I Become the Strongest with Infinite Skills Level

They left camp at first light, the false dawn finally giving way to the dungeon’s version of morning: pale, shadowless, and utterly indifferent to what waited above.

The stairwell to floor twenty-nine sat half-buried in a wall of black stone at the far end of the lake’s clearing, easy to miss unless you already knew it was there.

Ethan had scouted it the night before, after Lyris vanished back into the water. A narrow archway, no door, just a throat of darkness leading upward.

"Comforting," Kael muttered, echoing Gareth’s word from the night before. "Really feels like a place good things happen."

"Nowhere in this dungeon feels like that," Serena said, checking the straps on her pack one final time. "Get used to it."

They climbed in silence for the first three floors. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, familiar territory, cleared paths, monsters that behaved the way monsters were supposed to behave.

Predictable. Manageable.

Gareth took point, Serena close behind him watching the flanks, Milo in the middle where the group could protect him, Kael and Ethan trailing to cover the rear.

It was floor thirty-two where things started to feel wrong.

The corridor should have opened into a wide chamber. Ethan remembered the layout from climbing this stretch weeks earlier.

But instead it narrowed unnaturally, walls pressing closer than they should have, as if the dungeon itself had reshaped the space overnight.

"This isn’t right," Gareth said, slowing his pace. "This floor had an open hall. I remember it."

"Dungeons shift," Serena said, but her voice carried doubt. "Just not usually this much. Not overnight."

Ethan’s hand drifted to Veilcutter’s handle. The pale stone at its pommel had begun to pulse faintly, slow and deliberate, the same rhythm it had shown the moment he first took hold of it.

"Something’s here," he said quietly.

The attack came from above.

Not from a side passage, not from a hidden door. From directly overhead, where the ceiling of the narrow corridor split open like torn fabric and something dropped straight down into the middle of the group.

It landed between Gareth and Milo, forcing them apart, and unfolded to a height that scraped the corridor’s ceiling.

Six limbs, insectile in structure but wrong in proportion, its carapace a mottled black that seemed to drink in the torchlight rather than reflect it.

Where a head should have been, there was only a smooth, faceless dome, and along its back ran a row of glowing red markings that pulsed in sequence, almost like a heartbeat, almost like language.

"That is not a floor thirty-two monster," Kael said, already backing up with his fists raised. "I have fought floor thirty-two monsters. That is not one of them."

Gareth didn’t wait for confirmation. He swung his blade in a wide arc, forcing the creature back a step, buying Milo room to scramble clear toward Ethan and Kael.

The creature reacted instantly, not with the sluggish recovery of a typical dungeon beast, but with something closer to calculation.

It shifted its weight onto its rear limbs and lashed out with the other four in a coordinated sweep, forcing Gareth to retreat rather than press his advantage.

"It’s reading him," Serena said, backing toward the wall, eyes darting between the creature and the narrow space around it. "It adjusted the second he committed to the swing. That’s not instinct. That’s a decision."

"So it thinks," Ethan said.

He drew Bloodblade Ashura, leaving Veilcutter sheathed for now. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t a barrier or a seal. It was flesh, or something close enough to it.

"Lyris said the disturbance was making the monsters more coordinated. Maybe this is what she meant."

"Wonderful," Kael said. "Can we discuss that after the part where it stops trying to kill us?"

The creature lunged again, this time at Serena, who was closest to the wall with the least room to dodge.

She twisted aside at the last moment, close enough that one of its limbs scraped a line of sparks off the stone where her shoulder had been a heartbeat earlier.

Ethan moved before he’d fully decided to.

He crossed the distance in three strides and drove Bloodblade Ashura into the creature’s flank, aiming for the gap between two overlapping plates of carapace.

The blade bit in, deeper than he expected, and the creature let out a sound that wasn’t quite a shriek: low, layered, almost mechanical.

It spun on him immediately, abandoning Serena, and Ethan understood a half second too late that it hadn’t been trying to kill her at all.

It had been testing the group’s formation, mapping out who would move where. Now it had the information it wanted, and it came for him with all six limbs at once.

Gareth was there before it landed. He drove his shoulder into the creature’s side, throwing off its angle, and Kael followed immediately with a strike that would have shattered bone on anything human.

Against the carapace it did little more than stagger the thing, but it bought Ethan the half second he needed to reset his stance and drive the sword in again, deeper this time, twisting as he pulled it free.

The creature’s red markings flared bright, then dimmed, then flared again in a stuttering, uneven rhythm.

It let out one more sound, quieter than the first, almost confused, before its legs folded beneath it and it collapsed into the narrow corridor with a heavy, final weight.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Milo was the one who finally broke the silence, his voice unsteady. "Is it dead?"

"I don’t know," Ethan admitted, wiping the blade clean before sheathing it. "It didn’t dissolve like the Watcher did. It’s just... still."

Serena crouched beside it carefully, keeping her distance from the limbs.

"It’s not dissolving because it’s not supposed to be here. Whatever it is, this isn’t part of the dungeon’s normal cycle. It’s not going to reset the way a real dungeon monster would."

Gareth wiped sweat from his brow and looked down the corridor, toward the unnatural narrowing that had swallowed what should have been an open hall.

"If this is floor thirty-two, and it’s already sending things like this after us, what exactly is waiting on forty?"

Nobody answered him. Nobody had an answer to give.

Ethan looked at the fallen creature one last time, at the markings along its back now dark and lifeless, and felt Veilcutter’s pommel pulse once against his hip, faint but unmistakable, as if the sword had noticed something the rest of them hadn’t.

"We keep moving," he said. "Carefully. And we watch everything."

They stepped over the creature’s body and continued into the dark.