“At least Ragnorre’s pulling her own weight, Athalie. At least she’s a team player. But look at the kid,” said Dulcen, pointing with his sword. “He just froze up.”

Not far away, along the curve of the Farander Dungeon pit, Ragnorre was a storm of lightning punches and forearms. Behind her, Linzy held his head in his hands, looking sick.

If Nyx were Nyx right now, they’d have told Dulcen that Ragnorre was a grown-ass woman. While Linzy should have been prepared for this—and probably even had some cool monk training he was supposed to be drawing courage from—he was also a child-ass kid, and maybe he shouldn’t have been allowed down here in the first place.

But Athalie was, as all divers were expected to be, a team player. She smiled politely and let Dulcen feel smart.

A second later, the two of them sprang back into action as another posse of slimes erupted from the mist. Around the passageway, other battles had broken out. Ethel wielded her telhorns as if they were tonfa, launching tiny but pinpoint-accurate mindspells...Catamaug whipped with long metal lashes as Lark hung back, guarding herself...and Hue used his summoning powers—very rare and exceptionally suspicious—to command three spirit cats the color of dusty snow.

It was a desperate struggle...okay no it wasn’t, these were Route 1-tier slimes. There was no power in their numbers, only exhaustion. It paid to be an efficient killer here.

***

A suspicious deep dent, chipped away by the edge of Dulcen’s sword, revealed a passageway to Floor One proper.

It was narrow, rocky, pitch-dark, inhospitable except to the most gelatinous slimes, and cold. The cold stung the adventurers’ faces wherever their goggles and scarves slipped. And it was suffocatingly humid, doing no favors for all their sweat.

It would have been entirely miserable had Ragnorre not turned her pumped fist into a glowing, buzzing, whistling beacon of orbiting electricity. She led the way. She also sang. The others, with sorrow, allowed her to sing.

Tiny things squirmed in the darkness, but they were only dregs and squibs. Crushing them underfoot was hardly even necessary—these slimes would be too weak to emerge from the pit at all. The team could walk.

Nyx walked, thinking of nothing but sheer bodily movement.

“Psst.”

Nyx flinched. This cavern had a way of muffling noise with its echoing rocks and the drip-drops of water and goo from the ceiling. Other adventurers were talking, but inaudible behind the ambient noise and Ragnorre’s song. A voice in Nyx’s ear seemed inexcusable.

“Sorry,” the voice apologized.

“It’s fine, Ethel,” Nyx whispered back. “Us talking will be awkward no matter what. Why are we whispering?”

“I thought talking regularly would be more awkward than talking really quietly. Sorry, I just wanted to tell someone how...cool this feels. Good memories and anticipation, I assume.”

Nyx quirked their mouth to the side. “I guess,” they murmured.

“Sorry,” said Ethel again before slinking further backward in the line of divers.

...Ethel was scared too, right? She had to be filled with more mortal fear than Nyx. But hadn’t it occurred to her that Nyx was hiding a ball of trauma far knottier than whatever Ethel was dealing with? Or did she think that just because Nyx was a mildly badass demon, they could brush off anything and anyone—eventually?

It was kind of cool. Nyx’s human self could admit it. But it was kind of a nightmare. Nyx looked past Ragnorre’s glow, into the pure darkness, and glimpsed what might have been a centipede’s curling tail.

***

A broken chorus of slimes howled in front of the party, then from behind it—urrounding them.

For a while now, they’d been aware of a subtle churning in the floor beneath them, as if tectonic plates were being shifted by long and invisible chains of live goo. They had chosen to hurry. Not fast enough.

Huddling together and nearly back-to-back, the divers watched hundreds of tiny slimes rise from the ground. They’d become the ground—partially—and bits of rock and crystal jutted from their sides.

In the electric light, Lark snapped a hand in the air. “Attack!”

Ugh! Nyx bristled at the word. Why’d Lark make herself this unofficial team leader when she couldn’t do jack in combat? Whatever...

They started flinging out attacks the way dealers fling cards. Ragnorre’s fist stopped acting like a torch and started whirling—meaning they had the vision of travelers in a lightning-plagued superstorm. Except Nyx, who with their night vision could see it all in a glance: Ethel squinting out mind blasts, Catamaug’s shining, noisy whips (huh, he was good for a farmer), the glint of swords, Linzy’s charging fist.

And Nyx themself, swatting and carving through. The only thing that made these slimes harder than the earlier ones was literal hardness. They were inconsistent, is all...you had to aim your blade around the rocks or waste some magic on charging up your blow, but that was like heating up your laser knife to better slice through butter.

But after a minute of this, Nyx finally realized something: the slimes weren’t aggressive. The only things like an attack they’d done were surrounding the group, squealing, and wobbling around.

Were they just...a distraction? Was surrounding them a feint?

Not far from Nyx, one of Hue’s weird summoned snow leopards observed the slime before them. And sat there. Not attacking. If Nyx’s thinking was on the mark, then Hue wasn’t taking the bait...

Considering the way the ground had churned—and was still churning—Nyx was now willing to bet that the slimes were trying to merge together and, in one fell swoop, eat them all.