Zehrina wiped blood from her split lip and started to speak, but FDR stopped halfway through turning the Fireside Ascent back toward the Convention and did a second, sharper look at the far side of the floor. "Wait," he said as his blue eyes rapidly switched colors.
His gaze fixed on the broad barrier ahead, a long, deliberate wall set across the dungeon's width. Eisenhower reached them a moment later on the General's Highway and stepped onto the front edge of the platform with the irritated dignity of a man who had been overtaken in his own specialty.
"Looks like you were right," he said. "You were much faster than me."
FDR did not bother answering. He kept his attention on the wall, on the shape of it, on the way it sat poorly in the floor. Roy followed his line of sight and felt his own focus sharpen. Something about it was wrong. The barrier stood where an outer limit ought to have been, yet the pressure behind it felt open rather than final, as if the floor kept going and someone had simply chosen to hide the rest.
FDR stepped closer to the edge of the platform. "There is additional territory on this floor," he said. "The land continues beyond that wall. I can read at least a mile of open space behind it."
"How long have we known this?" Roy asked.
"I was not aware of it until now," Eisenhower answered first.
Zehrina lowered her eyes for a moment, then raised them again without trying to soften what she was admitting. "I saw it earlier," she said. "I said nothing."
"So the surprise is Zehrina's fault," Roy said, half joking.
"Yes, one hundred and two percent," Eisenhower answered instantly, probably not joking.
FDR turned from the wall just enough to include the rest of them. "This floor technically carries the effects of a dungeon break," he said. "The boss gate barrier is absent. That means the boss has already fallen. Since I assume none of you killed it, the remaining conclusion is simple. The floor is in dungeon break conditions."
"The floor above still had that giant bat dude, that means this floor has a lower level boss," Roy said, inching closer to Eryndra and Zehrina.
Squatting at the wall's base, JFK pointed out, "Look at this… the stones at the bottom don't match the upper ones. These lower stones are rough, almost suggesting the wall was constructed over a long period by a society that was continuously progressing."
Roy did not waste time asking whether that should have been possible. He had already learned enough on the prior floors to know the dungeon did not need his approval.
Truman moved up beside FDR as he spread his fingers toward the wall. After he looked once at the mile long length of the barrier, assessing the entire megastructure, he lifted his hand. "Calculation complete. JFK, step back and allow me to open it."
Orbs poured into existence around him in a widening fan, dozens at first and then more, enough to fill the space in front of him with a dense, bright swarm.
"Fission Magic: Girl Parade."
He sent them forward in a sweeping spread, and the entire length of the barrier disappeared under a rolling chain of nuclear detonations. The blasts tore through it section by section until the whole thing gave way in collapsing debris and hanging dust.
The crumbling wall's destruction coincided with the rise of the Fireside Ascent, lifting them high enough to survey the damage. It was not an empty room that had been concealed, but a vast kingdom and a waiting army.
The space beyond the false wall stretched so far back that the eye lost confidence before the floor did. The field was packed with bodies, ranks upon ranks of creatures pressed together in impossible number, all of them built wrong. One carried the plated back of a shell-beast and the forelimbs of something predatory. Another moved on too many joints with a head that belonged to nothing Roy recognized. Horns, claws, shells, chitin, hide, bone, eyes where eyes should not have been, limbs that looked borrowed, torsos that looked stitched by appetite rather than anatomy. The whole host surged with one collective intention the moment the opening appeared.
Roy felt the scale of it before he found his voice. "Move!" he yelled.
Eisenhower needed no second order. He stepped onto the front lip of the Fireside Ascent and laid the General's Highway directly beneath it, road after road snapping into place under the platform's path. The added speed hit immediately. The ascent shot forward, skimming above his laid roads while the mass behind them accelerated into the breach.
Only once the distance between them had begun to hold did Roy turn enough to ask the question that had lodged in his throat. "How many are there?"
Truman looked back over the field with the same expression he used for everything that might or might not deserve to exist. "I stopped counting at two hundred thousand."
The answer hung there while the platform raced for the Convention and the horde behind them spread wider across the opened floor.
Its boundary rose ahead, the great mana dome of the Convention of the Patriots layered with suspended scrolls, floating texts, and pillars dense with law-script. The edge shimmered with sovereign pressure. When the Fireside Ascent crossed into it, that pressure dropped hard onto Roy's shoulders and chest and legs with enough force to make him feel clumsy in his own skin.
He looked around in immediate annoyance. Takara was still moving normally. Orden was too. The trio had already crossed inside and showed no sign of strain. Lutrian, for once, looked merely alarmed rather than emotionally ruined.
"Is there some kind of debuff in this area? How are all of you so well?" Roy demanded.
Jefferson appeared next to him, gripping a narrow, glowing strip of script between his fingers. "Yes, now take this visa," he instructed. "Hold still."
Before Roy could protest, Jefferson pressed the strip to him. Immediately, the Convention's oppressive atmosphere shifted. It was still present, but it no longer judged him as an interloper.
Roy straightened, rolled one shoulder, and looked at the others again. "You handled them already?"
"Yes," Jefferson said. "When you were occupied."
Outside the boundary, the first wave hit. The outer wall of the Convention shuddered under the force of the impact. More bodies slammed into it at once, then more behind them, the entire front of the horde pressing itself against the sovereign border in a crush of limbs and teeth. Light ran through the surface of the barrier in branching stress lines that vanished, returned, and spread wider.
Warrex lay near one of the interior avenues with his armor scratched, dented, and darkened by the fight that had already happened here. Andri knelt beside him and brought up Womb Tomb in a slow, careful curve, the cocoon beginning to close around him in a pale protective shell. When she caught sight of Zehrina's swollen face and split lip, her hands shifted instinctively as if to offer the spell there instead.
Zehrina shook her head and softened her voice at once. "Thank you," she said. "Save it for him. I'll be alright."
Andri hesitated, then nodded and returned to Warrex.