Kara, sawn, Zeus began their raid.

**********

The gate smelled like rot and iron.

Kara stepped through first, her boots hitting the stone floor of the dungeon’s antechamber with a sharp crack that echoed down the corridor ahead. The air was thick — the kind of thick that pressed against your lungs and made every breath feel like you were drinking something. Mana. Dense, unfiltered, wild mana. The kind that only pooled in places that hadn’t been cleared in a long time.

She rolled her shoulders. "S-rank."

"You say that like it means something good," Sawn said, stepping in beside her. She was shorter than Kara by nearly a head, lean in the way of someone who didn’t need bulk to be dangerous. Her silver-streaked hair was pulled back tight. Her eyes moved constantly — not nervously, but methodically, the way a clock hand sweeps. Always measuring. Always counting.

Zeus came in last. He was broad, unhurried, his expression sitting somewhere between bored and mildly irritated. He looked at the corridor ahead — the dim torchlight, the slick stone walls, the distant sound of something shuffling in the dark — and then he looked at his hand and flexed his fingers once.

"Let’s get this done," he said.

---

**Their abilities, stated plainly, because a dungeon has a way of making things plain:**

**Kara — Talent: Summoner’s Court.** Kara can summon any monster she has personally defeated. The summoned creature retains its full combat capability but is bound to her will. Her preferred summons are her Obsidian Knights — armored warrior-class monsters she bested in a mid-rank gate two years prior. They fight with greatswords and tower shields, forming walls of steel around her and her allies. She can maintain up to four summons simultaneously, though holding more than two drains her quickly. She fights from the middle distance, using her knights as both shield and battering ram. Her weakness is that her summons can be turned — corrupted mana environments destabilize the binding. She doesn’t know this yet. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

**Sawn — Talent: Timeweave.** Sawn controls the timing of things. Not time itself in the grand dramatic sense — she cannot rewind or pause the world. What she can do is alter the rate at which specific things move through the present moment. She accelerates mana flow through her own body, making her reactions and movements functionally unmatchable in close quarters. She decelerates incoming attacks, bleeding their momentum until they arrive softened and slow. She can apply these effects to others — speeding an ally’s blade or slowing an enemy’s footstep. Extended use on multiple targets simultaneously drains her. She fights best when she has one clear thing to focus on.

**Zeus — Talent: Transmogrify.** Zeus transforms. Mana types, elemental attributes, physical matter — he changes the fundamental nature of things. He can convert an offensive fire spell into a passive heat ward. He can take his own body and reinforce specific parts with elemental properties — his fist becomes iron, his forearm becomes stone, his fingers become magnetized steel. He can grow. By transforming his own muscle tissue and skeletal structure, he can increase his size, though this is costly and he rarely needs to. He can do the same to weapons — his blade becomes a bow, becomes a hammer, becomes a wall. He’s been called a jack of all talents and he hates it. What the label misses is that transformation requires intimacy with the thing being changed — he has to understand what something is before he can make it something else. He is best in team raids. Alone, he’s average. With the right people, he’s the reason the raid clears.

---

The first wave came from the left corridor.

Twelve shadow wolves. Not real wolves — dungeon constructs shaped like them, built from compressed dark mana, with too many joints in their legs and mouths that opened wider than physics should allow. They were fast.

Kara raised her hand. Two Obsidian Knights materialized flanking her — tall, silent, their greatswords already drawn. The mana-cost of the summon tugged at her chest like a hook.

"Hold the line," she said.

The knights moved without question. They absorbed the first charge, shields up, and the wolves hit them like water hitting rock. Steel rang. One wolf got through — Sawn flicked her wrist and the creature’s lunge slowed mid-air, stretching grotesquely, arriving at half-speed. Kara’s third knight appeared and cut it down before it landed.

They cleared the wolves in four minutes.

Then came the stone golems.

Then came the mana leeches — pale slug-things that clung to mana sources and drained them. One attached to a knight and the summon flickered, destabilized, nearly dropped. Kara poured more mana into the binding and her vision blurred at the edge.

Then came the corridor room. Long and narrow, with ceiling spiders — dungeon constructs that dropped from above with paralytic thread. Zeus caught one on his forearm, transformed the thread’s properties on contact — changed it from paralytic to inert — and flung it back. The spider dissolved. He did this four more times. By the fifth he was breathing harder than he’d like to admit.

They sat in the recovery alcove three hours into the run.

Kara’s knights were dismissed. She didn’t have the mana to hold them while she rested. Her hands were trembling — not dramatically, just that fine, barely-there tremor that meant her reserves were running low. She pressed them flat against her knees.

"We’re not even at the boss room," Sawn said. She wasn’t saying it to deflate them. She was saying it because it was true and because she dealt in facts the way other people dealt in comfort.

"I know," Kara said.

Zeus stared at the corridor ahead. The mana density had increased as they’d gotten deeper — he could feel it pressing against the edges of his talent, making transformation slightly more resistant, like pushing through water instead of air. "How far?"

"Two more corridors if the gate map is accurate," Sawn said. "They usually aren’t."

A pause.

"Do we continue?" Kara asked.

It was a real question. Not weakness — assessment. They had struggled, genuinely struggled, against what were functionally the dungeon’s warm-up acts. The fodder. The cannon fire before the real artillery. An S-rank gate’s boss would be something categorically different from everything they’d just survived. It would be the kind of creature that made what they’d just survived feel like a fond memory.

Zeus stood up.

"We continue," he said. "We didn’t come this far to turn around in the hallway."

Sawn pulled her hair tie out and redid it. Tighter this time. "Then let’s stop sitting."

They moved.

The second corridor was worse than the first. Armored beetles the size of cars, shells reinforced with natural mana crystallization. They took twenty minutes on a single one. Kara’s knights broke against its shell twice before Zeus transformed the blade of one greatsword — changed its edge property to match the resonant frequency of the shell’s mana structure — and it cut through on the third pass.

The third corridor was worse than the second.

By the time they reached the gate that led to the boss room, all three of them were operating on fumes. Not empty — but close enough to the edge that every decision felt expensive.

The door was massive. Black stone, carved with old runes that pulsed faintly with mana that didn’t belong to any element they recognized. The kind of mana that was just *old*. Accumulated. Settled.

Kara pressed her hand against it.

"Whatever’s in there," she said, "we handle it together."

"Obviously," Zeus said.

Sawn said nothing. She was already timing her breathing, already beginning the slow internal process of readying her talent. Already measuring.

The door opened.

The boss was not what they expected.

They expected big. They expected aggression — the forward lean of a creature built for violence, designed by whatever deep dungeon logic created these things to be an obstacle, a wall, a final answer to the question of whether the hunters who reached it deserved to leave.

What they got was stillness.

It stood in the center of the chamber — vaguely humanoid, but wrong in the proportion of it, too long in the arms, too wide across the shoulders, its head featureless except for two vertical slits of dim red light where eyes might have been. It was the color of deep water. It didn’t move when they entered.

It was waiting.

"Siegal," Sawn said quietly.

Kara looked at her. "You can read its talent?"

"The mana tells me." Sawn’s eyes were narrow, calculating. "Siegal. I’ve read about it. Disruptive talent. It reaches into the mana flow around it — everything within range — and reassigns attributes. Replaces them. Whatever you were casting becomes something else. Whatever element you were channeling gets rewritten."

Zeus crossed his arms slowly. "That’s brutal against standard hunters."

"Against standard hunters, yes." Sawn paused. "Against us..."

The boss moved.

It didn’t rush — it exhaled, and the exhalation was made of mana. A wave of it, colorless and vast, rolling outward from its body like a tide going out. It hit Kara’s hastily-summoned knights first. Hit the mana binding that held them together, that made them *hers*, and it rewrote it.

For a moment Kara felt the connection flicker and thought she’d lost them.

Then the knights steadied.

But they were different.

The greatsword of the closest knight crackled. A sound like something tearing and then — lightning. Clean, blue-white, running down the flat of the blade in rivers, gathering at the edge, making the air around it smell like a storm. The other knight’s shield began to emit a low hum, resonant, a frequency that vibrated in the back of the teeth.

The Siegal’s aura had reached into their mana and tried to corrupt it. To scramble it. To make Kara’s summons into something she couldn’t control.

What it had done instead was amplify it.