I woke up to the smell of burning oil and roasting mushrooms.
I groaned, trying to sit up. The stone floor was unforgiving, but the makeshift bedroll of wolf pelts had provided just enough warmth to keep the subterranean chill from sinking into my bones. My ribs throbbed with a dull ache, the phantom heat of the [Holy Burn] still lingering, but the bleeding hadn't restarted. The System's edit had held.
[System Rebooting...]
[Rest Cycle Complete. Mana Regeneration applied: 10 hours = +1 Mana.]
[Current Mana: 4/10]
[Health: 45/100]
Four Mana. It wasn't much. It was barely enough for two Shadow Steps, or a single, minor structural edit. Taking on a Level 10 boss with this kind of fuel was mathematically suicidal.
But staying in Layer One waiting for Elara's trackers to find us was worse.
Lyra was sitting cross-legged by the small fire, expertly turning a skewer of pale, fleshy cave mushrooms. She looked up as I stretched, her grey eyes analytical. She tossed a thick, hardened leather vest across the room. It hit my chest, knocking the wind out of me.
"Put it on," she said flatly. "It smells like dead goblin, but it's better than fighting in a silk undershirt. I also found this in the stash."
She slid a weapon across the floor. It was a dagger, but not a standard one. The blade was dark, non-reflective metal, and it had a vicious serrated edge on one side. It felt perfectly balanced in my hand.
[Item Scanned: Assassin's Serrated Dagger.]
[Rarity: Common (High Quality)]
[Attribute: Bleed (Minor)]
"Thank you," I said, sliding the leather vest over my bandaged ribs and gripping the dagger. I actually looked like a rogue now, a far cry from the doomed, velvet-wearing noble I was yesterday.
"Don't thank me. If you die fighting the Rat King, I'm taking the vest back," she replied, chewing on a mushroom. She stood up, stamping out the small fire. "Eat up. We have a long walk to the descent."
The journey to the center of Layer One took hours. We moved in absolute silence, Lyra leading the way through a maze of collapsed tunnels, overflowing sewage canals, and treacherous, slippery walkways. We bypassed two scavenger camps and completely avoided a nest of what Lyra called "Spitting Crawlers"—hideous, oversized centipedes that clung to the ceiling.
As we walked, the architecture began to change. The crude brickwork of the upper sewers gave way to massive, cyclopean stone blocks. The air grew colder, heavy with a suffocating pressure, and the stench of decay became almost unbearable.
"We're close," Lyra whispered, pressing her back against a giant, moss-covered pillar.
I peered around the stone. My breath caught in my throat.
The tunnel opened into an underground cavern so massive that the ceiling was completely lost in the darkness. In the center of the cavern was a massive circular pit, easily fifty yards across, acting as a vertical drop into the true depths of the world. Layer Two.
But blocking the path to the edge of the pit was a mountain of putrid flesh.
It didn't look like a rat. It looked like a nightmare. It was a massive, hulking abomination made of hundreds of bloated, rotting corpses—human, animal, and things I couldn't identify—all fused together by a thick, bubbling black sludge. It had multiple limbs jutting out at horrific angles, and in the center of its mass, a giant, jagged maw opened and closed rhythmically, dripping acidic drool onto the stone floor.
[ALERT: Boss-Class Entity Detected.]
[Scanning...]
The blue screen flickered violently, struggling to parse the sheer amount of dark energy radiating from the creature.
--- ENTITY CODE ---
Name: The Amalgamation (Rat King)
Level: 10 (Gatekeeper)
HP: 2500/2500
Defense: Extreme (Sludge Armor)
Agility: Low
Weakness: Central Core (Embedded deep within the chest cavity).
-------------------
2500 HP. My dagger probably did a maximum of 10 damage per strike. I would have to stab it two hundred and fifty times, assuming its sludge armor didn't break my blade first.
"Well?" Lyra whispered, her hand resting on the hilt of a throwing knife. "Still feeling creative, Valerius? Because that thing looks like it eats creativity for breakfast."
"It's big, it's heavily armored, and it's full of toxic waste," I analyzed, my eyes darting around the cavern. "But it's slow. And it doesn't have eyes."
"It tracks by vibration and smell," Lyra corrected. "If you step on a loose pebble, it will crush you before you can blink."
I looked up. The cavern ceiling was hidden in the shadows, but massive, rusted iron chains hung down from the darkness, remnants of some ancient pulley system that used to lower cargo into the pit. Several of these chains hung directly over the Rat King's resting spot.
I looked at my Mana counter. 4/10.
I couldn't edit the monster. It was Level 10; its biological code was too dense, and I didn't have the Mana to overwrite it. But I didn't need to edit the monster. I just needed to edit the environment.
"Lyra," I whispered, formulating the craziest plan I had ever come up with. "How fast can you run?"
"Faster than you," she replied, her eyes narrowing. "Why?"
"Because I need you to be the bait. I need you to make noise on the left side of the cavern. Get its attention, make it turn, and expose its back to the ceiling chains."
"And what are you going to do?" she asked, clearly doubting my sanity.
I twirled the serrated dagger in my hand, staring at the massive, rusted links of the iron chain hanging above the beast.
"I'm going to drop the sky on its head," I said. "And then, I'm going to perform a little surgery."
Lyra stared at me for a long second. Then, she pulled two throwing knives from her belt. "If this gets me killed, Valerius, I will haunt you for the rest of your miserable life."
"Deal," I grinned.
Lyra melted into the shadows, moving silently along the perimeter of the cavern. I took a deep breath, gripping my dagger, and waited for the distraction.
The fight for Layer Two was about to begin.