed psychic marbles spinning in its orbit she had become that same dreadful "spinning top of death" Rico had once joked about. Here in the canyon, without cameras to flatten the violence into spectacle, the truth of it was uglier. Spiders leaping from the obsidian walls were smashed sideways before they finished unfolding their legs. Cockroaches that charged through narrow black corridors were shredded into shell, pulp, and twitching limbs by a halo of grinding psychic force.
Dominic was the answer to density.
Whenever the canyon tightened or a wave of chitinous bodies started stacking too thick for clean movement, Eyeless Heaven came up and God's Roar Cannon answered. The beam tore through roach knots, blew holes in spider nests, and sent shards of obsidian bursting outward in black glass rain. The echo of each blast rolled for seconds through the canyon, a reminder to everything hidden deeper in the crevices that a relic had come hunting.
Joanne disliked how much faster God's Roar Cannon was compare to her own spell. She could ploughed through the monsters in the same way she had struck Kenai out of the air. But her option took time to charge and power up, unlike the skill Dominic unlocked with his relic shield.
Rico, of course, had sneaked after them.
No one was surprised once they found him. No one was happy either.
He had come in and was treating the entire expedition like a shooting of a tokusatsu held in his honor. Fortress Form surrounded the raccoon the moment a new horde of cockroaches and spiders came into view. Carrockets screamed across the canyon in streaks of fire and dirt. Enoki machine-gun bursts stitched through clusters of spider bodies and punched wet holes into cockroach armor. Angry chili rounds burst in the middle of hives and left everything nearby screaming, smoking, or both. Now, with Phong's unlocking the anti-air dills, so had Fortress Form. Harden dills arrows shot up with terrifying speed and pin the descending body snatcher spiders to the wall.
The raccoon was utterly without restraint.
Emma only sighed once before giving up and timing her buffs around the carnage instead.
That was the other major difference.
Emma did not just stay idle around and handle media work while the team showing off how good they were on 1v1 situation. Well, she had planned to do that, but Adam Choi changed the course of the plan entirely. Emma had taken that chance to do deep study and analyze everyone fighting style. So now, in a group situation, she could time her buff right at the moment it was needed.
Emma's songs and layered support flowing through the team in the exact moments needed to break momentum or seize it. When Alex needed the edge on speed, it was there. When Dominic had to tank a corridor and blast through it, her buff hit him exactly as the first wave broke. The trident moved with new purpose under her timing, and Joanne's shots landed harder, cleaner, more often where it hurt. Even the newer mana-tech gear settled into its purpose as the hours passed.
Jake's vibrating daggers turned every weakness in a roach's shell into an invitation.
Jack's visor and belt system gave him sharper awareness of terrain and enemy movement, making the canyon feel less like a maze and more like a battlefield he could understand more clearly.
Séline's new gloves manifested mana shields just when she needed them, letting her hit without sacrificing her hands to shell edges, venomous limbs, or the black-glass somewhat control, despite the black rock still refuse to bend to his command.
Alexei's shield-fed second mana pool let him stay in the ugly parts longer than anyone expected. Emma's light armor did the same for her, sustaining the rhythm of her support instead of letting the canyon grind it out of her too soon.
And Joanne's revolver—half backup, half revelation—gave her a steadier firing line whenever mana economy became something to respect.
The known threats of the Obsidian Canyon proved less troublesome than they had any right to be.
The spiders averaged around level 45, the cockroaches around 49. A month or two earlier, those numbers would have mattered enough to define the expedition. Now, stacked with Phong's utility plants and buff consumables, refined by prana coat, and carrying new tools built for their exact weaknesses, Team Nemean cut through them with almost offensive efficiency.
The canyon still fought back. It still took blood and attention. But it no longer dictated the terms. Then the new threat appeared.
The first sign was the sound. Not the clicking skitter of roaches or the dry silk-whisper of spider movement. This came wetter, heavier somewhat. A drag and pulse, like soaked meat being hauled over stone.
Jake heard it first and raised one hand for stillness.
The team stopped in the shadow of an obsidian outcrop, every sense reaching outward.
Then one of them slid into view.
It was a slug. Only "slug" felt insulting to the whole category.
It was the size of a four seaters car, its long body translucent from rounded head to trailing end so clearly that the things inside could be seen working. Yet, for once, team Nemean wished they didn't just see what the slugs were proudly showing off: human organs. Or close enough to human that the mind revolted before the logic could confirm the ugly truth anyway. A heart-like mass pulsed in the center, red-black and overfed, connected to loops of intestine that slithered through its body like ropes dropped in gelatin. Two lung-shaped sacs inflated and collapsed under a layer of slick clear flesh. Bits of bone-like structure floated embedded in its length as if someone had melted a man down and let only the useful shapes remain.
Its face—or what passed for one—was worse.
A translucent bulb of head with shadowy nerve-knots twitching beneath the skin, and under that a circular mouth split into petal-like flaps lined with inward-pointing teeth soft enough to look harmless, until one realized they were meant for suction and grinding, not tearing. Threads of mucus trailed from the mouth and hissed when they struck the obsidian.
The sight wouldn't be so bad if team Nemean hadn't known that the Soerai were once human.
The slug flexed. Its body compressed in a way no healthy creature's should. And from a pulsing chamber somewhere deep in its torso, something shot forward and out through the mouth.
It landed hard ten paces away.
A petrified head.
Human-sized, mouth frozen open, eyes wide with the eternal astonishment of a victim who had died before understanding which nightmare had claimed them.
For one long second, nobody in Team Nemean moved.
Then Dominic said flatly, "I hate this place."
The slug compressed again.
Another stone head launched out and cracked against the wall near Joanne's shoulder hard enough to chip black glass.
And then the team saw there were more.
They were half-buried along the canyon floor and walls, clear-bodied monstrosities huddled in pockets of shadow where even the spiders had kept their distance. Some were larger than the first, bloated to the size of trucks. Others were younger and narrower, but no less obscene. Each one carried the same mockery of human anatomy inside their translucent flesh, and each one had piles of petrified heads and broken stony remains around it like ammunition caches.
"Cannoneer Slugs," Joanne said immediately.
No one objected.
The name stuck because it was simple and because no one wanted to spend more time than necessary philosophizing about how the dungeon had turned body-snatcher victims into projectile matter.
The first volley came all at once.
Stone heads screamed through the air in a rain of dead faces.
Dominic planted Eyeless Heaven and took the center. Séline flared her new mana shields outward, gloves singing under the sudden strain. Alexei drove his shield up beside them, extra mana flooding into the barrier line as the first impacts crashed in.
The force of it was disgusting.
Not because it was especially elegant or powerful, but because of the sound. Stone skulls breaking against relic metal, shields, and mana barriers sounded too much like failed executions. Chips of petrified face sprayed the air, cracked mouths split further, nose bridges shattered, teeth spun off in white arcs. One of the head exploded when hit by Eyeless Heaven, and from it baby body snatcher spiders came skittering out, much to the team disgust.
Emma's buffs landed across the team like a second heartbeat.
Alex answered first, launching volleys of psychic arrows and sling-pellets into the slug line. Joanne's revolver barked beside her, elemental rounds punching into the transparent bodies and making the human-like organs inside lurch and convulse in ways that turned the stomach. Dominic took one step forward through the barrage and fired God's Roar Canon into a cluster of them, blasting one slug apart so violently that clear flesh, human-shaped viscera, and half-melted stone faces exploded in every direction. Rico released barrages of weaponized plants before the treant became utterly spent, and he was reduced back to a raccoon.
Even then, it wasn't enough.
The slugs had nested themselves in layers of obsidian ridges and broken columns. Killing one only opened a lane for the next to spit through. Stone heads hammered the team's formation from angles that would have made a ranged class proud if the ammunition had not once belonged to the dead.
Enough was enough.
Alex decided that before anyone else had to say it.
She broke from the line.
Not with Bai Hu's storm fully spread, but with the other technique she had used to score her first win against Đăm Bhi. The psychic drill formed around her in a spiraling lance of force, dense, brutal, and hungry in a way her older constructs had never been. She turned that terrible shape forward and drove herself straight through the slug formation like a warhead.
The first Cannoneer Slug burst open around her.
Then the second.
Then the third, all their clear flesh and false-human interiors shredded into boiling ruin as Alex tore a path through them. Petrified heads burst in their chambers before they could be fired, sending stone fragments, slurry, and crushed baby spiders through the canyon in a grotesque rain. Obsidian cracked beneath the force of her passage.
By the time she emerged from the far side of the formation, the surviving slugs were already trying to retreat in blind mucus-soaked panic.
The system chimed.
Alex halted for just one breath, and even before she spoke the team felt the shift in her. Level 40.
She had already been a hair's breadth away from 39 back then. The Cannoneer Slugs had simply provided enough nightmare to push her over the line to finally gained 2 levels.
The rest of the team leveled too.
And because none of them carried the White Tigress's doubled EXP burden the way Alex did, they surged harder. More cleanly.
Dominic and Alexei took the lead at level 42.
Janet, Jake, Jack, Joanne, Emma, Séline, and Camille all reached 41.
The whole team stood there in the steaming aftermath of the slug fight, surrounded by shattered stone heads and translucent carcasses. They didn't pay it any mind back then. But now, after Alex had cleansed the battlefield clean of slugs, they could focus on their new mana. Thicker now, more viscous too. There was a slight burden on their output paths now as mana traveled through them. Their mana became even slower in both responses and travel time. Only a few fractures of a second slower, but on floor 3, those would be the different between life and death.
Emma was the first to test the new growth.
A fourth sword manifested behind her—Fa—without the help of Berserking Strawberry or other emergency boosts. The new blade trembled into being beside Do, Re, and Mi, its pressure clean and bright. Four swords manifested, meaning her buffs had surged upward again. 40%... it had doubled that of Phong's buff plants, aside from the strawberry.
Then she winced.
"All my buffs just got more expensive."
Jake laughed. "You say that like you won't still use them."
"I will. I'm merely complaining professionally."
By the time the team had finished breathing through the level-up adjustment, the ruin stood ahead of them.
It had been visible before only as dark geometry against darker stone. Now, up close, it rose from the canyon floor with that same wrongness all the buried civilizations seemed to share. Not human, not like anything on Earth at all, but one could tell that it was Stone-age adjacent, unlike the sci-fi futuristic cryo-chamber they have found in the pixies ruin.
Dominic studied the sky, the canyon walls, then the ruin.
"We camp."
No one argued.
They had made excellent time. They had also leveled mid-expedition, and in the dungeon that was never something to treat lightly. Better to rest inside old stone than push deeper with newly thickened mana and bodies still learning what changed.
So Team Nemean took the ruin for the night.
Camp was set in a broad half-collapsed chamber with enough cover to be defensible and enough intact wall to make the place feel, if not safe, then at least old in a familiar way. They lit controlled fires, set up Alerting Carrots, checked their gear, then shared the food Phong had packed for them. And, one by one, they settled into the strange work of inhabiting a stronger version of themselves.
The mana at level 40 and above was not radically different from what came before.
That was almost more unsettling.
It was still mana. Still flowed through the same intake and output routes. Still answered intent and class and technique.
But it had weight now.
It clung a little longer before moving. It resisted abruptness more. Everyone felt it in their own ways. Dominic and Alexei, two people who had earned their level 40 privilege before the league started, kept their silence. They knew how hard it was to get use to level 40 mana and how one had no one to ask but themselves, for mana behave differently depending on classes. A Raging Judgenaut couldn't teach an Arbiter Mindblade how to time her mana.
Jake cursed softly while adjusting his coat around his shoulders and said it felt like his body had upgraded to a more expensive kind of bad idea.
Joanne described it as "syrup with opinions."
Séline, of course, was fascinated.
Her hands moved through the air as if tracing invisible pathways, eyes narrowed in concentration while she felt the new viscosity and how it might affect the precision of her air-step technique tomorrow.
Alex sat apart from the others at first, staring into the ruin-dark and feeling level 40 settle under her skin.
They had reached the place.
They had killed their way through it.
And deeper inside the old stone, whatever remained from the lost civilization waited for morning.