199: The Flawed Rune
The teleport from Floor 2 was jarring, a non-sensory lurch as the Tower's system deleted one virtual environment and loaded the next. We materialized in a corridor that smelled of mildew, damp stone, and the faint, metallic tang of bat guano.
"Ugh, delightful," Seraphina muttered, wrinkling her nose as she stepped away from a patch of glowing moss. "A sewer."
"It's not a sewer," I corrected calmly, my eyes scanning the architecture. "It's a labyrinth. Floor 3."
The walls were made of ill-fitting, rough-hewn stone, barely illuminated by the same sickly green moss. The corridor split ahead of us, one path leading left, the other right. From the darkness above, the high-pitched skree-skree of F-Rank bats echoed, their sonar bouncing off the stone.
