James knew he was right, and he also knew the problem with it. Kael was not ready to climb and pushing him would only repeat the mistake that had already cost them once. Aria had retired and was not coming back. Elliot was dead. The version of Team Zero that had cleared Floor 9 first in the world did not exist anymore, and rebuilding it was not something they could do by wishing it back into shape.

"Then we look for people," James said. "Now. We still use random teammates for the next floor if we have to, but we start looking for permanent members today, not after 14." 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

"Agreed." Finn rubbed his face with one hand. "Two things, then. Clear 13 and 14 quick before the gap gets worse. And find people we can actually trust before we stand in front of whatever’s on 15."

Neither of them said anything about Elliot or about how strange it felt to be planning a roster with two empty seats in it. They both already knew exactly what they had lost, and saying it out loud again would not fill the seats any faster than working would.

The next five days did not go the way they wanted.

James and Finn searched while they prepared for Floor 13, and the searching taught James quickly that fame and a reliable teammate were not the same thing. They checked the Challenger boards, reached out to contacts, and reviewed the applicants who came forward the moment word spread that Team Zero was looking, and most of what came back was useless.

Some candidates were too weak to survive the floors James and Finn were already past. Some were locked into guild contracts that no amount of money would cleanly break. A larger number than James expected were clout-chasers who wanted the Team Zero name attached to their profile more than they wanted to fight, and he could spot them within a few minutes because they talked about visibility and sponsorship before they talked about clearing floors. A few were genuinely strong, but the strong ones wanted control, a say in every decision and a guaranteed cut and a title, and James was not interested in trading one kind of problem for another.

Then there were the ones who heard that James and Finn were aiming at Floor 15 and went quiet. The wipe had done its work on the Challenger community. Being approached by Team Zero was still a mark of status, but the people being approached had all seen the same confirmation James had, and a number of them stopped returning messages the moment they understood where the climb was heading. One promising candidate, a shield user with a clean record up to Floor 12, made it through two conversations before he asked directly whether Team Zero meant to attempt Floor 15, and when James said yes, the man thanked him for his time and was never heard from again.

James used the days for other things too. He checked his A-rank sword and armor, repaired the minor wear from Floors 11 and 12, restocked consumables until his ring was full, and kept training in the rented facility where he could summon the python without anyone asking questions about a disaster beast appearing in the middle of Dublin. Finn did the same from the estate, drilling axe forms in the basement and running the public Floor 13 strategy footage over and over.

By the fifth day, they still had no permanent third member.

James drove to Hale Estate on the sixth day with the search behind him and nothing to show for it.

Finn was already geared when James came down into the basement, and neither of them looked surprised that it had come to this. They had both expected the search to fail inside five days, and being right about it did not make it feel any better.

"You want to wait longer?" Finn asked. "Keep looking?"

"No," James said. "Waiting won’t make the Blood Writ go away, and it won’t tell us what happened on 15. We move."

Finn nodded and did not argue, because there was nothing to argue. He picked up his axe and stepped onto the platform, and James stepped up beside him.

"Same as before," Finn said. "We go in as two and let the System fill the rest."

"Same as before."

Finn opened the Floor 13 entry prompt, and white light folded around them both.

The Waiting Room resolved into grey, and three Challengers were standing there when James and Finn appeared.

The recognition came fast, the way it always did now, but the reaction was different from the Floor 11 group. The excitement was there, the same widening eyes and the same half-second of disbelief, but it was tangled up with something more careful, because the Floor 15 wipe had changed the mood around the higher floors and everyone knew it. Being paired with Team Zero was still the kind of thing these three would tell people about for years, but the climb had teeth again, and they knew that too.

One of them, a broad man with a warhammer across his back, covered the nerves with confidence.

"This is good," he said. "Being with you two should make this a clean run. You cleared Floor 10 on Hell."

"Nobody here has cleared this floor," Finn said flatly. "Not you, not me, not him. If you walk in thinking our names kill the monsters for you, you’ll get someone killed, probably yourself. Floor 15 just wiped a full party. Treat every floor below it like it can do the same."

The man’s confidence cooled into something quieter, and the other two, a woman with twin short blades and a younger man carrying a focus staff, exchanged a look but said nothing.

James stayed quiet through all of it and studied them instead, reading their classes and their gear the way he had learned to. The warhammer was a frontline build with enough armor to hold a line. The dual blades were fast and built for flanking. The staff was some kind of caster, though James could not tell the element yet. It was enough variety to make a floor possible, which was all random teammates ever needed to be, but none of the three felt like someone he would want in a permanent seat, and he had stopped expecting otherwise.

The transport took them, and the mission zone resolved into a dead place.

They stood in the ruins of an old fortified town, stone barracks collapsed into rubble and a broken curtain wall running along one side, all of it under a flat grey sky with no sun behind it. The air was dry and cold enough to catch in the throat. Bones lay scattered across the ground in the open spaces between the buildings, some of them human-shaped and some of them belonging to things James could not name, and broken weapons stuck out of the dirt at angles where they had been driven in and left to rust. Nothing living moved anywhere in sight. The silence pressed in wrong, the kind of silence that came right before something started rather than the kind that meant a place was truly empty.

Then the System chimed.

[FLOOR 13 — SUBJUGATION] [OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES] [HOSTILES DETECTED] [SKELETON WARRIOR x50]

James read the notification, and Finn glanced sideways at him, because the enemy type sat directly on top of James’s class in a way that none of the floors since his return had. James had been summoning and raising skeletons since the Tutorial. Now the floor was sending fifty of them at him as the enemy, and the irony was not lost on either of them.

The ground answered the notification before anyone could speak.

Across the ruined town the bones began to move, dragging themselves up out of the dirt and the rubble with a dry rattling sound that came from everywhere at once. The scattered remains pulled together into standing shapes, joints clicking into place, skulls settling onto spines.

Click. Clack. Crrk.

Skeletal hands closed around the broken weapons stuck in the ground and wrenched them free, rusted swords and notched axes and the occasional spear, and fifty empty skulls turned toward the five of them at the same moment.

The warhammer user swore under his breath. The woman with the blades dropped into a low stance. The young caster’s staff lit at the tip with a nervous flicker of light.

James watched fifty skeleton warriors pull themselves out of the dirt, and for the first time since returning to the Tower, the floor looked like it had been built to answer him.