The last thing the main force of three hundred players had done before going silent was scream.

Not the combat scream, not the coordinated battle cry of people executing a strategy, but the specific unravelling sound of people who had encountered something the strategy did not account for, and then nothing, and the nothing was worse than the screaming because at least the screaming meant something was still happening.

Liam had been listening to the silence for four minutes and twenty seconds while he finished the soup.

Elizabeth sat two feet to his left on her own rock, close enough that the heat from his shoulders reached her bare arm, far enough that she could claim it was coincidental. She watched him work with the expression she wore when she was trying to look like she was doing something else. She had been doing this since Day 1 and had not gotten better at it.

The way her gaze kept drifting back to his hands, the careful, unhurried way he moved through each step of the recipe, was the kind of thing Liam would have noticed if he noticed things like that. He didn’t. What he noticed was that her knee was almost touching his thigh, and that the proximity made the air between them smell like cherry blossom and steel polish, which was a strange combination that kept pulling his attention sideways every time he tried to focus on seasoning.

He adjusted the heat under the pan. His elbow brushed her arm. She didn’t move away.

Neither did he.

The problem arrived in the form of a sound, low and rhythmic and coming from the passage to the east, the direction the main force had gone. Not combat sounds, not the crack of spells or the clash of steel, but something older and slower, a vibration that moved through the obsidian floor and into the soles of their boots before it reached their ears.

Mirra’s lion ears went flat. "That’s not a ghoul."

"No," Liam agreed, not looking up from the pan.

"That’s not an elite either," she said.

"No," Liam said.

"Liam, what is that?"

"Something bigger," Liam said, plating the ninth bowl and holding it out to the nearest Ruby Eyed soldier, who took it with shaking hands and said nothing. "The main force just hit something they weren’t expecting, so we have about four minutes before it decides the food smell is more interesting than whatever they’re offering it."

The chamber went very quiet except for the sound of people eating soup and the growing vibration in the floor.

"Four minutes," Elizabeth said.

"Three and a half now," Liam said.

"And you’re still serving soup."

"Eighth bowl," Liam said. "There are four more customers."

Three of the remaining four Ruby Eyed soldiers put their gold down and took their bowls. The fourth stared at the passage with the expression of a man whose body had already made a decision his brain hadn’t caught up to yet.

"What is it?" the fourth one asked, his voice somewhere between a whisper and nothing.

Liam looked up from the pan for the first time since sitting down and studied the passage with the focused patience of a man reading an ingredient list. "Scaled. The vibration pattern suggests at least eight points of ground contact, which means either a very large spider or something the system hasn’t formally introduced us to yet. Either way, it’ll have a core. Last bowl?"

The fourth soldier put his gold down with both hands and took the bowl and drank it without breathing.

The vibration was now loud enough to feel in the back teeth, in the jaw, in the base of the skull. The silence from the eastern passage had the specific quality of something that had ended rather than something that had finished, and those were not the same thing.

Liam packed the pan away and stood up and looked at the passage with the red eyes that usually did the hunger thing, the sharpening that happened when something unknown was about to become known.

Eight contact points, he thought. Large-scale core and no logout, no rescue team. Everyone just drank the soup.

His stomach growled.

Sounds good to me.

"Everyone up," he said, his voice carrying the flat authority of someone who had decided what was happening next and was not discussing it. "Berry on the left flank, Noir on the right, Mirra back line, and keep Midnight covered. She’s still learning, and Rogue, wherever you are, stop sulking about the egg and get ready."

"I wasn’t sulking," Rogue said, from the shadows, in the voice of someone who had absolutely been sulking.

"Elizabeth," Liam said, and his voice dropped half a register without appearing to decide to, the way it did sometimes when he was talking to her specifically and not to the room, "stay close."

She looked at him. He had already turned toward the passage and was checking his gauntlets, not looking back, completely unaware of what those two words had just done to her cardiovascular system.

Her tail went rigid. Berry noticed. Noir noticed. Midnight made a face from twelve feet away that communicated several things without saying any of them.

The passage went dark.

Something stepped into the light, and it was not boss-fight enormous or Ogre General enormous, but the specific scale of something that had been in the dark long enough that it had stopped needing to be afraid of anything, all armoured plating and too many limbs and eyes that caught the purple moss light from every angle at once. Its presence hit the chamber like a wall, the weight of something the world had built specifically to end things, and it moved with the patient unhurried confidence of an apex predator that had never once been surprised.

Liam’s red eyes tracked it. The hunger bar calculation that usually kicks in automatically did not kick in.

His brain, which had processed a Lava Golem as a kitchen surface and a Kitsune Matriarch as a flavour experiment, looked at this thing and produced nothing useful for two full seconds.

Two seconds was a very long time for Liam Yoo.

[TOOL TIP: THE "NO REFUNDS" BUFFET]

Status: Ambush? You mean Surprise Delivery.

Customer Service: Successfully extracted the final 50 gold from a soldier who realised he couldn’t take it with him once the 8-legged "Ingredient" arrives.

Atmosphere: The floor is vibrating, the main army is dead, and the kitchen is technically on fire. Liam’s professional review: "Fire is useful."

Party Status:

Elizabeth: Near-fatal heart rate spike caused by Liam saying "Stay close" instead of the giant monsters.

Rogue: 100% focused on grieving an omelette.