Charles checked his sword blade. Clean. He hadn’t engaged. Naomi noticed but didn’t comment. Belle’s glance toward the back of the formation carried enough contempt for both of them.

Dante’s nullification field had never activated. The encounter lasted less than six seconds, faster than his deployment window.

"Good," Naomi said, because someone had to and she’d learned from watching Jace that acknowledging success mattered even when the success was small. "Let’s keep moving."

The ravine deepened. The walls grew taller, closed in from both sides. The root canopy thickened until the space became a tunnel instead of an open-air passage. The humidity stopped being uncomfortable and became something worse.

Water collected on every surface. It ran down the stone walls in streams, pooled in depressions that reflected the bioluminescent moss growing in patches along the upper reaches where the roots tangled together. The air temperature climbed past uncomfortable and entered territory where breathing felt like work.

Her tactical suit clung to her body like wet fabric. Every seam held moisture. Every panel trapped heat instead of venting it because the environmental systems had never been designed for a Void Gate’s mana-saturated atmosphere.

Sweat had nowhere to go. It pooled in the small of her back, ran down her spine, collected in the hollow of her collarbone. Her hair stuck to her neck and her cheeks. The pink and black strands escaped the braid Jace had woven this morning, strand by strand, until loose pieces framed her face and clung to the perspiration on her temples.

Belle wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and kept walking. Her detection range extended far enough ahead to give them warning, but the density of the air degraded the signal. Readings became fuzzy at the edges in a way Belle described as looking through frosted glass. The accuracy suffered. The detail loss meant they’d get less warning before contact.

The next group of mantises appeared at eighty-two meters, just beyond Belle’s comfortable detection range. These ones were larger.

"Contact. Eight signatures. Two of them are heavier than the first batch. Might be evolved variants."

The larger mantises proved Belle right. They stood hip-height on Naomi rather than waist-height. Their chitin had developed a green bioluminescent pattern that matched the ravine’s moss. Camouflage that would have been nearly perfect against someone without Silver-tier detection. Their mandibles were longer and carried a coating that sizzled when it dripped onto stone, eating through the rock where it landed. Acid, probably. Or venom concentrated enough to corrode inorganic material.

Naomi blasted the first one apart. The Gold buff roared through her channels like music she’d been born knowing how to play. Her Wave Motion converted stamina into spiraling destruction that punched through evolved chitin like tissue paper. Each shot barely registered on her energy reserves. The power was intoxicating.

She fired again. The blast carved through the second mantis’s thorax and continued through to crater the stone wall behind it. Two more fell to Hikaru’s invisible cuts, the Phantom Edge carving through armored carapace as easily as it had carved through the smaller variants.

Jordan trapped the two evolved specimens in shadow constructs that held for almost four seconds before the creatures tore free. In those four seconds Javier’s daggers found the gap between head plates and thorax on both. He dropped them with the quiet efficiency of someone who studied killing the way other people studied for exams.

Charles engaged this time. His Frame Perfect activated in a blur of preprogrammed motion that cut through a mantis’s front legs before pivoting to sever the tail segment. The execution was technically flawless. Beautiful, even, in the way that choreography could be beautiful when performed by someone with the physical talent to make it look effortless.

But Charles fought alone.

He moved without reference to the people around him. He didn’t check Belle’s position or Naomi’s line of fire or Hikaru’s cutting angles. His pivot brought his sword within six inches of Belle’s skull as she ducked to avoid the backswing. The blade whistled past where her head had been a fraction of a second earlier. Close enough that Belle’s light blue hair moved in the displaced air.

"Watch your goddamn spacing, Leone." Belle’s voice was flat and cold and promised future consequences.

Charles didn’t apologize. He wiped his blade clean and said nothing. Naomi knew everything she needed to know about whether he’d learned anything from six hours of being trapped in a Void Gate with people whose survival depended on his willingness to function as part of a team.

The ravine continued downward. The core signal grew stronger against Belle’s senses, a pull that made Belle’s eyes glow brighter and her step quicken with the instinct of someone who had spent her entire life following the trail of valuable things. The humidity pressed closer. The air grew thicker. The mantis populations grew denser.

Naomi fired again and again. Each blast carved through the murky air in brilliant blue-white spirals that briefly illuminated the ravine walls and the root structures above and the wet stone below. Her mother’s shell necklace bounced against her collarbone with every step, the one possession she’d brought from home that she would protect with her life.

Jace had braided her hair this morning.

She could feel it coming loose now. The pink and black strands escaped the pattern he’d woven with careful hands in the farmhouse before dawn. His fingers had been warm against the back of her neck. He’d hummed something she didn’t recognize while he worked, some song from a life he wouldn’t explain.

The braid was practical and functional and it was falling apart because the person who’d made it was somewhere in a canyon and she couldn’t reach him. The Gold buff that he’d given her through forty-five minutes of shared intimacy in a pocket dimension that smelled like wildflowers was the only proof she had that he was still alive.

Naomi fired again. The mantis disintegrated.

She kept walking toward the core that would set them free.