Liora’s spirit fire intensity was different from the spirit fire at advantageous operational intensity; it didn’t just purify, it pressured the corruption that was holding the mutants’ forced development together, finding the instabilities that the accelerated process had left in the system and widening them.

The Gold 3 mutants that took a direct hit from the spirit fire didn’t simply take damage; their new structure began destabilizing in a way that accelerated the damage they were already carrying.

Ren matched it with everything the Mantis had at this rank. The cutting power of the wind at Gold 1 shouldn’t be sufficient to end a Gold 3 mutant quickly on its own, but the huge extra % buffs and in combination with Liora’s destabilizing fire, the wind worked like a hot knife on butter on targets that were already having structural failures and extending them.

The guards held the perimeter with everything they had.

Lin and the panther moved between the lone targets that managed to push through the massive battle to the front with a precision that left no hesitation between one engagement and the next.

The seventh chamber cleared.

It didn’t take much yet.

In the silence after, while the group verified the state of each person, Ren read what he could read from the corridors leading downward.

He looked toward the eighth chamber stairs.

The eighth chamber would be above Gold 3. The question was how far above.

♢♢♢♢

Gold-rank beasts were large in a way that the word large didn’t quite capture until you were in the same room as one. A Platinum beast weighed roughly ten times what a Gold beast weighed.

A Silver beast weighed around a ton on average, which meant a Gold beast averaged ten tons and a Platinum beast started at a hundred.

The eighth chamber’s floor had the marks of the forced cannibalizing that were still fresh on them, also old wounds in varying states of healing, the occasional missing limb or compromised section of exoskeleton. But unlike the lower-rank mutants, these moved through the damage as if it were background noise; the multi-legged structure and compartmentalized node system that the new mutant corruption had built into them meant that losing part of the body wasn’t the same kind of problem it would have been for something with a more centralized anatomy.

They redistributed their new center of mass and continued.

The eighth chamber was going to be Gold 3.

That’s what they thought when they reached the last chamber.

Lin said it out loud: "Platinum 1 at most for the last two chambers."

Ren nodded... The pattern had been consistent.

If it took two chambers to go from Silver 3 to Gold 1, reaching Platinum would cost at least as much and probably more. The last three chambers, maybe.

They crossed the real threshold.

The first beast that detected them going down looked from the bottom of the chamber.

It was the size of a three-story building.

Platinum 1.

"We were lied to," Mayo said.

There was nothing to add to that, so nobody did.

The guards held the flanks. What followed wasn’t clean or easy in the way the earlier chambers had been clean or easy; it was still functional, and functional was still fine but needed some adjustments.

Seven Gold 3 normal tamers, their bonuses doubling and tripling the output of their beasts above their base rank, but a beast enhanced to the theoretical equivalent of Gold 9 was still not a Platinum beast.

The numbers had a cruelty to them that the math made precise. What compensated was the group. What compensated was always the group, and particularly when your group included three fighters operating well above the general level of the encounter.

But first Ren needed to make sure they were safe.

♢♢♢♢

Not a handful of platinum beasts... Dozens.

Platinum 1 mutants, each one around a hundred tons of mass, distributed through a chamber that was the widest they had entered so far, with a ceiling high enough that the scale didn’t feel immediately crushing. The space had been built to hold something or things of this size. That was worth noting.

"Gold 3 guards stay behind the main group, don’t separate," Ren said. "Invoke your beasts and pull them back if it looks dangerous. You’re supporting, not leading."

"And me?" Mayo called out, with the wounded tone of someone who had been visibly forgotten.

Ren smiled... He knew she understood she was counted among the Gold 3 group. He’d just left her room to make the joke she’d obviously would take the chance to make.

No guard protested, because none of them were being underestimated and they knew it.

Ren wasn’t suggesting they weren’t capable; he was calculating correctly, and correct calculations were what kept people from dying underground. The difference between a Platinum 1 beast at full health and a Gold 3 tamer with good bonuses was still a gap, and these beasts, though damaged by the cannibalizing that had pushed them to this rank, were still Platinum.

Ren summoned the two headed Gold 3 Diamond Hydra.

The entire chamber registered the shift in mana before the beast finished materializing. A Gold 3 beast influenced by bonuses exceeding 800% pushed above Platinum 2 output easily, and 950 points of multi-elemental control didn’t register just as background noise in any space.

They registered as a death sentence.

The Hydra’s presence didn’t arrive gradually; it arrived all at once, the mana displacement of it changing the quality of the air in the chamber the way pressure changed before a storm.

The dozens of Platinum 1 mutants responded with the reaction of things that had survived long enough for their instinct to distinguish between something ignorable and something that wasn’t.

This was NOT ignorable.

The Hydra fired the first light ray from the right head while the left head was already tracking the next target. The beam landed on the closest mutant and split it with the violence of a force that had exactly the power needed for the work and wasn’t wasting any of it.

The ones nearest to the impact launched backward in fear despite the control it had first making it eat to the death. The ones at the far end of the chamber began charging energy for ranged support, which was exactly the behavior of something with enough instinct to understand that sending everything directly into a known threat was worse than letting the front line probe first and using them as a buffer after.

Liora summoned the Bashe.

Liora’s double-tamer bonuses didn’t match Ren’s, but they weren’t too far behind. Her lower bonuses pushed past 550% and the mana and spiritual control numbers climbed above 800%, putting both her beasts above Platinum 1 in practical output.

The Bashe emerged small, the way these serpents always emerged before they ate. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

It didn’t stay small...

Every Platinum 1 that fell to Ren and the team was now its fuel. The Bashe processed that combustible with the efficiency of something built for exactly this purpose, and as a secondary benefit it denied the cannibalizing mutants their primary fuel source while a small application of spirit fire neutralized the accumulated corruption in the serpent’s system before it could cause problems.

The Bashe grew... Kept growing.

By the third minute it was twice the size of what it was attacking, and from that point the dynamic of the chamber shifted because the Bashe had its own weight in the calculation.

Lin released the Royal Panther Lizard.

The Gold rank beast was what it was: not the most impressive raw power in the group, not what anyone would have named as the deciding factor in a fight at this scale... But Lin guiding her Lizard-Panther was the combination of a specific kind of long practice, and long practice produced an efficiency that raw power alone couldn’t replicate.

Lin’s bonuses hovered around 400% overall, the thousand-day method having pushed the crane’s contribution to a meaningful additional 100% on the full base.

For Lin, having power similar to or slightly above her opponent’s was always sufficient to humiliate them with the gap in technique.

The Lizard-Panther hit the most densely packed flank at the near wall with the kind of agility and body control that made it look like the mass of its opponents was a burden and not a power, a useless trait it had dismissed ahead of time. It moved through them without receiving a single counter-hit, sank the bladed tails into three bodies simultaneously, and released the internal fire at contact. All three Platinum 1 mutants boiled from the inside at once.

The damaged Platinum 1 mutants lasted longer than anything below them had. Several minutes of genuine intensity, the kind of engagement where losing focus for a second meant something. Not unbearable, but not the systematic efficiency of the earlier chambers.

When the chamber went silent, Ren gave the group ten minutes and used that time to look at the walls.