Irrab’s leg was not fully regenerated yet, but at least he no longer doubted Cyn could grow it back. He was just missing a foot now. Shortly before the sun rose a few groups of the strangers, those in the best condition after their hellish night, had gone out to look for any more survivors. They came back with only one, plus Hex who had been on his way back anyway. The final straggler was an archer named Donovan, who had been the one shooting at Dana’s drone. The ‘drone’ was the flying statue the Tactician had received from the Trial of Luck, and while it had taken her some practice to use, she was able to control its flight and see through the statue's eyes. Donovan, upon hearing he had done nothing but make the rescue more difficult, apologized to the Tactician profusely. He believed the object belonged to the Vampires, and had been using a stealth skill which prevented Dana from finding out where the shots were coming from.

  The unconscious woman, Fish, woke up as everyone started to loosely gather at sunrise. She had been deposited gently onto the ground near Cyn by Mountain for her to keep an eye on during the night, while he lent a hand to the firefighting. When Cyn had been badly injured from her own mana in the Hungering Labyrinth, she had woken up afterward pretty softly. As had Scott, after the fight with the Illuminant Brood Queen.

  Fish did not wake up softly.

  Instead, the young woman sat abruptly upright, let out a loud yell, and burst into flames.

  Appropriately startled, and her concentration broken, Cyn jumped back away from the source of the fire. It only took her a heartbeat to recover before she darted forward again to help Irrab move away as well. As she dragged the injured man back, Mountain ran forward and tossed a bucket of water over the burning woman.

  “Fish! Calm down!” The water put out the flames and left their maker gasping, wide brown eyes looking around wildly before settling on the boy. It seemed to take her a moment to recognize him, before Fish was on her feet and hugging Mountain tightly while sobbing incoherently about Vampires, fire, and the moon.

  With Fish awake, and no other survivors to be found, it was time to get some introductions out of the way and figure out what in the hell had happened before Cyn and her party had shown up.

  Scott, ever the diplomat, took the lead in introducing them to the strangers first, admitting his confusion about why they had ended up being transferred to a floor in progress, and only stating it seemed to have something to do with feats some of them had acquired. The side-eye the Standard-Bearer was giving her and Hex while he talked about it made it clear he suspected they were two of the three Elite Adapters that had put them into this situation. He was probably pretty unhappy none of them had chosen to share that information. If the third wasn’t Scott, Cyn would bet money - or, she supposed, credits - that the final Elite Adapter was Dana. Especially since the Tactician had a remarkable poker face going on while Scott spoke.

  “Regardless of why you ended up here, we are damn lucky to have you show up like that. The last few days have been... difficult.” Alphina seemed to struggle with a word to describe their situation, and, from the expression the blonde warrior was making, Cyn felt as though that was a probably inadequate adjective.

  “Give me some names to put to these faces, darlin’, then we can get started on what needs doing.”

  Cyn did not catch all of their names as the strangers, her new raid party, introduced themselves. Her head felt pressurized between Spam’s simmering discontentment, and the weight of knowing so many people’s health status and location. The splitting headache was also why she had not bothered to check her notifications yet, since a further influx of objectives and whatever else the System would be throwing at her was not welcome until she had a chance to Meditate and sort out her problems.

  In total, there were fourteen survivors from the original raid party. Four warriors, three guardians, three archers, two rogues, and two mages. Outside of the few she had met during the attack, Cyn only latched onto one other name. Cirrus. She had taken note of the rogue well before he had introduced himself, and even kept an eye on him throughout the night as he assisted everyone. Average height, with tanned skin, dark eyes and short, light brown hair, he was pretty non-descript. She could not pinpoint exactly why, but Cirrus made her nervous from the moment she first laid eyes on him.

  There really was no explanation. He wasn’t using any mental influence or illusions, that she knew for sure. He seemed to be on friendly terms with everyone. She had spent a significant amount of her brainpower while healing Irrab’s leg to try and find any reason Cirrus stood out, and had come up with nothing. He just made her unreasonably nervous.

  Cyn continued to listen and keep one eye on Cirrus while everyone tried to explain what had led to this point, still steadily pumping Restoration into Irrab. It was easy to keep her own health low with Siphon to farm mana, even if no one near her needed the health points anymore. There were no safeguards in place to keep her from ‘wasting’ her resources like that, and as long as they were not fighting it didn’t even feel dangerous to her.

  Prior to the previous night’s attack, there had been twenty of them. Just over half the original number when they entered the floor a week ago, since their raid party had never been forty people. It had been made up of eight parties, and some of the parties were already down members before entering this floor. Of the fourteen still alive, they spanned five of the eight parties that had arrived on this floor together.

  The day before Cyn and her party had arrived, there had been twenty-eight of them alive, seven short of their original thirty-five.

  Scott was visibly shocked by the news, and before he could come up with a response Dana spoke up. “I assume that none of those deaths were to a Vampire attack on your homes, right? Because you would have done more to make sure you were not so vulnerable again.” The Tactician was not very subtly making sure they were not dealing with complete idiots, and while Cyn agreed it was information they needed to know, Dana also probably could have said it a bit more tactfully.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “The Vampires have not attacked like this before. They only picked off anyone who tried to travel through the woods at night, so we had no reason to think we would need to protect ourselves while near the Territory Heart.” Del gestured up at the glowing tree, which Cyn assumed was what he was talking about. What exactly that meant would have to wait until later, since the conversation about the large number of deaths trudged on with Scott’s insistence.

  “Then what killed everyone?”

  The first seven deaths were just accidents over the week they had been here, as explained by Alphina. A few picked off by Vampires or other predators in the surrounding area, a few others to overestimating their combat ability against other challenges present in the dungeon, or being caught off guard. It was the eighth death that lit the fuse of disaster.

  Initially, the man’s death had been seen as another unfortunate case of someone taking a risk, and losing. But the dead man’s original party had not felt that way. Instead, they accused a member of a different party of murder, and possibly even attributing some of the other ‘unfortunate’ deaths to them. Over the course of only a day, tensions skyrocketed as people took sides, or attempted to abstain and keep the peace.

  This tension culminated in a slaughter of the remaining members of both parties and a few others who had tried to intervene. Then, while the remaining nineteen mourned and tried to recover from the horrific events, the Vampires took advantage and attacked in the night.

  Fish and another woman from her party, Moon, had been the first attacked, likely since they had been in a hut near the edge of the woods. Fish had been the source of the flames that consumed the wooden huts they had all been living in, having panicked after being attacked in her sleep and accidentally setting both herself, and her attacker, on fire. Moon was not among the survivors.

  And now they were left with only a fraction of their original number, most of which had not focused on leveling up. With the threat of direct attacks now on the table, their tactics would have to change. Up until this point, they had all been acting fairly lax about the primary objective of the dungeon floor, which was to survive. Only those that wanted to actually level up left the village, with the understanding they were putting themselves at risk. Staying in ‘safety’ is why most of them were still low level. Four of them did not even have professions, as they had not encountered profession stones on the first floor of their dungeon.

  Without professions, they are missing out on a lot of possible stat distribution. But that does mean that Taesh, Irrab, Del, and Alphina have all evolved their class, since they are all over level ten. I guess Cogtopia was a little out of the way, but it’s strange only one group missed out on them. Did we even get the same dungeon floors?

  “Cyn? You need a break, sweetheart?” Scott was tapping on her shoulder, breaking Cyn out of her thoughts.

  Yah, I guess I do. She had just been staring blankly at Cirrus, who was staring back at her with a frown, and apparently Scott had noticed. Or she had been asked something. Cyn actually... wasn’t sure. She had a headache, her head felt horribly crowded still, and she honestly didn’t know how long she had zoned out for. Either not very long, since her mana was not empty... or she had been autopiloting keeping her mana regeneration buff going. “Maybe. Probably.” She looked down at her patient’s partly formed foot, lifting her hand and cutting off her skill. “If another mage can take over using Restoration on Irrab for a while. He’s almost done, but I haven’t tested if our body parts grow back on their own yet...”

  Del quickly walked over, kneeling down beside her. The aging man looked tired, with dark bags forming under his eyes, but his proximity made the resemblance between him and Irrab even more stark. “It is just Restoration doing this? I assumed you were using a different skill, or I would have assisted sooner.”

  Cyn nodded. “Yah, though... I am not sure how you will be able to keep up with the mana cost. I have a way to raise my mana regeneration higher than the cost of the channel.” She hesitated, grimacing and putting her hand back on Irrab’s leg. “Maybe I should just...”

  The other mage quickly grabbed her wrist, shaking his head and pulling her hand up to replace it with his own. “Fish and I can alternate. Get some rest, child.”

  Sighing, Cyn moved away slightly to get some space between herself and the raid party. It didn’t help much, but there was some relief to not feeling physically crowded alongside her mental crowding. She wasn’t even tired. Hopefully, she could get it sorted out through some meditation.

  While she got comfortable, Scott began to steer the conversation to how they could quickly improve their situation, at least to be prepared for the fact that they were at risk of being attacked at night. Sam, having worked in construction prior to the System and being a builder now, eagerly took the opportunity to jump in with ideas on what to do. First and foremost, a wall around the mound since apparently protecting the Territory Heart was important. They would have to make most things out of stone, not only because of the risk of fire but also because Sam only had experience using stone in his profession. Picking it up while stuck underground was going to have at least some effect in the long term for him.

  She let the conversation fade out while she fished Spam out of its pocket. If she could figure out what the hell was going on with it, there would be one less pressure source inside her skull. The fat frog did not resist, and to Cyn’s eyes it even looked unhappy. Spam had barely made a sound since they had entered this floor, so even if she wasn’t able to feel its emotions it was clear there was something going on. “I had to take care of other things first, but I know you’re upset. What’s wrong, buddy?” She spoke in a whisper to not interrupt everyone else, even though she was getting a lot of stares since only Mountain and Del had seen Spam.

  It made a soft warble, even quieter than Cyn’s whisper had been. But she didn’t speak frog. Not really. All she could feel was that Spam was unhappy, only a slight progression from how angry it had been when they entered the floor, and Cyn had an inkling that the emotion had something to do with her. Feeling as though she had done something wrong, with no way to fix it or even know what exactly what she had done, hurt.

  “I wish you could just tell me what made you so upset.” It gave another soft warble, leaning into Cyn’s hand as she gave her familiar a few Pets before putting it back in the pouch on her tabard. She hadn’t been able to solve the problem, unfortunately, but with her acknowledgment of it Spam’s emotions faded in intensity at least. It was no longer a thrumming distraction in the back of her mind, and more of just a weight not dissimilar to the physical weight of the familiar on her chest.

  Feeling sad, but having a bit more mental breathing room, Cyn closed her eyes and used Meditate. It was time to figure out if she could do something about the pressure of feeling so many people at once.