Chapter 238: Floor 29

Chapter 238: Chapter 238: Floor 29

The exit of floor 28 was just as they had left it weeks ago: a tall, cracked arch at the end of a long stone corridor, wreathed in a faint blue shimmer. Beyond it, the dark had a different texture.

Squad 07 stopped at the threshold.

"Last chance to say something sentimental," said Mirei. Nobody did.

Rowan stepped through first. The shimmer passed over his skin like cold water, and the world changed around him.

Floor 29 was a forest, and it was alive in a way that made the hair rise on his arms.

The trees were enormous, their trunks black and twisting, their branches knotted into a canopy so dense that no sky showed through it. But the forest was not dark. Pale blue and violet light drifted between the roots in slow clouds, spores or spirits or something in between, and every surface glowed faintly: moss on the stones, fungus on the bark, veins of luminous sap running down the trunks like slow, bright rain. The air was warm and wet, thick with the smell of rot and flowers. Somewhere far off, something large moved, and the leaves shivered in its wake.

The rest of the squad stepped out of the arch behind him and spread into a loose half-circle, weapons drawn, shoulders squared. No one spoke. Barney slid the tower shield off his back and settled it on his arm with a soft clank. Seraphina pulled a vial from her belt and held it ready. Caelen drew his sword, and Mirei nocked an arrow in a single smooth motion, her eyes already sweeping the canopy.

"Formation," Caelen said quietly.

They fell into it without thinking: Caelen and Barney at the front, shields up, Mirei a few paces behind and to one side with her bow raised, Seraphina in the center with her satchel open, and Rowan at the rear, where he could see the whole line and the ground beneath it.

The first thing he noticed was the moss.

It was growing around his boots. Small, bright green tufts, pushing up between the black roots in a widening circle, curling toward his steps as he took them. Wherever his heel touched the earth, the forest floor seemed to lean toward him. He glanced down, then at the others, who had not noticed.

Breath of Eden, he thought. Passive. I’ll have to be careful.

Then the forest moved, and he had no more time to think.

They came out of the undergrowth in a rush.

There were eight of them, long-bodied beasts with slate-gray hides and a ridge of curved, glassy thorns running down their spines. Their eyes glowed amber. They moved low and fast, like wolves, but they were the size of horses, and when the lead one opened its jaws, Rowan counted three rows of teeth.

"Thornbacks!" Barney bellowed and planted his feet.

The first one hit his shield at a dead run. The impact rang through the forest like a struck bell, and Barney slid back half a step, boots gouging the soil, and then held. He grunted, heaved, and shoved. The thornback flipped backward and landed on its spine, flailing, and before it could roll upright, Caelen’s sword came down across its throat in a single clean arc.

"One," said Caelen, without raising his voice.

The others closed in. Two more leaped at the line, and Caelen and Barney met them side by side, a wall of steel and shield that did not break. Mirei’s bow sang. An arrow struck the nearest beast in the eye, and it screamed and collapsed. A second arrow found the gap behind a foreleg, and a third pinned another to the ground by the shoulder. She did not stop to watch them fall. She was already drawing again.

Rowan stayed at the rear, and watched, and waited.

He had learned the hard way that a fight was a conversation, and that the best moment to speak was after the others had finished making their points. A thornback broke away from the line, slipping around the edge of the formation with its thorns bristling, and came straight for Seraphina’s flank.

She did not flinch. She flicked the vial in her fist, and a burst of pale green mist exploded in the creature’s face. It staggered, coughed, and went down in a heap, twitching, its legs folding under it.

"Paralytic," she said crisply. "Twenty minutes. Rowan, if you please."

He stepped forward, drew a short knife from his belt, and finished it quickly.

By the time the last beast fell, the forest floor was strewn with gray bodies, and the glow of the spores had dimmed in the churned earth. Barney lowered his shield and breathed hard through his nose. Caelen wiped his blade on a patch of moss. Mirei slung her bow, picked up an arrow from a corpse, and tutted at the bent tip.

"Eight," she said. "No injuries?"

"None," said Caelen.

"Not bad for a warm-up."

The harvesting began the moment the fighting ended, and it went the way it always had.

Barney was first to kneel beside the nearest carcass, drawing a curved skinning knife from his belt. "Hide’s good," he said, running his thumb along the slate-gray surface. "Thick, flexible, no rot. Fine for lining a gauntlet. And these thorns..." He snapped one off with a crack and held it up to the light. It was clear as glass, with a faint violet core. "Hard as steel, and light. I could make arrowheads out of these. Or inlay the shield rim."

"Take every one," said Mirei, instantly.

"Already on it."

Seraphina worked beside him, her sleeves pushed to the elbow, a set of small glass vials and a slender bone-handled blade laid out on a cloth. She cut into the base of one beast’s jaw, drew out a pale, glistening gland, and held it up with a murmur of professional satisfaction. "Venom sac. Intact. These are rare in anything that size." She dropped it into a sealed jar of clear fluid and reached for the next one. "The saliva is a natural anticoagulant, and I suspect the thorn sap will stabilize several of my elixirs. Do not waste a single drop."

Caelen stood guard while they worked, scanning the shadows between the trunks. Every so often, he stepped over to help roll a heavy body or hold a stubborn limb, but he never stopped watching the trees.

Rowan, meanwhile, had wandered a few paces away.

The forest was full of things he understood. The pale moss that coated the black stones was dense with a mineral sheen, rich in mana. The clusters of violet fungus on the trunks smelled sweet and faintly medicinal. And in the clearing’s center, half hidden by a root arch, grew a patch of low silver-leafed plants he had never seen before, their stems threaded with the same blue light that drifted through the air.

He knelt, pulled off one glove, and laid his bare fingers against the soil.

The ground spoke back. It was a different voice from Eden’s or Sunny Vale’s, wilder, stranger, rooted in something older than any field he had ever tended. But the language underneath was the same. The silver plants pulsed under his hand, once, twice, in a slow, cautious rhythm. They were not afraid of him.

"Those look interesting," said a voice at his shoulder.

He glanced up. Mirei had come over, bow slung, arrow tucked behind her ear. She crouched beside him and studied the silver leaves with open curiosity.

"I think they’re a kind of mana-rich herb," Rowan said. "I haven’t seen them before. May I?"

"They’re your department, boss."

He cut a few stems carefully with his knife and rolled one between his fingers. A faint tingle ran up his arm. "Strong," he murmured. "Stronger than anything I grow, even with the surge. I’d like to bring a few back and see whether they’ll take root in Eden."

"Or Seraphina can turn them into something that makes your teeth fall out," Mirei offered.

"Both are possible."

They worked together for a while, he gathering the silver plants and the violet fungus, she pulling up samples of luminous moss with her gloved hands. Behind them, the sound of Barney’s knife and Seraphina’s low commentary carried across the clearing, steady as a drumbeat.

When the squad had finished, they stood in a loose circle around the cleared ground. A great pile of materials lay neatly sorted at their feet: coiled hides, bundled thorns, sealed jars of glands and venom, a bundle of silver herbs, a basket of fungus, and a sack of mana-dense moss.

"Right," said Barney, brushing his hands on his apron with satisfaction. "That’s a good start. Pack it up, boss?"

"I’ll take it," Rowan said.

He laid a hand on the pile. A faint amber light bloomed under his palm, and the whole heap vanished in a soft ripple, gone to the quiet space of his domain, where it would wait in the cool of Eden’s storehouses. The squad did not blink. They had seen it before.

"Useful," said Seraphina, dryly.

"It saves on carrying."

They moved deeper into the forest, following a narrow trail of packed earth that wound between the roots. Floor 29 was larger than it had first appeared. As they walked, more creatures showed themselves: a swarm of lantern moths the size of dinner plates, which Seraphina harvested for their powdery wings; a lone, massive stag with antlers of living wood, which Caelen and Barney brought down together while Mirei kept it pinned with arrows; a clutch of rootcrawlers, long pale things that burst up from the soil beneath their feet and were dispatched by Rowan with three quick strokes of his knife.

Each kill gave something. Hides and antlers for Barney’s forge. Glands and wings for Seraphina’s lab. Roots, spores, and seeds for Rowan’s fields. They worked without hurry, one fight after another, one harvest after another, and the pile of materials in Eden’s storehouse grew and grew.

By the time the glow in the canopy dimmed toward artificial dusk, they had cleared half the floor. The squad stopped in a hollow between two enormous roots, set a watch, and rested. Mirei lit a small, smokeless lantern. Barney shared out strips of dried meat. Seraphina took inventory in a quiet, precise murmur, and Caelen sat with his back to a tree and his eyes half closed, listening to the forest breathe.

Rowan sat apart for a moment, letting his hand rest on the moss beside him. It had grown thick around his boots in the last hour, a bright green circle that spread a little more each time he moved.

"Boss," said Barney, from across the hollow. "Something wrong?"

"No," Rowan said, after a moment. "Only thinking."

"About what?"

He looked up at the glowing canopy and the slow, drifting spores. "How much there is," he said. "And how much of it we haven’t touched yet."

Barney snorted. "That’s what the next eleven floors are for."

The squad laughed softly. The lantern flickered. And somewhere far off, deep in the glowing dark, something enormous turned over in its sleep and was still.