The Antlion Queen Sun'ar had her body wrapped around the massive larva in the center of the nursery pit, coiled in layers that hadn't shifted in what felt like forever, her breathing slow and rhythmic as she kept vigil over the child she'd waited so long to see emerge.

  The nudge came suddenly; the larva's membrane pushed hard against her plating, pulling Sun'ar from her half-sleeping state, and recognition shot through her that the moment had finally arrived.

  She lifted her head, and her mandibles clicked together, the sound traveling down every tunnel connected to the nursery and heard by all those nearby her.

  "Bring all the corpses we have collected," Sun'ar clicked. "The long-awaited Prince is about to hatch."

  Antlions scattered throughout the pit threw themselves into motion, legs scraping against stone as they stampeded through the tunnels heading toward where they kept the corpses of the most powerful creatures they’d been hunting for the past month and a half for this very moment.

  Sun'ar pressed herself tighter against the larva, her body conforming to its shape in what could only be called affection, and she let herself imagine what he'd look like when he emerged, how strong he'd be, how the colony would flourish with a powerful general under her command.

  As she lost herself in her musings, they were cut short when a blue-scaled, four-clawed, humanoid hand punched through the membrane of the larva she had been diligently nursing.

  Those claws drove forward and buried themselves in her throat before she could process anything beyond the basic fact that something had gone catastrophically wrong, punching through the softer plating with enough force that pain exploded through her, but worse than the agony was the confusion; why was her child, her future general, attacking her?

  The head that tore free next was equally wrong, blue-scaled and twisted into something that appeared to her as an abomination of what it was to be an antlion. It clamped onto her neck and hungrily began to feed on her.

  Sun’ar’s mind went hazy as the thing that emerged from the larva she’d nursed began consuming her, leaving her unable to do anything to fight back as it devoured her.

  When it had finished feeding on the now-dead Antlion Queen, the creature released its jaws from her neck, and her body fell limply to the ground.

  After which the creature exploded from the larva in a spray of hemolymph, wings spreading wide as it launched into the air, fully revealing its blue-scaled humanoid body, before it threw its head back and let out a baleful screech.

  The Djinn shot up from her seat, going from relaxed to furious instantly, and when she snapped her head toward the Cyclops, the disgust in her eyes was scorching as the image of the screen froze on the face of the Antlion Prince screeching.

  "You dare cheat in a wager!" The words came out as a hiss, each one dripping venom as her hands clenched into fists and the air around her started shimmering with power that she was barely keeping contained.

  "I would never dream of doing such," the Cyclops said, sounding far too amused for someone being accused of cheating. With a dismissive wave, the scene on the screen in front of them began to rewind, becoming a blur until they stopped at a specific moment where the screen split in two.

  The screen on top showed them both from earlier, milliseconds from clasping hands to seal the wager, while the screen on bottom displayed a fragment of the Cyclops's very essence seeping into the Antlion Prince's larva, and just as the two Floor Guardians clasped their hands together and sealed the wager, the Cyclops's essence had already fully bonded with the Antlion Prince where it immediately started its work of enhancing and accelerating whatever was growing inside in ways that had nothing to do with how nature intended things to work.

  The Djinn stared at the replay, mouth opening and closing as she struggled to find words, but the Cyclops just leaned back with a smirk that made it clear he knew exactly what he'd done.

  "Everything I did was fair," he said, his eye gleaming with satisfaction. "It was not my fault that I came prepared for a wager."

  “We should trigger the traps that release the locusts,” Deacon said after a moment, his voice steady enough that it made the suggestion sound far less insane than it actually was at the thought of unleashing another horde of insects at them in a room full of traps.

  No one answered immediately, though the shift in the room was obvious, Jass turned her head slowly to look at him, brow knitting together, while Bonehead’s skull tilted a few degrees to the side as if he was physically checking whether Deacon had finally lost his mind, and Esmerelda’s fingers tightened around her wand though it was unapparent to anyone if she’d been listening to what Deacon had said or not given how out of it she’d been looking as of recently.

  Sam, however, narrowed his eyes by just a fraction before they widened as the tracks clicked in his mind and he understood what Deacon meant.

  “You’re going to have to explain that one,” Jass said at last, blowing a few stray strands from off her face.

  Deacon nodded, having expected that reaction, and shifted his stance so he could gesture loosely around the chamber with his free hand without ever taking his eyes fully off the ceiling.

  “Esmerelda already said it,” he replied, glancing briefly in her direction before refocusing on the others. “If we tried to rest outside the portal, whatever it was that set her off would have gotten us killed. That means going back to the teleporter pad, or even trying to retreat, isn’t an option.”

  Esmerelda swallowed and gave a small, shaky nod, confirming it without needing to put it into words again.

  “So instead of trying to rush the amulet half-exhausted and under-leveled,” Deacon continued, “we lean into what this place is already doing. If Hidden Quest Zones hand out Records just for surviving and progressing, then we should be killing as many of these things as we can while we still have control over the situation.”

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  Jass crossed her arms, brow furrowing as she thought it through. “You’re talking about farming them.”

  “Yeah,” Deacon said simply. “Because if these accounts Sam found are even half right, then this would be the only way for us to get stronger right now. Fighting here equals more stats, higher probability of getting skill upgrades, and much better odds of not getting wiped when we hit whatever’s next on our way to the amulet or whatever the hell Esme felt watching us from the other side.”

  Bonehead tilted his skull slightly, one finger tapping against his jaw as he considered the logistics. “And how exactly do we control that,” he asked, “without tripping half the floor, triggering every pressure plate at once, and getting buried under an avalanche of angry bugs.”

  “We kite them,” Deacon replied without hesitation. “This room’s already laid out for it. Jass and I take our Ravenlight Banner and stake it into the ground every couple of meters or so as we venture into the field of pressure plates, and step onto the pressure plates one at a time just to try and trigger a single cluster of locusts. Our banner should be able to deflect darts, bolts, or whatever projectiles that come fighting at us. And when we trigger a cluster of them, we pull back here where there aren’t any plates.”

  He glanced around to make sure everyone was following. “Once we drag them here, we can rain hell down on them without worrying about triggering pressure plates. Then we move to the next cluster, and the next, until we’ve killed everything we can and picked up a couple of levels—”

  “—maybe even finally unlock our first Racial Traits,” he continued, gesturing to Sam, Jass, and Esmerelda. “You getting Adaptive Aspirant would be insanely useful in a place like this.” Then he pointed at Bonehead. “Same goes for Boneweaving to boost your own survivability.”

  , Deacon thought to himself.

  Jass slowly nodded, the idea settling in as she imagined the flow of it. Locusts, even chimeric ones the size of fists, were fragile by nature and dangerous only in numbers or if they bit you and poisoned you – though that wouldn’t be much of a worry given Bonehead’s preparedness.

  “And while you all do that kiting business, I’ll be doing what I do best,” Bonehead added, turning toward Deacon. “I don’t get class levels from combat since I’m an Alchemist, but I’ll use this time to create a grease version of antlion insecticide for you and Jass to use. While simultaneously trying to create locust insecticide gas bombs or something similar from their cores and glands to weaken them so I can get a couple of Race Levels from their deaths.”

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” Deacon smiled at Bonehead, who shot him with his recently learned wink and finger gun combo.

  “Does that sound good to you?” Jass asked at last, turning her attention fully toward Esmerelda after having weighed the plan in her own head and agreeing that it was the best one they had.

  Esmerelda didn’t answer right away.

  Her gaze had dropped to the stone floor sometime during Deacon and Bonehead’s exchange, and now it stayed there, unfocused, as her mind was somewhere else. Her fingers tightened in the folds of her robes, knuckles paling as she shook her head slowly.

  “I…” she started, then stopped, swallowing hard before trying again. “I can’t sense— maybe… I don’t know... Everything just keeps changing too fast for...”

  Her words immediately caught Bonehead’s attention.

  "What is it that you keep seeing?" he asked, and the lack of his usual crass humor made the question land heavier than it otherwise might have, drawing Esmerelda's hands to clench tightly around the fabric of her robes as she bit down hard on her bottom lip and pressed her chin against her chest, her entire posture curling inward as if she could somehow make herself small enough to escape whatever visions were plaguing her.

  "I— I don't know how, but ever since I approached the archway and did what I did, I suddenly started seeing us all... dying," Esmerelda said, her voice trembling as she forced the words out through clenched teeth, her eyes squeezing shut as if that might somehow block out the images that were clearly flooding her mind. "I see Deacon disemboweled, his body broken and covered in massive lumps of pus, singed to a crisp, beheaded, killed by our spells, his heart torn out—"

  Her voice cracked as she continued, the words tumbling out faster now as if she couldn't hold them back any longer.

  "Jass getting her limbs cut off and bleeding out to death, her body drained of all color and naked where she's been filled with… orange eggs that are growing inside her, getting smooshed into paste," she gasped, her hands beginning to tremble violently as Jass moved forward instinctively, lowering herself to one knee and reaching out to gently take hold of Esmerelda's wrists. "Sam getting torn to shreds, his heart getting punched out, his tongue pulled out from his neck, his limbs broken, and his body bisected while he's trying to crawl somewhere and his insides are falling out of him—"

  The chamber seemed to grow colder with each horrific detail she cataloged, and when she spoke again, her voice had dropped to barely above a whisper, as if speaking any louder might somehow make the visions more real.

  "And Bonehead being crushed to death - his core getting shattered over and over again despite it being placed in different places such as his sternum, his stomach, his mouth, his brain cavity, his right eye socket." She paused, her breathing ragged and uneven as she tried to regain some measure of control over herself. "And it keeps changing. I see everyone dying in the most gruesome ways, over and over, and I can't make it stop."

  The silence that followed was absolute and suffocating, the weight of what she'd just described hanging in the air like a physical presence that none of them seemed equipped to address, and it took several long moments before Jass found her voice again, her thumbs already beginning to trace soothing circles against the inside of Esmerelda's wrists in an instinctive attempt to ground her. “We got you Esme.”

  "I don't know, it's just all so much, I can't control it. I've already seen you guys—" Esmerelda cut herself off abruptly, her jaw clamping shut as another wave of images clearly crashed through her mind, her entire body flinching as if she'd been physically struck, and Deacon found himself wondering just how many times she'd already watched each of them die in the few minutes since she’d warned them of the dangers of lingering outside the portal.

  "Okay, so let's take a moment," Sam said, his voice cutting through the tension, and all eyes shifted toward him. "So, from what I can understand, you've suddenly had your sixth sense somehow evolve – for lack of a better term, and it's now allowing you to see possibilities of our deaths. Things like stepping on a trap by mistake and getting pelted with arrows, burnt to a crisp, and everything in between, including whatever it was you sensed back outside. Is that right?"

  Esmerelda went quiet for several long seconds, her breathing shallow and uneven as Jass continued to rub soothing circles against her wrists with her thumbs, and when she finally answered, her voice was so small it was almost lost entirely in the ambient hum of the chamber's magical wards.

  "...Yes."

  Picking up on what Sam was putting down, Deacon shifted his weight and moved to double down, his voice taking on the kind of firm reassurance that he hoped would cut through whatever spiral Esmerelda was caught in.

  "Then we need to skew those possibilities in our favor," he said, trying to meet her eyes. "We can do this by getting levels and by keeping together… I want you to always remember that as Party Leader, I won't let any of you die before I do."

  The words were meant to be encouraging, meant to be the kind of absolute declaration that would give her something solid to hold onto, but the moment they left his mouth, the promise only served to multiply the visions of his death flooding her mind, each one more brutal than the last, his words only emphasizing them further.

  "...Okay," Esmerelda finally managed to squeeze out, lifting her head properly and opening her eyes as a single tear arced down her face. "I'm better now."

  The lie was transparent enough that no one believed it, but none of them could bring themselves to call her out on it.

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