Rey stood at the boundary between explored and uncharted Labyrinth territory, surrounded by eleven elite Nephilim warriors who'd volunteered for his first official expedition.
The team represented the Sanctuary's finest—veterans with decades of combat experience, mystical practitioners with mastery over Mid-Sequence Techniques, and specialists in reconnaissance, defensive formations, and tactical coordination.
Each wore Grade 8 protective equipment provided by the Council, carried Grade 9 weapons, and possessed spatial storage loaded with supplies sufficient for extended deployment.
But despite their impressive credentials, Rey could sense the nervous tension radiating from most of them. The boundary they were about to cross represented a psychological threshold as much as a physical one—beyond this point lay territories that had killed countless explorers over the Sanctuary's thousand-year history.
