Chapter 154 — The Fourth Floor

Chapter 154: Chapter 154 — The Fourth Floor

Floor Four announced itself with a shift in scale before anything else — the passage widening, the ceiling climbing higher overhead, the pale fungal light stretching across a considerably larger stretch of open cavern than anything the floors above had offered.

Arlen stood at the threshold a moment, taking it in.

Bigger, he thought. Kess mentioned that, back on the first dive. Floors don’t just get more dangerous the deeper you go. They get larger too.

He pushed forward at his own careful pace, senses stretched wide the way he’d learned to keep them without a party’s overlapping awareness to lean on. The terrain here carried a wetter quality than Floor Three — damp stone underfoot, water trickling somewhere unseen, patches of moss thick enough to muffle his footsteps almost entirely.

His first real encounter came within the hour — a pair of Mossfur Hares that startled from a thicket of pale growth and vanished before he’d even properly registered them as a threat. Harmless. He let them go without a second thought.

A Sporewing Moth drifted lazily overhead not long after, trailing a faint, powdery dust that Arlen recognized from the guild bestiary’s warnings and gave a wide, deliberate berth. Sleep spores. Not worth the risk for a Rank Two nuisance with nothing valuable to offer.

It was deeper in, past a narrow stretch where the passage split into three separate branches, that he found what he’d actually come looking for.

The Venomroot Snake lay coiled near the base of a thick, root-tangled wall, its scales a mottled brown-green that blended so completely with the surrounding growth that Arlen nearly walked past it entirely. Only a faint, deliberate shift of its coils — the patient, watchful stillness of something that knew it had been spotted and was deciding whether to strike or hide — gave it away.

He stopped, studying it from a careful distance.

Rank Three, he thought, cross-referencing what little he remembered from the bestiary. Venom, and enough camouflage to make it dangerous in a fight where I’m not already watching for it.

He drew his blade slowly, deliberately, and the snake reacted instantly to the motion — uncoiling in a single fluid strike, jaws wide, aiming for his exposed forearm with a speed that would have caught a less careful adventurer entirely off guard.

Arlen twisted aside, Hawk’s Eye tracking the strike’s full arc with enough clarity that the dodge felt almost unhurried despite how fast it actually needed to be. The snake’s fangs closed on empty air, and he drove Edgeline Strike down toward its exposed length before it could recoil properly.

It was faster than the strike suggested. The snake whipped sideways, avoiding the worst of the blow, and came around for a second attempt from an angle Arlen hadn’t properly guarded.

He caught the motion through Shadow Sense rather than sight, the pale scales blurring uselessly into the tangled roots behind it, and pivoted just enough that its fangs grazed his boot rather than his leg.

There, he thought, and drove a second strike home while it was still recovering from the missed attack, blade catching it cleanly across the back of the skull.

The fight ended there, quick and decisive, and Arlen stood over the fallen creature a moment, breathing steady, genuinely pleased with how cleanly the whole exchange had gone despite the snake’s considerable speed and the total absence of anyone to catch what he might have missed.

That camouflage would’ve been a real problem for someone less careful, he thought, crouching to examine it properly. Good thing I wasn’t rushing.

He harvested a portion of the meat and continued deeper, curious now whether the floor held anything else worth his attention before he turned back.

It did.

The passage opened, some distance further on, into a wide chamber unlike anything he’d yet seen in the Depths — a natural cavern easily the size of Greyhaven’s entire guild hall, its ceiling lost somewhere in shadow far overhead, thick roots hanging down from unseen growth above like a curtain of pale, tangled fingers.

He paused at the chamber’s edge, genuinely struck by the scale of it.

This is what Ilyana meant, he thought. Floors aren’t just deeper the further you go. They’re bigger. Considerably bigger.

Movement caught his attention near the chamber’s far side — a cluster of Rotfang Boars, four of them, rooting through a patch of disturbed earth with the same unhurried indifference the Fungal Bear had shown on Floor Three. Rank Three creatures, tusked and stubborn, but not aggressive unless provoked.

He gave them a wide berth, curious rather than combative, and continued along the chamber’s edge toward a passage on the far side that seemed, from the faint disturbance of the growth around it, to see considerably more traffic than anywhere else nearby.

That was where the second real fight found him.

A Thornvine Crawler dropped from the tangled roots overhead with no warning at all, vines lashing out toward his shoulders with a speed that caught even Hawk’s Eye’s careful tracking half a step behind.

Arlen threw himself sideways, one vine catching his upper arm hard enough to leave a shallow, stinging welt before he tore free of it, and rolled to his feet with his blade already rising to meet the creature’s next strike.

It was larger than he’d expected from the bestiary’s sparse description — easily his own height, its body a woven mass of thick, thorned vines wrapped around some central trunk-like core, dozens of smaller tendrils writhing at its edges like a nest of independent, searching limbs.

Rank Four, he thought, backing carefully out of its immediate reach. Plant control. Binding, most likely, if it gets a proper grip.

He didn’t let it get one. ℴ

He called on Storm Step the moment it lashed out again, closing the distance in a burst that put him inside the reach of its longest vines rather than caught within them, and drove a hard, concentrated strike into the creature’s woody core before it could properly reorient.

It shrieked — a dry, splintering sound utterly unlike any animal cry — and lashed out wildly, half a dozen tendrils converging on the space he’d occupied a half-second earlier.

He was already moving again, Duskveil thinning his presence at the edges of its awareness just enough that two of the striking vines missed their mark entirely, snapping through empty air where his shoulder should have been.

He pressed the opening immediately, gathering heat along his blade and driving Ember Touch’s concentrated warmth directly into the same wound his first strike had opened. The creature’s shriek rose sharper, smoke curling from the blackening wood, and its flailing grew increasingly desperate rather than coordinated.

One more, he thought, circling wide to keep clear of its remaining reach. It’s not adapting fast enough to keep up.

He drove the final strike home a moment later — Edgeline Strike combined with the last of the heat still gathered along his blade — and the Thornvine Crawler’s massive form finally, decisively collapsed, its woven vines going slack and lifeless across the cavern floor.

Arlen stood over it a long moment, breathing hard, genuinely more shaken by this fight than the snake had left him. His arm throbbed where the first vine had caught him, a shallow but stinging welt already beginning to swell.

That’s the real cost of solo work, he thought, examining the wound with careful attention. Nobody catches what you miss. I nearly didn’t catch that one myself.

He bound the wound as best he could with what little his pack carried, and decided, weighing the day’s accumulated exhaustion against the considerable scale of the chamber still stretching out ahead of him, that this was a sensible place to turn back.

He made his way toward the surface at a steadier, more deliberate pace than his descent had carried, the snake’s meat and a portion of the Crawler’s fibrous wood packed carefully away, and found himself, climbing back through the familiar stretch of Floor Three and Floor Two, turning over the day’s lessons with the same patient satisfaction he gave everything now.

Bigger floors. Bigger threats. Bigger mistakes, if I let myself get careless.

He emerged into the evening light considerably more tired than he had the day before, the checkpoint guard’s now-familiar nod the only ceremony marking his return, and made his way back toward the Foxglove already turning over, with quiet anticipation, exactly what that snake’s warmth might eventually have to tell him.