The second chamber opened after a narrow passage that forced them to walk single file.

Damon went first, Yuki right behind him, her four tails compressed into the tight space with the practiced ease of someone who had done this many times before.

The chamber beyond was considerably larger than the first.

The ceiling disappeared into darkness above while the floor stretched far enough that the far wall was only barely visible through the shifting blue-white light. The fissures here were wider and brighter, and the organic sound from the first chamber now carried a second note beneath it. Deeper. More deliberate.

Six creatures waited inside.

Different from the Stone Stalkers.

These moved on two limbs rather than six, their surfaces the same dark stone but smoother, their movement carrying the considered economy of something that fought with technique rather than mass.

Damon checked their levels instantly.

The highest was 96. The lowest was 93.

He moved before any of them had fully registered his arrival.

The level 96 went down first, his blade finding its neck before it could turn. He was already stepping into shadow before it dropped.

The second fell a moment later, caught mid-turn with no time to react.

The remaining four moved simultaneously.

They were faster than the Stone Stalkers. One strike came from his blind side and caught his shoulder, not penetrating, his relic armour holding, but the force behind it was enough to register properly. A reminder that the level gap in this world translated differently to what he was used to.

He activated Aegis Veil without hesitation.

The 30% damage reduction settled across him and he stopped trying to avoid every strike, letting the veil absorb what it could while his blade moved faster than the creatures could adjust.

Yuki moved on his left.

He caught glimpses of it between his own exchanges. She moved between the creatures’ strikes with the minimal effort of someone who had been doing this long enough to find it easy.

A faint shimmer appeared around her hands each time she touched a creature, and the moment it did, the creature simply stopped. Mid-movement, mid-strike, as if something had reached inside it and removed the part that kept it going.

"Mana disruption," she said, stepping past a frozen creature without breaking pace. "I interrupt their mana flow. They resume eventually." A brief pause. "But usually its too late by then."

The last two dropped within seconds of each other.

[You have slain 6 Void Stalkers]

[New Monster Index Bonus: +19 Strength, +14 Dexterity, +17 Vitality, +12 Mana]

Damon checked the bonus and moved toward the next passage without stopping.

The third chamber was the largest yet.

The ceiling here was so high the bioluminescence didn’t reach it. The floor was uneven, broken into natural platforms separated by fissures deep enough that the light from below created the impression of standing above something vast and alive.

Eight creatures.

These ones didn’t move immediately.

They stood distributed across the platforms, watching him and Yuki enter with the particular stillness of something that had learned patience, each one level 97 or above, their surfaces no longer stone but something darker, absorbing the blue-white light rather than reflecting it.

One of them tilted its head.

’They’re coordinating,’ Damon noted.

He was right.

They moved together, not simultaneously but in sequence, each one timed to eliminate whatever space the previous one left. It was the most organised thing he’d encountered inside any rift on either world, and it told him that whatever intelligence governed these creatures deepened with each chamber.

He adapted fast.

Shadow step between them rather than around them, using the formations against themselves, appearing in the gap between two coordinated strikes before either could reach him. Black ice to disrupt the ground beneath the rear line, breaking the coordination by forcing them to adjust their footing. Lightning into the cluster on the left platform, the purple arc jumping between three of them simultaneously in the enclosed space. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

Yuki disrupted two more from the right flank.

The fight lasted longer than the previous chambers.

One of the Deep Stalkers shifted suddenly and vanished.

Not thanks to invisibility, but its movement alone.

Damon barely caught the distortion before instinct forced him sideways. A blade-like limb cut through the space his head had occupied less than a second earlier and slammed into the stone hard enough to split it apart.

Fast. Far faster than the ones he faced before.

The creature recovered instantly, pivoting into another strike with mechanical precision. Damon intercepted this one directly, his sword catching the descending limb in a burst of sparks that illuminated the platform in brief white light.

The impact travelled all the way through his arm.

The thing was lighter than the Stone Stalkers, but the force behind its attacks was concentrated differently. It was less about brute force and more about efficiency.

It fought like something trained rather than a mindless creature.

A second Deep Stalker entered the exchange without hesitation, exploiting the exact moment the first disengaged. Their coordination wasn’t instinctive aggression anymore. It was measured pressure, layered attacks intended to exhaust reactions and force mistakes over time.

Damon answered with violence.

Shadow gathered around his boots as he stepped through the first creature’s guard, reappearing inside its reach before it could adjust. His blade pierced through its torso and black ice erupted from the wound an instant later, freezing across its upper body in jagged fractures.

The second creature reacted immediately. Almost too immediately.

It abandoned the opening entirely and drove toward Yuki instead, recognising the disruption she represented to their formation.

Yuki’s ears twitched once.

Then one of her tails snapped outward.

The creature halted mid-lunge as pale silver light wrapped briefly around its limbs. Damon felt the mana distortion even from several meters away, the flow inside the monster collapsing into disordered fragments.

The Deep Stalker strained against it for nearly two seconds before the effect began to crack apart, but Damon reached it long before then.

His sword removed its head cleanly.

The remaining creatures adjusted again as if learning from observation alone, which bothered him more than the disparity in levels did.

By the time the last one dropped, he was breathing harder than he’d have liked, the Aegis Veil having absorbed several direct hits that would have been significantly more problematic without it.

[You have slain 8 Deep Stalkers]

[New Monster Index Bonus: +22 Strength, +19 Vitality, +16 Dexterity]

[You have reached Level 80. You have received 1 Stat Point.]

[You have reached Level 81. You have received 1 Stat Point.]

He took a brief look at the notification before turning his gaze away.

"The rift core should be right through here," Yuki said, looking toward the fourth passage.

Damon followed her gaze toward the passage, which was a lot different from the previous ones.

It was a lot wider, and the bioluminescence around its entrance pulsed with a rhythm that didn’t match anything else in the cavern, slower and a lot more deliberate, the particular quality of something that knew it was being approached and was unbothered by it.

Damon rolled his shoulders once.

"Stay behind me when we go in," he said.

"Trying to protect me?" She mused, though his reply came quicker than she expected it to.

"No. Just making sure you don’t get in the way."

She considered this for a moment, then nodded, the grudging nod of someone accepting logic they would have preferred not to.

They stepped through together.

The boss chamber was cathedral-sized.

The ceiling existed here, just barely visible, the bioluminescence reaching it in faint pulses that illuminated carved patterns in the stone above. Not natural formations. Something had put them there deliberately, which raised questions he didn’t have time to examine.

The floor was flat and clear, a perfect circle of smooth stone surrounded by the fissures that ran through everything else in this place.

In the centre of it, completely motionless, stood a single figure.

Not a creature in the way the previous chambers had held creatures. This one was different in the way the necromancer Atlas had been different from the guards at the warehouse, not just stronger, but operating at a different register entirely.

It stood roughly four meters tall, its surface the same light-absorbing darkness as the Deep Stalkers but denser, more present, the edges of it perfectly sharp rather than blurred.

Six limbs, four legs planted wide, two upper limbs folded across what functioned as a chest, and a head that was simply a smooth dark surface with two points of pale blue light where eyes would be.

Using his inspect ability Damon checked its level.

’114...’

At the same time, heavy pressure fell onto him just as he managed to take barely three steps into the chamber. It was a passive weight that radiated outward from the creature the way heat radiated from fire. As if the monster’s presence itself made a dent in reality.

Yuki stopped beside him.

For the first time since the estate, her four tails were completely still.

"It’s past level hundred..." she recognised despite not having the same ability as Damon. "You know what that means, don’t you?" she asked.

Damon looked at the creature across the smooth stone floor and nodded.

"It’s past its third evolution."