Fort Erymanthian was the safest place in the Obsidian Canyon.
That sentence still sounded absurd to everyone who had crossed the canyon with their own two legs. Safety did not belong naturally to black glass ravines, spider nests, cockroach tunnels, Cannoneer Slug hunting grounds, and ruins where level sixty-two legacy bosses waited with relics made from the teeth of dragons. And yet Phong had carved safety into the place anyway.
Layer by layer.
The outer walls were watched by lizardmen scouts and Great Burrow mice. Elevated ropeways creaked softly in the dry canyon wind, connecting platforms and half-finished lookout points. H'Re-built pulley towers rose against the obsidian cliffs like skeletal trees. Below them, mutated plants held their own lines: Moletatoes hidden under the soil, Enoki machine guns tucked behind firing slits, carrockets sleeping in reinforced beds, chilies swaying with irritable menace, anti-air dill turning slowly toward every shadow that passed overhead.
Beyond that, the Timatoes prowled.
Or rolled.
Or shouted tiny fruit insults at cracks in the canyon wall until the cracks learned shame.
Only once Team Nemean was behind all of that did they finally unwrap Rico's "secret wall snack."
The object itself looked harmless enough at first.
A star-shaped crystal, small enough to rest in the palm, glowing with soft mana from within. It had been clenched inside a skeletal silver hand hidden in the painted hallway of the Stone Age ruin, wedged between murals of the Sky Emperor descension. That location alone made everyone cautious. Nothing found in the grip of an ancient silver skeleton, hidden in a wall beside an apocalypse painting, deserved casual handling.
Emma appraised it first.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Messenger Stone."
Jake leaned in. "That sounds less likely to explode than usual."
"Do not tempt it," Janet said.
Emma kept reading. "It records sound and images when activated with mana. Then it replays them when fed mana again. Almost like a dungeon video recorder."
Rico gasped.
"Ancient cinema snack."
"No one is eating it," Alex said.
Rico looked personally oppressed because human jumped to conclusion without trying.
They gathered in one of Fort Erymanthian's inner rooms, a reinforced command shelter made from stone, treated wood, woven root, and the stubborn logic of Phong's paranoia. Outside, the fort lived around them. Mice ran messages. Timatoes patrolled. Somewhere beyond the wall, a Giant Cricket carrier clicked softly while moving supplies along a new platform.
Inside, the air was tight with expectation.
Dominic tried first.
He was the highest level among them, and the whole active diver scene now—level 46 after the Yeak. Even higher than Vân and Yue Ting. He still looked faintly annoyed by his own injuries, but the level gain had settled into him with quiet mass. His mana had more weight now, deeper than before too, moving through his output paths like a current under stone.
He placed one hand over the star crystal and fed mana into it.
The stone flickered. A weak, pale pulse shimmered in the center, then nothing.
Dominic frowned. He tried again, more deliberately this time.
The stone glowed slightly brighter, trembled as if trying to wake, and faded.
For a moment, no one spoke.
That failure shook the room harder than they wanted to admit.
Dominic was not weak, at least not by any current human standard. He carried Eyeless Heaven, had fought level sixty-two lightning head-on, and had reached level 46 after killing a legacy boss. If his mana was not enough to properly activate the Messenger Stone, then the thing had been made for people standing in a higher sky than they had imagined.
Alexei tried next.
Level 45, evolved paladin. Mana reinforced by faith, shield, and that steady stubborn core of his. The stone gave him less than it had given Dominic.
Emma tried. Nothing as well.
Séline gave her shot with the exquisite precision she applied to everything involving mana pathways.
The stone quivered, but still nothing.
Then came the others, one by one.
Janet, Camille, Jake, Jack, Joanne. All level 44 now, each of them far above what they had been only months earlier. Each of them powerful enough to make older versions of themselves look almost civilian.
The Messenger Stone ignored them all.
By the end, frustration had become unease.
"It needs stronger mana," Emma said softly.
"Dominic is level forty-six," Joanne replied. "How much stronger does a video rock need?"
No one answered.
Then Alex stepped forward.
Emma looked at her. "You're level forty-two."
"I know."
Her level remained the lowest on the team despite all the impossibility she had displayed in the league and in the canyon, thanked to the title Bai Hu gave her, turning her growth into a harsher road. She had gained two levels from the Yeak, which would have been absurd for anyone else and still left her behind the others numerically.
By simple system logic, if Dominic's mana had failed, Alex's should not have worked.
Alex placed her hand over the stone anyway.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the crystal shone.
Light unfolded from within the star and rose into the air in clean layers, assembling itself into shape with a delicacy so different from the dungeon's usual brutality that the whole room forgot to breathe.
A figure appeared above the stone.
Three-dimensional, transparent but sharp enough to feel present. A woman.
Alex. No. Not Alex. At least not theirs.
Older by perhaps ten years, maybe mid-thirties. The same face in broad strokes, the same bone structure, the same severity waiting beneath stillness, but softer in places their Alex was not. Worn by command, touched by a grief that had been forced to learn posture.
Her hair was golden blond. Not Alex's lighter brunette. Something brighter, stranger, almost metallic in the mana-light. The exact color made Phong, standing near the back with his arms folded, go still.
Mr. Zero.
That was the first comparison his mind made.
The woman wore a golden circlet around her head. Thin, elegant, and too symbolically sharp to be mere decoration. Phong's second thought followed immediately, absurd and unsettling at once.
Sun Wukong's Jǐn gū ér - the golden headband that could bind even the Monkey King.
The projected woman adjusted something outside the stone's view, then looked directly toward whoever would one day receive the message.
She opened her mouth.
And, impossibly, behaved almost like Phong.
Not his mannerisms exactly, or an imitation, but this "Alex" had the same social hesitation before speech, same faint awkwardness in the shoulders, and the same shy discomfort with the weight of being watched.
Team Nemean's shock doubled.
Their Alex, standing in front of the projection, was confident, direct, and terrifyingly allergic to needless softness in public. This older mirror of her looked as though command itself embarrassed her.
"Hello," the woman said.
Her voice was Alex's and not Alex's. Older, quieter, carrying the kind of exhaustion people only developed after surviving long past the point when giving up was still an option.
"My name is Alexis Valantris."
The room went still.
"I am commander of the Human Federation."
The title landed like a door opening over an abyss. Alexis glanced down and to the side, as if checking notes she did not need, then gave a small awkward cough.
"If you are receiving this message, then I am dead."
No one moved. Even Rico stayed quiet.
"I do not know who you are," Alexis continued, "or whether you are from our line, another branch, another world, or some civilization the dungeon has yet to fully swallow. But if this stone still survives, then I owe you what little warning I can give."
Her expression changed. The awkwardness did not vanish, it was simply buried under command.
"Beware of the Night Kings."
The name entered the room like cold water poured down the spine.
Team Nemean had never heard it before. Night Kings. There first guess was Alexis people's way of calling the floor bosses. The Sky Emperor and his siblings called themselves the Pillars of the Dungeon, native dungeon races called them Titans. So maybe, Night Kings was htow another culture different than earth called those mana tycoons.
But the more they thought, the less sense that name made. Night Kings evoked elusiveness, creature of the night. Sky Emperor just appeared a few days ago and decided that the world was his personal stage. Monstrous Phoenix had blazed floor 2 and killed thousands. Horns of the Earth casual walk leveled humanity first attempt to "civilize the zone near the gate". They were extra, loud, anything but elusive.
The message confirmed everyone suspicion.
"They are not native to the dungeon," Alexis said. "Not truly. Yet the dungeon shelters their return. Once humanity advances far enough, they recover. Slowly at first. Then all at once."
Séline's fingers tightened.
Cà Rồng.
The word was not spoken, but everyone who had faced the thing in Tortura territory remembered the appraisal. Race: "human." The quotation marks had seemed unsettling then. Now they felt like a warning they had failed to understand.
Alexis looked briefly toward the tent wall beyond her.
"I am leading the army to fight one of them now."
Phong felt Alex shift beside him.
Their Alex was staring at Alexis Valantris with an expression he had rarely seen from her. Not fear, or quite recognition. It was something worse. The awareness of looking at a possible future that had already failed.
Behind Alexis, fabric lifted.
Someone entered the projected tent. A woman in her early thirties stepped into view carrying several spiders on her shoulders.
Team Nemean reacted as one. For those were body-snatcher spiders.
Smaller than the ones they had fought in the canyon, perhaps, but unmistakable. The same too-clever leg movement, the same horrible delicacy, the same petrified organ underneath their belly. They clung to the woman like pets, one perched on her shoulder, another nestled against her arm, two more creeping over her back with affectionate familiarity.
The woman herself was striking.
Long dark hair fell over her shoulders, interrupted by one red strand that looked almost like a modern highlight. In the middle of her forehead was a third eye, half-lidded and watching in a direction the other two were not. She moved with lazy confidence, the kind belonging to someone who had never had to ask permission from danger.
Alexis turned and visibly stiffened.
"Kdiê," she said, voice dropping.
The woman—Kdiê—smiled.
"You are still recording warnings?"
Alexis blushed. The commander of the Human Federation actually blushed.
"I was only—"
Kdiê stepped closer and reached up to pet one of the spiders. It rubbed against her fingers like a cat.
"You worry too much."
Alexis's eyes flicked to the spider. "They have too many legs. You know I hate spid..."
Kdiê's expression turned offended.
"Don't even think about it. My creations are too cute for a simple little moniker like arachnids."
The entire room inside Fort Erymanthian went colder.
Her creations. The body snatchers spiders were not native to the dungeon, just like the Soerai. Yet, one gave exp when killed, and the other did not.
Alexis looked away from the spiders with open discomfort, which made the resemblance to Phong even more disturbing. Their Alex would have either killed the spider or stared it down. Alexis looked like she wanted to move two steps back but was too polite to do so in front of someone she respected.
Kdiê leaned against a table, spiders moving across her shoulders and arms.
"You should not be worried. You are level one hundred, the only one of humanity that even has that level."
Alexis winced. "I am not that great."
"You are very annoying when you being modest like that." Kdiê tapped one spider gently on its head. "Everyone else is stuck at ninety-nine, I only gained the EX moniker and reached one hundred and one last month. But you grew to level one hundred."
Emma inhaled softly.
Level 99 EX, Level 100, Level 101. A structure of the system none of them had even reached the shadow of.
Kdiê continued, half thoughtful now. "I still wonder why the level system skips one hundred for everyone else and goes straight from ninety-nine to one hundred and one. Why only you have that level."
Alexis looked embarrassed again.
"Maybe because I slew the entity the monsters called Monkey Kings."
The silence inside Fort Erymanthian became absolute.
Monkey Kings - a floor boss according to the Wolven. The implication was too large to swallow all at once.
Alexis Valantris had slain a Pillar.
Phong's eyes flicked to the golden circlet again. Jǐn gū ér, Monkey King, golden hair like Mr. Zero. Then a level that should not exist and commander who looked like Alex and acted like Phong.
The message had become too dense with worldview shattering, existential crisis evoking information.
Kdiê sighed.
"You still should not make the warning."
Alexis straightened a little. "It may help someone."
"For our people, yes," Kdiê said. "For our civilization, yes. But that is not what you are doing, is it?"
Alexis said nothing.
Kdiê's third eye narrowed slightly.
"You are sending this to strangers."
Alexis coughed.
"I believe… if the dungeon repeats patterns, others may need—"
"You are adorable when you lie badly."
The body-snatcher spiders shifted on Kdiê's shoulders, mandibles clicking gently.
Alexis looked mortified. Then the projected image jostled slightly. Alexis moved closer, her face briefly filling the air above the stone.
"I have to go," she said.
Her hand reached toward the Messenger Stone, presumably to pick it up.
The projection ended as light collapsed back into the star.
The room remained silent.
Outside, Fort Erymanthian continued living. Ropes creaked, Timatoes growled, someone shouted orders near the pulley tower. A distant patch of Enoki machine gun clicked as it was inspected.
Inside, Team Nemean sat with the knowledge of a dead world.
They had hoped for a clue to another relic.
Maybe, if fortune felt absurdly generous, a copy of one of the Nine Secrets.
Instead, they had received a warning across space, time, and possibly universes from a woman who looked like Alex, behaved like Phong, commanded a Human Federation, reached level 100, killed something called the Monkey Kings, and still failed.
Dominic finally dragged both hands through his hair, making a complete mess of it.
His voice came out rough.
"If someone who killed a floor boss failed and had her world devoured by the dungeon…" He looked at the silent Messenger Stone. "Then what chance do we have?"
No one answered.
He looked toward the wrapped vajra, then Jack's leg, then Alex, then the star crystal.
"And why did the slain floor boss return?" Dominic asked. "Are they simply immortal?"
The question stayed in the room like another presence.
No system notification answered him.
No Pillar appeared to explain.
No ancient recording resumed.
The Messenger Stone simply sat in Alex's hand, dim and quiet now, as if the warning had done all it could and left the living to be afraid on their own.