The tense standoff continued, and the oppressive silence weighed on Ace like iron chains.

  Before him, just ahead of their small circle of survivors, the System floated in the tunnel's soft glow. Her silhouette bled into shadows that didn't quite match her movements. Bioluminescent moss painted her dress in sickly shades of green, turning her deep scowl into something fragile.

  Into something almost…

  …human.

  Ace's new vampiric senses caught everything—the slight tremor in her shoulders, the way her fingers kept twitching, the acrid tang of fear souring the air.

  All of this because he simply mentioned the Shadow Realm.

  Victor's presence radiated like ice against Ace's right side, a reminder that he wasn't the only monster in these tunnels. Neither of them spoke. Only the steady plink of distant water droplets broke the quiet air.

  "It doesn’t matter.” The floating girl’s shoulders tightened, and her voice was missing its usual playful lilt. "You have bigger fish to fry, Sergeant.”

  Ace watched her the way a sniper hunted a target through his scope. Sometimes the most valuable intel came from the things people were desperate not to say. And right now, the System's silence screamed at him.

  The Crimson Sword in Ace's hand pulsed violently, its channels flaring bright as though responding to her words.

  The air lightened suddenly, the oppressive weight lifting as the System's demeanor snapped back to its previous false cheer with such jarring speed that the others visibly flinched.

  But as the group exchanged uneasy glances, Ace noticed something significant: the System wasn't looking at him anymore. For the first time since their encounter began, she was deliberately avoiding his gaze.

  He'd struck a nerve. And in a game rigged against the players, any leverage—however small—might make the difference between survival and becoming another bloodstain on the dungeon floor.

  "Listen, Sergeant," she said, her childlike voice dropping to a menacing whisper. "You exist solely because I allow it. Your moderate entertainment value is the thinnest thread keeping you from oblivion. I've destroyed men far stronger than you just to watch the light leave their eyes." She leaned closer, her smile stretching too wide for her face. "You know why you’re here? Why I chose you? It’s because I want to catalog every way you can bleed. I want to archive each unique sound you make when something breaks inside of you. I want to document precisely how much suffering one soul can endure before it shatters completely. Keep asking questions, my darling, and I will make your afterlife a living hell. Your call.”

  His eyebrows shot up his face in surprise, and he glared at her with the intensity of an officer about to put a new recruit in their place.

  Wisely, however, he kept his mouth shut—because holy shit was this girl insane.

  Without another word, her body faded into nothing, leaving the small band of survivors in sudden, oppressive silence. The chamber's shadows deepened for a second or two before a pale glow bloomed at the tunnel's far end—sterile and artificial, like fluorescent lights in a morgue.

  The way out.

  Ace shook off the daze that had followed her dark confession and, lost in thought, headed for the exit. The System was gone, after all, and he had nothing to say about her outburst. All he could do was hold up his end of the bargain, make it to Floor 7, and then get the hell out of this place.

  One by one, the others joined him as they all wandered toward the light. No one spoke. They didn't need to. In a place built from nightmares and ruled by a sadistic child-goddess, even the dimmest exit sign became a beacon.

  Ace led the way, his new powers turning his shadow into a writhing thing that stretched behind him like spilled ink. The others fell into step—Marcus with his psychic aura making the air crackle. Olivia's Blood Dancer grace leaving crimson afterimages behind her fluid movements. Tara walked with serene confidence, the symbols now carved into her skin pulsing with divine corruption. In stark contrast, Victor's presence saturated the corridor, a predatory weight that pressed against Ace's skin. Raw strength radiated from the man’s rigid stance, contained only by the last fragments of his military control.

  And Rachel... Rachel just walked, her common vampire nature now painfully obvious in comparison to the others. She looked like someone who'd brought a pocket knife to a nuclear war, her transformation seeming almost quaint compared to the powers that radiated from the others like heat from a forge.

  Each step carried them closer to the pale light ahead, their shadows painting a portrait of what they'd become—soldiers turned monsters, humans turned legends, all of them living weapons headed toward something that felt more like a beginning than an escape.

  The light grew brighter with each step, but not warmer. If anything, it felt like walking toward the heart of winter. But they pressed on because that was what soldiers did, even when they had left the war behind.

  Even when they were monsters answering the call of something colder than death.

  “Good luck!” the System shouted from down the tunnel.

  Ace scoffed. Luck wouldn’t do a goddamn thing for any of them in a place like this.

  “I’ll be watching,” the System added, her voice little more than a whisper in his ear.

  He stiffened and looked over his shoulder, only to find Victor watching him with a fierce expression that Ace couldn’t quite read.

  Suspicion, maybe, or hunger.

  "Hang back a minute," Victor said, his voice low.

  Hmm.

  As much as he didn’t like the man, Ace’s curiosity got the better of him. He stopped, studying the others as Tara led the rest of the team toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

  Victor's eyes reflected what little light reached them this far from the exit. "Let's cut them loose."

  "You’re joking,” Ace said dryly.

  "I’m not,” Victor said under his breath. “They’re just civilians. They're dead weight. We're soldiers, Blackwell. We don't have to float the others. Not here. Not in this hellhole."

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Ace's jaw tensed, but he didn’t reply.

  The fucking audacity of this man—to even suggest such a thing told Ace everything about Victor that he needed to know.

  “You know I’m right.” Victor stepped closer, his face inches from Ace's. "They're not your squad, Marine. They're strangers, and you owe them nothing. This isn't Afghanistan. There's no command structure. No mission parameters. Just survival."

  Though he bristled at Victor’s words, Ace still didn’t reply—instead, he let his intense glare do the talking.

  Victor scowled, and his eyes darted back and forth as he studied Ace’s features. The shadows around them deepened, as if feeding off their tension, and coiled like smoke around their ankles.

  As much as he hated to admit it, however, Ace couldn’t deny that Victor had a point.

  He felt the weight of the man’s words sink into him like hooks, testing his morals. Victor wasn't wrong, after all. The others weren't Ace's responsibility. Every extra person represented another risk, another liability in the field, another potential casualty that would slow their progress and compromise his mission of getting to Floor 7.

  Tara's medical skills were valuable, but her hesitation in combat had nearly gotten them killed twice. Marcus talked too much and drew attention. Rachel could barely hold a weapon without shaking. Olivia, well, he didn’t know enough about her, yet, to make a decision.

  The cold, rational part of Ace's brain—the part trained to navigate combat with brutal clarity—tallied their weaknesses one by one. Something dark in the back of his mind whispered that they'd die anyway—and that they'd take him down with them.

  If survival truly was the objective, if getting home was the priority, then two trained soldiers moving fast and ruthlessly through the landscape would have exponentially better odds than babysitting civilians through this meat grinder of a world.

  Ace's teeth clenched as the two halves of himself waged an internal war—the tactician versus the leader, the survivor versus the protector. His fists curled at his sides, his nails digging into his palms until he felt the sharp sting of blood. The darkness pulsed around him, hungry for his decision, for the moment his humanity might finally fracture under the weight of this place.

  But that simply wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t how Ace operated, and he could never live with himself if he abandoned the others to die.

  He was a Marine, and only cowards left others behind.

  "No,” Ace finally said.

  Victor tilted his head in disdain. "Don't give me that Boy Scout bullshit. You think those people up there give a damn about you? About what you were? This world will burn that misplaced honor out of you, Blackwell. Maybe not today, but soon."

  "Maybe," Ace admitted. "But until then, we stick together. All of us."

  For a tense moment, Victor didn't move. His eyes darted to the darkness behind Ace, calculating something in that whirring mind of his. Then he shrugged, the gesture too casual to be genuine.

  "Your funeral, Sergeant." Victor brushed past him, and his voice echoed off the walls. "But when they start dropping like flies, don't say I didn't warn you."

  Ace watched him for a moment before heading toward the exit as well. As he caught up with the others, he studied them with renewed interest, Victor’s offer still ringing through his mind.

  “A word of warning, Sergeant,” the System added, her whisper echoing in his head. “Some doors, once opened, cannot be closed. Remember that when the shadows start speaking your name.”

  This time, Ace didn't bother looking over his shoulder. He knew she wouldn’t be there. Still, his fangs extended slightly on instinct.

  The Shadow Realm had just moved to the top of his priority list. Whether it ended up being a threat or an asset, it was key to his new life moving forward.

  “Would you look at that?” Marcus whistled in awe as he paused at the tunnel’s exit. He set his hands on his waist and took a shaky breath.

  The others joined him, and Tara gasped. She set one hand over her mouth as she peered out into the unknown.

  “We’re so fucked,” Rachel muttered.

  When Ace joined them, a flash of light blinded him from outside. He raised one forearm to cover his face as his eyes adjusted to the sunlight. It took a few moments to blink away the momentary blindness as his eyes adjusted, and though spots lingered in his vision, the landscape came sharply into focus.

  Distant dragons carved through the blood-red sky, their translucent scales reflecting the dying sunlight in deadly kaleidoscopic patterns. Shattered rainbows of refracted light danced across the valley floor, beautiful and lethal, turning the landscape below into something from a fever dream. Where these beams touched the ground, vegetation withered and smoked, the life-force leached out by magic Ace couldn’t begin to fathom.

  As they stood on a cliff’s edge overlooking a valley, the world below them churned with life. Shadow-laced wolves prowled through pockets of thick mist, their midnight bodies disintegrating into smoke with each silent footfall only to reconstitute moments later. Their eyes—burning orbs of cobalt flame—tracked a blood trail through the grass. The tainted fog parted before them, responding to some unspoken command.

  Halfway across the killing field, a massive skeleton pushed through the ancient forest, its bone structure impossibly intact without muscle or sinew. Standing four stories tall, the monstrosity's bleach-white limbs crushed ancient pines with casual disdain. Each step left trails of splintered heartwood and aromatic sap in their wake.

  Ace didn't want to know what the hell it considered prey at that size. In this messed-up realm, there seemed to always be something bigger than the last monster he’d seen. Something hungrier.

  Always.

  Now that they’d left the tunnel, the air tasted wrong—metallic and charged, like lightning about to strike. His skin crawled as his newfound vampiric nature registered threats his human half still struggled to process. Every instinct honed through years of military training screamed at him to find shelter, to get the hell out of here, but there was nowhere to go.

  Everything here was either predator or prey, and the line between them shifted with each kill.

  Ace's new powers stirred at the challenge that lay ahead of them. Shadows coiled around him like eager serpents, aching to be unleashed. For the first time since his transformation, he felt something dangerously close to anticipation.

  Excitement, even.

  Ace wasn’t just a soldier anymore, and the others weren’t just human. Those lives had died the moment they did.

  They were monsters now.

  And somewhere deep in the darkness that had seeped into his soul, Ace knew this was exactly what he needed to become in order to survive the inevitable bloodshed to come.

  He flexed his fingers, feeling the darkness in the cave behind him writhing and wriggling at his command. This new skill of his—Shadow Realm Immersion—hummed beneath his skin like a live wire. Whatever it was, it felt dangerous. Volatile. Like handling a weapon without knowing if the safety was on.

  Movement flickered at the edge of his vision.

  Ace's head snapped toward it, his reflexes triggering before conscious thought had a chance to even register what he had seen. His grip instinctively tightened around the sword in his hand.

  There—just beyond the treeline.

  A silhouette among the shadows.

  The sergeant stared harder, half-expecting the figure to evaporate into the writhing void at the edge of the forest. The man remained, however, and he watched Ace with unnerving intensity.

  Unfortunately, the dark fog surrounding the figure blocked most of its body, and Ace could only make out a few details.?A pale face beneath dark hair, the stranger’s features too sharp to be human. A black cloak that seemed to drink in the surrounding light rather than block it.

  The stranger wasn't hiding—the man was studying Ace with an unwavering focus that made the hair on Ace’s neck stand on end.

  It didn’t even glance at the others.

  Just him.

  Ace’s new skill had given him a powerful phasing ability, sure, but he didn’t know its limits yet, and he certainly didn’t understand the risks of using this newfound magic.

  From the looks of it, Shadow Realm Immersion had opened him up to an entire second world of darkness and death. If it was anything like the System’s hellscape, he could only imagine the target this had put on his back.

  He gripped his sword tighter and met the stranger’s stare, refusing to back down. In answer, the figure raised a pale hand in what was either an acknowledgement or a warning. With that, the silhouette dissolved into threads of darkness that scattered into a wind Ace couldn't feel.

  Great.

  Just great.

  Something waited in the shadows between worlds—and it had apparently marked him.

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