The Gold buff sang through Naomi’s body like a live wire buried under her skin, and she hated that the sensation felt good when everything else felt so wrong.

She stood on a ridge of volcanic rock that jutted from the forest canopy like the spine of something enormous and dead, her staff planted against the stone and her pink eyes tracking the smoke columns still rising from the eastern quadrant where Blair’s fire had chewed through a mile of ancient jungle before the mana-saturated moisture finally won. The air up here tasted wrong. Not just humid, not just thick, but actively hostile, like breathing through a washcloth someone had soaked in warm copper pennies and left in the sun for a week. Every inhale required a conscious decision to accept what entered her lungs, and every exhale carried the faint sweetness of mana corruption that made her teeth ache in the back where her wisdom teeth had never come in.

Jace was down there somewhere.

The thought kept arriving uninvited, pushing through tactical planning and threat assessment and formation discipline like a weed cracking concrete. She’d watched him grab Blair and disappear into the smoke when the leopards flanked their position, his leather jacket catching fire along the left sleeve as he pulled the Davenport girl away from a creature with jaws wide enough to swallow her torso. Naomi had been thirty feet up by then, riding the Gold buff’s enhanced Wave Motion like she’d been born with wings, her blue-white spirals carving swaths through the mosquito swarm while the ground team fought for survival below.

She’d seen him reach the cliff.

She’d seen him jump.

And then the smoke had closed over the gorge and Jace Monroe had vanished from the surface of a dimension that should not exist, taking Blair Davenport with him into a hundred-foot drop that Naomi’s brain kept trying to convert into survival mathematics. Terminal velocity for a human body. Impact force against moving water. The probability of a C-rank Strength rating making any difference against physics at that distance.

The numbers weren’t good. The numbers were terrible. She kept running them anyway because stopping meant accepting that she couldn’t fix this with data or planning or a color-coded binder.

"Love." Belle’s voice came from below and to the left, where the blue-haired girl crouched behind a root structure the size of a sedan, her crossbow tracking the treeline with the focus of someone who had decided that grief was a luxury and productivity was the only currency that mattered right now. "I’ve got directional on the core. Southeast, approximately four hundred meters, through what looks like a ravine system. Signal’s strong enough that I can feel it through three layers of rock."

Belle’s buffed Treasure Sense had given them two hours of competent navigation through a forest that wanted them lost. Her ability punched through solid rock to map hostiles, tagged mineral deposits as waypoints in a canopy so thick daylight couldn’t reach the forest floor, and locked onto the gate’s core signature with enough precision to give them something approaching a tactical plan. Without Belle’s perception overlaying the chaos with information they could use, they’d still be wandering through undergrowth and praying to random chance.

Naomi descended from the ridge to the root structure, her Endurance at Gold softening the impact into something her body absorbed without protest. Six months ago that drop would have destroyed her ankles. Yesterday it would have hurt. Today her legs compressed, distributed force, and pushed her upright in a single fluid motion that felt borrowed from someone else’s training. The buff Jace had given her ran through her system like a loan she couldn’t repay, making her faster and stronger and more capable than genetics should allow.

Except she had paid for it. She’d paid for it in a farmhouse that smelled like wildflowers, wearing cow-print lingerie with a bell around her throat, while a man who survived by drinking her milk told her she was beautiful and meant it enough that the System itself registered the sincerity.

She missed him so much that the physical ache competed with the mana corruption for space in her chest.

"How many hostiles between us and the core?"

Belle consulted something internal, her amber-brown eyes going slightly unfocused the way they did when the Treasure Sense fed her more information than a normal brain should process. "Twelve signatures. Most of them clustered around the ravine entrance in what I’m reading as a defensive formation. Two more patrolling a hundred meters out in an elliptical pattern. And one very large signature sitting directly on top of the core itself."

"The boss."

"Or a mini-boss guarding the approach. Hard to tell at this range. But it’s Silver-tier at minimum based on the mana density."

Jordan appeared from behind a fallen trunk where he’d been catching his breath, his short sword still dark with insect ichor from the last engagement twenty minutes ago. His hoodie had been abandoned somewhere in the initial chaos, and his grey eyes looked less sleepy than Naomi had ever seen them, which was simultaneously encouraging and terrifying because Jordan Wayne only looked fully awake when he believed death was close enough to warrant attention.

"Twelve plus two plus one boss. Against seven people. Two of whom are useless." Jordan ticked his fingers. "Math’s not great."

"I can hear you, you know." Charles Leone stood apart from the group, his blonde hair somehow maintaining its product despite three hours of combat in a Void Gate. His Frame Perfect ability kept his movements flawless, but it couldn’t mask the sweat stains spreading across his torn tactical suit or the way his hands shook when he thought nobody was watching. Charles had performed exactly the way Naomi expected during the crisis, which was to say he’d fought well as an individual and failed completely as a team member, breaking formation twice during the initial leopard attack and nearly getting Jordan killed the second time.

"Good. Maybe it’ll motivate you to be less useless." Jordan didn’t bother looking at Charles. He addressed Belle instead. "Route options?"