The first floor turned out to be easier than expected at least for Sophie's group.
They fell into a rhythm without really discussing it. Alen and Dren up front, reading the space and catching the first threats before anyone else needed to react. Sophie and Marie in the middle, covering gaps and providing support from the right distance. Lira at the back, quiet, but her eyes never stopped moving.
The floor one monsters didn't offer much. Slimes with translucent yellowish bodies that burst apart when hit with heat. Palm-sized spiders that moved fast but followed patterns easy enough to read after the first encounter. The occasional small goblin that was more noise than threat.
"Alen, left."
He was already moving before Sophie finished saying it. One basic-level fire strike — not the strongest thing he had, but enough — hit the large spider that had just crawled out from a crack in the wall. It burned and curled inward. At the same moment, a watershot came from just behind Alen's shoulder and caught a goblin that had apparently been sneaking up from the opposite direction.
Alen glanced back.
Sophie lowered her hand with a satisfied look. "Nice!"
He didn't respond, but the corner of his mouth moved slightly upward.
They kept moving, and as they went, the corridor showed them a different picture. Other groups were scattered at various points — some still standing across from a single slime, quiet arguments about who should step up audible even from a few meters away. One student's incantation fizzled out halfway, the magical energy dissolving before it could form anything. Further along, a student leaned against the wall with a hand pressed over their mouth, face drained of color after a goblin's insides had ended up on the dungeon floor.
"A lot of people struggling, huh."
Alen said it more to himself than anyone, but loud enough that it carried.
"I mean, what do you expect." Marie answered easily, still watching the other students with an expression that sat somewhere between sympathy and mild amusement. "This is probably their first time actually fighting. Not a practice run, not a simulation."
She let out a quiet laugh when a Lightning class student nearly shocked his own teammate in a moment of panic.
Alen didn't comment on that. He understood it — the first time in a real situation always felt different from anything a classroom could prepare you for. Pressure had its own way of making people who looked perfectly capable in training suddenly forget how to think straight.
What caught his attention next wasn't any of the other students.
Dren had drifted slightly away from the formation — not by much, just a few steps to the side, enough to put a small but deliberate gap between himself and the rest of the group. He hadn't said much since they'd entered. Not the kind of quiet that came from awkwardness — more like someone who simply didn't feel the need to fill silence when there was nothing that needed saying.
But there was a difference between quiet and closed off.
Alen slowed his pace slightly, letting the distance between himself and Sophie and Marie grow a little, and moved until he was walking alongside Dren. Their shoulders were nearly level when he spoke.
"Hey."
Dren glanced over briefly. Didn't answer.
"You don't talk much, do you."
He said it without any edge — flat, like someone stating an observation rather than making a point of it. His expression stayed as neutral as he could manage, nothing that could be read as a challenge or a provocation.
Dren didn't respond right away. He walked a few more steps before he finally said anything.
"What's your problem?"
Not a friendly question. His tone came out sharper than it needed to, and there was something at the edge of his expression — not quite anger, more like a discomfort he wasn't bothering to hide.
Alen didn't back off.
"No problem." He gestured ahead with one finger — toward Sophie, toward Marie, toward Lira walking at the rear. "We're teammates. Figured it wouldn't hurt to be a little open with each other."
Dren looked at him again, longer this time.
"Open," he repeated, in a tone that didn't make it clear whether that was a question or something closer to quiet mockery.
"Doesn't mean you have to tell me your life story," Alen said. "Just — knowing someone's there."
Dren didn't answer. He looked forward again — at the corridor still stretching ahead, at Sophie's back as she occasionally murmured something to Marie.
The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable, but it wasn't easy either. Somewhere in the middle.
Alen didn't push it. He'd said what he meant to say. The rest was up to Dren.
A few steps passed.
"Dren Falke."
Alen glanced sideways.
The guy was still looking ahead, expression mostly unchanged. But he'd spoken — and this time it wasn't to push back.
"My full name," Dren said, short and plain. "Since you seemed to want to know."
Alen let that sit for a moment.
"Alen Andreas."
---
The conversation stopped on its own.
Not because anyone ended it — but because every person in the group halted at almost the same moment, like something invisible had hit them all at once at the threshold between floors.
The body was right in front of the door.
A student. The uniform was still recognizable by its color accent — Water class. But that was about all that was still intact. The body had been split at the waist, the upper and lower halves separated by a distance that made no physical sense, as if something had pulled them in opposite directions simultaneously. Blood had spread wide across the stone floor, darkened to near-black in the places it had been exposed longest, still a deep red closer to the source.
And the smell.
Not just blood — though the blood alone was already enough to make Marie turn her face away and Lira press the back of her hand against her nose. There was something underneath it, sharper and wrong, like a liquid that had been held over heat far too long. A smell that had no business being inside any dungeon.
"What happened?!"
Dren was already stepping forward before the question left his mouth — instinct pushing him to go in, assess, act.
His right shoulder stopped.
"Don't."
Alen didn't raise his voice. It came out low, almost flat, which somehow made it land more like a warning than a command. His hand was still on Dren's shoulder — not a firm grip, but steady enough to be clear.
Dren turned with an expression that wasn't pleasant. "Let go."
"One second."
Alen didn't let go. His eyes stayed fixed on the space beyond the floor two doorway — tracing the corners he could see from where he stood, drawing in the air coming through the gap in a way that looked, from the outside, like he was thinking about something else entirely.
But his mind was somewhere far from here.
*That smell.*
He'd encountered it before. Not here, not in a place like this — but in his previous life, in a situation he didn't particularly want to remember in detail. The substance went by different names depending on who'd made it, but the effect was always the same. Monsters that were weak — the kind a beginner mage could handle without much effort — became something completely different after exposure to it. Faster. Stronger. Harder to predict in any meaningful way.
*Elixir.*
Why is it here?
He released Dren's shoulder slowly, almost without realizing it.
And why has it been spread around?
That second question bothered him more. Elixir wasn't something that appeared on its own — it wasn't easy to produce, wasn't something stored carelessly. If that substance was on the second floor of the academy's dungeon, someone had brought it in. And that someone had known when and where to use it.
His thoughts hadn't finished forming when a heavy sound rolled through the air from behind them.
Every head turned.
The dungeon entrance the massive door they'd walked through, the one connecting the dungeon to the academy grounds outside was shut. Not slowly, the way it had opened. All at once, with a stone impact that sent vibrations through the floor. And across its surface, dim patterns of light spread outward like glowing fractures, arranged in something far too precise to be anything accidental.
A magic seal.
Chaos broke out almost immediately.
"WHY IS IT CLOSED?!"
"Open it! Hey, someone open the door!"
"This isn't part of the test, right?! THIS ISN'T PART OF THE TEST?!"
Dozens of students rushed toward the door, hitting it with their hands, with magic, with whatever they could use. Some tried basic unlocking spells. Others struck the stone surface with their elements — fire, wind, streams of water — all of it absorbed by the seal without leaving a mark.
The door didn't move a single millimeter.
Through all of it, Sophie's group stayed where they were, none of them moving toward the door. Not because they weren't scared — but because something about this felt too deliberate to respond to with panic.
"How did this happen?"
Marie was the one who asked, her voice quieter than usual. Her eyes moved from the sealed door to the second floor corridor that now looked darker than before, then to the body still on the ground. "This was supposed to be a normal test."
Nobody answered right away.
Sophie stood still, both hands clasped together in front of her chest. She'd faced monsters before — that part wasn't new. But there had always been something behind it. A teacher who could be called. A safety protocol. A clear line between training and actual danger. That line was gone now, and the body on the second floor was the proof.
Her hands trembled slightly. She didn't try to hide it.
"What do we do?"
It came out smaller than she'd meant it to.
Alen didn't answer immediately. His eyes were still taking in the full picture — the sealed door, the panicking students, the dark corridor above, the smell of elixir that hadn't faded in the several minutes since they'd first caught it. The more he considered it, the more one conclusion kept surfacing as the only one that fit.
"There's an intruder."
The words came out flat, but the effect was immediate. A few students nearby who happened to be close enough went still for a moment. Marie turned sharply. Even Lira, who'd been silent throughout, looked up.
And Dren stepped half a pace forward, eyes narrowing.
"What do you mean, intruder?" His tone was caught between anger and disbelief — not directed at Alen personally, more the anger of someone watching an already unreasonable situation suddenly get a explanation that made even less sense. "This is an academy. There are security measures. No outsider just walks in."
"The security measures were designed for monsters," Alen said. "Not for a person pretending not to be there."
Dren went quiet.
"That seal on the door — that's high-level magic." Alen nodded toward the entrance. "Nobody in here could do that. Not even if every student combined their output. Which means someone who was never part of this test was already inside the dungeon before any of us walked in."
A brief silence settled over the five of them.
"And the elixir," Alen continued, dropping his voice so only they could hear. "That smell coming from the second floor , it doesn't exist naturally in any dungeon. Someone spread it deliberately. Someone who knew the test schedule, knew the layout of this dungeon, and had been inside long enough before the doors ever opened for us."
Sophie swallowed. "So this was... planned?"
Alen looked at her for a moment before answering.
"Everything about it is too clean to be a coincidence."