Lucen followed close behind, boots cracking faint glyph dust underfoot as Varik stepped into the corridor beyond the corpse.
The wall that had once marked the limit of the rift's mapped zone was cracked wide open now, broken not by battle, but by age and pressure, as if the deeper layers of the drift had grown impatient with containment.
The stone had peeled outward, like a wound that had finally burst.
The smell hit him first. Not rot. Not blood. Just something dry, copper-sweet, laced with ozone and something stranger, like the scent left behind by dead circuitry.
Lucen's mana flicked up as they passed through.
[Zone Depth: Unclassified]
[Thread Drift: Unstable]
[Adaptive System Scan Initiated…]
[Result: Glyph Logic May Behave Unpredictably]
He narrowed one eye and muttered, "That's new."
Varik didn't slow. "It's not a drift anymore. It's a foundation layer."
