The teleportation array deposited them at the mouth of the mine in a dissolving cascade of silver light, and then there was nothing but silence.

It was the particular silence of underground spaces, not the absence of sound so much as the presence of a different kind of it. The soft, irregular flutter of will-o’-the-wisps. The faint creak of settled stone. Light that came from the grooves in the cave walls in thin, intermittent lines, supplementing the ghost-fire in a way that illuminated without quite explaining anything.

Don stood at the front of the group and looked at the cave hall stretching ahead of them.

The walls told their story plainly. Dark, mottled gouges ran in long horizontal channels where tools had bitten into stone over and over again across years or decades, the resource stripped out and the scarring left behind. Human hunger rendered in rock. The floor was clear, no bones, no fragments, nothing moving.

Which was, Don thought, precisely the kind of quiet that preceded something.

Lily felt it too. Her body had taken on that particular quality of stillness she got when her instincts were talking, graceful and tense at once, her eyes moving in a slow, careful arc across the cave. "Something feels wrong," she said quietly. "I can’t place it, but something’s wrong."

Bernita’s expression turned thoughtful. "This reminds me of that tomb-raiding novel..."

The ground erupted.

Hands came first. A dozen of them, more, forcing through the cave floor in a rushing, simultaneous surge, green-tinged, wrapped in flesh that had been underground long enough to become something else. The sight was wrong in a way that hit the eye before the brain could process it.

Three warriors moved forward without discussion. Diana, Kira, and Yates stepped into the space between the hands and the rest of the group, weapons ready, bodies blocking the path. Don watched it happen and felt something settle in his chest, not comfort exactly, but recognition. That instinct, the forward step rather than the backward one, was the difference between players who understood what a frontline was for and players who thought about it afterward.

The hands extended further, past the wrist, past the elbow, and then paused. A strange, almost organic pause, the quality of something stretching after long stillness.

Kira moved in that window.

She crossed the distance in a single fluid motion, sword already swinging, and took both hands off at the wrist with a sound like green wood splitting. The severed pieces tumbled across the stone floor and came to rest in a dark corner.

1,895.

Clean hit. Solid damage. And also, Don registered with a cold clarity, not a weak-point strike. Whatever was coming out of that floor, the standard approach to finding its vulnerabilities hadn’t worked.

In the corner, the severed hands began to move.

The withered fingers found each other by some process that didn’t bear thinking about too carefully, crawled back across the floor, and reattached to the stumps at the wrists. The join was seamless. No seam, no gap, no evidence that Kira’s sword had touched them at all.

"Kira," Don said, keeping his voice level. "Come back."

She’d already seen it. She stepped back from a pair of hands reaching for her ankles and returned to the group without being told twice, which Don appreciated.

The floor kept giving up its dead.

They came out in loose succession, rotting, upright, various heights and sizes, wearing the tattered remnants of mining clothes. Some of them still held tools. One raised a shovel and swung it, and the head separated from the handle on the backswing and dropped squarely onto its own foot. The zombie looked down at this development with the complete indifference of something that had permanently resolved its relationship with pain.

Lily made a sound.

Don pulled up the attribute window and shared it to the party channel.

[Miner Zombie] - Enhanced | Level 30 | HP: 90,000

Physical Attack: 1,150–1,400 | Physical Defense: 700 | Magic Defense: 600

Skills: Heavy Strike, Corrosive Strike

He opened the map. At the far end of the cave hall, past the zombies and past the darkness, a rectangular shape marked the staircase down to the next level. It was not close.

Six faces turned toward him. He was the captain. That was the arrangement they’d arrived at, and this was the moment it meant something.

"Group channel, everyone," he said. "Diana and Kira take the side paths and pull in batches, twelve to fifteen at a time, not more. Get them positioned, then fall back to line. Yates, you’re waiting for them, AoE as soon as they’re grouped. Bernita, watch Yates specifically, the corrosive hits will stack on him. Lily, no AoE, so pick your shots. Necks. You know what happens when you hit the neck."

Lily nodded, jaw set.

Diana glanced at him with an expression that was almost amused. "He really does carry himself like a captain."

"He was a centurion," Don said, with the easy confidence of someone who had said this before.

Diana raised an eyebrow. "How many in the unit?"

He appeared to think about it. "A little over ten million."

"A centurion commanding ten million." She considered this. "That’s a fairly broad definition of the rank."

"The title was honorary. The point stands."

Diana and Kira split to the side paths, moving quietly along the cave walls. The zombies tracked them with the slow, implacable attention of things that had no concept of urgency, they turned, they followed, they shambled. By the time the two warriors had completed their circuit and returned to formation, the zombie column had covered perhaps a third of the distance between them.

It didn’t matter. The path was set. The dead kept coming.

When they finally arrived, Yates was ready.

He roared, not a skill announcement, just the sound of someone putting everything into a swing, and the halberd came around in two consecutive arcs, low and horizontal and brutal. Ribs detached from torsos. Something green and foul-smelling under pressure found sudden freedom. The cave filled with a smell that Don’s brain registered as wrong before it registered as anything more specific.