The gate sealed behind the last of them, and the sound stopped. The area around them made them shiver, making Lily open her mouth.

"Now be careful" Lily was halfway through saying something to Victor.

The first half of her words echoed out, but the second half did not arrive. Mira’s boot came down on stone, and the stone registered the impact without producing any sound. The wind moved against Lily’s collar in complete silence.

It lasted one second.

Then the sound returned and the second half of her sentence was heard by everyone as well.

Raze said, "Tell me that wasn’t just me."

Nobody answered.

"It wasn’t just you," Mira said.

"It seemed there was a lag in the dungeon or maybe just the area."

"Does that mean our conversation will be delayed?"

"Probably not, it might just be this area, we will see when we continue." Lily replies.

Elden had gone very still. He was looking at the air in front of him like he was trying to see something invisible. "The sound didn’t just stop," he said quietly. "It went somewhere."

"That’s not helpful, Elden," Mira said with a dry look.

"It wasn’t meant to be helpful. It was meant to be accurate."

"Even less helpful."

Lily looked between them. Mira and Elden were arguing again but somehow that helped calm her down.

Victor hadn’t said anything. He was studying the frozen city ahead of them with his phone already recording. His silence was different from the others, she noticed, but didn’t push it. Victor would talk when Victor was ready.

Ahead, Lily focused on the city-wide streets, low buildings, and a market square at the end of the first street they were standing on.

Stone weathered yellow.

Ironwork on the lamp posts.

A fountain in the square with the water frozen midway through its arc and a bird hung above the rooftops with its wings spread.

Not flying but fixed in the air at the exact moment it had been when the dungeon took it.

The trees in the square were dropping leaves that had stopped partway to the ground, each one suspended at a different height depending on when it had released.

Lily said, very quietly, "Don’t touch anything," and walked to the edge of the street with her tablet already open.

Hollow Sky had taught Lily one thing. If the world kept changing, she needed fixed points.

So she picked three.

Starting with the third droplet from the top of the fountain. It was hanging slightly lower than the others. It had left the crown a fraction of a second later than the rest had.

In four minutes, she had five zones mapped, and the team was moving.

...

The pace the dungeon allowed was slower than any of them wanted. The streets looked completely ordinary except for everything that was stopped inside them.

A cart with one wheel off the ground.

A child’s ball got stuck midway through a bounce.

Two figures stood in a doorway with their mouths open, caught in the middle of a conversation that would never finish. One still had a hand raised like they were waiting for an answer.

Mira stopped in front of the figures.

"Don’t touch them," Lily said without looking up from her tablet.

"I wasn’t going to." But Mira didn’t move. She was looking at their faces. "They don’t know..."

Raze came up beside her. "Don’t know what?"

"That they stopped." Mira looked at him. "They were having a conversation with a smile. And then time just took them. They didn’t even get to finish their sentence."

Raze looked at the figures. At the words still waiting in the air between their frozen mouths. "Come on," he said gently. "We need to keep moving."

Mira nodded, but she looked back once as they walked away.

Elden, who had been listening, said, "The whole city is like this. Everyone frozen mid-moment."

"I know."

"Just making sure you’re prepared for more of it."

"I’m prepared."

She wasn’t, but she kept walking anyway.

...

Lily kept her eyes on her tablet and her reference points and tried not to look at the figures in the doorway too long.

Mira counted heads every ninety seconds. And got Seven, every time. She counted again because once didn’t feel like enough. Raze caught her at the third count and said nothing, which was correct.

The first construct stepped out of a doorway before the map had been in use for five minutes. It was tall and thin, the same yellow stone as the buildings, its face flat and round with a single thin bronze line across it where a clock hand would have been.

A second construct came out of the door across the street.

A third came through a window arch above the wall behind them.

[Chrono Construct.]

[Level 46.]

[Chrono Construct.]

[Level 47.]

[Chrono Construct.]

[Level 48.]

Raze pulled Tyrant Edge from his back and set the stance Mira had worked with him on after Titan Grave. He shifted into the stance Mira taught him. "Slow one," he said.

"Don’t assume," Lily called from behind.

Raze was already hacking down with his blade. It glowed with a crimson light that illuminated the area. The construct vanished and it reappeared on Raze’s right.

Just as the sword crashed into the ground and released a crimson explosion that smashed into the side of the construct. But the Chrono Construct was still able to fire a metal bolt that smashed into Raze’s shoulder.

"Okay." He rubbed his shoulder. "That’s annoying."

"I literally just said that," Lily said.

"You said don’t assume. You didn’t say it would speed up."

"The implication was clear."

Mira brought the War Maul across at the second construct. It accelerated into her swing and hit the maul head-on. The impact ran up through the handle into her bad shoulder, and she held on through the pain.

"They speed up when you attack them," she said through her teeth.

"Noted," Raze said, resetting his stance.

Elden raised his Focus Staff. A white light shone before piercing beams rushed through the air to the surprise of the others. The Chrono Constructor didn’t vanish and simply stayed still as the lights crashed into it.

The Sevenfold Arc punched through the third construct’s chest. Seven beams of light drove down the same path. The construct dropped cleanly.

"Or you just shoot them," Elden said.

Raze looked at him. "Show off."

"I’m efficient."

"Those are the same thing," Raze said, and Mira laughed despite herself.

"It seemed that long-range attacks didn’t make it react," Lily muttered as she held her bow.

She and Elden quickly swept through the last Chrono Construct with their long ranges before the group continued.

Lily marked the first route safe. The market is less safe, and everything beyond the fountain is uncertain. Then she checked the tablet to confirm a turn, and the high-confidence zone was gone.

The fountain droplet had changed height. The bird’s wing wasn’t where it should have been. She ran the numbers, and they were wrong, then ran them again, and they were wrong in a different direction.

Elden was watching the bird rather than her tablet. "You marked that it was a viable route."

"I did."

"Maybe don’t."

She looked at him.

"I think it reacts when we’re certain about something," he said.

"That’s a feeling. Not a rule." She turned back to the tablet and rebuilt the route.

Two minutes later, the new map was wrong. She rebuilt the map from new readings. Four minutes later, it was wrong again. It was like the dungeon was learning what she was looking for and changing it before she could use it.

"Lily," Elden said.

"I’m working."

"Your hand is shaking."

She looked down at her hand before she pressed it flat against the tablet and kept typing. "It’s adapting to our movements," she said. Her voice was controlled but tight. "Every time we try a new route, it feels like the dungeon itself is shifting the area around us."

Elden was quiet for a moment. "So it’s not random."

"No. It’s reactive. It’s watching us solve it and then changing the solution."

"Can you solve something that fights back?"

Lily looked at him. In any other dungeon, the answer would have been yes without hesitation. But this dungeon wasn’t asking if she was smart enough. It was asking if she could function without being certain.

"I don’t know," she said.

"Then we just need to figure it out! Maybe we just need to keep exploring for more information." Mira chimed in with a smile.

"That does make sense." Victor pointed out, making Lily pause before slowly nodding.

And they continued.

...

Mira finished her head count. Seven. She looked away to ask Raze about the second support’s bracer, which had been sitting loose since the third construct fight.

When she looked back, the world had changed.

She was sitting.

On the stone plaza with her hands in her lap. Not just her, but everyone else was sitting except the second support, who was lying on the ground with his shirt pushed up and a fresh cut across his side.

Mira was already crouching over him with a bandage wrap pressed against the wound. Her hands were working the wrap with practiced movements.

She didn’t remember kneeling down or pulling the bandage out.

She didn’t remember any of this.

"What happened?" she said.

Nobody answered.

"What HAPPENED?" she said louder.

Raze checked his watch. "We lost six minutes."

Six minutes had gone, just like that? Like someone had cut a piece out of time and thrown it away. Mira looked at the bandage in her hands. At the blood on the wrap and then at the support hunter breathing hard beneath her.

She had treated a wound she didn’t remember him getting. Her hands knew what to do even when her mind wasn’t there.

That terrified her more than any monster.

"Is he okay?" Raze asked. His voice was steady, but his jaw was tight.

Mira checked the wound. "Shallow. He’ll be fine." She finished the wrap and looked up. "But I don’t remember this happening."

"None of us do," Lily said as she stared at her tablet. Six minutes of their lives were gone in a flash, and they didn’t even know what happened.

"I remember standing," Elden said slowly. "Then sitting. Nothing between."

Raze said, "Same."

Victor checked his own tablet. He didn’t usually need to check his own tablet. The fact that he was checking now meant he’d lost something too. The silence that followed was the worst kind. Not the absence of sound. The absence of trust in your own mind.

Mira walked to each person on the team. After quickly looking at their faces and touching their shoulders. She came back to Raze, she said, "We are all still here, seven of us."

"I know," he said.

"I had to check."

Raze nodded before Mira went over to help the support hunter up. She helped him tighten his loose bracer even as her hands were shaking.

Lily then told everyone to continue sitting in the plaza for another minute. Nobody suggested moving yet.

The second support, the one with the fresh bandage, looked at the cut on his side. "I don’t even remember getting hit," he said quietly.

"That’s the worst part," the other support said. He was checking his own gear. His hands were steady, but his voice wasn’t. "We don’t even know if we were attacked by a monster or something else in the dungeon..."

Mira looked at both of them. These were the replacements for the support they’d lost in Titan Grave.

"Raze," Lily asked. "How’s the bracer?"

Kael looked surprised that Raze knew his name. "Tight now. Mira fixed it."

"Jin?"

"Fine," Jin said before sighing. "I’m scared..."

"Good," Raze said. "Scared means you’re paying attention."

Elden was sitting with his staff across his knees, looking at the tower with an expression Lily had learned to recognize. The expression meant he was about to say something strange that would turn out to be exactly right.

"It’s not attacking us," Elden said.

Everyone looked at him.

"It’s not trying to kill us." Nobody spoke as Elden looked around the plaza and continued. "It’s trying to make us doubt ourselves."

"No wonder... By having us forget what we did in the last five minutes–"

"We start to not trust our memories and each other." Victor finished with a sigh.

"Is there a way to break the control!?" Mira asked with her eyes widening.

"What if we record ourselves?" One of the support hunters proposed.

"Oh! That could work!? We can even try to have maybe three or four of us recording. And then after that thing happens, we can see exactly what we forgot!" One of the supporters perks up with a grin on her face.

"No, that won’t work. Time might also affect the recording devices here." Lily said, making them frown.

Elden chuckles before looking at Mira. "Maybe we can just do Mira method? That counting your doing... It might be a good method to help deal with the doubts about whether we’re all here or not."

Mira trembled because he was right. Every time she counted to seven, she wasn’t looking for a problem. She was looking for proof that the team was still whole.

"Seven," she said quietly.

"Still seven," Elden said, and almost smiled.

Lily stood up from the ground and then paused as the area began shaking. All of them looked to see that the previous stationary tower was now drifting through the air. Their expressions shifted to shock as its shadow covered them before it dropped down to the ground.

And it shocked everything.

"It can move!?"

"Apparently," Raze muttered.

Lily’s eyes narrowed as she saw a shadow move on the side of it, projected from inside the stone rather than from any external source. The shadow ran across the tower.

Froze for a split second before vanishing in the next.

"What the heck was that!?"

"A monster most likely... And it’s probably stalking us."

Every frown while Lily looked at the tower. "Elden, your words about the mechanics... If we take it a step further. The dungeon is treating us like a video it can edit."

Silence fell on the group.

Elden stared at her. "That’s worse."

"Much worse." Lily nodded. "But the tablet isn’t going to help."

She left it on the stone while her hands looked empty in a way that made the whole team uncomfortable.

Raze picked it up and put it in his pack. "I’ll hold it," he said. "For when you want it back."

Lily looked at him, and something complicated crossed her face. "Thank you," she said.

She turned toward the tower. Seven people standing in a plaza in a dungeon that could steal their time and rearrange their world.

"We go together," Mira said. "Nobody walks ahead. Nobody falls behind. We stay close enough to touch."

"Agreed," Raze said.

"Agreed," Elden said.

Victor nodded once, and then he checked the distance to the tower. Then silently moved closer to the group. Kel and Jin moved closer to the group without being asked.

Lily looked at all of them. This was her team, who through the challenges in this dungeon had become close enough to trust each other. Standing around her, even though her maps were useless and her data was broken, and she had nothing to offer except herself.

Together.

This time, nobody walked ahead.

Nobody fell behind.