The chamber had gone quiet.

Twenty minutes had passed, maybe more. Ayla had lost track. The pool had stopped sloshing.

The goblin corpses were gone, consumed down to the last fingernail, leaving only damp stains on the stone where the bodies had been.

The smell remained.

The team had moved to the back of the platform, away from the worst of it. They sat in a rough circle.

Every one of them rested, waiting for their mana to replenish.

Kael stared at the spot where Ayla sat cross-legged at the edge of the platform, eyes closed, body still as a sleeping cat.

Kenji sat between the two groups. He was close enough to Ayla to count as her partner, yet far enough from the team to remind them he was not theirs.

Inside her stillness, Ayla worked through the new memories.

The goblin minds were mostly noise. Hunger. Cold. The feel of teeth meeting bone. She moved through the noise quickly and let it settle into the bottom of her catalogue.

The three Hobgoblins were different.

The Assassin’s life arrived sharper than she expected. The runt-loneliness. The kicks. The first kiss of the shadows when the wall had not pushed back.

She walled it off carefully, brick by brick. She had decided she did not want to feel like a runt.

The Warrior’s mind was simpler. Dominance, hunger, the pleasure of swinging something heavy. She filed it without effort.

The Mage was the one she lingered on. The Mage had been old, so his experience was vast.

Across the platform, Kenji felt the gazes of others sliding between him and Ayla.

He broke the silence.

"I believe you all understand what you saw, and what you did not see. Yes?"

The four of them went silent for a beat. They looked at one another.

The answer came in near unison.

"Yes."

Kenji watched their faces. He did not entirely trust the answer. He did not care.

His partnership with Ayla ended when the tunnel ended. What happened to her after that was not his concern, and what happened to them after that was not his problem.

He filed the calculation and waited.

Ayla’s eyes opened.

The gold was brighter than it had been before the harvest. She blinked once, slowly.

Her shoulders rolled. The motion popped quietly in the still air.

The team braced, almost imperceptibly, for whatever she was about to say.

"Kenji. Let us not team up with them anymore."

The chamber went still.

Awkward silence stretched across the platform. It was the longest five seconds the chamber had held all day.

Then, almost in sequence, four sighs of relief. They were quiet but unmistakable.

They had been worried about how to suggest the same thing themselves. Ayla saying it first had saved them the conversation.

Inwardly, all four of them felt a small disappointment underneath the relief.

Ayla had been the strongest member of the team by an unfair margin.

Walking away from her felt like walking away from a cheat code. If she had refrained from breaking up, they would have considered staying solely for survival.

But she did not need them anymore.

Kael cupped his palms together.

"Then let us part ways."

The other three followed him to their feet. They mirrored the gesture, palms cupped, heads slightly bowed.

"We owe you our lives," Sora said quietly. "We will not forget."

"Safe travels," Elara added.

Jaxon opened his mouth, found no words, and closed it again. He bowed lower than the others.

They left the chamber without looking back.

The tunnel ahead narrowed quickly, the walls pressing closer with each step.

The air grew thicker and warmer, carrying that faint metallic sweetness of blood.

They did not slow.

Kenji moved at a pace he had never maintained in any previous loop. With Ayla, he did not have to pause, scout, or be cautious. He could just move forward and she would take care of everything.

Ayla followed beside him, or sometimes ahead, or sometimes nowhere he could see at all.

The difference was simple.

There was nothing left in the tunnel that could threaten them.

They hunted as they moved.

Bloodnet spiders dropped from the ceiling. They never reached the ground.

Their bodies froze mid-descent, then collapsed before their legs could even twitch.

Clusters of lesser creatures scattered at the edges of their path.

None escaped. Shadows moved. Threads followed. Silence remained.

Kenji stopped trying to track every kill.

It was pointless.

He only noticed the results. Empty tunnels. Cleared paths. No resistance left behind them.

Ayla was in a good mood. She once again consumed the biomass of a Bloodnet spider, gaining its form.

Hours passed without meaning. The tunnels twisted and stretched, sometimes narrowing to the point where Kenji’s shoulders brushed the walls, sometimes opening just enough to ease the pressure before tightening again.

There were no chambers here.

No resting points.

Just long, endless corridors of damp stone and pulsing heat.

The deeper they went, the quieter it became.

Even the monsters thinned out.

"We’re close," he said.

His voice carried more weight than before.

Ayla glanced at him.

"The end," he added. "It opens into the mouth."

She said nothing.

But her gaze moved forward.

Focused.

Kenji’s thoughts drifted briefly.

In every previous loop, reaching this point had taken days.

Careful movement. Constant retreat. Losses. Deaths.

This stretch alone had cost him more attempts than he could count.

Now, they had crossed it in a single day.

Because of her.

He did not say it.

He did not need to.

The difference stood in front of him, walking calmly through a tunnel that had once been a death trap.

The passage narrowed further.

The walls grew slick, almost organic in texture. The faint pulsing beneath the surface became more noticeable now, like something breathing just beyond the stone.

A low sound echoed ahead.

It was the sound of the wind. Both of them halted. The tunnel opened widely ahead.

The end.

A vast opening stretched before them, the tunnel giving way to an enormous cavity.

The walls curved outward, disappearing into shadow, and the ceiling was lost somewhere far above.

They had reached the mouth.