Chapter 156 — Floor Five

Chapter 156: Chapter 156 — Floor Five

The checkpoint guard didn’t even ask this time — just a glance at the badge, a nod, and Arlen was through.

Floor Five’s descent took longer than any before it. The ramp wound down in a slow, deliberate spiral, and by the time it leveled out, Arlen understood immediately that Kess’s warning about scale hadn’t been exaggeration.

The chamber beyond stretched further than Hawk’s Eye could properly resolve even at its sharpest — a true underground forest, towering fungal growths standing in place of trees, their pale caps broad enough to blot out what little ambient light reached this deep. Bioluminescent moss carpeted the ground in slow, drifting patches of blue-green light.

This is Region Two properly, he thought, taking it in. Not just the edge of it. The whole of it.

He moved carefully, senses stretched as wide as he could manage.

A Fungus Deer startled from a thicket and bounded away before he’d properly registered it, and he let it go. A cluster of Sporewing Moths drifted overhead, trailing their faint sleep-dust, and he gave them the same wide berth he’d learned to give their kind on the floor above.

His first real fight came within the hour — a Giant Mushroom Beetle, easily the size of a small cart, its shell a thick, mottled brown that looked, from a distance, almost like part of the terrain itself.

It noticed him before he’d fully decided whether to bother with it, and charged with surprising speed for something so heavily armored.

Arlen sidestepped the initial rush, Hawk’s Eye tracking the creature’s ponderous turn, and drove Edgeline Strike toward a seam along its underside where the shell thinned. The strike connected, but glanced rather than bit deep, the beetle’s plating turning aside most of the blow.

Tougher than it looks, he thought, circling wide as it reoriented.

He gathered heat along his blade as it charged a second time, and this time met the charge rather than dodging it — driving Ember Touch’s concentrated warmth into the same weakened seam. The shell cracked, smoke curling from the wound, and the beetle’s charge faltered into a stumbling, wounded stagger.

He finished it with a clean follow-up strike, and stood over the fallen creature a moment, catching his breath.

Worth checking properly, he thought, kneeling beside it.

The shell itself was cracked and scorched, not worth much. But the mandibles, when he examined them, were dense and largely intact — the same kind of material Bellwyn had praised in the mutated Rockhide claws. He worked them free carefully, packed them away, and cut a portion of meat from the beetle’s less-damaged flank for later.

Not everything’s worth taking. This is.

He pressed on, the chamber’s scale making itself known again and again — a stretch of tunnel that opened unexpectedly into a second, smaller cavern he hadn’t anticipated, a shallow underground stream he had to pick his way around rather than simply wade through, thick roots crossing the passage at odd angles that forced him to duck or climb rather than walk freely.

A Mossback Turtle blocked one such narrow stretch entirely, its shell wedged between two outcroppings in a way that made Arlen suspect it had chosen the spot deliberately, territorial and unbothered by anything smaller than itself.

He considered simply going around, and found no clear alternate path.

Fine, then.

It didn’t so much attack as simply refuse to move, snapping at him with surprising speed when he tried to press past. He backed off, reassessed, and drew on Storm Step to close the distance at an angle rather than head-on, driving a strike toward the exposed flesh at its neck before it could fully withdraw into its shell.

The strike connected, shallow but enough to draw its attention properly, and the turtle lunged with a burst of speed that nearly caught his leg. He danced back, circled again, and this time timed his strike to land the instant its neck extended to snap at him — Edgeline Strike driving deep before it could recoil.

It took three more exchanges before the creature finally went still, considerably more stubborn than its size suggested it should be.

Arlen harvested what he could — a portion of the shell’s edge, dense enough that he suspected it might interest a craftsman the way the beetle’s mandibles had, and a modest cut of meat, tougher than the boar’s had been all those years ago but usable regardless.

Two kills, two sets of materials, and I’ve barely covered a fraction of this floor, he thought, glancing back the way he’d come and then forward toward passages that branched in directions he hadn’t yet explored.

He pushed on regardless, curiosity outweighing the accumulating weight in his pack, and found the floor offering up obstacle after obstacle in a way the shallower levels never quite had — a collapsed section of tunnel he had to find a way around, a patch of ground that gave slightly underfoot in a way that made him test each step before committing his full weight, a chittering, unseen chorus somewhere in the deeper dark that he chose, wisely, not to investigate.

By the time the fungal light began to feel less like exploration and more like the accumulated fatigue of a very long stretch of walking, Arlen had covered perhaps a third of what he judged the chamber’s true size to be, and understood, weighing the distance already behind him against how little of the floor he’d actually seen, that the easy rhythm of his earlier dives — down, explore, home before dark — wasn’t going to hold much longer.

Some dives take days, Kess had told him once, almost in passing, back during their first proper conversation weeks ago. Some take longer than that. Floors this size don’t respect anyone’s schedule.

He hadn’t fully appreciated the comment at the time. He did now, standing at the edge of a chamber that seemed to keep unfolding no matter how far he walked into it.

He found a defensible hollow between two thick fungal trunks, checked the surrounding ground carefully for any sign of a nest or den he might be settling too close to, and made the deliberate, practical decision to camp rather than exhaust himself pushing back toward the surface only to return here again tomorrow.

Efficient, if nothing else, he thought, settling his pack down. No sense climbing three floors twice in one day when I can simply stay.

He strung a careful, familiar perimeter of Web-Silk Binding around the hollow, the same nightly habit he’d carried since long before Aurenholt, and built a small fire, low enough to cook by without announcing his position to anything with better things to do than investigate light.

He hadn’t eaten yet. The beetle meat and the turtle’s tougher cut sat wrapped and waiting in his pack, and he found himself, settling back against one of the thick trunks to rest his legs properly, content to let hunger catch up with him in its own time rather than rush the evening.

The fire crackled low against the vast, dark quiet of the chamber stretching out around him, and Arlen sat there a long while, simply resting, the accumulated weight of the day’s walking finally easing out of his legs — no longer counting the hours until he’d need to climb back toward the surface, simply settling into whatever pace the floor itself demanded of him.