They were still fighting. Still standing. But the walls of Golem’s Gambit were beginning to bend.

  The first breach had been contained, barely. The second had become a brutal stalemate. The third and fourth were lost, and the units retreated. The fifth—through the Jungle Room—was still active, a grinding war of attrition in tangled undergrowth and rune-fused vines.

  Victories came in flashes.

  Zyrris collapsing a tunnel with a spatial rift.

  Caldron detonating an entire chamber’s polarity field, turning a dozen invaders into airborne wreckage.

  Kagejin, bleeding and limping, still disappearing into the dark and reappearing behind enemies with his blades already slick with the fluids of the enemy.

  But with each wave repelled, more came.

  Brent floated in the Core Room like a storm wrapped in crystal. His glow burned bright now—not with energy, but with strain. Each new breach meant more coordination. More mana. More decisions. More chances to be wrong.

  He was still directing. Still calculating. Still pushing his voice through the dungeon’s network to issue commands and relay enemy movement. But the edge was fraying.

  “They’re shifting again,” Brent said through grit and grit alone. “A new force grouping around the Spinning Blades—possibly setting up for another push toward the center.”

  “Caldron’s down to reserve mana,” Emil replied, his voice sharp but composed. “Clockwork Cavern has maybe fifteen minutes before it folds. Zyrris is pushing energy surges to buy time.”

  “And Kagejin?” Brent asked, his voice flickering slightly.

  “...He’s not responding,” Emil said.

  Brent didn’t pulse—just sat in that horrible silence for one heartbeat too long. Then: “Keep calling. He’ll answer.”

  Meanwhile, one room remained nearly untouched.

  Ignarok’s chamber.

  None of the Verdant Depths’ forces had pressed deep into the boss arena. The few that had crossed its threshold were now ash and bone, smoldering remnants at the edge of the magma track.

  Ignarok had claimed each one with crushing fists and gouts of molten fury—but it was never more than a handful. And now, he waited.

  And fumed.

  The chamber trembled every so often with the sound of a massive metal fist striking stone. Not in combat. In frustration.

  Back in the Core Room, Emil stepped forward. His eyes hadn’t left the readouts for hours, but now he looked directly at Brent.

  “They’re avoiding him.”

  Brent flickered. “Obviously. They’re not idiots. If they don’t have to fight the unkillable molten juggernaut, they won’t.”

  “Which means they’ll never go to him,” Emil said. “And we’re starving one of our best weapons.”

  Brent paused. He didn’t like where this was going.

  Emil pressed on. “Let him move. Connect the Core Room to his chamber. Give him access.”

  Brent spun around, his glow sparking erratically. “Do you know how much power that would take? That’s not a standard expansion, Emil. Ignarok’s room wasn’t meant to connect directly to this part of the dungeon. It’s a structural reroute. A massive one.”

  “I know,” Emil said calmly. “But we’re being pushed back. If they reach this floor’s center and we have to retreat, he should be able to defend you.”

  Brent flared, then dimmed. “We’ll lose reserves. I’ll have to shut down auto-repair in half the side corridors.”

  “Then shut them down.”

  The Core Room was silent for several seconds.

  Brent flickered low. “You know this could break containment. If the wall opens too wide and they breach before we’re ready—”

  “Ignarok will deal with it, ” Emil said. “And you know he will.”

  Brent hovered in place, his thoughts moving a hundred miles a second. He hated it. Hated the risk, hated the drain, hated giving up any part of his control.

  But he hated losing more.

  “…Fine.”

  He pulsed sharply, and the dungeon itself shuddered in response.

  Rocks creaked. Mana veins sparked. Somewhere below, Ignarok’s room began to shift, the stone between chambers unraveling like thread pulled from a tapestry.

  In the Core Room, the far wall trembled.

  Then a line of golden light split across it, widening slowly, painfully, as mana surged into the chamber like liquid fire. A massive archway began to form—large enough for Ignarok himself to step through.

  Brent dimmed from the effort. “There. Done. But I’ve had to reroute enough energy to cook a cathedral. We don’t get a second try.”

  Ignarok looked into the Core Room at Brent. The tension in his shoulders relaxed slightly.

  Ignarok knew he could defend his leader now.

  And soon… so would everything else.

  At first, Golem’s Gambit held.

  The traps were brutal. The defenses layered. The coordination between minions—flawless.

  But the Verdant Depths were not a mindless tide.

  They were watching. Learning. Adapting.

  The first sign came in the Jungle Room.

  Ferron had reinforced the outer root bridge, turning it into a kill zone for stalkers and vine-serpents. For a time, it worked—constructs lined the pathways, cutting down anything that crossed. Kagejin’s traps delayed flanks, and arc-slingers harassed from elevated ridges.

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  Then the vines began to move on their own.

  Thicker than any that had come before, these were not just overgrown roots. They were commanded. And they didn’t trigger the pressure plates.

  They unwound them.

  “They’ve sent something different,” Ferron said over the link, breathing heavily as his axe carved into another twisted dryad. “It’s controlling the roots like puppet strings. The traps aren’t firing.”

  Then came the spore-chargers—fungal beasts bloated with volatile gas sacs. One struck a construct directly, and the resulting explosion tore a twenty-foot hole in the central bridge. When Zyrris tried to destabilize the spores with arcane frequency, they resonated back, reflecting the magical energy along the root lines.

  “They’ve built anti-arcane creatures,” Zyrris said, his voice dark. “Some of these organisms are absorbing field pulses and redirecting them.”

  In the Clockwork Cavern, the automaton forces began to fall in droves.

  The creatures that emerged there were strange—thin, insectile, their chitin plated with a strange blend of moss and reflective bark. They darted between spinning gears and leapt over conveyor tracks with impossible precision.

  When they were hit, they didn’t bleed. They shattered.

  And then reassembled.

  “They’re using some kind of regenerative shrapnel matrix,” Mechard reported from his forward command node. “I kill them, and they come back together. My constructs aren’t adapting fast enough. They’re falling behind the reaction curve.”

  Brent’s glow flickered in the Core Room as more and more alerts pinged across the scrying displays.

  Red. Orange. Red.

  Losses.

  Pushback.

  He tried to reinforce one section, but he had used so much mana to create the Ignarok corridor. Every redirect came at the cost of another trap failing to trigger. Every automaton revived meant another couldn’t be deployed elsewhere.

  They had never planned for this many specific counters.

  In the Magnetic Mayhem Arena, Caldron’s polarity engines began shorting out—overloaded by sap-covered beetle-creatures that anchored themselves to the floor and grounded the field . The metallic hum of the chamber dulled, and Caldron’s voice cracked over the link.

  “They’re nullifying my charge. And my staff’s conductivity is compromised. The Thundertickler’s getting… tickled.”

  No one laughed.

  Brent’s glow dimmed further.

  “Status?” he asked, quietly, as Emil scanned the systems.

  “Clockwork Cavern is about to fall. Jungle Room’s been severed from three points. Aetherium’s holding—but Zyrris is burning mana too fast to sustain it much longer.” Emil’s voice was tight. “And Ferron’s wounded.”

  Brent pulsed, sharp and controlled. “Pull him if we have to.”

  “He won’t leave,” Emil replied flatly.

  A sharp boom echoed through one of the rear scry-panels. One of the secondary trap chambers—a backup route near the Magnetic Arena—collapsed inward. Spores and vines burst through, crawling up the corridor like hungry snakes.

  The Verdant Depths weren’t just adapting.

  They were tightening the noose.

  The lights in the Core Room dimmed again as more systems failed. Runes flickered. Status sigils blinked in erratic, panicked rhythms. The dungeon was still fighting, but losing ground fast.

  Brent stared at the central display, his form flickering faintly now as he tried to redistribute mana between defenses. It wasn’t enough.

  “Zyrris?” he called.

  The reply came through a moment later, tight and strained. “I’ve rerouted spatial distortion along the eastern threshold. That will buy me five minutes. No more.”

  “Ferron?”

  Static crackled, then: “Still standing. Lost my front line. Half the constructs are down. Axe’s chipped. That bastard with the flower-face took a bite out of my leg. Don’t suppose we’ve got a mana infusion tucked away somewhere?”

  Brent’s voice flickered. “Not without dropping the ceiling on someone.”

  “Tempting.”

  “Kagejin?” Brent asked.

  Nothing.

  Then a whisper: “Still here. In the dark. Bleeding. But I’ve got eyes on a stalker nest. Waiting for the right moment.”

  “You’re outnumbered.”

  “When am I not?”

  Emil turned sharply from the displays. “We’ve lost the Clockwork Cavern. Completely. They’re pouring in through the breach and heading for the secondary junction. If they flank the Aetherium, they’ll be in striking distance of the Core within half an hour.”

  Brent spun in place, his glow jittering. “Options?”

  Emil’s voice was cold now, analytical—but not detached. “We pull Zyrris to the rear corridor. Let him booby trap the fallback route as he retreats. Ferron can hold the Jungle door for another five minutes, maybe ten. Caldron’s barely got enough power to detonate the rest of his arena. If he does, it’ll buy time but take him offline.”

  Brent hovered still. “…And then what?”

  “We fall back to Ignarok’s room,” Emil said.

  Brent flared. “We’ll lose the entire dungeon.”

  “We’ve already lost it,” Emil said quietly.

  Brent didn’t answer at first. The thought of abandoning everything they’d built—every gear, every track, every hand-crafted trap and lovingly laid tile of engineered madness—made his core ache.

  They weren’t just rooms. They were his.

  But so were the people fighting in them.

  He looked at the displays again. Zyrris retreating under heavy pressure. Ferron limping, surrounded by a pile of broken enemies. Caldron’s energy flaring wildly, his armor cracked open.

  “They’ll die,” Brent whispered.

  “If we stay, we all do,” Emil said. “But in Ignarok’s room, we hold. It’s the one place they still fear.”

  Brent pulsed low, one last time.

  Then, with great reluctance, he raised his glow and sent a single, unified signal through every thread of the dungeon.

  “All units. This is Core Command. Fall back to Ignarok’s chamber. Repeat: Fall back.”

  There was no panic in the responses. Only grim confirmation.

  “Copy that,” Ferron said. “Hope the big guy’s in the mood to smash.”

  “I’ll prepare the rear corridor,” Zyrris said. “And I’ll make them pay for every inch.”

  Kagejin’s voice barely came through the link. “Heading home. Left them a surprise.”

  Caldron didn’t reply. But his room lit up on the scrying feed—a massive magnetic surge tearing the arena apart, pulling metal and root alike into a vortex of screaming pressure before it collapsed in a thunderous implosion.

  A final middle finger to the invaders.

  Brent dimmed, hovering lower now. “This is going to hurt.”

  Emil nodded once, his voice soft. “We make our stand where the fire still burns.”

  The molten glow of Ignarok’s chamber began to brighten—not just with heat, but with purpose.

  The beast had waited long enough.

  And the endgame had arrived.