I Become the Strongest with Infinite Skills Level

Ethan found the fire down to embers by the time he reached camp. Gareth looked up first, blade still resting across his knees, whetstone paused mid-stroke.

"You've been gone a while," Gareth said. Not an accusation. Just an observation, the way he said most things.

"I was talking to someone," Ethan said.

That got Serena's attention. She lifted her head from where she'd been wrapping the cut on her shoulder, her eyes sharp despite the late hour. "Someone. In a dungeon. On a floor we thought was cleared."

"The Watcher isn't dead," Ethan said. "It passed on. There's a difference, like I told you. And apparently it wasn't the only thing living down here."

He sat by the fire and set Veilcutter across his lap, angled so the firelight caught the storm-grey metal. Kael, who had been dead asleep only a minute earlier, was suddenly very much awake, blinking at the blade like it had personally offended him.

"That's a new sword," Kael said slowly. "You didn't have that sword an hour ago."

"I didn't."

"Where did you get a second legendary-looking sword, Ethan? Do they just grow at the bottom of lakes here? Is that a normal thing?"

"Her name is Lyris," Ethan said, ignoring the question in favor of the more useful information. "A fairy. Bound to this floor the same way the Watcher was. She can't leave it. She's been keeping track of what happens in the dungeon — patterns, movement, things changing between floors."

He explained it as plainly as he could: the disturbance climbing down from above, the aggression and coordination in monsters that should never behave that way, the three monitoring stones on floors forty through forty-two that had gone silent eleven months ago.

He explained the deal. Sword for information. Veilcutter for whatever they found — or whatever they proved had destroyed the stones.

When he finished, nobody spoke right away.

Serena was the first to break the silence, and her voice had lost its usual dry edge. "Monsters don't coordinate. That's not how dungeons work. Every floor operates independently — different ecosystem, different rules, different intelligence ceiling. If something's threading behavior across multiple floors, that's not a monster problem."

"That's what I thought too," Ethan said.

"So what is it?"

"I don't know. She didn't know either. That's the point of going up there."

Gareth set his whetstone down. "Floors forty through forty-two," he repeated. "That's eight levels above where we are now. Do you have any idea what's supposed to live up there?"

"No."

"Comforting."

"She said it's been aware someone's climbing," Ethan added, because it needed to be said and there was no way to soften it. "Whatever's causing this. She reached out through the dungeon looking for someone capable of taking this on, and it felt her looking. It knows we're coming."

Milo, who had been quiet through most of this, finally spoke up from where he sat wrapped in his blanket near the fire's edge. His voice was smaller than usual. "It knows about us specifically? Or it knows someone, generally, is climbing?"

"She said it knows about me," Ethan admitted. "I don't know if that means the rest of you as well. She told me to be careful — not just for my own sake."

That settled over the group heavier than anything else he'd said. Kael, for once, didn't have a joke ready. He just looked at the fire, jaw tight, arms crossed over his knees.

"So we're walking eight floors up," Gareth said eventually, "into territory that's been getting more dangerous for reasons nobody understands, toward something that already knows we exist, to find equipment that might not exist anymore, left there by someone who can't come get it herself."

"That's about the shape of it," Ethan said.

"And if we say no?"

Ethan looked at him. "Then we go back the way we came, and whatever's happening up there keeps happening, and it eventually comes down here instead of us going up to meet it. On its terms, not ours."

Nobody had an answer for that. It was the kind of logic that didn't leave much room to argue, mostly because it was true, and everyone at the fire knew it.

Serena finally exhaled, pulling her wrap tighter around the bandage on her shoulder. "I'm not saying no. I'm saying I want to know what we're dealing with before we're standing in the middle of it."

"That's fair," Ethan said. "We won't know until we get there. But we can be smarter about how we go up. Slower. Watch for the kind of thing she described — behavior that doesn't fit."

"And the sword?" Kael asked, nodding at Veilcutter. "What's it actually do? Besides look expensive."

"She said it doesn't cut flesh well," Ethan said. "It cuts through barriers. Seals, hidden things, walls of energy — whatever's concealing something. If this disturbance is being hidden from her, from the monitoring stones, from whoever's supposed to be watching this dungeon, then this is what's supposed to find it."

Kael considered that, then shrugged, some of his usual looseness returning. "So it's a very expensive key."

"Apparently."

"Fine. I can live with a very expensive key. As long as I get to keep using my very inexpensive fists."

That drew something close to a laugh out of Serena, brief and tired, but real. It broke enough of the tension that the group settled again — not relaxed, not entirely, but no longer braced the way they had been a moment before.

Ethan looked toward the ceiling of the floor, where the false dawn had crept a little further along the edges of the artificial sky since he'd left the lake. Gray light, thin and cold, beginning to press against the dark.

"We rest until it's fully light," he said. "Then we move toward the stairwell up. No point climbing exhausted, not with what's supposed to be waiting."

Gareth nodded and went back to his whetstone, the rhythmic scrape of metal on stone resuming like nothing had happened.

Serena lay back against her pack, eyes open, clearly not planning to sleep despite everything.

Kael curled back into his blanket, muttering something about expensive keys under his breath. Milo watched the fire for a long moment before finally letting his eyes close.

Ethan remained sitting upright, Veilcutter resting across his knees beside Bloodblade Ashura, the two blades a study in contrast — one wide and hungry, forged for violence, the other narrow and quiet, forged for something else entirely.

He thought about Lyris's words. It knows about you.

He didn't know what waited on floor forty. He didn't know what had silenced three monitoring stones or what kind of intelligence could reach that far down into a dungeon that wasn't supposed to think at all.

But he knew, watching the false dawn spread slowly across the false sky, that there was no version of this where they simply walked away.

There were floors to climb.

And something up there was already waiting for them to start.