​The corridor sloped even more sharply into the belly of the earth. The deeper they marched, the more the world around them seemed to lose its sound—an unsettling, unnatural silence. Tap... tap... The sound of their boot soles, which usually echoed loudly, was now muffled. Their own breathing sounded too loud in their ears, ragged and close.

​Khulafa suddenly stopped. His back stiffened.

​He raised a clenched fist into the air, giving the absolute signal for the entire team to freeze. His head tilted up slowly, staring at the vaulted ceiling that curved tens of meters high—so dark that their helmet lamps appeared as nothing more than helpless, tiny dots.

​"Hmm? What is it?" Thorne whispered, his hand reflexively moving toward his weapon’s hilt.

​Khulafa didn’t answer immediately. His index finger touched the edge of his helmet visor, activating the thermal and night vision scanner. Bzzzt. The display in his eyes shifted into a field of dull green. And there, at heights unreachable by light, he saw them.

​Hanging. Dozens—no, hundreds. They swayed gently like inverted jellyfish in the air, thin tentacles trailing downward, moving gracefully without making a single sound. Their bodies were nearly transparent, almost impossible to detect without mechanical aid. The helmet lights from below passed through those bodies, creating strange refractions like vibrating water ripples in the heart of the darkness.

​Mind Flayers.

​"It’s a psychic trap," Khulafa whispered through the Vibro-Comm. His voice sounded clear in his comrades’ skulls, but there was a bitter edge to it. "I recognize this pattern. Commander Borch once told me about it. They wait for prey to pass directly beneath them."

​Rianor was about to give the order to retreat, but he was too late. A soldier in the front rank—perhaps out of sheer nerves—took a step too far, crossing an invisible threshold.

​And then, the sound came.

​It wasn’t a sound captured by the sense of hearing. Not a hoarse scream or the roar of an engine. Something far more primal crawled directly into the neural center, bypassing the eardrums, piercing through the filters of human consciousness. A low frequency that made the skull vibrate violently. Thump.

​The soldier suddenly froze. His head tilted back with a vacant stare. His eyes widened, not in horror at the monsters above, but because he was seeing something that existed only inside his head.

​"Lina...?" he murmured softly.

​The name came out with a tone of deep longing, like a whispered prayer. Lina—whether a wife, a child, or a lover long since buried. His hand reached forward, trying to grasp the void. A faint smile began to bloom on his lips—a peaceful smile that looked utterly terrifying in the middle of this death pit.

​"Tsk, get him down, now!" Rianor ordered.

​Thorne moved like lightning. He lunged at the soldier, tackling him to the stone floor with a heavy thud. Thump! The soldier thrashed wildly, his fingers still clawing at the air as if trying to reach a fading shadow. "Lina! She’s right there! Hey, why are you stopping me? She’s calling for me!"

​"Wake up! There’s no one there!" Thorne pinned the man’s shoulders down by force, staring straight into his watery eyes. "It’s fake! It’s just a hallucination played by your brain! Do you hear me?!"

​The soldier panted. He blinked several times until his eyes regained focus. A second later, he sobbed. "But... but she looked so real just now..."

​Thorne released him slowly, helping him sit up even though his own hands were still trembling slightly. "She’s not here. Do you understand? It’s just us."

​Rianor immediately opened the public communication channel. "All units! Activate the White Noise in your helmets! Now! Do not turn it off until I give the direct order!"

​Sshhhhhhh—

​A constant static hiss began to fill their ears. The sound was harsh and uncomfortable, but at least it managed to dampen the low frequency trying to tear their consciousness apart. Some soldiers still looked pale, their hands gripping their Sudrath Spears tightly, not daring to look up.

​"Told you," Khulafa muttered as he adjusted his weapon. "They are the most efficient mental guardians in this place."

​From the ceiling, the Mind Flayers began to descend.

​Their movements were slow, almost graceful, like giant jellyfish floating in an ocean of air. Their long tentacles crawled down, touching the floor with sensitive tips, searching for organic heat sources. The helmet lights pierced their transparent bodies, revealing a cluster of nerves pulsing slowly at the center—something resembling a floating brain.

​"Fire!" Thorne shouted.

​Sudrath Spears began to bark. Mana rounds shot through the darkness, hitting the transparent bodies. However, a bizarre sight unfolded. The bullets passed right through without causing significant harm. No blood, no screams. The creatures only rippled for a moment, like water hit by a stone, then continued their descent.

​"Eh? The bullets are passing straight through!" a soldier cried out in panic.

​"They are in a spectral phase!" Arvid shouted from the middle of the rank, his hands busy adjusting his glasses, which were slipping from cold sweat. "They aren’t entirely physical matter! They are half-present in another dimension!"

​Rianor turned toward Dom and Khulafa. "Dom! Khulafa! Aim for the ones almost touching the floor! When they intend to make physical contact, they must solidify!"

​"Understood."

​Dom and Khulafa took stable positions. They ignored the hundreds of creatures on the ceiling and focused only on the closest ones. One Mind Flayer descended low enough, its tentacles nearly caressing a soldier’s helmet. At that exact second—as its body began to harden to attack—Khulafa pulled the trigger.

​Thung!

​The Gauss round shot silently, shattering the creature’s neural center. The Mind Flayer vibrated violently, then fell to the floor—turning into a clump of purple slime that smelled pungently fishy.

​"Wait until they solidify!" Khulafa shouted instructions. "Don’t waste ammo on shadows!"

​One by one, the creatures fell, turning into slime. Yet their numbers seemed limitless. Rianor realized his soldiers were starting to get overwhelmed; the White Noise didn’t entirely erase the mental attack; it only provided temporary protection.

​"Rianor," Arvid called out, his voice trembling. "The effect is getting stronger. If we don’t get out of this corridor soon, their nerves will burn out!"

​"I know." Rianor looked ahead, toward a vast room at the end of the corridor emitting a dim purple light. "We have to destroy the source."

​That room was the heart of all the horrors in Level 2.

​The ceiling was lost in a darkness unreachable by any mana lamp. But in the center of the room hung an organic-mechanical structure that made their skin crawl. A colony. Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of human brains floated inside glass tubes filled with thick fluid. Nerve cables and synthetic vessels ran between them, connecting every brain into one massive, pulsing circuit.

​Thump... thump... thump...

​The Hive Mind.

​Surrounding it, Mind Flayers twice the normal size stood guard, their tentacles glowing brightly. They were the protectors of this collective consciousness.

​"This..." Arvid swallowed hard. Gulp. "This is the central processing unit... they are using human brains as processors to control the mental defense system on this level. Like the Obsidian Crawler, but on a far more massive scale."

​Rianor stared at the rows of brains. Some of them still showed chaotic neural wave activity—souls trapped for thousands of years, unable to die, unable to sleep, forced only to ’exist’ and serve the machine.

​"They sacrificed their own people," Rianor whispered hoarsely. "What was all this for?"

​Riven stepped forward without hesitation. His mechanical axe roared again, slicing the silence with a threatening tone. "For something they considered greater than their lives." He stared at the center of the brain colony with a cold gaze. "And now... it’s time for them to rest."

​Riven lunged without waiting for a command. His axe swung at full speed, cleaving the air. The guardian Mind Flayers immediately descended to block him, but Dom and Khulafa gave them no opening. Every creature that tried to draw near was brought down with precision shots.

​Riven leaped high, then slammed his axe right into the heart of the Hive Mind.

​CRAAAAK!

​A scream exploded. Not a sound, but a mental shockwave that directly hammered the consciousness of everyone there. A release of thousands of years of accumulated suffering. Rianor felt as if his head had been hit by a sledgehammer, Arvid collapsed to his knees while clutching his temples, and several soldiers screamed in agony.

​Then, silence. A true silence.

​The Hive Mind structure shattered into pieces. One by one, the brains inside the tubes stopped pulsing and began to shrivel. The remaining Mind Flayers on the ceiling fell like dry leaves, losing their energy source and control. Purple nutrient fluid flowed across the floor, creating a puddle that smelled of sharp chemicals.

​Riven stood at the center of the destruction, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His mechanical axe spun slowly for a few moments before he finally turned it off. He stared at the remnants of the brains for a moment in silence, then looked away.

​Arvid stood up, his hands still shaking, and straightened his tilted glasses. "Horrific... but at least our path is clear now."

​Rianor nodded curtly. He looked at the corridor sloping further down, into a deeper darkness. "They sacrificed everything for this place... I have to know what they were protecting."

​No one answered. But ahead, the mystery of the next level was already waiting to be peeled back. And with every step, they drew closer to the core of Project Legion’s madness.