“Her condition can’t get any worse. She is cold as ice. I am afraid we might be late.” Zoe told Riley, tears watered up in her eyes but she tried to look brave while Sir Nick raised to his feet carrying Liss in his broad-shouldered arms. Tears coursed down his scarred cheeks without pausing.

“Hey. Save your waterworks for when she wakes up, you hear me. I gave you my word. And it means something where I came from too. Let’s roll, suckers.” Riley phrased, her words sounded strangely reassuring to them despite everything she had done.

Walking straight forward through the holographic wall, they found themselves stepping into a large cavern-like chamber that could fit quintuple their numbers, quadrupled their sizes, without breaking a sweat. Bones were piled up all over the place, of humans and monsters both. Riley and the team were surrounded all around by them as they trooped right into their midst. Some still had a few pounds of flesh sticking onto them. That could very much explain the insane amount of putrid stench infused in the air that surrounded them.

“God! This place reeks of death and demise.” Riley complained. Her thumb and forefinger joined toward clipping onto her nose.

The ground beneath them had convulsions and they thought it was an earthquake. But soon after they realized that it wasn’t when the whole flooring they stood upon began to ascend lifting them into the air along with it. It was an escalator but it hadn’t any cables attached to it neither on top nor up the bottom.

“We’re dealing with a boss alright,” Riley commented before she turned over to speak to Ryan. “You’re awfully quiet. It’s never like you.”

He was zoned out, staring into space and his wrinkled forehead suggested that he was ruminating on something that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to him. He twitched when Riley tweaked his ear, she yanked it pretty hard.

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Ryan got her attention, pretty good. “You’re hurting me!”

“What were you storming your brain for, genius?” She asked. Sir Nick and Zoe paid mind to their conversation.

“Not one thing adds up no matter how you look at all this,” Ryan said. “Why would a boss send higher floor beasts to the first floor when one is destined to face them on their way up anyway. Moreover, no creature on earth can dominate those hybrids into submission to form a pack, no creature except one. That’s what led me to think that this might be the doing of an omega.”

“Omega, you said?!” Sir Nick interfered, fear and distress clouded his prevailing depression for his daughter. Seeing him alarmed, a nasty fright spiraled through Zoe. She hadn’t seen him that terrified for like never.

“What’s an omega?” she asked, quite a bit curious and panicked. She had never heard of that word anywhere before.

“It is an alpha that massacred its own betas and gammas and feasted on their souls. By doing so, it gained the power of its entire army. But a physical body, of a boss monster nonetheless, can only take so much power. Its body becomes overpowered like a ticking time bomb, gradually growing unstable with the passing of every second until one day it detonates.” Riley explained to Zoe.

“To prevent it, the body takes matters into its own hands and shuts down involuntarily throwing the monster into a deep sleep. If awoken, it would be infuriated while it wreaks havoc like a mad bull and it won’t stop until it has brought down hell onto those in its sight. Miles of the area around it would be swept clean, engulfed in radiation and flames when it goes off.”

“Had the omega been awake, we wouldn’t be alive right now to talk about it.” Sir Nick added his comments to the discussion.

“You’re saying all the floors we’re crossing might most probably be deserted?” Zoe asked in surprise, she heard something she didn’t think would ever be possible. “Then who or what released those wolves onto us?”

“That’s the only mismatched piece in the puzzle, and the reason we should all stay vigilant, and carefully watch every single step we take from here onwards,” Ryan said, warning his team of his calculated predictions to be on high alert.

Riley sat down, cross-folded her legs, shut her eyes, and proceeded to meditate. Her entire body threw out a light, a little less bright than the sun itself minus the high temperatures. It was her blood cells carrying the chi she soul-tapped, from inside of her heart through into the left hand she raised to her shoulder height. The vitality got focused in her palm, intensifying the glow around the hand while the rest of her body’s shining continued to get dim.

“How did you know to focus your detection spell at that specific wall back down there?” Ryan asked Sir Nick, a slight spark of bewilderment and innocence lit across his face.

“The last hybrid tried to bolt out of there jumping onto your barrier in that direction. I had already blinded it with my latest attack. Hence, it was acting purely on its perception and its basic scent tracing ability. So, it must be sensing the path it took to get there.” Sir Nick answered, phrasing his theory to Ryan.

Not a moment later, the trio’s eye sets caught the gleam of many yellow-red gems and bluish-green quartz stones embedded into the ornately decorated cave ceiling. But the escalating ground didn’t slow down, not at all as it continued to ascend barging into the ceiling thrusting them against the roof. They were getting more and more stuck in between the moving floor and the unbudgeable stone roof.

“Madam Riley!” Ryan groaned, bent forward crushed to his knees, his back pressed to the stone roof in a futile attempt to avoid getting sandwiched while Zoe was shoving her palms into the roof with her knees pinned to the ground. It slowed down just a teensy bit but it was enough for their desperately depressed minds to think they were the reason behind it.

“Wow! I’m not as weak and pathetic I thought I was.” Ryan thought to himself. That little happiness and satisfaction didn’t last for long though. He found out soon as he turned his head over that it was Sir Nick’s brute strength that was forcing the ground to decelerate. He was bearing a pose similar to that of Zoe but a lot more masculine like he-man, he joined the objective after gently lying his daughter down on the ground.

A staff, three to four feet tops, had formed in her hand as Riley reached the end of her meditation. That was made of a normal-looking wood, nothing flashy or sparkly and had an average to a below-average thickness to it. She stood it up vertically and it had a short length to cover to fit in between the two surfaces, one resting, another resisting.

“Grow, pony!” she muttered near to its ear. It extended and passed five feet by to a near six feet when it fitted precisely supporting both upper and lower land. It had completely stopped the floor movement. The three straining till then collapsed to the ground on their back, not all were sweating and panting at least not like Ryan.

“Pony, show me eight feet of yours,” she said to it. But for a moment it didn’t respond as if it was hesitating to follow her command. Then it expanded more to almost eight-foot long as it propelled the entire ground they stood upon downwards like it was nothing, like gravity pulling a feather towards the earth.

... to be continued.