The platform rolled and the world went sideways.

Lily’s tablet left her hands. Victor’s feet left the surface entirely. Sera caught herself mid-step and skidded down what had been the top and was now the wall, her boots finding no purchase on the smooth bronze as the platform completed its rotation.

Kai’s foot came down on nothing. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

The air-step caught under his sole the way ground would have caught it and he kept walking, two more steps through empty air, and came down onto the new wall of the platform and grabbed Sera’s wrist on the way past her before she slid off the edge into the open sky below.

Lily caught the lip of an outcrop with both hands. Victor got one hand around a chain that was horizontal now, his weight hanging free. The supports caught what they could find.

Everyone was breathing hard.

Kai stood on the wall of the rotated platform and looked back at what the gate had done to the space around them. The original ground was somewhere to their left. The sky was somewhere below them.

The platforms stopped moving.

For the moment.

...

Lily pulled herself up onto the outcrop and found her tablet two meters away from where it had landed, somehow unbroken. She sat with her back against the stone and started reading.

"Five minutes," she said. "Give me five minutes, and I have a route to the next ring."

She got four minutes and forty seconds.

Victor stepped to the edge to look at the drop below the outcrop, thought better of it, and pulled his foot back.

The bridge Lily had been routing them onto disappeared.

Not crumbled. Not moved. It simply was not where her tablet said it was anymore. The platform that had been holding it had shifted several meters to the left, and the gravity zone above it had rotated a few degrees, and the combination had erased the path as completely as if it had never been there.

Lily stared at the display and saw the route was still there, but the bridge wasn’t. "That’s not how space works," she said.

Victor glanced at her. "What happened?"

"You changed your mind. The dungeon changed the bridge." She looked at the empty air where the route had been. "Those are not supposed to be related."

The platform under them began leaning slowly toward the open air while she was still talking.

They all watched as two narrow walkways unfurled from a structure across the gap that had not been there a minute ago. Lily glanced down at the tablet before looking at the walkways and made the call.

"Keep going and don’t think."

They moved.

The first walkway crumbled at the trailing edge as they crossed, the bronze dissolving from behind their feet as though the dungeon was reclaiming it the moment it was no longer needed.

The second walkway held but rotated mid-crossing, so the surface they had stepped onto was not the surface they ended on, and they arrived at the far platform at an angle that required everyone to adjust their footing simultaneously without slowing.

The wide platform at the end refused to take weight on its left half. Nobody could see why. The surface looked identical across the whole thing. Lily pointed them to the right side, and they crossed single-file along the edge like the ground might change its mind about supporting them at any moment.

Nobody trusted the ground anymore.

Kai had been watching the gaps ahead. He raised his hand and thought of the one Earth Mage he had run against, and the distortion found what it needed.

A small disc of stone formed at the edge of the platform, only wide enough for one foot. Sera crossed it without slowing. The disc crumbled under her trailing foot, and a new one was already in place for Victor.

None of the platforms survived more than a second.

Lily watched this happen and pulled her tablet in closer. "Can you do that consistently?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"Until my magic runs low."

"Then we have a route again," she said and started working.

...

Victor reached the next platform first, and his foot came down a fraction outside the line Lily had marked for him.

The platform tilted.

Slowly.

Like it hadn’t decided whether to fall yet.

Lily saw it before Victor felt it. "Move left," she said swiftly. "Now."

Victor did not ask why. He shifted left mid-stride, and his left foot came down with his full weight on the platform’s new angle, his shoulders following his center of gravity the way they were trained to follow it. He did not pause. He did not look down at what was happening under his feet.

The platform stopped tilting. The angle it had taken became the floor.

Victor stood on it and looked back at Lily.

"Don’t thank me," she said, already looking at her tablet again.

"I wasn’t going to," he said, and stepped to the next platform clean.

Behind him, Sera let out one quiet breath she had not intended to let out. Kai watched Lily put her tablet back to her chest and saw her notice, without commenting on it, that she had moved before her readings had told her to move. She looked at the tablet and then looked away. She was starting to understand what it was actually useful for here.

She did not say anything.

...

The first creature came from above halfway across the next gap.

It looked like a bird the way that Titan Grave’s constructs had looked like soldiers. Bronze, blank plate where a face should have been, wings that did not beat so much as angle themselves through the air, the way fins angled through water. It came down fast from behind them and did not aim at any one of them specifically. It aimed at the space they all had to cross, the only ground available, the path the dungeon had given them, and could take away if their footing broke.

Sera dropped her shoulder, and the first lunge went past her. The creature banked and came around, and the second pass made Lily change her foot placement.

The platform she had been about to step onto pulled sideways by three meters.

Lily caught the edge with one hand, and her tablet with the other, and two of the support hunters behind her broke stride trying to reach her. The platform under their feet registered the break and began tilting in response.

"Keep moving." Lily’s voice cut through the noise without rising in volume. "Don’t react. Keep moving."

The supporters kept their feet moving. One support nearly turned around while another reached toward Lily. But neither stopped moving as the platform continued to hold them.

The monsters came in pairs after that.

[Sky Hunters]

[Level 46]

They were creatures that looked like an eagle made out of metal. Their wings swirled with the wind while their blue eyes constantly shifted around for a target. One came from above, another from below, but they never attacked the same person twice.

Sera took one out of the air without slowing, her spear catching it mid-bank and coming apart into three clean sections that fell without touching anyone. The second creature peeled off.

Kai kept placing stones.

...

Four platforms in, the surface under three of the support hunters rotated against its gravity zone. It wasn’t a tilt or the ground breaking, but the platform simply decided that down was a different direction now.

And the three of them slid off the new vertical surface into open air with nothing below them but the sky that went down forever.

The gap between them and the nearest safe surface was wider than any jump they had made.

Sera was already moving.

Her spear was in her hand before the third support finished sliding, the shaft glowing bright enough to illuminate the gap. She drew her arm back and threw it across the gap into the side of a floating structure twenty meters out. The shaft drove in to the midpoint and held absolutely still, burning steady, the light of it visible against the bronze of the structure like something had been plugged into it.

Her second throw landed lower and further out. The third lower again, further again, each one placed with the specific spacing of someone who was building something rather than throwing something. By the time the supports had fallen the length of the gap, three light spears jutted out into the open air between them and the stable platform, distributed at intervals that a person could reach from the one below it.

The first support hit the first spear at the chest and wrapped both hands around the shaft. It held him the way a beam in a wall would have held him, immovable, the light pulsing once under his grip and then steadying.

The second support landed feet-first on the second spear and stood on it with his arms out for balance.

The third caught the third spear at the waist and held.

Sera was already throwing a fourth, this one placed closer to Kai’s stone platforms, bridging the last span back to solid ground. The supports climbed across her ladder of light one by one, hand to shaft to foot to the next shaft, until all three of them were on a stable surface and looking back at what they had just crossed.

Sera lowered her arm. The spears remained where she had placed them, burning quietly in the open air of the dungeon.

Lily looked at the spears and then at Sera. "That’s new."

"I’ve been practicing," Sera said.

Kai looked at the ladder of light stretching across the gap. "Clearly."

...

Nobody sat down immediately.

Everyone kept glancing at the routes behind them as if expecting them to disappear.

Lily had her tablet, but she was not making notes anymore. She was reading it the way you read something when you already know the information is going to be different from what you expected, and you are checking anyway.

Lily zoomed in and saw the route had changed. She zoomed in again, and once again it changed into something different.

"I can’t predict this," she said with a groan.

That might have been the first time Kai had ever heard Lily admit something couldn’t be predicted.

Sera said, "You’re doing it."

"I’m reacting. I read, and I predict, and I plan... But every prediction I make becomes wrong the moment one of us hesitates." She looked at the air around them, at the platforms shifting slowly through their rotations, at the gravity currents moving between the structures in pale lines. "There is no route. There is only what we do next, and then what the dungeon does in response, and then what we do after that."

Kai said, "Then stop trying to predict all of it."

Lily stared at him, and the silence stretched.

"That’s easy for you to say."

"It isn’t," he said. "I don’t know what’s happening either. I just stopped needing to know all of it."

She held the look for a moment.

Then she picked her tablet up and started reading again. The next route she marked wasn’t three minutes long.

It was thirty seconds.

Then twenty.

Then ten.

She stopped looking for certainty and started looking for possibilities. For years, Lily had trusted answers.

Answers were safe.

Answers stayed true.

But Hollow Sky kept taking them away, and so she stopped looking for answers. Kai had watched people survive monsters, but watching Lily abandon years of habit looked harder.

After she was done, they all began going up.

The platforms ran vertically now, the route folding upward through the dungeon’s interior as though it had been built by something that did not distinguish between floors and walls. Lily called the route in sixty-second windows. Kai filled the gaps with stone. Sera kept a spear in her hand at all times.

When they came over the next lip, the dungeon opened into something that did not have a scale the eye could hold. A chamber the size of a city, floating structures filling the air in every direction, gravity currents running between them in thick white lines. Far above, at a height the eye refused to commit to, something was moving slowly through the structures.

It flashed by them before the angle changed, and Kai couldn’t see it anymore. He only caught a glimpse. Its shadow crossed entire sections of the dungeon. For a moment, Kai thought he was looking at another floating structure.

Then it moved.

"That’s the boss," Lily said.

Nobody asked how far up it was.

Lily checked anyway and then quietly closed the map.

...

They had been climbing for ninety meters when one of the supports at the back of the line stopped walking.

He did not fall or step back but stood still for half a second and looked down at everything below him. At the drop that went down through the dungeon and out the other side into whatever was beneath the gate, and in that half second, the dungeon took everything.

The Ninety meters of path behind them vanished while the fifteen minutes of progress disappeared with it. All of it was released into the open sky below, and eleven hunters were suddenly in the air with nothing under them.

The route disappeared, but Kai was already moving as someone swore.

Kai air-stepped immediately.

The distortion found a path.

He took three steps across the air to reach the support at the back of the line, and his hand closed on the man’s harness. Before he pivoted on a fourth step of air and threw a thread from the Fractured Blade toward a stable platform forty meters above.

The thread caught, and he pulled them both upward while the dungeon fell away beneath their feet.

Victor was lower, falling at a different angle, but Lily had gotten a hand on Victor’s sword arm on her way down, and they were falling together, which meant when Kai’s hand came down toward them, he could catch both in one motion and add their weight to the thread’s pull.

Sera was working the lower section.

She caught a falling chunk of platform with a thrown spear, used the embedded shaft as a foothold to plant a second spear into a nearby structure, and launched herself across the line of debris to reach the two supports nearest to her. She grabbed one at the wrist and one by the belt and held them both against her while her spears burned steadily in the bronze around her.

Kai air-stepped upward, the threads pulling in, and Sera’s spears and his stone column met the falling group at different heights and caught them each in sequence. When they were all on stable ground again, nobody spoke for a long moment.

Everyone was looking at the empty air where the route had been.

Lily sat down on the platform with her tablet on her knees and looked at it without reading it.

Then she said, "I hate this dungeon."

Nobody disagreed with her.