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Barracks. Or the equivalent - structures designed for housing large numbers of people in conditions that prioritized efficiency over comfort, their uniformity suggesting that whoever occupied them wasn’t expected to develop individual preferences about their living arrangements. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

The system had called this Floor 1 the Barracks District on the dungeon’s original assessment, but the original assessment had been built from limited scout data, and Jake understood, looking at it now, that Floor 1 was an entire district rather than a single room, occupying a footprint that made the ground floor feel like an anteroom by comparison.

It was also occupied.

His Blood Sense found them before his eyes did - distributed through the grid of barrack structures in the way that soldiers distributed themselves through a defended position, not clustered but covering angles, the positioning speaking to tactical awareness rather than domestic arrangement.

They were waiting with the patience of entities that had been waiting a long time and were accustomed to it, their presence registering to his perception as multiple points of elevated threat distributed through a space too large to survey completely from a single position.

His Mana Sight found something else.

The command crystal network here was different from the ground floor squad’s internal crystals—larger, more complex, and mounted in the barrack structures themselves rather than in the soldiers’ bodies; the network of them connected in patterns that suggested a hierarchy of communication rather than the flat peer-to-peer arrangement the ground floor squad had used. There was a central node somewhere in the middle distance, brighter than the surrounding crystals in his Mana Sight’s perception, and the other crystals were oriented toward it the way branches are oriented toward a trunk.

Destroy the central node, and the floor’s communication collapsed entirely.

Finding the central node in a space this large without triggering a coordinated response was the problem the architecture had been designed to make difficult, because reaching the center of a grid meant crossing the grid’s outer sections first, and the outer sections were where the waiting soldiers were distributed.

Jake turned back to the group and kept his voice low enough that it didn’t carry into the space ahead.

"The floor uses a centralized command structure rather than individual crystals," he whispered loud enough for the group to hear.

"One primary node connected to secondary mounts throughout the barracks structures. Destroying the primary collapses the whole network at once."

He looked at Maudlina.

"I need to locate the primary precisely enough for your ranged destruction to reach it without me crossing the floor first."

"How far?" Maudlina asked.

"Somewhere in the middle distance. Forty meters, maybe fifty."

He was estimating from the brightness differential his Mana Sight showed him, which wasn’t precise enough for the accuracy Maudlina’s technique required.

"I need to get closer to give you an exact position."

"Getting closer means entering the grid," Ankerita said.

"Yes."

"Which activates whatever response pattern they’ve established for intruders."

"Also yes."

Jake looked at the grid ahead, at the dimness that concealed the waiting soldiers, at the lighting panels far above that cast illumination without shadow in ways that meant the shadows on the barrack structures’ sides and gaps between them were deep and connected and available.

"But I won’t be walking across the floor to do it."

Shadow Step carried him fifteen meters into the grid in a single transit, pulling him through the connected shadows between the barrack structures’ sides and depositing him in the gap between two buildings in the grid’s outer ring, the displacement silent and leaving nothing behind at the origin point that would mark his passage.

He crouched in the gap and extended his Mana Sight to its full range.

The central node was thirty-two meters ahead and three meters above ground level, mounted on a raised structure at the grid’s center that served as the command node’s physical housing.

Its mana signature in his Sight was significantly brighter than the secondary crystals, the brightness of something that had been accumulating and processing for a long time, and the secondary crystals oriented around it the way iron filings orient around a magnet, following the gradient of its influence.

He also found the soldiers.

Sixteen of them in the outer ring alone, positioned in the gaps between barrack structures in pairs, their altered forms distinct in his Mana Sight by the standardized mana architecture their modifications had created.

They hadn’t registered his Shadow Step - or if they had, the registration hadn’t yet produced a response, their collective thinking perhaps still processing whether the displacement they’d detected was a genuine intrusion or environmental noise.

He had seconds rather than minutes.

Jake marked the central node’s position with the precision his Mana Sight allowed and Shadow Stepped back to the group at the corridor entrance, the transit dropping him beside Maudlina with the same silence it had taken him in with.

"Thirty-two meters, three meters of elevation, center structure," he said.

"It’s brighter than everything around it."

Maudlina had already positioned herself at the corridor’s edge, her talent active and her awareness extending into the space ahead with the spatial perception that was her particular strength.

Jake watched her find the node - saw the moment of recognition in her expression when her senses located the brightness he’d described.

She extended both hands and the compression she built between them was visible as a distortion in the air at her palms, the force gathering with the controlled patience of someone who understood that more power and better aim produced better results than speed.

The altered soldiers in the outer ring registered the gathering mana and their collective response activated - the pairs moving from waiting positions into a coordinated advance toward the corridor entrance with the mechanical synchrony of entities sharing a single directive.

Maudlina released.

The compression crossed thirty-two meters in less than the time it took the lead soldiers to cover three of them, passing between the barrack structures in the narrow line that Maudlina’s spatial precision had identified as a clear path to the target and hit the central node with focused force that didn’t distribute across its housing but concentrated entirely on the crystal at its heart.