The gallery with the stream fell behind them, and the dungeon closed in again.

  The tunnels here were rougher, less traveled. No boot prints in the thin yer of grit on the stone floor. No torch marks on the walls. Even the fungi grew thicker, their bioluminescent glow pulsing in deep ambers and violets that painted the corridor in shifting, bruise-colored light. The mineral veins in the exposed stone branched and thickened with every hundred paces.

  They'd been down for hours. The potatoes were half gone, though water wasn’t a problem as they just refilled their waterskins at the stream. The carapace bundle on Marsh's back had grown heavy enough to make him roll his shoulders every few minutes. Sera's satchel rode low on her hip, weighted with Shambler ptes and the precious cloth-wrapped bundles of Stonemorels.

  Leo was running numbers in his head - bolts remaining, energy accumuted, distance from the stairs - when they rounded a bend and Marsh stopped, axe coming up, weight shifting to his back foot.

  "Something's ahead," he whispered.

  Leo's crossbow snapped to his shoulder. Sera dropped to a half-crouch, spear angled forward.

  Then Leo saw it too. A short, straight stretch of corridor that ended at a colpsed section of wall. And there, sitting against the tunnel wall with his knees drawn to his chest, was a man.

  He was young. Leo's age, maybe younger by a year or two. He sat in the dim pool of light cast by a candle stub wedged into a crack in the stone, its fme guttering in the faint draft, close to dying. His back was pressed ft against the wall, arms wrapped tight around his shins, chin resting on his knees.

  His hair was dark brown, almost bck, cut shorter than any farmer Leo had seen in Ashwick, the kind of cut that required a mirror and a steady hand. It was matted now with sweat and grime, pressed ft on one side where he'd been leaning against the stone. His face was narrow with a sharp jaw and straight nose.

  One cheekbone was swollen and purple-bck, the bruise spreading toward his eye socket. His lower lip was split, the dried blood cracking where the skin had started to heal. A scrape along his jaw, raw and pink.

  But it was the clothes that stopped Leo.

  The linen shirt was thin and undyed, but the weave was finer than anything Leo owned. The trousers were dark, well-fitted, with a leather belt that had been cut. The boots were leather, decent quality, one missing its ce entirely, the tongue flopping open.

  Leo scanned his surroundings. No weapon or armor, or even a backpack.

  The ntern light reached the stranger and his head came up fast. His eyes found the three of them in the corridor and his body went rigid.

  “You…” The stranger opened his mouth, but Leo was faster than him.

  "We're leaving," he said, already stepping back. "Let's go."

  Marsh didn't need to be told twice. He was already turning, axe shifting to cover their retreat down the side passage. Sera hesitated for a half-second, her eyes lingering on the stranger's bruised face, before she fell into step.

  "Wait…"

  The stranger's voice cracked through the tunnel behind them.

  "Please. Wait."

  Leo kept walking.

  "They took everything. Four men. I joined their party days ago. They said they needed a fifth for the deeper floors. Offered an even split."

  The words came faster now, tumbling out with the breathless urgency of someone watching his st chance walk away.

  "They turned on me. Took my pack, my weapon, my coin purse and food. I only managed to find this candle..."

  Leo didn't stop, but the rhythm of his stride broke.

  "I don't know how to get back to the first floor," the stranger said. The hoarseness in his voice had thickened with desperation. "I've been sitting here since the candle was tall. I don't know how long."

  "Not our problem. Could be a setup," Marsh spoke first, low enough that only Leo and Sera could hear.

  "He's alone," Sera said, but her voice was less certain. "If there were others waiting to ambush us, they'd have moved by now."

  "Or they're deeper in, and he's the lure."

  "Marsh…"

  "I'm not being heartless. You know the rule. Every delver who ever got robbed in a dungeon got robbed by someone who looked like they needed help," Marsh's jaw was set, his voice ft.

  Leo said nothing for a long moment. He could hear the stranger's breathing from around the corner. It was fast, uneven, the sound of someone trying not to fall apart.

  Marsh was right. Leo knew it. Every survival instinct he'd developed in the past ten days told him to walk away.

  But he hadn't been born in this world. He didn’t want to turn into a person who saw someone who needed help and turned away.

  He tried, but the stranger’s begging stopped him, which meant he wasn’t cold-hearted enough for it.

  Maybe…I don't have to be stupid about it.

  "Stay here," Leo told Marsh and Sera.

  Marsh opened his mouth. Leo held up a hand.

  "I'm not approaching him."

  He unslung one of their waterskins and pulled two boiled potatoes from the cloth wrap in Sera's satchel. He walked and stopped fifteen paces from the stranger. Close enough to be heard, but far enough that a lunge couldn't close the gap before Leo's crossbow did.

  The stranger was standing now. He'd risen when he heard them stop walking, and the movement had cost him. He was leaning against the wall with one hand, his weight on his left leg. His gray eyes tracked Leo's hands as he set the waterskin and potatoes on the tunnel floor.

  "The stairs to the first floor are back the way we came," Leo said, keeping his voice even. "Follow this tunnel until it opens into a wide gallery with a stream running through it. Past the gallery, you'll hit a chamber that stinks of spores, go straight through. After that, keep left at every fork until you reach a rge cavern with three exits. The one that slopes upward leads to the first floor."

  The stranger stared at the food and water on the stone between them. His throat made a visible swallow.

  "Thank you," he said, looking down at the stone floor, and when he looked back up his eyes were bright in the candlelight. "I mean it. Thank you. I didn't…I wasn't sure anyone would come through here."

  He pushed off the wall and took a step toward the food then stopped. His weight shifted forward, toward the three armed people who knew the way out. And Leo saw the impulse fsh across the stranger's face as clearly as if he'd spoken it aloud.

  Take me with you.

  The stranger's mouth opened, then closed. His jaw set, and something in his expression hardened.

  He stepped back. Settled his weight, then nodded once.

  "I won't follow you. I know the rules," he said quietly. "You've already done more than you had to. I will find my own way to the surface. Be careful if you’re going in deeper. There’s something there that made my…companions turn back."

  The word ‘companions’ sounded bitter.

  The stranger then looked at Leo again.

  “Then, farewell. May Valdris keep your sword arm true.”

  Leo didn't recognize the name. It wasn't a god the farmers of Ashwick prayed to, that one was Aelra. But the stranger spoke it with the ease of long habit.

  He filed that away.

  “And you too,” Leo nodded and walked back to his team.

  Marsh gave him a long look when he returned - the look of a man who thought his brother had done something foolish.

  "You done?" Marsh asked.

  "I'm done."

  Sera said nothing. But as they moved on, taking another passage deeper into the second floor, her hand brushed Leo's arm. When he gnced at her, she was looking straight at him, a small smile on her lips.

  They didn't speak about the stranger again.

  The next hour was the most productive stretch of the entire run, not counting the Stonemorels. The corridors here were riddled with side chambers and alcoves that previous delvers had either missed or never reached, and every third turning seemed to yield something worth stopping for.

  A pair of Stonecap Beetles in a low-ceilinged passage. Leo and Sera dropped them in under a minute, working the angles they'd refined through the earlier fights. A trio in a wider chamber took longer, one of them circling behind Marsh before Sera intercepted it with a spear thrust that caught the joint under its front leg on the first try. Then another pair, and then a lone beetle - oversized, aggressive, but stupid enough to charge straight into Marsh's pnted axe.

  Eight kills in around an hour.

  Leo's bolt economy was improving. He was averaging two bolts per Stonecap now, his eye trained to the deeper-set joints and the specific angles where the mineral crust thinned. His quiver was lighter than he'd like, but not critical.

  The energy count climbed with each kill.

  [Energy: 740]

  More than he'd ever held.

  Though Leo had his doubts. They’d encountered a lot more monsters than what he had heard from the tales of the other delvers. And there’s also the unexpected loot. Both Moonpetals and Stonemorels were supposed to grow on a deeper floor, yet his party had been particurly lucky.

  Leo knew that it couldn’t be normal, else there would be many more people in Ashwick who were willing to sell their lives for the dungeon.

  Between the beetle encounters, the dungeon offered gentler prizes. Sera found a cluster of Veilcap Stalks growing in a damp fissure where water seeped through a crack in the ceiling - pale, slender mushrooms with caps that shimmered faintly silver when the ntern caught them at the right angle. She knelt, fingers hovering, and went quiet for a moment.

  "Veilcaps," she said. "Tanners use them. The extract softens hide and strengthens it at the same time. My father showed me what they looked like, but I've never seen live ones."

  She harvested them with the same careful precision she'd used on everything else. When she was done, a neat bundle joined the Stonemorels in her satchel.

  "How much?" Leo asked.

  "One or two silvers, from the right buyer. Tanners and leatherworkers in any market town would take these without haggling."

  "Sera, have I told you tely that you're brilliant?"

  "Don't start."

  But her mouth twitched.

  Deeper in, they stumbled across the remains of an old campsite tucked into a recessed alcove. It was months old, maybe longer. A rusted ntern sat in the corner, its gss cracked, its oil long since evaporated or consumed by fungal growth. A pack y slumped against the wall, the canvas so rotted that it fell apart when Leo touched it. Inside was a few corroded tools, a length of rope turned brittle and useless, and - buried under a mat of pale mycelium that had colonized the pack's bottom - a small leather pouch.

  Leo worked it open with his knife and upended the contents into his palm.

  Mostly coppers in there, green with tarnish. But among them, glinting dully, were four silver pieces.

  "Someone didn't make it back," Marsh said. His voice carried no relish, just the ft acknowledgment of a risk they all shared.

  Leo pocketed the coins. They moved on.

  The encounters kept coming. Every stretch of tunnel seemed to hold something - a beetle pair here, a lone Shambler there, a patch of harvestable fungi clinging to a damp wall.

  "We've fought more in this hour than the entire first run," by now, the frequency was so unusual that even Sera noticed it.

  "Second floor's richer," Marsh offered, strapping another pair of carapaces to his groaning pack. "More monsters, more stuff. That's how it works, right?"

  Leo could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

  "Maybe…" Sera didn't sound convinced. They looked at each other, but no one could give an answer.

  The clicking started without warning.

  Not the familiar rhythm of Stonecap Beetles - Leo had learned that sound well enough in the st few hours to recognize it the way he recognized footsteps on the dirt path outside his cottage. This was different.

  Deeper in pitch and slower. It transmitted through the stone floor and up through the soles of Leo's boots.

  He raised his hand. Marsh and Sera stopped.

  Silence. Then…

  Click.

  A pause.

  Click-click.

  "That's not a Stonecap," Sera whispered. Her knuckles were white around the spear shaft.

  "No," Leo agreed. He shouldered the crossbow, pressing the stock into the hollow of his shoulder. His fingers found the trigger. The familiar weight steadied him.

  "Another cousin?" Marsh asked. He'd pnted himself at the front, axe up, feet spread. The gorget at his throat caught the ntern light.

  "I don't know."

  The clicking grew louder. Leo's teeth ached. The hairs on his forearms stood on end, though the air wasn't cold. He could feel it. Whatever that thing was, it was big.

  From the darkness ahead, something moved.

  A shape filled the corridor, bigger than anything they'd fought. It moved with heavy, grinding steps, and the sound of its legs on the stone was not the sharp click-click of chitin on rock.

  It was the sound of stone on stone.

  The ntern light reached it.

  Leo's stomach dropped.