Chapter 199 — What the Team Never Had to Face

Chapter 199: Chapter 199 — What the Team Never Had to Face

He woke stiff and sore in a way sleep hadn’t properly fixed, and found himself, testing his own battered arms before he’d even finished breaking camp, grateful all over again for Vitalflow Endurance’s steady, patient work beneath everything else the day ahead promised to cost him.

Second day. Still Floor Eleven. Should have been through this stretch already, at the pace the team set.

He pushed on regardless, the flooded passage widening gradually into the same kelp-choked terrain he remembered from months earlier, thick and drifting, visibility narrowing to only a few careful body-lengths in every direction.

A Prismatic Serpent found him within the hour, its scales scattering the dim light into confusing, shifting patterns exactly the way he remembered, and he called on Hunter’s Eye rather than trust his ordinary sight against it, the felt awareness of movement and mass cutting cleanly through the visual noise its camouflage relied on. He finished it in two strikes, cleaner than the previous day’s fights, and allowed himself a small, private satisfaction at the improvement.

The satisfaction didn’t last long.

A second Cave Shark found him not an hour later, larger than the first, and this one didn’t circle politely before committing. It came straight at him, fast enough that Storm Step alone barely carried him clear, and Arlen found himself, in the tangled aftermath of the dodge, genuinely uncertain for a moment whether he’d actually escaped its jaws or simply delayed them.

He fought it properly this time, deliberate rather than desperate, Water Sovereignty redirecting its second charge while Stonespike erupted from the riverbed beneath it, catching the creature mid-turn with a force that finally, visibly staggered it. He finished it with Edgeline Strike driven home through the opening, and surfaced afterward breathing hard, arms trembling with the particular exhaustion that came from a fight where every single exchange had mattered.

Two sharks in two days. That’s not coincidence. Something about this stretch keeps producing exactly the kind of predator built to test someone moving through it alone.

He rested longer than his schedule wanted to allow, and pressed on once his hands stopped shaking, the kelp forest gradually thinning into clearer water as the day wore toward its unmarked, underwater evening.

A pod of Deepclaw Crabs ambushed him from a cluster of buried shells late that afternoon, five of them where the guild notes suggested three was typical, and he burned through more of his reserves than he wanted to admit clearing them — Blazing Shot finding the gaps between their armored plates one by one, each strike costing him a little more of the steady, controlled discipline he’d tried to maintain since the day before.

By the time the last crab finally stopped moving, he was breathing hard enough that he had to surface twice in quick succession, more out of the need to simply stop and think than any genuine lack of air.

This is too much. Too many, too often, too strong for what this floor should be producing at Rank Four to Rank Five.

He made camp early that evening, well short of where he’d hoped to be by nightfall, and sat a long while at the edge of his small, defensible air pocket, turning the accumulated weight of two days over with the same honest, unflinching attention he gave every real problem.

Ilyana’s team barely fought through here. I remember that clearly enough — half the creatures we crossed paths with simply didn’t engage at all, gave us a wide, wary berth and let us pass. I thought that was just good routing. Good luck. I don’t think it was either of those things.

He thought of Osric’s realm sensing, the quiet, informal way an Elite-realm practitioner could read a lower-realm person’s stage on sight. He wondered, turning the thought over slowly, whether something similar worked in reverse down here — not a conscious reading, nothing so deliberate, but some old, instinctive weighing that predators carried in their blood, a sense for exactly how much danger a given target actually represented.

A team with two Elite-realm members reads as more than five separate threats. It reads as something else entirely. Something most of this region’s wildlife knows, on whatever level animals know anything, not to test.

I read as one man. Middle Novice. Alone.

He didn’t let the thought spiral further than that. He simply sat with it, the same patient discipline that had carried him through every uncomfortable truth about himself so far, and turned his attention instead to the practical question sitting underneath it.

How much further to Twelve?

He checked the guild map by the low, careful light of a small Mana Light cast, tracing the familiar route with fingers that still carried a faint tremor from the day’s fighting. Not far, by the map’s reckoning. A day, maybe less, if the terrain cooperated and nothing else decided to test him along the way.

One more day. Rest at the waystation properly. Then decide.

He wrote a brief entry before sleep took him, shorter than he wanted but longer than his exhausted hands strictly wanted to manage.

Second day in Region Three alone. Two Cave Sharks, a Deepclaw Crab pod nearly triple the expected size, and every fight costing more than it should for the ranks involved. I think Ilyana’s team’s presence was doing more work than I ever properly credited it for — not backup in the way I understood backup. A kind of quiet the water itself seemed to keep around them, one I don’t have yet and can’t fake by simply trying harder.

Twelve tomorrow, if the map holds. I intend to rest properly there before deciding anything further.

He closed the journal, and lay back against the meager comfort of his bedroll, listening to the kelp forest’s strange, drifting quiet pressing in around his small pocket of air and light.

Sleep came slower than it had the night before, his body’s accumulated exhaustion fighting against a mind that kept turning the same uncomfortable arithmetic over and over — two days, some serious fights, and Floor Eleven still not fully behind him.

He closed his eyes eventually, and let exhaustion win the argument his thoughts refused to settle on their own, already dreading, in some quiet, honest part of himself, exactly how much the remaining distance to Twelve might still ask of him before he finally reached somewhere safe enough to properly rest.