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The network shattered from the center outward.

Jake felt it through his Mana Sight as a cascade rather than a simultaneous event - the central crystal fracturing and the signal it had been maintaining dying and the secondary crystals registering the loss and losing their own coherence as the hierarchy they depended on ceased to exist and the soldiers mid-advance stumbling in the way that entities sharing a single thought stumbled when the thought was interrupted from its source.

The stumble lasted two seconds.

Two seconds of disorientation while sixteen altered soldiers in the outer ring and however many more behind them recalibrated from collective function to something more individual, the transition between those two states creating the same gap that the formation’s shield wall break had created on the ground floor.

Jake looked at Ankerita.

She was already moving.

Her attack was released in three rapid, successive compressions that hit the stumbling outer ring soldiers before they’d completed their recalibration; the strikes were targeted with efficiency.

Three soldiers went down with the clean finality of a force that had found the precise application point rather than simply hitting something and hoping.

Jake activated Shadow Infusion and felt his mana merge with the shadow matter between the barracks’ structures, the combined substance deepening and responding, and he manifested infused serpents not one at a time but all at once, pulling the number his current reserves could sustain without compromising the pool he’d need for the floors ahead.

Fourteen infused constructs erupted from the shadows between structures throughout the outer ring simultaneously, their mana-touched forms moving with the amplified speed that Shadow Infusion produced, and the outer ring became a contained chaos of altered soldiers trying to engage threats from multiple directions at once with the individual awareness they were now reduced to instead of the collective tactical intelligence they’d been operating with moments before.

Maureen took her men into the grid behind the serpents’ disruption with the decisive momentum of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of opening, their formation tight and coordinated, working the soldiers the serpents had destabilized with the efficiency of fighters who understood that finishing what someone else had started was as valuable as starting things yourself.

The floor cleared slower than the ground floor had, the space’s size and the number of soldiers distributed through it requiring sustained engagement rather than the contained burst that smaller spaces permitted.

Jake moved through the grid using Shadow Step to appear at angles the soldiers weren’t covering, his physical strikes targeting the command crystals he could locate through Mana Sight, each hit dropping a soldier and degrading the reconstituting collective further.

Ankerita and Maudlina worked the grid’s deeper sections from the corridor entrance, Ankerita’s spatial talent reaching targets that required getting across open ground to physically engage, Maudlina’s barriers protecting the mages whose reserves were visibly depleting with the sustained work of a long engagement.

When it ended, Jake stood in the grid’s center near the ruins of the command node housing and looked at his mana pool.

[ CURRENT MANA: 3,890 UNITS ]

Nearly a thousand units were spent across two floors, and the warlock’s abilities had performed beyond what his first-time usage had any right to expect; the mana pool’s exceptional volume meant that techniques costing forty-five or a hundred and twenty units were drawing from a reservoir large enough that even sustained use across extended engagement left the majority of it intact.

His shadow serpents had cost separately from the mana pool, drawing from his bloodline’s shadow reserves and those reserves were more depleted than the mana pool was; the two systems ran in parallel and each having their own ceiling that the other couldn’t compensate for.

He was going to need to manage both economies across the remaining floors without fully understanding how deep either one ran, which was a planning problem he addressed by accepting the uncertainty and moving forward, because the alternative was stopping, and that wasn’t acceptable.

Ankerita appeared at his side, reading the barrack district around them with the thoroughness of someone who didn’t trust clearance until they’d personally verified it.

"Two floors," she said.

"The structure is significantly larger internally than it appeared from the outside."

"Spatial manipulation in the architecture," Maudlina said, arriving behind her sister and looking upward at the distant ceiling with a known expression.

"The building material’s mana saturation. It’s not just dampening external detection—it’s maintaining an interior dimensional expansion. The footprint we saw from the treeline is the anchor, but the actual space inside is considerably larger than the anchor should support."

"Which means the remaining floors could be larger than the ground assessment suggested," Ankerita said.

"Which means the remaining floors could be considerably larger," Maudlina confirmed.

The system has been updated.

[ FLOOR 1: BARRACKS DISTRICT — CLEARED ]

[ COMMAND CRYSTAL NETWORK: ELIMINATED ]

[ FLOORS REMAINING: 5 ]

[ NOTE: STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CONFIRMS DIMENSIONAL EXPANSION IN ARCHITECTURE — FLOOR SIZES INCREASE WITH DEPTH ]

[ NOTE: FLOOR 2 DESIGNATED AS ARMORY AND PROCESSING — NATURE OF "PROCESSING" UNSPECIFIED IN AVAILABLE DATA ]

[ NOTE: WARLOCK MANA POOL AT 80% — SHADOW RESERVES AT 65% — BOTH ADEQUATE FOR CONTINUED OPERATION ]

[ CAUTION: WHAT CREATED THE ALTERED SOLDIERS WAS LOCATED ON FLOOR 3 IN PREVIOUS STRUCTURE ASSESSMENTS — CONFIRM OR DENY ON ENTRY ]

Jake read the last note twice.

What created the altered soldiers was on Floor 2.

He looked at the bodies distributed through the barrack district, at the altered forms that had been people before something had decided they would serve a different purpose. He felt the weight of the next floor’s designation settle into him with the particular heaviness of information that changed the nature of what he was walking toward.

This wasn’t just a dungeon dive anymore.

It hadn’t been since the moment the altered soldiers had raised guns in a structure that shouldn’t exist.

Jake looked at the passage leading downward.

Then he looked at his group - Ankerita steady and calculating; Maudlina, with her bright relentless curiosity undimmed by two floors of combat; Maureen, with the focused pragmatism that had kept her alive through decades of dangerous work; and the remaining soldiers and crew, carrying their accumulated exhaustion without complaint.

"We should while we can," he said.

"We don’t know what is waiting for us on the next floor. Replenish yourselves."

Nobody argued.

And the structure around them held its silence with the patience of something that had been waiting four hundred years and found ten minutes entirely unremarkable.