The stairwell narrowed as they went, stone tight enough to force single file. The rot hit harder now, thicker and more sour, like something had gone soft in the walls and no one could decide if it came from the sea or something worse. Mercer led the descent with a drawn crossbow and that clipped, shoulder-forward gait she used when expecting contact but not quite betting on it. Robin trailed just behind, boots quiet, revolver tucked out of sight but never far. Briggs followed next, axe strapped but not locked down, fingers twitching every so often like the weapon might leap to his hand if things got loud.

  Kade brought up the rear. Her cutlass stayed sheathed and her pace even, but nothing about her posture said relaxed. She tracked sound, spacing, and the cold tension coiled in the stillness. Shadows weren’t dismissed. They were processed, cataloged, and left on a mental shelf marked potential threat. The quiet wasn’t peace. Not after the hydra.

  The stairs finally spat them out into a long, rectangular chamber carved from dark stone. Thirty feet wide, maybe twice as long. Water had claimed the corners first, pooling shallow and slick where the stone dipped unevenly. Collapsed crates leaned drunkenly against the far wall, their contents bloated with rot or long since looted. A broken lantern floated in one puddle like it had died trying to stay useful. Smugglers’ graffiti crawled across the walls in faded chalk and knife-etched lines. Tide charts, coordinates, symbols Kade didn’t recognize but had seen enough to know they weren’t friendly. This had been a way station once. A checkpoint, or maybe a dead drop.

  No immediate threats. That wasn’t comforting.

  Briggs broke the silence first. "Room’s too open to be a kill box," he said. "Too many positions to cover if it was meant to pin us down."

  "Or it’s bait," Mercer offered, circling one puddle. She nudged a half-rotten crate lid with her boot. It dissolved on contact. "Nothing fresh."

  Robin stepped to the wall and touched two fingers to one of the chalked symbols. "These are the only symbols that I recognize. Probably just dungeon theming."

  Kade didn’t respond. Instead focused on reading the space like a piece of history. She’d seen setups like this in old coastal operations. Off-the-books drop points where cargo moved through the cracks in the system. She moved to a collapsed crate and crouched beside it, palm hovering over the scattered contents.

  Something crunched beneath her boot. It was bone.

  She lifted one edge of the wrecked box and froze. Beneath it, tangled in a half-dissolved sack of waterlogged grain, was the skeletal form of a man. No armor. Just the remains of a faded coat and a rusted belt buckle shaped like a compass rose. His boots were still on, legs folded like he’d tried to brace for something that never came. It didn't look like set dressing or someone who had been alive after the reboot.

  Stone stepped quietly beside her, fatigue leaking from every line of her posture. "Well, this is just weird. This looks like a real smuggler's cave. Plus whatever killed him, it wasn’t last week."

  "Try a century," Briggs said from across the chamber. He was prodding another corpse, this one partially submerged. "Teeth still in the jaw. Clothing style predates the reboot. This whole place was sealed well before the world went sideways."

  "And still it ended up in the Simulation," Robin said. "Dungeon AI doesn’t build from scratch. It seems to draw on real-world events. So, it is likely there was a real-world smuggling operation running under this lighthouse. Nobody I've talked to knows if that is standard behavior or just coincidence."

  Levi recoiled at the sight, choosing to move toward the back of the group.

  "Greed," Kade muttered. She stood again, wiping her hands against her coat. "They built this tunnel to dodge patrols. Shorten supply lines, avoid customs, maybe even smuggle people. Whatever it was, they weren’t just hauling rum."

  "Found something," Myers called softly. His voice sounded steadier than she’d expected. Good. The concussion hadn’t robbed him of his instincts, at least not yet. He was kneeling beside a bloated satchel near the back wall, half-tucked beneath the rotted form of another smuggler. "Still sealed. Kinda."

  He pried it open with a short knife, careful not to tear what remained. A small leather-bound journal fell out, water-stained and curling at the corners but mostly intact.

  Robin approached first. "Can you read it?"

  Myers passed it to her. "Pages are dry in the middle. Guess they knew how to seal a courier pouch."

  Robin flipped through a few pages, her brow knitting. "Inventory logs. Route markers. Nothing sensitive. But…" She paused, then turned the book so Kade could see. A passage near the middle had been underlined three times in thick, ink-blotted strokes.

  "We lost Errol on the back run. Didn’t see what took him, just blood in the water and something churning under the hull. Rolf says it’s the deep calling. I think it was just a shark, and it was bad luck it was there when Errol fell overboard. But I won’t sleep until we're back on shore."

  Kade let the words sit for a moment. The team gathered tighter without realizing it.

  "Does that really matter to us?" Mercer said. "It sounds like that was an event from before the reboot."

  "Not to beat a dead horse, but this is the type of stuff the Conclave wants to research," Robin replied. "Is this here by random chance because it was here before the reboot, or did the dungeon incorporate this into its theming when it was created?"

  Kade stayed quiet. Movement near the wall drew her attention, minor details pushing through the grime now that her mind had shifted gears. Bones tucked behind broken barrels. Symbols scratched into older markings, rough and uneven. These weren’t smuggler codes. They read more like warnings. Circles scrawled in haste. Jagged lines crossed through them. And one handprint smeared across the stone in something too dark to be rust.

  "Keep your weapons loose," she said finally. "This room feels like it is here to reset the pacing."

  Myers tilted his head. "A safe room?"

  "Yeah," Robin said. "Or close enough. The Simulation does ratchet down the tension post-boss fights so that it can slowly ramp it back up again. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe."

  Kade stepped to the center of the room. The air here was cooler, and somewhere beneath the stone, she could hear the slow, rhythmic pulse of water. Like an underground river, the smugglers would have used it to move contraband.

  "Most of these look rotten, but check everything for useful salvage." She said, motioning toward the crates and sacks slumped around the chamber.

  The team split without a word. Mercer pried open a half-collapsed box and sifted through the sodden mess, setting anything solid aside. Briggs tested lids with the flat of his axe before shoving them aside, his eyes always straying back to the far archway. Robin lingered with the journal, still turning pages like she expected the ink itself to betray a secret. Stone moved to Colt, knelt, and pressed her hand against his burned arm. A faint gold light bled through her fingers as the raw skin began to lose its angry edge.

  The chamber’s silence didn’t last.

  Briggs shoved aside a cracked lid and barked a warning. "Got one that looks too clean considering the state of decay of the rest of the crates." He jerked his chin toward a crate sitting half-sunk in stagnant water. Every other box sagged under rot, but this one stood square, wood swollen yet intact, rope ties still neat around the lid.

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  "Too clean usually means trouble," Mercer said. She kept her crossbow angled low, but her stance shifted to cover.

  Kade moved closer to look for herself. The grain of the wood carried no slime, no fuzz of mold. Wrong for this room. "Myers, trap box," she decided.

  Myers crouched near the find with an affable grin that didn’t quite mask the concussion’s pallor. "Let me guess. It either explodes, or it coughs something we don’t want to breathe."

  "Or both," Robin added dryly.

  Kade studied him for a moment while he looked over the crate. He looked steadier than he had half an hour ago, no more staggering, no slurred edge to his voice. "You sure you’re good for this?"

  "Good enough," Myers said. His smile sharpened as he pulled the short knife from his belt. "Besides, if I botch it, you’ll all get to say you told me so."

  He worked the lid methodically, tracing the seams with his blade. A faint hiss answered him, followed by the smell of wet ash. He rocked back on his heels, waited, then eased the top open a finger’s width. A gust of pale smoke curled out, bitter and choking.

  "Looks like someone’s idea of a joke," he said. "Weak charge. Mold spores mixed with flash powder. Enough to panic a crew, not enough to kill one."

  He slit a narrow seam, let the smoke bleed off, then pried the lid back. Inside sat a shallow scatter of tarnished coins, a rotting ledger tied with ribbon, and three stoppered jars filled with sludge the color of rust. One bubbled faintly, glass fogging at the rim.

  "Some weird alchemical stuff," Myers muttered. He fished the ledger out with care and set it aside.

  "Not bad for someone who nearly cracked his skull." Kade replied, taking one jar from Myers.

  Potion of Minor Healing

  Quality: Uncommon

  Enchantment: Minor Healing

  Description: A small jar of thin red liquid that smells faintly of copper and spoiled fruit. It tastes worse than it looks, sour enough to make the tongue curl, but it knits shallow wounds and steadies the body within minutes. Nobody drinks it for the flavor, only because it’s better than dying.

  Kade turned the vial over in her hand, watching the thin rust-colored liquid slosh against the glass. She uncorked it for a quick test and nearly gagged at the tang that hit the back of her throat. The smell alone was enough to sour her stomach, sharp and metallic with a hint of something rotten under it.

  Better than dying, she thought. That was the sales pitch in a bottle.

  She crossed to Stone and held it out. "You’re the one who’ll make the best call with this. Put it where it buys us the most time, but keep it quiet we have these for the moment."

  Stone accepted the vial carefully, eyes widening a fraction as she got the glazed-over look of someone looking at Simulation screens.

  Three clerics already weren’t enough for a crew this size, and Stone had bled herself thin in the hydra fight. If these potions worked the way the Simulation claimed, then they needed more. A steady supply. Enough to bridge the gap between Stone and the other clerics' miracles. Because the next time one of them ran dry on mana, someone would not get back up.

  "Boss, got another one of those coin things too," Myers said.

  "Alright, then I guess that's an important note. We need to keep an eye out for those things," Kade said, slipping the coin in her satchel with the others they had found.

  "Assuming they actually do anything," Briggs replied.

  She gave a curt nod. Fair enough.

  They gathered what they could, careful not to jostle the other unstable crates. Mercer tucked the ledger into her pack. Briggs gathered the coins into separate pouches, no point in carrying them all in one target. Stone shifted back to Colt and pressed her hand against his blistered arm again. Light seeped from her palm, soft but steady, until the rawest burns lost their shine.

  The team regrouped near the archway. Two passages waited beyond. One ran dark, walls wet, air heavy with a rot that clung to the tongue. The other bore torches and carried the sound of rushing water.

  Kade weighed both. Darkness meant no visibility for anyone but her and rot strong enough to give a clue as to whatever waited inside. The lighted passage gave them visibility and noise to cover their approach. Neither looked kind, but one was manageable.

  "We take the torch route," she said.

  "Hold on." Colt’s voice cut through the room. He pushed off the wall, half-steady but not cowed. "You just made that call for everyone. What, no discussion? No vote?"

  Kade turned to face him. "That’s right. We don't vote on military operations."

  "The SMC is gone," Colt said. His voice carried now, enough to pull every gaze. "You’re not an officer anymore. You’re just another survivor pretending those bars on your collar still matter."

  Briggs stepped forward, jaw set. "Careful."

  Colt didn’t flinch. "Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me the same Navy that ran patrols in my city didn’t look the other way when the tide started climbing. Tell me your chain of command didn’t leave civilians to drown while you circled the wagons just like the government."

  The air grew colder than the stone.

  Briggs’s axe shifted loose with a scrape. "You're saying my people let yours die?"

  "I’m saying the old order had its chance," Colt fired back. "Once this dungeon’s cleared, it’s not going to be your Captains or Councils calling shots. It’ll be dockworkers, smiths, laborers. People who actually keep the world moving."

  Levi hung back, saying nothing. He didn’t move to check Colt, but he didn’t add weight to the attack either. Kade marked the way he stayed still, careful, like he wanted Colt to drive a wedge between the Tidebound Front and the Horizon Talon. Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake, right, Levi?

  Robin’s tone slid in smooth. "Authority gets decided by who walks out alive. Maybe it’s not about SMC or Front or Council. Maybe it’s about who takes what the Simulation offers and makes something out of it."

  The words tightened the air like throwing gasoline on a fire.

  "Enough." Kade cut across before the sparks took fire. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it carried, sharp as steel on stone. "You all want to argue theory, do it topside. Down here we move or we die, and I’m not dragging bodies because you wanted to win a debate."

  The silence that followed was brittle. Colt’s jaw worked, Levi’s eyes darted, Robin’s face smoothed into unreadable calm.

  She looked to Colt. "You want to choose a path? Be my guest. Lead us."

  He froze. The challenge hung between them, heavy, undeniable. For a heartbeat, Kade thought he might take it. His jaw tightened, eyes flicking toward the dark passage as if the decision could be pulled from stone if he stared hard enough. Then the moment stretched, and nothing came.

  That’s the difference, Kade thought. Anyone can bark about authority when the choice is theoretical. It takes more than noise to put yourself at the front of the line.

  After a long moment, Colt shook his head. "Not my call."

  "Thought so." Kade turned back to the torch lit hall. "Now, if there aren't any objections. Let's keep going."

  Her patience had already frayed, but she kept her tone flat, the same voice she used to cut brief arguments on a deck. Funny how people always want to make decisions when it isn’t on them to live with the fallout. She let the thought settle, then pushed forward, setting the pace.

  The torch lit passage stretched ahead, stone sweating with salt and damp. The air shifted with every step, too steady to be natural, like the dungeon itself kept its breath shallow and waiting. Milo and Lance carried the front, shields set, while Kade shadowed them close, Robin and Myers falling into her orbit. Mercer and Stone kept the center, their boots whispering against wet stone. The rear sagged under Colt and Levi, both of them silent but glaring, a weight all its own. Briggs sealed the column, axe loose at his side, eyes always working the dark edges.

  Stone’s healing had bought them back into fighting shape, or close enough. Armor still carried scorch and acid marks, bandages still showed under sleeves, but nobody limped now. The line moved steadily with the silence of people who knew how close they’d come to cashing in.

  The corridor alternated between rough-cut rock and stretches of clean masonry, like smugglers had carved through natural veins and stitched them together with finished halls. Torches burned in iron brackets, steady flames that threw shadows longer than the light deserved. More than once they passed a side tunnel, only to find it caved in or twisted back on itself, feeding them into the same key passage they had started from.

  After the fourth backtrack, Kade felt the pattern. Illusion of choice. Keep the rats moving, but never let them off the path.

  "Another split," Mercer said ahead. She lifted her crossbow toward a right-hand turn, only to find it collapsed ten feet in, rubble piled so high it might as well have been bricked shut.

  "Same story," Myers replied. "Every fork’s a bad joke."

  "Not a joke. Control. The Dungeons like a leash." Robin said.

  Colt’s boots dragged at the back, his silence loud. Levi matched him pace for pace, gaze sharp, their animosity thick enough to taste. Kade didn’t waste energy on them. If they wanted to stew, they could do it out of her sightline.

  They pushed on for another thirty minutes. Sweat collected beneath her collar, not from heat but from the slow grind of walking without progress. The torches never wavered. The air never shifted. It was like moving through the inside of a clock, every gear already set, every step preordained.

  Then, the floor rumbled.

  It came from the stone beneath their boots, a low growl that climbed into the walls. Milo braced instinctively, Lance shifting with him, shields up. The sound spread faster than they could track it, rolling down the hall and feeding into the alcoves they had just passed.

  "Kade," Briggs called from the rear.

  She already felt it. Pressure underfoot, stone flexing with a vibration that wasn’t natural. The alcoves on their left and right split wide as the floor gave way. Chunks of rock sheared off, plunging into dark tunnels below.

  From the black, water surged. And with it came sound, the wet rasping cries of the drowned as they scrambled upward through the breaks.

  Kade’s cutlass cleared her hip. "Both sides. Brace! Here they come!"

  The drowned screamed. The tunnels shook.

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