Mark gritted his teeth against the bone-chilling cold and pushed forward. Darkness held no terror for him — it had been his constant companion for over a year and a half. He knew the night would bring a different breed of monsters, yet he felt no fear. On the contrary, he found himself yearning for an encounter. In this lifeless void, even the presence of a predator was preferable to the suffocating silence.
The desert was psychologically brutal in a way no dungeon floor had been before. The second floor had been generous with detail — unique trees, jagged rocks, varied terrain. No two steps had felt the same. But here, his 60-meter Multi-Sense registered nothing but near-identical dunes, repeating endlessly in every direction. It wasn't a landscape. It was a loop. And somewhere in that loop, Mark's confidence in his own perception began to quietly erode.
For the first time in a long while, he felt truly blind again.
Not in the physical sense — he had made peace with that eighteen months ago. This was something older and uglier. The raw helplessness of having no reference point, no anchor, nothing to push back against. The Multi-Sense he had spent months refining, which had become his eyes in every meaningful way, was now only serving as a witness to the desert's absolute indifference.
He hated it.
He pushed further, noting with grim relief that the absence of wind meant his footprints remained intact. A fragile comfort. Another sandstorm would erase them in minutes. To truly function on this floor, he needed a permanent solution — a way to locate the Gate regardless of distance or weather. Until he found one, every step forward was a gamble.
He was still turning the problem over in his mind when movement registered at the edge of his sensing radius. Not on the ground. In the air. A mana signature, approaching fast.
Mark had recently managed to weave his multiple senses into a unified Multi-Sense, and had just integrated Sound of Heart into the array. Previously the skill had only helped him read intent through heartbeat and tone in conversation. Now it worked in real-time combat as well. The creature's inner monologue was, as always, straightforward to the point of comedy.
Finally, meat.
He was elated. He had found a conversation partner.
He conveniently ignored the fact that this partner had a nine-meter wingspan.
Mark executed an Air Dash, stepping sideways out of the diving line. The Appraisal flickered automatically.
Silent Desert Owl. Mana: C-. Ki: None.
The talons closed on empty air. Through Sound of Heart, Mark felt the creature's confusion — a brief, indignant pause, as if it couldn't quite believe it had missed. Then it recovered and changed tactics. Rather than diving again, it beat its massive wings and sent feathers flying outward like thrown blades. Each one carried mana. And every movement, every launched feather, arrived in complete silence.
Mark deflected what he could, dodged the rest, and closed the distance. The owl recognized the shift — prey becoming hunter — and tried to ascend. Too late. Mark aimed his staff at its wing and released an Air Blade. The owl had no warning. One moment it was climbing, the next it was falling, one wing useless, striking the sand with a heavy thud.
He ended it quickly. An Air Spear through its head. Clean.
He stored the carcass and stood in the silence again.
Then something drifted into his radius. Humanoid. Airborne. Moving the way smoke moves — without urgency, without weight.
Mark's temples tightened immediately. He hadn't forgotten the Banshees and Wraiths of the second floor. Even the memory of them made his ears ring.
Desert Siren. Mana: D+. Ki: None.
A desert Siren. He wasn't sure why that surprised him.
Then the song began.
It was soft at first — a voice, wordless, shaped more like grief than music. It didn't announce itself. It simply arrived, the way a smell arrives, filling the space before you realize it's already inside you. Through his Multi-Sense, Mark detected mana-laced mist curling outward from the Siren's form. The song was a delivery mechanism. The mist carried the payload — hallucinations, mirages, the phantom smell of water and food, whatever the desert's desperate dead had wanted most in their final moments.
Mark saw the trap with complete clarity. Sound of Heart confirmed what he already knew: to the Siren, he was a meal, nothing more. Aura Sense was screaming.
He didn't move.
The song continued, and Mark stood in the dark and let it happen to him. Not because he was deceived. Not because the magic had taken hold. But because he hadn't heard music in a year and a half, and the part of him that remembered what it felt like to be a person — not a fighter, not a survivor, not a blind man cataloguing threats — that part had simply stopped moving.
It carried him somewhere specific. A subway car, late at night. Headphones in, the city blurring past the windows, the particular peace of being surrounded by people and completely alone at the same time. He had been unremarkable then. Ordinary in every sense. He had complained about that life constantly, in the private way people complain about things they don't realize they love.
He missed it in a way that had no practical outlet. There was nothing to do with that kind of missing. It didn't solve anything. It just sat there.
The song filled the space it left behind.
After a while — he didn't track how long — Mark reached into his inventory and pulled out a portion of prepared meat. He tossed it toward the Siren without ceremony, the way you'd leave something out for a stray. Then he turned and walked toward the Gate.
The Siren went quiet. He felt its confusion through Sound of Heart — a beat of something almost like uncertainty. Then it found the meat, and the hunt was over.
Mark walked back through the dark and tried to empty his mind. His brain refused to cooperate.
Why didn't I kill it?
He had the answer, more or less. When the song reached him, he hadn't felt like a blind man in a dungeon. He had felt like someone listening to music on a bus, going nowhere in particular, with the whole evening still ahead. For a few minutes, the machinery of survival had gone quiet, and something older and quieter had taken its place.
It had taken a monster to make him feel human.
He found a bitter kind of humor in that, if he looked at it from the right angle.
The practical reality was simple: this was the dungeon. There were no other humans here. Letting one Siren live cost nothing and threatened no one. Outside, with its hunting methods, it could have preyed on the desperate and the lost, and Mark would have carried some portion of that. But here, the only potential victim was himself.
And if he was being honest — he wanted to hear the song again.