“Woah,” Deacon breathed, slowly pivoting beneath the lantern’s bluish-white glow as he tried to make sense of the scene around him.

  He was in some sort of underground desert cavern, where all around him were countless tunnels, narrow spirals, wide burrows, some no taller than his thigh and others large enough for a truck to pass through.

  But what stunned him most was the complete absence of sandstone; the very material the cavern should have been made from, however, there wasn’t a single chunk of it anywhere. By all rights, the tunnels should have collapsed without support, yet the sand held its shape: loose, shifting, and somehow still intact.

  , Deacon thought to himself in disbelief as he turned his gaze upwards, spreading his mana sensing to as far as it could travel.

  Above them stretched a full dome of free-flowing sand, suspended as if an ocean hung overhead. Its surface slid and rippled in slow currents, grains cascading down in thick streams that formed into dozens of thick pillars of the same flowing sand scattered throughout the cavern.

  Each pillar looked as though it should collapse under its own instability as each grain seemed to be flowing, yet they held their shape, supporting the dome of shifting grains above with ease.

  “You like?” Bjorn chuckled as he stared at the awestruck look on Deacon's face, which seemingly got his sour mood back into order, as he took in the look of sheer marvel Deacon showed. “You can touch them, by the way.”

  “What is this…?” Deacon asked, the question slipping out without conscious thought as he took a few steps toward the nearest sand pillar and cautiously raised his hands toward it.

  The moment his fingertips brushed the surface, his hand passed cleanly into the flowing column, met with absolutely no resistance. He felt every grain slip across his fingers like water running through his hands, yet the structure didn’t distort, didn’t weaken, nor react at all to being breached.

  Deacon slid his hand deeper into the column, up to the wrist, rotating it slowly just to feel the sand roll around his skin. “How could… wow. When did you find this?”

  “You can thank your Great-Great-Grandmaster of the Sovereign Blades’ husband,” Bjorn said, following Deacon’s line of sight as he moved, though his own attention kept flicking toward one of the tunnel mouths on the right side of the cavern. “While her skills with magic were quite good, her husband’s skill with magic was the kind of absurd that brought forth legends and myths, such as dragons being reborn into new races while retaining their dragon hearts.”

  Deacon took a few steps forward, still entranced by the shifting ceiling above him, and did not notice the way Bjorn’s posture subtly sharpened as his head angled just slightly as if he’d heard something beneath the churning of sand all around them.

  “And his skill with barrier magic,” Bjorn continued, as his hand dropped into his back pouch, “was, and still is, unparalleled. It sucks that he left so soon, though.”

  Before Deacon could ask what he meant as he turned his head towards his uncle in confusion on why he hadn’t mentioned them before, Bjorn’s hand flicked outward with a motion so fast Deacon barely saw the blur of metal before a faint crack echoed down one of the sand tunnels.

  A handleless throwing dagger Bjorn had pulled from seemingly nowhere in Deacon’s eyes vanished into the darkness, and a moment later, a muted, wet chitinous screech could only be faintly heard in Deacon’s ears as it echoed throughout the cavern.

  Deacon turned sharply toward the tunnel, blinking. “Was that—?”

  “An antlion scout,” Bjorn said, plainly, before turning back to look at Deacon. “It separated from its colony, and would have wandered here if I’d let it keep going… Can you tell me why I killed it from so far away, instead of letting it eventually reach the barrier and try to make its way inside?”

  “Vibrations,” Deacon replied. “If it attacked the barrier, it could make a lot of noise, and the rest of its colony would feel the disturbance. With hundreds, if not thousands, of antlions working together, they would be able to break through or cause enough of a disturbance to cause a cave… sand-in.”

  “Correct,” Bjorn nodded, eyeing the barrier that held the sand above them. “A few hundred of them hitting it at once would’ve brought the whole thing down, and unfortunately, it’s been many years since this barrier was reinforced. A century or so since its last touch-up.”

  Deacon swallowed, his eyes flicking between the now-still tunnel and the massive dome of moving sand overhead. “…how long has the barrier been up?”

  “Centuries,” Bjorn replied, crossing his arms as he surveyed the cavern.

  Deacon slowly pulled his hand from the sand column, watching the grains close around the space his arm had occupied as nothing had ever disturbed it.

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  “Wow,” he murmured again, the word slipping out before he could even think to stop it as he quickened his pace to fall in stride beside his uncle.

  Bjorn’s expression had shifted again, though Deacon could not see it with the burnt-orange mask atop his face; he was able to see that his uncle’s posture had a tinge of tension hidden beneath his relaxed stance.

  Deacon didn’t miss the way his uncle’s head turned to look at several more tunnels branching off from the main cavern.

  , Deacon thought, resisting the urge to look behind him.

  Bjorn’s thoughts, meanwhile, were written plainly enough across his mask that Deacon didn’t need to read his mana to get an idea of what was brewing behind that calm fa?ade as his uncle kept looking at him and the tunnels.

  He was clearly debating something, likely about whether to have Deacon and his friends come down here and “exterminate” the antlions.

  And just as clearly, as Deacon read his uncle spoke out his thoughts, You and your friends will come back here after we’re done with getting your things, and cull the antlions population. You might even find a Hidden Quest down there.”

  Deacon held back a sigh. Hidden Quests weren’t something you stumbled across every day, but he couldn’t bring himself to refuse his uncle, not after all the hands-on training he’d been given and all the phone arguments he’d had to deal with just to make sure he’d be available to focus on that training.

  Grandmasters rarely spent more than a few minutes a week with cadets. They simply didn’t have the time; their duties stretched across the entire Order and dealing with contracts and dealings across the Tower.

  Training responsibilities usually fell to the Order’s disciples; cadets who had cleared the Floor and committed themselves to the Knight Order permanently. Those disciples received direct instruction from the Grandmaster and, in turn, were entrusted with guiding the next wave of cadets while also taking on missions on behalf of the Knight Order. They supervised training sessions, handed out missions, and awarded tokens for completed tasks.

  The Sovereign Blades had disciples as well, though only a handful. Even so, Bjorn insisted on training Deacon personally, squeezing in as much hands-on instruction as possible before he would inevitably be called away on another contract or another dealing for the Knight Order.

  Besides, his friends would understand; this would be perfect training for when they would inevitably come across an underground desert-themed Floor on their climb.

  “… Okay,” Deacon muttered, kicking the small rise of sand in his path.

  As they reached one of the largest tunnels, a massive gapping passage directly across from the teleporter pad they’d arrived through, Bjorn tilted his head down to look at Deacon and his resigned expression on his face.

  “Jump on my back and close your eyes,” Bjorn said to him while patting his shoulder. “I’ll give you a piggyback ride.”

  Deacon blinked up at him, his brain taking a solid two seconds to process the order. “…What?”

  “Just do it,” Bjorn urged him. “If we walk through the tunnel, it’ll take too long, and you’re too slow to keep up with the pace we need to reach in order to make it to the bazaar before nightfall. Unless you want me to put you in a fireman carry?”

  Was it emasculating? Yes.

  But would he rather just listen to his uncle and not get punched in the head? Also, yes.

  As such, he leapt onto his uncle’s back, locking his legs around his waist and hooking both of his hands on his uncle’s shoulders.

  The moment Bjorn grabbed onto Deacon’s legs to secure him in place, something shifted around them. A thin veil of steam began to curl off Bjorn’s shoulders, dispersing into the tunnel air with a faint hiss.

  A split second later, thin feathered wings unfurled from the sides of his boots, stretching taut within the tunnel, mana shimmering along their edges.

  Deacon barely managed to close his eyes in time after registering his uncle suddenly growing wings from his boots before Bjorn shot forward.

  The blast of acceleration ripped at Deacon’s grip, forcing him to clamp down hard, nails biting into leather. The world became a smear of motion behind his squeezed-shut eyes.

  Even hanging on with every ounce of self-preservation he had, Deacon felt the force of the movement threatening to peel him backward. He only grinned harder, jaw tight, exhilaration bubbling up despite himself.

  “H—holy shit!” Deacon whooped, clamping his eyes shut even tighter as the wind buffeted against him, each twist and turn of the tunnel taken at a speed so fast it blurred every sense he had. “This is awesome!”

  Deep beneath the dunes, far past the tunnels near the teleporter pad that Bjorn kept casually glancing toward, a nest sat buried within an enormous sandstone cavern, packed wall-to-wall with a shifting bed of amber-colored larvae.

  As Bjorn’s presence faded into the depths, part of the larvae field heaved upward. The mound burst open, revealing a massive antlion clawing toward the surface. Its wings, still slick from its time below, snapped halfway open and shook, spraying larvae off its back.

  It lifted its head and went perfectly still, every joint locked, listening intently to something approaching through the tunnel far above.

  A smaller antlion poked its head out of one of the connecting shafts and angled its gaze downward toward the larger, winged antlion. It chittered in a rapid-fire sequence of clicks that echoed through the cavern.

  As the antlion gave its report, the larger antlion didn’t interrupt, didn’t move, didn’t even blink; instead, it absorbed the stream of information while the larvae clung to its legs and antennae like oil, some even forcing their mandibles out of their shells in order to remain on the larger antlion’s body.

  When the scout finally stopped, the cavern returned to its previous silence.

  The winged antlion dipped its head slightly, mandibles shifting before it answered with a deeper, slower pattern of clicks that rumbled throughout the cavern. “Send all forces into Temple Solomon; we must retrieve the amulet within to appease the Floor Guardian. Unlike the Fallen Queen, I shall release the shackles that bind us to this Floor and allow us to go beyond!”

  The moment the last click left its mandibles, the scout antlion turned without hesitation and darted back into the tunnel it came from, already vibrating its own body to relay the order through the colony’s networks.

  The large antlion didn’t wait to listen to the relaying orders of its attendant, instead letting its body sink back into the larvae and cocoon itself once again, for it would need their strength to strike their foes who seek the amulet.

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