The second floor had ten minions too, lined up in a loose formation across the space. Level 71 to 79, each one armed with twin daggers, moving with a tighter, more deliberate energy than the first floor’s shambling mass.

The Floor Guardian stood behind them, another monster wearing an oni mask, but this one had long curved talons extending from all seven fingers on each hand, held open at its sides like it was waiting for permission.

None of them moved.

Winston’s eyes narrowed. Every other enemy in this pagoda had charged the moment it registered him.

These were standing still and that gap between expectation and reality sent a clear signal.

’Something is wrong here.’

His vision went out before he could act on it.

The entire floor just went dark. Completely, instantly and without transition. No light from the sigils on the walls, no ambient glow from the armor’s runes registering against a surface. Just absolute darkness.

And then the sound cut out too with no echo, no ambient cavern noise, nothing. Winston couldn’t hear his own breathing or heartbeat and the first hit came from the left soon after.

BAM!

It pushed him back two steps.

Then more came; they were rapid, precise and landed from multiple directions before he could orient himself.

The Black Dragonic Armor absorbed everything cleanly, Draconic Resolve converting impact after impact into temporary shield layers that kept regenerating and no damage was getting through.

But he also couldn’t land a single counter when he had no idea where any of them were standing.

Then the Guardian hit him.

The force was on a completely different level from the minions. It launched him backward and he crashed through the pagoda wall, stone cracking around his frame on impact.

He stayed lodged there for a moment, the armor’s passive already working on the force absorbed.

Without it, that strike alone would have burned a Life Tithe charge without question.

Winston held still and forced himself to think.

No light, no sound, no visual, no audio, no external reference points. Every conventional survival tool he had built over three days in this gate was useless on this floor.

He couldn’t fight what he couldn’t locate, and the attacks were coming from positions that shifted constantly in the dark.

He closed his eyes. It made no difference after all there was nothing to block out. But the motion helped him turn inward.

He reached for his Soul Trait and pushed his awareness outward into the darkness around him.

The assault continued. Strikes landing from multiple angles, the Guardian mixing in powerful blows that rattled him against the cracked wall.

He held on and kept his focus narrow. Monsters were harder to read than humans, their soul signatures didn’t burn with the same clarity.

He pushed deeper, sweeping wider.

But the Guardian was done holding back and it was going all out now, trying to shake Winston loose, trying to end this while he was blind and pinned.

Winston absorbed it and kept searching.

Then he saw their monstrous souls, scattered across the darkness like dying embers.

Small red flames, each one a soul, hovering in the black where the monsters stood.

’Got you.’

The soul flames were faint, dull and barely there, but against the absolute void of the darkened floor, they burned like signal fires.

Winston locked onto every one of them without letting go of the Yari.

His grip had stayed tight on the polearm through every hit. That hadn’t changed.

He mapped the positions fast. Eleven souls total, ten minions scattered across the floor in loose formation, moving with that unsettling synchronized energy he’d noticed before the lights went out.

And one larger soul, the brightest of them all, surging toward him with aggressive intent. The Guardian, unmistakable even as a flame in the dark.

Winston had everything he needed.

He pushed off the cracked wall and dropped into a battle stance.

Every soul in the room went still.

The pause lasted less than a second, just long enough for the monsters to register that something had changed, that maybe he could actually see them.

They got their answer before they could act on the question.

Winston exploded forward, Yari swinging in a wide horizontal arc aimed at five souls clustered on his left. Five bodies hit the floor without the sound of the swing traveling across the room.

The remaining five minion souls scattered in something that looked like panic. It didn’t help them. Without the sensory advantage that this void ability was built around, they were just monsters with twin daggers.

Winston closed on each one and the floor cleared in under a minute leaving only one soul, the large one.

It had moved to the back of the room the moment Winston entered his battle stance. The moment he’d shown he could track them.

"So that’s how it is."

"You spent this whole fight beating on someone who couldn’t see you," Winston said into the dark although his voice didn’t travel, he didn’t particularly care. "And the second I can, you run."

The Guardian’s soul shifted. Then it surged forward, the decision made as if trying to prove a point.

The soul flame illuminated a faint outline of the creature’s body as it closed in, just enough for Winston to read the attack before it landed.

The right arm came around in a wide swing. Winston stepped back into a tight spin, the attack cutting through empty air beside him, as he let the rotation carry the Yari’s shaft down along his arm until he held the very end of the polearm.

The spin completed and the Yari swung outward at full extension.

The force caught the Second Floor Guardian across the right temple and sent it crashing down into the stone floor with an impact that would have been deafening if this floor hadn’t swallowed all sound.

Winston drove the spearhead down into the downed creature before it could recover.

The large soul flame went out.

A breath later, the darkness lifted and the sound returned. The floor’s ambient light bled back into the walls like nothing had happened.

Winston straightened and looked at the staircase leading to the third floor.