Chapter 98: Floor 11

Finn laid it out fast while the harpies circled and built up their nerve to dive.

"You don’t out-range flyers and you don’t wait them out. You force the dive, you punish the landing, and you tear the wings. Theo, you’re bait. Open ground, shield up, make yourself the easiest target on the field. Mara, Cian, you punish anything that commits to him from range. James and I take anything that drops low enough to reach."

Theo swallowed but moved out into the open platform with his spear braced and his stance wide, and the effect was immediate. Three harpies broke from the spiral and folded their wings to dive at the exposed target, shrieking as they came.

**SKREEEE!**

"Now," Finn said.

Mara’s gun barked twice, *CRACK-CRACK*, and Cian threw a lash of lightning that caught the lead harpy across one wing. The bolt did not kill it, but it tore the rhythm out of its flight, and the harpy tumbled out of its dive and came down hard and low across the stone near Theo.

That was James’s window.

He had held his mana while the harpies were too high and too fast to hit reliably, because Necro Blast was wasted on a target that could juke in open air. The moment the harpy dropped into its broken descent, he fired.

`[NECRO BLAST]`

The bolt of necrotic force caught the harpy mid-fall and punched it into the ground, and Theo’s spear came down through its neck a second later.

`[HARPY SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 220]`

The corpse hit the stone and stayed there, and that single body changed everything for James, because now he had something to work with on the ground instead of only chasing shapes in the sky.

The three new Challengers stopped looking for an easy clear and started listening.

***

The harpies adapted once several of them were down.

They stopped diving one at a time and began coming in coordinated groups, and they used their shrieks as a weapon, a layered piercing sound that scraped at concentration and made it hard to track more than one target at once. One swept low over Cian’s position and nearly raked him before he threw himself flat, and another got its talons into the back of Theo’s shoulder armor and hauled him a full meter off the ground before Finn closed the distance and sheared its leg off with his axe.

**THUD.**

Theo dropped, rolled, and came back up swearing but intact.

James took a slash across the forearm from one that came in low behind him, and his new armor turned most of it, leaving a shallow line instead of a deep cut.

He turned into it and cut the harpy down with the A-rank sword on the backswing, his Swordsmanship rougher than a trained duelist’s but enough at this range, and the kill triggered the chain he had stopped thinking about consciously.

`[DEATH CHAIN TRIGGERED]`

`[NEAREST HARPY — NECROTIC DOT APPLIED]`

Then the moment that made the new teammates understand. Three harpies came down together at Mara’s position, tight and overlapping, and James detonated the first harpy corpse right as they closed over it.

`[CORPSE EXPLOSION]`

**BOOM.**

The blast caught all three in the air at the low point of their dive, and two dropped out of the sky outright while the third spun away with a wing shredded and crashed into a broken wall.

`[HARPY SLAIN x2]`

`[CALL OF SOULS — MANA RESTORED]`

Mara stared at the smoking craters for half a second before she remembered to keep firing.

The harpies thinned out fast after that, and once their numbers dropped past the point where they could swarm, the three griffins finally tilted out of their high circles and came down to fight.

***

The griffins were a different problem entirely.

They were larger, heavier, and far harder to bring down, and they did not dive recklessly the way the harpies had. They tested the team instead, sweeping past at the edge of range to draw fire, breaking off before anyone could land a clean hit, and angling their passes to try to split the weaker members away from James and Finn. The first one nearly peeled Cian off from the group before Finn called him back.

"They’re hunting the formation," Finn said. "Tighten up. We bait one and we commit when it commits."

James watched their timing through two more passes while the griffins circled and probed, and he started to read the rhythm of it, the slight tuck of the wings before a real dive, the way each one favored a hard bank to the left when it broke off.

"Theo, hold the center," Finn said. "Mara, Cian, both of you on the next one’s left wing when it drops. James—"

"The joint," James said. "When it’s lowest."

The first griffin committed. It folded and dropped toward Theo with its claws out and a scream that drowned the wind.

**SKREEEEE!**

Theo planted his shield and held, Mara and Cian hammered the left wing with gunfire and lightning until the membrane started to tear, and Finn stepped in to draw it lower with a feint of his axe. At the bottom of the dive, when the griffin was committed and close and could not change course, James put a Necro Blast straight into the damaged wing joint.

`[NECRO BLAST]`

The rot bloomed through the joint and the wing folded wrong, and the griffin came down hard onto the stone instead of pulling out of its dive.

**CRASH.**

It was still lethal on the ground. It came up screaming with claws and beak and one good wing buffeting hard enough to stagger Theo, but grounded was a fight they could win, and Finn went in directly while James supported with his blade and the others kept the last harpies off their backs. Finn’s axe took it through the neck after a brutal thirty seconds.

`[GRIFFIN SLAIN]`

`[EXP GAINED: 1,400]`

The second griffin died faster because the team already knew the timing. They baited, they tore the wing, James dropped it, and Finn finished it before it could fully recover its footing.

The third one nearly took Mara.

It came in from an angle they had not covered, ignored Theo entirely, and got its claws into Mara’s shoulder before anyone could react, lifting her off the ground as it tried to climb. She screamed.

**"AAAH—"**

James was already moving. He could not risk Necro Blast with her in the claws, so he closed the distance and put the A-rank sword through the griffin’s trailing back leg, and the pain made it drop her. She hit the stone hard but alive, and the moment the griffin came low to recover, Finn was there.

His axe came down through the base of its skull.

**THUNK.**

`[GRIFFIN SLAIN]`

The last shape fell out of the sky, and the wind kept moving across the plateau over the bodies.

***

The System chimed.

`[FLOOR 11 — SUBJUGATION COMPLETE]`

`[ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES ELIMINATED]`

`[FLOOR CLEAR REWARD DISTRIBUTING]`

`[FLOOR 11 CLEAR — BASE REWARD]`

`[TOWER CREDITS AWARDED: 2,000 TC PER CHALLENGER]`

`[PARTY EXP POOL: 9,000 EXP]`

`[DIVIDED BY 5 CHALLENGERS: 1,800 EXP EACH]`

James felt the EXP land and push past the threshold.

`[LEVEL UP!]`

`[YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 18]`

`[ALL STATS +1]`

`[FREE STAT POINTS +5]`

`[EXP: 1,185/13,000]`

`[UNSPENT STAT POINTS: 5]`

Then the MVP calculation.

`[CALCULATING MVP...]`

`[MVP: JAMES GANNER]`

`[REASONING: HIGHEST KILL CONTRIBUTION, CORPSE EXPLOSION CLUSTER ELIMINATION, GRIFFIN WING-JOINT STRATEGY]`

`[MVP REWARD: 5,000 TC]`

`[BONUS EXP: 1,000]`

James put his five free points where he always did, two into Intelligence and one each into Strength, Agility, and Endurance, and closed the window.

Theo, Mara, and Cian were checking their own rewards with the dazed look of people who had cleared a floor they had been afraid of. Mara’s shoulder had already healed with the floor clear, and she was the first to start thanking James and Finn, the words coming out too fast and too many, about how they never could have done it without them and how lucky they had been.

Finn cut it short. "You did fine. You held the bait, you hit the wings, you followed instructions. That’s why you’re alive. That’s all it is."

The three of them took that and quieted, and the awe they had walked in with had settled into something closer to respect, because they had seen up close that Team Zero’s reputation was not luck.

***

White light returned them to the basement, and the three new Challengers vanished back to wherever they had entered from, leaving James and Finn alone in the room with the gaps in it.

They were both tired, but it was a clean kind of tired, the kind that came from moving instead of sitting still.

"Floor 12’s the same type," Finn said while he set his axe down. "Subjugation. If we wait too long we lose the rhythm we just got back. We should hit it before that happens."

"Two days," James said. "Rest, resupply, then we climb."

"Two days," Finn agreed.

James opened his System on the way out and looked at the Floor 12 unlock notification sitting there, waiting.

`[FLOOR 12 — UNLOCKED]`

He closed his hand around the hilt of his new sword.

Two days.

Then they would climb again.