Roy raised a hand and opened a portal along the inner edge of the Convention. The Nightshatter's armament came into view through it, and missiles began firing through one at a time. They streaked out over the boundary and slammed into the front ranks of the horde in rapid succession.
The blasts threw bodies backward and limbs snapped. Whole clusters got knocked off their feet and rolled into the ones behind them, but the damage to them was minimal. Roy stared as the next salvo landed and produced the same result. The monsters were battered, displaced, shoved aside, but the damage was nowhere near what those hits should have done.
"What the hell are these things?" Roy asked, his gaze tracing the grotesque, mismatched anatomy of the beasts.
Lynder stepped to the edge of the boundary. He raised a hand, drawing false void into a narrow, shimmering line of absolute cutting force. "Dissection."
The magic caught one of the nearest creatures, splitting it neatly through the torso. The body dropped in two clean halves, but the expected shower of loot never came. There were no mana crystals, no gold, not even a scrap of usable hide. The remains simply lay there, hollow and wrong.
Lynder's expression sharpened. "Their mana signatures are nearly identical," he said. "The bodies are all built differently, but the energy pattern sits in the same range across the entire front line. And none of them match any species in the records."
Lutrian nodded quickly, his eyes darting between the monsters. "He's right. Bits of them look familiar, a claw here, a shell there, but the whole things don't. They look... stitched together."
"And no drops," Lynder added, watching the horde trample over their fallen kin. "This floor is operating under rules we haven't encountered yet."
Roy shifted his gaze from the remains toward the fresh waves of creatures pressing in. "Exactly how much power are we looking at with these things?"
Lynder stepped forward to the edge of the boundary and drew false void into a narrow cutting line. He sent it into one of the nearest creatures, splitting it neatly through the torso. The body dropped in two clean halves, but nothing fell out of it. No mana crystals, gold or loot of any kind.
Lynder's attention sharpened at once. "Their mana signatures are similar," he said. "The bodies are all built differently, but the energy pattern sits in the same range across the entire front line. And none of them match any species I know."
Lutrian nodded hard. "I agree. Bits of them look familiar, but the whole things don't. They look mixed."
Lynder crouched slightly, watching the severed corpse and the bodies surging over it. "And none of them are dropping items. None. This floor is wrong in a way we have not seen so far."
Roy shifted his gaze from the mangled monster remains toward the fresh waves of creatures pressing in behind it. "Exactly how much power are we looking at with these things?"
Lynder took a moment before responding. He methodically cast a series of standard offensive spells followed by several false void incantations, when he finally broke his silence, the utter composure in his voice only intensified the gravity of his words.
"Individually, they are roughly equivalent to a Floor 210 boss," Lynder stated. "Give or take a few levels."
Roy whipped around to face him. "Every single one?!"
"Precisely."
"That's impossible," Roy argued. "The floor we just cleared wasn't even in the same league as this."
"I agree it defies logic," Lynder remarked, "but that doesn't alter our reality."
Lutrian swallowed and forced himself to keep looking outward. "Then nobody comes down here blind. Not until we know what this place is."
A few of the creatures managed to force parts of themselves through the Convention's border before the pressure pushed them back out again. Claws hooked over the edge. A jaw punched through, snapped twice, and vanished as the barrier sealed around it. The next impact hit even harder, and the lines of light running through the wall flared bright enough to stain the interior pillars.
JFK stepped into the strain and started repairing it by hand. His fingers moved in short, fast motions, laying barrier sutures directly over each new crack as soon as it formed, sealing stress lines before they could widen into breaks. The work demanded speed more than spectacle, and he gave it exactly that, stitching the Convention closed one wound at a time while the horde hammered at it from outside.
The pressure mounted with every passing second, a relentless tide of violence that tested the very limits of the sovereign border. Roy watched as the repaired sutures pulsed with a frantic, rhythmic light, fading only to flare brighter under the next bone-jarring impact. Outside, the horde had become a singular, crushing force, grinding against the Convention's defenses until the distance between the wall's resilience and total collapse narrowed to a razor's edge.
FDR stepped forward, the weight of his presence suddenly dwarfing the chaos outside. Mana rolled off his chassis in dense, deliberate wave. The interior of the Convention answered with a resonant, metallic thrum. Floating scrolls snapped taut like banners in a gale, and the pillars hummed with a deep, tectonic frequency. Along every paved road and interior avenue, the law-script began to burn with a fierce, gold-white light, signaling that the sovereign territory was no longer merely a sanctuary, but a weapon waking up.
Roy watched the transition, feeling the atmospheric pressure spike until his ears popped. "FDR? What are you doing?"
FDR did not turn, his gaze fixed on the horizon of monsters. "Invoking the Arsenal of Democracy," he replied, his voice echoing with the layered resonance of a thousand speakers. "Protecting the nation."
His hands rose in a slow, majestic arc, and the air before him ignited with layered marks of Forgotten Scripts. It was an architectural blueprint of power, thousands of glyphs and older shapes rotating in complex, interlocking gears of light. Each line of script carried the legislative weight of a century, stacking into a towering monument of intent that governed force at a civilizational scale.
"Forgotten Scripts and Forgotten Tongues," he proclaimed, each syllable sounding like the strike of a gavel against the soul of the dungeon. "Grand Conjuration…"
The Convention shivered as the very air turned to liquid mana. A massive, rhythmic boom began to pulse from the earth, the sound of a vast, hidden engine of industry grinding into gear. It was the roar of furnaces and the scream of whistles, a phantom heartbeat of a world that refused to fall.
"…Phantoms of the Industry!"