"Had the omega been awake, we wouldn't be alive right now to talk about it." Sir Nick added his comments to the discussion.

"You're saying all the floors we're crossing might most probably be deserted?" Zoe asked in surprise, she heard something she didn't think would ever be possible. "Then who or what released those wolves onto us?"

"That's the only mismatched piece in the puzzle, and the reason we should all stay vigilant, and carefully watch every single step we take from here onwards," Ryan said, warning his team of his calculated predictions to be on high alert.

Riley sat down, cross-folded her legs, shut her eyes, and proceeded to meditate. Her entire body threw out a light, a little less bright than the sun itself minus the high temperatures. 

It was her blood cells carrying the chi she soul-tapped, from inside of her heart through into the left hand she raised to her shoulder height. 

The vitality got focused in her palm, intensifying the glow around the hand while the rest of her body's shining continued to get dim.

"How did you know to focus your detection spell at that specific wall back down there?" Ryan asked Sir Nick, a slight spark of bewilderment and innocence lit across his face.

"The last hybrid tried to bolt out of there jumping onto your barrier in that direction. I had already blinded it with my latest attack."

"Hence, it was acting purely on its perception and its basic scent tracing ability. So, it must be sensing the path it took to get there." Sir Nick answered, phrasing his theory to Ryan.

Not a moment later, the trio's eye sets caught the gleam of many yellow-red gems and bluish-green quartz stones embedded into the ornately decorated cave ceiling. 

But the escalating ground didn't slow down, not at all as it continued to ascend barging into the ceiling thrusting them against the roof. 

They were getting more and more stuck in between the moving floor and the unbudgeable stone roof.

"Madam Riley!" Ryan groaned, bent forward crushed to his knees, his back pressed to the stone roof in a futile attempt to avoid getting sandwiched while Zoe was shoving her palms into the roof with her knees pinned to the ground. 

It slowed down just a teensy bit but it was enough for their desperately depressed minds to think they were the reason behind it.

"Wow! I'm not as weak and pathetic, I thought I was." Ryan thought to himself. That little happiness and satisfaction didn't last for long though. 

He found out soon as he turned his head over that it was Sir Nick's brute strength that was forcing the ground to decelerate. 

He was bearing a pose similar to that of Zoe but a lot more masculine like he-man. He had joined the objective after gently laying his daughter down on the ground.

A staff, three to four feet tops, had formed in her hand as Riley reached the end of her meditation. 

That was made of a normal-looking wood, nothing flashy or sparkly and had an average to a below-average thickness to it. 

She stood it up vertically and it had a short length to cover to fit in between the two surfaces, one resting, another resisting.

"Grow, pony!" she muttered near to its ear. It extended and passed five feet by to a near six feet when it fitted precisely supporting both upper and lower land. 

It had completely stopped the floor movement. The three straining till then collapsed to the ground on their back, not all were sweating and panting at least not like Ryan.

"Pony, show me eight feet of yours," she said to it. But for a moment it didn't respond as if it was hesitating to follow her command. 

Then it expanded more to almost eight-foot long as it propelled the entire ground they stood upon downwards like it was nothing, like gravity pulling a feather towards the earth.

"Stand clear of this circle," Riley instructed the team as she fabricated a three-foot radius circle hologram with the pole as its central axis. 

She seized the pole and gripped the center of its shaft firmly with both her hands.

"Get me out of here!" she whispered, her mouth approached the staff and stopped just a few inches away from it. 

It once more took a few seconds to follow her order. It seemed like she didn't take much of its consent into consideration. She was straight away harassing her crank into doing her bidding.

"Don't make me ask again, you arrogant imp!" she threatened as she squeezed it harder around its center, tightening the grip of both her hands around it. 

But soon after, she released her clutching over it and stepped back until she was out of the marked circle when the staff began to stretch uniformly along its width all of a sudden.

The cane kept at expanding, and got thicker and wider until it's radius and the radius of the marked holographic circle matched. 

To put it in simple terms, the center of the circle enlarged and became the circle itself. 

A thin and small staff transformed into a huge distended cylinder as if it got pressured from the inside to bloat up real big and large in an unreal amount of time.

Ryan sharpened his eyesight before directing it toward the cylinder and noticed a very thin horizontal slicing exactly in the middle. 

That whole thing wasn't just a single-cylinder, no, it had two of them one on top of the other clubbed together with a slick hard-to-notice gap, sundering the two.

... to be continued.