They advanced through the next floors with simple ease. Ankerita leading them, they had not much resistance. It felt very odd to them that they were moving through the floors easily. It wasn’t like they passed through; they did fight, but it wasn’t very hard. They were like regular fights without the need to put much thought into them. The commander or the soldiers were defeated with a straight-on fight. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Jake didn’t need to use his strength as the others handled the work. He stayed behind the line, observing and taking note of everything.

What struck him as odd was how easily they were progressing through the floors. A structure like this shouldn’t have been this accommodating.

The feeling lingered in the back of his mind.

So he waited. Experience had taught him that when something felt wrong, it usually was.

And when they reached the final floor, what they saw was nothing.

That was the first thing Jake registered when the passage delivered them into the room - white marble walls and a white marble floor, the surfaces clean and unmarked and utterly indifferent to the violence that had occurred on every floor above.

No equipment, no soldiers, no crystal network pulsing in his Mana Sight.

The ceiling was low and plain.

The room’s dimensions were modest, smaller than any floor they’d encountered, and the absence of threat after four floors of sustained combat produced a disorientation that was almost physical.

The group spread through the room with weapons raised, checking corners and walls with the thoroughness that experience had made automatic.

They had to be on guard because there was no telling what might come or when something might happen. The men had injuries, nothing life-threatening, but if any serious battle were to happen, then it would certainly lead them to their deaths.

Ankerita ran her spatial talent across every surface and found nothing.

Maudlina extended her magical perception to its limits and returned the same result.

Jake’s Blood Sense registered the group’s own heartbeats and nothing else living in the space.

"This can’t be it," Maureen said.

She was right, though not in the way any of them expected.

"Why is there nobody here? Shouldn’t this the place where the leader of the dungeon should have been present?" Maureen said with uncertainty in her eyes.

Ankerita looked around; she was looking at all possibilities or if they had missed something.

"Maybe it’s not the final floor?" Maudlina said, looking towards the group.

Jake sighed and said, "We didn’t find any hidden doors or other pathways. It should be the final floor."

Ankerita said, "Maybe this is it. We have already killed their commanders and severed the connections between the soldiers."

Jake looked at her and said, "If that were the case, why aren’t we outside? Dungeons still exist because the leader of this place is still alive. I wonder if this is some mental attack, not a direct attack."

As they were standing, suddenly Jake felt something change in the air.

And in the next moment, the room changed without warning and without mechanism - no door opening, no floor giving way, and no sensation of movement at all.

One moment Jake was standing on white marble beside Ankerita and the next moment he was standing outside in grey morning light with cold air moving across his face and the smell of earth and smoke filling his lungs.

He felt like he was standing alone, for a moment.

He turned in a slow circle and found the dungeon’s exterior wall rising behind him, the same black material he’d entered through, but different now in ways that took him several seconds to identify.

The dimensional expansion was gone - the building stood at the footprint he’d seen from the treeline, no larger, its proportions those of a structure built for the space it occupied rather than containing more than that space permitted.

The forest was absent, replaced by open ground that sloped away from the fortress walls toward a landscape of low hills and scattered treelines in the far distance.

And across that landscape, dark against the grey morning, a line of movement was coming toward the fortress with the organized momentum of force in deployment.

He looked around and noticed that everything looked different and the view he had seen before going into the fortress wasn’t there. It looked new and familiar to him.

Jake observed the soldiers, noting that their appearance - skin, eyes, teeth, and hair - was indistinguishable from regular humans. They were a stark contrast to the beings he had encountered within the fortress walls. In the midst of what appeared to be an authentic battlefield, they brandished firearms and exchanged shouts. The air was thick with the sounds of combat: bullets hissed through the air, grenades were tossed across the field, and the roar of cannons echoed over the ridge.

Jake understood before his mind had finished processing what his eyes were showing him.

This was before what happened to that fortress; it was the past.

Not a vision, not a projection.

He was standing in it with cold air on his skin and real ground under his boots, present in a moment that had already concluded, watching it unfold the way it had unfolded before the forest grew back and the years accumulated and the dungeon swallowed everything inside the fortress walls.

The soldiers reached him before he could decide what to do.

They came around the fortress wall at a run, four of them in uniforms that belonged to Jake’s first life’s catalogue of military clothing without belonging to any specific country or era he could precisely identify - the practical gear of people whose governments had prioritized function over distinction, worn and patched and carrying the smell of extended field use.

They saw Jake standing outside the wall and one of them grabbed his arm without breaking stride, pulling him toward the fortress gate with the automatic urgency of people who had no time for questions about why someone was standing outside during an incoming assault.

They thought of him as a civilian or someone from their side. It wasn’t clear what they thought of him.

"Inside," the man said.

"Now."

Jake went inside.

The gate closed behind them and the sound of it closing was the sound of a decision being made, thick and final, the metal mechanism engaging with the permanence of something that wouldn’t open again until the situation outside resolved in one direction or the other.

The fortress’s interior in this time was nothing like what Jake had moved through on the floors above.

It was full of people, the spaces between structures dense with soldiers in various states of readiness - some at the walls with their weapons trained on the approaching line outside, some moving supplies between positions with the focused economy of people who understood that what they were carrying mattered more than how fast they were going, and some sitting against walls with the careful stillness of people conserving energy they couldn’t afford to spend unnecessarily.

Jake moved through it and nobody questioned his presence; the chaos of the situation provided a cover that made one additional person unremarkable.

He watched and he listened and he let the past speak in the language it had available, which was the language of faces and bodies and the specific way that people carried burdens that had been on their shoulders too long.

The assault began before the morning was fully light.

The sound of it was the first thing - a sustained percussion that Jake’s first life recognized and his second life had no framework for, the particular violence of projectile weapons deployed in volume across open ground.

The soldiers on the fortress walls returned fire with the discipline of people following trained protocols, their movements mechanical with the repetition of people who had been doing this long enough that procedure had replaced thought in the moments when thought was too slow.

Jake climbed to the wall and looked out over the battlefield and saw what the fortress was holding against and understood the size of what the soldiers inside were carrying.

The force outside was larger.

Significantly.

The kind of larger that made the logic of a sustained defense brutally clear to anyone capable of doing basic math.

A man appeared beside Jake on the wall - older than most of the soldiers, carrying the weight of command in his posture rather than his insignia, the specific gravity of someone responsible for other people’s lives who had been doing that calculation across too many days and too many nights.

He looked out at the force outside with eyes that had moved past the acute fear of the engagement’s early days into the harder, quieter territory beyond it, where fear had been absorbed into the landscape of the situation and what remained was simply the work.

"They cut the supply line four days ago," the man said, and Jake understood he was hearing it the way the past allowed him to hear it, directly and without the barrier of a language he shouldn’t have understood.

"We have ammunition. We have weapons. We have the walls."

He didn’t list what they didn’t have, because listing it served nothing.

"How long can you hold?" Jake asked.

The man looked at him sideways with the expression of someone who had been asked this question by themselves many times and had arrived at an answer that was honest rather than comfortable.

"Long enough," he said.

"That’s all that’s required. Long enough."