The teleportation ended with the familiar, stomach-lurching snap of space settling back into pce. The five members of the Ravenlight Party found themselves standing atop the teleporter pad registered to Floor Ten: Dunes Dunes Dunes.

  The standing mp Deacon had bought hours earlier with his uncle did absolutely nothing to pierce the darkness stretching beyond the stone ring beneath their boots, its light guttering out as the spell holding back the sand drained every st drop of mana from its unprotected battery.

  With an exasperated click of his tongue, Deacon reached to his hip, thumb brushing the etched housing of his Mana Lantern as he fed a steady stream of mana into its protected crystal.

  Pale blue-white light spilled across the sand-coated floor and crawled up the surrounding walls, revealing hundreds of tunnels spiraling outward in every direction like the inside of a massive thimble.

  “You weren’t joking,” Sam muttered as he looked at the still-moving sand around them in wonder.

  A sudden cone of bright orange light caught him full in the face, causing him to recoil instantly. “Ahk—” he hissed, blinking rapidly as he rubbed at his eyes.

  Muffled ughter quickly followed.

  As the area grew brighter, Sam shook his head, blinking away the bck spots clouding his vision before reaching into his Spatial Satchel and pulling out his own Mana Lantern.

  “Keep up, Sam,” Jass muttered as she and the others followed after Deacon.

  “Bite me,” Sam shot back as he popped open the tch on the ntern’s gss cone. “I know it was you.

  “And I will get my revenge,” he muttered to himself as he fed a trickle of mana into the crystal and snapped the tch shut just as it blossomed into light. Releasing his grip, he watched it lift from his hands and float into pce just off the left side of his head.

  He hurried after the group, turning in a slow circle as he went, taking in the sheer marvel of magic holding back so much sand without letting it compact or colpse. “I can’t wait to be able to do this type of magic myself,” he muttered.

  With his vision tinted red with Blood Sense being cast, Deacon brushed his hands against the walls and tunnels ahead, feeling the subtle vibrations moving through the sand. Looking off in the distance and down, Deacon caught sight of the massive cluster of giant antlions skittering about, confirming what Bjorn had said about them overpoputing the tunnels and pushing closer towards the barrier keeping up this pce.

  “You tell your families?” Deacon asked without looking back, his voice echoing slightly in the tunnel they were all walking down.

  “Yeah,” Bonehead replied easily, tugging his hood farther across his skull – not at all wanting to deal with having to clean sand from in between his bones. “Mom and Pops said they’d be fine. Mom was… surprised I even knew about the ongoing tension with the major guilds and nobility, but she said the war won’t touch Floor One anyway, saying that it’s a Ceasefire Zone.”

  “Really?” Deacon asked, never having heard that before. But I guess that makes sense since they don’t want to have to lose the next generation of climbers.

  "I think this was the only time I heard my father become speechless when I asked him if there was going to be a war," Sam added with a quiet chuckle as he walked beside Bonehead, feeling how the barrier was actively siphoning the excess mana that was passively leaking from their bodies to keep it running. "But, yeah - my father said the same; every major pyer in the Tower agreed that Floor Zero is not be touched, as how else would the next generation climb and more Floors; ergo, resources get added."

  Deacon remained quiet for a moment before a thought whispered into his ear that caused him to pause, which in turn made everyone else behind him come to a stop.

  “But what about occupying it?” Deacon asked, looking over his shoulder at his friends.

  A long, uncomfortable pause passed through the Party of five before Deacon wordlessly focused back onto the path ahead and continued down the tunnel, with his Party following his lead.

  …Yeah, Deacon thought as he let out an audible exhale from his nose as he took a left turn down the tunnel. That tracks.

  “And you two?” he asked as they reached a fork where the tunnel split into three narrower paths. “Jass? Esme?”

  For a few seconds, neither of them answered. Causing Deacon to look over his shoulder and see them wordlessly exchanging looks with one another. Somehow managing to have full on back-and-forth conversation without making a single sound.

  “Hm?” Jass and Esmeralda hummed almost in unison as they snapped their attention back onto Deacon, who had paused at the head of the group.

  “Oh—right,” Jass said after a beat, rubbing the back of her neck as she walked. “Sometime during our three-month stay on Floor Three, my mom and dad packed everything up and moved back to Floor Twenty-Seven. That’s where my mom’s side of the family lives.”

  She flicked Sam a sideways gnce as she continued. “Pretty sure Dad just didn’t want to run into Uncle again and start another fight.”

  “Fair,” Sam shrugged, following Deacon’s lead as he dropped down into a shallow vertical break in the tunnel wall, nding lightly in the adjacent passage below before continuing forward without missing a step. “Dad’s an asshole, and that fight he had with Uncle was… yeah. Calling it catastrophic feels like underselling what really happened, honestly. All that over a st name, too.”

  Deacon snorted quietly but didn’t comment as he kept moving, eyes scanning ahead while his Blood Sense focused onto the massive cluster of antlions still a ways ahead of them.

  “And you, Esme?” he asked, gncing back just long enough to catch her reaction.

  Esmeralda hesitated for half a second longer than Jass had, fingers tightening slightly around her wand as she walked.

  “Not sure where Mom is,” she said eventually.

  “What?” Bonehead voiced what everyone else was clearly thinking, his skull turning slightly toward her.

  “She messaged me after we won the tournament,” Esmeralda continued, her tone steady despite the weight of the words. “Said she was going to keep searching for something called a World Tree. She said that she would pop in from time to time to catch up.”

  “Well, Mrs. Hope had good stories about the explorations she’s had, so I guess that’s not out of the ordinary,” Deacon said before frowning. “But, the hell is a World Tree?”

  “A type of divine tree,” Bonehead answered, slipping into a posh accent. “Simir in principle to the Huitzilopochtli Ceiba Tree that I cultivated back in the temple that we got trapped in on Floor Three, the very same one that grew in a ke of blood, and we harvested sap from. Both fall under divine-css flora, but from what I—”

  Bonehead was cut off mid-sentence by Deacon raising his right palm up just before the low, echoing sound of chittering rolled ahead of them, growing rapidly louder and sharper as it yered over itself.

  He lifted a clenched fist without turning around, and signaled to them, “twelve incoming”, then followed it with a quick three-finger motion indicating “three minutes out”.

  On his orders, the members of the Ravenlight Party quickly got into position.

  Jass moved up to Deacon’s side, her give partially extended but kept not fully uncolpsed to avoid the bde from getting caught on the walls of the tunnel, angled low to avoid catching the tunnel walls. While Sam and Esmeralda fall back behind Bonehead and take out their staff and wand, respectively.

  With them in formation, they advanced forward, with that a sharp ping split the air as a translucent screen bloomed into view in front of Deacon.

  HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED!

  Gncing away from the massive translucent screen hovering in front of him, the blue-skinned humanoid lounging in a tilted, hovering sofa chair shifted slightly, the single massive eye centered atop his head narrowing as it tracked the figures moving across the dispy.

  Loose-fitting blue robes draped over his frame, the fabric embroidered with a shimmering gold sea serpent swimming across the fabric, while a bone amulet bearing the depiction of a kraken rested against his chest.

  On the screen, Deacon and Jass surged forward together, weapons already coated in Fme Armament and Earth Armament respectively, as they crashed into two antlions at the head of the swarm.

  Beside the one-eyed man, reclining in her own hovering chair, a humanoid woman sat with her body wrapped in soft pink veils that concealed her skin from neck to toe. The fabric flowed loosely, shifting with every subtle movement she made, though it did nothing to hide the graceful lines of her form. Long bck hair spilled freely over the back of her chair, cascading downward like ink, while her posture remained rexed and composed.

  “Would you be willing to have a wager?” the veiled woman asked calmly, her gaze never leaving the screen as the Ravenlight Party fought against the incoming antlions.

  The cyclopean man tilted his head slightly toward her. “With what price?”

  “A favor,” she replied without hesitation.

  His lone eye slid back toward her. “And what is the wager?”

  “On which side retrieves the amulet first,” she said pinly.

  “As you know, the one who offers the wager has the right of first dibs,” the cyclopean man said with a growing smirk on his face.

  “Cyclops,” the veiled woman said as she finally turned her head toward him, the veil around her eyes lowering just enough to reveal sun-kissed skin and bright vender eyes as she leaned forward slightly, “you need not try to lecture a Djinn on the matters of a wager.”

  She leaned back into her chair, her gaze returning to the screen. “Now,” she continued, “which side do you put your wager on?”

  The cyclops couldn’t help wetting his lips as his eye traced her silhouette, savoring the sight for a brief moment before he flicked his fingers and turned his attention back to the screen.

  The dispy shifted to show the submerged Antlion Queen and the rge amber rvae she was nursing, the form of a winged antlion clearly visible within the amber — nearly the same height as a brute antlion even before emerging.

  “While I may be a young Floor Guardian,” the cyclops said slowly, “having contracted with the Tower less than a hundred years ago after the previous Guardian of Floor Eleven moved on to another Tower…”

  “…I do keep my eye and ears on every Floor. A clever attempt at hiding your ace in the hole,” he added, amusement creeping up his tone. “It matters little that the Party of Five won the tournament, or that their human leader somehow survived long enough to kill the Holy Pontiff that Liliara created.”

  The veiled woman rose smoothly from her seat.

  “Then,” she said, extending her veiled arm toward him, “my wager shall be on the Ravenlight Party.”

  A slow, devilish smirk crept across the cyclops’ face as he stood from his chair, taking her offered hand and lifting it carefully. He pressed a brief kiss against the back of her veiled hand before lowering it once more.

  “The wager is set.”

  She returned to her seat, posture composed, eyes once more fixed on the screen.

  The dispy shifted again, now showing Sam yanking Deacon back by the shoulder before smming his staff forward and unleashing a massive surge of water that crashed into the antlion horde, forcing them back in a roaring wave.

  Immediately after, Esmeralda grabbed Jass by the shoulder, pulling her clear before snapping her wand forward and releasing a burst of ice mana that fsh-froze both the water and the antlions trapped within it, buying the party a moment of breathing room.

  Unseen beneath the yers of her veil, a faint smirk tugged at the Djinn’s lips.

  Thraksius