The hill rose out of the landscape like a quiet exhale.

No trees. No brush. No cover for anything that didn’t want to be seen.

Just wide, open grass that caught the fading light of the Secret Realm’s sky and held it in long amber streaks across the slope. From the crest, the land spread in every direction without obstruction — distant forest canopies, the shimmer of water bodies, and the faint glow of mana concentrations dotting the horizon.

"This one," Rudrean said.

Nobody argued. This open place was the best so that they would be ready for anything that came after while they slept.

They landed at the crest, and the first thing Lyra did was hold up the cube.

It unfolded.

Not slowly. Not with ceremony. It simply expanded, one surface pulling away from the next in smooth geometric sequence, layer following layer outward and upward until the structure stood three storeys tall on the grass behind them. Its exterior was clean matte black, the same material as the gift cubes, with faint hairline engravings that pulsed faintly as the lightning system inside activated. Warm light spilled from the windows.

"Your magic items are really handy," Ryzen muttered.

Lyra said nothing, already moving toward the interior to assess it.

Rivera touched Ryzen’s arm. "Firewood."

"Right."

Ryzen went to work.

He couldn’t exactly fell trees from a treeless hill, but he was resourceful. He produced several dense bundles of dried root clusters from his storage ring — gathered on an earlier sweep through the forest below — and arranged them in a shallow ring of stones Aelira shaped using a controlled Phoenix Flame pulse to fuse the base in place.

Rudrean crouched and pressed two fingers to the wood.

A thread of Phoenix Flame, thin and precise, caught the kindling.

The campfire breathed to life.

It was a warm, steady orange, low and controlled. Not a battlefield flame. Just fire doing its one honest job.

Rivera unpacked what they had gathered throughout the day, like smoked cuts of monster meat from earlier kills, tubers pulled from the underwater pond network, and several faintly glowing herbs that Lyra had quietly collected when nobody was watching, but her orbs had detected them.

"She added seasoning," Aelira said, holding up a bundle of the herbs with a grin aimed at Lyra, who had reappeared at the doorway.

Lyra blinked. "The flavor compounds interact better with flame-cooked protein."

"She does care," Aelira said to Rudrean under her breath.

Rudrean smiled and said nothing.

The cooking was Rivera’s doing primarily, her movements efficient and practiced. She turned the meat over the fire with a long-handled spit, the herbs distributed across the coals, and the tubers wrapped in leaves and buried in the outer ring of heat to slow-cook.

The smell that rose from it was absurdly good for a hillside in a Secret Realm.

They sat around the fire while they waited.

Ryzen stretched his arms over his head and exhaled. "Four more days."

"Right." Rivera nodded and glanced at Rudrean and Aelira. "We’re already at fourteen thousand points. I doubt other teams have even gathered five thousand, to be honest."

Lyra nodded. "The last time this secret realm opened, the top 50 to 60 had around ten thousand points by the end of the fifth day." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"Yep. So we are already doing way better." Ryzen smiled.

The food was ready.

Nobody needed a second invitation.

Ryzen ate in a way that suggested he had not genuinely relaxed in a long time. Rivera watched him with a quiet warmth that she didn’t bother hiding. Lyra ate in small, precise movements, her eyes occasionally drifting to the horizon out of habit before returning to her bowl.

Aelira finished first, stole a piece from Rudrean’s portion without asking, and received no objection.

Rudrean ate slowly, his gaze moving across the hill’s perimeter at intervals. The open ground was an asset, but it was also a statement.

After the meal, they moved inside.

The house was exactly what Lyra had described. Clean. Functional. Lit. Three storeys with bare floors and empty rooms waiting to be used. Basic furniture occupied the ground floor — a table, chairs, and a shelf. The upper levels had similar setups.

"By the way, I have the idea to create very soft and comfortable beds," Aelira said with a grin and looked at Rudrean.

"Oh...yep." Rudrean smiled and snapped his finger.

Heavenfall Wind responded.

He shaped it slowly, the way he might shape clay, drawing the air into density, layering compression in careful gradients, building each surface to hold rather than push. The wind didn’t blow. It settled. It collected into forms that gave slightly under weight and returned gently, every pocket of pressure calibrated until the surface held a steady, even give.

Six beds. Two per floor.

They weren’t visible in any conventional sense. Just regions of air that behaved like something far more comfortable than air had any right to be.

Ryzen sat on one and immediately sank to the ideal depth.

"Wow!"

"I am never sleeping on anything else," he announced.

Rivera sat beside him, tested it, and nodded once with her eyes closed.

Lyra approached hers carefully. She stood over it for a moment, then sat.

Her tail went still.

Her shoulders dropped slightly.

She said nothing, but she sat there for a long moment before lying down.

Then she got up and said. "Now let’s set up defenses and detections."

"People or monster, we might get attacked."

Formation work came next. Lyra set out her detection array, a network of thin mana-thread sensors extending outward from the house in a wide ring, each thread calibrated to register movement above a threshold weight and mana density. Rudrean added a secondary layer using Heavenfall Wind, a pressure membrane at ground level that would distort slightly under any footstep beyond the perimeter.

Two layers. Overlapping blind spots.

"Alarm range?" Aelira asked.

"Four hundred meters," Lyra said. "Anything large or small enough to matter, we’ll know."

"Good."

The fire outside burned down on its own. The hill sat quiet under the Secret Realm’s night sky, which held its own faint luminescence, not stars exactly, but the ambient glow of mana saturation in the upper atmosphere, painting everything in pale silver.

Inside, the house was warm and still.

An hour passed.

Rudrean was not fully asleep. He was rarely in unfamiliar ground. He lay with his eyes closed, his breath even, his awareness loose but present, the way Isalyn had described as passive scouting, keeping the senses open without directing them.

Then everyone woke up with a sudden jerk.

Lyra’s alarm rang.

Sharp. Precise. One clean tone that cut through the quiet without hesitation.

Rudrean was upright before the second pulse.

Aelira was already at the window.

Lyra appeared at the doorway between floors, her golden eyes fully alert, the sleepiness gone from them entirely as if it had never been there.

"Four hundred meters, northwest bearing." Her voice was flat and focused. "Five signatures. Moving in formation."

Ryzen was on his feet. Rivera beside him.

Lyra’s tail was still. "They are not wandering. It seems they have seen us previously when it was bright here, and then decided to launch an ambush to eliminate us."

Aelira turned from the window, her revolver already formed in her grip.

"They came for us, so let’s make sure they leave this secret realm for good." Her voice coldly rang.

Suddenly, everyone’s face changed as danger bells rang!

And the first to move was Rudrean, instantly exerting his body and mind to the utmost limit to prevent the disaster.