Dungeon Floor 2: The Rotting Gardens
Belly Valley Ruins – 18 Hours After Hive Queen Elimination
The first floor had been a massacre.
Alberto skimmed through the casualty reports, his eyes cold, calculating. Twenty-two Exo-Knights dead. Four ISSD super soldiers gone. But the rewards had been worth the butcher's bill—1.2 billion SC from the Dungeon Core and the Hive Memory Shard, an artifact pulsing with strange psychic imprints.
And yet, the Hive wasn't truly dead.
The moment Kain's team pulled out, seismic sensors detected something. A faint tremor. A hollow beneath the throne room. A second floor.
Alberto clenched his fist. The Hive had burrowed deeper than expected. If there was another Dungeon Core below, it meant more SC, more resources. But if they left it unchecked, it also meant something worse—something festering beneath Rafa's foundations.
That wasn't an option.
He leaned forward on his obsidian desk, issuing a new command through his neural link.
