The floor did, indeed, begin to rise, but it was slow. It would take far longer to even remotely threaten her, unless it suddenly shot up all at once when the countdown hit zero. Somehow, she didn’t feel like that would happen.

Nevertheless, she pressed the button to see what happened.

The countdown reset to thirty, and the floor fell back down.

Zelsys sighed, walking over to the floor panel right in front of the door.

She took the Butcher out of its holster and held it against the floor that it might serve as a pillar if the floor did indeed try to crush her, and waited.

Twenty. The projection turned orange.

Ten. It began flashing and the floor began rising.

Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.

It had now risen nearly a third of the way towards the ceiling.

Four. Three. 

Closer and closer to the ceiling, even the lightgems turned red and began flashing in a strobing pattern as the rising of the floor sped up.

Two. One. 

There was nothing.

The countdown froze at one. It flickered to zero in dark red, then flickered back to one, now in blue. 

Zero. One. Zero. One. Zero. One.

The door slammed open, and Zelsys knew it was now or never, slipping through into the next intermediary chamber. The moment she hit the floor, the previous chamber’s floor did indeed slam into the ceiling with such force that it shook the walls, the door closing shut behind her.

Looking about, cleaver in hand, she saw that this chamber didn’t even have a door or a glyph. It had a Fog Gate, and that was all it had. 

The Fog Gate came alive at her approach, and she stepped through. Once the familiar sensation of Fog transit washed over her, she saw a huge chamber sprawl out before her.

It was a square floor plan, easily twice as large as the Sister’s arena, with three doors on every wall. In its center was a wide, squat altar entirely covered by a projection glyph that projected the dungeon map. Bizarrely, the map showed that she was in the first floor’s Fog Transit chamber, even though she had barely traversed three chambers, four if she counted the Sister’s arena as a separate chamber. 

 You saw through the Parasite’s deception, well done.

 

“Wasn’t it you at the end when the countdown flashed and the door opened?”

 

Not directly.

 

She can never exert the control,

to directly kill a challenger using my works.

 

That is why she tried to starve you,

and to use her children to do the job.

 

It is a safeguard put in place,

specifically to prevent what she tried.

 

A raised eyebrow, a mental question of, “Why would that be the case? And aren’t you supposed to never provide new information?”

 

As for your first question:

 

The first time I was active,

the first so-called hero to reach my core,

tried the very same gambit.

 

My builders were still alive then,

and put that precaution in place.

As for your second question:

 

That restriction has similar roots,

and a similarly specific jurisdiction.

 

I may not provide any new information,

that could directly aid one’s cultivation.

---

“I can't remember our last victory, was it the past, or just a dream?” Strolvath sang as he walked amidst the collapsed bodies, the ebb and flow of his emotions having carried him to the shores of nostalgia. Anger, or melancholy, even the weeping, volatile mixture of rage and sorrow - it mattered not what emotions fuelled his performance, only that he took the care to channel them appropriately.

He knew not how long he’d been going at it, how long he’d walked through these halls using his voice to fell dozens of malformed meat golems. Time quickly got away from him when he really got into a performance, but all he needed to know was that he was making progress.

Drones, Warriors, Doormen… He’d seen worse. This hive was all too large, all too prolific for the utter lack of specialization among its drones. No flyers, no jumpers, no ranged drones besides the Twitcher. He considered that perhaps this hive was underdeveloped, but further consideration led him to another idea. If the Queen couldn’t directly use the Fog Transit system to anywhere other than the dungeon entrance, then the locusts on the first floor had to have reached the upper floors by traversing the entire dungeon bottom-up.

What few exceptions there were, could be explained by the possibility that perhaps she could strongarm the dungeon core into transporting a few locusts to certain points in the dungeon. After all, the core needed warm hostile bodies to fill its halls, so that it might provide an appropriate challenge in the absence of its own black stone golems.

“The world we grew to love has crumbled, with my own efforts losing steam…” Strolvath continued with his mournful tune, strumming out a slow melody that could only be heard over the screeching of his foes thanks to his own amplification of its volume. 

There was no struggle here. Second chamber in a row, and it grew no more difficult. His foes grew more numerous, that much was true, but numbers meant nothing when their sheer mass wasn’t sufficient to drown out the sonic assault that was his weapon. It was an entirely different case when he purged this chamber, however.

His mustache still smoldering and his body still burning with the steady, well-controlled flame of Victory Echoes, he crossed the precipice to the next chamber, ignoring the utility glyph on the wall. The veteran knew himself well enough to not need such aid, and more importantly, didn’t want to risk disturbing his own concentration.

In the next chamber he was faced by not an army, but by three Locust Nobles.They looked… Unremarkable, at first glance, with pretty par for the course mutations. Mandibles, chitin plating visible through the holes in their clothes, eyes replaced by bulbous black orbs, yet still set as a human’s eyes would be.