The air underground tasted the same as Leo remembered - damp stone and sweet rot, with something fungal underneath that coated the back of his throat like moss on a wet log. The bioluminescent fungi lining the walls pulsed their familiar blue-green, painting the corridor in shifting, ghostly light.

  Leo adjusted the leather strap of his new ntern where it looped around his left wrist and checked the oil level by tilting the small gss window. Three-quarters full. Good for hours yet. The warm orange glow it cast mixed with the fungi's cold luminescence, creating a border of sickly yellow-green where the two light sources met.

  They'd been down for less than twenty minutes, moving through tunnels they recognized from the first run. The entry chamber with its crumbling stone pnters, and the first wide corridor with its hanging curtain of bruise-purple vines, were already behind them.

  This time, they'd come prepared.

  The boiled leather armor sat stiff across Leo's chest, cinched at the sides with simple buckle straps. It smelled like tanning acid and linseed oil. The fit was tight enough to restrict his breathing by a fraction, a constant squeeze around his ribcage that he was still getting used to. But when he thought about the Thorn Beetle's leg spike that had opened Sera's arm on the st run, the discomfort felt like a bargain.

  Sera wore the matching set, cut smaller for her frame. It changed her silhouette - broader at the shoulders, stiffer through the torso. Her spear rode in her right hand, the new iron spearhead catching the ntern light with a clean, oiled gleam. The leather satchel on her hip held their supplies: bandages rolled tight, a tin of healing salve that stung like wasp venom but kept wounds clean, boiled potatoes wrapped in cloth, and waterskins filled to the brim. Two backup torches were strapped to the outside of the satchel, their heads wrapped in oilcloth.

  Marsh walked point, axe loose in one hand, his own ntern held high in the other. His armor was simir to theirs - scarred leather over a padded linen undershirt - but the addition that mattered was the gorget strapped around his throat. Hardened leather reinforced with a strip of riveted iron along the front, the copper rivets catching the light.

  He'd bought it himself. The bruises from the Strangler had faded from livid purple to mottled yellow, but the memory hadn't.

  Twenty fresh crossbow bolts sat in Leo's quiver, properly fletched with uniform shafts and decent iron tips. A different world from the mismatched scraps he'd scraped together for the first run.

  "Quieter than st time," Sera murmured from between them. Her eyes swept the tunnel walls.

  "Maybe they heard we were coming back and packed their bags," Marsh said without looking.

  Leo's ignored their banter. His mind drifted to the night before, when he'd told Sera about the two men who'd cornered him on his way back from the carpenter's shop.

  Sera's reaction had been exactly what he had expected. She'd gone rigid, her hands curling into fists so tight that her knuckles had bleached white, and for a full three seconds Leo had genuinely believed she was about to grab her spear and march into the vilge to find them.

  It had taken him the better part of an hour to talk her down. They had a dungeon run pnned, and would need their strength for that. The two bastards weren't going anywhere. They lived in the vilge and could be dealt with after, when Leo and Sera had coin in their pockets and weren't running on the fumes of pre-dungeon nerves.

  Sera had agreed, eventually. But the way she'd agreed told Leo that the matter was far from settled.

  They passed through the first floor without much drama. There was one group of five Thorn Beetles, which were dispatched quickly. Leo scored two kills, bringing his energy up to sixty-six. A good start.

  The corridor that led to the downward passage was exactly where Leo remembered it - the steep, sloping tunnel branching off the rge natural cavern where they'd avoided the other party of delvers on their first run.

  "This is it," Leo said, lifting his ntern toward the downward slope.

  The passage was narrow - wide enough for two abreast, but only barely. The ceiling dropped lower as the angle steepened, forcing Marsh to duck his head. Their boots found less purchase here. The stone was slick with moisture, a thin film of condensation that made every step more difficult.

  The air changed as they descended. The sweet-rot smell that permeated the first floor gave way to something denser and more mineral. Underneath it, a faint metallic tang that coated the tongue and made Leo think of copper pennies and old blood. The bioluminescence also shifted. The cool blue-green of the first floor faded, repced by deeper hues - violet that bordered on bruise-purple, amber that pulsed in slow, steady rhythms, and patches of a deep red that Leo hadn't seen above.

  The fungi themselves were different species. Larger. Some grew in shelf-like formations that jutted from the walls, their surfaces slick with moisture. Others sprouted from the floor in thick clusters, their caps broad enough to obscure the path. One specimen, growing where the tunnel met a crossroads, was the size of a barrel. Its surface mottled gray and brown, exhaling a faint, sour mist that made Leo's eyes water when he passed too close.

  "Smells different down here," Marsh muttered, wrinkling his nose.

  "Different floras," Sera said. Her voice had gone quiet. "There might be different monsters too."

  "How comforting," Marsh said.

  The nterns were essential now. The second floor's ambient glow was dimmer than the first. Stretches of corridor would be lit well enough to walk by fungal light alone, then plunge into pockets of near-total bckness that swallowed even the bioluminescence. Without the nterns, they'd be walking blind.

  Something else was different. Leo noticed it in the walls.

  Veins ran through the exposed stone in thin, branching lines - like capilries in raw meat, except these were dark, with a faint, dull sheen that the ntern light caught at certain angles. He ran his thumb over one as they passed. Hard and cool to the touch.

  He pulled his hand away and kept walking.

  The descent leveled out. They stood at the threshold of the second floor.

  The corridor ahead opened into a wider passage, the ceiling rising to twice the height of the first floor tunnels. The walls here were rougher, less shaped - natural stone interrupted by the crumbling remains of old supports, wooden beams long since rotted to dark, spongy husks. The floor was uneven, scattered with loose stone and the dried remnants of fungal colonies that had bloomed, died, and been consumed by the next generation.

  "Tight formation," Leo said. "Same as above. Marsh, watch the floor, it's uneven. Sera, check the ceiling. Those shelf-fungi could hide anything."

  They moved forward. And the first encounter came faster than Leo expected.

  The clicking started low - a vibration transmitted through the soles of their boots and up through the bones of their legs. Then the pitch rose, sharpening into a rhythm that was both familiar and wrong.

  Like Thorn Beetles, but slower. Each click carried a weight to it, as if someone had taken the same dry-wood tapping and pyed it through a rger, thicker instrument.

  "That's not a Thorn Beetle," Sera breathed.

  "Sounds like one's bigger, meaner cousin," Marsh said, adjusting his grip on the axe.

  "Maybe a Stonecap," Sera said. "Their shells pick up mineral deposits from the stone. Much harder."

  "How much harder?"

  "You'll want to aim for the same joints as the Thorns. But they're set deeper, so you need to be more precise. I don't think you can brute force this one, Marsh."

  Marsh just grunted in response.

  "Formation," Leo said. "Let's see what we're dealing with."

  They rounded the bend.

  Five of them. Arranged in a loose cluster near a patch of amber-glowing fungi, their heads low, mandibles working at something on the ground. They were simir to the Thorn Beetles, with the same basic architecture - segmented shell, six jointed legs, wedge-shaped head pte, protruding thorns. But everything was scaled up. Each one was a third rger than the biggest Thorn they'd fought on the first floor.

  But the shells were what set them apart. A crust of mineral deposit covered the chitin like a second yer of armor - dull, grayish-brown, textite in pces where the deposits had thickened. The thorns protruding from their backs were shorter but stouter. When the nearest one shifted its weight, the joints between its shell segments ground against each other with a low, gritty sound.

  "Shit," Marsh said softly.

  "Same pn," Leo murmured. "You hold. Sera fnks. I shoot. Don't bunch up."

  The nearest Stonecap lifted its head from its meal. Compound eyes caught the ntern light and fred. It let out a low, grinding click.

  Click. Click. Click-click.

  They all turned, then charged.

  They were slower than Thorn Beetles. That was the first thing Leo noticed - the mineral weight on their shells traded speed for mass. But what they lost in agility they made up for in raw impact. When the lead Stonecap hit Marsh's axe, the force of the collision drove him back a full step, his boots scraping furrows in the stone. The sound was no longer a sharp crack of chitin, but a dull, heavy thud that resonated through the tunnel like someone had dropped a sack of gravel.

  "Gods..." Marsh grunted, pnting his back foot. He shoved the beetle sideways with the ft of the axe. It skidded, cws scrabbling for purchase, but recovered faster than a Thorn would have.

  Leo aimed for the neck joint - the same kill shot that had dropped Thorn Beetles reliably on the first floor.

  Thwack.

  The bolt hit. But instead of punching through, it skipped off the mineral crust that had built up along the joint seam with a ft pling that made Leo's stomach drop. The bolt tumbled into the darkness.

  "They're armored at the joints too," he called, already bracing his foot in the stirrup. "I need a sharper angle!"

  "On it!" Sera shouted back. She'd engaged the second Stonecap from the fnk, her spear probing for the gap beneath the front leg. The tip scraped across the mineral crust once, twice, before finding the seam and sliding in. The beetle lurched, let out a grinding shriek, and snapped at her with mandibles that could take a finger clean off.

  Sera twisted the spear and pulled back. The wound leaked dark ichor, but the beetle stayed up.

  Marsh was trading blows with the lead beetle and a second that had fnked him. His axe work had evolved since the first run. He used the ft to shove and redirect, creating openings he couldn't exploit himself but that Sera and Leo could.

  A third Stonecap broke from the cluster and circled wide, heading for Leo's position. He finished the reload - step, brace, pull, click - and put a bolt into its face at ten paces. The angle was steeper this time, aimed at the thinner chitin around the mandible joint. The bolt sank in with a wet crunch. The beetle staggered, one side of its jaw hanging loose, ichor dripping from the shattered joint.

  Not dead.

  Leo reloaded again. The stirrup system was earning its price with every cycle - three seconds between shots instead of the agonizing fumble that had nearly gotten him killed on the first run. He put the second bolt through the wounded beetle's exposed neck, and this time it dropped.

  The fight ground on. Marsh pinned one Stonecap with his boot and brought his axe down on the joint Sera had already weakened. It took him three hits to crack through the mineral crust, then the fourth found chitin, then flesh. The beetle's legs folded.

  Sera and Leo worked the st three in tandem. She'd probe, feint, draw the beetle's attention and make it turn, exposing the softer underside for a heartbeat. Leo would put a bolt into the gap. One shot wasn't enough. Two or three bolts per beetle, each one finding a slightly better angle than the st, chipping away at the mineral crust until the iron tips reached the vulnerable chitin beneath.

  The st beetle went down with Sera's spear buried in the soft tissue behind its head pte, driven in with both hands and a sound that fell somewhere between a grunt and a war cry that echoed off the tunnel walls.

  Then quiet. Labored breathing, the drip of water, and the slow tick-tick of cooling ntern gss.

  Marsh leaned on his axe, chest heaving. His forearms were streaked with greenish ichor, and a fresh bruise was already darkening on his left bicep where a Stonecap had caught him with a gncing blow that the armor had mostly absorbed.

  "Tough bastards," he panted.

  "Much tougher than the Thorns," Leo agreed, pulling bolts. Some came free. Others had bent on the mineral crust. He counted what remained in his quiver.

  Fourteen. If every Stonecap pack ate this many bolts, he'd be dry before they reached anything worth finding.

  I underestimated the second floor, he shook his head.

  Sera was already kneeling by the nearest carcass, her knife working the seams of the shell. Her movements were quick and sure, but she paused when the first section of carapace came free.

  "Look at this," she held the piece up to the ntern light. The mineral crust added visible thickness and weight. "This is higher quality than the carapaces from the first floor."

  "Better price?" Leo asked.

  "Definitely, but I don't know exactly how much."

  They stripped five carapaces. The mineral-crusted shells were heavier than Thorn shells. Marsh's pack gained noticeable weight when they strapped them on. He grumbled about it but didn't argue. Money was money, and these were the kind of earnings that made the bruises worthwhile.

  Leo checked his private screen while Sera cleaned her spear and Marsh retied the straps on his pack.

  [Energy: 210]

  Leo scored three Stonecap kills, earning him forty-eight energy each. Far more per kill than the first floor Thorns.

  He filed the information away and stood.

  "We good?" he asked.

  "Good enough," Marsh flexed his bruised arm, wincing.

  "Good," Sera slid the st carapace into the bundle and tightened the strap.

  "Then we keep going."

  They pushed deeper into the second floor. The tunnel widened and branched. Leo picked the path with the strongest airflow, since moving air meant rger spaces ahead, which meant room to maneuver if something found them. The mineral veins in the walls grew more pronounced as they walked, branching and thickening like dark roots in pale stone.