The canyon turned into a death trap in seconds.
Spider body snatchers poured down one side in jerking waves of stolen limbs and hooked legs. The giant cockroaches came from the other, skittering over obsidian with those half-open bodies gaping wide, rows of teeth shining wet in the dark. There were dozens, 40 or 50 something, each the size of a minivan.
For one heartbeat, Team Nemean was caught between two nightmares.
Then Dominic made the call.
"Alex, you, me, we punch through the roaches," he barked.
Alex turned at once.
No argument.
No hesitation.
They became the spearhead.
Behind them, the formation snapped into place with the kind of speed that only came from trust and drills and having no better options.
Alexei took the rear, planting himself in the center of the triangle formation. Jake, Séline, and Camille folded around him, giving his shield the spikes it needed so relentless attackers would think twice before doing anything stupid. Jack and Janet locked the sides, covering the dangerous angles where the body snatchers could slip in and turn retreat into collapse. Emma took the center, blades already humming around her, and she became the heart of the whole formation.
The first cockroach hit Dominic like a wagon dropped off a cliff.
He met it with a roar and a two-handed blow that cracked chitin and drove it sideways into the canyon wall. Alex's spear and rapier flashed past him an instant later, carving open the softer flesh beneath the split plates while her shields slammed another monster off balance.
But there were too many.
Their chitin shell were too thick, the momentum their heavy body generated hit like a freight train. Dominic groaned in pain, and retaliated with a force that left his own fists bloodied from the reaction.
Emma saw it.
And she made the decision.
Without warning, she reached into her pouch and pulled out a Berserking Strawberry. Even now, the strawberry pulsated with the violent tremble of condensed power and bad ideas. Its flesh red like blood, the seeds gleamed wrong.
Janet saw it and went pale. "Emma, wait—"
Too late.
Emma bit down. Immediately, power rushed down her spines as if a dike had broken, all her stats doubled at once.
The air around her blades screamed.
Do. Re. Mi.
And then something new was born in the ring of sound around her: a fourth blade appeared.
Fa.
It came into being in a burst of shimmering force, brighter and less stable than the other three, vibrating so hard the note above it looked like it might rip free of the air. Emma's eyes widened for half a second, even as the strain hit her. Unlocking a fourth sword with pure stats instead of proper leveling come with its own downside. Emma received a penalty in mana regeneration as long as Fa blade was manifested.
She didn't care, not right now, not in a pincer attacks from monstrous roaches and spiders who want their bodies.
Emma sang.
The new pulse rolled through Team Nemean.
The effect was immediate. The stats increase not only allowed Emma to unlock the fourth blade, but it also push her buffs from 30, to 40%, across four stats: strength, dexterity, constitution, and intelligence.
Everyone felt it. Dominic hit harder, Alexei held firm, Séline and Jake attacks broke clean through exo skeleton and spider flesh.
But on Alex, it changed something else.
Alex felt it too, and her eyes sharpened.
There it was.
The thing she had been missing.
She had felt it before, most clearly when she ate the Berserking Strawberry, but the 40% buffs from Emma gave the same sensation, albeit a bit more vague. Alex felt the things she her constructs were missing: presence, weight.
Even before Phong had pointed it out, she had known.
She had known since the Ice Wolf, since Samir, since every fight where her precision and speed and flexibility were terrifying, but not enough to become that one crushing answer when she needed to break something outright. Her constructs felt like an illusion, the pain they caused were mostly psychological. They could still draw blood if she hit flesh, but they felt like weird light sabers that had all the downsides of a weightless blade and none of the upside of a plasma based weapon.
That was why she started experimenting with the drill attack against the Mushroompires, then the Ice Wolf. That was why she had started experimenting with spear constructs after Samir.
Her constructs had lacked weight.
Alex's mind raced toward a decision, or more precisely: an experiment, and it was a dangerous one. She pulled out a Berserking Strawberry of her own.
Dominic saw it. "Alex—"
She ate it anyway.
Her stats exploded.
Emma's forty percent buffs stacked on top of doubled everything.
For one impossible stretch of moments, Alexandra Vogel stopped being merely one of the strongest divers on the East Coast and became something monstrous enough that even her own team felt it.
Psychic force roared out from her in a violent bloom.
Every construct around her thickened, sharpened, deepened, carrying real weight like they were made of steel and iron.
The spear in her hand became a weapon that broke formations, her shields hit like moving walls, the vajra crashed down with all the certainty of divine punishment. Even her rapier, normally all finesse and surgical threat, started punching through chitin with horrifying solidity.
Dominic laughed, half feral, half awed.
"Now that's a spearhead."
And Team Nemean drove forward.
Dominic smashed open the first lane.
Alex widened it.
Together they tore into the cockroach swarm with the kind of raw force only great teamwork and doping strawberries could create. One roach got split open by Dominic's strike and then caved in fully when Alex's weighted shield hammered it into the wall. Another leaped and got impaled so hard by her spear that the back half of its body tore itself off and fell into the cliff below.
Behind them, the line held.
Alexei anchored the retreat with inhuman stubbornness, shield and armor locking down the back while Jake, Séline, and Camille turned every attempt by the body snatchers to close in into a blood price. Jake cut spiders out of the air before they could land. Séline broke legs and body joints. Camille went for the neck connections with cold, exact violence, severing controller from stolen flesh whenever she got the angle.
Jack and Janet held the sides with everything they had.
Jack could not control the obsidian, but Stone Warden was still a semi-tank class. He shoved enemies into each other, threw whatever cockroach body parts he could reach toward the spiders. Janet rallied, handing out morale buffs like a vending machine.
In the middle, Emma sang.
Her voice was shaking now.
Each note burned mana like a furnace.
Each second cost gnawed at her reserve.
But for that short, blazing window, Team Nemean became too strong to stop.
They ran in a brutal, disciplined formation, and retreated straight at the gate.
Cockroaches died in heaps.
Spider-snatchers shattered against the back line and got thrown aside.
The golden entrance back to Floor 2 came into view ahead, closer with every horrible second.
Then Emma's voice broke.
The fourth blade shattered first.
Then the others dimmed.
Alex felt the borrowed edge start to slide away even as they crossed the last stretch, and the Berserking Strawberry in her system had begun to turn from a miracle to an impending penalty.
Dominic roared.
That, strangely, was what they needed. Not a numeral, calculatable buff, but an inspirational burst from a leader they could trust, something even the system could not quantified.
Team Nemean made one final burst.
Then, they spilled through the gate and onto the staircase back toward Floor 2.
The moment they crossed the threshold, the pressure behind them changed.
Jake risked one glance back.
The cockroaches had reached the body snatchers.
And, instead of following Team Nemean through the entrance, the two swarms turned on each other.
The canyon erupted into fresh violence.
Cockroach mouths peeled wider, rows of teeth crushing spider-ridden bodies in sprays of black blood and shattered limbs. The body snatchers leaped and latched and petrified what they could. Compared to territory and survival, preys and extra bodies were second priority. Roaches slammed into the body snatchers from both sides. Spiders dropped from stolen bodies and vanished under churning mass.
None of it came through the gate.
Not one.
Emma hit the stairs on one knee, breathing raggedly.
Alex braced herself against the golden frame, chest rising hard.
Dominic looked back once, judged the chaos beyond, and said the only thing anyone sensible could say.
"Back to floor 2."
So Team Nemean retreated up the spiral staircase between the floors, battered, alive, and savoring the first real taste of what Floor 3 meant. Behind them, in the obsidian canyon below, the monsters tore into each other while the gate to Floor 2 stood like a border even nightmares obeyed.
The moment Team Nemean crossed back through the golden gate and into the safer side of the threshold, the whole group felt the shift. Not safety exactly. Floor 2 was still Floor 2, but compared to the obsidian canyon and the things living down there, the air here felt almost merciful.
Dominic did not push them farther than needed.
"We camp here," he said, looking at Alex and Emma first. "Close to the gate."
No one disagreed.
They needed to stay near the entrance they had just found. They also needed to wait out the Berserking Strawberry backlash before trying anything ambitious again.
Nyx and Bruno were already there when they arrived.
The two had stayed behind from the Floor 3 push because level twenty was still too low for that kind of madness. The moment they saw the team coming back, both rushed over. Bruno first, all open worry and restless energy. Nyx right after him, faster, quieter, her tail low and her eyes sharp as she counted injuries at a glance.
Bruno reached Alex and made a distressed sound in his throat.
Nyx's ears flattened.
Because Emma and Alex got hit by the crash immediately.
The crackback for 1 minute of doubling stats, was extreme weakness for 1 day. Both woman had their stats dropped to single-digit level.
As low as Phong.
Emma staggered first, one hand shooting to the wall as her knees nearly gave. The four glowing blades around her were already gone. Her face went pale in seconds, all that deadly battlefield value stripped away by the punishment that followed the fruit.
Alex had it worse.
Much worse.
The moment the power left her body, the damage underneath it showed. Her muscles had been pushed too far, her bones had taken strain they were not meant to take. There were tears, bruising, internal stress, cuts where pressure backlash had broken skin, and deeper injuries from forcing her body to withstand all those stacked buffs at once.
She made it three steps before Dominic caught her.
"Alex."
She hissed through her teeth, trying to stay upright from pure stubbornness, but the sharp pain rushed in and left her gasping for air.
Joanne went cold. "She's bad."
Emma, weak and unsteady herself, looked at Alex and stopped trying to hide how worried she was.
They got her down carefully.
The camp near the gate turned into controlled frantic.
Dominic barked order, Jack and Alexei secured the perimeter, Jake and Camille checked the approaches. Séline got medical supplies ready. Emma sat with her back against stone, breathing shallowly, furious at her own body for failing this quickly. And then Nyx and Bruno, useless in Floor 3 but very much present here, hovered near Alex and tried to comfort her. Bruno wagged his tail, barking at the ground. Nyx threw him a glare, saying: "Calm down pup. Not all problem could be bitten to submission."
They used Sympathy Enoki on her.
The healing effect took hold, knitting the smaller damage, closing what it could, easing the worst of the immediate danger. It stabilized her, it kept the situation from tipping into something life-threatening. But even they could not fully solve it.
The wounds were too deep, too widespread, too wrapped into the exhaustion of the Berserking Strawberry backlash.
Alex would live, but she was going to need more than a day to recover properly.
When her breathing finally steadied enough that everyone could stop expecting the next second to get worse, the whole camp seemed to exhale at once.
That was when they realized they were not alone.
A presence had settled nearby, patiently, silently, waiting until the crisis passed enough that they could notice.
Dominic turned first.
Then Emma.
Then the others followed his gaze.
A tiger stood beyond the camp line.
Not a normal tiger. Not even close.
Its coat was white as fresh snow, so clean it almost shone in the dim dungeon light. Its body was large enough to make every instinct in a human body say run before a conscious thought could form. But the strangest part was the legs.
They were not flesh.
From the shoulders and hips down, the limbs dissolved into wind. They weren't transparent exactly, but more like pale currents shaped into the idea of legs, holding the body aloft through motion that never truly stopped. Every shift of stance stirred the air around it in soft spirals.
Jake checked the status menu and went very still.
"...yeah, no."
Everyone else saw the same thing.
Name: ???
Level: ???
Stats: ???
Everything red.
A floor boss.
Another one.
It wasn't hostile.
Which, at this point, was about the best news they could hope for.
The white tigress watched them with calm, bright eyes. She did not seem bothered by their fear. If anything, she looked faintly amused by how quickly the whole group had re-formed around the weakened Alex and Emma despite their own exhaustion, despite what stood before them was a Pillar of the dungeon.
Then she spoke.
Her voice was feminine, smooth, and far too clear for a beast that size.
"So. These are the mortals that little brother complained about."
Nobody moved.
Nobody was stupid enough to interrupt.
The tigress looked at Alex first, then Emma, then past them in the direction of Floor 1 as if distance meant nothing to her.
"Little Yama has been grumbling," she said. "He says our eldest has helped the farmer of Camp Stymphalian several times."
That made a few people glance at each other.
Everyone there knew who she meant.
The eldest.
The Sky Emperor.
The white tigress's eyes narrowed in lazy interest.
"That made me curious."
Emma, still weak enough that her voice came out softer than usual, said, "And curiosity brought you here personally."
The tigress's whiskers twitched.
"Yes."
Dominic stepped forward half a pace, placing himself between her and the rest without pretending the gesture would matter if the White Tigress chose violence.
The floor boss looked at him and did not mock the effort.
Instead she said, "Relax. If I wished to kill you, your concern would not slow me."
Jake muttered under his breath, "Comforting."
Joanne elbowed him without looking away from the tiger.
The tigress padded one step closer, the wind-legs making almost no sound on the stone.
"I have no interest in your deaths," she said. "Not today."
That was something.
They let out an audible sigh of relief.
Her gaze drifted briefly toward the golden gate to Floor 3.
Then back to the group.
"There is a colony of Mushroomoids nearby," she said. "A civil war is eating through them."
Dominic frowned. "Mushroomoids?"
The tigress nodded once.
"The aggressive faction you call Mushroompires can be reverted. They were not born that way. Not entirely." Her tail moved once behind her, slow as a cloud. "I would prefer the colony returned to Mushroomires."
Emma's eyes sharpened even through the weakness. "You're giving us a quest."
"Quest entail rewards. More like a friendly request."
The tigress sat then, all effortless power and impossible grace.
"Settle the civil war. Restore the colony's balance. Turn Mushroompires back into Mushroomires." Her tone remained calm, almost detached. "Do this, and I will consider my curiosity satisfied."
She stated no rewards, and no threats either, at least not openly. Yet, no one in team Nemean was foolish enough to think that they could turn it down.
It was a floor boss asking something of them.
Which meant it was a quest whether the system marked it or not.
No. It was worse. The system had never once forced any of them to do anything, not even a single punishment was handed out for not doing quests assigned to you.
But request from a floor boss was a different beast. No one knew for certain how it would react to being turned down, and no one was foolish enough to be the lab rat for to test that theory.
Alex, still lying against rolled blankets, managed to crack one eye open enough to look at the white tigress.
"Why us?"
The floor boss's gaze settled on her.
"Because little brother's farmer has become everyone's strange problem," she said. "And because those who walk with him keep surviving things they should not."
That was rude.
But it was fair, too.
The wind around her legs stirred once more.
"So," the tigress said, looking over Team Nemean as they stood bruised, drained, and one bad day richer. "Will you hear the details."
No one answered immediately.
Because they knew, that this single answer could be the differences between life and death.