“What?” Deacon said, the word coming out sharper than he intended as he pulled his attention toward the notification that he had supposedly ignored in favor of keeping calm and analyzing the hallway he was in to prevent both him and his friends from getting skewered, burned, frozen, or otherwise maimed.

  Sure enough, the line was there, sitting calmly like it hadn’t just upended his understanding of how Race levels were supposed to be given.

  *Your Race has reached Lv 21 – Points allocated, +1 Free Point.*

  “…The fuck,” Bonehead said at almost the exact same time, his skull tilting slightly as he looked at his own System Notification that popped up. “I got one too.”

  Jass let out a slow breath through her nose, eyes narrowing as she glanced between the two of them before her gaze drifted to Esmerelda, and then finally settled on Deacon again. “What the hell did we do to deserve a Race level?” she muttered. “I get you,” she added, jerking her chin toward Deacon, “you cleared the flame hall basically solo. But the rest of us? ...We did jack shit.”

  Deacon shook his head, confusion mirroring her own. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said quietly. “All we did was cross a hallway.”

  “You only get Race levels when you do something that pushes you to your limits, accomplishing certain feats and tasks, and or…” Bonehead said, looking as confused as everyone else, as he tried to come up with a reason for them all to get a racial level. “Or I don’t know, some cumulative shit that you end up doing that defines you as you.”

  “Okay, I get maybe I got it because I had enough XP in reserve to level up after killing all those Antlions with you all, and with me clearing the obstacle course pushed me just over the line, but, if you all got a level when I did… then what the fuck happened?”

  “I don’t think I—” Sam started, then froze mid-sentence. The color drained from his face so fast it was almost impressive. “Oh… fuck.”

  He dropped to one knee hard enough that the cartilage in his knee audibly popped, though he was unbothered by it as he was already fumbling with the straps of his Spatial Satchel as he yanked it free and began rummaging through all the books he kept inside it.

  “What’s wrong?” Deacon asked immediately, already moving toward him as Esmerelda cast a diagnostic spell onto Sam out of fear that he might have been struck by something. Though much to both her relief and confusion, Sam was healthy and unafflicted.

  “There’s nothing physically or magically wrong with him,” Esmerelda said, voice tight, though her eyes never left Sam as he rummaged through his things like a man possessed. “Sam, are you okay?”

  Sam didn’t answer right away; instead, he continued to take out one book, then another, then another, placing them all on the floor before finally pushing aside his Spatial Satchel after taking out the seventh book out of the hundreds he kept inside it.

  With the seven books taken out, he quickly began flipping through them and stopping at random, in the eyes of everyone else.

  “Ever since you mentioned those people who arrived on the Isle of the Damned with their levels being Lv 0,” Sam said, voice strained as he spoke while scanning the text, “and asked me to look into it, I started digging. Like… really digging. Party records, academy archives, old expedition logs, personal journals — anything that had to deal with the randomness of levels.”

  “Eventually, I came across the answer to what it was for what you asked for, right?” Sam said, turning to Deacon, who gave him a confirmation.

  “Well, during my search for that answer, I came across a whole lot of other shit,” he said as he stopped flipping through the books, where now all seven books displayed various chapter names.

  “The Silent Maidens’ Journey into the Sunken DepthsLone Heir of House Thornshire’s Maddened Claims of a Super DungeonBiography of Triss Polluck – Adventurer Extraordinaire

  Deacon crouched beside him, careful not to touch the pages as Sam continued flipping, landing on chapters that looked random to anyone who didn’t know what they were looking for.

  “And while none of them talked about level zero arrivals,” Sam continued, wetting his lips, “they all mentioned entering Floors and finding weird and crazy shit; these ones mentioning Hidden Quest Zones – ones far more wacky than normal.”

  “What do you mean, wacky?” Deacon asked.

  Sam finally looked up at him, eyes wide and a little frantic. “You know Triss Polluck, right? Twenty-nine confirmed Hidden Quests, founded her own noble house off the information alone.”

  “Of course,” Deacon nodded, Jass and Esmerelda doing the same.

  “She’s the reason the Academy even has standardized expectations for Hidden Quests,” Sam pressed on. “Most of what we think we know comes from her papers. Not to mention that whole scandal that happened with her grandson leaking parts of her journals onto forums years back and destroying a couple of her high-paid contracts in the process.”

  He grabbed the book in question so they could see the chapter he would be referring to.

  “In her nineteenth recorded Hidden Quest,” Sam said, tapping the margin, “she noted something that scared the shit out of her. The creatures she faced inside the zone were much stronger than they should have been. And I’m not referring to elites, I’m referring to them being above the Floor cap entirely.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “What?” Deacon said out loud in confusion.

  “While it doesn’t say where this nineteenth Hidden Quest she discovered and sold actually was, for context, if it had been on Floor Ten, for example, the level cap for standard mobs would’ve been around twenty, with elites at twenty-two. But she was fighting things that hit like they belonged three floors higher, with levels to match.”

  Jass frowned. “But we haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “I know,” Sam said, nodding sharply. “That’s what I’m confused about–”

  “…Fuck us,” Deacon swore under his breath, the words immediately drawing attention as he slowly began to rise.

  The others followed his gaze and noticed that his irises tinged red with the activation of Sense.

  The ceiling wasn’t empty.

  Hundreds of fist-sized shapes clustered just beyond the stone, packed tightly together in irregular patterns, their movements subtle but unmistakable once noticed, and as Deacon’s gaze slid from the ceiling to the walls, he found even more of them embedded behind the sandstone brick walls.

  [Chimeric Locust Lv 22]

  ***

  [Chimeric Locust Lv 24]

  Deacon exhaled slowly, lowering his gaze back to the Party.

  “…Yeah,” Deacon said quietly, eyes still tracking the ceiling as his grip tightened on the glowstick in his free hand.

  “We’ve got a fuck ton of them hidden behind the walls,” Deacon said quietly, his voice low and calm despite the tension crawling up his spine as continued to paint the ceiling and walls with the red silhouettes of hundreds of fist-sized locusts. “Locust chimeras, levels twenty-two through twenty-four. At least a few hundred that I can see without straining my eyes.”

  “Fuck,” Jass muttered as she shifted her footing and scanned the chamber again, eyes flicking from the pressure-plated floor to the statues and back to the walls, her shoulders squaring as if bracing for something to go wrong at any second. “Does that mean if we step on the wrong one, we’d be facing an army of them?”

  “Eh,” Deacon shrugged, unsure if she was correct on the matter. “I sure as hell hope it's just one cluster at a time – despite them looking pretty fragile, we don’t have the…” Stopping himself, he just recalled what Esmerelda was able to do; cast magic.

  Snapping his fingers in front of his face, Deacon pushed mana through the familiar circles that spun around his soul, producing .

  With a shark crack of air, a thin wisp of flame bloomed between his thumb and index finger, small, unimpressive, and costing a hell of a lot more mana than he would have liked, but it was very real and working.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.

  Seeing it and recalling what she just did to Sam, Esmerelda immediately lifted her wand and turned it in a smooth clockwise arc, threads of mana spiraling outward as she cast a dome-shaped that expanded to cover the entire Party, the surface of it shimmering faintly as it settled into place.

  “It’s possible to cast here,” she said, brow furrowing as she adjusted the flow, “the ambient mana isn’t inert like the hallway, just… resistant. Meaning that it’s expensive; at least triple the normal mana cost for a simple spell like this.”

  , Deacon thought, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding before glancing back at Sam. “Keep going. Tell us what else you found.”

  Sam swallowed, clearly forcing himself to refocus as he gestured at the spread of open books around him, fingers hovering over the pages, recollecting himself as she tried to recall what he remembered reading from them.

  “Okay, so,” he started, dragging a hand through his hair, “Triss Polluck wasn’t the only one. Everyone here also found Hidden Quest Zones that were very different than normal ones, like the one we completed.”

  “The Silent Maidens,” he said, tapping the first book. “They found a Hidden Quest tied to a sunken temple and were forced to navigate an underwater maze while avoiding an infant kraken that was seven levels higher than them and classified as an elite on top of that. Half the time, only two of them were actually doing anything, while the others were just… hiding and trying not to drown.”

  “They still managed to escape while completing the quest without fighting a single creature, aside from barely managing to thwart the kraken, and ended up gaining around four racial levels each. Even the ones who did fuck all. According to the account, the only reason they survived at all was that their Tier 2 Vice Captain was present, surveying the trial grounds for the guild,” he continued. “The only reason this ever got out instead of being kept in-house was that one of the more useless mages posted it online after getting chewed out by the Vice Captain for her performance.”

  Then he pointed to the open book below it.

  “The Ironcrest Party’s porter, Vale, posted on a forum years ago that their Hidden Quest was basically a series of monster gauntlets, wave after wave, and by the end of it, they’d lost three-fourths of their original Party just trying to keep moving forward. Even though he did no fighting, every three waves or so, he would gain a reward just like the rest of his Party”

  Looking up from the open books to his Party, who surrounded him, he concluded his research. “And they all say the same thing: the Hidden Quest Zones they were in had the difficulty scale cranked up to the nth degree, but so were the rewards. You gain Records just for being there, for surviving, for pushing forward, even if you aren’t the one landing the killing blows or solving the puzzle.”

  “... And we just gained a level by walking down a hallway,” Jass said slowly before letting out a long groan. “We are so fucked.”

  “Yup,” Sam nodded. “From what I could find, Race levels, class levels, skill progression, everything in these Hidden Quest Zones seems to accelerate while in them.”

  Bonehead tilted his skull slightly. “That sounds too good to be true – why the hell would there be any mention of this anywhere? Cause if we found one, I wouldn’t tell a soul.”

  “Because it is,” Sam replied flatly. “Every single account also mentions that once they left the zone for the Hidden Quest, whether they completed it or abandoned it, that effect disappeared. So when people tried to come back later, or sold the location to other parties, the ones who followed didn’t experience the same gains.”

  “So, it’s inconsistent,” Deacon said.

  “Completely,” Sam agreed. “Some people, like the ones in the book, swear it’s real. Others claim that they walked through the same zones and both saw nothing special other than the fact that they experienced the Hidden Quest normally, all things considered. There’s nothing official on the topic considering how little there is on it, so it’s all speculation.”

  He gestured weakly at the ceiling. “But given that we just got race levels for basically standing still, and we’re sitting under a nest of over-leveled chimeric locusts… I’m inclined to believe the people who said their Hidden Quests got pushed into difficulty.”

  Silence settled over the group as Deacon stared down at Sam, then slowly lifted his gaze back toward the ceiling, watching the red-silhouetted clusters shift behind the sandstone bricks.

  Bringing his right fist up, he rested his knuckles against the bridge of his nose. An idea began to form as he tapped absently, eyes still fixed upward.

  After a full minute had passed, he lowered his hand.

  “I think I’ve got an idea,” he said quietly.

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