The voices get louder fast.
Boots on stone. Flashlights cutting through dust. Someone arguing in a tense whisper that keeps breaking into real volume.
Then a familiar voice slices through the noise, confident and annoyed, like the gate is inconveniencing him personally.
"Stop pushing. If you trip, you'll get someone killed."
Lee Minho.
The sound comes from the corridor the chamber opened a minute ago, the one that wasn't there before. That alone should terrify anyone with a working brain. Instead, Minho sounds like he's walking into a classroom he owns.
The supervisor's shoulders stiffen. He's still bleeding, still trying to stand like an adult in a room full of kids.
The rookie boy flinches at every sound. The girl keeps one arm around him, holding him together by force.
My overlay sits in the corner of my vision, steady and cold.
Hidden Authority: 1Detection Risk: 39%System Audit Flag: ActiveSystem Attention: Locked On
The audit is the real problem.
A fight is simple. Even a bad fight is simple. You win or you don't.
An audit means the System is observing choices, recording them, deciding what to do with a variable it doesn't recognize.
The chamber shifts.
Not dramatically. Just enough that the floor hums under my feet, and one of the pillars slides a few inches, grinding stone against stone. The gate is still adjusting the layout like it's alive.
The thing in the dark ahead doesn't move yet. But the pressure is there, faint and patient, like a predator holding its breath.
More prey arrived. It's listening.
Then the pressure sharpens, like it's pleased.
Minho's squad spills into the chamber.
Five of them. Two rookies I don't recognize, one bulky guy with a shield strapped to his arm, a thin girl holding a staff she clearly bought yesterday, and Minho in front, posture relaxed, flashlight low.
They freeze when they see us.
Not because they see people. Because they see blood. Because they see a collapsed crawlspace blocked by rubble behind us.
The crawlspace behind us was sealed by rubble, and the corridor we came from didn't exist anymore.
Minho's eyes land on me immediately.
They don't flick around searching for answers. They lock onto the inconvenient piece of the scene like he already decided where blame and credit should go.
"What happened," he asks.
The supervisor answers, voice controlled but strained. "Gate anomaly. We're regrouping. Your squad needs to hold position."
Minho's mouth curves into something that isn't a smile. "Hold position where. There's no exit behind you."
He steps forward, flashlight beam sweeping across the chamber, then toward the darkness ahead. The air subtly tightens when his light touches it.
The thing in the dark shifts.
A slow scrape. Heavy. Deliberate.
One of Minho's rookies curses under their breath. The shield guy raises his arm instinctively.
The staff girl whispers, "That's not E Rank."
Minho keeps his face calm, but his eyes sharpen. He's smart enough to feel it. His tone changes, a little less smug, a little more careful.
"Supervisor," he says, "we should retreat and report."
The supervisor's jaw tightens. "There is no retreat. The entry path collapsed."
Minho looks straight at me again. "Collapsed because you did something."
I don't react. I don't argue. Argument is oxygen for people like him.
The girl on my squad shifts slightly, putting herself between the rookie boy and the new group, as if bodies can form a wall in a dungeon. She's tense, but she's not stupid. She doesn't trust them.
The chamber shifts again.
The pressure behind my eyes tightens, and my overlay flickers.
System Audit Flag: ActiveAudit Focus: Environmental Interference
So that's what it's tracking. The collapse. The layout change. Anything that looks like rule breaking.
Minho's rookies start talking over each other.
"We should go back."
"How."
"This gate's messed up."
"The Association won't believe us."
The shield guy takes one step forward, then stops, like his courage reached the edge of a cliff and decided to wait for a push.
Minho raises one hand. The chatter dies. Command presence. He has it even without the trait fully unlocked.
"Everyone shut up," he says. Then, softer, "We move together. No heroics."
He turns to the supervisor again, polite on the surface.
"If we're trapped, we find a path. But we do it with a plan, not panic."
The supervisor looks like he wants to hate him and agree with him at the same time. Authority doesn't matter in a place like this. Competence does.
A low scrape echoes again from the darkness, closer now.
The thing isn't waiting anymore.
The staff girl's flashlight beam shakes. "I see something."
The air grows colder. Enough that it stings when I inhale.
The shadow steps into the edge of the light.
It's taller than a man, its limbs long and jointed, skin like wet stone. The head is wrong in a way that makes the brain resist labeling it, as if the gate copied the idea of a monster from memory and got the details slightly off.
The pressure hits.
Not as pain. As weight.
The rookie boy on my squad collapses to one knee again with a choking sound. The staff girl on Minho's side staggers and almost drops her flashlight. The shield guy grunts like he took a punch.
Minho's eyes widen for half a second. He recovers fast, but his throat bobs once.
Even he felt it.
The supervisor tries to step forward and his injured leg dips. He catches himself, breathing hard.
The thing's head tilts. It isn't rushing. It's measuring.
My overlay flashes another line, colder than everything else.
Authority Use Recommended
I can feel the trap in that suggestion. Use authority again and the audit will spike. Don't use it and we might not survive.
Minho's gaze snaps to me as if he expects me to do something. Like he already decided I'm the kind of person who makes the room change.
Fine.
If there are witnesses, I control what they witness.
I don't use authority on the creature. That's too obvious.
I use it on the pressure.
Just a shave off the top.
Suppress, minimal.
The weight in the air snaps thinner. Not gone, just cut enough that lungs work again.
The rookie boy gasps. The staff girl steadies. The shield guy's posture lifts.
Minho feels it too. His eyes sharpen like a blade finding bone.
My overlay updates immediately.
Hidden Authority: 0Detection Risk: 44%System Audit Flag: ActiveAudit Severity: Escalating
Too high.
That number is entering territory where consequences stop being theoretical.
The thing in the dark reacts. It freezes for a fraction, then takes a step forward fast enough to turn the shadow into a lunge.
The supervisor raises his baton.
Minho's shield guy steps in front, bracing.
The creature's claw slams into the shield.
The impact is brutal. The shield guy slides backward across stone, boots screeching, arm shaking violently. The shield holds, barely.
Minho's staff girl panics and starts chanting too loudly, mana rising in an uncontrolled wave.
The creature turns its head toward her like it can taste it.
"Stop," Minho snaps. "Don't draw it."
Too late.
It moves.
The creature shifts sideways with unnatural speed, bypassing the shield entirely like the shield never existed. Its limb snaps toward the staff girl.
The supervisor tries to intercept. His injured leg fails him again.
The girl from my squad moves instinctively too, stepping forward to protect someone she doesn't even know. Brave, stupid, human.
I don't let her get carved up for that.
I grab a stone from the floor and throw it hard at the nearest pillar joint, the same weak point pattern as the previous chamber. Not because I think the pillar will collapse. Because I want sound, I want dust, I want the creature's attention pulled off the staff girl for half a second.
The stone hits. Crack. Dust shakes loose.
The creature's head snaps toward it.
Half a second.
That's enough.
I step into the creature's path and slam my shoulder into its torso, not trying to knock it down, just redirecting its momentum away from the rookies and toward the center depression, the bed in the floor it clearly belongs to.
It resists. Heavy. Strong. More than it should be.
The pressure behind my eyes spikes again, probing. Testing. It feels the difference in me now.
Minho's voice cuts sharp. "Jaehyun. Move."
He didn't shout my name earlier. Not until now.
That's not concern.
That's attention.
The supervisor swings his baton at the creature's elbow joint where the earlier dent still weakens the hinge. The baton connects. The joint grinds wrong.
The creature hisses. The walls pulse.
The chamber answers with a low groan as the layout tries to change again.
Minho's shield guy recovers and rams forward, trying to pin the creature's leg.
The creature kicks once.
The shield guy goes down hard.
The staff girl screams.
My jaw tightens.
Too much noise. Too much mana. Too many people who don't know how to shut up in a gate.
The creature uses the distraction to twist free from me and surge toward the largest cluster of bodies. It wants the easy kills. It wants panic.
I scan fast, not the creature, the environment.
My hidden layer flashes fragments.
Environment Control Node: ActiveAnchor Point: Central DepressionStability: Low
So the depression isn't just a bed. It's an anchor.
Break the anchor and the room stops obeying it.
That's the way top hunters fight high tier threats. You don't trade blows. You cut the mechanism.
I move straight for the depression.
Minho sees me move and his eyes narrow.
He thinks I'm going for treasure.
He's wrong.
I drop to one knee at the cracked edge of the depression where the fissure opened earlier, the place that pulsed when I claimed the fragment. Cold air breathes up from below.
The creature senses it immediately and pivots toward me like I just grabbed its throat.
Good.
Come.
If it commits to me, it stops hunting the rookies.
The supervisor shouts, "Jaehyun, stop."
He doesn't understand. He's thinking like an Association employee, not someone trying to live.
The creature lunges.
Minho reacts fast, faster than he should for a rookie. He steps in and tries to hook the creature's limb with a clean movement, a technique that looks practiced.
He still gets thrown aside like a nuisance. He hits a pillar shoulder first and grunts, breath knocked out.
For a split second, the smugness cracks.
He looks human.
Then he looks at me again, and whatever he sees there makes him colder.
The creature's claw descends toward my head.
I brace.
I don't have authority.
I don't have time.
I have one shot to break the anchor before it breaks me.
Then my overlay flickers violently, and a new message appears over everything, bright and intrusive like it owns the world.
System Audit InitiatedSubject: Kang JaehyunCompliance Required
The creature freezes for a fraction.
So does the air.
So does my breath.
Because the System didn't just watch.
It spoke.
A public System window flares into existence above the chamber, visible to everyone.