The Bureau took them in through a sealed corridor before dawn, not a waiting room.

The floor was polished to a shine. The doors along it only opened when something upstairs decided they should. Medics, aides, and armed Bureau agents stood behind a long wall of glass, watching the twenty get ready on the other side of it, and nobody out there spoke above a murmur.

James moved down the line with the rest. Guild pins threw small points of light off the glass. The S-ranks near the front carried old scars at their wrists and the backs of their hands, the kind a person earned by walking into places like this and coming back.

This did not feel like Team Zero going up a floor.

It felt like a country handing twenty people to something that had already eaten six.

His hand went to his sword without him telling it to. Then to the slot where the sealed scythe sat cold against his hip. Then to the seal on his wrist. He made it stop after that.

He opened his System one last time before the gate, and the thing that had been hanging two weeks finally landed.

[DELAYED COMBAT RESOLUTION]

[CHALLENGER KILL CONFIRMED: WILLIAM LANGFORD]

[EXPERIENCE AWARDED]

The Tower did not care that the kill had been a man. It logged him like any other body and paid out like any other body, and that was colder than anything Langford had said before he died.

[LEVEL: 24 → 26]

[ALL STATS +2]

[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 25 → 35]

James did not celebrate it. He read it, and he started spending, because walking into Floor 20 with points sitting idle in his window would have been its own kind of suicide.

Most of it went to Intelligence. His control, his mana pool, Grave Command, Necro Blast, Corpse Explosion, Death Chain — all of it ran off the necromancer’s output, and output was the only place his level gap could be answered. The rest he split between Endurance and Agility, because a Level 45 enemy could erase a slow mistake.

[AGILITY: 51 → 56]

[INTELLIGENCE: 78 → 98]

[ENDURANCE: 52 → 60]

[LUCK: 38 → 40]

[HP: 1,020/1,020 → 1,220/1,220]

[MANA: 1,470/1,470 → 1,690/1,690]

[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 0]

He flexed his hand and closed it. His thoughts sat sharper behind his eyes. His next breath went deeper than the last. When his fingers settled around the sword grip, they settled like they belonged there.

He was still a long way under the S-ranks on that screen. He could live with that. He only had to be useful.

The raid room let everyone see the gap.

The Bureau screen carried the roster with the levels beside the names, and the levels did most of the talking.

Marcus Hale. Level 76.

Maeve Callahan. Level 56.

The independent S-ranks and the guild elites filled the band between 45 and the low 60s.

James Ganner. Level 26.

Finn Hale. Level 24.

Finn looked at the 76 next to his father’s name, then looked away before anyone could catch him doing it.

Nobody in the room treated Maeve the way they treated the two boys. Her number was its own argument. Nobody looked at a Level 56 Radiant Warden with her contract record and called her a passenger.

O’Shea and Niamh did not give a speech.

"One thing, before you go up," O’Shea said. "The Tower reset floor access. It did not reset levels, titles, gear, skills, or a single hour of anyone’s experience. Marcus is still Marcus. The S-ranks are still S-ranks. The only thing that changed two weeks ago is which door is open. Don’t walk in there thinking the reset made anyone equal. It didn’t."

That was the whole briefing.

Marcus crossed to check his own people, and on the way back his eyes caught on Finn’s gear.

He reached out and tugged a strap at Finn’s side that sat a finger too loose, the one over his left ribs.

"Left’s open," Marcus said. "Tighten it."

Finn’s jaw set. He heard it as a correction and pulled the strap tight without a word.

Marcus was already turning away, on to the next thing, before Finn could decide whether to be angry or grateful.

Maeve, a few steps off, was not watching the cathedral feed or the quest title. She was watching a young support healer drift toward the S-rank battlemage.

"Not there," she said. "Stand off his right shoulder, not behind him. If he overcasts, the back-pressure off a spell that size will put you on the floor before the enemy gets a chance to."

The healer moved. Maeve checked her circlet and said nothing else.

The twenty entered together, and the System gave them the real mission, not a clear order.

[FLOOR 20 — MAIN STORY RAID]

[RAID SIZE: 20/20]

[MAIN STORY QUEST: ANGEL OF LUST — THE FIRST DISCIPLE]

[OBJECTIVE: KILL THE FIRST DISCIPLE]

[FAILURE CONDITION: RAID DEATH / OBJECTIVE FAILURE]

The floor did not open as a castle hall. It opened as a city.

They stood at the foot of a wide marble avenue that ran straight toward a cathedral in the far distance, its spires broken against a flat grey sky. Red banners hung off the ruined towers on either side. Angel statues lined the street, and every one of them had had its face scratched away.

The marble looked clean at a glance.

Then James got the smell of it. Sweetness first, thick and floral, almost pleasant. Then the rot underneath, climbing up through it.

He looked down. The gutters along the avenue were dark with old dried blood and full of petals gone brown and soft.

It was the sweetness that put him on edge, sitting on top of all of it, more than the blood underneath ever could.

"Formation," Marcus said, and the raid moved like it had drilled together for years.

Frontliners forward. Shield line a half-step behind them. Mages and ranged layered back. Healers boxed in the center, scouts angled to the flanks, supports ready to plug a gap. It was a clean, professional shape, the kind a real national raid made without thinking.

The first wave was not three monsters in a street. It was a flood.

They came down the avenue from the cathedral end, a crowd of them, and the front of the crowd was barely human anymore.

[Consumed Pilgrim — Level 28]

Rotten skin, split lips, fingers worn down to the bone from praying at something long after it stopped answering. Behind them came worse.

[Rotten Devotee — Level 31]

[Hollow Knight — Level 36]